Hi friend,
New job and sleep regressions — first the kids, now also me — have pushed these little arts appreciation notes into the background. So here’s an omni-update to cover the last three and a half months.
First, really quickly, I made a couple of YouTube homages as a birthday present for Tara. The first apes Japan Eat, who uploads one-minute shorts every day about eating food in Japan at restaurants, convenience stores and food alleys. His speedy, mostly monotonous delivery masks a genuine desire to like the food that’s put in front of him and the knowledge to place it in some kind of context. He particularly focuses on smaller, out-of-the-way places, as evidenced by his constant references to ‘mom and pop restaurants’, and he’s way harder on the bigger or more popular establishments. Anyway, I pretended he came to Paraparaumu and ate a piece of cheesecake at Hudson’s in Coastlands Mall:
The second pays tribute to Fairbairn Films, two Aussie brothers offering commentary on 21st Century life by shouting at each other. Jeff and I didn’t get the sight lines anywhere near right for this, and I’m obviously reading, but still, I’m pleased with the writing and it was great fun to make.
Have you made anything lately? Now to the books and movies.
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BOOKS
Faves
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis Carroll, 1865
Finally got to the source. I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say this book goes beyond centrality to the Western literary canon; it’s fundamental to the Western idea of childhood as a place of fancies and nonsense and constant threat. I suppose Carroll follows the Brothers Grimm in that tradition, though his fey landscape is less grim and more absurd. His writing is very readable considering it’s 160 years old, and I suppose it’s that accessibility, along with the many fascinating images and characters conjured, that helps the myth persist. I found it interesting that I couldn’t get a read on Alice, who blunders from one peril to the next, munches almost constantly on snacks, and stroppily refuses to accept this strange world on its terms, all while characterised by Carroll as gentle and courteous to all and rendered in Tenniel’s illustrations as soft and long-lashed, but severe, a kind of porcelain doll with oddly adult features. I wonder what the real Alice made of her.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
by Anita Loos, 1925
It’s not often you read a hundred-year-old book and feel like it could have been written yesterday. I guess Lorelei Lee would’ve been on her phone an awful lot if so. I mean on the page she seems fully formed and recognisable as a contemporary figure. Contemptible, untrustworthy, still somehow innocent, perhaps because of the quirks of prose and misspellings, and because a parade of probably even worse men keep dropping everything to pursue her. I was darkly fascinated and will have to reread Gatsby to see if this was the actual great American novel of that year.
The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
For me, ‘The Great Gatsby’ invokes stuffiness and school classrooms, even though I’ve read it before, not at school, and know exactly how incisive and cynical it is about high society and America itself. It’s the title, which sounds lofty enough in itself and isn’t helped by its association in the hundred years since with essay structure: introduction, point 1, point 2, point 3, conclusion. Reading it again, there could be no other title. We all know Gatsby isn’t great, though in his polite and straightforward pursuit of an honourable but misguided goal, he is greater than pretty much everyone else in the book. And of course, he isn’t even Gatsby either. I’m pretty well fed up with the idea of the great American novel written by a white man that skewers the American Dream and leaves you disenchanted — but, truly, here is that great American novel.
Of Walking in Ice: Munich – Paris: 23 November – 14 December, 1974
by Werner Herzog, 1978
This review pretty much nails it for me, especially the last line:
“This is Herzog in the maelstrom of transformation into myth while remaining a man with hungers and pains and compassion.”
The man is so closely attuned and devoted to his own legend that the reason for his long walk — mentor Lotte Eisner’s ill health — becomes secondary to the walk and the man walking it, most of all the liminal spaces expanding inside his head in the pouring rain and snow. (He is thoroughly soaked throughout.) To be fair, it’s a journal scrawled out in real time, not intended for publication, but he still went ahead and published it anyway. A flight of fancy somehow still recognisable and rooted to the real world, much like his films.
New releases
Theft
by Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2025
Loved Gurnah’s talent for drawing you into a story here. This is a sharp focus novel of rooms and subtle looks, and I smashed through it. I’m not sure where that ending came from, though. That one guy’s ambition was always there, true, but it went unexpectedly off the charts in the final third. And I’m not sure I buy the other two, seems a bit contrived romance to me. But so what? Solid, a pleasure to read. My first novel by a Tanzanian.
Dream Count
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2025
This book took me some time to plod through, I think because only one or two story threads really captivated me enough to draw me back whenever I had free time. Overall it’s a frustrated and sometimes frustrating collection of moments and lives, sitting comfortably in financial privilege most of the time but most compelling when the focus is on a less comfortable character, whose wants and hopes and dreams are so much clearer than the rich women into whose orbit she fortuitously spins, and, in her plain-thinking way, spins them properly off course. Adichie has such a talent for spinning a yarn in rich prose, and I feel enriched by her literary gifts, but also sometimes irritated by her predisposition to write characters fortunate enough to be so self-obsessed.
Universality
by Natasha Brown, 2025
Not sure what I’m supposed to think. Anti-diversity shills are taking over the world, column inch by column inch? The ‘marketplace of ideas’ (man I hate that phrase) is still in the pocket of the usual pale males? Either Brown is a satirical galaxy brain beyond my simple reckoning or I’m just not buying what she’s selling. The scene-setting magazine article that opens the novel is the longest section and the best; once we’re flitting around in people’s heads, the prose and story fall over. The working class make the barest intrusion into the world of these characters and the mastermind kingpin around whom the plot turns feels very low stakes to me. Competing for fleeting and quickly forgotten scrolls. Is all that the point? Is the climax supposed to feel so anti-climactic? Is it a commentary on all the time we waste debating identity politics while the world burns?
Children’s
Whetū Toa and the Hunt for Ramses
by Steph Matuku, 2021
More chaotic and episodic than the first one as Whetū and Tori the cat ride starbeams to all sorts of weird, wonderful, and properly frightening worlds. The climax takes place in a land of machine overlords and mammal enslavement. Grim. But there’s a point to it all, some great messages for kids (and adults), and they’re subtly driven home. Not sure my character voices are on point but the children were well into it and laughed a lot.
The Secret Wreck
by Linda Chapman, illustrated by Mirelle Ortega, 2022
Is this the end of Mermaids Rock?! (The series, I mean, not the characters’ home, which remains very much intact.) It sure seems like it. These kids are getting too big and adventurous and complex for brief sallies away from their wee patch of sea floor. Soon they’ll be going to university, and falling in love, and circumnavigating the globe powered by nothing but snack powder packets and perpetual phosphorescent tubes concocted by Naya in her lab — assuming she uses her powers for good, not evil. Exciting for the kids, with the usual positive messages about working together and to your strengths.
The rest
Sabine’s Notebook
by Nick Bantock, 1992
Exquisitely designed exercise in frustration, not the good kind. Fragile man seeks liberation from self, but world is self.
The Dark Forest
by Cixin Liu (translated by Joel Martinsen), 2015
I had the same feeling as with Iain M. Banks novels: that working on the grandest scales and following the boldest flights of fancy inevitably gets a bit silly, like lining up the entirety of your unfathomably expensive space war fleet to be dispatched by a single alien probe in one clean fell swoop. The ideas are so compelling that it doesn’t really matter and I flew through 550-odd pages. It’s the middle-of-trilogy novel so I don’t think I can properly consider it until I’ve read the last one, which I will, next year.
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MOVIES
TANGLED
directed by Byron Howard & Nathan Greno, 2010
Wife absolutely adores it. I found it quite forgettable on first viewing many years ago, but I’m starting to see the positives, particularly a somewhat realistic portrayal of parental abuse in an animated children’s film — calculated but seemingly offhand negging, persistent gaslighting, plus of course the textbook incarceration in inescapable tower… Is that a positive? Well, my kids are going to come across people like this in life, and seemingly already are, so it’s helpful to see that on screen and see how they can be liberated from that, although it shouldn’t have to take a man riding in on a horse. Or pursued by a horse. There are also some truly spectacular visuals, and with a trip to DisneySea planned for November, I’m genuinely excited to be surrounded by those lanterns too (if I’m lucky).
PENGUINS
directed by Jeff Wilson & Alastair Fothergill, 2019
We’d had kind of a rough run with movie night choices, and for this turn, I wanted something:
-short
-funny
-physically comedic
-not animated
-without dead parents
Because there’s only so many times my daughter can come out of bed at 9:08pm with an anguished look on her face and say, “I don’t want to die” or “I don’t want you to die” before you think hey, we’ve got a sensitive one here, maybe we aim really low for a year or two and steer clear of all those classic family movie shortcuts to drama involving absent parents or orphanhood or visceral on-screen murder of the noblest lion ever to lead the animal kingdom. So, in a panic, I chose PENGUINS, a cutesy documentary with Ed Helms narrating and voicing a heavily anthropomorphised story about the world’s clumsiest penguin. And the kids laughed, and it held their attention, and learned a thing or two from the unreal 4K cinematography of brutal, desolate Antarctica. I never thought I’d say this, but thank you, Disney.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON
directed by Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders, 2010
Same as the first time — I don’t really get it because I don’t lose my mind every time Toothless appears, as my wife did and as my kids now also do. Like, these deranged, high-pitched sounds whenever Toothless moved sideways, or looked up and then down again. It’s not that the film overall has nothing else — it is charming enough and occasionally surprising — but what would be its reason for existence, and most of the creative choices, without the need to sell stuffed Toothless toys?
RATATOUILLE
directed by Brad Bird, 2007
King stay the king. Yeah, it’s about fine dining and criticism, to which you might say, who gives a shit? Well, RATATOUILLE and Peter O’Toole made me give a shit.
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Music next time!
Love b
Jdanspsa Wyksui 