ONLY a handful of people knew my conceptual art-work, My Five Year Old Can Do Better Than That, featured in two 2012 art awards shows.
One of them was the 21st annual Wallace awards at the Wallace Arts Centre.
My text-based piece was installed in a modest salon some distance from the main galleries. It was modestly visited and a digital video took top prize.
The other big show was the Walters prize at the Auckland Art Gallery.
It rained a bit and a sub-tropical wind rustled in the stalks as I buried Toto in the sweetcorn paddock but he was already cold because the old man put him down at lunchtime except the injection wasn’t strong enough and the dog crawled under the house to die and the old man phoned me to ask if could come out and crawl after him, Toto, I mean, except it turned out he wasn’t under the house but was laying on the damp earth in the shadow of the villa and hardly breathing so I carried him into the sun and the old man came around the side of the house with a sack and a freshly loaded syringe but then he couldn’t find a vein in Toto’s leg so I rolled him over and he aimed the needle at his liver but he was too fat so we had to find a bigger needle to reach his heart which was a bit ugly except the he was too half dead to feel pain although he hyperventilated for a bit as I watched him fade away because I wasn’t going to put him the sack until he was gone then I said see y’later bae and slid the sack around him and carried him into the sweetcorn paddock and dug a deep hole so the dogs wouldn’t dig him up then went and washed my hands in the bathroom and rinsed out my mouth except my hands still smelled like shit and the beer we had afterwards didn’t taste too good either.
Among the soft aircraft carriers and canyon rock formations at Wainui Beach are bubbled masses of rock.
Shapes in the rock suggested something sentient slowly coming into being. I tried sketching one amorphous mass to see if the abstract, fluid shapes would create their own sort of language – but the pattern was too irregular. My line was too cautious and the cartoonish, biomorphic shapes I wanted would not cooperate.
The jungle demon was slumped so long among the exposed roots of a tree, tendrils had snaked around its ankles. Vines that once bound the demon’s body hung from its neck, wrists and legs.
Crude stitching that had knitted together its mouth had also long rotted. The demon could not close its eyes because its eyelids had been cut away.
One eye sat higher than the other anyway due to a tumble into the rocks of a dried river bed where the demon Arri had remained face down for several months. When the mud dried and turned to dust, the doll surprised itself awake with a muppety sneeze. Read more
“Auckland Volunteer Coastguard rescued a man shipwrecked on Brown’s Island after getting confused between east and west. He dialled 111 from the island and said he was being attacked by cows, then turned his phone off when he thought cows would find him up the tree he had climbed.”
The Dominion.
Mr Lee is packing his bags for his return (by plane) to China when I phone to inquire after his close encounter with cows.
“It was a very awful experience, in fact,” says Mr Lee. His accent has a faint American inflection.
“I can be very honest: I was very silly.”
The brothers Olsen appeared at the end of the street shortly before midnight. Gaslight buttered the cobbles and narrow garrets peaked into the sky. The crunch of rat under wooden wheel softened the silence as the Olsen boys trudged into town, towing their ark of a cart behind them.
The Yucatan town of Tahmek is not listed in Lonely Planet and it’s best it stays that way. There are no hotels or pensiones in Tahmek. It is a crossroads, an intersection, a transit point in the screeching jungle.
If it wasn’t for the bullfight in honour of the Pope’s visit to the Mexican peninsula, we would not have got off the bus.
![bullfight[1]](https://badcactus.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/bullfight1.jpg)
We planned to see the bullfight as part of the Mexico experience, then catch the last bus out to Izamel. Read more
In the short film Staunch the Bleak Flow, former Gisborne man Bill Pauly played Mr Death.
Sadly, Bill’s character came for him in March last year. He died of a heart attack in his Wellington flat. He was not found for a few days. He was generally reclusive and, it’s fair to say, non-mainstream.
Bill was articulate, sometimes anarchic, mostly broke. He had a degree in semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, but he lived eccentrically. His talent never really found a home. Read more
Theatre as ritualised sacrifice surfaced in a fundraiser at the Gisborne Showgrounds a few springs ago. The horse-boy auction was held in support of women diagnosed with breast cancer but the unconscious paganism behind it was the stuff of country matters.
A grassy arena corralled by timber stalls at the Showgrounds made up the venue. Women in groups of 10 sat at tables in the stalls under tin roofs. At the centre of the ring, the MC was costumed as a circus-ring master and would be in charge of a posse of horse-boys – 12 young farmers in green shorts – when they arrived.
A few days after the 2007 earthquake, someone left a dinghy on the side of the road across from my place.
Painted on the hull were the words: Take me away.
They seemed a cruel and unusual taunt. The boat was one kilometre from the sea with no hope of getting back. It was beached as. The message could have been an existential cry. It could have been something oracular, except it was stuck on dry land and without a rising tide it wasn’t going anywhere. Even in the event of a tsunami generated by an avalanche in the submarine Hikurangi Trench 40km away, the boat wouldn’t have time to float. The first and last any of us in these parts would hear of that would be the match-stick snap of Norfolk Pines along Centennial Marine Drive.
