Postcards from New Zealand: Day Seventeen

Today I stayed home to make another attempt at washing. This time, things went well: the machine finished its cycle promptly after 90 minutes, there was no rain, and the sheets were dry after an hour in the sun. On a sunny day, there is something strangely pleasing about hanging laundry on a line, socks with socks, shirts alongside shirts, underpants marching neatly in a row with other underpants, and a certain satisfaction in knowing that the clothespin has fastened the cotton tightly to the line, so that it won't twist up or slide down.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Sixteen

Today I was sick and I didn't do anything. I sat on Graham's couch and let the snot come out of my nose. If you are going to be sick in Auckland, Graham's living room is a good place to be; the sun comes in through the bay windows, and there are shelves of books and seashells and hand-glazed pottery for your eyes to listlessly explore as you sip red bush tea on the red couch. It's very cozy.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fifteen

At brunch, we had seen an "apple and feijoa" smoothie on the menu. We asked our waitress, "What's feijoa?" but she could only tell us the obvious: a fruit—saying that it was rather particular and hard to describe. At night, Aldo went to the main house to pay our rent, and returned with two hands full of green, sweet smelling pods—tiny footballs with an umbilicus at one end, surrounded by a stiff crown of tiny leaves. Feijoa, from the tree in the garden, courtesy of our lovely hosts. He cut one in half and scooped out the inside with a spoon: pear and guava. Firm but yielding, aromatic and sweet, a delicately structured lattice infused with tropical juice.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Fourteen

Today we adventured to Whatipu (say FAH-ti-poo—the Maori "wh" is pronounced as an "f"), an expansive beach around the bend from Karekare. It's likely easier to reach Whatipu by foot, walking along Karekare's shore until they become Whatipu's, but ill-planning creatures that we are, we took the car, which meant driving all the way up and all the way back down and all around a mountain for 40 minutes, on a gravel road to boot. This should be considered my formal request that that road, and all roads, be paved. Was it worth it? I didn't personally find Whatipu as compelling as Karekare, although it was at Whatipu that we ran the 100 meter dash from the dunes to the shore and into the waves, stark naked, with no one there to see.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Thirteen

Today we went to the fish market, where you can pick out whatever whole, fresh fish you want and bring it to the chopping station, where they'll prepare it for your kitchen according to your orders. The man working the station wears white rubber galoshes, rubber gloves, and a white rubber apron. He scaled our snapper as tentatively as you might sand six coats of cracked paint off a banister, and after he'd gutted the thing, he used the side of his knife to swipe the pile of entrails to the floor. Then he pulled out a hose and flushed the inside of the creature clean, making a power-wash pass over the counter. All this was done in under ninety seconds, but I was transfixed.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twelve

Tonight, we had mussels and Belgian beer at the pub. Kiwis are particularly proud of their mussels, which are bigger than the ones you get in the States, with green shells instead of black. The flesh ranges from a pale and pearly pinkish white to a creamy, almost lurid orange; they're chewy and taste a bit fishy. I generally find seafood to have a kind of celestial delicacy, but these mollusks are for mortal masticators.

Music: Massive Attack at the Vector Arena

I haven't been to a big show like this in a while, so found myself rather overwhelmed by the smoke and flashing lights and beer-swilling/spilling teeny-boppers pushing past me; I must be getting old. That said, Massive Attack put on a high-intensity show, considering they're even older than I am. They gave equal weight to their new album Heligoland and 1990s favorites like Teardrop, Angel, Safe From Harm, Unfinished Sympathy, and Karmacoma; the new songs are generally harder and more guitar-driven than the older dreamy grooves I prefer.

An enormous LED panel dominated the band's rotating cast of vocalists, and at times I wasn't sure whether the audience was cheering for the musicians or the light show. All Music Guide's first bullet point describes Massive Attack's mood as "druggy," so I suppose I should have been less offended by the textual accompaniment to their first song, in which the LED wall flashed name after name of recreational drug, flicking quickly through and then briefly pausing (ecstasy-cannabis-PCP-methamphetamines-HEROIN) as if an unlucky slot machine. The general remainder of LED accompaniment comprised the sort of pseudo-socially responsible headlines/hyper-leftist yellow journalism that is appealing to immature anti-establishment rockstars. I'm "anti-war" myself, but I don't think it's responsible to flash tidbits like "head in a bag" and "just doing our job" on the screen during a trip-hop show, at the beginning of which you've advertised the use of dangerous drugs whose cultivation and trade are deeply connected with the international violence and oppression you're criticizing. Nor is it just to compare the British PM's gardening expenses with the GDP of small African nations, unless you are also going to include for comparison the budget for your tour's LED set design. I will accept responsible political activism from an intelligent band like Radiohead, but couldn't help but feel like Massive Attack was clinging, in a very un-nuanced way, to Thom Yorke's coattails.

So long as I kept my eyes off the stage and on my dance partner, I enjoyed myself. Ultimately, my experience with Massive Attack is as a Tricky fan, so I was disappointed he didn't show (though the presence of Martina, whose voice I know from Tricky albums, totally made the show). When they ended the encore set with Karmacoma, even though I was dancing, I was itching to get home and listen to Overcome, Tricky's far superior version.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Eleven

Our hosts are out of town for a few days, and have asked us to feed the chickens in their absence. Because Aldo is generally busy cooking for me at chicken feeding times, I intended to take this duty for myself, even though I find the chickens to be nasty little things, and I loathe their beaks and claws. And so, I filled the little plastic box with three handfuls of pellets, two of corn, as instructed, and brought the box over to the trampoline, under which the chickens are fed. My aim was to pour the grain out into an upturned plastic garbage can lid, as instructed, but the feathered beasts were hungry, and had been stalking me since my stint at the feed bags. Smarter than I expected, they knew why I was there. They followed me, a horrible gurgling in their throats, their beaks and claws dangerously close to my bare legs and naked feet. I stepped away, but they followed. I suddenly realized that I was being chased around the yard by three chickens. "Chickens!" I shouted, "Learn to fear me!" But they did not. My only escape was to fling the feed out onto the ground, far from where I stood. They scurried to it, leaving me at last at ease.

Books: The Picasso Papers, by Rosalind Krauss

I've never been fond of Picasso; a few of his early blue paintings are pleasing enough, and for a brief moment, when I was writing a short paper on Les Demoiselles d'Avingnon, I became somewhat infatuated with that painting. Similarly, when editing a friend's paper on Guernica, I looked long and hard enough at that picture to find myself attracted to parts of it. But, on the whole, Picasso, for me, is a cold, unfeeling artist, and a shape-shifter more out of necessity than innovation, as each of his so-called styles is really another failed experiment.

In fact, the only treatment of Picasso that I've ever found remotely compelling is from the children's cartoonAnimaniacs, in episode 45 of the first season, in which the three cat/dog siblings barge in on the morose artist in his studio, insisting on a game of Pictionary. Somewhat against his will, they begin to play, but his classical drawing of a guitar isn't recognizable to them. "That's not a guitar!" they whine petulantly; "That's a guitar!" and scribble up a cubist confusion of the stringed instrument. This goes on and on, until Picasso's dealer walks in them and finds the Animaniac's drawings. Mistaking them for Picasso's own, he determines that they are genius, and snatches them all up to hang in his gallery.

Aside from being terribly entertaining television (quite the oxymoron, if you know me), this scenario is brilliant in its comfortable acknowledgment that cubism is just some crazy, experimental bullshit. Enter Rosalind Krauss*, whose Picasso Papers examine only two periods of the artist's career: cubism and the pseudo-return to classical drawing (which she calls pastiche). Krauss' main thrust, though it takes some excavating to suss it out, appears to be that cubism was a genuine form of artistic expression, but the post-cubist return to classical drawing, a pattern of pastiche in which the artist made copies of figurative paintings and photographs in the style of the French neo-classicist portraitist Ingres, was fraudulent, a psychoanalytic reaction against the mechanization of art (brought about by the camera and popularized by Picabia) in which his hand nevertheless behaved mechanically. Krauss uses the unwieldy Freudian concept of "reaction-formation" to express this, adding to her academic stone soup a healthy dose of Andre Gide, including a lengthy expanse on his stories of gold coin counterfeiters, a dollop of Dostoevsky by way of Mikhail Bakhtin, a pinch each of Adorno and Derrida, and other various, unrelated references, just to spice things up.

What stands out, though, is not so much her insistence on academic name-dropping, for that is unfortunately standard issue in these sorts of texts, but her complete inability to understand the artistic process, the artist's creative mind, and the simple legibility of a work of art. Loathe to admit that a drawing could be anything so simple as a drawing—a doodle, a sketch, a study—she insists that every stroke made by Picasso is an intentioned stroke, which mode of thinking enables misreading after misreading (truly, over-reading) of collages and drawings which to me, being raised by an artist and knowing a few others, are very clearly just a mode of artistic play, experimentation, and questioning. Of course, Guernica is the product of years of studied work, not the spontaneous jouissance (to use one of the academy's favorite ridiculous words) of a genius, but these minor sketches and portraits, which Krauss studies as if they were made with an equal amount of intention, are actually no more than exercises, the fiddling around of a hand and mind idle between projects, and engaged in playful conversation with artists and intellectuals both contemporary and bygone.

I'm no fan of the generally backward views of The New Criterion, but in one of its old issues, Roger Kimball wrote a piece entitled "Feeling Sorry For Rosalind Krauss," in which he laments the academic's inability to truly see and thus feel works of art. Of another of her books, he writes, "Few books claiming to deal with art can be more optically unconscious than The Optical Unconscious." As I'm no where near as facile a writer as Kimbell, I will quote him again in wholehearted agreement: "Here is a woman who has devoted her professional life to art and ideas, but who clearly has no feeling for art, and for whom ideas are ghostly playthings utterly cut off from reality. . . Why, she must wonder, do other people seem to care so much about art and beauty when to her it is all an arid, narcissistic battleground? It is pathetic, really. Her writing and ideas are pernicious, but one cannot help feeling sorry for Rosalind Krauss."

*full disclosure: I took a graduate-level seminar with her at Columbia and she gave me the only C I've ever received in my life. If you think that means I have a bone to pick, and that my thoughts on her book are therefore biased, fine.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Ten

Today I stayed home alone with the intent of doing some laundry, or as they call it here, washing. I had just put the first load into the machine (as per our hosts' instructions, on "quick wash") when I realized that there was no dryer, and I would have to use the clothesline out in the chicken yard, which looks something like a twirling television antenna, on a massive scale. The "quick wash" was still going after two hours, when I gave up and instigated a force quit. By now, the blue sky had been swept over with a tropical storm, so I had to hang the clothes indoors while the second load washed. By the end of that (another force quit, this time after only 30 minutes or so), the sun was out again, and I hung all the clothes outside. There weren't enough pins, and a stiff breeze kept blowing our shirts out into the piles of dried corn husk, where the chickens pecked at them with mild interest. Aldo came home and we went to the park, practicing line drills as the sun set. In the dark, the sky broke again, and the rain came, hard. We ran home, but not until after we had finished our drills. In the dark, in the rain, in the nude, Aldo stood under the swinging antenna, pulling down our soaked laundry, while six chicken eyes, and hopefully no neighbors' eyes, watched.