Latest news with #AlexCasey
The Spinoff
27-05-2025
- General
- The Spinoff
Is homemade butter worth it? Two methods, put to the test
With butter prices slipping through our fingers, we took matters into our own hands. Every day it feels like there's a new headline about Aotearoa's butter price blowout. With Stats NZ reporting a 65% price hike since February last year, a block of butter is slipping out of reach for many, with the rise unlikely to melt away anytime soon. People are lining up at Costco to bulk buy blocks of slightly cheaper butter, with one man even driving 750km to fill his van with the stuff. And it's putting pressure on cafes around the country, with some forced to hike their cheese scone price up to a whopping $8, and others resorting to buying butter from Australia. It got us thinking: would it be cheaper to make butter yourself at home? How hard can it really be? And will it taste just as good as Costco's finest? Alex Casey tried the shaking method My recipe for homemade butter came from The Stay at Home Chef, whose promise of 'a fun old-fashioned activity for kids' seemed achievable even for me, an adult who once let a whole unopened bag of frozen corn melt onto the sizzling hot element because I got distracted on my phone. The only prep required was picking up 300ml of fresh cream from Pak'nSave Riccarton for just $3.25, digging out an old jar from the garage, and washing the spider corpses out. As I watched the arachnid exoskeletons circle the drain, I felt a sense of old world charm seep in. There was no electricity or machinery needed here, and no fancy chemicals or additives apart from good old fashioned elbow grease. I diligently poured one cup of cream into the jar, twisted it shut, and began to shake with reckless abandon. Alas, within seconds of vigorous motion, I was splattered with cream (not accepting any blue humour at this time). With the jar safely secured with packing tape, I settled in again to listen to a 5.02 minute long voice note from a friend while doing my first round of shaking (the Stay at Home Chef promised 5-7 minutes). About 20 seconds in, my right arm started to ache and I had to swap to the left. This went on for a while, until I settled on using both hands and shaking from side to side like an excited trophy winner, and then back and forth in front of me like I was doing high speed netball passes. As the voice note finished, I was delighted to hear no more sloshing in the jar. Could it be that I had just made butter in half the time of the 'All Too Well' 10-minute version? I sliced through the sellotape feeling like Old Mother Hubbard, but was crestfallen to find nothing but whipped cream within. I ate a conciliatory teaspoon, and got back to work. The next voice note I shook my way through was eight minutes long (my friend is fine) and by the end of it I heard a satisfying 'THONK' inside the jar. The contents had separated into a thin white cloudy liquid housing what can only be described as a bright yellow brain within. I strained it all through the sieve and was delighted to find a near perfect sphere of butter waiting to be mooshed into a small bowl with a bit of salt and garnished with parsley. This is the 90s after all. I burnt a piece of Vogel's to a crisp and slathered it from coast to coast in my luxury hand shooketh butter. It was delicious, creamy, just like from the shop but possibly even better because of the delectable analog smugness. All in all, I got about 78 grams of butter from my 250mls of cream (minus the sleeve spill and the conciliatory teaspoon of cream) which means I'd be spending $20.80 to make my own 500g block (which is not the projected price until August). Daylight robbery you cry, but there is hidden value here. Consider the free arm workout, the free science extravaganza, free buttermilk, and free 50mls of leftover cream. The next morning I made two pancakes with the leftover buttermilk, served with leftover (jar whipped) cream, and of course my own melted homemade butter. It was a turducken of dairy products that had gone farm to plate, nose to tail, liquid to solid and all the way back again. A priceless bit of fun in a bleak ass world. Anna Rawhiti-Connell tried the KitchenAid method I set the task of making butter with my KitchenAid for myself, confident it would be easier than Alex's shaker method. Bridget Jones famously described married people as 'smug marrieds'. I am describing KitchenAid owners as smug KitchenAiders. When someone comments on something impressive you've made with a KitchenAid, you can't just take the compliment, you have to say you made it with a KitchenAid, but you're allowed to pretend you're saying that to highlight it's no big deal to make homemade pasta when you are aided by precision engineering. Those are the rules of KitchenAid club. KitchenAid's 'recipe' for butter is cheerfully titled ' Homemade Butter – Colour of the Year 2025 '. It's a) a Pantone-esque announcement about their colour of the year and b) a sales pitch for their cheerful and accidentally bleak-sounding colour range, described as a 'soft, energising butter yellow with a creamy satin finish'. Like butter, I guess? I woke up yesterday morning, my butter-making task on my list, and promptly handed half the job off to my husband by asking him to get some cream on his way back from the gym. 'Why?' he said 'Work' I replied. He nodded wearily, knowing it would be for some cockamamie experiment that my type A personality couldn't resist partaking in. I'd said I needed a 330ml bottle of MeadowFresh cream to match Alex's cream 'for science'. He wearily said there wasn't any and wearily put a 500ml bottle of Anchor cream in the fridge. The experiment has been corrupted and has already cost me $4.84 and a spousal favour backlog. I poured 330mls of cream into my KitchenAid bowl along with half a teaspoon of salt. One KitchenAid recipe I googled mentioned a 'whipping disc'. I don't have a whipping disc. I panicked for a brief second before returning to the first KitchenAid butter recipe I'd found the day before which just used the standard whipping attachment. I don't know why there are so many 'recipes' for something made of cream and centrifugal force. The recipe advised it would take 10-15 minutes for the butter fat solids to separate from the buttermilk. I'd half read a message from Alex the night before about how long it took her to make butter using just her arms and a jar and was immediately crestfallen because I thought she'd said seven minutes. I've just read her butter odyssey properly and my zest for life has returned. The KitchenAid recipe advised slowly dialling up the machine from one to turn-it-up-to-11, Vin Diesel speed. From cream to separated fat and buttermilk, it took eight minutes to get butter. I drained it in a sieve as per the instructions and rinsed it a few times with cold water to rid it of the last of the buttermilk. Voilá, le beurre! The magic of making something you have spent your life assuming required a gigantic industrial manufacturing process and the feeling of pretending you're sticking it to Big Dairy are enough to make the extremely dodgy economics of this endeavour worth it. I got 86 grams of butter from 330mls of cream. To make 500 grams of butter would have cost me $28.13, so it makes zero fiscal sense. I suspect the mixer approach, while faster, also wastes more cream by the time you lose the precious fats of our land to the bowl, the wall, your face, a spatula and a sieve. The butter was taste-tested by my colleagues yesterday, who praised it after spreading it on bread and putting that into a toasted sandwich press. I can confirm without the mask of a toastie, it tastes like butter, and I feel like a science wizard. A+++ would make it again if I won Lotto or owned a cow.
The Spinoff
13-05-2025
- Politics
- The Spinoff
Don't just ban social media for under 16s – ban it for everyone
Alex Casey suggests a bold amendment to the social media ban. Last week, National MP Catherine Wedd chucked a member's bill into the biscuit tin that would restrict social media access for anyone under the age of 16. Following a world-first crack down in Australia, the Social Media Age-Appropriate Users Bill would take 'all reasonable steps' to prevent those under 16 years old from accessing social media, with the aim of 'protecting young people from bullying, inappropriate content and social media addiction', said Wedd. The bill unleashed a flurry of reactions, with David Seymour describing it as a 'ridiculously simple' solution while Chris Hipkins was 'broadly supportive' but called for a more detailed government-led bill. Then on Sunday, Luxon announced that social media restrictions for under-16s will become part of the government's official work programme, with education minister Erica Stanford tasked to 'explore options' for cabinet to consider in the future. So while we are spitballing our options, here's a bold consideration from an Age-Appropriate User: why stop at 16? Why not also ban the over 65s, more likely to be in exposed to misinformation and subjected to social media scams? Why not also ban former reality TV stars for sharing weird AI videos? Why not the late teens chasing UV on TikTok? And, most crucially, why not ban me, throw my phone in the biscuit tin and submerge it in piping hot school lunch magma? I saw a thing on Instagram the other day – couldn't tell you who posted it, or if it was a cartoon or an X screenshot – that said something along the lines of 'I'm sorry for viewing your Instagram story within the first 15 seconds, but you have to understand that I haven't put my phone down for six years.' It's a sentiment that cracked me up but also cut deep: I've tried almost everything apart from my Users Device Trapped In Biscuit Tin Magma Bill to curb my addiction. In 2021, I deleted Twitter after staring at the Capitol riots for what felt like four days straight (they lasted four hours). I immediately emailed Twitter HQ and pleaded with them to reinstate it. Instagram followed soon after. 'I started giving up hours of my own weekend to lie on the couch and watch other people's weekends,' I wrote in a chin strokey op ed in 2023, high on my own social media free supply and unaware that I would be back in less than a year. I've tried all the different apps and tricks like turning the screen black and white, all to no avail. I even bought an old Nokia brick phone from a deceased estate on Trade Me, which was all going well until I turned it on and found heaps of scary pixelated photos of old feet in slippers. Last year I embraced the brick once more for a sublime 48-hour smartphone-free challenge in Melbourne, and felt a sense of peace and calm inside my brain I hadn't felt in years. There are plenty of other non-teenagers out there like me who also harbour this kind of sad, silent, social media addiction. A 2021 study found that 36% of New Zealanders considered themselves addicted to their screens, spending over five hours a day in front of screens outside of work or education. Half of the people surveyed (52%) reckoned it negatively impacted their physical health, and more than one-third (37%) said it was bad for their mental health. What these numbers don't go into is how insidiously it seeps in and disrupts your everyday life, until one day you're ignoring entire plotlines in TV shows, missing crucial details in IRL conversations, nipping away from social events to go to the toilet and get a quick hit of… a Shortland Street actor unboxing a toastie machine? An AI video of Rose vlogging the sinking of the Titanic? An influencer getting what looks like half a cup of golden syrup sucked out of her face? In our house, we colloquially refer to the worst of it as a K Hole, a nod to the hallucinatory and dissociative state that sees total detachment from one's body and environment due to the overconsumption of ketamine. But my drug isn't ketamine, it is lip-reading deep dives of Blake Lively on the red carpet, this compelling reel about an egg yolk and an army of matches, and frenzied thrift hauls from mid-western mums with sock curls on the other side of the world. 'Are you in a K-hole again?' my husband will holler into the dark abyss of my office every night, 20 minutes after I furtively muttered 'I'll just go put my phone on charge'. Soon he will find me, paying homage to the guy at the end of Blair Witch Project by facing the corner in the total darkness, head bowed, indeed in a K Hole. Mornings aren't much better either – not when I'm staggering out of the loo with the creaking gait of the Tin Man due to once again sitting on my phone for too long. It's humiliating to admit all of this, but also important to remember that this behaviour isn't normal in anyone, of any age. Terms like 'brain rot' and 'doom scrolling' have become so commonplace that their catastrophic connotations of death and decay barely register anymore. We need more severe language and stricter measures for people like me, who spent over 13 hours on Instagram last week. That's an entire weekend of every month, 700 hours per year, or a solid month of scrolling. Ban the kids, sure, but then please ban me too.
The Spinoff
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
My weekend snooping around Ōtautahi's most famous buildings
Alex Casey goes on an odyssey through some of the most important buildings in Christchurch. Moving to Ōtautahi in the 2020s is a bit like starting a prestige TV show about five seasons in. The budget is massive, the production values slick and shiny, and the reviews are positive, but you still can't escape the fact that you've missed out on pivotal early character building and some truly enormous plot points. As a result, you're left hurriedly searching up things on Wikipedia at social events, nodding along sagely at mentions of vaguely familiar villains (Gerry Brownlee) and collecting morsels of lore like a magpie wherever you can. Can you really ever understand a place if you missed the most galvanising moments in its recent history? And how do you go about backfilling that knowledge and those experiences? I've learned a lot already through telling stories of creativity and community here, be it the miniature rendering of the pre-quake city or the turtle rescuer still caring for quake refugees. But it was a recent deep dive into the Brutalist Timezone and the new stadium at Te Kaha that opened up another crucial (and screamingly obvious) portal to better understanding Christchurch: the buildings as central characters. With that in mind, last weekend I toddled along to Open Christchurch, an architecture festival where the doors are swung open to some of the city's most significant buildings. Where the phrase 'architecture festival' may have previously left me retreating into one of those deep sleep chambers used by Matt Damon in Interstellar, I'd noticed there was a certain buzz around this festival for the past few years and it always seemed to sell out quickly. This year I managed to nab a powerful itinerary, and here is everything I learned from my snooping. Saturday My day began with a tour of College House in Riccarton, a place I had only ever driven past on the way to the airport and assumed, based on the aggro high white concrete walls, was some sort of boring sludge factory. But as we were welcomed in to stand by the crackling fire in the lounge of the student hall, I realised I could not have been more wrong. Deemed by architect Sir Miles Warren as his greatest creation when it opened in the 1960s, College House is still used as swanky University of Canterbury student accommodation to this day. Architect Alec Bruce, who worked on the post-quake renovations, guided us through the courtyard to the Arthur Sims Library, which gave me a chilling bloodlust to study again (especially with texts on display such as Dan Carter's autobiography and 'Pizzas and Pastas'). Beneath rich warm wood panelling and spiral iron staircases, we gazed up at the centrepiece – an enormous web-like structure of dark beams and light fittings. 'Utterly gratuitous and utterly brilliant,' Bruce mused. 'And totally unexpected from the outside.' Same goes for the College House chapel, which would be the first but not the last time I would hear about Gothic Revival (less spooky vibes, more high pitched roofing). Costing $3m to repair post-quake, the chapel was split into six pieces so the ground floor could be restored. 'This is not the sort of building an engineer would let you design post earthquake,' said Bruce. We ended the tour in the ornate art-filled dining hall, which used to have an original Bill Hammond plonked by the coffee machine until they realised how much it was worth. From College House I zipped into the city for a tour of the Observatory Hotel in the Arts Centre, originally built in 1891 and home to the magical Townsend Teece telescope, one of the city's greatest objects. I'd written about the miraculous survival of the ' munched ' telescope during the quakes, but hadn't had the chance to nosey around its surrounds. The entire observatory tower collapsed in 2011 and was, as guide Shane Horgan told us, meticulously reconstructed with every piece of basalt stone numbered and put back in its original place like a jigsaw puzzle. Inside the building, formerly the University of Canterbury's home of astronomy and physics, the original wooden staircase curled towards the heavens. It was still standing when everything collapsed around it, and was taken offsite and kept under a tarp at Christchurch Boys High. The stairs creaked in welcome as we ascended. 'That's a heritage feature,' laughed Horgan. 'Cost a lot of money, by the way.' After a peek at some of the rooms (very flash, very high ceilings) we ended the tour under the mighty telescope, still pointed skyward as it was over 130 years ago. Back on the ground, I sprinted past punters on the river to Te Ara Pū Hā – yet another place I had no idea existed. Modelled on The High Line in New York, this is a four-block stretch of lush green planting that will one day form a forest corridor along the city's edge. Landscape architect Adrian Taylor and cultural advisor Te Marino Lenihan explained that the design was born out of a close working relationship with Ngai Tahu. 'The collaboration was powerful and should be done more often,' said Lenihan. 'This is the blueprint of true treaty partnership.' That idea of treaty partnership was evident on the tour itself, which opened with Taylor doing his pepeha aloud for the very first time – Lenihan encouraging him to go off the cuff – and the group introducing themselves and where they were from. Along the way, Lenihan explained how the rebuild allowed for Ngāi Tahu to have a greater presence in the city. 'Before the quakes, Christchurch was known as the most English city outside of England,' he said. 'We were invisible as mana whenua, so the opportunity was there to put our fingerprints on the future.' Those fingerprints could be found everywhere from the illuminated pounamu tiles to the angular stone seating inspired by purupuru. Wandering down four city blocks, we learned about the dozens of species of native plants on show, including edibles for foraging like pūha and horopito, as well as soon-to-be giants like kahikatea and harakeke. The tour ended with everyone cheersing with a 'mauri ora' before sampling a thimble of Taylor's own artisanal gin, infused with native botanicals from the very same walkway we had just strolled down. As a non-drinker, I rode a light botanical buzz all the way to the Town Hall, chatting with a former architecture lecturer named Jonathan who had travelled from Napier for the festival. He showed me some of the sketches he had been doing around the city, and frequently stopped on the walk to point out how timber framing fire resistance works, or how the gold exterior of Tūranga looks like curtain being drawn open, or the provenance of the word 'keystone' as it relates to the arch on the Heritage hotel. My head was spinning, and not just from the 5ml of horopito gin. We made it inside the Douglas Lillburn Auditorium, renowned for having some of the very best acoustics in the world. I walked onto the very same stage as the Vengaboys and clapped my hands. The sound reverberated powerfully around the entire hall, and I had to resist doing three more claps to the tune of 'Shalala Lala' in tribute to the Eurodance legends. I took a seat in the back row of the hall, exhausted, and watched a little kid in an All Blacks cap take the stage and belt a wobbly bit of the national anthem. Moved to tears, I knew it was time to go home. Sunday The day began with me racing through the labyrinth of fencing in the square to make it inside the Christ Church Cathedral for the 10am tour. Donning hard hats and fluro pink vests, a group of 50 of us were given a brief introduction outside by Carolyne Grant, director of the rebuild project team. 'This is the literal and figurative heart of the city,' she said. 'It took 40 years to build the first time, we hope it is not that long this time.' Widely reported as being 'mothballed' late last year due to a lack of funds, Grant rejected the use of that term. 'It's not mothballed yet: it's paused. And we will need to find a new way forward,' she said. With a heartfelt warning that re-entering the cathedral can feel overwhelming, we quietly stepped inside. One woman instinctively put her hand over her heart as she looked around at the exposed wooden skeleton. Another muttered 'oh, it's so sad' to nobody in particular. People shared stories of the last time they had been inside, including a man who had climbed the steeple a few weeks before the quake, and a woman who had visited the flower show with her Nana just days before. A topiary elephant stood amongst the ruins for weeks, apparently. I admired a large yellow Beyonce-style fan, positioned close to where the altar might have originally been. It constantly secretes a bubblegum-smelling vapour that keeps the pigeons away – the same who famously dropped two tonnes of poo over their decade of squatting. Grant also acknowledged the dozens of stray cats and kittens who lived in the derelict cathedral over the years, and assured us all that they had all been safely rehomed. Now, her attention is focussed on the future: 'we could lose the cathedral if we don't care for it,' she warned. It was very difficult not to be stirred by the sheer scale, emotion and ambition of the cathedral restoration project, already $85 million deep and only one third of the way complete when it was put on ice. Should Christchurch cling on to salvaging the first cathedral ever built in this country? Or cut our losses, let the pigeons back in, and call it an overpriced aviary? I didn't know the answer and I didn't really have time to mull it over – across the square the mayor and Dame Adrienne Stewart were about to cut the ribbon on the brand new Court Theatre. With dust from the cathedral still on my boots, I joined a heaving crowd of radio hosts, Court Jesters and Mark Hadlow, all chomping at the bit to get into the new theatre. 'There is no place like home, so welcome to our new home,' said Dame Stewart. We poured inside, marvelling at all the exposed light wood and rusted exterior, a nod to the temporary location – The Shed – where the Court has operated for over a decade. Kids were doing improv in the rehearsal space, we got to poke around the props (fake eggs! fake pizza!) and look at the costume workroom. 'People make costumes here for their job,' explained one mum to her daughter, whose jaw was on the floor at all the wigs and shiny fabrics. 'You could go to uni and study that.' From the brand new home of theatre to a temporary home of worship, I trotted my dusty boots through Latimer Square to the Transitional 'cardboard' Cathedral. Designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and opened in 2013 for just $7 million dollars, there really was quite a lot of cardboard happening everywhere. As I stared up at the 96 cardboard tubes, each weighing 500 kg, that lined the A-Frame building, guide Richard Parker told me that Ban kindly donated the design pro-bono to the city. 'He's an All Blacks supporter, which helps,' he smiled. The very last stop on my tour was Chateau on the Park, a really buzzy hotel designed by Peter Beavan in the 1970s in time for the Commonwealth Games. Tucked away in the bush off Deans Ave – 'you can still walk to Ricky mall from here, but you really feel like you are somewhere else' said guide Ann McEwan – even my half-shut eyes could recognise the high pitched roof as Gothic Revival. There was also a fish-filled moat (?) and two enormous suspended functional cauldrons (?). 'Two of the most bizarre things you will ever find in Christchurch,' McKewan said. As a smiling robot vacuum cleaner parted our tour group like the red sea, I felt like I was finally transcending all sense of time and space. In just 48 hours I had been inside late 1800s Gothic Revival relics, 1960s university halls, 2010s post-quake disaster architecture and a brand new 2020s theatre only a few hours old. I had also seen the future in a newly-planted greenway, the lush results of which none of us will even be around to see. I had sipped botanical gin, picked pūha, clapped on a stage, and learned a lot more about this place than a Wikipedia page could ever offer.
The Spinoff
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Event noticeboard: Bread sculptures, celebrity choirs and camembert
The Spinoff's top picks of events from around the motu. When I read that Alex Casey turns to self-help book The Artist's Way when she feels herself Animorphing into that monstrous 3D modelled remote worker, I knew I needed it – office life is no less monstrous. On Saturday the book was ready for me to pick up at my local library. Squinting through my baggy tired eyes each night, I have just made it to the explanation of the artist's date. Julia Cameron wrote that to create, we draw from an 'inner well'. Ideally the well is a reservoir stocked full of trout. Some of the fish are big, fat and ready to eat, while others are babies that need more time. But the well needs upkeep – if we don't give it attention it becomes depleted, stagnant or blocked. There are no more fish. The main tool to nourish the well is the artist date, a two-hour commitment each week to to go somewhere alone (she is strict on solitude). It could be a walk, a visit to the best dump shop in town or any of the following events. Performance and visual art: Having it all, all, all Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland Street, Auckland Central 10am-5pm Tuesday through Friday, 10am-4pm Saturday until May 10 Performance: 1-2pm Saturday, May 10 Free Saturday is your last chance to see an artwork by one of my very favourite artists, Eva Mendieta. The film on show is from her famous Silueta series, where she carved the shape of her body into natural landscapes and filled it with organic matter like moss, sticks, flowers or grass. She often activated the works with fire, water or blood. There's a modesty to the five-minute video, with its grain and flickers, that adds to the intimacy of the work. Mendieta is one of nine international artists in the exhibition, bought together because their work was pivotal in the re-evaluation of female subjectivity in art between the 1960s and 1990s. Other key works are Cut Piece by Yoko Ono, Semiotics of the Kitchen by Martha Rosler, So help me Hannah by Hannah Wilke and Ever is Over All by Pipilotti Rist. It's not all serious – the installation of the works is big, bold and colourful, and many of them are tongue-in-cheek. On Saturday, local artist Prairie Hatchard-McGill will be staging a one-hour performance called Bread – she will make sculptures out of soft, white loaves! Northland Scenic Hotel, 58 Seaview Road, Paihia 10am Saturday, May 10 Kingsgate Hotel Autolodge, 104 Marsden Road, Paihia 1pm Sunday, May 11 At songwriters in the round events, musicians take turns performing songs, usually acoustic, and sharing the stories behind them. Visual Art: Sculpture Northland Whangārei Quarry Gardens, 37A Russell Road, Kensington, Whangārei 9am-5pm until Sunday, May 11 $5 – $10 Over 100 sculptures in lush subtropical gardens. Auckland Music: Can't Even, album release show, BUB Neck of the Woods, 155B Karangahape Road, Auckland Central 8pm Thursday, May 8 $20 – $30 Singer-songwriter-comedian-karaoke icon Priya Sami is celebrating the release of an 'emotionally unstable, classic hits debut'. She will be joined by a full band, a 'celebrity choir' and supported by She's So Rad. A gameshow like no other, Bonetown is hosted by Spinoff fave Brynley Stent. Each night five comedians will join her to battle wits. Poets Craig Foltz, Alison Glenny and Richard von Sturmer will be accompanied by music from Robert Sly. Waihī Muse, 5 Havelock Road, Havelock North, Hawkes Bay 10am-4.30pm Monday – Friday, 10am-3pm Saturday until May 29 Free Big, celestial paintings that give way to abstract layers of paint up close. New Plymouth You simply must go to see and hear the country's biggest heart-throb. Wellington War Memorial Library, 2 Queens Dr, Hutt Central, Lower Hutt 2pm Saturday, May 10 Free A chat between Michael Brown and Lower Hutt-born musician Luke Rowell (Eyeliner/Disasteradio) will be followed by a performance from Eyeliner! Nelson Music: Imani-J Elma Turner Library, 27 Halifax Street, Nelson City 2pm Saturday, May 10 Free Imani-J sings in English, Te Reo Māori and French, plays guitar, keys and swings between RnB, Neo-Soul and Afro Beat. Ōtautahi Music: Brouhaha With Keelty's, Polson, Toronja 'A brand-new free jazz group formed in Ōtautahi that offers ecstatic, burning, tangled webs of improvised sound complete with howling saxophone and guitar effects over a volcanic bass & drums team.' Ōtepoti Orokonui Ecosanctuary, 600 Blueskin Road, Dunedin 5pm Saturday, May 10 $60 The sun will be setting, the birds will be flitting around the protected forest, and the strings will be playing powerful, haunting, raw, emotional and sweeping music. Southland Film: The Big Bike Film Night St James Theatre, 61 Irk St, Gore 6.30pm Monday, May 12 SIT Centrestage Theatre, 33 Don St, Invercargill 7pm Tuesday, May 13 $13.50 – $28 Two and a half hours of action, drama, humour and inspiration in the form of short cycling films from around the world. This week, make a commitment to nourish your well. Ban your boyfriend from coming along and from calling you. See you on the other side.
The Spinoff
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
Why doesn't the South Island get the comedy festival?
Our national comedy festival barely crosses the Cook Strait. Alex Casey tries to find out why. I've lived in Ōtautahi for two and a half years now, and I can tell you one thing for free: this city bloody loves a laugh. For example, I once saw a man in a curly blue clown wig driving a Suzuki Swift around and around the roundabout in St Martins. I've seen, on multiple occasions, a parody bumper sticker of Jim's Mowing that simply reads Jim's Pubic Trims. I've seen a chihuahua on Cashel Street wearing a straw hat and a tutu. All strong signifiers of a crack-up city. I've also been in extremely packed and buzzing rooms to see tonnes of stand up comedy, be it a shambolic work in progress show at Little Andromeda, experimental goings-on at Dark Room and Space Academy or a sold out night at James Hay with prodigal sons like Chris Parker and Guy Montgomery. Good Times Comedy Club has heaps on every week, and improv institution Scared Scriptless has just moved to its new home at the swanky Court Theatre in town. Why then, is Christchurch currently being plagued by posters for New Zealand International Comedy Festival shows in Wellington? Why are there just a handful of offerings daring to cross the Cook Strait to the South Island at all? And is Christchurch being overlooked as the next big comedy city? James Mustapic is one of those few brave comedians bringing his show south over the festival, and he explains his working simply: 'I like doing shows there, I get pretty good crowds, and I've got nothing else to do.' Coming down relatively often to visit his family in Christchurch, Mustapic started gigging here in 2019. He will often bring his work in progress shows to test out at Little Andromeda, before jumping on a line-up show across town at Good Times. 'Even if they don't have the biggest rooms, the audiences are always really nice,' he says. 'Sometimes in Auckland they just won't laugh unless there's a big audience, so I really enjoy it.' Mustapic also mentions Little Andromeda's All You Can Eat offering, in which people buy a $60 ticket to see as many shows as they like in a month. 'I think that really encourages people to get out and see lots of different things that they might not usually want to go see,' he says. Michael Bell runs Little Andromeda Theatre, which has been open on the Terrace since 2020 and programmes a mix of theatre and stand-up. 'I think stand up comedy is well attended in general in Christchurch,' he says. 'We've got really good venues that look after artists and make it an easy place to come and try out new material. So many of New Zealand's famous comedians are also from Christchurch, so we'll see them come home and try things out.' Because of these work in progress shows, Bell says Christchurch is already hosting an unofficial comedy festival of sorts. 'It's just that we get it a month or two early,' he laughs. 'That's why I'm not as up in arms about it, because I literally see the North Island comedy festival at Little Andromeda every year.' Pip Taylor, the owner of Good Times Comedy Club is slightly more emphatic about the absence of the comedy festival in the south. 'They say it is our national comedy festival, but it is really just a North Island comedy festival,' she says. 'We're the second biggest city in this country, so hopefully they'll come to the party soon.' Having been involved with the comedy club since it opened in 2020, Taylor echoes that things are 'thriving' in the local comedy scene. By way of example, she mentions a headline-grabbing mishap with her paperwork earlier this year that could have been disastrous. 'So I was a day late in getting my liquor license renewed, and I lost it for 25 days. But while I bled money over the bar, the audience was still turning up for comedy,' she says. 'I think that is such a strong indicator of how people feel about comedy here in Christchurch – they're still showing up for it, even when they can't get drunk.' This stone cold sober love for comedy not gone unnoticed by Lauren Whitney, director of The New Zealand International Comedy Festival. While Christchurch has previously been used as an occasional satellite location for the odd touring act or gala over the years, she says that there are plans to explore a closer relationship with the city, and soon. 'It's not about a lack of interest in Christchurch, it is really just about capacity and resource at this stage.' Whitney explains that the core funding for the festival comes from commercial sponsors like Best Foods Mayonnaise, and the rest is from Auckland and Wellington city councils (funding from Creative New Zealand is inconsistent, and they didn't get any this year). 'Because we're not getting long term consistent funding, it's very hard for us to future plan, because generally, by the time we finish a festival, we're then going out and seeking funding all over again,' she says. There's also the issue of timing. The schedule creep of comedy festivals in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Brisbane overlapping with New Zealand has meant that availability of talent is becoming an issue as it is. 'Currently we have about 650 performances across three and a half weeks in Auckland and Wellington, and so scheduling another city on top of that would produce some logistical challenges,' she says. 'Nothing we can't work out, of course.' So while I might be whinging down here in the south for the moment, scavenging for errant laughs wherever I can find them (Jim's Pubic Trims), Whitney assures me that momentum is building. 'The dream is to grow Christchurch as a market, not only for the work that we're doing, but also for the wider ecosystem so that comedians can perform with or without us,' she says. 'The long term aim is definitely to do more and more and bring stuff consistently.' In the meantime, South Islanders can check out a smattering of comedy festival shows here
