Saturday Morning for Saturday 29 October 2022

8.10 Dame Valerie Adams: intimate film reveals our champion at her most vulnerable

It’s a cliché to describe a life portrayed in film as a rollercoaster. Yet, while we know the highest highs of Dame Valerie Adams' career - five-time Olympian, two-time gold medallist, easily one of our most successful athletes - a documentary following her final Olympic campaign is unflinching and intimate in also revealing the very human lows.

Directed by Briar March, More than Gold is a remarkably intimate portrait of an inspirational sportsperson as a mother, daughter, sister and friend.  

It’s currently screening in cinemas nationwide.

 

8.30 Darian Woods: inflation and bank profits on planet money 

New Zealand’s inflation rate is at a 30 year high. Across the globe, central banks are scrambling to control it without tipping their economies, and indeed the world, into recession. 

New Zealander Darian Woods has made a career in the US explaining complex financial concepts in plain English. He’s the host of NPR podcast The Indicator by Planet Money, NPR’s financial team. So can he help us make sense of inflation? And the record profits being recorded by banks?

Before NPR, Woods worked as an adviser to the Secretary of the New Zealand Treasury. He has an honours degree in economics from the University of Canterbury, and a Master of Public Policy from UC Berkeley.

 

9.05 Freya Daly Sadgrove: the different sides of a show pony 

“Smashing theatre and literature together“ is poet, producer and MC Freya Daly Sadgrove’s mantra for Show Ponies, the hit revue that sees Aotearoa poets perform their work like pop stars: outrageous costumes, bright lights, beats and, naturally, backup dancers. 

Show Ponies returns to Verb Festival in Wellington for two shows following a tour to Brisbane, Dunedin and Featherston earlier this year.

As brave and confrontational about her own life in print and on stage as she is funny and clever, Sydney-based Daly Sadgrove has a Master of Arts from the International Institute of Modern Letters. Head Girl with Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2020 was her first book. 

 

9.35 Lucien Rizos: the remarkable legacy of MP Gerald O’Brien

What do you do with all those papers and possessions when someone close to you dies? In the case of Gerald O’Brien (1924–2017) – former Labour Party MP for Island Bay and local businessman – nephew and artist Lucien Rizos photographed everything.

This was no small task: O'Brien had been documenting his own life since childhood. His estate includied 100s of hand-painted cut out characters he created for a parallel world, with its own alternate geography, nation states, and histories.

Rizos’s project Everything, took over three years to complete with Rizos organising O'Brien's life into more than 60 magazines. Everything is on display at the Adam Art Gallery until 18 December.

 

10.05 Rijula Das: revealing different sides of Kolkata’s red light district  

Sonagachi in Kolkata (Calcutta) is the largest red-light district in Asia, with an estimated 10,000 or more sex workers in residence. It’s the setting for Rijula Das’ debut novel Small Deaths, a ‘modern noir’ thriller capturing all shades of a colourful urban area. 

Originally published in India with Picador, it was long-listed for the JCB Prize for Literature and won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award in 2021

Small Deaths was informed by Dass’s PhD research into sexual violence and women’s right to public space in India at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where she taught writing for two years. 

Also a literary translator, Rijula Das is the programmer of this year’s Verb festival in Wellington 3-6 November.

 

10.35 Danyl McLauchlan: proteins and the power of new machine learning agents

Protein scientist and writer Danyl McLauchlan joins Kim to tackle life's big questions, ideas and thinkers. This week – is a computer’s neural network conscious? 

There used to be about 170,000 known protein structures, with it usually taking a PhD student three years to build up a 3D model of one. Now, in just under a year, AI system AlphaFold has (provisionally) solved the structures of around 200 million: incredibly useful information for research in drug design and clinical diagnostics. 

Because AlphaFold is modelled on the human brain, there’s only so much we know about its consciousness. Is it deeply boring to have to solve hundreds of millions of protein folding problems? 

 

11.05 Playing Favourites with Ebony Lamb 

Debuting on Saturday Morning is ‘Take My Hands at Night’, the first single off honey-voiced alt-country musician Ebony Lamb’s upcoming first album, produced by Bic Runga and Kody Nielson. 

Former lead singer of band Eb and Sparrow, Lamb’s dreamy sound has been explained as somewhere between Nina Simone and Gillian Welch, with a glimmer of Catpower. She is about to commence a doubleheader tour with Australian-based New Zealander Jess Cornelius, November 9-13. Details are here. 

Ebony Lamb has also become increasingly known for her work as a portrait photographer. Her images have graced the covers of books by many authors featured on this show in recent years. 

Ebony joins the show to play favourites.  

 

Books featured on this show:

Head Girl
Freya Daly Sadgrove
ISBN: 9781776562961
Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press

Little Deaths
Rijula Das 
ISBN: 9781542036696
Published by Amazon Publishing
 

Songs featured on this show:

Golden Age
Chris Staples
Played at 10.30am

Roads
Portishead
Played at 11.25am

Street Haunting
Jess Cornelius
Played at 11.35am

Something on your mind
Karen Dalton
Played at 10.51am

Feeling Good
Nina Simone
Played at 10.57am