Charles Meryon, The Death of Marion du Fresne at the Bay of Islands, New Zealand, 12 June 1772, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington (1846-1848) I Sometime between 1846 and 1848 drew the scene en graiselle in pencil and crayon, heightened with chalk. It’s a largish work, one metre by two metres – a heroic scale for a “heroic” subject, executed by the French artist Charles Méryon (1821-1868) and exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1848. Thence it passed on to the artist’s closest friend, Antoine-Édouard Foleÿ (the two were stationed together at the French naval base in Akaroa on Banks’ Peninsula), a member of the Paris Positivist circle of the philosopher Auguste Comte, who left it to his son. The drawing was purchased in Paris by New Zealand-born British art collector Rex Nan Kivell, who smuggled it back to London, rolled up in the leg of his trousers, as the Second World War broke out. Eventually this magnificent curiosity entered the National Library of Australia as part of t...
Given the tendency of the New Zealand media to be relentlessly jingoistic to the point of sycophancy when it comes to our film-makers in Hollywood, by way of counterpoint and because you are highly unlikely to see attention drawn to them elsewhere, I have compiled a list of less than glowing reviews of Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit , concentrating on the ones that raise interesting points rather than merely being snarky. In no particular order: Richard Brody, "Springtime for Nazis: How the Satire of "Jojo Rabbit" Backfires, The New Yorker , 22 October 2019. Peter Sobczynski, "Jojo Rabbit", eFilm Critic , 23 October 2019. Nick Schager, "Jojo Rabbit": Taika Waititi's Nazi Satire Tries and Fails to Find the Funny in Fascism", The Daily Beast , 19 October 2019. Adam Nayman, "Jojo Rabbit" and Taika Waititi's Childish Approach to Nazism", The Ringer, 18 October 2019. Jonathon Romney, "Film of the Week: Jojo Rabbit...
I don’t dislike Hera Lindsay Bird’s poetry – It’s worth the devotion of some solemn thinking time to it. I take it that seriously. Playa respects game, and in the kangaroo courts of social media one has felt somewhat misrepresented. It’s easy to misconstrue description as hostility when trying to unpick postmodern irony, anti-aesthetic and literary persona, when, in the space of reading Bird’s poetry, I find myself trying to match it, sarcasm for sarcasm. It’s not particularly my cup of tea, but it deserves to exist and clearly has a readership. At worst, like Bill Manhire, it’s a matter of hits and misses; the hits knock you on your arse and the misses leave you shrugging. In the spirit of Richard Rorty’s ironic pragmatism, it’s not the end that matters but the means the author chooses to try and get there. The persona that forms the kernel about which it is constructed is evidence of Bird’s skill and talent. Some of the extended metaphors are striking enough to linger in the mem...
Comments
Post a Comment