Author and poet Hera Lindsay Bird. Photo / Dean Purcell
In the theme of The Last Kiss, Canvas asked writers, artists, comedians, broadcasters and a sex worker from Aotearoa New Zealand to explore the dimensions of a kiss as portrayed in film, TV, literature, food, politics, life and sport. And Hera Lindsay Bird writes a poem, just for us.
HERA LINDSAY BIRD: Anything Can Be Poignant If You Put The Word ‘Last’ In Front Of It
The last gasp, the last straw, the last supper
The last unicorn. The last waltz. The last of the summer wine
Fermat’s last theorem. The last train to Clarksville.
The last: Will and Testament, Exit from Brooklyn
Of the Mohicans, Chance saloon
Even the last Pizza-blast Dorito
In the Pizza-blast Dorito Party Sharepack, has a certain pathetic ring to it.
What is it about the last Mount Glorious Day Frog
That makes it sadder than, say, the penultimate Mount Glorious Day Frog
Feasting on butterfly larvae and flat-bodied crustaceans
In the Australian undergrowth?
Why is it always ‘the last temptation of Christ’
And never one of his earlier, and more formative temptations?
What is it about the last kiss,
That makes it sadder than any other kiss?
Technically, every first kiss
Is also a last first kiss.
And every last kiss,
Is also a first last kiss
Which means every first last kiss
Is also, technically, your last first last kiss
Which, if you think about it
Is just another way of saying, etc
What’s so great about a last kiss anyway?
Most last kisses are nothing
but a kind of oral punctuation
at the end of a dried-up sentence.
No,
the only place to live is here
in the centre of the labyrinth
Here, in the meat and horror and boredom of it all
The stars wheeling overhead
Time and no escape
Here, in the fetid swamp of repetition
The stars wheeling overhead
Time - like I already said - and no escape
The last stars, if it makes the poem any better
The last stanza,
If it makes the poem any faster
The line before the second to last line of the poem which goes:
(life, friends, is supposed to be wasted)
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
(last line from Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright)
Hera Lindsay Bird is an award-winning poet. A North American edition of her poetry collection Hera Lindsay Bird is to be published by Deep Vellum Press.
ANNA CODDINGTON: “Kiss From a Rose”
As a teenager I had a love/hate relationship with Seal. I was 13 when this song came out and it was the kind of tune my friends’ mums liked. It was an emotional power ballad, yet it kinda slapped.
The lyrics don’t really make sense - it starts with “Ba-ya-ya, ba-da-da-da-da-da, ba-ya-ya”- but sensical lyrics have never been a prerequisite for massive hits. It’s about the vibe, and the vibe here is great - suspension in the verse, anticipation in the pre-chorus, and full pulling-your-fist-down power in the chorus. But the lyric is wavy enough to interpret as applicable to your own life, and that is the magic of a good song. No one cares about Seal’s feelings - we’re interested in how Seal makes us feel about our own lives.
“Did you know that when it snows my eyes become large and the light that you shine can be seen?” I’m sorry, what? That snow reference comes out of nowhere. Doesn’t matter! The melody is interesting and the words fall on it well. Whatever it means, it feels great.
Seal compares you to a kiss from a rose on the grey. There’s no literal interpretation for this. Let this be a metaphor for whatever you need. The grey is your job, your upcoming exams, your hypo kids in the holidays (am I projecting? Maybe, but this is about you). A kiss from a rose is a glass of wine, a massage, everyone pre-ordering the children’s book you randomly decided to write in lockdown (projecting again), or an actual kiss from someone you’d love one from - your partner, Seal, whoever.
It works because that’s what kisses are like. Touching lips as a literal idea is weird. Mouth germs. Disgusting. But in the right moment, with the right feeling behind it, a kiss is an indescribable feeling. Kiss from a rose is as good a way to describe it as any.
Anna Coddington (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue) is an award-winning musician and author. Her pukapuka Blue, Blue Christmas, is out on November 7.
DAVID HERKT: Male-to-Male
A full-on, lip-locked, male-to-male kiss is like many other human kisses, but with a little added freight. Despite the best efforts of Shortland Street actors and a reality TV series hosted by Dannii Minogue, male-to-male kissing still hasn’t quite made it to the very ordinary status it should possess – except for those involved. For them, the kiss should be something special, at least one hopes.
In my somewhat diverse CV, I do have the fact that I was one-half of New Zealand’s first male-to-male movie kiss in the 1980 feature film Squeeze. In film terms, it was a fairly brief kiss – and no tongue. It was also a kiss between a Māori and a Pākehā, which also shouldn’t have been noteworthy, but somehow was.
It happened during a bed scene, shot on a hot summer afternoon, under intense movie lighting, in the bedroom of a sprawling old villa in Parnell’s Birdwood Crescent. The fact that it was supposedly a “closed set” hadn’t deterred anyone in the crew, including the movie’s electrician with his roll of gaffer tape.
It was odd kissing someone in front of so many watching people and a camera, but it was a job. It was there to be done, so we did it. There was no such thing as an “intimacy co-ordinator” in 1980.
At the time, gay sex was still illegal in New Zealand and would be until 1986. There was a single somewhat lonely demonstrator holding a sign that read “God says no” at the movie’s premiere at a cinema in Mission Bay.
Watching the nightly TV sport’s round-ups now, I am frequently reminded of the changes that have occurred. Any successful rugby try or soccer goal is greeted by full-body embraces, legs thrown around waists, mouth-plants on cheeks and, for the enthusiastic player, sometimes on the lips. It isn’t just the emotional French or Italians, but even the allegedly more sober Brits.
The young no longer have to grow up with some sort of weird barrier to seeing same-gender kissing as part of life’s expressive intimacy and joy. For that we should be thankful.
David Herkt is an award-winning journalist, freelance TV director-writer and a regular feature writer for Canvas.
KIM KNIGHT: The Kiss of Spring
Shaved raw and scattered on pizza with hazelnuts and wild onion flowers. Wood-roasted and served with snapper bacon. Struggling to breathe under a puree of courgette with capers and cured egg yolk.
Extreme Makeover: The Asparagus Edition is upon us. My social media feed has gone green - and so have my gills.
Across the country, chefs are taking the seasonal delicacy and turning it into the culinary equivalent of a reality television show bathroom reveal.
Nobody needs an $8000 gold bathtub. And the vegetable once humbly known as “sparrow grass” definitely does not need orange foam or black garlic or white anchovies. Like cargo pants or mason jar salads, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Records show restaurants have been gilding the asparagus for some time. In 1958, a recipe for “a royal Dutch cocktail” combined the vegetable with cream, sherry, ginger syrup, two oranges and copious amounts of diced chicken. In 1987, a recipe for “creamed asparagus with a difference” turned out to be ... soup.
Asparagus is picture-perfect (ask Manet). Asparagus needs nothing more than steam, butter and salt (ask my mum).
So why can’t chefs leave it alone?
I’m almost certainly blaming the wrong people. There is definitely not enough profit in the hospitality industry to invent dishes nobody wants to eat. The fault is with foodies. Their incessant quest for The Next Big Thing has forced the ruin of The Actual Thing. (Documented asparagus-adjacent atrocities from the 1980s include a whole baby salmon stuffed with oysters and mussels poached in white wine and garnished with pineapple, potato croquettes and asparagus spears topped with a shrimp sauce.)
Asparagus needs no embellishment. Witness the verse from 10th century Arabic poet Kushajim that described the raw ingredient so beautifully, it prompted the then-ruler of Baghdad to send out to Damascus for supplies.
“We have spears with crooked ends / that stand tall and proud / with most agreeable sleek shafts / and heads that crown their stalks ...
“Elegantly arranged on platters / like neat embroidered goldwork / Adorning the hemline of the finest silk – o if only we had a bottomless well!”
At the current supermarket price of approximately $2 a spear, I can only concur with the poet. Inspired, I attempted my own ode to the bounty of spring: “Asparagus. How do I love thee? Let me count the wees ...” Anyway, it’s a work in progress.
Asparagus season is short. The Bluff oyster of the vegetable world will be gone before we know it but, this spring, its appearance took me by surprise. Once, we measured the passage of time by the depth of our jandal tan lines and the lengths of our sleeves. In modern times, we have exchanged seasons for one long and extreme weather event. It was a shock to wander into my local greengrocer (that excellent one, immediately adjacent to the Balmoral flea market) and discover gardens are still delivering on schedule.
I bought three bags, snapped off their woody ends, and boiled them until they were tender. Drain, cool and cocoon in slices of sandwich-sliced Molenberg, buttered all the way to the edges. Asparagus season is here. The world is still turning. For a few, brief bites, it felt like everything was going to be ok.
Kim Knight is an award-winning journalist and Canvas restaurant reviewer.
MIKE MINOGUE: Kiss Off
As I watched the Women’s World Cup winners being presented their winners’ medals by an oddly “affectionate” - and now former - president of Spanish football, Luis Rubiales, I was immediately reminded of my first kiss.
That pash, as it was then known, was at my 13th birthday party at home in Levin. We were standing awkwardly on the back porch while one of my girlfriend’s friends kept a lookout. It was an incredibly tense few moments leading into the kiss itself. No matter how many pillows you’ve made out with or how many posters of Alyssa Milano you have slobbered on up until this point, you know instinctively that this will be, somehow, different. We nervously leaned in and when our lips finally met it was like fireworks going off in my head. An incredible rush burst through my skull and for a moment I was on another planet, almost completely separate from my body. When we parted I was euphoric. This was undoubtedly the greatest thing that had ever happened to me, to perhaps anyone, ever.
My eyes eventually opened in time to hear my girlfriend carve seven words on to my soul forever more: “I never want to do that again.”
Brutal.
I learned that night, as Rubiales, discovered at this year’s women’s World Cup final presentation, that two people can have a very different experience of the same event. Thankfully my shame was limited to just myself, my girlfriend and those she she chose to confide in, who were, seemingly, the entirety of the school roster including the teachers, caretaker and bus driver, Mr Griffin. Rubiales’ shame was far greater and, most would argue, deservedly so.
I committed no crime, of course, and have worked very hard to bury the memory of that eve, mostly successfully. I have had more than 10 kisses since that evening and while no long-term relationships have developed from them, I have made some solid friendships which I consider a win. You’ll be pleased to know my then-girlfriend moved on to have many, many boyfriends and has now been married for almost 30 years, a relationship that includes children, affection and I’m assuming, at least in the beginning, some pashing. So it’s nice to know it was just me that was the issue.
I would say to Rubiales that although it may seem like the world is against you right now, that you may hate yourself and feel that everyone else does as well, know that in 30 years you may find yourself whistling contentedly in the shower, when all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, the memory will creep back into your head and your body will crease into an all-consuming cringe.
In other words, you’re unlikely to ever forget the experience and you’ll certainly never get over it and in your case, I think that might make it a good learning experience.
Mike Minogue is an actor and broadcaster.
JOY HOLLEY: Romeo + Juliet
It’s out of character for me to write about a heterosexual kiss these days, but Romeo + Juliet is my favourite movie of all time. Also, it’s camp AF and loved by the gays so ...
My parents saw Romeo + Juliet in the cinema on Valentine’s Day 1997, while my mum was pregnant with me. I watched it for the first time as a teenager and dreamed about it night after night for months afterwards. Of course, I was obsessed with Leo DiCaprio, but I was also entranced by Claire Danes (though I tried to deny this at the time).
I could write about every kiss from this movie, but I’m going to focus on the iconic elevator scene (cue Kissing You by Des’ree). Thanks to Juliet’s angel wings, this kiss can be recognised by its silhouette alone. It’s her and Romeo’s first kiss, and only minutes later they realise what the audience already knows: their families are mortal enemies. Even without this knowledge, there’s already a sense of the forbidden (Juliet’s supposed to marry Count Paris, and Romeo’s not supposed to be at this party). The kiss takes place behind closed doors, with many of their family and friends on the other side. This kind of kiss is familiar to me, though in my case it was always Juliet + Juliet. Kissing in secret often sucks (especially for queer people) but it can also be undeniably hot and exciting. That’s what this scene captures: how dizzyingly good a kiss can feel. The camera spins around and around the star-crossed lovers, and everything outside of the elevator feels far away — until the doors slide open again. This was famously difficult to film (the BTS footage makes Claire and Leo’s performance even more impressive), but I’m so glad they pulled it off. Thanks Baz Luhrmann — Virgo excellence!
Joy Holley’s first book, Dream Girl, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2023. It is a collection of short stories about young, queer women navigating desire in all its manifestations.
ROSEANNE LIANG: Cinema Paradiso
For me, it’s the montage of kisses from Cinema Paradiso - one of those arthouse films you’ve either never heard of, or is so “Cinema 101″ that cinephiles might roll their eyes at how passé it is. There’s even a parody of the montage in an episode of The Simpsons.
In the movie, the story goes: a famous Italian film director is informed that an old friend from his past has passed away. The director travels back to his small seaside hometown, remembering how Alfredo, the town’s only movie projectionist, fostered the director’s love of cinema from boyhood, teaching him how to project films and splice out the cinematic kisses that the town’s priest had deemed immoral. In death, Alfredo has left the director a reel of film. When the director projects it, all the censored kisses of decades past play out on the big screen, connected into one glorious celebration of life. It gets me every time.
These days it feels crazy - almost quaint - to consider that kissing onscreen could be seen as a threat. The priest is afraid that screen kisses might erode the moral fibre of the townspeople, and I think about how other such kisses have “eroded moral fibres” - from Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura’s biracial kiss on Star Trek, to Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal pushing the so-called “gay agenda” on Brokeback Mountain. The kisses I remember the most are the star-crossed, stolen ones - Romeo and Juliet, Happy Together, Bound, Thelma and Louise. I think about how far we’ve come from the puritanical world of Cinema Paradiso - and then I realise I’m kidding myself.
When I studied history at school, I always thought progress moved inexorably forward - World War II, the Civil Rights movement, the Stonewall Riots, #MeToo. Unfortunately, we’ve had to find out that Progress, like Time, is relative, as we’re all forced to swallow the rhetoric of going “back” to some unspecified halcyon past (as evidenced in not one, but two separate parties’ election slogans this year). Are things getting worse because the future is bad, or because progress is a mirage?
In Cinema Paradiso, as the kissing montage continues, we cut to the director’s reaction as he watches the gift Alfredo left him, tears welling up. My tears mirror his as I mourn with him - joys taken away that we will never get back. Then, as Ennio Morricone’s resplendent score swells, the director begins to smile through his tears - hands up by his head, marvelling even. And I cry. Like the sap that I am, I cry - not just because it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but also because nothing is ever really lost. No matter what happens, no force can deny or oppress the messy, wild, dangerous joys that make us human. Not forever. Not even for that long.
Roseanne Liang is a film-maker, writer and co-creator of the TV series Creamerie
AMANDA JAMESON - Lipstick on your Collar
“I want deep, passionate kissing,” he said, in a manner lacking manners. A way you cannot escape the lizard tongue poking and prodding thoughts that may have already taken over your imagination. But it wasn’t imagined. It was a salty memory from the last person who demanded it. So, I refrain. No, I don’t offer that as part of my service.
“Are you sure?” He smiled intently. “Pretty sure,” I replied with certainty. He happily left after our appointment - a little worse for wear. But smiling broadly where any graciously sought kisses would have been pressed.
My next gentleman was right on schedule, he watched my lips as I talked. I imagined he was mesmerised by my conversation. But that was my imagination. “I don’t want any kissing as I don’t want lipstick on me!” He was enamoured by the YSL warpaint on my face but didn’t want it transferred. Fair enough. Neither do I ... This stuff is expensive.
The following appointment was due and swiftly became one of my favourites. A shy man. A lovely soul. He seemed to carry a reserved sadness inside of him, akin to polite carry-on baggage he didn’t want to let anyone else trip over.
“Do you kiss?” he asked tentatively. Hopefully. And I understood. I returned his smile kindly at his anticipation and winked. “I don’t play tonsil tennis, if that’s what you mean.”
It wasn’t. He wanted intimacy. He craved it. I felt his anxious urgency as a human need for human touch, not a despondent angling towards something I wasn’t comfortable with.
I showed him the mouthwash in the bathroom and poured us a shot glass each. We both took a swirl. It’s a two-way street walking down this road of intimacy.
And so began the long kiss goodnight.
Amanda Jameson is an escort based in Poneke.
RUTH SPENCER - The Best Kiss As Portrayed In TV, Film or Literature
Hearts, Mr Collins! Hearts! Is there anything more tantalising than watching two people yearning to have - but not actually having - a relationship? Every stolen glance loaded with unspoken longing. The impossible kiss: that’s real romance. I could watch hours of it. Six hours, to be exact. The same six hours, over and over.
The BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, released in 1995, is delicious agony. Save your passionate kisses, your frantic clinches, your bronzed Hollywood limbs clambering gymnastically toward ecstasy. Give me instead Fitzwilliam Darcy’s upper arm brushing the sleeve of Elizabeth Bennet’s pelisse as they turn to walk together down a country lane. Give me long, pensive stares out of windows, especially after a bath. Give me gracious mansions carved from ancient stone (not for romance, I just want one. With a lake, because ... reasons).
In the Regency world of Pride and Prejudice, even the most chaste touching is frowned upon. Dancing is a kind of formal hopping, and kissing is for after the bureaucracies of marriage, presumably once you’ve seen someone hop enough to know they’re The One. When Lizzie and Darcy realise their feelings for each other, they can’t fall into each other’s arms as the music swells. They can only yearn.
And as always when two people are negotiating an unexpressed tumult of emotion, the world goes on around them being ridiculous. We are not allowed to wallow in the sublime. Mary will insist on singing. The bored coachman (played by Auckland actor Andrew Grainger) falls in the horse trough. The universe doesn’t align to give love the reverence it deserves.
But an impossible kiss, the kiss not taken, creates a kind of sacred space outside the world: an invisible temple to the distilled essence of romance. Upper arms brushing lightly in a country lane. Hearts. A truth universally acknowledged.
Ruth Spencer is a comedian and regular Canvas writer.
JOY COWLEY - The Moth Kiss
When you wake up in the morning, what is the first thing you do?
You are not the only one.
As I sit there, my cat runs in and puts her wet nose on my foot. It is nice. Not many humans would want to kiss my foot.
Robert Browning wrote a poem about kisses for his beloved. He described the moth’s kiss and the bee’s kiss.
I won’t share with you my history of bee kisses. They are locked in a golden memory hive that I occasionally open to taste honey.
Most of my moth kisses come from young children. If I am sitting in a classroom, moth kisses will alight on my hands, arms, face. If I am standing, the kisses become hugs.
I have never charged for working in schools around the world.
Always I received the greater payment – love.
The moth’s demonstration of aroha is also strong in family. When he was 7, my Māori great-grandson Ethan went to his first tangi. He snuggled against me, told me about it, and then said in a quivering voice: “I don’t want you to die, Granny.” I told him that people are born, people died, and in between they tried to have a happy life. Ethan brightened at that. He said. “When you die, Granny, I will dig the hole for you.” I promised him he could do that with my ashes, and we had two moth kisses to seal the promise.
Many years ago I was visiting schools in Hawaii. Every class presented me with a lei so by the end of the day my head was poking through flowers as thick as a truck tyre. When I was leaving, a boy ran up, saying, “I’ve got another lei for you.” I bent over and he put a black string around my neck. He kissed my cheek, and I saw that one of his shoelaces was missing.
I still have that black shoelace in a jewellery box. It is the most valuable item there.
Joy Cowley ONZ DCNZM OBE is one of Aotearoa’s most prolific authors of children’s books. Her latest, At the Bach, is illustrated by Hilary Jean Tapper and is available in November (Gecko Press).
AIRANA NGAREWA - Kiss And Be Killed
The nannies in North Taranaki have been waging a 100-year war on every Māori and marae they’ve ever met and been welcomed on. These women are more stiff than straight whiskey, and any man silly enough to argue with them has surely had too many. “It ain’t cool to be colonised,” these white-haired warriors protest. “Kiss my cheek and I’ll knee your balls.”
This is their Māori land march, and they have 1000 Whina Coopers ready to shoot straight down the barrel and kick down the doors of Parliament. Pacificists as their ancestors at Parihaka were, this lot are sick and tired of talking. Don’t matter if they’re three feet from the ground or legal giants like the nannies up north, you better find a way to make your nose meet theirs. These old-as-time old-timers keep their canes handy for one reason only. Nothing teaches better than a smack upside the head from a 73-year-old woman who you now know you should’ve hongi’d.
The koros call it the last kiss. Not ‘cause it’s the last time you’ll try to kiss their nannies, although of course it is, but because it’s the last time you’ll ever kiss anyone with your eyes closed. Whether 9pm at the pub or midnight at the club on New Year’s Day, there isn’t a brand of whiskey stiff enough to dull the headache these nannies left you like a lesson.
“If you really want to make that lovely lady’s night, let your lips be and give that girl a good old-fashioned hongi. It ain’t cool to be colonised.”
Airana Ngarewa (Ngāti Ruanui, Ngāruahine, Ngā Rauru) is an author. His first novel, The Bone Tree, is out now.
TAYI TIBBLE - First kisses
The first kisses I remember are always the ones that remind me, surprisingly, of my old school friend Karishma, who would gift each girl in our little group a plastic lotus candle on our birthdays. When lit, it would bloom and sing and that’s what a good first kiss reminds me of, heat and thickness unfolding, the feeling of melting plastic.
However, it’s the moments before that affect me more, the small build-up of signs and details. This is what intoxicates me and stays with me long after — one of life’s great highs — inhaling all the smoke signals two bodies can give off. Like leaving the closing Latin bar, unconsciously hanging back for him, seeing him and enjoying him so tall and boyish coming down the stairs. Smiling at him with the best of me (cheeky, daring, sweet). His hooded eyes narrowing (and glowing green like a cat) reading exactly what was on my mind. A Chaka Khan song playing from the bar next door. I let myself go. A current of conspiracy, a rush of a river.
Or, at the height of summer, in the wet splash of Mish Mosh, students gone home for the summer, the club full of sloppy Christmas parties and crooked reindeer ears. I’m in a pink dress like a flower, brand new with fresh-cut tags. The DJ putting my record on, him downing the rest of his drink and following me on to the dancefloor. I’m surprised. I drape my hands around his neck. I feel his eyes, dark and upturned like a taniwha, settle seriously on my mouth.
In the hotel, overlooking the crushed city, while I crushed fun from my wallet with the room key. Come here, he said and I did. So simple. Even in the dark, eyes bluer than summer. Later, I would learn, this was a line he kept in his soft black suit pocket. Once he told a rockstar this was the sexiest thing he had ever said to a woman, and the rockstar immortalised it in a song. I should have rolled my eyes, being fed a line like that, but I only felt proud of him. I always do, always will.
Tayi Tibble (Ngāti Porou, Te Whānau-ā-Apanui) is an award-winning poet, whose second book, Rangikura, was published in 2021.
KIRAN DASS – Barbed Wire Kisses
There was a popular spacies parlour at the south end of Kirikiriroa’s Victoria St called Battletech. In the 1990s both homies and grunge kids rubbed shoulders, playing games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Underneath Battletech was a dank and foreboding pawn shop we called the Stolen Goods Shop because they always had a great selection of indie cassettes in there that I assumed must have come from flat burglaries.
While some of my friends played spacies, I’d go down the steps to the “Stolen Goods Shop” after high school and browse the tapes. One day, a cassette with a stark black and white cover caught my eye. Barbed Wire Kisses by The Jesus and Mary Chain. It was only $1.
On the bus back home to Ngāruawāhia, I popped the tape into my Walkman with the cheap orange foam headphones and the way my ears are tuned was changed forever. The title Barbed Wire Kisses is the perfect description of the sound I didn’t know I was looking for as a teenager. In this colossal collection of their B-side stand-alone oddities, The Jesus and Mary Chain sounded like an all-boy-girl group. Steeped in the heritage of the Shangri-Las, the Ronettes and that nutcase Phil Spector’s searing wall-of-sound - they had songs about girls named Cindy and Candy. But matched with howling Velvet Underground guitars and feedback with nods to Chuck Berry, their sound was a perfectly sweet but barbed, spiky kiss of brutalising scorching hot blues and amphetamine-laced surf guitar (Barbed Wire Kisses has a mangled cover of the wholesome Beach Boys classic Surfin’ USA but the Mary Chain’s take sounds like glass shattering and clanging sheet metal), clattering death disco drum machines and Bo Diddley hoodoo beats. There’s a cover of Diddley’s Who Do You Love? with its gnarly imagery of skulls, tombstones and “47 miles of barbed wire” made even more menacing.
When I finally saw a photo of The Jesus and Mary Chain, probably in a rock magazine at the Hamilton Public Library, I thought the brothers Jim and William Reid looked impossibly cool in that sunglasses-after-dark way. Teased-out hair, Ray-Bans, black leather. The thought of meeting boys who looked like that seemed pretty remote to me in my small world, living in Ngāruawāhia and going to school in Hamilton. Barbed Wire Kisses is now 35 years old but the sound is timeless and placeless, like something from another planet. l thought they were American, from the Mojave Desert, perhaps. But they beamed in from Scotland, from the working-class town of East Kilbride.
I finally got to see The Jesus and Mary Chain play in Auckland on their 2016 Psychocandy tour. It was perfection. At one point I wondered, is that the guitars screaming or a bunch of girls? I think it might have been me.
Kiran Dass is a critic, writer and programme lead at WORD Christchurch.
STACEY MORRISON – Hei te wā tītoki
There are many ways to say goodbye in te reo Māori, many of them specifically express an extra detail of the parting, as to whether you’re talking to someone who is leaving, or someone who is staying, and you are the one leaving. Look up “Goodbye” in a Māori dictionary and you’ll see what I mean. Here are just a couple of entries:
Haere rā – goodbye (said to someone leaving)
E noho rā – goodbye (said to someone staying)
I like the inherent acknowledgement of movement, who is staying and who is leaving. It means you’ve taken notice of the actions and next intention of the person you’re farewelling. To me that seems respectful. I’ll notice and feel Sarah’s departure as the editor of Canvas and as a luminous presence in our workplace. Picture someone who seems to buzz with kind energy, their āhua – nature, vibe always bright, that’s Sarah. She always looks at you properly. You know that sort of look, that’s not just a passing glance from a busy co-worker? It’s the look you receive when someone is genuinely interested in how you are and what you have to say. Small talk is barely present, Sarah always dives in to bigger, deeper, more important issues first, with a light giggle thrown in so it’s not all too earnest.
If I manage nothing else, I’d like Sarah to know that I have always appreciated how she cares, who she amplifies, the stories she carefully chooses and crafts. So, I will say I’m sad you’re the one leaving Sarah, but I’m not going to say haere rā. Instead, I’ll say hei te wā tītoki – I’ll see you some time in the future, literally “when the tītoki blooms”.
As Sarah blooms in my world, whenever I see her.
Hei te wā titoki.
Stacey Morrison (Te Arawa, Ngāi Tahu) is a TV presenter, broadcaster and author of many books, including My First Words in Māori and Kia Kaha: A storybook of Māori who changed the world.
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