Why local musician has the wind in her sails
'Am I big enough yet?' Gabrielle Pho would ask her mother every year. At 3 or 4, she wasn't. Aged 9, though, the Virginia-born Pho was finally an appropriate size to start French horn lessons.
'I don't remember a time when I didn't know what I was going to play,'
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NZ Herald
6 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Travel Alerts: Tortoise encounters, french feasts, and a crocheted wharenui
Celebrate Bastille Day in Auckland Bastille Day, France's national holiday on July 14, is best known for fireworks over the Eiffel Tower, street parades, live music and picnic baskets filled with wine and cheese. While most Kiwis can only dream of spending it in Paris, one local travel company offers a delightful alternative right here in New Zealand. Boutique Tours France hosts four-day French language immersion ateliers in Akaroa and West Auckland. Limited to eight guests, each retreat includes conversational French lessons and classic experiences like pétanque, live French music, long-table dining, and plenty of good wine. Created during the pandemic to bring a taste of France closer to home, the ateliers have since become a go-to for New Zealand's Francophiles. Celebrate Bastille Day in Auckland with Boutique Tours France. Party with artists at the Gold Coast Bleach* Festival returns to the Gold Coast in 2025 with its most ambitious programme yet, running from July 31 to August 10. Under the creative direction of guest artistic director Michael Zavros, the 11-day event features more than 100 performances across iconic locations like Hota, Kurrawa Beach, and Emerald Lakes. The lineup includes three world premieres and spotlights everything from live music and bold installations to culinary delights. Whether you are chasing festival energy, creative conversations, or beachside performances, this is one of Australia's most unique contemporary arts experiences. Full programme and ticket info available at Australian artist Kirsha Kaechele will take her provocative installation Ladies Lounge outside Mona to the Hota Gallery. Photo / Supplied Crocheted wharenui It's not every day you see a wharenui made entirely of neon crochet. Wharenui Harikoa, created by artists Lissy and Rudi Robinson-Cole, is a joyful and immersive art experience now on show at The Civic in Tāmaki Makaurau. Crafted from vivid yarn and inspired by Māori tradition, the large-scale installation blends ancestral storytelling with light, sound and colour. Visitors step barefoot into a glowing world of tukutuku panels, sensory touch walls and a shifting soundscape led by taonga puoro and karanga. Inspired by Matariki and the celestial family, this is the first time the wharenui will stand while Matariki is visible in the night sky. Guided tours with the artists are free but limited, so book ahead. Entry is free and open daily. Walk-ups welcome. Visit to plan your experience.
Otago Daily Times
a day ago
- Otago Daily Times
Achievements answer Live Aid critics
When Bob Geldof recruited Bono for a charity concert, he thrust global inequality into the spotlight. Forty years on, the pair discuss the legacy of Live Aid with Angus Macqueen. "He has a rage in him that has made him, I think, the greatest conversationalist I've ever met. He's turned expletives into poetry around our kitchen table. I don't believe any of my activism would have happened without his inspiration." So says Bono about Bob Geldof. "He wants to give the world a great big hug, and I want to punch its lights out." So says Bob Geldof about Bono. I knew little about Geldof — beyond having joined the nation in watching the Live Aid concert in 1985 — when I was invited to join him for a meeting with the BBC's head of content, Charlotte Moore, last year, alongside the renowned documentary-maker Norma Percy, to discuss plans for marking the 40th anniversary. Geldof steamrollered the occasion with stories of being on Air Force One with George HW Bush, driving Italian prime minister Romano Prodi into a hotel bathroom to make a decision on debt relief, and visiting the Elysee palace with Francois Mitterrand, persuading the top-secret French president to allow spy satellites to broadcast the Live Aid concert to Africa. Such stories led to the commission of a 40th anniversary series on Live Aid and Live 8. The scale of the 1985 Live Aid concert is hard to comprehend. With virtually no warning, the BBC cleared the schedule for an insane dual gig, bouncing from Wembley in London to JFK stadium in Philadelphia over 16 hours. The claim, though how anyone could prove it, is that the line-up of superstars including McCartney, Bowie, Queen, Jagger, Turner, Dylan and a young Madonna, reached 84% of the world's TV sets. In an age of cash, cheques and postal orders, more than £100m was raised. When I began talking about Live Aid to others, I ran into a huge generational divide. Most who were adults in the 1980s retain a rose-tinted memory of a time when people came together to do something for the famine in Ethiopia. But those aged 40 and under responded with either total ignorance or profound cynicism. Wasn't the money wasted or misused? Weren't the concerts just an exercise in self-promotion for a declining rock star, in the case of Geldof, and in yet more dull sanctimonious celebrity moralising, in the case of Bono? Often added is a layer of ideology casting Geldof and Bono as "white saviours", with attitudes that embody everything that is wrong about the relationship between the global north and south. Witness the storm raised by Ed Sheeran and Fuse ODG around the re-release of Do They Know It's Christmas? last November. Geldof and Bono met through music in the clubs of Dublin in the 1970s. "I'm Irish. Bob Geldof is Irish," Bono said. "We would consider ourselves partners [with Africans] from the beginning. It is not a patronising or even paternalistic relationship that we have with our African peers, because we're Irish. We have the folk memory of famine." There is a hint of truth to such romantic exceptionalism, but it rarely convinces critics. What convinced me was the sheer hard work both of them have put in since. Tony Blair's officials, along with their EU counterparts, were impressed to find that Geldof knew all the statistics when confronting them with the iniquities of the quotas that stymie Africa's trade with the rest of the world, from bananas to chocolate. Bono spent weeks in the vaults of the World Bank in Washington in order to argue debt figures on the floor of Condoleezza Rice's office in the White House. Many will know the mythologised story of how Geldof was inspired to act after watching a BBC news report about a "biblical famine" in Ethiopia, during which a young British nurse was seen literally picking out which children to save. But it is worth considering again. How many of us have watched horrors on our TVs, and simply kept on sitting on our sofas? Geldof did something. Forty years later, witnessing him break down when remembering his first visit to the famine area of Ethiopia, I had no doubt as to how that decision transformed his life. Geldof's mix of charm, calculation, rudeness, passion and an intelligence that cannot stomach evasion, drove him through the offices of presidents and prime ministers, the diaries of music superstars, and the lives of millions of people around the world. Twice. He is surprisingly modest when he admits that he didn't like Queen before their Wembley performance, or when he explains he had to negotiate with Madonna by letter. He knows that his mission has given him access to superstars that his own music has not. But when he thinks he is right, he is a bull; when he doesn't like something, he tells you. And doesn't stop telling you. Very loudly. As Bono put it: "It's not a question of persuasion. He's just impossible to argue with. Bob Geldof is what justice looks like when it runs out of patience." Geldof is aware of the criticism around white saviourism; the current questioning of the very concept of aid and charity. "I will not have the ACTUAL empirical history examined or critiqued through an arbitrary and irrational structuralist undergrad theoretical lens, no matter how groovy a 28-year-old imagines it to be. Structuralists, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and all those other tossers hold that reality is a semiotic construct. That it does not exist as we believe it. Tell that to the starving. Not that those c***s have ever gone without so much as a cornflake," he wrote to me in a message. He goes on to insist that postmodernism, irony and relativism are all impediments to action, and excuses for inaction. His answer is to list concrete achievements: sums raised, hospitals built, lives saved. Things done. That might seem rude or insulting, but watch him confront Margaret Thatcher in 1984 over Band Aid's VAT charges, or answer complex questions about the misuse of aid by the Ethiopian authorities in 1985, and you see his political acuity. Geldof's imagination is unbounded. He knew the 1985 Live Aid had to be the biggest concert ever and broadcast all over the world. In 2005, when cajoled into attempting a repeat, he insisted that eight simultaneous events must be held in each of the G8 countries, for the people to challenge their leaders. Once in passing, Geldof told me of a project he had dreamed up in 1989 to take on climate change: he would train to be an astronaut and orchestrate a 24-hour programme from every part of our fragile planet while aboard the International Space Station. When Nasa did not answer his calls, he rang the Russians. He was too tall. Where Geldof is right in your face, Bono is all strategy and planning. Where Geldof charges out front like a mad general, Bono builds a team around himself, his lobbying "band" as he calls them. The Live Aid concert inspired Bono and his wife to work with an aid agency in Ethiopia at the end of 1985, without fanfare. He and Geldof began what Bono calls the journey from charity to justice, understanding that only governments can truly address the iniquities of the relationship between the different countries of Africa and the global north. For Bono, these goals superseded ideology. In 2001, he appealed to the "enemy", US president George W Bush, in what Bush's chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, described to me as the "greatest lobbying exercise" he has ever seen. Bush was widely despised, but Bono, secure in his religious belief, appealed not only to Bush's conscience but to some of the most conservative figures in the Senate. He persuaded them that aid to Africa was not just a religious imperative, but in the US's deepest interests. One result was Pepfar, which over the past 20 years has seen different administrations put more than $US100 billion into providing HIV medicine across the continent. As Bush told me, in a rare interview clearly aimed at the current incumbent of the White House: "About 27 million people now live who would have died. And the fundamental question for Americans was whether that was in our national interest. I decided it was. It would not have happened without Bono." Bono's anger is intense as he describes how Trump and Musk are laying waste to that legacy, and USAID. "A hammer has come down from hell, and it is going to cause hell," he said. "Elon Musk can treat USAID like a company that he's just bought, where his tactics are always to just fire everybody, dismiss everybody, and rehire the absolutely necessary. There are millions of people who are going to lose their lives because of this act of vandalism." His lobbying band are still fighting to save what they can — including the vaccination campaigns that have almost wiped out polio. — The Observer
The Spinoff
2 days ago
- The Spinoff
How do you follow up a Wellington icon like KC Cafe?
For owner and chef Michael Chan, the answer is Hei – the restaurant he always dreamed of opening. One of the many problems with modern TV cooking shows is the obsession with 'elevating' food from non-Western cultures. You'll recognise the kind of moment I mean: a contestant on Masterchef, My Kitchen Rules, or some other food-adjacent programme will announce they are cooking something from their home country's repertoire of dishes. The middling TV-man-chef will confidently announce he's not worried about flavour, but fears the dish may end up looking a bit too 'rustic'. He makes the classic error of thinking a lack of physical height in a dish is the result of a lack of skill. I do get why. So much of the world has been influenced by the French principles of cookery, and it is easy to look past a dish that does not conform to some of these ideals: height, texture, colour, placement, contrast. Of course, I love a bit of clever plating. When it's done well, it's a visual treat and helps you navigate the flavours. But do we really want our nasi goreng served in a tower, with sphericated shrimp, spring onion espuma, chilli crisp floss and 'textures of lotus root'? Actually, maybe that does sound quite fun? But probably not. When I first heard of Hei, the new 'refined' Chinese restaurant on Cuba Street, I had my worries. In a city bursting with exceptional South East Asian restaurants, who was this supposed elevation really appealing to? Then I realised it was being opened by Michael Chan and the whole family from legendary Courtenay Place eatery KC Cafe. So, I parked my cynicism, went for dinner and had a chat with Michael about opening that difficult second restaurant. Michael first thought of opening Hei during the 2020 Covid lockdown. Like all of us, he had time to lean into that vague existential dread of what he was doing and where he wanted his life to go next. The result of that panic is Hei: his dream restaurant. 'I always loved cooking, but it was a bit hard at KC as the aim for that was to just make a living for the family. I haven't really had the chance to be creative with my dishes there,' he says. Too many of the things he was dreaming up simply 'weren't really suited for KC.' He ended up with dozens of notebooks filled with more complex and playful dishes, ones that would simply clog the well-oiled machine at KC Cafe. Opening a more formal, docket-based restaurant has been no easy task. Michael had zero experience in front-of-house service; at KC the process is to 'yell out the orders' and hope for the best. And like so many in hospitality, he's had to stare down waves of self-doubt. 'It's taken this long to build up the courage to do it,' he says. 'But I wanted to model for my kids that it's OK to fail. I mean, it's not great. But you learn and adapt.' Michael's speciality has always been Chinese cookery, especially from the Guangdong region. When designing the new venture, he wanted to try to change the Kiwi mentality. 'When people think of Chinese food, I think most people think of cheap takeaways. There is so much more to the cuisine,' he says. Take, for example, the pomelo and prawn salad (fun pub fact: pomelo is officially the largest citrus fruit). It is a dizzying combination of ingredients that is at once chaotic yet purposeful: tart green apple and bitter pomelo sit among red onion and fistfuls of vibrant, fresh Asian herbs: Thai basil, coriander, lemongrass, kaffir lime. There is heat from sambal and texture from peanuts and thinly sliced red onion. It is the epitome of elegance yet demonstrably flavour-led. It is exactly what Hei is designed to be. Inspiration for his dishes is drawn from many places, from videos he saw online to meals he has eaten overseas. He works backwards from what he has seen and tasted and reverse engineers the dishes in his own style. Like the golden pork chop and rice on the lunch menu, which is a classic in Hong Kong cafes, or the fried prawn balls his son became obsessed with in Singapore. Michael tried many times to recreate them, and found they were 'delicious with chilli oil velouté.' Char siu, too, has been developed further than is traditional. Instead of its conventional luminous pink, Micahel's sits deep and earthy with black flecks where the flames have licked at its extremities. Rather than using the customary pork butt, he opted for the much leaner loin. A move that in lesser skilled hands would have proven dry, but here it is unctuous and luxurious with its citrus and honey glaze singing sweetly. Another thing that sets Hei apart is the drinks list: a showcase of biodynamic and organic wines from producers like Bryterlater in North Canterbury and Decibel Wines from Hawke's Bay. This place is certainly not a BYO. The cocktail list is just as exciting. It was made in collaboration with Dee's Place, the bar downstairs that has a very strong claim to being the best bar anywhere in the city (if you haven't been before, go there right now and ask for a whiskey and freshly juiced green apple). The drinks incorporate many of the ingredients Michael uses in his cooking – for example, the Smacked Eastside has sesame oil and coriander in it. It is this level of care that speaks to Michael's passion for delivering something unexpected in the Chinese restaurant space. All of this is not to say that any of this elevation or refinement makes it inherently better than any other Chinese restaurant in town. What makes it so compelling is that this restaurant is truly a passion project. One where every single last decision has been painstakingly made by someone who understands food and hospitality. The velouté under the prawn balls is not a gimmick; it is there because Michael is absolutely certain that is where it should be. The cut selection on the various meat dishes has been made because he knows it will work and become something special. Hei means happiness in Cantonese, and after eating there and chatting with Michael, I cannot think of a more appropriately named restaurant anywhere in the world.
