Colin Marshall

He wanna travel

This article, from the Japanese magazine Paper Sky, is an interview with Haruki Murakami about writing and the states of mind brought on by foreign geographical contexts, and vintage record collecting. It was pretty much precision-engineered to get me to read it:

I hate asking you this, but here goes: What are your three favorite overseas destinations?

H: First would be Boston, Massachusetts in America, because it’s the most convenient and satisfying city for collecting secondhand Jazz records. Plus, there many delicious Indian restaurants in Boston — and you can find Samuel Adams draft beer anywhere in town. You can also run the marathon there — which I’ve done a few times. In Europe, I really like Stockholm, Sweden. Again, there’s a wonderful secondhand record shop there, and I visited that store everyday for three days straight. The owner is a fanatical collector of great jazz records. And here’s something unusual: The passengers on the subways in Stockholm are almost all talking on their cell phones all the time. It’s very surreal.

I also love Sydney in Australia. Although most of the people there wear boring clothes, because the fashions are really casual and simple, the food and wine in Sydney is excellent. How mysterious! Also, the aquarium and zoo in Sydney are both unique and wonderful. Unfortunately, there’s not a single good secondhand record store there. Maybe that will change in the future.

What does Murakami do on his many airplane flights? “Sometimes I take my small DVD player with me and watch old Jean Luc Goddard [sic] movies. As you know, those great old Goddard movies are hardly ever shown on planes.” My greatest desire is to be Haruki Murakami watching a Jean-Luc Godard movie on a flight to Stockholm.

Diversifying your intellectual portfolio

Rolling into the KCSB studio to as I do every Thursday afternoon to air The Marketplace of Ideas, I got to talking with the host of the show before mine. He's preparing to resign from both his time slot and his day job a local club, cutting whatever chains might keep him from life's next level. In his case, that level is teaching English abroad, a pursuit I've noticed a surprisingly large number of peers taking on as a pre-vocation vocation.

He'd really like to go to Shanghai — "If I can learn that language, I've got a job for life," — but might settle for Korea. A bunch of miscellaneous people with nonzero proximity to me have done the latter, from Madelaine's ex-roommate to this girl I knew in high school who I tend to refer to as "the flakiest human being in the world." Given even my very, very shaky comprehension of Hangugo, I realize on some level that if my U.S. existence ever falls through, that's where I'll wind up too. The rest of the friends/acquaintances who've gone the English-teaching route seem to be in Japan, which I understand pays the most but also costs the most.

There are lots of arguments for this sort of thing, several of them convincing. This particular fellow admits a lower than savant-grade ability to learn foreign languages, but he's willing to let that ride in order to make up for about 30 years of lost seeing-the-world time. This resonates with me. In recent years, I've felt a mounting desire to be influenced by a wide array of different stuff, whether said stuff is different countries, different cultures, different languages, different sounds, different art, different minds, different means of expression. I don't believe you can just will the diversification of your intellectual portfolio; you have to put yourself in places, literally and metaphorically, where it can't help but be diversified.

I suspect this because I've noticed that, whatever I expose myself to, I become more like. It's especially the case with writers, no doubt because so much of my time is taken up with reading their work and writing my own. When I binge on the texts of, say, Kobo Abe, David Foster Wallace, Paul Graham or Alexander Theroux — to name four vastly different personal luminaries — I find myself writing, and thus thinking, much more like Kobo Abe, David Foster Wallace, Paul Graham or Alexander Theroux than I'd been before. This speaks either to my uncommon intellectual flexibility or my lack of much of a personality. Either seem plausible.

Sound artist and avant-garde music journalist David Toop talks about having "reprogrammed" his brain in youth by listening to megadoses of unusual music. I think he was on the right track, but I'll bet the technique generalizes way beyond the sonic arts. Despite the obvious obstacles poses to forging long-term friendships, I've thus come to envy those "Army brats" whose parents' perpetual relocation leads to eclectic personal histories: born in San Diego, elementary school in Johannesburg, high school in Leipzig, college in Zürich, grad school in Hong Kong, now they're in Bangkok, that sort of thing.

I think of David Sedaris, another writer I often read, re-read and absorb into my being, and his essay "Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa". It's a treatise on his jealousy of his boyfriend Hugh, the son of a State Department officer, and his exotic upbringing. A PDF is available, on, of all places, OralHistoryKorea.org's English composition archive:

Certain events are parallel, but compared with Hugh's, my childhood was unspeakably dull. When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh's family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the price when it comes to nouns and objects.

[ ... ]

They weren't rich, but what Hugh's family lacked financially they more than made up for with the sort of exoticism that works wonders at cocktail parties, leading always to the remark "That sounds fascinating." It's a compliment one rarely receives when describing an adolescence spend drinking Icees at the North Hills Mall.

[ ... ]

Theirs was the life I dreamt about during my vacations in eastern North Carolina. Hugh's family was hobnobbing with chefs and sultans while I ate hush puppies at the Sanitary Fish Market in Morehead City, a beach towel wrapped like a hijab around my head. Someone unknown to me was very likely standing in a muddy ditch and dreaming of an evening spent sitting in a clean family restaurant, drinking iced tea and working his way through an extra-large seaman's platter, but that did not concern me, as it meant I should have been happy with what I had.

How Rodger Swan cured my Japanese psychodrama

The vlogger Rodger Swan won a scholarship that took him from his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan to Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. He later returned to teach English in the northern prefecture of Iwate. All the while, he entertained thousands with his two YouTube video series, Tokyo Swan and Iwate Swan. Then he suddenly died of acute pancreatitis.

Three things. First, it's high time that, as a species, we ditched these lousy pancreases; they go south on us with terrifying frequency. Second, boy, memento mori for sure, especially since Swan was a couple years younger than me. Third, after finding out about him through an especially excellent episode of Keith McNally's oft-excellent podcast XO, I came to see him as the continuation of a thread in the experiential arts, if you like, that I've been faithfully yet only semi-consciously following for years.

This is the Westerner-goes-to-Japan narrative. I'm thinking of Japanese cinema scholar Donald Richie and his Japan Journals. I'm thinking of Japanese literature translator Donald Keene and his delightfully-illustrated Chronicles of My Life, which I just read. I'm thinking of the posts on Japan (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Nick "Momus" Currie would write in Click Opera and now writes in Zuihitsu. I'm thinking of Pico Iyer and his The Lady and the Monk. I'm thinking of (also former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Ian Buruma and his numerous examinations of the country and its ways.

My favorite, though, has to be (also former Marketplace of Ideas guest) John Nathan's Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere, which, though filled with recollections of up-close-and-personal encounters with the likes of Kobo Abe, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Toru Takemitsu — yeah, I'm basically insane with jealousy — is also so distinctive and so personal that I can't read a chapter of it without feeling shock and gratitude that some editor didn't try too hard dick with it. Nothing in the entire memoir is put quite the way you'd expect, and that's a welcome quality indeed.

Spending hours upon hours transcribing my entire 13,000-word conversation with Nathan for 3Quarksdaily got me thinking: where are the heirs to this tradition? Many more Western kids are now interested in Japan than when he was getting onto it, and infinity more than when Richie and Keene were. But most of them seem to be interested for entirely different reasons. I actually asked Nathan about this right at the end of the interview:

You're a teacher at UCSB. You teach classes pretty regularly and you have kids of several ages. You're seeing a generation that's very much into Japan. Being someone who was interested in Japan kind of on the vanguard of that in America, what do you think of the way Japan — Japanese culture, Japanese stuff — for some American kids, a refuge?

I'm not the best person to ask about that. You're talking, of course, about anime and manga and some design elements and stuff like that. That's what it's about. You're talking about the otaku movement. This year, at ICU, we had students from UC campuses, and a number of them — maybe there were thirty kids total — studying in this program in Tokyo. More than half of them were computer and game addicts and freaks whose principal interest in Japan was this.

I have a very strong negative reaction to that, and I conducted myself accordingly. I said, "Look, you guys want to study that, you study that. I'm going to teach you wonderful things about Japan that you don't have any idea about, many of which are the fundament on top of which all this other stuff that wows you stands."

Flipping through SBCC's course catalog, I see what is perhaps a sad testament to this: "Japanese 121: Language and Culture through Japanese Anime. For students who are ready to learn the basics of Japanese linguistics and colloquial Japanese in order to understand and appreciate Japanese anime." I guess that's just playin' to the crowd, but damn.

This is why I'd long assumed Gen Y's inability to produce its own John Nathans, its own Donalds Richie or Keene. I've spent the past fifteen years suppressing, to the extent possible, my own interest in Japan; the subject seemed to have been hijacked by what Encyclopedia Dramatica might call the unwashed sperglord. At age 13, taught myself the Japanese language's phonetic scripts with great interest, but I dropped any ideas I had about taking any classes in it at school for fear, no doubt partially ridiculous, that I'd get lumped in with the mouth-breathing Evangelion-worshipers.

I don't know why Japan has become such a hideaway for this class of socially maladroit, culturally tunnel-visioned Gen Y-ers, but it has. What can it possibly offer them? Additional alienation, that of forever being a visible outsider in a supremely connection-centric culture? Whatever their motivations, I don't think I'm too bold in claiming that they're ruining it for the rest of us. Yet despite my decade-long crusade to diminish my own apparent fascination with the place, it's manifestly clear that I'm still interested in Japan.

Rodger Swan's Westerner-goes-to-Japan narrative gives me hope by standing as a counterexample to the now primarily (I assume) Naruto-driven Nipponophilia of our generation. And while I'll never know him except through his videos, I do have friends who put in or are currently putting in Japan stints and writing/blogging/vlogging/podcasting/vodcasting/blodcasting about them in a way that's not awash with cultural detritus, a way that's aware of, as John Nathan put it, "the fundament on top of which all this other stuff that wows you stands." But hey, part of what got me into Japan initially was anime, video games, J-pop and the like, so it's not as if I can really judge anyone else for it. (I could judge myself for never evolving forward from there, though — and harshly.)

Nevertheless, me and most of my age cohort are obviously drawn by two different Japans. Mine isn't so much the Japan of mecha epics, blaring arcades, collectible Fullmetal Alchemist figurines, towering shelves packed with volume after volume of manga and vending machines brimming with used schoolgirl socks. It's more like the Japan of Kobo Abe's gritty surrealism; the experimental music of Masayuki Takayanagi, Ryoji Ikeda, Toru Takemitsu, Yasunao Tone (yes, he moved here, but still); the near-perfect pacing and atmosphere of the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hiroshi Teshigahara, Yasujiro Ozu; the thousand tiny interpretive differences of local jazz; the context so opposed to mine that it lets me be, observe as, learn from and relish the status of a total outsider. It's not an objectively better Japan, but I find it a subjectively better one.

Rodger Swan has also, for what it's worth, gotten me intrigued by the art of vlogging. I admire his videos, and enjoy those of many other Japan vloggers, but were I to vlog, I would distinguish myself by adopting these vows of austerity (because I can't make anything without vows of austerity):

1. No camera movement
2. No use of "uh" or "um"
3. No use of the in-camera mic
4. No color images

But my video camera broke and I'll probably convert to Super 8 film, so whatever. The most important lesson I drawn from the life of Rodger Swan remains that, not only is life too goddamn short for Naruto, it's too goddamn short not to pursue your interests, or to dishonestly evade them because of associations you consider distasteful.

Talking my way through Denver

In New Zealand, I took more or less speechless field recordings. In the "Mile High City" of Denver, Colorado, where I spent last weekend and a healthy chunk of last week, I've recorded a narrative travelogue. There for the 2010 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference — and, of course, to explore some urban terra incognita — I kept my Zoom H4n in tow to yammer into whenever a question or observation struck me. If you think it takes a good deal of mind over matter to unselfconsciously walk around an urban center talking into a recorder, you are right. But the transformation happens quickly. Yet another inhibition shed! Damn inhibitions.

So submitted for your enjoyment is my Denver travelogue (MP3, 17:30, 16.1mb), the first in what I imagine will become an irregular series of city podcasts. Subjects covered include:

• Denver's preponderance of brown-brick-and-glass architecture
• A presentation from artist/animator Kota Ezawa
• The Hyatt Regency's elevator-based ambient television
• Denver's unusually high amount of public sculpture, included but not limited to Claes Oldenburg's "Big Sweep" ("no fondling the broom, no caressing the broom")
• Lessons about publishing and creative work in general learned while browsing the AWP bookfair (more on this to come)
• What a glass-encased Quizno's is a synechdoce for
• What you have to do when you forget to pack any boxers

I now travel somewhere interesting at least once a year — and if things go right, that number will rise steadily — so expect more where this came from. Suggestions are welcome, though I realize I should've captured more conversations with other people. Maybe when I go to Mexico City. I still have some of my, uh, high school Spanish.

Album one

I got everything I wanted from my trip to New Zealand. The more abstract side of the wish list included temporary outsider status, sweeping contextual shift and the feeling of displacement for which I thirst. The less abstract included hours upon hours of field recordings, made with my trusty Zoom H4n. (Beyond a few postcards, I desired no higher a climb up the ladder of souvenir tangibility.)

Spurning a compulsion to cut all this material into a coherent whole the moment I returned home — and, quite frankly, not feeling like taking on that kind of work so soon after re-entry — I decided I'd first need some distance from the journey itself. I wanted to approach the recordings as, if not pure sound, then at least as something purer than sonic detritus of the last few weeks. Not knowing how long I'd take to cross this threshold or what it would feel like when I did, I simply waited about six weeks.

Never having assembled multiple field recordings into an extended piece before, I pre-emptively quashed my fanciness by arranging them chronologically. The listener would hear the sounds in the order I captured them. On one hand, this introduces a neat built-in travel narrative — catching the train, then catching the plane, then exploring Auckland, then driving down to Wellington, then flying south, etc. — but on the other, I don't trust narrative. It's a double-edged sword, the other being the lethally poisoned edge of banality.

I figured I'd arrange for chronology and cut for aesthetics and interestingness, which still left me much freedom in the details — almost too much. Would I line the recordings right up against one another? Would I keep them discrete? Would I attempt to blend them seamlessly into a single sonic mass? Would the transitions affect realism, or would I cut from location to location without trying to construct plausible movement?

Any ideas I had about making the piece sound like a totally faithful, if compressed, journey from Los Angeles to Auckland to Wellington to Invercargill and back quickly went out the window, as (a) I had neglected to record in every location, (b) I soon determined that the listener wouldn't be able to identify what all the sounds were and (c) I myself couldn't identify what all the sounds were. The six-week distance at work!

This, of course, matters not; as enthusiasts of the genre know, field recordings are no more mere aural documents of people, places and things than cinema is a mere audiovisual document of human relationships. When Lee Patterson burns peanuts, does his audience care that they're getting the most realistic, recognizable representation of the sound of burning peanuts? Nah. They care that Patterson has recorded sound that's interesting; neat as his choice of source can be, it's merely incidental.

While my more prosaic New Zealand recordings are immediately recognizable — ducks, fountains, boat toilets, that sort of thing — I'm more pleased with those that have, with time, turned abstract. None but me could identify some of this malfunctioning technology, out-of-the-way ambience and esoteric machinery — and hell, half the time even I can't do it. If my goal with this piece were to convey the message "In New Zealand, I heard birds and ducks and cars and waterfalls and creaky floors..." I would just say — or, admittedly more likely, tweet — "In New Zealand, I heard birds and ducks and cars and waterfalls and creaky floors..." Certainly I'd have spent less on batteries that way.

But given sound as my media of choice for this project, I resigned myself to living with its complications. Being a fervent adherent of the "do whatever you can and then iterate" method of making stuff — also known as "suck, then rock" — my other resignation was to winding up with maerial that, given my inexperience with mobile, handheld recording in unpredictable outdoor environs, probably wouldn't sound especially good. I'm into field recordings, but it's not like I know anything about them — I just unsystematically stuck the mics in the way of whichever air compressions seemed richest.

Finally donning the headphones to assess the damage, I found that — shock, awe — my recordings sounded pretty decent! I mean, I'm not about to give Lawrence English a run for his money, but I definitely produced enough to work with. Some, especially what I recorded in the Auckland Art Gallery, sounded almost, to my ears, almost like "real" field recordings. Alas, I had slightly too little city (especially Wellington) stuff and slightly too much animal-and-forest stuff, perhaps, but what can one do — New Zealand's an animal-and-forest kind of place.

I can already tell that my greatest enemy in this larger endeavor will be Old Man Wind. I had a hunch this would become a problem even as I recorded, putting into effect my emergency "stand between the gust and the mic" deflection method. Despite my valiance, the wind's dreaded staticy booming still tainted several of my clips, but I feel I must have learned some important editing skill in my desperate attempts to seamlessly excise the distortion. Or maybe I just need better shielding than the sock that came with the H4n.

But to mask obvious technical problems represents the easier end of the decision spectrum. Given my self-imposed — and, to an extent, software-imposed — 60-minute time limit for the final piece, the complicated question of what stays and what goes becomes more confusing. Should the nearby thudding of moving furniture be included, even though it unexpectedly broke the ambient sound of the location I'd been trying to capture? Probably — it's a fine reflection of the randomness of life, etc. Should the recording-start jingle on my dad's video camera be included? Sure, though ideally not every five minutes.

And jeez, I can't even really articulate to you how I handled the issue of, having selected the precise in- and out points all the clips, how best to transition them into and out of one another. The process bordered on voodoo, but I can't say the result is alien. When I finished a "rough draft" with everything lined up and rudimentarily transitioned, I made like I was writing an essay: I went back, re-listened and re-listened and tweaked everything that didn't feel right until it did. In this process, and only in this process, did I learn the qualities of more "correct"-sounding transitions: bringing the second clip up to full folume before fading out the first, that sort of thing. (Naturally, this rule and others go out the window in certain special artistic sub-cases, of which there are dispiritingly many.)

But here it is, New Zealand Stories, mixed down and 192k MP3-ified for your listening pleasure. (Right-click the link and do all that "Save as..." business to save it on your hard drive.) Some notable memories it triggers in my mind include:

• 7:25 The Auckland Domain a biggish park in the very city you'd expect, and one of the several near-silent environments from which I somehow expected much recording material. I was surprised at its near-desertedness — save the presence of that giant protractor — but then I realized it was like 10am on a Monday. Quick, blame jet lag.
• 10:35 Yes, there is Māori-language media, which I insisted on watching. (There's also lots of Germany-centric TV, for some reason, maybe to cater to the hojillions of tourists from there.)
• 11:45 I didn't quite capture enough city sounds, but here are some I did. Recorded in some Auckland alleyway not far from Queen street where the East Asian restaurants flowed freely.
• 12:55 As soon as I head the Auckland Art Gallery's floor, I knew I had to have it. (The second-grade tour group was a bonus.)
• 20:16 The tone of Auckland's crossing signals emerged as an equal priority.
• 21:00 Located in what Kiwis believe to be the worst city in the land, Hamilton Gardens was quite possible the aesthetically nicest surprise of the trip. Most of that was visual aesthetics, of course, but nothing stops me from recording.
• 22:00 There were surprisingly few non-English speakers around — here are a couple.
• 23:00 I don't even know what song this is, but it's intruded on my life for at least a decade now. (In New Zealand specifically, my life was intruded-on by Cascada's "Evacuate the Dancefloor", which is big in Wellington clubs.)
• 27:08 A local dad unsuccessfully tries to point his kids toward a kiwi bird, which, like the rest of its species, spends 100 percent of its time digging for food.
• 31:35 Though most of New Zealand's children seem eminently non-precocious, I felt as if these two were, in some manner, precocious.
• 32:16 These are "kakas," birds that sidle up and bite your shirt. (They bite mine, in any case.)
• 37:00 This machine, which I can't even begin to describe, produced what was likely my favorite man-made sound to capture.
• 41:09 This is Fuel, quite possibly the finest 60s organ-jazz coffee bar in the entire Wellington airport. (They brought out my tea in a pink service, which I chose to take deeply personally.)
• 46:23 My only recording yet made while kayaking, or, if you prefer, while desperately struggling to keep my recorder from falling in the water.
• 47:43 As pure sound sources, I loves me some malfunctioning radios. (Especially if they're in the Dundedin Public Art Gallery, a neat place where I spent much time.)

I submit that it is not bad for a first field recording album, but your mileage may vary. Infinitely more important: it exists. It exists, and therefore is buildable-upon, preferably in places like Iceland, Portugal, Korea, Switzerland, Belgium and maybe Japan. Stay tuned.

Fourteen theses on New Zealand

1. New Zealand has 80 million sheep

I think I saw most of them while driving from city to city. Every few minutes I'd pass yet another hillside absolutely lousy with them. As for all those remarks about the stupidity of sheep, I now believe 'em; all the beasts seem to do is munch on grass. Hundreds upon hundreds cluster together, heads bent low, chewing. No wonder "sheep" has become a byword for the mindless un-self-awareness.


2. New Zealand has four million people

Most of them live in Auckland. The rest live in cities like Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. The rest of the rest are scattered across dozens of tiny hamlets, many of which road-trippers must drive through because the country largely lacks "freeways" as Americans know them. While scooping us a couple cones of ice cream — mine, naturally, being kiwifruit-flavored, although I was tempted by the apparently NZ-only flavor "hokey pokey" — one of these tiny-towners spoke of her desire to visit Los Angeles. I didn't tell her that Los Angeles, while my own favorite American city by a near-comical margin, almost always drives foreigners into a complicated vortex of hatred and confusion. And that's just the Londoners; I can only speculate on the reaction of someone born, raised and settled in Clinton, New Zealand.




3. New Zealand has cool cities

Though very much a bounty-of-nature sort of place, New Zealand has raised urban areas that impress even a tireless watcher of cities like me. Auckland, the largest one (444k metro, 1.4m region), feels so much like Vancouver that I had to constantly remind myself that I was 7000 miles from southwestern Canada. In both cities, East Asian and Anglo influences are everywhere. As a fan of Vancouver, I thus automatically became a fan of Auckland, even though some patches seem pretty anonymous and things beyond the core appear to shutter surprisingly early. New Zealanders outside Auckland seem to harbor a certain low-level antipathy toward the place, but I imagine that, drunk, they'd admit to enjoying themselves there. If a project required me to live in Auckland for a year, I could easily do it.

Wellington is New Zealand's capital, and, while not quite as large as its big northerly brother (389,000 metro, more like 170,000 at the center), feels livelier. Several times, residents of neither Auckland nor Wellington informed me that Wellington is "better" than Auckland. In the sense that Wellington offers more galleries, late night cafés and record shops, it is indeed better than Auckland. (It's often called the "cultural capital," in addition to being the capital capital.) It's also significantly dirtier than Auckland, but then, do clean streets get you anything more interesting than a high spot on those eye-glazing "livability" rankings? If a project required me to live in Wellington for a year, I'd jump at the chance.

Christchurch I didn't have time for, but it looks neat.

Dundedin, "the Edinburgh of the south," was so cold that I felt as if I was treading on one large, windy witch's teat. I'm told, however, that the town's chilliest October on record recently finished, so the "summer" temperature might still have sat at an abnormal low. I was thus forced into the Dunedin Public Art Gallery for extended periods, which, with its collection of Japanese woodblock prints and current field recording-heavy exhibit and despite large chunks of it being closed, is coolsville. The building also hosts a miniature branch of the New Zealand Film Archive, which offers all sorts of local features, documentaries, commercials and shorts free to watch in either MPEG or VHS formats. I gorged myself on its despairing social realist and experimental film collections, where I happened upon William Keddell's The Maintenance of Silence, one of the finest shorts I've ever watched. (And I've watched, as it were, a pantload of shorts.) Alas, I can't find a copy of it anywhere else and Keddell himself abandoned filmmaking for stereography in the 80s.


4. New Zealand is the cradle of bungie jumping

And as such, it offers plenty of opportunities to attach oneself to a cord and leap from high edges. My impression is that you can get on a bungie and jump almost anywhere in the country, from intensely picturesque cliffs to cranes over urban supermarkets. We paid not one but two visits to Queenstown, the south island's extreme sports mecca, and while there I couldn't help but consider the enticements to go bungie off something.

Up until very recently I considered bungie jumping the exclusive ken of the overstimulated moron, but I've come around to see its appeal. It's all to do with confronting fears, and thus defeating them. Having arrived at the conclusion that I'll need to live a tad nore Nietzscheanly in order to accomplish what I'd like to accomplish, I should deliberately immerse myself in that which I fear just as I should deliberately eat superhuman amounts of that which I fear. Manually overrriding countless blaring mental and physical impulses by plunging an insane distance on purpose would seem to fit the bill.

But I didn't end up jumping, because it's too expensive. $175 NZD for ten seconds of freefall? Not in this lifetime. Then again, that too might be part of the appeal: who would go to a discount bungie jumping venue? Or maybe that's more of a thrill. I know little of these matters.




5. New Zealand has implausibly majestic scenery

I still don't quite believe it. I remain convinced that Doubtful Sound, in which we kayaked, is actually CGI projected onto a dome wall. They were going to use it as background in a movie but found it too over the top.


6. New Zealand is a tea-drinker's paradise

I first learned this on the (culinarily impeccable) Air New Zealand flight from LAX to Auckland, on which flight attendants walked the aisles with a pitcher of black tea in one hand, a pitcher of milk in the other. I learned it again when I saw the Auckland airport's "free tea" stand (which was closed because it was so early in the morning, but still). I learned it again when every hotel room I entered came stocked with plenty of tea bags and single-use packets of milk — not, I should stress, "non-dairy whitener." (Damn you, large and powerful lactose-intolerant lobby.) I continued to learn it when every single place at which I ate or stopped offered a decently wide selection of teas, always served with milk, a saucer and extra hot water. I once suspected that tea-delivered caffeine causes the headaches I sometimes get, but after this trip's tea megadosing and only one headache the whole time, I've scrapped that hypothesis. I'm first and foremost a scientist, people.


7. New Zealand is a secret German colony

The country is overrun by Germans, and they're not just tourists. One of them even served me a pizza. Another tried to find, but could not ultimately find, the Tabasco sauce. I learned some time ago that Germany had overtaken both Japan and the States as the chief global exporter of irritating, ostentatious travelers, but New Zealand's Teutonic visitors weren't awful, just shockingly numerous. I encountered more Germans than Aussies, and the behemoth to the west is suppose to be New Zealand's numero uno tourist supplier by far.

Perhaps other countries host an equally strong German presence, or perhaps the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's destruction got them in a traverler's-freedom mood. They may have come to New Zealand for its country-wide German film festival, a celebration of the primarily East German cinematic arts. While in Wellington, we managed to catch a screening of and Q&A about Andreas Dresen's excellent Grill Point, a completely improvised realistic yet absurdist film set in grim Frankfurt-Oder. As Dresen discussed his improvisational method and enthusiastically experimental approach to filmmaking, I realized I was in the presence of a pretty sharp dude. Eager to catch up on his allegedly volumnious oeuvre, I was crestfallen to find none of his work available on my rental service of choice. Thanks, Netflix!




8. New Zealand assigns one police car to each island

Speaking of cars, you can really drive them in New Zealand. Blasting past the aforementioned rolling hills, sheep, etc. at 145 km/h is not just an option, but the apparent norm. This may sound delusional to the Americans reading: "What, you mean there aren't speed traps every twenty miles?" I do mean that. I only spotted a handful of cop cars in the entire trip across the country, and I'm pretty sure I just saw the same two cars a few times. They've got distinctive blue-orange checkerboard pattern, so you can't really miss 'em.

This hands-off approach to the law appears to extend to other realms of human affair as well. Unlike many young people who go abroad, I do not now hate America, nor have I ever hated it. In fact, of all the grievances so frequently filed against the States, I share only one: its pervasive culture of litigation. Because I was not constantly being told where not to go or what not do to by New Zealand's officials and official signage, I assume its people do not bust out with huge lawsuits at the slightest provocation of their tender feelings. I have a feeling that when a Kiwi slips on some ice or spills hot coffee on his groin, his first instinct is not to demand financial restitution. It may be his third or fourth instinct, but felt on cloud nine about the fact that it didn't appear to be the default option.

See, for the foreigners reading, I know you've been told we Americans are supposed to be rugged, individualist settlers, but we're actually weeping babies. New Zealanders routinely back over children in their driveways — I learned from hotel TV that they've got the highest rate of that in the world — and take it like men.


9. New Zealand has one (1) black person

I saw him in Dunedin.




10. New Zealanders have a jones for lighthearted communist agitprop

In Auckland, we smoked cigars and drank beers at an all-red bar simply called "Lenin". We smoked cigars again at a Wellington coffee shop called "Fidel's", which has a bunch of Castro heads etched into its windows. I visited a similarly-themed bar called "Havana", which I understand is owned and operated by the same people. Wellington also has a communist cafe called "Pravda", which I lacked the time to check out. (Bizarrely, cigars themselves are terribly difficult to find in the city.) That these places all provided solid goods and services — Lenin's bartender was a tad on the surly side, though he appeared to be in the midst of breaking up with his girlfriend, who was standing right there — suggests that the commie fetish is purely an aesthetic tic from a place never really threatened by the reality of dialectical materialism. It's kinda like how Bryan Ferry thinks the Nazis had great suits. Still, something about this struck me as being in vaguely poor taste — you might as well open up a curry joint called "The Killing Fields".


11. New Zealand is probably not objectively better than the United States

"In New Zealand, I didn't have to remove my shoes, ditch my water bottle or sometimes even go through any kind of scanner at all before boarding a flight." "In New Zealand, you can pump your gas before giving your cash to the cashier, who actually speaks English." "In New Zealand, you can use the airport's luggage carts without putting money into a machine." "In New Zealand, no bums hassle you for change or even appear anywhere in your field of vision."

All these are true statements that an American traveler — and, more to the point, an Angeleno — might well utter, sill awestruck, upon returning from New Zealand. These qualities lead young backpackers and/or exchange students to act as if they're just about to renounce American citizenship and begin again in the antipodes' loving embrace. Caught up in foreign-land rapture, they forget the downside to living in one of Earth's most geographically isolated countries.




12. They're a friendly lot in New Zealand

Like many Americans abroad, I found the people of my target country to be almost uniformly friendly. (The colder types tended to turn out to be Australian.) Unlike many Americans abroad, I don't think of this as a stark contrast to the people of my source country. Pondering Kiwi friendliness leads me not to condemn the alleged untrusting, antisocial behavior of my countrymen but to think that, hey, the people with whom I interact in the states are pretty friendly too. We both got some nice folk in this here developed world, we do.

Now, I live in Southern California, which somewhere along the line got branded with the symbol for "teeming hotbed of self-absorbed A-holes." I routinely find myself on the fringes of debates about whether the hot bed of Southern California indeed teems with the self-absorbed, the A-holeish. While I usually vote for the motion that it doesn't, that's not exactly my stance on the situation. I would submit more that what self-absorbed A-holeishness exists in Southern California — and it's not the choking morass that's often claimed — rises as a by-product of its climate of ambition.

Whether they excel or are totally incompetent, a greater percentage of Southern Californians actively seek to to make something of themselves than of any other population in North America, except maybe NYC's. I would trade much away to be around ambitious people; the occasional ambitious jerkwad constitutes a small price indeed. Too often, I find that "friendly" (or its cousins "down to earth," "salt of the earth" and the dreaded "earthy") translates to "waiting to die." Outside the States' nexuses of ambition, where People Have Values And Treat Each Other Right, too many strike me as less concerned with recording sprawling concept albums than with putting on show chains. True, one's own answer to Tusk can't get one through a blizzard, but it's like the old proverb goes: better to die in a snow bank having recorded your sprawling concept album than to live without a sprawling concept album to your name.

So I'm not sure I could make anywhere outside a major media capital my Forever Home. (Let's leave aside for the moment my deep discomfort with the mere idea of a Forever Home.) New Zealanders seem happy, but (a) "happiness" is not so much my goal and (b) I can't shake the feeling that the truly ambitious mostly get out of the country as soon as they can. Leaving aside your Neil Finns and your Cliff Curtises, the evidence would seem to suggest that, like San Francisco, New Zealand, for all its perks, requires its natives to emigrate in order to come up in the world.

(But could I see myself becoming my generation's Alistair Cooke, broadcasting Letter from New Zealand on a regular basis for decades and decades and decades? Maybe.)




13. New Zealand's girls dress relatively well

This is a specific area in which New Zealand is indeed objectively better than the United States. As friends know, one of my most well-worn hobby horses is the squick-inducing development that, at least in this country, chicks dress kinda like dudes, or at least a lot of them do. (Not for nothing is the expression "to get into her pants" widely used and understood here.) Where others might rue the clouds of smog or endless highways that blight the landscape, I experience similar ill effects from, say, studded belts and hoodies. It's a pleasure-of-the-environment thing, like clean air but, I think, more important. While many of the junky fashion trends I see on a daily basis exist in New Zealand, the ambient aesthetic level of Kiwi girls in the 18ish-25ish age bracket is way higher.

What I first found notable, and what even more normal people would at least find noticeable, is that these New Zealand girls wear black tights with almost everything, regardless of outfitual context. This sounds like a recipe for sartorial disaster, but it actually works quite well. As for the men, I didn't pay their clothes much attention BECAUSE I'M NOT FREAKIN' GAY JEEZ.

(Actually, I normally pay much more attention to what the fellas wear than what the lasses do, because I can use what I learn from it. But New Zealand men dress, for the most part, unremarkably. I get the impression that a distinct suit culture has yet to take hold.)


14. New Zealand is ridiculously fun

In conclusion: A+, would visit again, and I haven't yet mentioned the food, which even on airplanes was delectable. Never again will I laugh at tired 1980s stand-up routines about airline meals.

A Commitment to Social Media

This reply to my New Zealand bleg, from Angela of Positively Wellington Tourism, is elaborate enough to deserve being re-posted in its entirety. Businesses with a Commitment to Social Media, take heed: this is how you do it. Not with a paragraph out of stock, semi-spam, self-linking "reply" file, but with this:

"I could not care less about the Things You Must See. Any landmark featured on a postcard does not require my presence."

Fair enough. Guess you won’t be dressing up as a bee and posing in front of the Beehive then.*

In terms of things not necessarily on the figurative Things You Must See list, but that you must in fact see/do I’d recommend:

- Havana coffee and the chocolate brownie at Deluxe on Kent Terrace
- Watching a movie at the Embassy Theatre (conveniently located next to Deluxe)
- Going to a play at Bats and/or Downstage
- Getting a barperson to read your cocktail personality at Matterhorn (nb: this isn’t actually an official tourism product – I’m just immensely indecisive when it comes to drinks of choice and luckily they’re skilled in the realm of tastebud reading)
- The Writers Walk
- The Sunday food markets
- Fidel’s Café on Cuba St
- Havana on Wigan St
- Sweet Mother’s Kitchen on Courtenay Place.

* People don't actually do this.


"Actually, I want to actively avoid most places tourists go. I care more about existing amidst NZ life as it's lived; I can see the damned Sky Tower on Google Earth. The one exception is museums, but I'd be going to those anyway, even if I lived near them. (Smaller art galleries I'm definitely interested in.)"

This is good. We have lots of museums. Te Papa is the national one, Museum of Wellington is the local one, and there’s a cricket one, a Cable Car one, a Katherine Mansfield one and probably some others.


"I will, at least some of the time, be carrying around field recording gear, so sonic richness is a plus."

For sonic richness of the urban variety, I’d suggest hanging out along the waterfront about 8am on a weekday. People transport themselves to work in a variety of ways here (bike, walk, rollerblades, skateboard, running etc) and it can make for quite an aurally interesting experience given the changing underfoot patterns of the developed infrastructure. For sound recording of the natural variety, do a night tour at ZEALANDIA – it’s a sanctuary about 10 minutes’ drive from the CBD and you can hear kiwi calls. The males are the high pitched ones and the females are of a lower vocal tone. Please note, I am talking about birds here, as in animals. Not 'Kiwis' as in the colloquial reference to people of New Zealand descent.


"I tend to prefer the built urban environment to the suburban or rural. But I realize that this is one of those breathtaking-majesty-of-nature countries, so I'm keeping my mind open like a well-functioning parachute. (It may say something that I'd originally considered doing the less nature-y north island only.)"

This is also good as ‘built urban environment’ is what Wellington does. Although one of our key marketing pillars is ‘nature close to the city’ and Wellington is in the North Island so I am somewhat concerned the ‘less nature-y’ reference means our marketing team need to step it up a bit. I’ll have a word. Wellington’s downtown is pretty small – read 2km in diameter – so I won’t tell you where to go, you’ll find it.


"I never made it to the second and third Lord of the Rings movies."

So the movie tour circuit probably isn’t going to be your thing. If you’re out Miramar way (which you probably won’t be as it’s quite suburban and I note you don't really do suburban or rural), go and have a coffee at Café Polo and check out the Weta Cave.

Art galleries and the like are listed on www.WellingtonNZ.com and we also run www.texture.co.nz when we've got our underground hat on. The latter is a good point of reference for music gigs that are on when you're in town.

We're also on Twitter at @Wellington_NZ if you want to be kept in the loop when you're about/on your way.

The more I hear about Wellington, the more intrigued I am. Even when what I hear comes from people, y'know, actively selling it and such. I still might want to dress as a bee, though. I'd probably have done that anyway, no matter the country.

Tea cozies

My New Zealand bleg drew some interesting responses. Reader/photographer Danielle King, who moved from Toronto to Auckland half a year ago, makes a bunch of recommendations, including:

Mt Eden. It's possibly the best view in the city. (And, yes, I've been up the Sky Tower). Great place to just relax and take in the views on a nice day. Weekdays are better since it can get busy with tourists on nice weekends.

The French Cafe. The best food I've ever eaten in my entire life. It's a little pricey but worth the splurge. Though I didn't try it, the degustation menu has been raved about by just about everyone I know.

You must have a flat white while you're here. If you don't like coffee, have a hot chocolate. They take their hot beverages seriously here and it shows. Everything's yummy.

Tyler Cowen himself says:

Eat fusion cuisine in Auckland and Wellington, Malaysian and Burmese food, fish and chips (of course), lamb, forget the beef and chicken 100 percent. Don't order them once.

I very much like Napier. Do "quaint" things, like shopping for tea cozies. Try to rent a cabin for a day or two away from a city. Drink their wacky fruit juices. Go for walks. Don't expect too much culture or good art to look at. The Pacific materials in the Auckland museum are superb, however.

Never am I un-down for fusion food. I hereby swear to avoid the beef and chicken. (One does not — does not — ignore this man's culinary recommendations.) I always plan to walk plenty, wherever I am, but I'll do even more in NZ, especially since I'll need to do quite a lot of it to get mobile field recordings. Despite the fact that I'm not sure what they are and will now have to visit Wikipedia to find out, I'll keep my eyes open for the country's finer, cheaper tea cozies.

From Ben Casnocha comes an argument that, considering how much more he's traveled than I have, merits consideration:

I've never gotten the "I don't want to see what tourists go to" thing. "Must-see" attractions are must-see for a reason. They are usually extraordinary. I also think that it's very hard to "experience life as a local would" when you are only passing by. Popular tourist destinations tend to be popular because they combine some element of localness with added elements of accessibility and entertainment. Most San Franciscans don't cross the Golden Gate Bridge very often. Most live at home and go to work in SF and then return to their home. This doesn't mean you shouldn't go to the GG Bridge.

Indeed, it's worth thinking about why, exactly, popular tourist destinations become popular tourist destinations in the first place. But at the same time, none of the popular tourist destinations I've visited thus far have done anything at all for me. The Golden Gate Bridge is, alas, a particularly unfortunate example: despite having seen it a bunch of times, I'm still not quite sure why it fires up everyone else's blood. This may all be a simple case of varying mileage, though. I wouldn't recommend that anyone else avoid tourist attractions, but they don't amount to much more than a daylight drain for me. (And I should add that I don't exactly want to "experience life as a local would"; I just want to exist in places where locals are experiencing their lives. If I wanted to live just like the locals, after all, I'd have to get a... job. Shudder.)

I recall an old post from forcemajeure — a fellow who has traveled not merely much more than I have but helluva much more than I have — which echoes astutely my own ideas about how to approach travel:

I love the experience of going someplace foreign and just experiencing daily life there. Some people go to see the sights, to visit the things you Simply Must See, but that's not me. I prefer integrating myself into the daily life of a place as much as I can, just absorbing the pace of life, the details. Crowding around some monument with a bunch of tourists so you can be photographed in front of it, proving you were there, holds no appeal for me. As a matter of principle, I almost always refuse to carry a camera when visiting a place. If you want to know what the Eiffel Tower looks like, buy a damn book. It looks just like that; take my word for it.

The travel memories I really treasure are those of ordinary moments. Girls in a pizza joint in Jerusalem trying out their English on me. Sitting in a café in Milan, watching pedestrians cheat death in an uncontrolled intersection. Helping an old lady I'd never met before carry her groceries into her fourth floor walkup in Prague. Strangers inviting my family to dinner in Buenos Aires. There's the occasional crisis, like when I was pickpocketed in Budapest, but those, too, become part of the experience you're looking for, if you let them.

And it also looks as if I must've subconsciously swiped a Comedically Proper-Nouned Phrase of his. Neat.

I'd be lying if I neglected to add that said I'm also somewhat influenced by the people I occasionally meet who return from what should be life-changing trips with little more to show for it than 700 JPEGs of themselves standing in front of various icons. (Rarely do I befriend these people.) It's the same reason I pare down my personal library: fear of artifact-collection drawing bandwidth from experience-absorption.

New Zealand bleg

This technique works for Tyler Cowen, so why wouldn't it for me? (Put aside the comparative size of our readerships, and the fact that Cowen could crush me like a blog-bug, for a moment.) I'll soon travel to New Zealand for a couple weeks, so Kiwi or Kiwiland-savvy readers, what neighborhoods/environments do you recommend I hang out in to get the maximum perspectival shift from my usual chillin'-in-the-U.S.A. mode? Bear in mind the following: I could not care less about the Things You Must See. Any landmark featured on a postcard does not require my presence. I will not personally be carrying around a camera, and thus will not need to visit anything in front of which tourists cluster and give the thumbs-up. Actually, I want to actively avoid most places tourists go. I care more about existing amidst NZ life as it's lived; I can see the damned Sky Tower on Google Earth. The one exception is museums, but I'd be going to those anyway, even if I lived near them. (Smaller art galleries I'm definitely interested in.) I will, at least some of the time, be carrying around field recording gear, so sonic richness is a plus. I tend to prefer the built urban environment to the suburban or rural. But I realize that this is one of those breathtaking-majesty-of-nature countries, so I'm keeping my mind open like a well-functioning parachute. (It may say something that I'd originally considered doing the less nature-y north island only.) I never made it to the second and third Lord of the Rings movies. I'll stop in Auckland, Rotorua, Napier, Wellington, Queenstown, Manapouri and Dunedin, with the most time spent, I believe, in Auckland, Wellington and Queenstown. * * * Speaking of Tyler Cowen and New Zealand, he once spent a year living in Wellington ("for me the single most beautiful city in the world") and wrote about his favorite things New Zealand. I most certainly look forward to the country's fish and chips, as well as its take on Burmese cuisine. Of course, Napier's all-art-deco construction intrigues me. Cowen's favorite Kiwi painter — one among a slow scene, he admits — is Colin McChahon, of whose stuff I tend to approve:

Travel is awesome

This weekend I Podthought about The Indie Travel Podcast, a useful, likable program that I stumbled upon while browsing the iTunes directory for New Zealand-y stuff. (It seems only appropriate that I prepare for my trip with podcasts.) Toward the mostly positive review's end, I add:

There's also an eerie cast of unreflectiveness to most of the voices heard on the podcast; while the participants are all respectable travelers, the tales of their journeys hew with shocking loyalty to flat, meaningless adjectives like "good," "great," "awesome," "cool," "mad" and "insane," rarely reaching beyond the surface. Painful as it is to hear Jeff Koons' Puppy described simply "enormous" and "weird," though, the fact remains that Craig and Linda have been to Bilbao to see it. Your Podthinker hasn't.

While the podcast's hosts and guests themselves are more eloquent than I give them credit for, the essential point holds. Listening, I was reminded of most of the serious travelers I've met — those who routinely take off for months at a stretch — and the yawning gap between how fascinated I am by their experiences and how fascinatingly they describe their experiences. How was hitchhiking through Belgium? "Oh, it was cool." That trip on the Orient Express? "It was great!" The surreptitious sojourn into North Korea? "Awesome."

This seemingly willful refusal to draw anything from travel experiences beyond the most basic verbal renderings of those experiences has always surprised me. My standard joke has been to invoke the weatherbeaten Australian globetrotter who, constantly in motion, vigorously zigs and zags from unusual international experience to unusual international experience yet has absolutely nothing to say about any of them except that they were right fun. I hesitate to get stereotypical, but it I'll admit to being archetypal; these characters pop up with surprising regularity. (The Indie Travel Podcast's hosts are New Zealanders rather than Australians, Kiwis rather than Aussies; perhaps that's why they're that much better at talking about their trips.)

When I wrote that Travel People don't have much to show for it, I didn't just mean that they don't have a lot of souvenirs. If anything, I'm anti-souvenir — anti-trinket of any kind, reallly — myself. In a few too many of the cases I've seen, the impoverishment appears to extend to the mind as well as to the possessions. I'm not asking for navel-gazing, but is the smallest degree of probing really to much to ask? Then again, maybe they've got it right and I've got it wrong; the zen Buddhist literature I've been wolfing down recently pushes hard for direct experience, unmonitored by a divided mind. So I don't know what to believe.