The New Zealand Herald is bringing back some of the best premium stories of 2020. Today we look at five of the best Canvas stories of the year.
Toy story: Pleasure and discomfort in the sex emporium
If you disregard the preliminary scoping visit I'd made a few days prior and the visits I'd made a few years earlier to Peaches and Cream, Peaches and Cream Extreme, D.Vice, The Basement and Nauti NZ and the visits I'd made in my 20s to several tourist-friendly emporia overseas, I had never been in a sex shop before.
I asked my guide, Rayan Fu, if it was okay for me to take photos.
"It's fine," she said.
"Not for publication," I said, "Just for my own sort of use."
She didn't reply.
I meant for reporting purposes.
The shop divides roughly into three areas. The novelty/game/party supplies section, the sexy undies section and the section with the stuff for getting off. We'll be focusing on the stuff for getting off.
Greg Bruce discovers there is both pleasure and discomfit to be found in a sex emporium.
Warning: This article contains explicit language.
Searching for my friend John: The boy who became a bank robber
Decades roll by. Adolescents grow, accept responsibilities, find jobs, a career, perhaps have a family. I've often wondered whether that happened for John? Did things come right? Did he make good?
We were close friends for not much more than a year but 1973 left its mark in my memory. It was a turning point. My worst school report led to a respected uncle warning I might like to sort myself out before the School Certificate year or find myself working as a manual labourer.
It was a turning point for John, too. He was soon gone from school and from my life. Focused on schoolwork and making the Canterbury junior road-cycling team, I lost touch with him. I'd started university when I heard he'd robbed a bank. He was 19 when he went to jail.
Herald writer Phil Taylor goes in search of his old school friend.
You are what you wear
Do clothes maketh the woman? Two power dressers tell Kim Knight how earthquakes, pandemics and personal tragedies have influenced what they wear.
Artists inspired by coronavirus
An epoch is marked by the minutia of its moments. On March 26, 2020, when New Zealand went into level 4 lockdown, hours were measured by the rise of sourdough starters, the planting of roadside poppies and the creation of art.
Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand, is a collector of such moments. Consider its works: aprons embroidered by soldiers from World War I, the final notice for earthquake-prone buildings after the 2010-11 Christchurch earthquakes. Banal and beautiful slivers of history.
When New Zealand shut its doors, Te Papa's curators had a unique challenge. Collecting from life is part of their vocational DNA – they connect with communities to discover items of historical import. Lockdown prevented them from taking part in this: barred from their cultural communities, the collection process, through necessity, became virtual.
In the six months following the first lockdown, Te Papa collected more than 30 items related to the world pandemic and its impact on Aotearoa. These items are history in action: they will inform our grandchildren's understanding of these strange days.
There are government information posters, home-made face masks and ugly reminders of racism targeted at Asian New Zealanders as the virus progressed. There are also artistic, creative responses to a time that's unprecedented in Aotearoa's history.
Joanna Mathers spoke with three makers about their exquisite creative responses to a pandemic.
What I learned while learning guitar in lockdown
The day I bought the guitars, I panic-signed for three free months' access to Fender Play, an online tuition app guided by non-threatening, boringly dressed, well-spoken people who show you how to play, and how to read chord charts and tablature. On the second day of lessons, just after teaching basic finger techniques, the app taught me the riff to the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction. This interspersal of song lessons with guitar fundamentals is key to the pedagogy of the Fender Play app. Every few lessons, they break off from scales or chords to teach well-known songs to help you feel like all the discomfort and frustration is worth it. It's one thing to understand the psychological manipulation embedded in this and another to be above it. I was proud of mastering Satisfaction and, a couple of days later, interrupted a Zoom conversation with friends to play it while they looked on, astonished.
With lockdown looming, Greg Bruce decided it was the right time to learn guitar. Here's how it went.
