What Did Matchbox 20 Lead Singer Say to the Statue?
I want to take you for granite.
One of the things that has happened to me since I came to New Zealand is that I have started reading, reading recreationally, for the first time in at least five years. That's not quite correct, actually, I've read books recreationally while in college, but not a string of them, not the way I've been reading for the past couple of weeks. So far I have read Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Catch-22, Anna Karenina, The Life of Pi, and now I am reading All The Pretty Horses, which is one of my favorite books.
There's an extent to which I will always identify with cowboys, besides hating the actual riding of horses with all the passion my bruised genitals can inspire, which is, you might imagine, quite a bit. Another one of my favorite books, Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," is also about cowboys, specifically about the collapse of the American frontier. In All The Pretty Horses, that collapse is largely complete, and the world is all the wilder for it, which is a pretty melodramatic and book-jacket way of describing things, but one that fits the way Cormac McCarthy writes, I think you'd agree if you've read him.
The protagonist of All the Pretty Horses speaks at least passable spanish, and as a result there's a bit of easy spanish mixed in to the writing - really written in, not awkwardly inserted, thanks in large part to the pretentious and ridiculously effective way McCarthy handles dialogue. Another notable aspect of All The Pretty Horses is the extent to which communication between characters and between characters and the environment - like most cowboy books All The Pretty Horses is, in large part, a novel about inarticulateness - is handled with looks that either do or do not connect. Condemned prisoners travel through the Mexican borderlands, catching sight of children playing in the street, asking them to get them cigarettes, the children complying. More often than not, people meet, exchange pleasantries, share resources, and move on. I'm not doing it justice, but only because I don't entirely respect it, because it's so efficient that the machinery of the theme is immediately apparent, and not fully convincing. If that makes any sense.
Queenstown has a street musician who apparently learned all of his songs in the years between 1993 and 1999. I walk down Beach St. near dusk and I'm likely to hear him singing a Matchbox 20 song, maybe some Pearl Jam. The street musician, I learned when I passed him on the street yesterday, has a messed up leg, and I immediately tend to think that whatever's wrong with it is permanently so, as he's using what I think of as polio crutches and not normal ones like you'll find in the States.
Much like every sad moment on television for years and years, and every high school prom in which the school's ethnic balance skewed more than 80% white, that Green Day's horribly titled "Good Riddance" is a staple of this guy's repertoire. I just walked by after drinking a cappuchino - I don't drink cappuchino's normally, no, move along - up the street, and he was playing a Nirvana song that I've heard so many times I've forgotten the words. It's from In Utero, I think, one of the five or six songs on that album that uses the words "rape" without being "Rape Me." I always like it when people talk about Kurt Cobain as some sort of sensitive poet-prince; it's always seemed to me like he was successful not because of an excess of imagination but instead extremely narrow field of metaphors he chose from. From what I understand, he came to agree with me.
In any case, there are these three kids who, were I in Texas, I would immediately classify as Mexican, because they look Mexican and Texas has a lot of Mexicans so odds are I'd be on the ball. I'm in New Zealand, and I don't think I've seen any Mexicans, and certainly not Mexican families, over here so far, so I'm not sure. In any case, they were standing with the street performer, like too close to merely be listening to him. A boy and a girl, about five years old, fidgeting, not nervously, but just for something to do, the leg of the girl up in her ankle length dress as she twists side to side. Their younger brother - again, this is an assumption, the family relationship - is in a cardboard box, is just sitting on the sidewalk in the kind of cardboard box your microwave may have come in, unless it was a really big mircrowave, in which case imagine a slightly smaller box. His head and shoulders are out and up a bit; he is unamazed by whatever circumstance has gotten him where he is. All three are watching the singer, the kid in the box more intently than the other two. As I walk by, his eyes never leave the Kurt Cobain song and the guy singing it with the same intensity I've seen him sing five or six other songs, his head back, his eyes closed, and, like Kurt Cobain, he's mumbling every word except "rape" and me, with the book in my hand and the Kurt Cobain in the air and the children of a recognizable ethnicity and demeanor, am just drowning in my own misspent adolescence, just swimming in it.
There are things that I want to come back to, in the States. There are things to miss, and I've been pretty clear about what those things are, and, in any case, you can probably imagine what they are. Wireless internet is one of them, and if you didn't guess that immediately, thanks, you do me credit. One of the things I'm not looking forward to leaving behind, incidentally, is the relative profusion of public toilets in New Zealand. Public toilets are boss. There are things that change, I think, to put it as plainly as possible, when you travel, change about yourself, about your relationships with others, and all that. Most of those things I want to stay the same. That is, with the possible exception of these sideburns which I respect and fear more than truly feel at ease with, I want the changes I've begun to register in myself to stay changed for a while, at least until I learn how to wear them. I get the impression that this indicates the trip, so far, has been a success. When it comes to how I'm spending these four months, and the big grey nothing, punctuated by a few welcome and attractive bits of certainty - hi Katherine! - that constitutes the next period in my life, I guess I'm just going to have to take the photographs and still frames in my mind, hang it on a shelf of good health and good time. Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial. For what it's worth: it was worth all the while. It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right. I hope I have the time of my life.
One of the things that has happened to me since I came to New Zealand is that I have started reading, reading recreationally, for the first time in at least five years. That's not quite correct, actually, I've read books recreationally while in college, but not a string of them, not the way I've been reading for the past couple of weeks. So far I have read Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Catch-22, Anna Karenina, The Life of Pi, and now I am reading All The Pretty Horses, which is one of my favorite books.
There's an extent to which I will always identify with cowboys, besides hating the actual riding of horses with all the passion my bruised genitals can inspire, which is, you might imagine, quite a bit. Another one of my favorite books, Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," is also about cowboys, specifically about the collapse of the American frontier. In All The Pretty Horses, that collapse is largely complete, and the world is all the wilder for it, which is a pretty melodramatic and book-jacket way of describing things, but one that fits the way Cormac McCarthy writes, I think you'd agree if you've read him.
The protagonist of All the Pretty Horses speaks at least passable spanish, and as a result there's a bit of easy spanish mixed in to the writing - really written in, not awkwardly inserted, thanks in large part to the pretentious and ridiculously effective way McCarthy handles dialogue. Another notable aspect of All The Pretty Horses is the extent to which communication between characters and between characters and the environment - like most cowboy books All The Pretty Horses is, in large part, a novel about inarticulateness - is handled with looks that either do or do not connect. Condemned prisoners travel through the Mexican borderlands, catching sight of children playing in the street, asking them to get them cigarettes, the children complying. More often than not, people meet, exchange pleasantries, share resources, and move on. I'm not doing it justice, but only because I don't entirely respect it, because it's so efficient that the machinery of the theme is immediately apparent, and not fully convincing. If that makes any sense.
Queenstown has a street musician who apparently learned all of his songs in the years between 1993 and 1999. I walk down Beach St. near dusk and I'm likely to hear him singing a Matchbox 20 song, maybe some Pearl Jam. The street musician, I learned when I passed him on the street yesterday, has a messed up leg, and I immediately tend to think that whatever's wrong with it is permanently so, as he's using what I think of as polio crutches and not normal ones like you'll find in the States.
Much like every sad moment on television for years and years, and every high school prom in which the school's ethnic balance skewed more than 80% white, that Green Day's horribly titled "Good Riddance" is a staple of this guy's repertoire. I just walked by after drinking a cappuchino - I don't drink cappuchino's normally, no, move along - up the street, and he was playing a Nirvana song that I've heard so many times I've forgotten the words. It's from In Utero, I think, one of the five or six songs on that album that uses the words "rape" without being "Rape Me." I always like it when people talk about Kurt Cobain as some sort of sensitive poet-prince; it's always seemed to me like he was successful not because of an excess of imagination but instead extremely narrow field of metaphors he chose from. From what I understand, he came to agree with me.
In any case, there are these three kids who, were I in Texas, I would immediately classify as Mexican, because they look Mexican and Texas has a lot of Mexicans so odds are I'd be on the ball. I'm in New Zealand, and I don't think I've seen any Mexicans, and certainly not Mexican families, over here so far, so I'm not sure. In any case, they were standing with the street performer, like too close to merely be listening to him. A boy and a girl, about five years old, fidgeting, not nervously, but just for something to do, the leg of the girl up in her ankle length dress as she twists side to side. Their younger brother - again, this is an assumption, the family relationship - is in a cardboard box, is just sitting on the sidewalk in the kind of cardboard box your microwave may have come in, unless it was a really big mircrowave, in which case imagine a slightly smaller box. His head and shoulders are out and up a bit; he is unamazed by whatever circumstance has gotten him where he is. All three are watching the singer, the kid in the box more intently than the other two. As I walk by, his eyes never leave the Kurt Cobain song and the guy singing it with the same intensity I've seen him sing five or six other songs, his head back, his eyes closed, and, like Kurt Cobain, he's mumbling every word except "rape" and me, with the book in my hand and the Kurt Cobain in the air and the children of a recognizable ethnicity and demeanor, am just drowning in my own misspent adolescence, just swimming in it.
There are things that I want to come back to, in the States. There are things to miss, and I've been pretty clear about what those things are, and, in any case, you can probably imagine what they are. Wireless internet is one of them, and if you didn't guess that immediately, thanks, you do me credit. One of the things I'm not looking forward to leaving behind, incidentally, is the relative profusion of public toilets in New Zealand. Public toilets are boss. There are things that change, I think, to put it as plainly as possible, when you travel, change about yourself, about your relationships with others, and all that. Most of those things I want to stay the same. That is, with the possible exception of these sideburns which I respect and fear more than truly feel at ease with, I want the changes I've begun to register in myself to stay changed for a while, at least until I learn how to wear them. I get the impression that this indicates the trip, so far, has been a success. When it comes to how I'm spending these four months, and the big grey nothing, punctuated by a few welcome and attractive bits of certainty - hi Katherine! - that constitutes the next period in my life, I guess I'm just going to have to take the photographs and still frames in my mind, hang it on a shelf of good health and good time. Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial. For what it's worth: it was worth all the while. It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right. I hope I have the time of my life.
posted by Jeremy at 7:57 PM
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