Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Monday, September 28, 2026
Angel Olsen - Big Time, Shut Up Kiss Me
Good morning kisses, giving you all mine
Pull back the curtains, show me the sunshine
Needing this coffee, needing some nature
Need it right now, it can't wait until later
We're always busy, baby, not this time
Lay in the tall grass, talking with your eyes
Talking with your eyes before we knew we were
Thinking the same things, I'm a believer
And I'm losing, I'm losing, I've left it behind
Guess I had to be losing to get here on time
And I'm living, I'm loving, I've loved long before
And I'm loving you big timе, I'm loving you more
Take to the lakе, playing lady in red
Hanging onto every word that you said
Staying up all night, out by the fire
Singing your songs now, you know I'm a crier
And I'm losing, I'm losing, I've left it behind
Guess I had to be losing to get here on time
And I'm living, I'm loving, I've loved long before
And I'm loving you big time, I'm loving you more
And I'm losing, I'm losing, I've left it behind
Guess I had to be losing to get here on time
And I'm living, I'm loving, I've loved long before
And I'm loving you big time, I'm loving you more
And I'm loving you big time
And I'm loving you big time
And I'm loving you big time
I'm loving you big time
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Sunday, September 27, 2026
Artist's new beginning in Nelson
Artist's new beginning in Nelson
Tao Wells is living and working at an artists' retreat that is being set up in Wakefield. He and his partner, Laura Shepard, are expecting a child, with a civil union on the horizon next month.
Wells gained notoriety in Wellington in 2010, with a controversial installation project that promoted the virtues of being unemployed.
His taxpayer-funded installation, The Beneficiary's Office, urged people to abandon jobs they didn't like, rather than suffering eight hours of "slavery".
Wells, who was on a benefit at the time, ran an office in Manners St with five "staff" for two weeks, promoting his unemployment philosophy publicly.
The project received a $3500 grant as part of a $53,000 performance art installation series paid for by Creative New Zealand and the Wellington City Council.
Even before that, Wells was no stranger to controversy.
Wells has performed different versions of the same piece, 27 times since then and will do so again at the New Performance Festival in Auckland in February.
In 2007, Wells used a Creative New Zealand grant to visit Melbourne as an artist in residence, where he exhibited "a whole lot of really full-on political artwork" exploring race relations.
Wells said he expected his exhibition at Conical gallery in Fitzroy – "a hot-bed of political activism" – to evoke strong reactions, but was shocked when the curator of the gallery censored his work.
Wells had printed 3000 pamphlets saying there was "no culture in Australia" and that the country was "20 years behind New Zealand" in terms of race relations, but the curator banned him from delivering them.
"It
was like they were willing to invest in me as an artist as long as I
behaved in a way that didn't actually do anything," he said.
Wells features in the latest issue of edgy New Zealand art magazine White Fungus, which forms part of a new exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art next month.
He said he had found "a new lease of life" in Nelson and was excited about getting involved in the region's art scene.
"My work ebbs and flows. There's the controversial and shocking stuff and there's actually just normal products that I try to sell," he said.
Wells is working on a series involving "domestic linen paintings" using pillowcases, which he hopes to show at some point.
"It has been quite a crazy road. I was in Wellington for over a decade and in the last five years I felt like a rusty old car in someone's yard that no-one wanted to fix. People give you a go here."
The Happy Bene, a film documenting the Wells' installation project and the reaction it received, is available online.
Saturday, September 26, 2026
Friday, September 25, 2026
Thursday, September 24, 2026
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Monday, September 21, 2026
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Sunday, September 13, 2026
NZ Tim Dillon & Kurt Metzger: End Times & Demons | Fallout Wasteland Radio
"the fact that you can purchase Trump and the Republican party and those people will allow you to do anything you want as long as you support them politically. So you have E Elon and Zuckerberg and Sam Alman and Teal and all of those guys to varying degrees, but it's the same overall goal. They are all trying to get rid of the government and insert them and install themselves as the new government and install their companies as the new government. They believe they are the government."- TD
Saturday, September 12, 2026
Friday, September 11, 2026
Thursday, September 10, 2026
Monday, September 7, 2026
Sunday, September 6, 2026
Saturday, September 5, 2026
Friday, September 4, 2026
Thursday, September 3, 2026
"In Dunedin, New Zealand, she meets Tao Wells, who sparked outrage with a grant-funded project that proposed unemployment as a route to sustainability." - Chris Kraus on Tao Wells. Financial Times, Max Liu. Nov. 2018
"In Dunedin, New Zealand, she meets Tao Wells, who sparked outrage with a grant-funded project that proposed unemployment as a route to sustainability. Back in the US, she talks to Thomas Gokey, co-founder of the Rolling Jubilee project, which, Kraus explains, “raised money to buy up millions of dollars of bundled debt and then wrote it off to start a conversation about the nature of debt”.
Money is the subtext of several essays and the question of who can afford to make art is one of Kraus’s urgent concerns. “I see a distinction between artists who can afford to play the long game and those who must play the short game,” she says. “The latter are sneered at as hustlers and hype-merchants, but they’re usually people who need to make money quickly. It’s a matter of access which is connected to class.”
Many of the artists Kraus writes about live, she says, “off the metropolitan grid” (Vera in Mexico, Newby in Germany, Wells in New Zealand). Is this the inevitable consequence of the rocketing cost of living in major cities?"
Books
Chris Kraus: ‘I’m reaching out to people’
The novelist and art critic talks about her travelling role as a pollinator of ideas
Writer Chris Kraus at the New York Botanical Garden © Sasha Arutyunova/The New York Times.
When I arrive at the Royal Academy of Arts to meet Chris Kraus, I find the American novelist, art critic and publisher sitting at a desk in a life-drawing studio, signing copies of her new book for a group of students to whom she’s just delivered a lecture. “Email me,” she tells one woman, then laughs, adding: “I promise our conversation won’t end up in a book.”
I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Correspondence is central to Kraus’s work. In I Love Dick (1997), the first of her four novels, Kraus used the epistolary form to blend fiction, autobiography and feminist polemic. Social Practices, her new collection of 26 essays, features transcripts of conversations with artists, as well as a surreal account of a seven-year email exchange with a Romanian woman who wanted Kraus to write about her.
When the students have gone, I sit down with Kraus over coffee and ask if it’s important to her to be available to her readers. “Definitely,” she says. “In my writing, I’m reaching out to people. I never want to work on a scale where I can’t be available to things that interest me. I don’t need a filter.”
At 63, Kraus has more readers than ever. I Love Dick was reissued in 2016, at the same time as Sheila Heti, Leslie Jamison and other members of a new generation of women writers cited its influence. The following year, it was adapted for an Amazon TV series starring Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Hahn (Kraus is apparently tired of talking about it, so I don’t go there). Its narrator is a writer who is obsessed with a professor of art, while the protagonist in Kraus’s most recent novel, Summer of Hate (2012), is also an art critic. Her fiction can be essayistic, while her essays often read like fiction. Does Kraus see her novels and her art criticism as part of a single project?
“Yes,” she says, speaking softly but fixing me with a firm gaze. “I don’t understand why people are so insistent on genre divisions. When I write, I start with an idea, rather than considering what form it’s going to take. All parts of my life are tied up with the art world.”
The essays in Kraus’s new book were written over the past decade and a half for exhibition catalogues or Artforum and other magazines. They reflect her interest in conceptual art with a social agenda — a subject explored in her 2004 book Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness. She is a warm, witty critic, so it’s easy to enjoy her essays regardless of whether you are familiar with the artists she writes about. As Kraus says: “My essays aren’t analytical or discursive. I try to reflect the spirit of the artworks I’m writing about.”
The hilarious opening essay, “Trick”, isn’t really about art. It describes Kraus’s experiences of working in strip clubs in New York’s East Village in the late 1970s. “My job was to hustle men into buying ersatz champagne,” she tells me, “which is funny because now I’m writing about the art world as a hustle.”
In the final piece, “Resistance”, Kraus combines meditations on seemingly disparate subjects — a plastic coffee scoop, a found letter, the story of Walter Benjamin’s 1926 visit to Moscow — in a beautiful collage essay about loss.
In between these autobiographical pieces, Kraus travels the world, meeting artists. “I’m like a pollinating bee,” she says, “bringing news of one group to another.” With notable exceptions — such as the photographers Ryan McGinley and Kate Newby, from the US and New Zealand respectively — the artists in Social Practices eschew traditional mediums. Why? “The humanities have become degraded and are migrating into the art world,” says Kraus. “Ten years ago, independent film moved into the gallery and now we’re seeing something similar with literature and theatre. People are doing things like teaching, translation and activism under the rubric of art. It gives them more cachet and a wider reach.”
In northern Mexico, in Mexicali, Kraus visits Marco Vera, who has set up a cultural centre that is bringing together everyone in the local community, from scholars to gangs. In Dunedin, New Zealand, she meets Tao Wells, who sparked outrage with a grant-funded project that proposed unemployment as a route to sustainability. Back in the US, she talks to Thomas Gokey, cofounder of the Rolling Jubilee project, which, Kraus explains, “raised money to buy up millions of dollars of bundled debt and then wrote it off to start a conversation about the nature of debt”.
Recommended Life and Art from FT Weekend Chris Kraus on the FT culture podcast: listen to the author discuss sex, autofiction and the ‘flawed female protagonist’ Money is the subtext of several essays and the question of who can afford to make art is one of Kraus’s urgent concerns. “I see a distinction between artists who can afford to play the long game and those who must play the short game,” she says. “The latter are sneered at as hustlers and hype-merchants, but they’re usually people who need to make money quickly. It’s a matter of access which is connected to class.”
Many of the artists Kraus writes about live, she says, “off the metropolitan grid” (Vera in Mexico, Newby in Germany, Wells in New Zealand). Is this the inevitable consequence of the rocketing cost of living in major cities?
“People are moving to more affordable places,” says Kraus, “so smaller cities have become important in the international art cosmos. In the UK, Glasgow is the obvious example. Yesterday, I gave a reading at TOMA, a free art school in Southend-on-Sea. Recently, I was in touch with artists in Lyon. London and New York are where commercially viable work is exhibited. But they’re not where art is being made.”
Where would Kraus go if, like the students she met at the Royal Academy, she were starting out on a creative life today? “Oh my god,” she says and, for the first time, sounds stumped. After a moment, she says: “I’d live in a cheap suburb within a reasonable commute of a large city. Or I’d find a free study programme. Wherever you are, you have to meet your peers.”
Social Practices , by Chris Kraus, The MIT Press, RRP £13.99/Semiotext(e), RRP $17.95, 296 pages