Bubble-Punching
New Plymouth / Wellington City-Watching Field Notes March 2025
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”1
I’m tinkering with a rantifesto on art (watch this space!) but in the meantime, here are some city-watching stories, mostly from the last fortnight.
On the commuter train watching a lean & hungry bureaucrat opposite. He finishes watching news videos & starts watching eating videos: a dark-bearded guy in a baseball cap, not fat, steadily putting away huge quantities of food. Multiple breakfasts— a dome of something: a huge cake or pudding, maybe?— a dozen burgers… One video ends & another begins & then another, over-consumption of over-consumption, gluttony for entertainment & to me it seems embarrassingly obscene, like so American, basically food porn. It’s so weird how people in public act like their screens can't be seen.
In the pub in New Plymouth I saw a kid propped up at the bar while the adults talked & drank. The kid was glued to a device & on the screen was a slick-looking kid frenziedly eating glazed donuts— that hypervideo look, saturated colour, speeded up, exaggerated expressions— I could tell it was meant to be funny but it horrified me, both the artefact itself & the kid’s watching of it, it made me feel cold inside & sick for the world. Zeitgeist.
Then at dinner Vanessa told about a friend who indulged in an anti-sugar rant right after she had just eaten two pieces of Vanessa’s lemon meringue pie. Exc-use me! That made me remember the woman at Hogmanay. I told Vanessa how earlier on in the night I had heard her lecturing other women on the evils of sugar, how you should never eat it. Then a bit later on I found myself sitting beside her on the couch & we had a good drunken conversation; our first conversation ever, really. I had never seen her less than strictly self-controlled, & I found I liked her a lot more when she was a bit messy. She ranted to me about her childhood & men & things. After midnight we were both still at the party, & she was ranting to the table at large now, pouring more champagne into a glass but also spilling some over the leftover food. Small hours of the infant year, by that stage she had no more fucks left, zero fucks.
Later I found out her day job is dark things & I thought, fair play, if anyone’s entitled to get good & fucked up… Maybe she was upset about it in the morning, but at the time the storm of her cutting loose felt powerful to me, the mess righteous. Sometimes the poison needs to be purged.
“Well,” said Vanessa, in a philosophical tone: “I’m glad they got to express their bestial natures.”
A pukeko crossing the road, stalking rapidly into a run, made me think of the ghosts of birds, how it would be to see a small moa crossing the track.
Ploughed field / brown corduroy
The greens of my two inks. Moss green & cactus green. The green of Caitlin’s toenail polish somewhere in between. Is green linear, though— can one green be said to be between two others— or is it a spectrum, a field? What shape does the family tree of greenness take?
The blind law professor in You Can’t Ask That,2 who, when they asked him if you could see one thing in the world, what would it be, said a printed page. As he spoke he reached his hands forward into the air in front of him as if that’s where the words were. Then he told about how when he was five or six he loved going to the graveyard; it was one of his special treats, because he could feel the words on the stones with his hands.
The other guy, younger (who explained his sight as if you put your fists in front of your eyes, then imagine the peripheral vision as looking through a sheet of glass that’s been sandblasted) said he’d see his kids’ faces. The older guy considered that idea, but said he knew his wife & kids, & seeing them wouldn’t change his knowing of them— he still wanted to see the printed page. He’d written a book, in the old days, by memory: by typing on a typewriter, remembering what he’d already written.
From the bus window, against the evening sea, women walking. There’s a baby riding on its Grandmother’s shoulders with its arms out like wings, eyes squinted against the wind. As the bus passes my eyes are still on them, I’m a comet passing a planet, & a tiny dark pigtail appears around the corner of the baby’s head, this little plaited quill, sticking out behind, silhouetted against the silver sea.
The bus is stopped at the lights on Willis Street when a grey mouse puppet appears at the bus window, right by my face. I lift my head from the pillar & look down the hand’s arm into the face of a laughing man. His raucous laugh rises up through the bus window like an Australian bird call. He’s merry & bald & wearing green & on his other arm is a faded tattoo that I think is of Wile E. Coyote. I’m laughing back down & he’s draped his elbow over the window now, so that the mouse-glove’s head is hidden inside the door. Looking down from above I can see that his car is full of crap, piled on the passenger seat & dashboard: I see a cheese grater. The lights change & he floors it, speeding away laughing, wiggling his grey-clad little finger in midair, making the mouse wave bye-bye.
In Te Awe library a tiny serious young woman is eating sardines out of a can with her fingers. Her black hair is parted down the middle & she wears huge square glasses. She holds the can close to her mouth, just under & in front of her chin, with her other hand. I don’t dare to look too much because she’s seen me watching her, but out of the corner of my eye I see her suck the fish-oil from her tiny fingers, delicate as twigs.
The impossibility of describing a bird’s cry (which is really a tune) in words.
Tween boy on the bus touching his top lip with the side of his forefinger. Is it something to do with shaving? Then the sun touches his profile from behind and lights up the fuzz halo. Baby rabbit. He rides two stops along the ridgeline & disembarks, thanking the bus driver in a croaky voice. Frog. Heron.
A trailer full of furniture bumping along Willis Street behind a car, mattress wedged in, chest of drawers, & a large Monstera, its leaves fluttering like banners, what does it think as it travels in its open wagon, no roof or walls, sudden stimulus, sky, wind, heat, light.
Into Jack Hackett’s to look for Will, who said he might be here. Everyone looks at me because of my green sequined jacket. A boy seated near my elbow twists one fist over the other in the manner of opening a bottle & his fists emit pops like the rupture of the metal linkages between cap & ring, but the effervescent sound goes on too long & I look down & he looks up into my face, young handsome dark moustache & goatee & he’s laughing & I see what’s in his grip is actually a small roll of bubblewrap & I laugh & we both laugh, he shared his bubblewrap with me just for fun, not the feel but the sound, he shared half of the joy.
Cubadupa, Sunday evening. Disliking the intermittent showers of flung crushed ice inside the Laundry / Fishmarket mashup zone (the ice came out of a fish-crate, & also it has made the ground underfoot very wet), I try to take shelter under an inflatable shark, which proves inadequate, so I flee to the street, where bubble-blowing flower-crowned young hippies are dancing next to, then with, a magnificent pair of silver-fox dykes in full regalia. Everyone is filming themselves & each other. Everybody dance now! I don't want the bubbles to touch me, but aside from that, I feel fine; great, even. A curly baby has arrived, standing bowlegged on the tarmac of the street, which is probably still warm, the baby’s eyes get round with awe, it begins bouncing & clapping, enraptured by the bass, the colourful people, the bubbles.3 The sun is almost down behind the roofs, & backlit by its old gold a shaggy-haired kid in a striped jumper leaps repeatedly, punching bubbles.
I’m singing at Pyramid Club this Friday in support of Lancashire ballad-singer Jennifer Reid. Looking forward to it!
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
An excellent Australian TV show on Netflix
While I was at Cubadupa I remembered that last year I also wrote about the babies, here:
What Thou Art Now, I Was
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts: “On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”
You are singing in support of Ye Jennifer! Wow. I did not yet know you sang. Have a great gig.
Also ploughed fields / brown corduroy - lovely. In Devon, they are red velvet.
Also, also, love the new wordmark.
Needed this, deeply. Thank you for letting us ride along with you. ps - I’d like to think the shape of the green family is arterial, plant lung-ish.