Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Seven

Today was serene and beautiful, but we were stuck indoors for most of it, so, at five o'clock, we decided to take a walk to an outdoor cafe in the neighborhood. When we got there, they'd closed at four. The cafe is next door to a winery's bar and restaurant, but they had closed at four too. This is on one summer's last Saturday afternoons, with the sun shining sweetly for another few hours. New Zealand, why do you close so early?

Music: Talib Kweli and Jean Grae at the Powerhouse

It seems that my time in New Zealand, when not spent chasing chickens out of the house, is dedicated to hearing live performances of musicians with whom I'm not all that familiar. Looking for tracks produced by the 9th Wonder, I'd come to know a few of Jean Grae's tracks well, but I don't have any of her albums, or any of headlining Kweli's.

Hip-hop in Auckland seems a little out of place (Jean, Talib, and their back-up singer are perhaps the eighth, ninth, and tenth black people I've seen in this country—no exaggeration—and I've been here a month). That said, Jean was in high spirits, literally and figuratively, drinking Gray Goose straight from the bottle, and exhorting the audience to step up their game. She was particularly hard on the front row, stopping between songs to instruct a lardy blonde in hip-hop show etiquette: "Get your titties up off the motherfucking rail."

Sugar-coated belligerence aside, the girl can rap. No matter how drunk she got, she didn't miss one word; her delivery was crisp and clean, and her flow rhythmic and playful. Kweli, contrastingly, was loud but indistinct, hard and repetitive, like a jackhammer that paused every few minutes to exhort its own utility. While Jean and her back-up singer were making math jokes, Kweli was name-checking himself every few lines; while Jean told us to tip our bartenders, Kweli told us to buy his t-shirts. Not knowing his work well, but having always considered him a thinking-man's rapper, I have to admit that I was disappointed. If I'd never heard of either of them, and didn't know that hip-hop is, for the most part, a man's world, I'd have been surprised that Jean opened for Kweli and not the other way around.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Six

Today, I learned a new sport, devised by languishing mountain climbers and called slacklining, in which you string up a flat bungee cord between two trees, about three feet off the ground, and then walk across it. Of course, I'm not actually strong enough to hop up onto the cord on my own, but I spent the afternoon trying to balance on it, first one foot, then the other. Later, in the car, I could feel the wobble underneath my ungrounded feet, the way you do when you step off a boat.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Five

Tonight we went to this dinky Malaysian restaurant for dinner, which we always drive by and which is always totally packed. There was a table for two outside, but it was cold and we wanted to sit inside. They had a group of three move from a table for four to an empty table for eight and sat us at the empty table for four. Then, a group of five people came in, and they moved us to a now empty table for two to seat the five at our table for four. I don't imagine this ever happening in New York.

Books: The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Stories, by H.P. Lovecraft

When reading, I always keep a list of words I don't know so that I can look them up later. At home, I keep this list in a book by my bed, and never actually look up the words, but that is for another blog entry. Here in New Zealand, I keep them on a square of paper, and actually had cause to use a dictionary for another purpose, and therefore decided to look up some of the words used by Lovecraft I didn't recognize when reading The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Stories. Interestingly, of the five words I had time to look up, three of them (naphtha, mephitic, and ichor) had similar implications, that of foul-smelling organic fluids.

This is a Lovecraftian obsession, and while I especially enjoyed The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Thing on the Doorstep, the author has a number of stylistic hang-ups that I found rather distracting. I'm not commenting here on his personal mythology (e.g. the Necronomicon, a dreaded volume of witchcraft supposedly written by the "mad Arab Abdul Alhazred," and which is a Lovecraft invention, appears in many of his stories), but his tendencies to reuse tones and phrases, so that having read one good Lovecraft tale, you've as good as read the lesser ones as well. For example, the author often describes horrors as indescribable, and leaves them at that: "I can but ill describe;" "To describe their exact nature is impossible;" "I cannot describe the incidents and sensations;" "One need not describe the kind and rate;" "I can hardly describe what I saw;" "I can scarcely describe it;" "It would have been quite futile to try to describe them;" "The exact nature of this stirring is extremely hard to describe;" "This scene I cannot describe—I should faint if I tried it;" etc. A generous critic will suggest that Lovecraft in this way implies a horror outside of language, the literary analogue of Hitchcock's refusal to show any more of the murder in Psycho than the weapon's shadow followed by blood swirling down the drain. The brutality implied is much stronger, and generates a more delicious sense of dread, than does, say, the campy butchery of Evil Dead 2. A less generous critic will say that Lovecraft is lazy or incompetent or both.

Alternately, I would suggest that, as an intellect, Lovecraft is less like his hero Poe, who was most fascinated by the senses, than a later writer like Borges, a bibliophile fascinated by the intersection of annals and lore; history and myth, less interested in traditional story-telling than describing, say, a civilization on a faraway planet, or under the sea, via its art and architecture, in encyclopedic fashion. Lovecraft, aping Poe, isn't as dry as Borges, but its clear that underneath all of the "weird" and fantastic, the ichor and mephisis and naphtha, Lovecraft is more seriously attending to building an alternate intellectual world, a personal library of mythical volumes, describing mythical places with mythical creatures who have their own detailed mythical histories.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Four

Today, I cried while trying to parallel park. This isn't unusual; I don't drive in New York and so only find myself having to parallel park a few times a year. But parallel parking on the other side of the street is even harder. The reality is that, since the driver's seat is on the opposite side of the vehicle, one is the same distance from the curb as one would be in the States. So, it should be equally easy. Unfortunately, it is not. After I finished parking, and while I was still crying, I got out of the car and Aldo re-parked it.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Three

This was our last day in the Northlands, and on the way home we stopped to see the famous giant kauri trees of Waipoua Forest. I like trees, and I like big trees, but the must-see kauris, the most famous of which is likely 2,000+ years old, didn't much move me. I felt much more intimately inclined to a tree of more pedestrian proportions I had found on the beach at the end of Wharau road near Kerikeri a few days ago. This tree's trunk grew right up out of the beach, but only for a few feet before opening like the palm of a human hand into five sturdy branches, with an empty bowl in the center. Here I promptly curled up, leaning my head against one, and stretching my legs up against two others.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-Two

Today we drove to Cape Reinga, the northernmost point on the North Island accessible by car. On the way there, we could see the pristine beach on the western coast, which stretches out to Cape Maria Van Diemen, culminating with Motuopao Island. All the while, Aldo wanted to go swimming there. From our map, and the sheer drop down the cliffs from the road, I told him that would be impossible. After parking and visiting Cape Reinga's lighthouse with the other tourists, he led me to a trail, which follows the coastal bluffs and drops down onto the beach. The walk took about 30 minutes. No one was there. No one from the lighthouse could see us. We hid all of our clothes behind a bush and walked, like prelapsarian Adam and Eve, down the two mile beach. We swam in the Tasman sea and walked back, pulling on our clothes just as a group of people were arriving. The fabric, even though it was soft, worn cotton, warmed by the sun, felt abhorrent to my skin.

You can see our beach here.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty-One

Stopping at a small local beach today on our way to the fancy-pants Bay of Islands, Aldo pointed out a cormorant in the ocean. I asked how he could recognize it at that distance, and he explained that they have a different degree of buoyancy than most seabirds, and float with much of their bodies under the water. I had merely thought that it was sick, because it looked like it was struggling. As it swam closer to the shore, eventually stumbling drunkenly along the beach on its way to the shoreline pond, we saw that it was indeed struggling; it had a fishhook lodged in its mouth. It wouldn't let us get close enough to help.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Twenty

Driving home from Mitimiti, the end-of-the-road beach west of the Warawara forest, where we had seen Polynesian locals collecting their dinner of fresh mussels off the rocks, we saw a tractor turning onto the gravel road from its farm. My vision is poor at distances, but as we came closer, I could see the strange, heavy load swinging from its front arm: a cow's carcass, dressed and ready for the butcher. The tractor entered the intersection and drove down the road, swinging the carcass through the dust with total nonchalance.