I walked round Back Beach and environs to pick up most of these images. The little bay is chock a block with benevolent decrepitude and the people who either don't mind it, don't notice or don't regard it as such. I'm on the fence myself; bone lazy, no great lover of progress for its own the sake, but sometimes perplexed at the extent to which peeps will let something slide. Perversity cracks a strange whip, driving its troika of conflicting impulses ever onwards and sideways. Sometimes when you love something, you have to let it go, apparently.
Back Beach is a weird little semi-feudal demesne type situation presided over by tinkering boat fanciers (real and pretend) and looking somewhat like my idea of coastal Norway on a bad day in a bad year. Things get worse as you approach the commercial container and log port at the northern end; well, I say approach, but we're not really allowed to any more because terrorists.
They're everywhere.
This is the third portion of this expansive whole; catch up on the first lot of images and commentary here and the second here if you've got ten minutes to burn.
Back Beach is a weird little semi-feudal demesne type situation presided over by tinkering boat fanciers (real and pretend) and looking somewhat like my idea of coastal Norway on a bad day in a bad year. Things get worse as you approach the commercial container and log port at the northern end; well, I say approach, but we're not really allowed to any more because terrorists.
They're everywhere.
This is the third portion of this expansive whole; catch up on the first lot of images and commentary here and the second here if you've got ten minutes to burn.
| RIGHT a floating A directs the streams of human ballast cruise ship passengers from their e coli infested bilge belching floating feedlots commercial vessels onto the ugly industrial wharf, on their way into Dunedin and beyond. Where they can be relieved of their discretionary income via 3xs overpriced day trips and Chinese local knitwear. You may detect ambivalence in my attitude toward this 5 month influx, but after ten long years I would not care if I never saw another slack-jawed gawp, plastic visor or item of off-white leisure wear in my entire fucking life. Make of that what you will. |  |
ABOVE beer bottle BELOW costa line
 |  Ah, maritime rust. The salty kiss of the ceaseless waves and eventual smiter of all ferrous conceits. |
 ABOVE container mountain and crevasse, Port Otago. They stack them so high in NZ that dock workers perish in the process until someone complains that they're blocking their view. RIGHT NO GOOD / OK / VOLVO. Industrial tyres at the port. |  |
 RIGHT emulsion fatigue on an old shipping container. Any time violent orange peers through tasteful grey is a joyous occasion. | LEFT boat shed detail, Back Beach. Some of this is tagging. Some of it is... maintenance? Some of it is indecision. Some is weather-related. But when I appreciate stuff like this as a whole, I just can't help but think that beauty is an ambush predator, a gorgeous visual fer de lance lurking where we least expect it. This inadvertent montage pleases me greatly. If I was trying for something like this myself, I'd never get there.  |
 |  |
ABOVE LEFT MmmMmmMmmcontainer stack detail. ABOVE RIGHT commercial port stuff.
ABOVE Pinus radiata logs mounded in ponderous sheaves on the Port wharf, destined for Asia, which seems to have an insatiable appetite for this mediocre softwood. It's a N American species that grows like a weed here, to the extent that it threatens what remains of our native forest. The stupidity of the average NZ landowner's drooling love of monoculture and the lowest common denominator boggles the fucking mind, it really does.
 | LEFT the eternally vacant franchise sign that looms over the local petrol station. I walk past this scene nearly every day and it's had a profound subconscious effect, to the extent that I consider this arrangement a personal metaphor. If I ever generate a coat of arms, it'll feature empty sign sinister. With ermines rampant. |
RSS Feed
