Daily News Channel
When Kim Kardashian prints a 352-page book of selfies will she suffer the same fate as Narcissus: a self love so great it became his downfall
The buxom reality-TV star has announced the concept for a book, aptly titled Selfish.
Kardashian, 33, dominates social media channels such as Instagram, where her 17 million followers are given a behind-the-scenes look into her
Think Auckland in the 1980s. Big hair, framed by big shoulder pads, sports cars and parties and cellphones the size of a brick.
Think success of the methode champenoise variety.
It is all true and was sexily summed up in the “glitter soap”, Gloss, which hit New Zealand screens in August, 1987.
The sharemarket crash was still to come.
These days, Miranda Harcourt is New Zealand acting royalty. In the 1980s, she was a young actor in Dunedin.
Her “most recent achievement” before landing the role as hated young journalist Gemma in Gloss was protesting against the Miss New Zealand show in Dunedin – and throwing meat at contestants.
Suddenly she was in Auckland, starring in a racy series about hedonism, glamour and wealth.
There was the drama on screen, then there was the excess in Auckland in real life.
“It was Auckland in the late 1980s – wild, outrageous parties constantly. Any historic account of that time is all true,” Harcourt said this week.
Gloss, says NZ on Screen’s Paul Stanley Ward, was initiated “against the backdrop of a bull market and America’s Cup boosterism”.
“It was the ’80s and New Zealand had swapped agriculture for aspirational living.”
With a hat-tip to US soap Dynasty, it was based around the wealthy Redferns and their Auckland magazine empire. From the opening credits, with a saucy theme song provided by singer Beaver, the show was sexually charged and the public loved it.
Harcourt remembers people hosting “Gloss parties” – dressing up in glam clothes and cheap jewellery to invite friends around to watch the show.
In a world before most people had video recorders, they would stay home to watch Gloss.
Restaurants, feeling the slump in customers, started rolling in televisions so punters could watch Gloss while they ate.
People, unable to differentiate between Gemma the fiction and Harcourt the actress, would spit on her at the beach. (Incidentally, similar things still happen to Shortland Street baddies and, famously, actress Anna Gunn was threatened for the character she played in US series Breaking Bad.)
For Lisa Chappell, who played rich brat Chelsea Redfern in Gloss, the sudden fame “went over my head a little” – even if she would have bunches of schoolgirls following her down the street.
“When I did Telethon I was mobbed and asked to sign fans’ body parts but other than that I developed a great skill at not seeing people recognising me, which I still have to this day.”
Chappell was 17 and performing in a Christchurch fringe festival when she landed an audition. It didn’t hurt that she was billeted with respected actress Michele Hine, who helped her with her scenes.
She returned to Auckland and quit her job in an accounting firm after auditioning.
“Luckily I got the part,” she said this week.
It has been 27 years since – a time in which she has had a long and successful career, including starring in Australian drama McLeod’s Daughters – but she still considers Gloss her best job.
“I have never worked with such a close, kind, inclusive bunch of actors. As the ‘youngy’ they all took me under their wing, Ilona [Rodgers who played Maxine Redfern] in particular, and made my first professional acting job an absolute dream.
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“I loved doing this show so much that I hated weekends.”
A recurring theme for those who remember the show were the Liz Mitchell-designed, quintessentially 1980s, high- fashion costumes, “in that mad fashion era”.
“My favourite moment was Ilona trying to get through a door with an enormous hat on, and shouting, ‘get me double doors’.”
As a teenager, with a teenage appetite, she would eat the food props. The crew would try spraying the food to stop her. “They said it was for the lights and to make it look good but I know it was to stop me from eating it all.”
Gloss screened for the final time in 1990. It has been 24 years and Harcourt and Chappell still get recognised as Gemma and Chelsea. The other day, Chappell was in her local bookshop in Sydney when two Kiwi women barrelled up to her. “Chelsea. It’s so good to meet you,” they exclaimed. “I loved that show! Why don’t they bring it back”
Chappell reckons it’s a good question. “We could all have Gloss parties and dress up to watch the show, how much fun would that be”
Watch the first episode of Gloss here.
– The Dominion Post
Two decades after their first studio album, Shihad are back to rock basics – saying their latest release is the heaviest in years.
FVEY was recorded in the same studio, with the same producer (Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman) as their first studio album 22 years ago. It’s the tenth record the band has released since they first came on to the scene with Churn in 1993.
“I don’t know whether it’s that that made it our best record we’ve made in ages, but it is,” frontman Jon Toogood says.
The band had been touring with Black Sabbath, which had turned them back towards their rockier roots.
PETER PAN By J M Barrie
All children, except one, grow up. So begins the story of the motherless boy who crept into the nursery of the Darling children and took them away on an adventure to Neverland, the place that’s second to the right and straight on until morning.
And what an adventure! Rollicking tales of fairies, lost boys, Indians, mermaids, pirates – and, of course, that most fearsome pirate captain of all, Captain James Hook.
Children everywhere will thrill to their exploits, and adults will either pity or be repulsed by the self-centered, selfish child who refuses to remember in his efforts not to grow up.
The Disney movie, based on the play Peter Pan, which was Barrie’s first work about the original lost boy, is a saccharine version of the story. Barrie’s original book, published in 1911, offers us a darker tale.
Parental angst and guilt, casual deaths and horrific massacres, a malicious fairy who isn’t the little ray of sunshine that Disney would have us believe in – all feature in this classic book, which has been loved for over 100 years.
The story of the boy who never grows up is not an easy read. The language is old-fashioned and doesn’t sit well with our modern phraseology. It‘s better read aloud, and Barrie’s narrative asides and sly commentary about the selfish nature of children, which will sail over their heads at the same speed that Peter circles the pirate ship, will lighten the task. Take the time to read it to a child you love, and you might just enjoy it, too.
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– Waikato Times
It seems to be defying gravity, but is it defying taste and logic
The artwork deemed to be deserving of this year’s National Contemporary Art Award is part of a fluorescent light tube apparently perched precariously on the edge of a wooden shelf.
Titled Tell Someone if Something Happens, the work by Wellington artist Deanna Dowling, looks set to reignite the “Is it really art” debate that frequently accompanies the announcement of the annual awards hosted by Waikato Museum.
This year’s judge Simon Rees was in no doubt of the artistic merits of Dowling’s creation.
“It’s an elegant and simple and good looking object. The artist has had fun messing with logic . . . it breaks all the rules.”
In her artist statement, Dowling spoke of the fragility of the fluorescent bulb, which seems like it could fall and smash at any moment.
“I have dropped one, and god, the sound is so satisfying . . . Go on. I dare you. The sound is better than glass.”
Dowling’s efforts earned her the $15,000 prize. Five merit awards were also announced at last night’s ceremony at the museum. They were Hamilton artist Elsa Lye’s The Cardinals; Pretty Boys by Dunedin artist Madeleine Child; Christchurch artist Ina Johann’s Lost Lines #2; Natalie Guy of Auckland’s Form for Interior; and A Drawing Activity, created by Frances Hansen of Auckland.
The award’s recipients have included some eyebrow-raising works such as a cream-coloured bus shelter created by Auckland artists Michael Parr and Blaine Western for the 2012 competition. In 2009 fellow Auckland artist Dane Mitchell took out the award for his piece Collateral, packaging from other award entries that he instructed gallery staff to throw together as his exhibit.
Rees said the entries for this year’s award were “a pleasing admixture of attention-to-craft, beauty, conceptual eclat, devil-may-care, deep-thinking, elegance, humour, and dedication to the outright ugly – in a good way. All the stuff contemporary art is made of.”
The National Contemporary Art Award exhibition is open daily from today until November 9, from 10am to 4.30pm at Waikato Museum. Admission is free.
Rees will host a free floor talk at 10am today at the museum.
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– Waikato Times
It seems to be defying gravity, but is it defying taste and logic
The artwork deemed to be deserving of this year’s National Contemporary Art Award is part of a fluorescent light tube apparently perched precariously on the edge of a wooden shelf.
Titled Tell Someone if Something Happens, the work by Wellington artist Deanna Dowling, looks set to reignite the “Is it really art” debate that frequently accompanies the announcement of the annual awards hosted by Waikato Museum.
This year’s judge Simon Rees was in no doubt of the artistic merits of Dowling’s creation.
“It’s an elegant and simple and good looking object. The artist has had fun messing with logic . . . it breaks all the rules.”
In her artist statement, Dowling spoke of the fragility of the fluorescent bulb, which seems like it could fall and smash at any moment.
“I have dropped one, and god, the sound is so satisfying . . . Go on. I dare you. The sound is better than glass.”
Dowling’s efforts earned her the $15,000 prize. Five merit awards were also announced at last night’s ceremony at the museum. They were Hamilton artist Elsa Lye’s The Cardinals; Pretty Boys by Dunedin artist Madeleine Child; Christchurch artist Ina Johann’s Lost Lines #2; Natalie Guy of Auckland’s Form for Interior; and A Drawing Activity, created by Frances Hansen of Auckland.
The award’s recipients have included some eyebrow-raising works such as a cream-coloured bus shelter created by Auckland artists Michael Parr and Blaine Western for the 2012 competition. In 2009 fellow Auckland artist Dane Mitchell took out the award for his piece Collateral, packaging from other award entries that he instructed gallery staff to throw together as his exhibit.
Rees said the entries for this year’s award were “a pleasing admixture of attention-to-craft, beauty, conceptual eclat, devil-may-care, deep-thinking, elegance, humour, and dedication to the outright ugly – in a good way. All the stuff contemporary art is made of.”
The National Contemporary Art Award exhibition is open daily from today until November 9, from 10am to 4.30pm. Admission is free.
Rees will host a free floor talk at 10am today at the museum.
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– Waikato Times
Broods, a band in collaboration with Lorde’s producer, has flown to the top of the charts this week.
The song Mother and Father by New Zealand siblings Georgia and Caleb Nott – also known as Broods – took out top Kiwi single.
Choreographer Malia Johnston has been in charge of the moves at the whacky-but-sophisticated World of Wearable Art (WOW) show since 2002 and it has absorbed the bulk of her talent and time.
“But you have to do other things as well, and bring them to WOW,” she says. “You have to go out and look for inspiration all the time and you have to be engaged in what you do.”
This year, her big non-WOW project has been Mana Wahine, which she co-choreographed for Okareka Dance Company with its artistic directors Taiaroa Royal and Taane Mete. The all-women show opened in Rotorua last month and is on the road to 11 centres with Wellington performances in mid-August.
Mana Wahine is far from the zany glitz of WOW. It is a serious attempt to distil into dance the essence of women. The catalyst for the production was a story Royal heard from a relative, of a shared ancestor, Te Aokapurangi, a young woman who was captured in battle and taken far from home but who eventually returned to single-handedly save her people from slaughter.
Royal, Johnston says, wanted to make a work exploring female strength and the way women think, not specifically Maori women – “and the work evolved into celebrating those concepts”.
The production, she says, “is like a painting to me. It evolves, a show that keeps on unfolding and leads you to a wonderful conclusion. It’s very physical”.
And Mana Wahine is time out from WOW which has been so all-consuming that it even, years ago, cut short her OE almost before it had begun.
Johnston, 41, who completed a degree in dance at Unitec in Auckland in 1998, first worked for WOW in Nelson in 2001. There was no particular job advertised but she was momentarily at a loose end and sent in a video and a letter, scored an assistant’s role, did her best to help the extravaganza onto the stage in style, then set off on her big OE. She never assumed she might be employed again on WOW.
She was in Ireland, with London, Italy and Brussels on her list of countries to work and dance in over two or three years, “when the call came asking if I could come home and do a second show”.
She came home to be principal choreographer (“I’ll do a delayed OE in my 60s, maybe”) and found her first show in the role “daunting”.
“In Nelson the stage is very long. You’re looking at it overall and micro-sections along the way. I had to approach it differently to any other show I’d done. Once I worked it out it clicked into place.”
She also had to work with models which she had never done before, and with sets – “and a whole lot of stuff you don’t normally have with dance. It was a pretty crazy show. I hadn’t worked so hard in my life.”
Her now husband, choreographer and dancer Guy Ryan, worked with her. “We were stage managers and directors, just so much. We were going home, downloading the video of the rehearsals. There’s much more support since then. It was a really crazy ride and a fantastic community of people and designs.
“I like making it different each year. It is tricky, but it’s exciting.”
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After nearly 14 years of WOW she still makes no assumption about her future there – “given when I first worked for the company it was never a given the relationship would continue. That’s how I feel, but since I became artistic director five years ago I have a commitment to the company. With artistic relationships you have to keep your mind open.”
Dance has preoccupied Johnston since she was a little girl in a small South Island town where her parents were school teachers. She made up her own dances to the record player in the lounge.
When she was 12 she persuaded her parents to let her learn dancing and caught the bus from North Loburn to Ashburton each week for lessons. In the seventh form, at school in Christchurch, she ran her own jazz dance school.
She had almost finished an arts degree at university when, by chance, she saw a brochure for Unitec’s dance course in Auckland. She thought she was too old at 23, applied anyway and got in.
She’s since initiated many of her own projects and been commissioned to create work for tertiary dance schools and for Touch Compass Dance Trust and Footnote Dance. WOW, though, has kept her busy for more than a decade. And she still gets first-night nerves.
“They wrack you. You hope for the best and you’ve done everything you can. There’s a lot at stake and anything can happen. It’s not a relaxing business.”
Mana Wahine, Okareka Dance Company is at Te Whaea Theatre from August 13-16.
– Your Weekend
While her Shortland Street character Sarah Potts faces the biggest challenge of her career – an infectious virus that she cannot diagnose – Amanda Billing ponders how she would handle such a crisis.
“I’ve dealt with adversity in the past and I will again,” Amanda says. “We’ve all had setbacks in our life and at the end of the day there have been times when I’ve been passive in the face of those setbacks.
“But there have been other times when they’ve brought out the best in me. I think that’s actually what this situation does – it brings out the best in Sarah and I really enjoyed that.”
Thankfully, Billing does not have to deal with the high-stakes challenges that Sarah does on a daily basis, although she says this time it is tougher than usual for the diagnostic expert.
“She’s in the worst position for a doctor to be in, which is where she can’t heal people and that is the hard thing,” Billing says.
“It’s just feeling powerless, feeling helpless, the uncertainty of it and the literally life-and-death nature of it. If people show up she can’t make them better, she doesn’t know how to make them better and that’s a horrible feeling.”
Sarah’s crusade to find a cure could also have had dire consequences for her relationship, says Ben Mitchell, who plays her long-term partner TK Samuels.
“She’s a medical professional trying to be a scientist,” Mitchell says. “That actually pisses him off to tell the truth.
“She’s a mother; she should be there spending time with her family. She’s got MS herself and she’s not really taking care of herself…
“Then he starts to realise that she’s got this obsessive compulsive thing to do it and that’s her nature and he loves that about her too.”
Billing, who has played the tenacious doctor for almost 10 years, admires Sarah’s persistence.
“Tenacity, that’s a good word (for it),” Billing says. “I think she’s probably more like that as a rule than I am. Having played someone for such a long time it’s really interesting when their positive characteristics come out like this. Like being able to see humour in a difficult situation or not giving up or loving someone unconditionally.”
Fans of the couple will be pleased to see that out of a grave situation comes a commitment between TK and Sarah in the form of a proposal.
“Their relationship changes because of their involvement in this situation,” Billing says. “That tenacity can be really annoying for (TK) but he knows that it results in good things for other people.”
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Of the proposal, Mitchell respects his character’s take-charge attitude.
“I relate to his masculine focus,” Mitchell says. “He’s explosive, he’s intense, he’s deep, he’s devoted. He’s not ambiguous… He’s black and white. If he doesn’t like you he’ll tell you… I love these qualities… Plus he gets to have a lot of good-looking girls with him. That’s the boy in me, the little kid goes, ‘I really like the hot girls I have to kiss everyday’.”
While it may finally be happily ever after for Sarah and TK, the problem of the contagious virus remains. Can Sarah make a diagnosis before it is too late
“The thing about this storyline is that it’s the hero’s journey,” Billing says. “She’s always been that sort of character where she goes out in the world and she’s got a problem to solve and she conquers or not as the case may be…
“I think we like that story as human beings because it’s inspiring and reminds us that we face these challenges in our own life.”
The last time Billing faced such a professional challenge she was tackling theatre, after many years on TV. Last November, Billing played Roxie Hart in Auckland Theatre Company’s Chicago opposite Lucy Lawless and Shane Cortese.
“I am constantly saying to myself ‘Am I ready I don’t know if I can do this’,” Billing says. “I was supported by everyone that I was working with and that’s a crucial part of it as well and that’s central to Sarah’s story too. She has to trust herself.
Shortland Street
Mark Ruffalo is absolutely lovely. Let’s just get that out of the way from the off. Shaggy, shambling, a bit giggly and soft around the edges, he comes across in real life much as he does on screen in the roles one critic summarised as “the wounded hipster neurotic of modern cinema”.
He fronts an organisation against fracking and other pressure groups for renewable energy and clean water, doing genuine hard yards on podiums surrounded by placards; he’s marched with Occupy Wall Street. Meanwhile, he and his wife, Sunrise Coigney, have been together for nearly 20 years. Lovely.
Right now he is here to discuss