Len Lye's Wind Wand

This is one of Len Lye's best known kinetic sculptures: the Wind Wand. It stands 45 m high on the seafront in New Plymouth, North Island. It can bend at least 20 metres, so sometimes I can be quite scary to see it sway in the wind...


Len Lye was a New Zealand born artist; he had a passion for both cinematography and kinetic sculpture and an obsession (that's what we thought) for making movement something real.
On our recent visit to Melbourne, we visited an exhibition on Lye's work at the Centre of the Moving Image. Some of his sculptures were just mind-blowing, and watching them moving, some of them at the same time, was quite an experience!
His movies were also quite a discovery for us; dancing patterns of colourful lines and prints. Here's a taste of it:

Barefoot

One of the things that surprised me most when I arrived here in New Zealand was seeing people going barefoot everywhere. You see them everyday at uni, in the supermarket, walking the dog in the park and even in pubs (like the one in the picture). It's like they don't remember to put their shoes on before they leave the house!

I heard a kiwi the other day saying one of the things he missed when he went overseas was walking barefoot without fearing hurting his feet. The first thing he did when he came back home was taking off his shoes and walking on the grass. I have to say it's a nice feeling, but I still don't dare going anywhere without my shoes on...and I think it has to do more with my made-in-spain mindset (what would my mother say?!) than with fearing I would hurt my feet...

The Flight of the Conchords

Here's a TV show made by kiwis that everybody should watch before coming to NZ. So funny...this guys are hilarious! Check out their accent, and their outfits (specially Bret's T-shirts). If you've never heard of them, I recommend you watch their HBO one night stand, that's a good start. These are two of our favourite videos- It's business time...

Kiwiana

On our recent visit to Christchurch we spent a rainy afternoon at the Canterbury Museum, a highly recommendable place if you are visiting the city, with lots of information about the first Maori and European settlers, and a pretty cool interactive exhibition about the body (sometimes I wish I was 7 again...).

Well, there we came across a replica of one of New Zealand's most famous houses: Fred and Myrtle's Paua Shell House. There were lots of people in the queue to see the house, and we had no idea what the story behind this place was, so we joined them just in time for the next show to begin. So we entered this small cinema where we learnt about Fred and Myrtle's collection of paua shell and other kiwiana stuff.

Fred and Myrtle Flutey spent their whole life together in their small house in Bluff collecting paua shells from the sea, polishing them and hanging them on the living room walls. Along with the paua, they gathered and displayed all sorts of items and icons from New Zealand's pop culture and heritage (what people here call kiwiana-generally seen as kitsch, but loved by everyone). They opened their house to the public and it became one of the most popular tourist attractions in the area until their recent death some years ago.

The collection has now been brought back to life thanks to the Fluteys' family and the museum, and here you can see Phil with his cheeky smile in the living-room replica we saw:

And...yes, polishing all those shells is a lot of work!

How cool is your letter-box?

Mail-box, Letter-box...whatever, they are everywhere, even in the most remote places or in the middle of nowhere. On top of a hill, down the hill, after the tunnel, past the river...you might not see any house around, but you'll surely find one of these. Does the postman get here everyday? No idea, but sure they get mail, otherwise they wouldn't have put them there!

In the cities...well, that's a different story. Sometimes it is as if they were competing to see who's got the coolest letter-box. Some of them are miniature copies of the house they belong to, others are extravagant, funny or just very colourful, like the one on the picture. Oh God, I've just realised how boring my letterbox is! We should talk to our landlady about it...