Your Older Sister's Rock Music

that you fell in love with, though you did not have a rockmusic household. Because I can find no trace of White Cross on the internet, this is the song i most remember falling in love with. It throws me back into childhood with rockstar abandon and also speaks of the wild horses my older sister's neighbours have been capturing for her from the mountains. And I just found out that it is U2. I just came across it on my hardrive while researching for an 80's Jam Night birthday party this weekend.

Finally, I can wear my mullet that I bought with you on that unplanned Newtown shopping trip.

sunshine and rock music

soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONkiLR5Ehys&feature=related

wellington is only this windy for two months of the year

and yet it has become it's permanent reputation

i dont have to run as far to get the same exercise

and the ground is covered with racing shadows of the clouds

there were sweeping over the hillsides as i was swinging down the ngauranga gorge on the way home yesterday and U2 was on the radio. then i hooked round onto the harbour as a neeroplane

was rising straight up from the eerport because it was heading straight for me. the water was blindingly cyan through my sunglasses.

It is rockmusic season in the secondary acoustic cortices of my brain and Radio Hauraki is cooperating. i got two Linkin Parks yesterday on the way to the cook strait: i was cruising down the island bay straights, keeping just behind the shadowedges of clouds which were travelling in front of me. i drove all along the entire waterfront to the wrong cafe, and then had the luck to keep going in the wrong direction, so I got the pleasure of going all the way to the nature sanctuary, then retracing my path, getting the view in the other direction.

the wind had snapped the tops off every single wave.

i spotted the huge white block of the old surf lifesaving headquarters cafe instantly. mike was leaning against the far window in a tshirt the same colour as the water, enjoying the sand trails and whorls that the wind was making along the mighty stretch of visible beach. i sat facing the opposite direction and observed the neeroplanes arranging themselves in the sky over the eerport.

and i got magic on the way down the ngauranga gorge again today, which happened to be a new single from my favourite band.

magic, i tell you.

lol I slept through church but I went to morning tea afterwards

walked in and it was unusually crowded, warm with people, and smelt of rich wine

some were holding their glasses off the horizontal

I went to your house afterwards with all of the choir

I like your street, it is all along the top of a ridge

you can see the entire runway, it is miles away

and I could have seen to the south island

were it not so fantastically misty

there was fresh snow on the kaikouras last weekend you say

we collect on the cold deck to drink tea and

exclaim over your mugs

they are all different

and watch the aeroplanes from so far away.

(you know you put your hand out the car window

and tip it up and down to get lift

that is the lift the aeroplanes use

if you go fast enough the air feels like liquid

and then you can swim through it.)

We could all watch them all day.

You all wish it was sunny and blue but I love the cloud like this

there is more ambient light

and it is so silver.

It makes the sea glow and it gives the gables depth

and the white houses look like pieces of sky resting on the buffs

like so many windowed butterflies

the boats in your painting are in trouble.

Conversations on which trees are spooky

(macrocarpa and native bush)

but british trees are reassuring

of course.

and on art and leaving the pencil lines there, like da vinci

I didnt understand most of what she said

like about the energy being in the line.

Though most of you had your childen a good few decades ago, we also had a conversation about zombies

and about french cinema.

The almond birthday cake with cream and with blood oranges marinaded in champagne were amazing.

I like your window seat

the books stacked against its window

the shelves of strange faraway things

(your husband had collected them years ago

had travelled much)

there is a turntable in your piano room which is still turning

for it has got to the centre of the record

but has not stopped.

Your vegetable garden is rampant

the carrots are about to take over the world

and we know it is silverbeet only by the brilliant crimson stalk

if I was a plant in your garden, I would be happy.

i saw the open sea today

a flat blue horizon between two buffets of land

for an instant (i was driving on the motorway back from the hutt)

yesterday there was a short wizzened bescarfed babushka waiting outside the doctors for it to open, with me, in the spitting rain. she was agitated about trying to get an appointment, and unleashed torrents of russian on me though she knew i didnt understand. (i think she just needed to get it off her chest).

the nurse was like 'what else would you like a blood test for?' and i was like THE ENTIRE PERIODIC TABLE. but they only have magnesium and iron.

it took me owers to return home because i dallied in the gardens photographing the flours and other pretty things.

*   *    *   *

yesterday i got to clean the skeleton.

i got to get a student to carry it back across the playground for me. he enjoyed the attention. i told the staring gurls that he was taking it to the ball.

I probably shouldnt have.

Enchantment.

I was on the top of Mouwntvick last night to watch saturn and venus set, though only venus showed up. I am still baffled. Perhaps we are missing a planet but know-one noes yet.

I toald the british photographer beside me about the planets.

Also there were yewniversity students putting treebranches down the cannon, and marvelling that it pointed straight at their campus.

There was actually quite a few people up there last night. The main streets lit up like arteries, glittering with lazy red, white, and orange blood cells.

This is over the airport.

And this is venus just above the horizon.

I goed for a walk last night for fun; since I started werk a month ago I have got enough fresh air and exercise lugging skeletons and boxes of chromates and sulfates across the playground, and so have not had to seek it out deliberately.

Eye went to the balcony at the top of the cable car and gazed; and eye continued on down through the gardens past the open door of the scout hall, out of which proceeded voicy echoes off wooden floors and that dusty hall smell and boys in shorts with large tree boughs.

Eye saw so much and took so many photos, and got waylaid in Bolton Street Cemetary again (will eye ever stop photographing it?).

In deep Wellingtown the streets begin to smell like food and the supermarket is full of suited people released from work.

from the kitchen window at night

i can see a red light blinking in the small gap between top stories of the houses across the road

it is the top of mt victoria

and is the same level as me

on the other side of the valley which holds an entire CBD

from the dining room window in the day

set at ninety degrees to the kitchen ones

i can see shreds of snow still on the tops of the tararua's

if i open the door, the vernal winds will dust the house for me.

I am enjoying seeing the schoolgirls with thick glasses who walk home slowly while reading novels.

I am enjoying commuting to work outside the city on the empty side of the motorway, against the opposing lanes of gridlocked cars to the soundtrack of radio narrating the congestion of each particular offramp.

But while I presently realize that I am chasing shadows, soon I shall fall under the spell again and wake in a thousand years a thousand miles away and my clothes will still be clean and pressed, just in time for me to roll over and die of old age.

The death metal has returned and I hope my flatmates do not mind.

i met a Mathematician in the gardens

he was strolling down the steps of life and death
you are not supposed to go so backwards sir
from death to life
he does not beleive in the soul (he has a PhD in logic) and
he does not beleive that i could either

i am Neuroscience
let us take over the world
what is free will made of
let us look for quantum uncertainties in water

if you do not hear from me, i
have been swallowed by the system or
am dead

I wish I had not lost his email.

all i have in my head are these grey boxes, they wont go away till i put them on the internet

you gnow what stuns me everytime

is the effect that psychology has on the image we see

not (just) in that we see what we want to

or that it makes slopes seems steeper than they are

but there is an even-more-pure skewing

i noticed it first when i painted the dunedin harbour and hills

its never till you are viewing the finished painting online

that you see how you have ackzaggerated whatever you consider to be the focus of the view

because of the fovea; because in the centre of your retina is a spot that is crammed with photoreceptors

and whatever you are looking straight at gets horrendously overprocessed

and because your brain says 'better = bigger' (stupid brain,) i painted the notable mountains much higher than they actually were

and comparing the photograph to it,

each peak seems unbelievably inconsequetial.

and then there are portraits where the strange nose gets somehow bigger...

you gnow what tort me kuller like nothing else? trying to deceptively edit photoes in microsoft paint. you think something is one colour and you pick the same one from the palette box but then you get it onto the actual photo and it is nothing like what you thort. and you think an area is one colour but eventually you are forced to beleive that there is a tonal variation there that your brain was adamantly denying....

DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BELEIVE WHAT YOU SEE

belief is for the weak, and you must build a life without it before you can be truly happy

-buddha (me)

a house made of nostalgia

i fall in love with a song

i play it endlessly for days

because through it i go somewhere else

somewhere beautiful

where there is grace

and i wiki its origins, its background, i pore over the comments on the youtube clips of it, i pore over the ideas that listeners have of it's meaning, i look for photos of the musicians, i seek to feel like part of the community of listeners.

and all because i have lost parts of my soul

after the great disintegration

sometimes i find pieces of it locked inside songs

and can only go view it through a glass darkly

by listening

i usually find in my researching that a musician has a strong past experience or childhood in common with me.

it explained why my brothers, stepbrother, and i listen to Skillet music, frontman John Cooper had the same kind of loss and family stuff in his adolescence that we had in ours. when i read that i had already been experiencing for years that his music assaults my soul and intensely loves me - it is daunting.

in the case of my most recent crush, i found that though the entire album was instrumental, it had been created about the ghosts that we create out of lost people and eras.

"The album title has to do with chasing after symbolic shadows, as in reflections of things and not the reality. They might be reflections of the past or losses that linger in our lives but are no longer real. We don't beleive in ghosts--living with a ghost to us just represents living with the memories of events or people who have died in your own life. The album takes up the theme of impermanence, and I think that the sooner we embrace our own impermanence, the more meaningful our lives become."

i know my entire creativity is attempting to record the ghosts. i chase after reflections, writing poetry about shadows, creating online photo albums and blogging, all about shadows, about that which is only a suggestion of something real, as a shadow describes an object but does not exist.

“I'm fascinated with structures that are being reclaimed by nature – by weeds, vines, some force of nature pulling down a manmade object...I see beauty in it. Hammock's music is like that.”

seriously! It's just music. How did my soul know that the artist was thinking that when they made it? My entire art is all about showing beauty that was previously obscure and undiscovered. My grandmother's art too; my mother reckons she must have painted every rusty shed in all of Otago....and the aforementioned musicmen talk about zen and francis bacon and that beauty which you only find in pain and sorrow in the making of the album, all things which i am passionate about but usually fail in trying to communicate or bond with people over.

my house of nostalgia is bleeding on me, but i dont mind.

~poetry that wasn't quite so brilliant in the mawning~

the harbour is littered with sailboats today, jets hanging above. i walk along the waterfront to church.

in the choir, i get hypoxically high; the medieval robes are deliciously swishing and occlusive. to partake in chants that monks have sung for centuries; to be a mere part of history, this pleases my socialist nature.

the artists are the prophets

* 0 * *

after four months, i finally have an actual bed, i have hung my photography, my grandmother and aunt's paintings are on the wall, my other aunt's quilt on my bed.

electric blanket!!!

i am going volcano climbing!!

i am going home for my birthday!!!

today i bought lamb and bok choy from the markets, and tried some chestnuts from the man who had sold some to stephen fry the fortnight before. the harbour is yet enchanted on the way home, all flat water and snowy backdrop, there is a ferry in the background and a sailboarder in this foreground:

six hours later, i get back from latin chants and candles and dread silences in a dark church, with an organist who takes herself very seriously, and down syndrome children who broke the reverence with the occaisional inhuman howl.

it was fantastic.

winter is over and mating season is upon us.

the mowntins have been replaced with a line of raggedtopt dark cloud.

i briefly had a view to the tangihuas

there is still snow on the end of them

my to-be-productive mawning was decimated by my flatmates documentary on steinway pianos

steineway is too american and mainstream for me

i do prefer yuropeon pianos

but now i have a piano craving

i maid screaming turtle chill blend coffee and bacon sandwiches for the both of us

and i lay on the good couch

the wind the wind

there is a pamplet circling outside the lounge windows

and the gulls are hanging in an updraft

he has gone to print off books

and i am going for a run soon along oriental bay

Ah rubbish day in Wellington. So many prostrate wheelie bins littering the pavements.

I have acquired so many free awesome clothes since getting to Wellington. I wear them most of the time. I made a friend over the free bin at a Newtown op shop. She had a brain injury too, but hers was from back in 'naam. woke up on the floor of a vietnamese hospital and wondered what had happened.

Newtown op shops are in themselves a cache of concentrated culture anyway. I find alliteration cheesy, but there is no better way to put that.

this was on the counter there":

also a funky girl i know was moving house and giving away funky clothes and they are amazinger than my own clothes. i am on my way to resolving the emptiness of the HUGE dresser that was in my room when i moved in.....

this is the soundtrack to my life at the moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-lruTqt8iA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-jgzVHyZd4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5rNlrUOHrU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tDXjyTBKs8

Last week my washing all blew down to the other end of the line, and I couldn't reach it.

I suppose I should go get today's lot off the line and put it in the dryer.

I have a job interview on Friday...

i got there and the house was empty and dark

for they had all gone to hamilton just for fun

i got in a side door, it was unlocked

and played the piano in the dark

and you came home and made omelette while I played

and we ate it with the cabbage i had brought

two different flavours of ice cream

and then i tuned your guitar and we closed a door between us

the rainbow door

and played and sang to drown each other out

thank god for grace she is amazing

we have the same demons and

your talk restores my soul

* * *

it is sleeting outside

I shall be seen by no-one today

at least, not until I go out to play the piano later

with grace

and to church and to the pub

I shall stay in my room with the rest of the cabbage

and coffee

It Is No Longer Early Days

the streets are interconnecting and shrinking

and the dazzling is retreating

nestled in the many valleys like

snow

there are some residual daunts

missing the first five minutes

avoiding eye contact

and wandering in off the street

i went to see the candles

rows and rows of languages underneath the melody line

darkness

there was a cretin angel warming her hands at the blaze

a half-lit bronzed flickering flat blank face

diligently relighting the wicks as they drowned themselves in liquid wax

with a fearfully straw-like but long flint

in front of the khrusificksion

and the occaisional crazed caw from her friends in the back

surrounded by awe and latin and organ

i was sitting next to the woman with breathing difficulties

home up the hill

against the black rainwater

streaming down the footpath

jittery spatters of light pass under my feet as I pass the lamposts

rain to remove my makeup and shame

grace has found me as I am, she has a piano and she knows my secrets now

i have a job interview on friday.

The Early Days III

what seemed orange last night

is in fact pink in the daylight

but I still like it

i am not dying, it is just the

withdrawal effects

my neurochemistry is beginning to creep back

in trepidation, that i will just drive it mad again

it is right

I didn't know you were a knight, sir

but you lived down the coast from her

did you know

food is for the weak

and for the widow of zarephath, she

is staying until thursday

my shoes wore out so fast in those days

and my clothes and my IQ and my poetry

and the nightmares turned to eucharistic horror

Happiness Is

this teacup was from my grandmother years ago

i have rediscovered it

it has always been too nice to use

but i think i deserve it now

i grate ginger into the steeper and put clover honey in

and the lid keeps it all hot and it provides a coaster for when i take the steeper out....

The Early Days II (Present Participles)

i am breaking the numerology

this is the therty fourth post

becoming Lady Macbeth

waiting in the grey hallway

getting entangled with the pentecostals down the hill

making chopin for the pingpong, i made them play manically

singing a hymn to mary the virgin, too

my first

and we got drunk on the blood of christ afterwards

he must have been wasted at the time of death

my life is still charmed

though i am still debilitatingly honest

No Title And No Photograph

glory is exhausting, it's just as well i have a god to give it to, or i would explode. i wish to ditch my creativity in a bottomless pit and go deny my soul in a monastery forever.

creative burnout. sent the internet capacity over the edge with the millions of arts that i uploaded last week. removed batteries from camera so that i didn't have to snatch every piece of art that came my way. actually they fell out and rolled down a bank and even though i went back when i had time and foraged immensely through rotting undergrowth i did not find them.

i am blatantly wasting opportunity. i am depriving the world of myself. and it is fantastic. i am not an artist anymore. i am a human. i am not earning my place in this world. i am simply freeloading, overstaying, crashing the party.

why do we seek what is worthwhile?

why do we pursue good things?

why do we try to succeed?

to fulfil our potential? why?

it's like everyone believes in god these days or something

in other news, i found my leonard cohen cd which i had given up for lost long ago, because it was.

last time we saw you, you

looked so much older, your famous

blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder

i want a Famous Blue Raincoat.

i have no poetry

only song lyrics

i am stealing other people's art

and plastering it on the walls of my soul

because i have forgotten why i exist

leonard's golden droning is making me sleeepy

and you treated my woman

to a flake of your life

and when she came back

she was nobody's wife

i met a knight, though i didn't know he was a knight. he was just a random old artist in a random studio that i wandered into from the street and he painted like my grandmother used to. i was talking about art and error and that i had total respect for watercolours as they are as unforgiving as hell and he showed me where he had once made a mistake and then changed it, and it was not noticeable. he was the mayor of wellington for 7 years, and an architect, thus the perfect watercolours of buildings. he was always warm and encouraged me to visit regularly, and gave me a small print of a view of wellington from not far from my house. i was so honoured. he wants to see my paintings. but i bought food instead of paint again this week, and i want to do a new wellington one to show him. do you know michael fowler? that's sir michael fowler to you....

i bought food. i have never had a full larder, not like this. i tend to buy small amounts of food at a time. perhaps having less food choice is easier. certainly having too many choices destroys my ability to know what i want to eat. ALL OF IT. i am a communist. please make my decisions for me and tell me what to do.

thank you for the trouble you took

from her eyes

i thought that it was there for good

so i never tried

i made this amazing pork chow mein. it was flavoured mostly with Mi Goreng noodle sachets. grating ginger root and chopping garlic was so good for my soul. the silverbeet and brocolli and carrot were also important.

i made ginger and honey tea from its raw ingredients. i find it very fulfilling.

i made these amazing afghan biscuits. actually, they had wholegrain oats instead of cornflakes. does that make them anzafghans? what made them incredible though was that i put one m&m on the top where one normally puts a walnut. walnuts are too healthy though, and colourless and m and m's have pure saturated discriminate colours.

i think karlyn may be coming over for coffee tomorrow....

the dice, the dice

the dice

i bought these rubbers today

they are making me happy

indeed

and all you want to do with dice

is THROW them

and then they

bounce

all

over

the world

and get lost

how to draw (The Neuroscience Of Art)

For this task, you will find that the right side of your brain is most useful. This side is all about novelty and initial processing. With respect to images it is about the shape of things and what they actually look like.

Unfortunately the left hemisphere (which is often misleadingly overemphasized as 'dominant' and 'the language side') does tend to take over on tasks like this; It deals more with known information and labels, and tends to think it has it all sussed and knows what is going on.

It will categorize the subject matter and tell you how it ought to look. You will end up with a clichéd image that will probably be factually right but essentially wrong; have the right components in the wrong ratios.

In the case of drawing, this is not useful; you need to be able to draw what you actually see, (or in the case of abstract art, the individual elements, gestures, and impressions that your visual system perceives) and not what your brain secretly thinks it is supposed to see.

To solve this, you can either focus on drawing the negative space around the subject matter (for example, the spaces BETWEEN the fingers) or you can distort the image so that it is no longer processed as a particular category by turning it upside down, or by taking a photo and using drastic and wanton photoshop to make it unrecognizable but for the basic structure.

Another problem with the visual processing systems is that they adapt to an unchanging stimulus. Leep firing the same wiring in the brain and it will start to ignore it after a while. Stare at an image on an easel for a while and it will lose it's salience.

The solution here is to turn the painting itself upside down, gaze at its reflection in a mirror, or to take a photo, and shrink/enlarge it.

Previously invisible mistakes* will emerge and glare at you -- do not lose heart!!!

Also, I tend to have three or four paintings going at once, and go from one to the other every few minutes. It reduces the perceptual blindness.

Of course, art is not about copying; That is far better acheived with a camera. It is also good for the drawer to have an artistic-not-autistic eye that can decide what details to leave out, and which to emphasize or even distort.

Now I just have to figure out how to play music with the right side of the brain....

* Of course, because there are no rules in art (is that not its definition?), there are no mistakes. There is, however, such a thing as a painting where you can see what the artist was trying-to-do. It can either be fixed, or the quality within the image that failed can be violently but obviously obliterated. This is fun.

Bibliography

http://www.drawright.com/bookA.htm

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/159/9/1615

The Early Days I (Poetry)

the early days

of untrustworthy cognitions

of streets with too many corners

adventures behind each one

and pictures too

writing up tables

and plans for survival

the poet had just killed himself

as poets are wont to do

but there are lots of

other

new

ghosts here

too

of going undetected

through your streets and your circles

in your back rows

different spectacles each time

until they found out

declared my income and that this would not go on

that I would take and eat and grow

value

jets and ferries and planets

so many of them

days and days of blinding sunshine

my bed smells like light and air

the days of the

goddess of denial

who strenghthens one with vacancy

with independence (i tried to kill her i have not seen her since)

and the God who was even closer

I have not forgotten,

my first night here

you gave me food and talked about the return of the prodigal

and my soul smiled

kyrie, eleison

and long ago

the days of cider and guitars

and giving your heart to jesus

my soul was older then

but my world less daunting

it is early days yet

and we shoudn't read into it too much

square zero is an excellent place

from which to start

perhaps they do not hate me after all

Chocolate Sorcery And Other Family Treasures.

Chocolate Mug Cake (mine) (actually I think it's Michelle's)

Size six egg. In a mug. Some flour, some butter, lots of cocoa, some sugar. Adjust ratios till it's the right consistency. Doesn't matter, it can't really fail. The more you do it, you'll get the feel for what's right (just like life). Cook it till it's cooked. (In a microwave). Decorate with chocolate sauce(ry)* and m$m's. Best eaten in a break from creative mania, or alternatively creative frustration.

Chris' Lamb Shanks (younger brother) (lamb is such a christian thing to eat lol)

Lamb shanks in slow cooker. Put sprigs of rosemary, thyme, and sage together and tie some string round each end. And add them. And Delmaine Crushed Tomatoes With Olives. And decent mushrooms and cheap red wine. And potatoes or whatever. Cook till its cooked.

Rachel's Curry (older sister)

Buy a beef roast. Cut it into SDcard-sized cubes. Get six onions, blend three ** with a bulb of garlic and two inches of peeled, finely chopped ginger. chop and fry the other onions. Add the meat to the pot to brown then the onion/garlic/ginger paste. Fry for several minutes, then add 2 tsp coriander, and one of cumin and tumeric. Cook for a few more minutes then add a tin of chopped tomatoes. Cook for a few more minutes then add 250g of unsweetened greek yoghurt in three or four lots. Cook for about another hour and add chopped fresh coriander.

Andrew's Dessert (older brother).

Cut up bananas. Put in a bowl. Also put in cognac or baileys or whatever. And chocolate chips. And marshmallows if you are a girl. Microwave until cooked.

*the family chocolate sorce(ry) recipe:

butter, sugar, lots of cocoa, heat till dissolved. little bit of full cream milk maybe, unless you do want it to sediment as solid blocks at the bottom of your icecream yum

** the last time I did this was ten years ago in an undergraduate laboratory with detergent to lyse onion cells for a biology experiment. The blender's lid came off.....

I found a ledge above the cablecar

a tiny ledge

and i sketched undisurbed

the bars made it easier to do composition

a frenchman came down to take photos

and we had a bit of a conversation with a few french words thrown in

just a few

he told me to visit the south of france, by the spanish border

he likes it there

i bought food this week instead of paint

it was a tough decision

then i realized i could paint watercolour with granny's old rembrandt pastels

i love using hand-me-downs from Artists

and i have screeds of large watercolour sheets

bliss

i am catching my flatmate's cough. one afternoon out painting and i'm already sick...

mOdax

...he couldn't turn up, texted me just before I got there. I went anyway, got a coffee and scribbled in my pink&green jewelled notepad:

God the cities are so cubic, such a clamour of colours; God we are so crammed with these overlapping grids of various perspective, these right angles; do we unconsiously crave the silent purple curves underneath shyly suspended pollen drops, hinted nectar, frozen doe's with their outstretched fawns?

God I want to go to Antarctica with my camera.

She brings my coffee, i put it on the edge of the single column, newstype on the almost-imperceptible grey grain of newspaper, through which i am entering into South America. There is no photo, but i find brown faces black hair rainbow clothing, and eventually i find new characteristics crawling out of the faces which I found all_the_same just a minute ago.

I cannot explain these new distinuishing features, like you cannot explain the lady you always meet on the bus and with whom you step into deep conversation, who would be spoiled if you ever exchanged names; you already have a languageless name for each other that doesn't belong to writing or speech.

The South Americans are in trouble, but the children grin, and there are babies. Electoral; process; discussed; referendum; Chavez; health; opposition; deterioration; oil; credit; missions; social; brutal; grip; economics; activists; front; vehicles; popularity; prudence; empire.

God I want to go to Antarctica.

Back on the bus:
Outside the window, driving past a kite in a tree, children in a treehouse. The man at the back, i know him namelessly too; he owns a bike for sunny days.

Wellington II

The phone booths are red here. The buses are yellow, the dairies are yellow, the bulwarks are yellow, the tugboats are red. There are canyons downtown. I accidentally sheltered in the foyer of Mojo's headquarters while waiting for the portrait gallery to open. There were stacks of sacks of coffee up to the ceiling and huge espresso machinery, likely for antique and aesthetic purposes. It smelt so nice. I swear I will destroy my camera by taking photos in the rain. But Wellington in the rain is ravishing. It shines. (The relevant photoparagraph is far below and it justifies this rambling one).

I went to an exhibition opening night and on the way there some athlete woman was like 'seal in the harbour!!!' and I followed the people to see it and I managed to photograph it's tail or something. At the exhibition I randomly joined the band with their tambourine and made art and music contacts and ate cheese but not wine.

I will never run out of galleries here.

This is a city of poetry. It is perfectly acceptable to have abstract and unnecessary words inscribed in commonplaces, and for graffiti to be philosophical.

Modern art got the better of me yesterday. There was a fountain down on the docks, a rigid black tube reared like a cobra spewing water. It moved incrementally but froze again. We were enchanted. Then we saw the rest of it lying on the other side, and some sensible person found the tap and turned it off. It was just a broken hose.

I moved to the top of a different hill. This one has a view of the whole of the hutt valley.

I get up early to observe the four planets, and am slowly becoming sleep-deprived again. Here I have a desk and a GARGANTUAN chest of drawers that all my clothing cannot fill (the first of it's kind i have ever encountered; needed I any excuse to buy more clothes?) and a shelf where my books fit PERFECTLY and flatmates who are not particularly permissive of my self-neglect (I have been frugal of late in apprehension of the mechanics bill....) HA the mechanic, that's a story...I got the cash out for him last night and walked back but he wasn't there and it was getting dark and he had locked my car up so I headed back up home past the Beehive and ended up walking up Glenmore St past the gardens (it is a dank and creepy street; trees at night have always freaked me) with $600ish cash in my wallet going "I JUST hope the rapists don't check my wallet...." (Luckily the universe was not eavesdropping on my brain at that moment) so once I got home safely there was the adrenaline euphoria. Apparently I'd arrived in the 5 minutes the mechanic was away.

I realize now that I trusted him because he was scottish and he looked like my scottish brother-in-lore and I am biased toward accents of the homeland. He seems to have been trustworthy though.

I can see the observatory from the lounge. I asked them, but they are not open at 5am, for me to go and see Mercury. How can they call themselves Astronomers??? Never mind, I shall become one of their astronomers in time for Jupiter's return in a few months....

I moved from a flat in Vogeltown. I was there for a month. I was generally cold and hungry and sleep-deprived and fleabitten while i was there. I had bread and jam and butter in my room which was fine as the wooden floors meant it was frigid, but also noisy from drunken small-hours footsteps so i didn't sleep much, also because of the biting things (i was so sure they were bedbugs, as they bit me in rows and columns on my torso, 17 at a time...)

They must have been dogfleas, that got stuck under waistbands and hemlines and socks...I had welts on my ankles.

I loved the lanky black quiet old dog though, I do not blame him.

I found where the pianists gather. there is a Welsh Dragon Bar on a large traffic island on the one ways. It used to be public toilets, and has domes on the roof. It is red and green and white, like the welsh. We collect there on a sunday night and play each other music on a total honky tonk. Dave pulled some chopins out of his head for me.

canyon

mojo

canyon

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