Hip-hop and The Human Touch

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas.

In this week’s issue: Hip-hop and The Human Touch, Devil in the bag, a Bloody business, indeed, collecting Kiwis, when skunks work, tracking the tutus and the quote of the week.

Hip-hop and The Human Touch

Hip-hop is a social phenomenon, so you’d think that museums and galleries everywhere would be frantically making space for their cutting-edge shows on beats and bling.

Not so. A Brooklyn gallery did manage to put a show together once,  Tim Walker recalls, but it kinda missed the point. “They did the classic thing of putting Tupac’s sneakers in a glass case and so were viewing them as a historical commodity,” says Walker, the director of the New Dowse Gallery in Lower Hutt. The Dowse, however, took a different tack when it did its 2003 show, ‘Respect’, working with the local hip-hop community.

But then the Dowse has always done things differently. Walker says the gallery says its role to highlight innovation and creativity. It successfully blurs the lines between ‘fine’ and ‘commercial’ art to focus on the value of all kinds of creative endeavour. And now it’s just completed a $6 million development. In the latest Idealog, Mary Parker takes a close look at the New Dowse and its vision at the heart of a creative city. Read the story on our website.

Devil in the bag

News comes from the maniacs at Back of the Y that their forthcoming film, The Devil Dared Me To: The Randy Campbell Story, is finished and received its premiere among the hordes at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, last week. Apparently the Americans even got the jokes.

Expect The Devil Dared Me To on New Zealand screens later in the year. A new series of Back of the Y is apparently on the way, too—this time on TV3.

A Bloody business, indeed

If you have a copy of Blood magazine, better hang on to it. Our spies tell us there won’t be another, after the CAANZ executive decided ads run in the magazine wouldn’t be eligible for the Axis awards.

That’s a damn shame. Blood was hardly the only place where ads could be run to become eligible for awards, and the idea behind Blood—a one-off magazine highlighting creative print campaigns that would be passed to a new editor for each issue—is a fine one. And it worked, too; Andy Blood’s first issue was a great read. I would love to have seen what his annointed successors, Guy Denniston and Emmanuel Bougneres, would have done if they had the chance.

C’est la vie. For a reminder of the ideas behind Blood, check out David MacGregor’s interview with Andy Blood last year and my potted review of the magazine.

Collecting Kiwis

Does daylight saving time already seem like a distant dream? Console yourself as winter approaches by checking out the selection of the world’s most gorgeous travel getaways at kiwicollection.com. I’m there, man. And why ‘Kiwi’ collection? Well, it’s all about the fruit, apparently. “Like the kiwifruit, the company tries to be fresh and full of flavour in everything it does. After all, every journey in life should be a rich, rare and succulent experience.” Uh-huh.

When skunks work

Rapid prototyping has always been a devilish skill to get right and in many industries it’s almost a lost art. But as publishing maven Tim O’Reilly points out on his blog, there are a lot of similarities between the techniques used by today’s Web 2.0 startups and the principles that Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works programmes pioneered. Even in famously fraught industries like aircraft development, Skunk Works themes like small teams, strong direction, trust, a lack of management layers and protection from bureaucracy still work today. They’re rules that every industry can learn from.

Blackbox M14 noise cancelling headphones represent the finest Kiwi innovation and ingenuity. Designed for the frequent traveller, the M14 boasts the latest advanced noise cancellation technology from Phitek Systems, blocking up to 92% of background noise. Imagine being able to perfectly hear the in-flight movie! The Blackbox M14 connects to your mp3 player, PC or handheld and is great value at $379. More …

Tracking the tutus

The New Zealand Ballet’s six-week, 60-performance summer road trip is still sweeping its way around the country. The company has been split in two to cover the whole country; it’s performing today in Thames, today and tomorrow in Wanaka, tomorrow in Putaruru and then on to Tauranga, Twizel and most everywhere in Godzone that hasn’t already been graced by the ballet this year. Check out the dates and venues.

And don’t forget the Silo Theatre’s ‘threatrical bootcamp’, with two plays directed by Oliver Driver and Michael Hurst featuring a new generation of New Zealand acting talent.

Check out these events and more at Idealog’s events guide, Agenda, online and in print. Anyone can add an event to Agenda—just fill out the form on our website.

Quote of the week

“The key idea is to show how innovation and creativity drive human progress socially, spiritually, economically and culturally … it’s quite an unsual model for an art gallery. Actually, forget art gallery, forget museum—this new space defies description”

—Dowse director Tim Walker in ‘Seeking trouble’

More at Idealog online

Read more on our website: web exclusives, opinion, Idealog IP, the Idealog blogs and the Idealog podcast. See you at idealog.co.nz.

   Matt Cooney
   Editor