Pete A. Nicholson
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Sunday, Aug 15, 2010
Life During Wartime
Oh, neglected blog. I feel like I owe you an apology. So here goes: I was sick, and then on tropical vacation, then I was sick again, only this time more violently. In the midst of this second round of sickness came the Melbourne International Film Festival, that most trusty staple of the antipodean winter.
Feeling like utter shit made the stakes somewhat higher for this year’s festival: the sheer willpower it took to leave my hovel and find my way through the cold to the city meant that if a film was balls, as several of my MIFF selections inevitably are, I felt like I had failed myself in some terrible, irrevocable way; that I might never make it home again, stuck in some Faraway Tree-bardo of biting winds and overwrought foreign cinema, my face hot and my snacks gone.
As ever, though, a few films made it entirely worth it, with one in particular reaching parts of me I wasn’t even sure existed. But more on that later.
I started off, or at least tried to, with Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz’s sequel of sorts to his morbid and wonderful Happiness, which might still be the blackest comedy I’ve ever seen. I really wanted to see this one, so much so that I almost passed out trying to leave the house. I decided it was safer to watch it at home, where I could sweat and shiver in peace. (Thanks, internet.)
Life During Wartime features many of the same characters as the original but they are, with one exception, played by different actors. (Solondz makes no attempt to find actors who resemble the old ones; indeed, he seems to delight, as he did in Palindromes (2004), in finding characters that look strikingly different from their earlier incarnations: Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character from Happiness is played here by Michael K. Williams, who played Omar in The Wire; Jon Lubitz’s cameo is reprised by Paul Reubens, better known for his work as Pee Wee Herman.)
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Sunday, Jul 18, 2010
It's Time To Agree On Some Things
Why do we have to fight for gay marriage instead of using our energies to end nuclear proliferation and poverty? Why has egalitarianism got us so confused that we feel like we have to admit all ideas into debate, no matter how obviously delusional?
Sam Harris, a neuroscientist and one of the world's bravest critics on exoteric religious nuttery, recently spoke at TED about how we might agree on all things moral, and the profound difference this would make. A sobering and great talk.
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Monday, Jul 5, 2010
A Man and a Unicorn, Alone on a Mountain Top
Image: Arklahomahiker
Unicorn: Is there any more booze?
Man: I'm pretty sure that's the last of it.
Unicorn: Fuck.
Man: Come on, man. You don't need drink. It's so fucking beautiful up here. Look at the stars for chrissakes.
Unicorn: Great. Stars. I see them every fucking night. Do you get a hard on for your bedroom ceiling? No. What I'd give for a night of smog. Just a whole sky of grey nothing.
Man: Maybe you need to get away for a while, bro. Might help you learn to love this place again.
Unicorn: You fucking people are the worst.
Man: What fucking people?
Unicorn: You fucking people.
Man: I don't know if I follow you there, bro.
Unicorn: Let me level with you, bro. I'm a unicorn. I didn't choose to be one. In fact, if I had the choice, I would almost certainly choose to be something else, something dull and insignificant and blue-collar, like a maggot or a fucking bee. This horn here isn't just for decoration. It makes me extremely fucking sensitive. I can tell a fucking asshole coming into this park from ten miles away. And every time you come up here, trying desperately to wash yourself of the horrors of your meaningless, plasma-screened, fluorescent-lit life, it's like a goddamn punch in the face.
Man: Shit, bro. I had no idea. I just--
Unicorn: Of course you didn't. That's the problem with you fuckers. Right now I'm guessing you're feeling a heaviness in your torso, a sensitivity to the fact you're steadily pissing away your humanity, that there might not be much left. But tomorrow, you'll wake up and see a fucking double rainbow or something, and you'll come in your pants. Then you'll get in your little fucking car and drive back to your eco-condo reminding everyone how fucking liberating it is to be at one with fucking nature. But, my dear balding, cargo-panted friend, you ain't at one with shit. Every time you come up here, you take a fucking dump on nature's head. And there ain't enough flies in the forest to clean that shit up.
Man: Sorry, did you say there's going to be a double rainbow in the morning? I've always wanted to see one of those. I saw one in a dream once, but it felt more like double vision. You've got me all excited. I'm gonna call it a night so I can get up nice and early.
Unicorn: You do that.
Man: K, thanks bro. Hope you feel better soon.
Unicorn: Yeah. Thanks.
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Saturday, Jun 26, 2010
Four Records From The (Almost) Canon
This piece originally appeared in Issue One of Stop Drop and Roll. It was written in 2006.
Sun City Girls: Torch of the Mystics
Majora, 1990
On an Indonesian boat trip in 1989, the Sun City Girls borrowed some equipment from the boat's lounge band, saying they wanted to play a short set. The audience clapped politely as the Girls rolled through a set of Sumatran pop, stop-start improv-skronk and a few trashed covers of American standards. The performance--which, like almost everything the SCG have done, later surfaced on a recording--features a local, at one point during the set, exclaiming to a friend, 'Ah, this is American jazz!'
Scruffy looking desert kids from Phoenix, SCG began playing open mic nights in the early eighties, bewildering audiences with their mix of unhinged improvisation, obscuro exotica and performance art, their incredible racket combining musical wizardry with self-indulgent trash, often within the space of a single song. They made a business of defying expectations; the Girls were known to execute note-perfect covers of Jodorowski's El Topo soundtrack, then, a few nights later, sit on stage with cheap mics imitating hobos for an hour while their soundman danced like a tramp behind them.
Behind the Girls' bizarre and sometimes caustic public persona, though, lies a serious love of the Orient; a love that somehow manages to marry vulgar Americana with elements of Eastern esotericism. The Girls' affection for the East has led Alan and Rick Bishop, the brothers at the heart of the group, to spend a few months each year traipsing through the third world, recording the sounds of themselves and others, often dropping the resulting tapes into local milk bars.
While their Indonesian audience recognised something of the Girls' kinship with jazz's innovation and improvisation, for a long time no one in their home country knew quite what to make of them. Indeed, until the release of the out-masterpiece Torch of the Mystics in 1990, a lot of people thought the SCG were merely an elaborate post-punk joke. They could be forgiven--the Girls' immense discography includes literally hundreds of recordings that run through free jazz, hushed folk balladry, campfire babbling, spastic gamelan, astral-pop and terrible classic rock covers; album titles include Horse Cock Phephner, Dante's Disneyland Inferno and 330,003 Cross-Dressers From Beyond the Rig Veda.
There has always been a conviction to the Girls, though--a trueness of heart, some have said--that, to many, only began to become truly obvious with Torch of the Mystics, an immensely charming, delirious distillation of their obsession with the East.
To this day, I can't understand more than a few words on the record (much of it is just cooing and screaming). But there is a wizardry at work here that affects me in the way few records do. 'Space Prophet Dogon'--presumably a paean to somebody we are not yet lucky enough to meet--is quite possibly the most ecstatic song I've ever heard: tangled vines of Richard Bishop's incredibly loose, virtuosic Eastern-tinged riffing tailed by Alan's spidery bass and utterly wild, almost wordless yelping; the whole thing underpinned by drummer Charles Gocher's magnificent, spastic pounding.
According to long-time out-rock writer Byron Coley, we have the Girls to thank for the diversity of modern underground music. 'Without these french-fried, grass-skirted motherfuckers,' he wrote, 'it would all sound like Merzbow.'
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Thursday, Jun 17, 2010
Hetfield vs. Science
In mid 1981, Danish-born drummer Lars Ulrich put a classified ad in a Los Angeles newspaper, 'looking for other metal musicians to jam with.' One of the respondents was 18-year-old guitarist and singer James Hetfield, then in the band Leather Charm. In October, they officially formed Metallica, a thrash metal band.
In 2009, popular software company Microsoft launched Songsmith, a musical accompaniment program. The first program of its kind, Songsmith allows users to enter a vocal track, to which the program automatically generates what it thinks is the most appropriate backing music.
That same year, Hetfield the metal singer met Songsmith the digital accompaniment program. The resulting 'jam', which you can hear below, pairs Hetfield's desperate howl about a man facing the electric chair with a decidedly upbeat midi groove.
If you listen closely, it sounds as if Hetfield is lost in the machine, and the machine is telling him: 'You're at the fair, James! Why not just enjoy yourself! Why do you keep screaming?' But Hetfield, alas, cannot hear the machine: he knows, somewhere deep inside him, that the machine is trying to kill him.
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Monday, Jun 14, 2010
Recent Spam, Reviewed
I receive lots of comments on this blog. Ninety-nine per cent of them are from robots, or people posing as robots. Let’s take a closer took at eight of them.
Name: Seth Gerla
Commenting on: Stephen O’Malley & Attila Csihar: 6°FSkyquake
Advertising: Cat food discount codes
Comment: Thank-you to the men and women overseas fighting for our freedom and for helping these lovely kitties
Review: Honest and open-hearted, but lacks clarity. It’s unclear both how our brave servicemen and women are helping these lovely kitties, and which kitties Mr. Gerla is referring to.Name: jordan shoes
Commenting on: May Day, Eyjafjallajökull
Advertising: Footwear
Comment: Thanks for this article. It give me new spirit to continue my blogging journey.
Review: As general as it is benign, Mr. Shoes’s uplifting comment at first filled me with a gentle warmth. But then I got to thinking: could it be my spirit he’s using to continue his blogging journey? That might explain those recent gnawing feelings of emptiness I’ve been having.Name: Lawn Care
Commenting on: Deerhoof
Advertising: Top Soil
Comment: @Marco I know what your mean. In the current economy its tough to find a career that pays good and is stable . I have discovered that if you just work hard and are consistent you can go places . Look at the writer of this article, they are clearly hard working and have just been consistent over time and are now enjoying at least what would appear as somewhat of a success. I would encourage everyone to just keep hustling and moving forward.
Review: Mr. Care offers some sage, everyman advice here. But I am not sure Marco is listening.Name: Rey Fossa
Commenting on: Sir Richard Bishop
Advertising: Cyber Knife
Comment: Definitely agree with that which you stated. Your explanation was certainly the easiest to recognise. I say to you, I usually get irked when folks discuss problems that they plainly don’t know about. You managed to kick the nail directly on the pinnacle and explained out everything without complication. Maybe, people normally takes an indication. Will probably return to get more. Thanks.
Review: Mr. Fossa is really talking from the heart. He knows it’s not easy to kick the nail directly on the pinnacle, which is why he will probably return to get more.Name: Hindi Sms
Commenting on: F#A#Infinity
Advertising: Indian SMS
Comment: Thank you for this amazing list of ringtones. hope you post fresh ringtones everytime their is an new release. I am actually happy as i have the best quality ringtones then my friends. You rock mate.
Review: The Australian touch at the end — mate — is nice. It reminds me, in an odd kind of way, of those slideshow ads you see in the more dubious corners of the interwebs, the ones with comely lasses from your neighbourhood ONLINE AND WAITING FOR YOU RIGHT NOW. There was one thing that confused me, though: if Mr. Sms and his friends already have the best quality ringtones, what use is my amazing list to them?Name: Otilia Mclennon
Commenting on: 40 Years of The War On Drugs
Advertising: Forex Strategy Site
Comment: you two rally make a lovely couple.
Review: Some of these may actually be posted by people — probably the same ones who respond to those ads you sometimes see attached to power poles that say ‘EARN SIX FIGURES FROM HOME.’ Ms. Mclennon, however, is clearly a robot, and a poor one at that. Unless she thinks I’m one of the black dudes in the South Bronx photo, and that the other one is my lover. In which case, Otilia, I apologise.Name: money affiliate
Commenting on: The Food Pyramid
Advertising: Make Money With Affiliate Program
Comment: Ronaldo is the only wits I like the world cup if he does not play the world cup spirit is gone for me .
Review: It saddens me that Mr. Affiliate cannot find any wits to like now Ronaldo is too old to play in the World Cup. One can only hope that over the next several weeks he is able to rediscover the same wits/spirit in something or someone else.Name: Adena Boggioni
Commenting on: Five Small Ways To Ward Off The Apocalypse (Part 1)
Advertising: Kids Socks Wholesale
Comment: Hi,what a good shirt,thanks for sharing.I will get one like that.bill
Review: Technology is developing all the time — apparently fast enough for some robot or stay-at-home mum in Delaware to see what I’m wearing. Thankfully, with the power of the internet, a cheap, faithful replica is likely only a few clicks away.
Photo: melody am
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Tuesday, Jun 8, 2010
Lou Reed Talks To The Press
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Friday, Jun 4, 2010
40 Years of The War On Drugs
South Bronx, early 1970s
A few years ago, I began editing and rewriting the autobiography of a man named Cheech Marrero. The project just fell into my lap; I had never met Cheech before a mutual friend handed me the unwieldy collection of interviews I was asked to turn into his life story.
Cheech, a Puerto Rican New Yorker who lived most of his later life in California, had tried to write his story a number of times, mostly because people who knew parts of it told him he had to. For Cheech, though, mustering the same enthusiasm was always difficult; as I would discover as the project went on, he was possessed of a genuine and deep humility that made the process of trawling through the details of his life uncomfortable for him.
Cheech died last year, after a short battle with liver cancer. He was 75. His story, which will hopefully be published later this year, was full of remarkable battles. He was twice jailed for crimes he didn’t commit, the first time when he was 15; in his second stint, facing life, he taught himself law, tracked down the person who committed the crime he was accused of, and got himself released.
At the end of his second stint inside, Cheech underwent training in addiction therapy. When he got out, he returned to the Hunts Point area in the South Bronx, where he had grown up, and put these new skills to use, working tirelessly to improve the desperate situation of the community’s residents.
At the time, drug addiction and gang violence were rife throughout the South Bronx; Cheech said that the average life expectancy for most kids was eighteen or nineteen. Puerto Ricans in the area had the highest rates of drug addiction anywhere in the world.
‘The population density of the Southeast Bronx — 500,000 people crammed into 5 sq. mi. — is among the nation’s highest,’ a Time article from 1972 read.
‘Housing, health care, employment and education are woefully substandard. Fifty percent of the children under six have never been immunized against polio. Forty percent of the area’s families are on welfare. More than 10% of residents between 15 and 44 are heroin addicts. Says one of Mayor John Lindsay’s minority specialists: “The Puerto Rican experience in New York has been a total disaster.”’
South Bronx, 1980
The battle to turn things around, Cheech and his associates found, needed to be fought on two fronts: they needed to go after the corrupt politicians who were stealing or misusing all the funds meant for the area, and they needed to stop the supply of drugs coming into the community.
The South Bronx streets were flooded with amphetamines, which Cheech and his associates soon traced back to a number of major pharmaceutical companies. These companies, they found, were basically giving drugs away: procuring them was about as hard as ordering a pizza.
One company, Cheech said, ‘was producing over 140 million barbiturates and amphetamines a month… Any one of us with nothing more then a resale number could, by simply calling an 800 number, order and receive these drugs very cheaply, reselling them on the streets at 10 or more times their cost.’
Cheech and his associates’ first plan of attack was to appeal to the companies themselves. They called each of the companies and told them what was happening. Each time, they were told that their concerns would be taken seriously, and that someone would get back to them. No one ever did.
The next step was to raise their concerns with the Narcotics Commission, who proved similarly unhelpful. Realising they had to change the game, Cheech and co. started contacting producers and anchormen from major TV news shows. A number of networks showed interest in running an exposé on the pharma companies. Within a week, Cheech was informed that funding for the rehabilitation programs he and his organisation had set up — the only programs of their kind in America at the time — was being ‘reviewed,’ and was now threatened.
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Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Jesus Approaches Man, Asks For Treehouse
Here is what your treehouse might look like if your Dad was a gifted and eccentric Japanese renaissance man, who lived near the beach and liked to build things out of driftwood:
Here’s what it might look like if your Dad was a Korowai tribesman, who build their houses ridiculously high up in trees to ward off mosquitoes and rival clans:
And here’s what it might look like if your Dad was a fundamentalist Christian from Tennessee named Horace, who was granted a vision from Jesus of a treehouse, perfect in its detail, that he would spend the next fourteen years building:
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Sunday, May 23, 2010
Five Small Ways To Ward Off The Apocalypse (Part 2)
Step Two: Less Juice For Faux-Foods
Picture it: a freezing railway platform on the outskirts of a large city. It’s late evening, and all the trains have stopped for the night. There’s hasn’t been anyone around for a couple of hours now. But something stirs: in an alcove, just by the ticket machine, sit four brightly lit vending machines, quietly whirring to each other in the frozen night.
Just fifty metres away, across the tracks, are the even brighter lights of a convenience store. Inside, toward the back, are a wall of fridges full of the same drinks and chocolate bars that the vending machines carry. Like the vending machines, the store, as it proudly says on the sliding doors, ‘never closes’. There are another two of these stores within 200 metres.
It’s the middle of winter, and no one has bought a drink from the vending machines for almost a week now; the convenience store is lucky to sell more than a few each day. In that time, they have together used enough energy to heat twenty houses.
This is luxury: having anything you want, any time you want it. Even if no one wants it. Vending machines and convenience store fridges are always on, no matter what the season, or the number of people likely to make use of them. For the most part, they cool products that don’t require refrigeration to remain consumable. Indeed, most of these products are so full of mysterious compounds and chemicals they would likely outlast the vending machines and fridges themselves. We cool them simply because we find them more pleasing that way.
Of all the first world countries, no one exemplifies this victory of convenience over common sense better than the Japanese. In Japan, a country of 127 million people, there is one vending machine for every 23 people. It’s not uncommon to wander down a back alley in a Japanese city and come across seven or eight of them, each selling more or less the same things, lined up alongside one another. So what does all this add up to?
The electricity required to power Japan’s 5,582,200 vending machines over the course of a year is roughly equivalent to Bangladesh’s annual power consumption.^ (As a comparison, Australia has around 110,000 refrigerated vending machines, or one for every 180 people; America around three million, or one for every 100 people.) When you add convenience stores to that figure—Japan, though admittedly an extreme case, has more than 42,000 of them—you’re likely wasting enough juice to power several other countries in the region.
It would be unrealistic, even with the kind of freewheeling dreaming I’m allowing myself here, to think that we might be able to curb the sales or wider availability of the products typically sold in vending machines and convenience store fridges in the foreseeable future. But it is entirely reasonable to think that we might limit the enormous amounts of power they currently account for.
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy!
Faux-celebrity douches take note: if you’re going to do a feud, do it properly. Ideally, go into the jungle and duke it out until you’re actually in a position to kill each other.
That’s what Werner Herzog, the legendary German director, and Klaus Kinski, his leading man and chief tormentor, did in the early 1980s, when they headed deep into the Peruvian jungle to film Fitzcarraldo, a film about a music loving dreamer who tries to haul a steamboat over an Amazonian mountain.
Fitzcarraldo, like pretty much every film the two made together, involved death threats and screaming and allegations from both sides of psychosis and torment. Herzog, as you might imagine, was typically the more measured of the two, but he could still bring it: as you’ll read after the jump, he eventually said that he should have had Kinski killed when he had the chance.
Kinski, for his part, in his white-hot (and eventually recalled) autobiography, Kinski Uncut, said of Herzog: ‘He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It’s no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.’
Years later, Herzog, speaking in My Best Fiend, his documentary on his relationship with Kinski, took up his right of reply:
‘Kinski’s fits can partly be explained by his egocentric character. Egocentric is perhaps not the right word; he was an outright egomaniac. Whenever there was a serious accident, it became a big problem because, all of a sudden, he was no longer the center of attention. He was no longer important.
[On the set of Fitzcarraldo], a lumberman was bitten by a snake while cutting a tree. This was the most dangerous snake of all. It only takes a few minutes before cardiac arrest occurs. He dropped the saw and thought about it for five seconds and then he grabbed his saw again and cut off his foot. It saved his life, because the camp and serum was 20 minutes away. When that happened, I knew Kinski would start raving with some trifling excuse, because now he was just a marginal figure.
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Thursday, May 13, 2010
May Day, Eyjafjallajökull
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For optimal viewing, turn off the sound on the video (it’s a Jonsi track, I think) and hit play on the soundcloud player (Eno’s The Big Ship). I know it’s Jonsi’s homeland and all, but I think it’s fair to say the whole scene’s dramatic enough already. (Via Sean Stiegemeier.)
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Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Five Small Ways To Ward Off The Apocalypse (Part 1)
‘If current trends continue, by the end of this century as many as half of earth’s species will be gone.’ —The New Yorker, 25 May, 2009.
When I read a sentence like the one above, something strange comes over me. I know I’ve just taken in something terrible, but something about it is too awful, too momentous to even register.
So what usually happens is this: my torso locks up, my brain becomes filled with a kind of white noise, and then all of a sudden I am filled with an incredibly pressing desire to eat some cheese, go for a swim, or watch an action movie.
Recently, though, I’ve been trying to stay with this feeling. I’ve been trying to let it course through me to see what happens. Turns out there are two possibilities: I either completely go to water, or I start thinking about small things that might be done to remedy it.
Of course, I’m not really an expert in anything, and if I’ve learnt anything, it’s that the big questions facing mankind are usually the province of experts. Occasionally, when our collective terror reaches a high enough pitch, groups of these experts get together and talk a lot and write voluminous reports on what the problem is.
These then get filtered, via various means, into terrifying sound bites that make us want to eat cheese, go swimming, and watch action movies. And so it goes.
Photo: Steve Rhode
The guiding logic of this approach seems to be that the clusterfuck we’ve all made for ourselves is terribly complex now, and beyond the reach of ordinary people, or simple solutions. We’re screwed, and only a great genius, or a very advanced machine, can save us now.
But what if it wasn’t actually that hard? What if we could start pulling ourselves back from the precipice by throwing away a bunch of useless shit we don’t even need? What if consumer choice and comfort weren’t the supreme goals of civilisation? How much, then, would we really find we need?
A lot of the problems these questions bring up—the first world’s abuse of developing countries, our capacity to spoil our pets while at the same time supporting factory farming, the ineffable and shared sadness that makes us shop til we drop—can’t be readily simplified and remedied, at least not yet. Which is why we tend to forget about them, because it feels like there’s no place to start.
Certainly, there are many ways our chaos manifests that will take a lot of soul searching, sacrifice and compromise to come to terms with and do something about. Some things, however, are really easy, and could be done tomorrow. Here I offer five of them.
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Sunday, May 2, 2010
What happens if everyone shouts from the rooftops?
Recently, one of the internet’s more ornery music scribes, Chris Weingarten, came out and said something that pissed a lot of people off: the internet and search engine optimisation are killing music criticism, and maybe even music as we know it.
In his rant, which you can watch after the jump, Weingarten singled out music blog aggregators like The Hype Machine, who, he said, far from democratising music listening, as they claim, are actually homogenising it, and reducing opinion to the lowest common denominator.
Weingarten’s most salient point, however, was how the internet’s obsession with being first, and yelling the loudest, is turning everything to shit.
‘The race to be first is currently the most fucked-up, nasty, Ebola virus devouring music writing from the inside.’ Weingarten said. ‘Let’s say I’m at a rock show and something interesting happens, like Jay-Z brings a guest out or Lady Gaga’s fucking face falls off… I could go to one of my editors and file one of the most evocative, lucid pieces of writing about it, I could have my photographer friend there shooting these gorgeous, artful photos, but the most clicks for that story will go to whoever got it up the fastest. Insight and artistry are no longer an end-goal, they’re afterthoughts.’
Writing about music, as well as listening to it and learning about it, Weingarten said, have become math, controlled by algorithms and filtered through the ‘bland middling taste of the internet hive mind’.
Now all that matters is racking up hits with ‘wet spitballs of non-news’, at the expense of saying anything worthwhile, or, god forbid, actually criticising something. (Pitchfork, he noted, recently stopped publishing negative song reviews, presumably to stay in the good graces of the record companies who give them their so-called ‘exclusives’).
‘If clicks are what matter,’ Weingarten concluded, ‘it doesn’t matter if the writing is any good. And that fucking blows.’
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Friday, Apr 23, 2010
Natural disasters sometimes look like metal album covers
Grand natural disasters in picturesque places don’t just make for good photography; they also offer a wealth of cover material for today’s progressive metal band. All the late-night photoshopping in the world couldn’t hope to compare to the ungodly lightning frenzy nature unleashed via the volcano — even if, oddly enough, the lightning (at least in the picture below) looks like it was roughly inserted by an enthusiastic 14 year old playing around with his first copy of Elements.
The next two have a more pastoral — though perhaps even more apocalyptic — vibe that, considering the somewhat gentler hues Varg Vikernes has been pursuing since his incarceration, might even make the next Burzum cover. They also give a little credence to the ‘act of God’ claims insurance companies have been pulling to avoid paying out pissed off, unwashed travellers stranded in airports and rich, cosmopolitan cities across Europe.
Thanks to volcano boffins Stromboli for the shots.
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Monday, Feb 16, 2009
The food pyramid
Recently, my cousin, who is in education, sent me something both horribly disturbing and terribly familiar: the food pyramid. The pyramid he sent me was the standard US model in favour up until the early 90s; apparently, it can still be found on a lot of American food labels.
The first thing I noticed was fats, oils and sweets up the top: it’s hard not to get the sense that this section is made up entirely of party glitter/fairy dust, which is forever drifting gently and benignly down onto the other foods in the pyramid, covering everything in a protective golden film.
I’m not a nutritionist, but this pyramid, in shape and colour and message, seems more to me than the road map to Enormo County it has proven to be: each time I look at it, it seems to radiate the backward, slightly comic feel of those quaint, hopelessly outdated medicine books that used to recommend taking mercury and squill as a diuretic, or rubbing butter on burns. If it weren’t still in use when I was growing up, and the guiding logic behind the way billions of people eat, it would be harmless and funny, something we did before we knew better.
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Tuesday, Dec 9, 2008
Hi.
Blogs have always given me a vaguely sticky feeling. I’m not sure why this is exactly, but whenever I’ve thought about starting one over the last few years, the skin on my feet has gotten real hot, and my tinnitus has ascended into a kind of needling, strangled whine, the kind I imagine dogs hear when you blow those special whistles. On their own, these two physical signs rarely portend good things. Together, I thought, they were a clear sign to stay away. Still, here we are, in the clammy expanse of the interweb.
Why the change of heart? One night, several weeks ago, a tall man with intense, glistening thighs appeared to me in a dream. We were together on the shore of some kind of lake. He wore a beard of white velvet, and communicated to me non-verbally through a series of short beeps. After a few drinks, he started asking about my freelance business, and how I was planning to get it off the ground. I told him I was going to set up a website. He nodded sagely. Then he lifted off his beard in one motion, as if it were a loose piece of skin. “You need a blog” he said. Without the beard, I realized that I knew this man: he had been my sister’s partner for some time. His name was Steven. I didn’t know he had these kind of powers. Still, I should have recognized those thighs.
So you know what you’re in for, I thought I’d use this first post to lay out what this blog will be about. For my edification and your entertainment, I hope to be primarily covering the following issues:
—The food pyramid
—Unpopular Music
—Wilderness
—Subversion as fun
—Werner Herzog
There probably won’t be:
—Funny cats
—Acerbic references to other personages in the blogosphere
—Bird metaphors
—Photos of myself taken with a camera I am holding
—Jazz solos
—The use of the real names of people close to me, like Ed Nicholson, Pascal Babare and Steven Watts
But there could be:
—Sweeping changes to all of this without any prior warning.
By way of introduction, my name’s Pete. I’m 6”1 and white and live in Melbourne. Based on a recent DNA swab my father submitted to National Geographic, I probably descend from hunter-gatherers who migrated through north-western Europe several thousand years ago. This at least explains my ridiculous feet, which only seem to make sense when I am walking large distances.
I write and edit for a living, which is what this site is primarily about. I thought about keeping this blog relevant to said profession, but that would get tiresome pretty quickly. So instead, let’s move on to something far more interesting and edifying: the food pyramid.
Yap
A blog in which I speak about things that probably don’t concern me
Yap is my explosive new blog, wherein revelations and mysteries and insights pour out like so much cheap wine. What will I talk about, you ask? What is there to say? In my first blog post, I make a compelling case for why my blog, the 234,544,569th of its kind, should exist — and what it means for you.