Christchurch City Libraries Blog

Having earthquakes has its upside – world famous opera stars honouring us with their presence for example. Placido Domingo has always been my favourite tenor. I can take or leave Pavarotti and never liked Jose Carreras, but Domingo is a sort of baritone tenor and I find his voice rich and satisfying.

He can act as well. I first saw him on film in a version of Carmen which screened at a film festival way back, playing opposite the sexiest Carmen I have ever seen. I came out of the theatre feeling as though my spirit had just been to a banquet. He followed up not much later with a film version of Otello which was equally spellbinding and passionate.

He’s getting on a bit now, but he looks after his voice by conducting rather than singing all the time. You’ll need to get in quick to get a ticket because they’re selling fast despite the hefty price tag.

If you miss out though, we can provide you with some great  recordings as CDs, or streamed on your computer through Music Online or Naxos Online Music Library, and even online videos in Naxos Online Video Library.

The Fine Arts and Music Collection covers all subjects artsy: from drama to music, to art history, dance and filmmaking. Information is provided on hundreds of arts-related topics from:

• Hip hop to Handel;
• Art theory to machismo in movies;
• Ballet to belly dancing;
• Early music education to advanced music theory;
• Art therapy to the new urbanist movement in architecture.

With more than 150 full text journals this electronic resource is ideal for supporting any questions that students, artists, teachers, art buffs and music lovers may have.

Fine arts and music collection and many other useful electronic resources can be found in the Source.  Access this from home with your library card number and PIN, or at our open community libraries.

My latest Arts Festival outing was Raising the Titanics. Although my view of proceedings onstage consisted of the actors’ heads, and only their heads, framed by the backs of the heads of the people sitting in front of me, I still managed to enjoy it.

Vanity prevented me from taking a rug (so aging) as recommended by one reviewer and it proved the right call. The dome was toasty warm, and resembled an igloo only in shape.

The Titanics, fictionally set in the golden age of the Māori showband, featured some great singing and gave me a craving to hear those beautiful close harmonies from the real thing.  Where better to start than The Maori Volcanics? Billy T. James and Prince Tui Teka were alumni, and while I’m listening I’m going to flick through the book about them to enjoy their visual stylings .

Sunday the 14th August. The snow held off and Scape was launched successfully, surely a huge relief for the 6th Biennial of Art in Public Space, postponed twice due to earthquakes.

Art lovers gathered in the TelstraClear Club in Hagley Park to mark the heartbreak and hard work involved,  to celebrate the achievement of making it actually happen and to set off to see the works in situ.

We all got a copy of the handsome programme, archival documents in themselves with the many alterations and amendments added as circumstances changed. Lead by the Town Cryer and exhorted to keep it orderly (wasted words to an art crowd – no sooner underway than wandering willy-nilly among the traffic).

First stop was The Lambs’  Book of Life (Folder Wall), the enormous Darryn George work  on the Christchurch Civic Offices Building Montreal Street Wall. Based on “an internal view of a filing cabinet drawer with the receding label tabs of suspended folders seen as a metaphor for the function of records and registers”, the sheer scale of the work is quite overwhelming.

After a musical interlude from a small brass band on bicycles and the spectacular sight of a trailer load of red balloons launched into a sky that was still blue, we were off to Gardensity, Ash Keating’s work designed before the September 4th earthquake. This “fictional property development which houses new condensed, sustainable living located in Cathedral Square”,  is spookily timely considering the very recent launch of the Draft City Plan, but it does look to disobey the height restrictions (just a bit). It’s on the forecourt of the Art Gallery.

The final work on the walking tour was my particular favourite, Ahmet Ogut’s Waiting for a Bus. A ”gently rotating carousel (that) provides an invitation for people to sit, stop and observe the slowly unfolding view of the altered city surrounding them”. The small brass band had nipped around the back way, taken up the invitation and were in fact gently rotating, much to the fascination of passersby. This one is outside the Museum, where there surely is an unfolding view of a very altered Arts Centre.

Get out,  have a look and tell – what’s your favourite?

The Storylines Free Family Days are held every year throughout New Zealand to celebrate the amazing, extremely talented authors and illustrators that we have in our country.  This year the Christchurch Free Family Day is being held at Cobham Intermediate School, 294 Ilam Road, Burnside on Sunday 21 August, from 10am-3pm.  It’s a chance for you and your children to meet some fantastic New Zealand authors and illustrators, including:

• David Hill
• Kyle Mewburn
• Leonie Thorpe
• Donovan Bixley
• Ben Brown and Helen Taylor

And some very special guests…

• Author of the Zac Power and Phoenix Files series, Chris Morphew
• New Zealand legends, The Topp Twins

Your children could get their favourite author’s autograph, listen to them talk about their books and read some of them, or enter the Storylines competition.  It’s totally FREE, so come along with your family and join the fun.  You can download the programme from the library website or grab one from your library.

I can’t take it any more – I just have to complain.  Bitterly.  And at length.

With a name like Outpost, a tagline like “They took the job to ESCAPE THE WORLD. They didn’t expect the WORLD TO END” (and yes, the all-shouty capital letters are as presented), and a cover picture of a hazard-suited dude watching a burning city, it was always going to be either Trash or Treasure.

Sadly for Adam Baker, I’m placing this one firmly in the Trash category. Despite rave reviews from publishers on Amazon, lots of kudos from authors like Stephen Leather, and a general vibe that this is a great and gripping read, I’m not feeling the love.

The premise? Absolutely fab – what’s not to love here. A wintering-over skeleton crew marooned on an Arctic oil rig as civilisation falls to a global pandemic. The characters – hmmm, a little flat (conflicted chubby reverend Jane, dreadlocked dope-growing Sikh engineer Ghost, tattooed ex-con Nail, codeine-addicted doctor Rye: can you say walking cliche?). Tolerable, although there’s no real character development.

The storyline? Well, let’s just say, how many disaster scenario locations can you squeeze into one book? We’ve got the almost abandoned oil rig, the scientists marooned on the ice, the actually abandoned Russian research station full of biohazards, the crashing-in-front-of-their-eyes space station pod (with dying cosmonaut), the floating cruise liner (with infected ravening hordes), and I’m still only halfway through the book.

The thing that’s really tipping the balance, though (because despite all this, I can still see the potential), is the STYLE of the thing.  Every page has strings of sentences like this: “Flash of lightning. She let her eyes adjust. A seething ocean. Surging, frothing waves.”  Every single page. It’s like Dick and Jane Visit the Apocalypse. Can I make it to the end of the book? I don’t know. Do I even want to?  I don’t know. Also, there’s a sequel …

Have you read it? Vote below – trash or treasure? Or suggest some similar books that I might enjoy …

• Find more books in the Trash or treasure series
• Find more (and better? you decide) books about the end of the world

The language collection is not necessarily an area that would immediately spring to mind when thinking of a good book to read in bed. You may instead picture dry old texts hammering home grammar rules and the dire consequences of not using an apostrophe correctly. But think again. Some titles we have received lately look  fascinating, often funny and without the slightest hint of stuffiness. Here are some good examples:

The Language Wars: A History of Proper English
Examines grammar rules, regional accents, swearing, spelling, dictionaries, political correctness, and the role of electronic media in reshaping language. It also takes a look at such niggling concerns as the split infinitive, elocution and text messaging.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language
Packed with nuggets of information about language, culture, history and power, Robert McCrum traces the way that the English language has twisted and turned in response to the way the world has changed.

Unmentionables: From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean
‘Ladies of the night’, ‘love handles, ‘collateral damage, ‘vertically challenged’. We use them all the time but are we just being polite or actually lying? 

Planet word
Celebrated author and actor Stephen Fry has been fronting a BBC programme about language called Planet Word. Talking about this new programme he states that

 ”We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

 I’ll have to think about that one, but in the meantime the book based on the programme should be very entertaining.

If you like a bit of fun and enjoy learning new words then try out Save the words.  I stumbled upon Snollygoster : A shrewd unprincipled person, especially a politician! “Instead of giving snollygosters the key to the city, it might be better to change the locks”.

They've brought their National Sport with them.

30 years ago today … Saturday 15 August 1981.

This rally coincided with the first test between the Springboks and the All Blacks.

It took place in Christchurch at Lancaster Park (later renamed Jade Stadium, and now the AMI Stadium).

More information on the Springbok Tour:

• View all the 1981 Springbok Tour posters in our collection.
• Search BiblioCommons for books on the 1981 Springbok Tour.
• Websites with information on the 1981 Springbok Tour.

It’s been a famine and now it is a feast. Two really good Press Christchurch Writers Festival events in the last two weeks and more to come, tickets booked for the Arts Festival and last night the opening of the Film Festival.

The theatres were full at 8.15pm for that show-offy Palme d’Or winning The Tree of Life, which officially opened the festival, but a small and select audience was there at 6 for a little gem of a documentary.

Guilty Pleasures was an affectionate look at those pieces of pink perfection –  Mills and Boon novels. There’s one sold every four seconds somewhere in the world  and the film followed some of the product’s more far-flung fans.

Hiroko, from Japan, was so transfixed by the ball-room dancing of Dana and Savannah, the protagonists of one M&B novel, that she spent huge amounts of money learning how to quick-step. Shumita perused piles of titles in the Number 3 Library in Delhi, a shop so full of books it resembled a pink cave, and that wasn’t counting the chest high stacks on the pavement outside.

For those of you who think anyone can write a Mills and Boon novel, Roger has news for you. He writes under the pseudonym Gill Sanderson and would never feature a hero named Roger, or a hero with red hair. So now you know.

If you do think you’ve got what it takes to be a successful romance writer, there’s lots of help out there. The titles are works of art in themselves; try Love writing, or Heart and Craft, or a subject search under Love Stories – Authorship.

And on the subject of Guilty Pleasures – what’s your favourite Mills and Boon? Go on, you know you’ve read at least one in your life – Share!

August is family history month and on Saturday 20 August, the Canterbury Branch of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists is holding a public research day at St. Ninian’s Church Hall, Puriri Street, Riccarton.

The day is in fact a celebration. For the first time in six months there will be available old familiar friends: tombstone transcripts (find references to these  on the library catalogue by using the words ‘sepulchral monument‘); local state primary school records; the matching brides-and -grooms and other CDs; and Denys Hampton’s michrofiche which may, via the Appendices to the journals of the House of Representatives, lead one to the indiscreet comments that some ancestor made in front of a long-forgotten royal commission.

Parish registers, cemetery transcripts, School indexes, the CDs, NZ BDM microfiche and NZ cemetery microfiche, and experienced researchers in Australian, European, and British Genealogy will be available . Society members will also show how to use school records and computer networks.

The earthquake of 22 February resulted in centres for historical and genealogical research such as the CentralLibrary and the Anglican and Methodist archives becoming trapped in the CBD’s red zone.
Slowly, access to these things is resuming.

• Archives New Zealand in Peterborough Street, a magnificent but under-used institution, is now open and offers limited research facilities.
• On 23 February brave souls from the Canterbury Branch of the New Zealand Society of Genealogists rescued their holdings from the Shirley Community Centre. These include the society’s bound volumes of Christchurch-and-environs church baptismal, marriage and burial registers. Genealogical Society members began transcribing these registers to a card file in 1980. With the card file stuck in the Central Library it is great to have the bound volumes available.

Material is available for use from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Participants are asked to bring their lunch; tea and coffee will be available.

Richard Greenaway