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The Lumière Photo Essay. Portraits of The Chills’ Martin Phillipps, Auckland, December 2015. Read More »

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The Lumière Photo Essay. Images on The Eversons performing live, Auckland 2015. Read More »

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“Mallory Ortberg” Illustrated by Julia Sharp for Thomas Phillips’s 2016 interview with Mallory Ortberg, satirist and co-founder of The Toast. Read More »

Like a lot of people, I first heard of her in high school and then in college realised that, among the intelligent set, you were supposed to really look down on people who liked her. But then I reread her in my mid-twenties and it was just so funny! It’s funny because I am laughing at her, but it’s also very tender and protective. She’s just so charmingly straightforward. There’s no guile to Ayn Rand. She genuinely thinks everyone should go on the radio and talk for 40 pages and then retire to a valley and bring lots of oil barons and blow up the railroads and everything is just gonna work out.—Mallory Ortberg on Ayn Rand

“Larry David / Laurie David” Illustrated by Elina Nykänen for Alexander Bisley’s 2006 interview with Laurie David, environmental activist and producer of An Inconvenient Truth. Read More »

#An Inconvenient Truth

“Spellbound” Illustrated by Natalia Deyr for Alexander Bisley’s 2004 interview with director Jeff Blitz. Read More »

#Spelling Bee

“Tunde Adebimpe” Illustrated by Hikalu Clarke for Alexander Bisley’s notes on TV on the Radio and other Sydney cultural highlights. Read More »

#Tunde Adebimpe #TV on the Radio

“Haruki Murakami” Illustrated by Hikalu Clarke for Alexander Bisley’s interview with ex-Granta editor and Murakami interviewer (at his sold-out Auckland Writers Festival session), John Freeman. Read More »

AB: I thought you did well getting some fresh insights out from Murakami. For instance, his answer that he believes in evil was fascinating. Was there anything you were particularly proud of?

JF: I wanted to get him to talk about metaphysics, because I feel like his books operate in a world that feels like chance but it’s something else. Like this sense of a greater, bigger design that’s never spelled out and when he said towards the end, “I feel like someone’s watching out for me, I don’t know who he is.” That’s so perfect, I thought that’s exactly what his books feel like; that there’s a reach towards a sense of a greater order in life, and yet somehow don’t ever make the mistake of explaining what that order is. They explain the search for the order, the feeling and the need for it, but they don’t ever come firmly down on a cosmology, if you will.

AB: Has he influenced you as a writer?

JF: His style is so inimitable that I think it would be careless to try and write like Murakami. But I did realise in reading his books that clarity is a very powerful theme. So I suppose in a sense that people who you admire eventually filter into how you think and how you think shows up in how you write, and I suppose in some way I’ve definitely come away from his books feeling that the braver thing to do sometimes is not to obfuscate or to make things pretty but to just try to describe them with intense clarity.

#Murakami

From the Archives: Robert Fisk photographed by Catherine Bisley in Wellington for Alexander Bisley’s 2006 interview with the visiting journalist. Read More »

The sign of a good film is when you wake up in the morning thinking about it… I think film has an unstoppable power to convince if it’s properly made.—Robert Fisk on film

#Robert Fisk

The Lumière Photo Essay. Images from Homegrown 2015.

In this series: Iain Gordon, Dallas Tamaira (Bongmaster), Jon Toogood (Shihad), Laughton Kora (Kora). View the full photoset »

#Shihad #Kora

“John Clarke” Illustrated by Elina Nykänen for Alexander Bisley’s 2008 interview with the Melbourne-based Kiwi comedy legend. Read More »

Not only is the media not doing its job properly, it’s perpetuating a story, fantasyland. So yeah, I don’t think the standard of the media is terribly high. This is substantially to do with cost requirements within media organisations. At the moment there is a world wide credit and banking crisis, which comes as a huge surprise to the media since their concern has not been wisdom, research or the well-being of the community, but money.—John Clarke

#John Clarke #Fred Dagg

“Iceland” Illustrated by Hikalu Clarke, inspired by Pico Iyer’s new book, The Art of Stillness. Read More »

AB: The Art of Stillness is your beautifully written new book. The arresting, complementary Iceland images are by Icelandic Canadian photographer Eydís Einarsdótti. She calls the country one of the few places where she finds “perfect stillness in mind and body”. What makes Iceland special for you?

PI: Iceland, more than anywhere I know, reminds you that travel takes you to forgotten, unvisited, amazingly exotic places inside yourself. Of course it is the geysers, the rowdy pubs, the people—out of some ancient Norse legend—and the haunting open spaces of Iceland that transfix one on arrival, and look like nowhere else, with their treelessness and their quaint, boldly coloured little houses set against vast stretches of nothing.

But what that brings home to you is that the external landscape springs a gate open so that suddenly you’re in somewhere new within your memory or imagination. Sitting on a hill in rural Iceland, the wind whistling in your ears, with nothing around you but scrawking birds and maybe the sound of distant bells, you can’t fail to feel taken very far away from your rushed and congested daily life and into somewhere deep and transporting.

“To go out,” as the great Scottish-American naturalist John Muir had it, “is to go in.”

#Pico Iyer

The Lumière Photo Essay. Images from Joey Bada$$ and Run the Jewels’ recent New Zealand tour, James Cabaret Wellington, January 9, 2015.

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#Joey Bada$$#Run the Jewels

The Lumière Photo Essay. Images from Rhythm and Vines 2014.

In this series: Jagwar Ma, Chase Status, MØ, Chet Faker, Danny Brown. Read More »

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The Lumière Photo Essay. Portraits of rising Wellington singer-songwriter Estère, who performs at Rhythm and Vines on December 29-31. Interviewed by Barney Chunn for The Lumière Reader in April. Read More »

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Katherine Mansfield. Ref: 1/2-002594-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22601543

“Out of the Past” is a monthly series curated for The Lumière Reader by DigitalNZ. Each month, DigitalNZ will post a surprising image or item from their search service, selected to relate to the current activity on Lumière. We hope that the series will surface some fascinating ideas and images from New Zealand’s past and provide a fleeting historical perspective on Lumière’s content.

Katherine Mansfield’s 126th birthday was celebrated recently by a special lecture at the Keynes Library in London. Guest writer Lana Doyle was there, and was able to cover the event, and the energetic activity of the Katherine Mansfield Society, for this website. There are many excellent photos of Mansfield at DigitalNZ, both at her birthplace in Wellington and at her various residences in London and France. Here she is, caped and with a book, in France, 1916. Read More »

DigitalNZ is an aggregated search engine and data service which makes New Zealand’s digital content easy to find, share, and use. The initiative brings together the digital collections of nearly 150 New Zealand organisations from libraries and archives, to private companies and community groups—and it is growing every day. All 26 million digital items from these organisations are searchable via digitalnz.org. Part of the magic of DigitalNZ is that it surfaces New Zealand content that is buried by Google, and makes New Zealand’s digital heritage more searchable and accessible.

#out of the past #Katherine Mansfield

“Naomie Harris” Illustrated by Elina Nykänen for a conversation on playing Winnie Mandela in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Read More »

#Naomie Harris

“Noam Chomsky” Illustrated by Matt Kambic for Alexander Bisley’s 2010 interview with New Yorker political writer Hendrik ‘Rick’ Hertzberg. Read More »

RH: The problem is [Chomsky] always ends up in the same place no matter what the circumstances. And it’s always the evilness and awfulness of the United States and its ruling circles that is the explanation for everything. And I just have a problem with any ideology that no matter what the input is, the output’s always the same.

AB: His worldview seems bereft of nuance.

RH: It does, and in that sense it’s very much like the worldview of the hard ideological right, which also always yields the same output. No matter what you put into it, it always comes out with lower taxes. That’s the answer to every problem. How can the same thing be the answer to every problem?

#Noam Chomsky

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