"And You Call Yourself CANADIAN?!"

There is a Viking (or is it an Inuit?) slam that goes something like this:

"Your house is so cold you can't even make love to your wife!"

New Zealand, like Ireland and the Netherlands, is one of those places where indoor heating, insulation, windows that work, and ventilation are considered "optional" in homes. From June until September, it is also a place where a person, accustomed to -10 degrees Celsius winters and warm homes, can nearly die of heat prostration outside and hypothermic exposure inside ... all in one day.

Boiling the pasta reduced indoor visibility to 1 metre in any direction.

One of my sick fantasies is to run a Kiwi-inspired "Winter Hospitality Themepark" -- for Kiwis only -- in Northern Ontario between, oh, about mid-October until April. They get to live in a 2cm thick clapboard shed with a corrugated iron roof. I'd chuck them a wool blanket, a flint, and a bundle of dry kindling and say, "see you in the Spring!". I'm certain that by sundown of the first day, the sniveling would be enough to wake the bears.

"Le maison de Jean". $5 per use. Because later I'll have to muck it out.

Hot water will incur a charge of $25.
Mixed with cold, $35. Because I'll have to use two buckets.

My good friends J and C in Whangamata had a few hearty laughs at my expense recently.

I emerged from the guest room one morning decked out in double wool socks, trackpants, a sweatshirt, scarf, and a toque. Well, so what? Except that I had slept in this getup underneath a sheet, a comforter, and a wool blanket. I still had the urge to drop and do, like, fifty.

At the sight of me, J and C broke out into hysterics. Guffaw guffaw guffaw. "Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!" doubled they over their Weet-bix.

In Canada, they'd sic Social Services on you.

"You wussy Canadian!", C chortled.
"Oh yeah, ha ha yourselves! It's friggin' F-R-E-E-Z-I-N-G in here! Agggghh!"
"This from the lady who surfs in June!"
C, ready to prove me a total sideshow embarrassment to my countrymen marched me over to the (obviously leading to nowhere and connected to nothing) thermostat.

It read 9 degrees Celsius.

Indoors.

"Oh fine", she conceded, "we'll put on the heater ... you WUSSY CANADIAN!"
I felt like I was back in the Claddagh, Galway. December. The North Atlantic. Hibernia. My flatmates refused to turn on the heater. There was no hot water. I froze. My roommate wore silk nighties. I wore a snowsuit, spent every night at the overheated pub, and ate my weight in Galaxy bars just to stay alive. I swore, never again. And here I am.

With a few simple Canadian tricks, I managed to heat that death-trap up!

I can't wait for Sunday. I'll be journeying down to the bottom of the North Island, to stay with my relations for a week. They proudly -- and I mean proudly -- set their home at a balmy 17 degrees Celsius.

I'll be giving out free Themepark passes. And packing a few extra sheep.

Impressions of a Hack (er...?)

JR Kinipela has been hacked ... in a strangely old-school kind of way!

Today I was going to post an entry called "Degas to Dali: A Personal Tour" for those of you who missed the recent modern art exhibition that just closed at the Auckland Art Gallery. However, when I went to find my notebook, I discovered it was missing! "Oh no", I thought, "all my commentary was in there! I must have left it at the gallery!". And then a miracle.

Moments ago a rather scattered looking courier showed up with a package from a "Peppermint Pattie", who claimed to be a "crayon ninja, academic kamakaze". Accompanying the package was a large card saying, simply, "you're welcome!". For what, exactly? I dove into the package. Obviously this was going to be good.

You may have already guessed that the mystery package was none other than my notebook ... sporting a few "alterations". In this effort, PP was evidently inspired by the latter-day modes of New Zealand artist Colin McCahon (one of my favourites ... how did she know that?).

Peppermint Pattie, after the school of Colin McCahon (2012)
Mixed media on Korean printed "Romantic Diary".

Amongst these alterations is one, bizarre demand:

Send me your 105 + a bucket. STATIM.

and a curious request:

Please dance with me.

Huh? Further, PP seems to be obsessed with the idea of an art gallery as a "quarantine", a metaphor (?) used over and over throughout her interlinear, marginal, and superficial glossings to refer not only to art galleries, but universities and university departments alike! It's as though, somehow, they represent one in the same thing to her. On the face of it, she seems to have "quarantined" all my scribbles as though they themselves are related to the idea that I, myself, should be or have been "quarantined"! What the?!

Commentarius artis/Ars Commentarii

But it gets worse. PP has made a very thinly veiled intimation that she is going to try and sabotage my academic career in New Zealand ... and abroad, by appropriating my identity and hawking a fake CV complete with curated samples of "my" work!

You just have to see this stuff not to believe it! Nevertheless, the show must, in some way, go on -- despite the confusions and obstructions created by the (random?) amendations and emendations of PP.

"Degas to Dali: A Personal Tour", orig. by JR Kinipela (2012)
Peppermint Pattie, reviser and curator.
Mixed media on printed Korean "Romantic Diary".

The ramblings of PP are somewhat accurate. The Degas to Dali exhibition (March 03-June 17) did, indeed, show 79 "Scottish Lollies" -- that is, paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland, for the cheapish price of $20. Together they represented 100 years of modern art and included all the usual suspects from, yes, Degas to Dali. The mental contagion I mean the creativity of these artists was effectively contained I mean well displayed in the gallery, with the expected curatorial and interpretative antigens I mean commentary, the results of which were somewhat uneven in control groups I mean in quality.

Dr. JR Kinipela's CV, or, 105: "please dance with me".

Thankfully and frustratingly, the usual "art crowd" was not in attendance on the last afternoon of the exhibition, but all of New Zealand was. Thankfully in that you could see people making their own discoveries and sharing them with strangers and loved ones in an honest, unstudied, and immediate way. Frustratingly in that the traffic patterning resembled a sheep or cattle run and was hard to overcome. Reverence closed the art experience to many who feared getting too close to or too far away from the infectious I mean hallowed objects under quarantine I mean on (dis)play. They were organized by a thematic and chronological check-out line, point-of-purchase, Euclidean notion of space. You know how it works: you move from the magazines, to the tic tacs, to the chewing gum, chocolate bars, cigarettes, and lotto tickets. Max Ernst's "Sea and Sun" (1925), for example, needs to be viewed from various distances and vantage points to achieve any meaningful sensory impact. Otherwise, as something hanging on the wall, it's pretty crap. I prefer bouncing around from space to space, place to place, over towing the line and reading cue-cards as though I were supposed to be having an socio-culturally engineered, cross-media edu-tainment "experience". For twenty bucks.

Tertiary Education: Teaching or Marketing Tool? Both/And?

With apologies to Billy Apple (William Tell?)
"Cash Only 1/2 Price" (1984-90)

The exhibit had six wards I mean rooms: Early Influences and the Impressionists; Painters of Modern Life, Cubism and Vorticism; Scottish Colourists; Expressionists, Dada and Surrealism; Pop, Op and Beyond; Full Circle. Some real gems were in the mix, and highlights for me were Walter Richard Sickert's "High Stepper" (circa 1938-9), and P. Wyndham Lewis' "Seated Figure" (circa 1921).

Peppermint Pattie, "Pop Art Epistle" (2012)
Mixed media on printed Korean "Romantic Diary".
Curatorial Notes:
PP cannot be experienced in academic rejection letters.
They are not usually so well written nor forthright!

What a feeling to finally stand in front of a P. Wyndham Lewis effort after the colossal let down at the Tate Modern in London! Those jerks had every Lewis pic in storage when I visited in 2010. Another absolute highlight was to experience one of Salvador Dali's exploding Raphaelesque heads (1951) LIVE! But here is where the commentary of my gallery experience must end for now.

Unfortunately, so much damage was done to my manuscripted notes (if not my reputation as a professional academic) by PP that it will take me some time to recover and restore them to their original state. Right now that feels like a lot of highly-skilled intellectual work of great cumulative social value for no pay nor direct R+D application. So, I'm afraid you'll just have to wait for "Degas to Dali: A Personal Tour". Jumping from one quarantine to another takes time, my friends ... I'll have to tell you what I really think later! 


Anyway, I may rename the post "Who Let the Dogs Out?!: Modern Art as High-Stakes Media Scam, 1848-2012". Watch this space!