The lights go out and I can’t be saved
9:32 am Wednesday, 8 October, 2008
Okay Dave, just type. It seems appropriate that I’m listening to a song called My Firstborn For A Song. It’s by Bell X1 and it’s about a songwriter struggling with writers block and trying to make a deal with the devil for a song to come to him.
I’m not there at the moment. In fact I have a long entry typed up from a couple of nights ago but I’m not happy with it. In fact I’m so unhappy with it that in a very unusual turn for me, I’m going to dump it and start again. And by start again I mean that I’m going to write the same posting or at least the same ideas behind it again and see what comes of it this time.
I had an inkling as I was working through it that something just wasn’t working and I shoved that away and kept typing. That’s nothing too new, sometimes I’ll just carry on and see what happens and it can work out or more often I’ll stop after a few lines and just start all over again. Rarely I’ll abandon the post. Though it must be said I have at least 20 drafts saved of things that I had stopped at and should go back to at some point but rarely do.
I’m going back to this one for a couple of reasons. The most important one is that it annoyed me. What more reason do I need than that?
Funnily though, it’s not worth it. It’s not worth retyping out and it’s not really worth much even on the scale of this little blog. However, like I say, it annoyed me and so here I am.
I wrote it in Dunedin on Monday evening. It is now Wednesday evening and I’m down in Oamaru but more on that later on.
Starting again kinda leaves me without a starting point onto it and so I’m just going to type and see what I can come up with.
Here we go now.
So on Saturday I did the brewery tour and that was good. I think I’ve mentioned a bit about that. Then that evening I, and this will tell you how bored I was in Dunedin, I went to see Step-Brothers. Yeah, I think that says it all. I really really needed something to make me laugh and it did a little of that but it is nothing like as funny as it thinks it is.
Before that however I had sat in The Bog and, over a pint of Guinness (not bad), contemplated suicide. I had gone in so I could try and get some reading done but my book Now It’s Time To Say Goodbye by Dale Peck looks fascinating but it’s just not working for me. I’d give up on it a short time later and work through some other books. Anyway I’m the only customer in the pub but away in the corner there is a young fella playing guitar and singing a few songs. He’s okay but some of his choice of songs are pretty odd. It’s almost like he’d take a one-hit-wonders of the 90s playlist and learnt them off. Did you ever really think you’d have The Crash Test Dummies Mmmmm Mmmm Mmm become a Sunday afternoon session song? No, me neither. Though as I recall they were a bit more than that one hit and I did enjoy the album way back whenever that was.
Anyway he’s playing away and I’m half listening and half trying to read my book and half staring into space and none of them are working for me. Then he goes and plays James Blunt’s Your Beautiful and all of a sudden I find myself thinking that perhaps now would be the right time to just give up on all the travelling and indeed on this life. Hmm interesting phrase ‘this life’, I don’t know why I typed that. It’s not like there’s another life to be had. There really isn’t a need for the word: ‘this’.
The problem, and I hope you can understand how troubling this is, it’s at this moment that a realisation sinks home. I…I…I like it.
There, I’ve admitted it. I know, alright I know. It gets worse though. That makes two songs by him that I like. Sometime ago I heard 1973 on the radio or something and I liked it and I was disgusted when I recently found it was a James Blunt song. So there you go, that’s my confession and it’s enough wonder if I should even carry on living, I like two songs by James Blunt. Are there worse crimes out there?
Now that brings me to another bit about music. Mr. White mentioned seeing Coldplay recently. As far as I can tell he did this by choice and was not forced at gun or knife point. I’m somewhat shocked, it must be said. I think though that my problem with Coldplay (aside from ya know, Chris Martin) is everyone else in the world. I remember when their first album, Parachutes, came out and when you would hear Yellow all over the place. Now I like Yellow. It suffered massively from overexposure and I’ve heard it about 10 times too many for one life but it’s a decent tune. I haven’t listened to the album in a while but I bought it (an actual CD too!) and I don’t recall it being offensive. Perhaps a little bland and a little samey but not offensive.
I did see them on their support tour for Parachutes. They played at Slaine in 2001. It would perhaps be unfair to say that they were totally unmemorable but I cannot remember a thing about their performance. It would be fair to say that after them was an absolute blast of a set by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers and then my first time seeing U2. They have no chance against bands like that.
So a not bad but not great first album and one summer anthem and then they go ahead and release a second album and somehow become one of the biggest bands in the world. I must be missing a release of epic genius between Parachutes and A Rush Of Cold Blood To The Head that explains why all of a sudden they were huge. The second album I must admit has one great track. I have a lot of time for Clocks but the rest is mediocre trash that all sounds the same. There’s nothing in this album that should catapult anyone to greatness. There’s no amazing live show that propels them that little bit more and gets the buzz going, there’s just the same album. Recently they released their fourth version of the same album and yesterday Q decided they were the greatest band in the world 2008.
It’s almost enough to make my head explode. Now of course Coldplay have a similar problem to James Blunt. Blunt suffers from being ‘That cunt James Blunt’ and Coldplay suffer from Chris Martin. These are pretty serious handicaps and I have no doubt contribute to my dislike but I mean come on people. How an earth can a band with him as a frontman have any real sort of presence? It’s madness I tell you madness.
Now I recently mentioned that I could not understand how the Kings of Leon had become such so huge. I like them, I’ve seen them five or six times live over the course of the first three albums. I still consider the first album to be the strongest by a long shot. It’s got a much rawer edge and I think the followups have been over-produced. I don’t consider any of them to be bad albums and I like, and listen to, them all. They are, and always have been an excellent live band and so do get some big bonus points for that. They had no real stage presence to begin with when they were doing smaller venues and just starting off but they knew that and so the set would make up for it. The volume went up and the place just rocked. So I guess it’s fair to speculate that the live shows helped build them a little more than the second and third albums (both of which I find work better live). Then on Friday last week when I ended up in whatever the hell club that was in Queenstown, one of the biggest hits of the evening was Sex On Fire, it really kicked the place off which was interesting.
Anyway the other big songs that night were by The Killers (I can’t remember if it was Mr. Brightside or Read My Mind, I think it was the latter) and Katy Perry’s I Kissed A Girl. In a further and hopefully final confession for the evening, I’ve grown to like it. Aside from the fact that you can’t really move without hearing it three to five times a day around here, well there isn’t really an aside from that. It’s just wormed it’s way into my head. It’ll get associated with some of this travelling and it already has a place on my travelling playlist. I do like her voice, I have not heard the album but she does an excellent cover of MGMT’s Electric Feel, kinda reminds me of early (pre-diva) Mariah Carey.
Now moving along off of that. Let me tell you a little more about how exciting Dunedin is. I hope you are sitting down.
Dunedin has the world famous Baldwin Street of course!! Yes yes, the very one from the Guinness Book of Records. Ah you know it, what am I saying. Of course you know it. Who wouldn’t be proud (and in fact so proud as to build a museum/cafe/gift shop!) of having the steepest street in the world! Alright it’s somewhat more impressive than it sounds on paper (how could it not be) but only in the effort it takes to walk up and back down. The gradient reaches 1 in 2.86 and so walking up the 200 or so metres takes just a little bit of effort and then walking back down takes even more.
I did give up on Now It’s TIme To Say Goodbye and instead I read James Lee Burke’s most excellent The Tin Roof Blowdown and Fred Vargas’ Have Mercy On Us All. The latter annoys me for two reasons. First it’s a French novel and so translated. I really find that translated crime fiction can be tough going and this is one of them. It’s stuffy throughout and a lot of the dialogue doesn’t flow very well. This is my second, if not third, Vargas novel and I like the plots and I like the interesting characters but the second thing that annoys me is that Fred Vargras is a woman. I always forget this. I have no explanation for this but I simply do not like female crime writers. It’s even odder as I grew up on Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie but if I’m browsing for books and I pick something up and it sounds interesting and then I realise it’s by a woman, I put it right back down. Odd odd odd. I put off reading The Secret History for sometime because it was by a woman and look how wrong I was about that!
Moving on again, on Monday evening I watched What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted which is the sequel to Once Were Warriors. One of these is a powerful piece of movie-making and the other is a not entirely unreedeming effort at telling a story that didn’t really need telling. I only realised when reading up about the movies today that there are some pretty significant differences between the original book of Once Were Warriors and the movie. Par for the course really but had I know that I’d have read the book beforehand. Having seen the movie and read about what some of the changes have been, I’m not sure I want to put myself through reading it.
As I mentioned way back at the start, I’m not in Omarau also known as Penguintown. It’s famous for two penguin colonies and that’s what people come here to see. So last night I went to see a colony of Blue Penguins return from their days fishing. It was pretty good though there are lot of restrictions around seeing them, no cameras, no talking, no anything that might scare them. Fair enough really I guess. Anyways just as the sun went down they started to come back to shore and for about an hour there was a steady flow of rafts coming up the rocks and into their holes. Tiny little things. It’s breeding season now an this means that there are a lot of them around, there were 140 last night, and also that you can plainly see some carrying eggs close to being laid. I’m not convinced it was worth $20 but it’s run by a government agency and all the money goes into looking after the penguin colonies and I’m generally okay with giving money to things like that and also, it’s not often that you get a chance to 20 odd penguins coming ashore at once and running up rocks to their homes while chasing off the rabbits! Shame there’s a blanket ban on cameras but as the staff put it, “a flash can cause them serious damage and people in general are idiots and so we have a blanket ban on cameras”. Can’t really argue with that…
Now then today has been quiet. I’m on my own in a 5 bed dorm. In fact I’m the only guy staying in the hostel at the moment and so there was no-one moving around to wake me up. I slept until 11am which was nice. I’ve not done that in a while. Then I took a wander around the town (yawn) but had some brunch and some afternoon tea and then I went to see what I thought was New Zealand’s only Whisky distillery. Turns out it’s not the distillery, it’s just a maturation store. However they still do tasting and tours of the barrelhouse and I figured that would be fun. I was right, I was more than right!! I wandered in to find out that the tours are off at the moment because well there’s no-one around to take the tours and so they don’t have people to run them. However and it’s not an exact quote “Not to worry though, why don’t you come over here and we’ll taste some the whisky and then you can just go and have a wander around.” So I did both! They have a few whiskies for tasting and each is meant to be $2 but they obviously weren’t bothered by that and it was a quiet afternoon and so I got a tasting of 5 of their own and then I was just let into the barrel rooms (it’s actually a floor) and left to wander around. Then when I’m all done and making to leave she insists that I come back over for another couple of tastings of the particularly nice 19 year old single malt. And all this is long after I’ve explained that I’m a lowly backpacker and thus cannot afford to be buying a bottle and couldn’t carry it even if I did. So top marks there to the New Zealand Malt Whisky Company.
That brings us right around to now where I’m back at my hostel sitting in the common room with the heater going and typing away. It’s quiet tonight, I’m the only one sat here. Last night there was a roaring fire and four pretty girls sat around…it was better.
Tomorrow is the beginning of the end for New Zealand. I’m off to Christchurch which is my final destination. I’ve been here for just over a month and I have to say it’s been great. I’m hugely taken with NZ. I am starting to look forward to the weekend though. Crossing the dateline is going to be cool (I’ll probably be sleeping or not paying any attention and certainly won’t notice a thing but ya know time travel!) and then getting to South America is going to rock. I’m excited about Chile. I’ve only got 3 nights there and so I need to make the most of it. It’s going to be good. It’s going to be different and that’ll be nice.
Finally (I think) I went out with my proper camera sometime recently and as soon as I setout just holding it I felt better. I’ve not been taking my kind of photos for a while, at least not many of them. There are a few but it’s very much been about tourist photos. Aswell it should be of course. I’m a tourist and I have no problem taking tourist photos and I love a number of mine and I’ve loved taking them but it’s not quite the same thing. There isn’t anything hugely creative about them. Sure I try every now and again but it’s not the same as being based somewhere and being able to plan a little bit of creativity (yes yes I know). It’s odd that I miss doing that as for such a long time I wasn’t creative at all. I’d say that I’m still not but of course photography is a bit creative, or perhaps it’s better to say that it can be. My friend Jill has within the past couple of years (perhaps longer, that’s just what I’ve seen) shown herself to be this amazingly creative person across a whole range of things. I’m looking forward to the day I have a wall again as I can finally hang a piece by her up. But that’s going off track a bit. Every now and again when I log into Flickr or I’m reading up blogs I’ll have a couple of minutes and I’ll spot something she’s done recently and it’ll be awesome and I’ll be jealous and I’ll wonder why I can’t do things like that. Well that’s simple enough, lack of talent. I mean easy one to answer that But and this is the but, again when I’m settled somewhere, it would be nice to see if I can change or channel that jealousy into inspiration or at least into determination to get up and go and take some photos that make me happy and let me take some photos that I want to take.
Related to this and I’m relatively sure that it one of the things I first talked about when I planned off this trip (well done Dave, good planning) is that I don’t believe that everyone has a book in them. I was pretty sure that I didn’t. Mainly because and I know this will frustrate writers, I don’t know where they get their ideas from! I’m not sure I’d have an idea for a book. I do know that the classification for a novel starts at 60,000 words. By that simple calculation I have enough enough for a lot of books. There have been days where I’ve written 10,000 words for here and I suspect that my word count for this trip would easily be over 100,000 and I’d not be too unsure it wouldn’t be over 200,000. Then add in years of archives, well I’d be curious to run a word count sometime down the line and see what I come up with. That magical day when I get all of my years of entries together into some manageable format, a word count will be one of the first things I’ll do.
The problem, aside from the lack of ideas, is plainly obvious to anyone reading this. I’m overfond of commas and exclamation points. I’m over reliant on a number of stock phrases and I have the descriptive skills of a gnat. I’m fairly sure that I could sit down and bang out enough words to fill up a book but whether there’d be a story there would be the main question and then I’d worry about what would happen to the poor editor that was lumbered with it.
However in what really will be the final confession for the evening. I have an idea and I find myself giving it a lot of thought. I don’t know what to do about it.
I do know that in the fridge is a bottle of beer made with whiskey, what you thought I walked out empty handed?, and I’m going to open that up and spend an hour online and then I’m going to get some sleep and I’m going to dream. (Dream was the 3537th word)
21.58 Oamaru New Zealand, Wednesday October 8th.
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