May - The Inside Story

As I said in the last blog, the weather is getting colder. We had a couple of weeks with gale force winds that closed the airport and ferries, and it feels warm if the temperature gets into the 50s. Still, in terms of cloud and rain, the weather changes every half hour, so it is never uninterrupted gloom. Therefore, we have done lots of inside things this month: music, theater, movies, and lectures. Unfortunately, these don’t offer so many opportunities for photos, so I am putting in pictures of the Museum, Parliament, and various statues around town.

This has been Music Month in Wellington, so Te Papa Museum has been offering lunch hour music events. We saw a Maori group called Big Belly Woman. They started with a couple of songs with Maori chants, but most of their work was jazzier. They did have an interesting instrument – basically a disk spun on 2 strings to make a humming noise – I don’t know its Maori name. Another program featured a pair of young Pakeha women singer/songwriters called Harriet and the Matches. (Pakeha is a commonly used, non-derogatory term here for non-Maoris.) Finally there was a program of nineteenth century French songs in honor of the Monet exhibit and performed by students from the New Zealand School of Music.

This month we also went to the first of the two operas we have bought tickets for: The Italian Girl in Algiers by Rossini. It was performed in a marvelous huge Baroque style Opera House. We were towards the back of the top tier, which would have been ok, except that our view of the English subtitles was partially blocked. We did manage to move down a little bit after the intermission. The Italian Girl is opera buffo, so the plot is quite silly, but Rossini’s music is very lyrical. I think to help the plot seem funnier, it was staged as a TV soap opera, but on the whole I found that to be more confusing and distracting, rather than helpful. The University has been offering some opera classes, so I took one about this opera, which definitely helped, and now I am taking a couple on Shakespeare as adapted to opera, which is very interesting.

We saw the play, Blood Wedding, by Garcia Lorca, ironically on Mother’s Day. The play is about a girl who runs off with a former lover on her wedding day. Although the groom’s mother did not particularly approve of the marriage, she does approve of her son pursuing the couple for revenge and honor. It was well done.

In honor of their Monet exhibit, Te Papa also showed some French documentaries (without subtitles) about Monet, Degas, and Debussy, which I think I actually understood about half of. I learned a lot, particularly about Debussy and Degas. They also showed a film about the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, which was really interesting. There were lots of film footage and stills from the 30s on. It was made on the occasion of a reunion in 2000 of surviving members. Many were still remarkably active and interesting for being in their eighties and nineties. Both programs piqued our interest for ballet, so we have bought tickets for a ballet in July.

We also went to two programs about writers. One was a reading, discussion and book signing with Ann Thwaite about a new book Passages she has written about her New Zealand pioneer great grandparents. She talked about some of the differences between writing family history and biography. She has written biographies of AA Milne and Frances Hodgson Burnett, among others. We also went to a panel of regional winners of the Commonwealth Prize for Literature, where each person read some of his or her book and answered questions.

I went with a friend from Meeting to see a film at the National Film Archives about Maori weaving. I found it most interesting about teaching and cultural transmission. In traditional societies, the children mostly learn without being taught. They are around adults all day, and attempt to do the things the adults are doing. The adults may help them learn, but that is secondary to doing what they do. When you have a society like the Maori, where some of that cultural transmission got interrupted, you have to more deliberately learn some of the crafts as an adult, so the people in the movie were really analyzing this process and trying to figure out how to continue to pass on their skills. They were also thinking about the role of artistic innovation in traditional crafts. The woman who was the main artist decided that what mattered was who you were making the piece for. If it was for the tribe, she made it traditionally. If it was for herself or for sale, she could innovate.

I also went to see the new Star Trek movie, which I enjoyed very much. And Ron and I went to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. At last I have seen it in a theater where the audience knew how to participate in the film. So there were lots of kids in costume, dancing and throwing rice and all the rest of the stuff. It was a lot of fun.

Finally, we have gotten involved with some political activism here. We were invited by a friend to go to a meeting about a raid that happened in 2007 on some Maori activists. Like many countries, New Zealand beefed up its security after 9/11. Having actually also zero danger from outside terrorists, it justifies its security budget by going after domestic targets. A Green party Member of Parliament talked about what he has discovered about his surveillance, and even that of his mother, a Communist back in the fifties and sixties. I also went to a rally for Aung San Suu Kyi a week ago, for all the good it might have done. It was a small group of people, but we were addressed by Members of Parliament from all three parties.

Then last Sunday and Monday we attended a conference on Nuclear Disarmament. The opening keynote speech was by Malcolm Fraser, a former (and rather conservative) Prime Minister in Australia, giving an excellent speech on why we need to move towards abolition of nuclear weapons now. New Zealand also has a Minister for Disarmament who spoke. With Obama’s recent speech in favor of eliminating nuclear weapons, now is hopefully the time to move forward on this front.