In this issue

My image of the week

Frontispiece

– William Carlos Williams

Atamaarie e te whaanau:

Good morning, family, and welcome to this Sunday.

This Sun-day.

Perhaps Christians might prefer to refer to it as Son-day.

In Te Reo Maaori, the word is Raatapu.

Raa-tapu.Raa=Sun, tapu= sacred.

This is the day that honours the sacredness of the Sun, and the fact that it is our sun that sustains all life on our beautiful blue spaceship.

As a side note, it is linguistically interesting that Raa is the Egyptian God of the Sun.

While one might say that the significance of Sunday is cultural and/or religious, Sunday has always seemed to me to be a day that is somehow different from all the other six. A day to celebrate.

We might make Sunday a day for giving thanks that yet again, we have made it a little further along the road of our life, a day for joy and gratitude.

This week, I felt it was time to share two things with you; a poem celebrating the wonder of our Taiao, our natural world, and, secondly, how we creators can protect our intellectual property.

I hope you enjoy this issue.

A Hymn to my mother, the Earth

― Paul Stamets

A Hymn to my mother, the Earth

And

At the turn of the seasons when

Summer is tipping tenderly over into the arms of Autumn

And the air is awash with liquid, lustrous light,

when

goldglitter dreamspecks of divined, dancing dust hang,

joyous and suspended in the thrumming, threaded air

I will plant the soles of my feet

deep into the forest floor of my mother’s belly,

sense its gentle rise and fall

and feel down, down, down

to the soft, purple heart-river pulse

of her winding womb beneath.

I will kneel ,

clothed only in sunshine and joy,

in a meandering, rambling meadow of wildflowers,

of blue-grey daisies with petals outstretched,

suspended on impossible stalks of shimmering, see-through green.

of bright-cheeked, crimson poppies embarrassed by their own wonder,

and sunflowers turning their faces to follow the yellow arc of the sun.

I will watch

bejewelled butterflies carve glittering trails in the air

and honeyed, hovering bees drink from beckoning, pouting pollenwells,

while tiny beetles in lacquered rainbow armour scuttle busily across my feet,

and sinuous, sectioned worms intertwine

in lazy, writhing spirals beneath the crumbled earth.

I will listen

to the perfectly-pitched summer hum of violin-strung insects,

and the abrupt ejaculations of exploding seed pods casting their future far and wide,

and I will know

my mother’s abode abides.

-Tony Bridge 2021

Protecting your Patch

- Mehmet Murat ildan

A few notes on Copyright

Sooner or later, it’s going to happen to you.

About ten years ago, I was wandering the mean streets of Christchurch working on a project photographing the city at night when I happened to walk past a little art gallery down High Street. There in the window, an enormous framed version of one of my photographs was staring out at me with a very nice price sticker on it.

It was the first I knew about it, that somebody had helped themselves to my work without asking or even offering to reimburse me.

Over the next few days, I rode a rollercoaster of emotion ranging from anger to sadness. The real question here was: what was I going to do about it? The conciliatory me wanted to shrug his shoulders, curse mightily and let it go. However, my kaiako (teacher) at the time pointed out to me that perhaps this was a test of my willingness to stand up for myself.

Ouch!

I lawyered up. It took a little manoeuvring, a pointed letter (including a reference to my lawyer’s name and address), along with a hui (meeting), before matters were resolved and Mana restored.

I’ve recently been helping a friend who has had the same problem. But, of course, she didn’t want to do anything about it either. But, of course, it didn’t help that her own people had helped themselves to work she had shared on Facebook, all of which had her copyright plastered over the pictures.

They went ahead and did it anyway.

There was no offer of apology and a downright refusal to compensate her for their theft. A well-known Maaori activist, one of the offenders, bluntly told her there was no way they were either wrong or going to offer her any compensation.

I know what you are probably thinking, that your work isn’t good enough for anybody to want to steal it. But you really can’t say that with any degree of confidence. There are plenty of instances of people’s pictures appearing on Aliexpress or Pakistani condom wrappers.

Google is your friend here. But what can you do about it? Probably not much, except to send them dark thoughts.

But what if it happens closer to home? And believe me, big corporates are as guilty as anybody of helping themselves, simply because they can. And inevitably, unless you have won Lotto, their pockets are much deeper than yours, and there is sod-all you can do about it.

Well, there are a couple of things you can do to protect your intellectual property.

The first is to write your rights usage terms into your metadata. This is a straightforward thing to do in LightRoom (get in touch if you want me to show you how to do it) and means that any ethical designer working for a corporate will see it and, being aware of the legal implications, probably get in touch.

Hopefully.

I certainly had had that experience when a designer rang me out of the blue asking about a particular work and what my charges would be for them to be able to use it.

Win-Win.

You might decide to license it under a Creative Commons flag, where the work is freely available for all. Your choice.

The point of this article is to tell you about an organisation called Copyright New Zealand. Many of you will be aware of APRA, an organisation that works for musicians to ensure they get paid royalties for their work. And there are very effective at it. For example, every time a radio station plays one of their songs, they receive a small royalty for the performance.

Until now, nothing of that sort has existed for writers and visual artists.

Until now.

Now there is. Enter Copyright New Zealand. Signing up is a straightforward process that won’t cost you anything. Of course, if you are working with a corporate entity, they will negotiate the fee on your behalf (and clip the ticket on the way through). Still, it gives you a layer of protection and an organisation willing to go into bat on your behalf.

I have included a link to them below. And yes, I have signed up.

Interestingly enough, they are developing a process where, if the work is on-sold, the original artist gets a share of that.

Here is an example.

The iconic central target artist, Grahame Sydney, has produced some extraordinary work. One day I met the man who purchased his stellar painting of the Wedderburn goods shed (see below) because that work was hanging in his gallery home. I admired it, congratulated him on his purchase, and we went for coffee.

Some years later, I stayed with him and his wife in Nelson. I enquired about Sydney’s painting and whether he still had it.

No, he didn’t.

He shared with me that he bought it from Grahame for about $36k, then he on-sold it for around$70k to another art collector, who then on-sold it for just over$100k. The last he heard was that it was back on the market for around $140k. Graham, of course, only received the proceeds of his first sale, not the other $100k by which the work had appreciated.

Now there is the beginning of a move afoot to ensure that artists receive a percentage of all future sales of their work. However, it will take time in an age when to be an artist is mostly to live hand-to-mouth. When art is seen as an optional extra, that could make the difference between an artist continuing to produce and going off to be the greenkeeper at the local golf course.

As I said, it costs nothing to sign up and to build an organisation that supports us all.

Fevered Mind Links (to make your Sunday morning coffee go cold)

Authors, Publishers & Artists

Authors, publishers and artists own the copyright of published material. Copyright Licensing New Zealand will help you copy and share extracts of their work.

A Brief History of Peanut Butter — www.smithsonianmag.com

North Americans weren't the first to grind peanuts—the Inca beat us to it by a few hundred years—but peanut butter reappeared in the modern world because of an American, the doctor, nutritionist and cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg, who filed a patent for a proto-peanut butter in 1895.

How to Make Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs | The Food Lab — www.seriouseats.com

Back when I was a lowly line cook at a fancy-pants restaurant in Boston, as the new guy, it was my job to wake my butt up at the crack of dawn to come in early and prep breakfast whenever one of the Beacon Hill politicians wanted to impress their campaign funders with boozy waffles and perfectly sof

Quick Cassoulet — www.eatingwell.com

Meanwhile, heat oil in a 4- to 6-quart Dutch oven over medium heat. Add onions, carrot and garlic; cook, stirring often, until just beginning to color, about 5 minutes. Add kielbasa and cook, stirring, until lightly browned, 3 to 5 minutes.

Antarctica was once a rainforest. Could it be again? — www.vox.com

The coldest continent on Earth used to be as warm as Italy. Here’s how we know. Not far from the South Pole, more than half a mile below the ocean in a region that was once covered by ice, a layer of ancient fossils tells a surprising story about the coldest continent on Earth.

From eruption to obliteration – the sights and sounds of 48 fateful hours in Pompeii — aeon.co

Before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on 24 August 79 CE, Pompeii was a thriving Roman port city and commercial hub near modern-day Naples, and home to an estimated 15,000 people.

The Dead South - In Hell I'll Be In Good Company [Official Music Video]

Official video for "In Hell I'll Be In Good Company" by The Dead South.

Buy/Stream “Served Live" here: https://sixshooterrecords.lnk.to/ServedLiveID

Stream/Buy the full album, "Good Company": https://SixShooterRecords.lnk.to/GoodCompanyID

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Follow The Dead South

Facebook: http://facebook.com/t

The inner lives of dogs: what our canine friends really think about love, lust and laughter

It is humanity’s great frustration, to gaze into the eyes of a dog, feel so very close to the creature, and yet have no clue what it’s thinking.

End Papers

On Koha

Koha is a lovely Māori word, a core part of tikanga (tradition). Since the Māori language is about the willing exchange of energy, it refers to the idea of a gift in return for something given freely. It might be advice, consultation, or even a waiata (song).

Recently a couple of you pointed out that you would love to give me something in return for the efforts I make with the newsletter.

Bless you, both.

In many ways, writing the newsletter is my way to try to be of service to all of you, and the thought of asking for something in return makes me feel distinctly uneasy, as if I am betraying some sacred trust. But it feels as if it is time to talk about that.

Being of an age, I get by living off my government pension, which means most weeks are a bit hand-to-mouth. However, $437 per week isn't enough to pay rent, power, Internet, and buy food and petrol. So, when people ask me if they can help, I will put my pride in the cupboard at the back of my studio and accept anything freely offered.

One of the options available to me is going premium and offering a subscription (Adobe and Microsoft have much to answer for!), but I'm reluctant to do that. Many of my contemporaries have moved to that model, but I would prefer to avoid doing that.

There are several ways we can help each other.

I love teaching, and I have been working hard to develop an online studio where I can work from home and help.

You might consider taking advantage of my knowledge and getting me to look at your work through a portfolio review. If you are a beginner, I can help take your art to a whole new level by working with you one-to-one as a mentor. I would dearly love to have about four students with whom I work regularly. If this sounds like you, please get in touch.

You might consider purchasing a piece of my work to frame and hang in your home. You can either visit my online gallery and order there, or you might want me to handprint a piece for you, sign it and ship it to you.

Or you might want to drop me the cost of a cup of coffee (large latte, double shot, and regular blue milk) every month or so.

Every little bit helps and keeps me productive and doing what I love, namely being of service and attempting to bring light into a very dark world.

Once I figure out how to do it, I will put a little donate button at the bottom of the email, and if you are so moved, you may want to click it and koha me.

Finally

As always, it is Sunday and a beautiful day.

Please let us all remember that we are intricately intertwined, and the more we feel love and gratitude for what we have, the more we are making a difference in the world and each others' lives.

Ngaa mihi arohaa nunui ki a koutou

Much love to you all.