| Maximo Park Diary Entries |
| These are diary entries by Maximo Park members from the Official Maximo Park Website. |
Tucson |
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| 28 Sep, 2005 |
I walked around Tucson, as I had promised myself. Mostly, I find myself struck by the similarities between my own town and that of others, wherever we find ourselves. Solicitors and General Practices had been set up in houses, althoughyou rarely see large cacti blossoming in an English back garden, as there were
here.
I continued up a street called Alameda in the heat and I recalled the Elliott Smith song of the same name. The tallest buildings in town peered over the rest of the skyline, as if embarrassed at their presence. In a lot of other US cities, there are a ton of giant structures that stretch proudly into a grateful sky, but I sensed something different here. Maybe it is right that the civic buildings and banks stay low, in keeping with the housing around here, which betrays the Mexican heritage of this border region.
I wandered through orange archways beneath richly patterned domes, past a park that had lost the water for its intricately mosaiced fountain. The hotdog sellers were just setting up and scratching their brows, adjusting to work in the morning warmth. Their stained, steel signs and metal carts shared the same
world weary sighs as they creaked their way along to the familiar patch of dry concrete that had been allotted to them.
The main square that provides a gateway to the rest of downtown Tucson, has a sculptural public seating area, made up from mangled, red metal that zig zags around in loops like a giant bedspring manipulated by Marinetti, the Futurist artist. Even the multi-storey car parks were coloured-in, bearing purples and yellows with the faded mountains lurking in the background, as if to reinforce nature's overall dominance of this part of the world.
The road got dustier as I plodded onwards and the buildings became moreresidential again. I saw a lot more car parks, only this time they were at street level and their surfaces were all cracked gravel. Populated by just a smattering of cars, I could look across them and see the regular patterns made
by the faint white dividing lines. They looked like a collection of worn-out book covers that you might find in a skip. I remember once finding a shop in Scarborough that had loads of ancient Penguin books dealing with science and social issues and their front covers were quite sparse but with bits of collage or clean, straight lines symbolising the subject.
In the heat, a woman and a man approached me to ask if I had any money to spare for them. As an example of their poverty, the man waved a small cylinder of Pringles and told me this was their only meal. Both of them had dark brown, leathery skin and straggly hair like a lot of destitute people I have seen in
the warmer states of the USA. I had only taken my camera with me so I held my arms open and showed the pair that I had nothing to give them. The thin, bearded man picked up on my accent and asked where I was from and the woman sprang into life when she heard I was English. She was wearing a grubby denim jacket and she told me she had lived in Newbury as a child because her father was an officer stationed there. The man, who was holding an orange can of pop, said good luck and stretched out two of his available fingers to touch my hand.
I walked on. At a curve, I decided to turn around, walking back past cars for sale and slim, Christian figurines staring from windowsills.
Paul |
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