It’s Oscar nominations day! Let us share in the joy of headlines that aren’t full of sadness, despair and such and celebrate what was actually a pretty good year for film. In my status as Radio New Zealand Official Academy Awards Correspondent (TM) here’s my take on the nominees and a look at a few New Zealand-linked possible winners:
…I’m bogged down in a pre-Christmas pile of actual money for my words work, so content here is a little sparse lately, but that doesn’t mean other people I know aren’t writing away!
Way back in the Paleozoic era of blogging, we used to link to each other all the time. These days, with social media becoming a bigger dumpster era fire than ever, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea to cut out the middle man again. Here’s what some friends and colleagues have been doing online lately that floats my boat:
* I’ve beavered away on the edges of music journalism for most of my career, and it’s grim times for it at the moment in New Zealand. My mate Chris Schulz has had a far bigger music writing career than I ever did, and he’s rightfully been on a bit of a crusade lately about how arts journalism is dying in Aotearoa. Case in point, when I moved here 15+ years ago there were still several magazines regularly covering NZ music and reviewing it. That’s all gone now. Can the internet save us, or something else? Schulz spoke to RNZ and others recently trying to draw attention to this problem and has been regularly banging the drum for music journalism on his own Substack – all well worth a read!
* I watched the first Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Special on the weekend and it was a delightfully silly romp, with David Tennant and Catherine Tate back for a run after an unfortunately kind of dire period for Who. Jodie Whittaker being the first female Doctor should’ve been a groundbreaking moment, but her performance was swamped by a lot of truly terrible writing, insanely convoluted plots and overacting, to the point where I only watched about half her episodes. (I also never want to hear the phrase “fam” again.) I thought about writing about why even though I didn’t grow up with the Doctor, I’ve grown to dig him ever since wonderfully eccentric Christopher Eccleston came along as Doctor Number Nine in 2005. But I realised one of my best pals is not only the biggest Doctor Who fan I know, but quite possibly the biggest Doctor fan in all of New Zealand. Let friend Bob tell you 101 reasons why Doctor Who still rules after all these years. I’m hoping that the excellent-looking Ncuti Gatwa coming up as the Fifteenth (!) Doctor leads to a bold new era for the good doctor.
* So New Zealand had an election about six weeks back, and it’s taken that long for coalition negotiations to settle on the new government, which looks to be the most conservative we’ve had in well over 20 years. You’ll find hot takes, angry takes, gloating takes all over the place about that, but I want to single out Susie Ferguson’s fantastic analysis piece at RNZ that zooms in on one Auckland electorate won by a libertarian/centre right third-party candidate, and why it actually proved that America-style bible-thumping theocratic conservatism has yet to really work in New Zealand (which, IMHO, is a very good thing). Go read: The meaning of Tāmaki – the most fascinating election race
Well, after 17 years in this country I finally got asked to write about Thanksgiving, specifically, what we Americans down here do to mark this very American holiday on the other side of the globe.
Over in the bustling world of freelance journalism, I’ve got two new pieces out there this week!
At Radio New Zealand, I dug into the hip world of used book fairs like this past week’s GABBS 24 Hour Fair, where hundreds of folks pack stadiums in search of everything from Lee Child to Shakespeare at bargain prices. Finally, I have weaponised my own addiction to buying books into freelance material!
Meanwhile, over at the New Zealand Listener magazine, my latest book review published there in this week’s Nov. 11-17 issue is a scary thing indeed – a look at a fascinating study of fear, Fear: An Alternate History of the World by Robert Peckham.
More importantly, my return to blogging in 2018 kicked off a real renewed interest on my part in the writing end of journalism. I’ve been a working journalist for a long time now, but for many years I found myself focusing more on editing, design and (ugh) management.
Finally I remembered how much I love the act of writing, of reporting and digging for odd facts and talking to interesting strangers. Diving back into blogging in 2018 after a hiatus of several years jumpstarted that part of my brain.
I began to write more and make a concerted effort to build a kind of freelance career down here in New Zealand, in addition to other journalism work.
I’m happy to say I’ve submitted more than 170 invoices for paid writing since 2019, written articles for websites, newspapers and magazines all around the country and at least a hundred or so other non-bylined pieces for Radio New Zealand, where I’ve been working since 2021 and a place I deeply respect for providing quality, diverse and important journalism down in this part of the world.
This website also helped me bring back my long, long-dormant comic book Amoeba Adventures, when we were all stuck in those dreary, uncertain early days of the pandemic a few years back. The Covid hiatus seemed like a really good time for me to pull out all my ancient comic strips and scan and throw them on the internet as I’d been meaning to do for ages. I put nearly 50 of my 1990s small press comics up to download (for FREE! hurray!) and looking at all my old goofy Prometheus comics finally inspired me to pick up a pencil again for the first time since 1998 and write and draw six brand new issues of Amoeba Adventures to date.
In other words, blogging here reminded me why words matter, why art matters when everything else is annoying as hell in this increasingly fractured, fractious world.
More than ever, the past year or so has convinced me that blogging feels more like a natural home for my writing than the endless bickering and hot-takes and rage-scrolling of social media. I left Twitter (I refuse to call it “X”) about a year ago, before it all really went to shit, and haven’t regretted it once, watching it spiral down into a miasma of hate, conspiracy and misinformation. I’ll link to my stuff on Facebook and Instagram, but this site is where I want to commit most of my “spare” writing time rather than arguing with strangers on the internet or whatever.
These days the blog is kind of my writing workshop where I babble about things that maybe don’t quite meet the standard of paying work, or are a little too esoteric, plus linking back to my other projects.
Somehow I’ve bashed out 319 posts on here the last five years – I try to get one up a week, and these days focus mostly on quirky pop culture writing rather than sharing every detail of my life, because that all got pretty old pretty quickly on the internet, didn’t it?
Writing here, generally, makes me feel good about myself, even I’m just tossing words about in a random mix to see what sticks. I write for myself, first and foremost, but I am hugely appreciative of those who’ve followed my website, or my comics, the past few years as Writer Nik attempted to come out of his musty old shell.
All you folk who leave a comment or click a link or download a comic are tops in my book! Cheers and here’s to more words to come!
Ever wondered what it’d be like to spend 24 straight hours in a movie theatre?
My latest hard-hitting investigative piece over at Radio New Zealand takes a look at the 24-Hour Movie Marathon at Hollywood Avondale, celebrating its 24th anniversary this year!
Here’s a new feature by me over at Radio New Zealand up this weekend – a look at how American style ‘low and slow’ barbecue cooking is making a splash way down in this part of the world, and a talk to several leading NZ barbecue pit masters! Go read:
I’m running around getting ready for a holiday and juggling deadlines like they were howler monkeys escaped from the zoo, but here’s a quick look at some other things by me elsewhere on the internets:
It’s just about time for Whānau Mārama New Zealand International Film Festival, the bestest time of the year if you love movies, and I have already bought far too many tickets. You can read my preview of all the film fest action right here at Radio New Zealand, and it also doubles as a bit of a tribute to film festivals in general, which we all know are the best-ivals.
Meanwhile, I’m also keeping up an occasional book reviewing side hustle over at NZ’s best weekly current affairs magazine, The Listener, which after a few pandemic-plagued years without a web presence has recently launched a bigger digital footprint.
You can read my latest book review of David Grann’s excellent historical page-turnerThe Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder right now in the latest issue at good newsstands everywhere in New Zealand, and the review is also online right here (paywalled):
New by me over at Radio New Zealand: 12 TV series you may have missed in the age of peak content, just in time for your post-Christmas lying around groaning with a full stomach and looking for something to watch vibe!
I take a look at a dozen excellent TV shows (do we still call it TV? Stream-TV?) well worth catching up on during the holiday season if you’re so inclined including Sandman, Raised By Refugees, This Is Going To Hurt, The Old Man and much more! (Most excellent graphic above by RNZ’s most excellent graphic artist)
Nik Dirga 