3: Share your favourite food/meal and the story behind it

In central Wellington there’s a humble little Japanese restaurant, run by a humble little Korean man, down a humble little brick alleyway. There’s a humble little dish there called Katsudon –rice, egg, onions and a crumbed pork cutlet.

Over many years I’ve had this dish while sitting alongside lovers, workmates, family, friends, co-conspirators, innovators and artists. That one dish has been the start point for hours lost to passionate debate, nights lost to karaoke and days, if not weeks, lost to ideas and dreams sparked in that humble little restaurant.

2: Tell the story of your day in pictures

Left to right, top to bottom:

1.       Woken by a wailing two year old.

2.       Memory card games with the four year old before breakfast.
3.       Making 3 bowls of microwave porridge while feeling very Poppa Bear.
4.       The ride to work.
5.       A rarity these days: the tie.
6.       Driving to Stratford to submit to the Council. Cause of tie.
7.       An office-wide discussion about pancakes.
8.       New Zealand Music Month provides a soundtrack to a library visit.
9.       A chocolate cake randomly appears on the office table. Is consumed.
10.   The building across the road gets demolished.
11.   48 hour film festival team meeting.
12.   Excitedly perusing the latest Art+Object online catalogue.
13.   Reading back through 6 old Wallpaper magazines which I'm thinking of selling.
14.   Cutting my daughter’s hair in the bath.

So here goes.

Call it peer pressure, call it an emergence from the fog of parenting, or call it an attempt to vent, but it would seem I'm blogging again.  And what better way to kick things off than with a month-long blogging challenge.

Here's the first post. Hopefully I'll maintain some form of momentum.

1.    Playlist: Choose songs that mean something to you and tell us why.

Paul Simon, Boy in the Bubble (1986)

Paul Simon’s Graceland provided the soundtrack to one of those endless summers we all had as kids, the summer I got my first surfboard, and cruised the beaches of Mahia in my fluoro board shorts. Fun fact: Paul Simon would later marry Edie Brickell, who was a serious contender for this list in her own right, for similar reasons.

Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Organic Anti Beat Box Band

What is it about teenagers and movies? In my case it was Thrashin, a story of a country boy who moves to the city, wins the girl and the big skateboarding contest. It was a story of hope, dreams and beating the odds to achieve them. It was also a story that had a very young Red Hot Chilli Peppers playing live at a skate club. I dutifully mail ordered their latest tape – 1987’s Uplift Mofo Party Plan – from the back pages of a Thrasher magazine. It was a gateway drug, first into skatepunk, then to the broader alternative music genre.

Blur She’s So High

Later in my high school years, my art teacher/creative mentor/barometer of cool went to the UK for the summer holidays and came back buzzing over a new band he’d heard called Blur. He made me a mix tape (!) that featured their first single which had just hit the market – around 1990 I think. I traded this for the aforementioned Red Hot Chili Peppers tape. And that, kids, is how I got into indie. 

The Stone Roses, Fools Gold

A couple of years ago I rode a mountain bike 4 hours up a gold mining trail up a very large hill in the South Island. Fittingly, this was my earworm.

The Smiths, How soon is now?

I was a latecomer to the Smiths, who were pretty much a rite of passage for anyone with an older brother or sister when I was growing up. But from the moment I first heard the searing soaring guitar intro I was in catch-up mode. It’s the song that reminds me what technology has done for (or to) music: my kids can sit at a computer and discover entire movements in music with a few mouse clicks – something that once took dozens of swapped mix tapes, glimpsed moments of student radio on visits to cities with students, and months of trawling NME.

Fly My Pretties, Nato’s Theme (2005)

2005 was a pretty big year, peaking on 17 September when Helen Clark, for whom I then worked, was re-elected Prime Minister. It was a closer result than many had predicted, with a strong showing from Don Brash on the back of his polarising Orewa Speech. Two nights earlier I was sitting in Wellington’s Paramount Theatre – one of my favourite places in the world – when Fly My Pretties mastermind Barnaby Weir instructed anyone brave enough to admit they were voting for Brash to leave the premises. It was a rare moment when work and life melted together.

Every new beginning is somebody else's end.

Das 1-3 of the Len Lye Centre.

 



Replacement therapy.

 

Not in a position to buy a work by Bill Hammond, they took to growing their own.

They were happy times.

Keeping it real.

Untitled (gas loop) No 1 by Ariel Schlesinger.
Via Today Tomorrow.

Etch-A-Sketch

Quite possibly the first memory I have of visiting an art gallery was attending the opening of an international photography show at the Govett-Brewster as an emerging and awkward teenager ca. 1985. We’d purloined tickets through my father’s business being stockists of the sponsors – Kodak, from memory. I don’t remember a lot – wearing a black and white shirt, lots of people and stairs, a glimpse into a world that equally awed and terrified me.


Somewhere along the line it must have impacted though, subsequently acquiring, as I did, a degree in art history, a job at the Govett-Brewster for a fashion, quite a few pieces of and books about art, and an insight into a world that still equally awes and terrifies me.

I was reminded of all this on Saturday, when we took Jasper to the Cafe Govett-Brewster for a celebratory birthday fluffy (him) and to check out the new exhibitions (us). He went in armed with his new modern take on an Etch-a-Sketch (birthday present), with which we drew a bunny rabbit in honour of Peter Peryer’s Hare, and an upside down ship which was still installed from the previous show.

We bravely ventured into Gallery 4, which previously held the ‘bouncy castle’ – much feared because of its loud noise – to see Fiona Pardington’s new works The Pressure of Sunlight Falling, and nervously and hastily looked beyond the barrier ropes and into the darkened spaces that were still in changeover, before retreating to the safety of the main gallery via a lift ride.

On leaving, the half-dozen or so gallery staff present in and around the foyer delivered a stunning rendition of Happy Birthday to a very chuffed, if slightly shy, birthday boy.

One day I hope to look back and be able to think to myself “that was when it all began.”
 
Image: http://www.itstrulyrandom.com/

Training

Yes it was an April 1 product launch from ThinkGeek, but as a former Playmobil and current Apple users, I've got to admit that a Playmobil Apple Store holds quite a lot of appeal.

Particularly so given Taranaki recently lost its only real-ish Apple store and my kids (still getting used to saying that) are likely going to be spending quite a bit of time in Apple Stores in the future.