Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Muse: Rugby World Kitsch, in reply to Sacha,
There's cream for that
Most entertainingly delivered externally, on the business end of one of these. (Link to image SFW but may offend as it educates those of a seal-loving disposition.)
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Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Emma Hart,
I find it interesting, in a car-crash sort of way. I’m not asking anyone else to.
Oh, no -- but honestly the spectacle of never-were politicians having a pissy-fit over their list rankings got tired fifteen years ago. :)
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Muse: Rugby World Kitsch, in reply to Russell Brown,
Bob Parker, Sir David Gascoigne, Bob Harvey, Sharon Hunter and Wally Stone were appointed by the minister to consider the applications, which ran to about four times the available budget.
Can I just say this one more time:
I have no reason to believe anyone connected with the REAL New Zealand Festival Lottery Fund Committee acted outside their remit or improperly. Hell, they issued some grants I'd personally have probably argued against, but that's a quibble you can have about any funding round anywhere. And should when millions of dollars of public money is involved.
But am I entitled to find the media swarm -- and the tone of a good deal of it -- sketchy when the previous week even more public money got dished out with almost no national media coverage? Russell's right, the process around the "tupperwaka" was not beyond reproach but it just felt to me that there was another subtext in play.
And finally, The Giant Rugby Ball still doesn't do a damn thing for me -- and it's debatable whether it really couldn't have been "brought home" through other funding channels -- but different strokes, different folks. And if we all responded to the same shit the same way, what a boring 'verse it would be.
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Consider Damien O’Connor. Is he a Tink – a genuine anti-union homophobe – or was he just trolling the Labour Party?
I’d like someone to explain why I should give a rodent’s rectum either way. Either he's a bigot having a public temper tantrum, or just acts like a bigot because he sees some utility in it. An ulcerated 'roid on the body politic either way.
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Honestly, Russell, I'm just looking at this and weeping softly.
The culmination of the Cultural Olympiad, the Festival will open on 21 June 2012 – Midsummer's Day. It will run until 9 September 2012 – the last day of the London 2012 Paralympic Games.
At the heart of the festival will be a programme of commissions by some of the finest artists in the world in events ranging from pop to film, from visual arts and fashion to theatre, from circus to carnival, from opera to digital innovation.
The first commissions include works from the likes of Rachel Whiteread, Akram Khan, Cate Blanchett, Mike Leigh and Damon Albarn, Rufus Norris and Jamie Hewlett.
In total, the festival will feature more than 1,000 events, with an estimated audience of more than three million people. Some of the events will be ticketed, some will be free to attend. A dedicated website will go live from summer 2011. Further information on ticketing, pricing and promotional plans will be provided in the build up to the first tickets going on sale in October 2011.
OK, I know there was never a hope in hell of New Zealand doing anything on the scale of London next year, but there seems to have been some joined up thinking going on where arts wasn't a "nice to have" afterthought. (And they're having a recession too, Bill.)
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Sacha,
they’re a “do nothing” government – except for what they’re doing.
And the not-at-all-secret secret agenda. Really, folks, this is sounding like the script for Saw, Part 69 -- it's all awfully familiar, but still doesn't make any sense.
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The full list is here as (why? why?) a Word document. It’s quite an amazing array of projects, with lots of smaller grants, many local Maori projects, etc.
Quite, which is why I said there are plenty of totally unexceptional projects – and a half dozen or so I find quite exciting – in a pool of contestable Lotteries funding, which I’m sure has been apportioned with utter propriety. Wearing my AFS hat, I’m not going to bitch anyone for going for any funding on offer.
I’m not not up in arms about the waka plan, but it does seem poorly executed in comparison to the other projects you’ve criticised.
Can’t disagree with you there, but plenty of people are and there’s a faint whiff of concern-trolling and political opportunism in play. Did The Herald cover the REAL New Zealand Festival Lottery Fund Committee announcement at all?
And I think it’s at least debatable that “Match Day Festivals around the approaches to Eden Park” and “support[ing] the delivery of community engagement activities at Rugby World Cup 2011 team open-training sessions at venues around Auckland” could have been paid for by the Council and the RWC itself, while the Lotteries funding went to another project. But I guess that’s not a really sexy question to be asking.
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Muse: Rugby World Kitsch, in reply to Grant McDougall,
Grant:
To be fair, if ACT wasn't having its middle age spread in public, Hide could take the consistent position that the state shouldn't be funding arts/culture (or commercial sporting events) at all. Why it isn't is well outside MUSE's remit, or my expertise in political pathology.
And when it come to dog-whistling about "bloody Maari's", I think it's fair to say Shane Jones is proving as adroit as Lucia Popp nailing "Der Hölle Rache"
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<i>I like fiction that is challenging, and self-conscious, and so on (which is also not to say that “genre” fiction can’t be that). I just kind of yearn for it to, um, settle down a bit plot-wise?</i>
Well, I don't think you can get more "self-conscious" than Muriel Spark's 1957 debut The Comforters -- and I find it hard to disagree with Ali Smith's warm (but spoiler rich) appreciation in the Guardian.
Does plot and formal experimentation really have to be a zero sum game?
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I don’t have much of a problem with the decision itself, but I do with the secrecy around it.
Quite – but having said that I wish Drinnan would either STFU or just get his facts right. I’m a little sick of the Herald editorially pontificating about transparency and competition, when APN has consistently been coy about it’s own lobbying of government and how it’s effectively crushed anyone trying to muscle in on the effective monopoly in New Zealand largest media market since the Star closed down over twenty years ago.
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