Madonna
confessions
guilty
death penalty
fallout
punishment
collapse
vibe-shift
change
revolution
justice
temporary
reprieve
habits
END
Saturday (morning)
Lily has a routine and she sticks to it no matter what. She paws my face and failing to get a reaction, does it a second time but with her claws out. I hide under the covers, but she just steps right up, literally standing on my face. What about that?
But I can see the sunlight on the deck through the duvet and the promise of a perfectly sunny winter’s day is enough reason to get up (grudgingly) at 7:30am, cat or no cat on top of my face.
I go upstairs and spy the kettlebells. Mmm, maybe later (sore) alligator.
Need to eat and remember that I have those protein oats. I assemble a bowl with banana, berries and granola. I arrange all the components around it and take a photo thinking, well, will you look at that? So social-media worthy..hmmmmm.
Three minutes and 10 seconds later in the microwave, the bowl is a bubbling slate-grey sludge that probably resembles the surface of an alien planet.
But looks aren’t everything, if you don’t know that yet.
I dig into the oats and it’s warm, comforting and delicious.
Happy birthday L (from Claude)
She sits in the frame
like someone who has learned
that softness is not the opposite of strength.
The trees rise behind her,
straight with purpose,
while she folds herself into the moment
as if time can be held gently.
A small smile—
not asking to be noticed,
not trying to disappear.
Just there.
Like a quiet path through a forest,
certain of where it goes
without needing a signpost.
Jacqueline Fahey, Protest Paintings
I’m adding Jacqueline Fahey to my list of favourite New Zealand artists.
The problem is, I’m not feeling her later works. A survey of her work is on display at the Gow Langsford gallery until the 20th of this month, and while the exhibit focuses on her ‘unflinching eye for the sociopolitical world (which) has only grown more piercing with time,’ I’m going to venture my uneducated opinion that it’s not her best work, for me anyway. And the latter works are the ones on sale- a triptych (Whatever Happened to Bernadette Devlin) is a steal at $145k, which would be right at home in a brutalist-styled modern home.
But it’s her earlier works, where she mines the interiors of her life as a woman finding meaning and validation as a wife, mother and homemaker that I feel she’s strongest not only visually, but intellectually as well. To paint as she did at a time when society held very different expectations of women, both as individuals and as artists, was a potent radical act. By elevating the domestic sphere and asserting the significance of women's lived experiences, she transformed the personal into the political and this is what cements her legacy among New Zealand's great artists.
In her later works, however, that woman seems to have disappeared, or rather, she is at home and doing stuff that people in their 90s typically do,
Instead, you get the painterly equivalent of someone posting photos and videos to social media, layering protest and outrage over images as literal text. Not being disrespectful, but just imagine if someone gave Jacqueline a phone and several social-media accounts?
Pretty pictures, sure. Provocative? Not really. Will I bring out my black Amex? Yup, but only to purchase her early works.
Sundays
Chicken, chicken (skin) and more chicken.
We had nothing planned for Saturday night dinner, so Papa's Chicken it was — the leftovers of which got paired with ramen the next day. There are a million chicken places out there, some genuinely great (like Papa's), some disappointingly meh (Popeyes, I'm looking at you). Papa's main strength is consistency. I'm partial to their plain, unseasoned, crispy variant, which you can doctor to your own taste — Kikkoman and crispy chilli oil, in my case.
Then the chicken skin arrived. Two kilos of it. I hadn't even realised I'd ordered it, and it came from this online store — the only place I've found that sells it here.
As someone who has become annoyingly snobbish about meat sourcing, I had questions. Is the chicken free-range? What exactly is the quality control on how the skins are processed? Without clear answers, I just ran them under cold water over and over until my hands started to go numb. They're going to be cooked anyway, right?
The best method I've come across is to lay the skins flat on a baking sheet and roast them in batches. I've seen people on social media dump everything into a pot of water and wait for the liquid to evaporate, letting the skins render and fry in their own fat — but I think this is misleading. Unless you're using a brand-new, genuinely non-stick pan, the skins inevitably stick during the boiling phase and tear when you try to work them off with a spatula. (I used a non-stick pan. They still stuck.) That said, I do see the merit of a quick parboil beforehand to take the edge off that intense, barnyard chickeny smell.
Yes, keto people will tell you chicken skin is practically a health food. And while rendered chicken crackling is genuinely delicious, let's not kid ourselves — it's still mostly fat. We treat it as a treat.
And because the crackling had left us with a nice pool of rendered chicken fat, and we had some large chicken legs sitting in the freezer, it seemed only logical to make chicken inasal for dinner. Sort of. I didn't actually have cane vinegar, calamansi, or lemongrass — so it was inasal in spirit and appearance, if not entirely in flavour. It's been a while, honestly, and I can't even recall with any certainty how it's supposed to taste.
One last thing: there's a US lobby group that flatly declares that chicken is not a healthy food choice. Take that with an enormous grain of salt — it's an American organisation, after all, and they have their own agenda to push. As they always do.
Questions that (sometimes) keep me up at night
Yes L; there are some questions that keep me up night.
Where and how can I get that miracle drug that will add another 30 years to our cat’s life?
When really, will I start getting actual wrinkles??
How do I deal with pubic hair turning white?? Does it matter?
Is there an endgame to Philippine politics?
Where and how do you begin therapy and recovery for artistic atrophy?? For what ends??
Should I just start writing??
How can I admit that I really don’t like salmon that much?
How do you know that you have enough clothes??
Is sex work really that bad???
Can one start all over again with art?
Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now
Copy pasted as is:
Spanning decades of artistic exchange since China’s Reform and Opening Up in 1978, Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now offers a captivating look at how a new generation of Chinese artists have responded to the seismic shifts in society – transitioning from rural to urban, traditional to modern, and industrial to global powerhouse.
The exhibition features a powerful selection of works from international heavyweights including Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Xu Zhen and Yang Fudong, alongside stunning pieces by cutting-edge artists making their New Zealand debut, including Lu Yang, Pu Yingwei and 2024 Sigg Prize Winner Wang Tuo.
Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now presents fresh takes on traditional Chinese crafts, imposing robotic sculptures and meditative digital landscapes. This exhibition reveals the complexity, innovation and bold vision of Chinese art today, inviting you to discover a dynamic and ever-evolving cultural landscape.
The exhibition is proudly supported by the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation and New Zealand Government’s Events Boost Fund.
city on the cusp of winter
Auckland’s weather has been described as having a warm, oceanic climate with distinct sub-tropical influences, which means warm, humid summers and mild, wet winters. Saturday was dipping just above 10 degrees, but after walking about 2 km from Symonds all the way to the viaduct with precise, well-timed stops at a specialist optometrist store, a newly opened Asian bakery and a small snobbish boutique stocking Celine & Loewe, it was hot.
We have small coffees at a Starbucks and loiter at Britomart a bit at the large public square called Te Komitititanga. This is the tourist part of the city which funnels an endless stream of people taking the ferries back and forth to Waiheke, Davenport, Pine Harbour & Great Barrier Island. This is literally the only part of the city where there is a crowd.
Then it was some more walking for a yum cha lunch at Grand Harbour at the corner of Customs Street West and, Pakenham Street East, where we had barely taken off our coats when the roast pork cart came around (two please!).
There’s no time to feel guilty over a hundred dollars worth of dimsum; you just walk it off again until you come to the Britomart weekend market and see the stalls selling donuts. mochi-cheesecake hybrids and vegan pastries.
But then we didn’t really get dessert so….
Accept things for once
An aggressive Thai massage. A dubious can of cheap sardines. An elaborate meal of slow-cooker beef cooked in Rendang spices, then served with Japanese ramen and kelp broth. Four eggs for himself (The protein! As if 350 grams of beef wasn’t enough). Half a bag of spinach wilted in hot oil.
Bent over the toilet without his glasses, he had the horrifying thought that he’d literally vomited up his own guts. Then he saw it was only the spinach — undigested, black, and slick as kelp out of water. The nausea came in waves, and each one had a lesson, had a question.
Lesson: Don’t be afraid to hunch over the bowl as they do in movies- it is, after all, a $3,700 toilet bowl- so that you can contain all the gory spatter.
Question: How much beef did he really eat?? Every vomit seemed enough to fill a small bowl. That would be $14.99 please.
And he was cold, deathly cold and sleepy. But also vastly relieved. Because for once, there was absolutely nothing he could do, like for real. And nothing else mattered. His body was either healing or dying and he couldn’t tell the difference. Nor cared. For once in a very long time, he surrendered to just accepting it, to being at peace with it. It helped that every cell in his body, every thought, was in accord towards that objective.
So he just slept with the electric blanket on at 3, with the cat nestled near his legs.
Friday
When you don't bother reading instructions
The shelving in the bathroom looks great (the colour is called ‘Gentle Oak’), but be careful not to shake it or put something heavy on top of it. It’s rickety like a bamboo scaffolding on a 20-storey building in Hong Kong. The flat pack came with a cryptic set of assembly instructions, which he didn’t really follow. How hard was it to put together a shelf? It’s not, but patience and mindfulness are not things he’d like to expend energy on when building a shelf, which is an object he considers minor, inconsequential and for this particular one, something just for optics. Six new Country Road towels, three for each level. A pale green glass vase on top that could hold long, slender calla lilies. An imitation white coral shell.
He hates remote controls, especially for TVs, which he believes have evolved into something more complicated than the Presidential Emergency Satchel. His default behaviour when using one? Punching every single button until the screen makes sense, or show him what he wants to see.
He was mid-way through shaving his head when the shaver just died, and he thought, it can’t be- he just charged it two days ago. But S was suspicious. This same shaver was a replacement for one that just lasted 5 months. Both were the same model. Both started sputtering, then completely died even after having been charged. They returned the 1st one to the store as it was still within the warranty period, and got the same model; surely the defect was just a one-off, a fluke. But here we are again, and he was looking at his head, one half clean-shaven, the other half with that tell-tale sheen of gray regrowth which he hates.
Have you cleaned it?
There’s this little hatch on it, but it’s empty.
Yeah, but where do you think all the hair goes?
He NEVER really knew nor cared. So it was a bit of a shock, and a fascination when they opened the shaver head and saw five months’ worth of hair compressed in the rotors and the cap. It was so full, the mechanism was actually, literally choking.
How Was Your Friday? It was the usual
He gets anxious when he forgets to bring his AirPods. He can’t pretend to be deep into Olivia Dean or Travis Scott or the old Weeknd or whatever he had on his music-streaming account, and now he has to pretend that without the music, he was deep in thought about something else. Surely, if you had no phone to look at or ear-thingies to listen to, what could you be doing looking at shit or thinking about shit? You were virtually exposed. Some loser could try to get your attention, to engage with you and then what? There were more and more people lately at the bus stop, phone-less, ear-thingyless, mouth slightly open, and eyes darting every which way like some animal that had been up all night. Were they hungry? Were they tired and needed to rest? He didn't really care. All he needed was to pretend to be deep into something while he watched them furtively.
He could do anything he wanted. The tools of knowledge and creation stretched from creating a totally new face for someone, teaching an AI assistant to comb through gigabytes of archival data in less than 2 minutes, to rendering a brochure in 3D just because he could. Was it necessary? Not really, and in the end, he did an actual mock-up for the 3-fold cover just to see what it was like in real life.
He wants to smell like he lived in a world on fire because it is.
One of these days out of sheer childhood nostalgia, he’s going to sit down to a bowl of his childhood Fruit Loops and watch YouTube clips of Superfriends. He will remember the days when innocence meant trusting anything that felt and tasted good; sugary cereal, the tang of orange juice, rice slathered with pork fat and seasoned with fish sauce.
Did you know? A McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese (US) contains approximately 740–770 calories, 48–51g protein, 42–45g fat, and 40–43g carbs. This high-protein, high-fat burger also provides roughly 20g of saturated fat, 165mg cholesterol, and 1,360mg sodium.
Birthday Week food dump
Happy Easter Sunday
I remember being obsessed with penny loafers, but the bigger mystery was the source of that obsession. Where had I seen them? What thought process did I go through at 12, 13 (?) to make me want them? But the mystery deepens when I actually get the shoes (don’t know how I convinced my mother of that) and to wear them specifically for one event- the Stations of the Cross for Lent. They were so new that they cut the back of my heel. To this day I still can’t decide whether I suffered for fashion, or was punished by God for my vanity.
I miss the quietude of the Holy Week of my childhood. No distraction of either entertainment or food. Pray and contemplate my mother, the lone Catholic enforcer in our household, urged us. I prayed- to get taller, for better (less oily) skin, for friends. I contemplated my existence, and of life out there in space, of faeries who attended Easter Sunday mass and whose only tell-tale clue of what they are is the absence of a medial cleft (I furtively scanned people’s faces as they bowed their heads and closed their eyes to pray).
What do you eat for Sunday when everyone is dieting? Don’t forget the buns (we got a pistachio and chocolate variant); an easy to cook lamb (butterflied leg of lamb that cooks in 35 minutes); and sticky date pudding (minus the ice-cream). I miss the lechon from Bangsal which we got on the way back from church.
Holy Saturday
March was mad
'Adult' books
In The Art of Simple, Eleanor Ozick retreats to the ‘bush’ country of Te Atatu and shows us that it’s okay to ‘isolate’ ourselves, that we can have our Walden moment. Well, in New Zealand we certainly can, and why not?
How can we stay connected to others without losing ourselves? Don’t ask me a question whose answer I already know. I could add my own tips: 1) don’t be afraid to let someone go if they turn out to be total cunts; 2) be generous; 3) know and respect the limit of your generosity.
What’s a reverse mortgage? What’s an offset account? Should you invest in unethical stocks, and to hell with ethics because the world is fucked anyway? Suddenly, moving out of middle-age and into the twilight (!) years is so much more than having great blood-work, great skin and getting away with wearing clothes meant for people two decades younger than you.
After being in this country for nearly 18 years, I’ve realised that I don’t really know much about it beyond my own Walden Pond. And that’s actually terrible.
Would you buy American butter?
FUCK NO. Story here. We use Westgold Grass-Fed Butter. Buy local people!
If it feels like Monday, then it must be Monday
It’s actually Tuesday.
A brilliantly sunny, cold day, the chill coming in so suddenly- no warning, no transitional ease- that it makes you think of the worst. What if the weather turned the way our normally genial cat would suddenly turn from picture-perfect cuddliness to possessed, rabid psycho with razor-sharp claws?? (We’ve never clipped them, the better to defend herself, we’ve rationalised).
Well, I thought, glancing at the clothing racks filled with last season’s coats and jackets in the spare bedroom turned walk-in closet, at least we’re prepared. Last year was so strange that we didn’t do a spring clean at all. The coats and jackets have stayed put instead of being stored in the bins we have for winter clothing.
So which one is suitable for olive, wide-legged cargo pants and silver New Balance 1906s? The checked bomber in Italian wool? That waxed cotton jacket, perhaps in navy blue? Another bomber, but a shiny black aviator-style in flight nylon?
I could still smell last year’s scents on them- Replica’s By the Fireplace (my favourite, until I got three bottles at the same time as gifts and got sick of it); D.S & Durga’s Debaser, which I liked better than Diptyque’s Philosykos; Prada Pour Homme which smells like rain at 4am.
None of them seemed suitable and I wore a thermal hoodie instead.
Things I'd like to buy but...
Between a renovation, a trip and clothes (!) in 2025, it would be a while before I deign not blink (my non-existent) eyelashes and buy anything (to a point, mind you) that I fancy. But it’s a relief to feel that I have no problem with this, nor would be fooled again into thinking that money in credit cards is free (they sit somewhere in my drawers, fully paid, the cards digitally locked).
But all these virtuous actions doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped looking.
