Show Notes
It's Labour Weekend, which in Raglan means the studio doors are open. The Raglan Arts Weekend is in its 16th year, with more than 70 artists inviting thousands of visitors in to see where the work gets made. Co-ordinator Nicky Brzeska joins Perlina to talk about what's on show, from ceramics to taxidermy, and how the weekend makes room for emerging artists alongside the familiar names.
More from Culture 101
Sarah Ell was a sixth former camping on the shores of Lake Tarawera when she first imagined writing about the eruption. That was 1986, a century after the mountain blew. Forty years on, her story has a cast of visitors gathered at the hotel with lies to tell and plans to carry out. The reader knows what's coming. They don't. At the heart of A Sky Full of Fire is Mohi, a young Tuhourangi boy. Sarah tells Perlina why she couldn't write this book without a Maori voice, and what it meant when a Tuhourangi reader loved it. She also explains why there's always weather in her books.
Kirsten Vangsness was halfway through an ab workout when a distinguished voice across the gym announced that it worshipped at her throne. It was Tim Curry. She went straight to work and burst in on her bosses to tell them he wanted to be on the show. Kirsten has played Penelope Garcia on Criminal Minds since 2005, a part she only auditioned for to help a friend in casting look good. She was working three jobs to pay the rent at the time. Twenty seasons later, she still gets excited every time she sees her name on a call sheet. She tells Perlina about the shy kid who stopped talking for a year, and the drama class that showed her where she belonged.
There's a lot more singing in season two of Happiness, and Luke Di Somma is the one writing it. This time the show within the show is a Sherlock Holmes musical. Luke helps run the writers room, so the songs are planned from the ground up rather than dropped in later. TV is tough on a songwriter, though. A stage number can run six minutes. On screen, two minutes is a long song, and a close-up can say what a lyric would. Luke also looks back on a Christchurch childhood with an activity every lunchtime, and years spent as a conductor for hire with theatre companies around the South Island. Some of the people he met there may seem familiar.
Not many people decide to sit down and watch a 40-minute drama on their phone. Plenty of people will watch 40 one-minute episodes, though, one easy decision at a time. That's the hook behind micro-dramas, the vertical, cliffhanger-loaded soaps turning up in social media feeds, more and more of them made with AI. University of Auckland business lecturer Johnny Chan has been studying why they're so hard to put down. He's never watched one for fun, and after his research, he probably won't. In China, 850 million people do. Johnny walks Perlina through how a typical storyline keeps twisting to hold you, and why he worries about a generation that can't sit with anything longer than two minutes.
Jonathan Smart knew artist Mark Braunias since 1988, the year Jonathan opened his gallery and Mark graduated from Ilam with a remarkable class of artists. Almost two year's after Mark's death, Gliff, the current show at Jonathan Smart Gallery, offers a glance across a career that began with Donald Duck in conversation with the Virgin Mary and ended in bright fluoro colour. Jonathan remembers Mark moving in for days to paint straight onto the gallery walls, knowing it would all be painted over when the show came down. For Fast Favourites, he's reading Richard Russo and heading to a West Coast campsite with his fishing rod. After an opening, he takes the crew to a Japanese diner where the chef decides what you eat. And Marlon Williams' latest album is what settles his granddaughters.