AndrewPaulWood

For Tomáš Jedlička My first awareness of things Czech in New Zealand would have been in the early 1980s. Everyone had Bata Bullets ( Baťa or Baťovy závody) , the largest manufacturer of shoes in the world and famous for utopian worker communities like the one in Zlín. Czech cartoons were broadcast on New Zealand television (then entirely state controlled) like the exquisite Little Mole ( Krteček ), created by Czech animator Zdeněk Miler, where any rare Czech dialogue might as well have been Charlie Brown’s teacher’s garbled underwater utterances for all I was aware. New Zealand would return the favour by selling Czechoslovakia our own Children of the Dog Star (1984) where it was dubbed into Czech as Děti ze S íria . Rumour has it that the Czechs thought it had been made in the 1970s rather than the ‘80s because the fashions were so old -fashioned even by Eastern Block standards, and someone had gotten the Roman numerals wrong for the production date. And for some reason known onl...

Among my many peculiar enthusiasms for the six London churches of English Baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736). Why is difficult to pin down, a combination of their diversity, eccentricity, excellence in execution, and the strange mythos they have accumulated around themselves like iron filings around magnets. Hawksmoor wasn’t quite as socially well-connected as his close colleagues Christopher Wren and John Vanbrugh, but he did share in their genius. He had Wren’s sense for the articulation of volumes, and something of Vanbrugh’s theatrical flamboyance, but the eccentric synthesis he arrived at was all his own. For me they represent a kind of exotic “other”, a historical architectural stratum I could never find in New Zealand; shades of Lord Macaulay’s “when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's”. Part of the fascination is that we know so litt...

O you are not good for me, and the attraction is something hard to explain. Greasy, lukewarm, all the spices glugging together blandly pricking the tongue’s tip but when you’re in my mouth you’re all I can think of. A palinode to the melancholia of plastic table tops; the benignly patriarchal smile of the Colonel, my sometime psychotherapist. It’s the ultimate solipsism and I forget debts, chores, contracts, family dramas, invoices, unrequited love, because in that glorious moment there is nothing else beyond the certainty of that crispy battered skin. I am busy with that aesthetically satisfying, yielding crunch, the too-salty fries, the gravy swimming in reconstituted potato cream the colour of his beard. The tiny little red plastic spoons with razor edges. My mouth’s war of northern aggression. Pieces of chicken fall south. You look like Elvis’ manager, licking your fingers. The franchise faux Dixie Southern-ness of it all. ...

Carl Sylvius Völkner (c.1819-1865). Dostoevskian holy fool who’d naively, blindly, even willingly gone to his sacrificial doom. His headless remains lie beneath the floorboards of pretty little Hiona Church (Māori transliteration for “Zion”) at Ōpōtiki in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. Born in Kassel, Hesse, Völkner arrived in the nascent British colony in 1849, sent by the North German Missionary Society. In 1852 he changed allegiance to the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) and married the aspirational, emotionally unstable Emma Lanfear, sister of the CMS missionary Reverend Thomas Lanfear. Ordained an Anglican in 1861, Völkner took enthusiastic charge of the isolated mission at Ōpōtiki that August, among Te Whakatōhea who built Hiona and a school for him. Twice, in 1864 and early 1865, Völkner made trips to Auckland. It was on the second of these trips that he was sent word from Te Whakatōhea that it wasn’t safe for him to return. It had been found out that he had been s...