Blip

Of course I still post to this blog!

Problem is that it's less a diary of things I now put on Facebook and now a repository for either photos (which are easy to publish, but increasingly personal and so I don't post them) or for ideas I have which are either ill-formed, so why would anyone want to read them, or just plain boring.

But Bloggy is always in my heart.

Here's how everyone else should parent

The little boy, Charlie's size, but younger came over a few times to check out Charlie's Matchbox car. Then he came over and gave Charlie a series of little punches, right on the side of the arm. I didn't see it, but I saw the little boy scamper back after his name was called at his own table.
Then he came back and did it again.
'Can you stop your child from hitting my son?' we asked, loudly enough for everyone to hear.
Charlie wasn't hurt, or even that bothered. But the boy's mother dragged him over to our table and told him to apologise.
Then it began.
Charlie sat there and waited. All four adults at our table sat there and waited. The boy's mother crouched next to him and told him, goaded him, asked him, pressed him and nagged him to say sorry. But the boy did nothing. He didn't move his lips, he stared anywhere but at Charlie, at the wall, into the middle distance. He leant back into his mother, snaking his little arms up around for a cuddle, a hug, a chance to bury his face, and each time he was gently unhooked and told to say sorry. He was immediately ready to move onto the part where he was assured that everything he did was okay. This went on for minute after minute. No one spoke but his mother. There were no tears, no raised voices, just firm whispering and denied affection. The closest the kid got to verbalising anything was trying to kiss Mummy's ear.
Waiters squeezed by, Charlie became bored and still the snuggling and whispering went on. And on. Still the whispering and urging went on. The tone never changed, neither did the boy's facial expression - if vacant denial can be called an expression.
Finally, I think he managed to mutter 'sorry' to Charlie audibly enough that the ordeal ended. Hugs all round. Hand-holding, playing with cars, kissing goodbyes and the other table left.


Here are your questions for discussion:

1. Why did it take five minutes of snuggling and explaining to get a kid to say sorry?
2. How does a kid with no other obvious social impairments arrive at the idea to repeatedly hit another kid his own age?
3. Why was saying sorry to someone's face the worst thing that could happen to that kid, as opposed to say, anything else?
4. Are there any moral downsides to teaching your offspring to, when physically abused, retaliate with a single jab to the nose and a threatening catch-phrase, ie. "Don't mess with the Moose, motherfucker"?

Death throes

Sometimes you can spend an entire weekend doing something by not really doing it.
The 3 people who still read this blog know that I'm very very close to the end of my PhD. I'm actually at that point that I know other PhD students have reached where they chuck a hissy and submit it.
'Good enough!' they cry, dropping into the mail chute. Or giving it to the office. Or whatever ceremony goes along with it. I generally like to imagine an office admin pulling out a bell and giving it a few shakes. Nothing massive, but something out of the ordinary. Then we could all use a community-shaping euphemism:
'You rung the bell yet?'
'Nope, still got my conclusion to tidy up.'
That kind of thing.

My obstruction to 'ringing the bell' (maybe it'll catch on!) is the abstract. 500 words, what's the thesis about.
Easy, right?
Sort of.
It's a summary of a summary of a summary of my thesis.
I'm sure, once I get the wording right, I'll be asked to summarise it again. Maybe I'll just remove everything that's not a noun or a verb:

Thesis. 
Class. Literature. Metaphor. Australia. Power. Novel.

At least I won't have to spend long on it when that time comes.

I spent the entire weekend thinking about it and not very much time actually doing it. Even less productivity came out at the end. I'll get there. Go, me. Go.

And, of course, the final absolutely last bit is (I think) the acknowledgements. I'm thinking of doing it year-book style with little portrait photos of everyone and awards underneath. But that could just be the procrastination talking ...

Racism

Something I've learned in the last week: The only thing a white Australian seems to hate more than being called a racist is seeing a black Australian being told 'sorry'.

It's the same objections that came up before, during and after Kevin Rudd's Apology. All these people rumbling away in the background how it wasn't them, it wasn't their ancestors, why should they have to feel bad?

I think there's some specific white terror that, if we say sorry, then we'll have to give everything back. I think the fear of apology is borne of an implicit knowledge that, boy, did we whites really get away with absolutely everything. And it's so close to the surface, that the merest suggestion that, perhaps, we should all take some responsibility for the current thinking on race in Australia, suddenly everyone's throwing up their hands and wagging their heads and generally behaving as though white privilege does not exist.

Bogan haiku

The boy shouts 'fuck you!'
at his sky-bound red balloon.
Mum slaps his hot tears.

Plagiarism green pasta

I stole this recipe from a good friend of Mele's. It's my go-to dinner party recipe for when shitloads of people need to be fed.

Ingredientes:
Basil pesto

• Basil (duh)
• Nuts (almonds, pine nuts, cashews, whatev) - dry fry in a pan and don't burn
• Salt
• Pepper (grind it up or you'll have peppercorns)
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil - the stronger the better

Put it all in a blender. Leave the oil out.
Turn blender on. Then pour oil in. Boom. Pesto.

OR

Buy a jar of basil pesto. Your choice.

Cherry tomatoes (chop in half)
Zucchini (sliced in pretty half moon shapes)
Broccoli (chopped up into bit sized bits)
Peas (handful)
GARLIC (crushed into little bits)
Avocado (about half per person, chopped)
Baby spinach

More EV olive oil
Chicken stock powder
Maybe like, white wine or that verjuice stuff

Pasta (whatever you like)

Methode:

1. Cook pasta in a big pot.
2. While it's cooking, throw in the chicken stock.
3. When it's nearly done, or just done, throw in the chopped up broccoli and the peas. If you can't be stuffed with these two, just forget about them.
4. Pasta done. Strain it with the broc. and the peas. Set aside. Keep a splash of that chicken stocky water in the pot if you can. If it all pours away, so what it's just salty water.
5. Put the pot back on the heat. Same pot. Less washing up like that.
6. Put in a big slug of olive oil. Hey, take a bloody shot of olive oil at this point. You're gonna be fine.
7. Put in the crushed garlic. Swirl it around until you can hear it making a little noise.
8. Pesto in.
9. More swirling.
10. Zucchini in. Let that fry up a bit. Basically until it's hot.
11. This is the bit where you can throw in the white wine or verjuice. Just a little bit. For fanciness of flavour. Or, so you can blame me if it doesn't taste right: 'Bloody Franzy! He said to put wine in it!' Seriously though: don't put heaps in. You're just ruining wine you could be drinking. Don't drink the verjuice though. It's not alcoholic.
12. Wine/verjuice steamed off? Pasta back in. Cherry tomatoes in, baby spinach in, avocado in.
13. Stir it up until everything is touching everything else. Give the whole mix some cracked pepper while you're doing this.
14. Serve it up and eat the rest for lunch.
15. Parmesan cheese, of course.

You can pretty much forget everything except for the pasta, the pesto and the tomatoes and it's still going to look great. But you shouldn't. Who doesn't have some cracked pepper and at least one vegetable you can either fry or boil in the pasta water lying around?

Street

Tired night

Blue branches

Green trees

Orange clouds

It's not the lens

But I did finally get a new lens.

 

+

 

=

Fast'n'Fabulous

Screw The Avengers. The true super-hero franchise of this century is the Fast'n'Furious franchise. If you watch these movies, don't go with your snorting trumpet on, ready to denigrate the poor acting, the dodgy physics, the shit-like-this-would-never-in-real-life stunts. Watch the movies as the slow awakening of a gang of real life superheroes, discovering their awesome, supernatural powers and using them on the world.
They aren't even aware.
Superhero movies have long had their day. Their plots and characters and histories were largely conceived over 50 years ago, during a time when science was just about putting chrome on things and then putting those things on the moon. Superman and Batman pre-date the modern understanding of DNA. It was sufficient to explain things happening in superhero worlds by just saying "Super! Hero! POWER!"
These days, the superhero universe of The Avengers movies come across as kind of like the church's scrambling to update the wife-beating, slave-swapping days of B.C. to account for the invention of the telephone. And the birth-control pill. When the Hulk turns hulky and Ironman flies in a world still populated by electric cars which still have trouble finding power points, it's difficult, even for a clear-eyed believer like myself to not purse my lips to one side and grumble 'Oh, come on. How? Exactly?'

Fast'n'Furious doesn't need that justification. It doesn't need the weighty back story hanging about the narrative like a tracking bracelet on a first date: 'So, you've been explaining why it's there for about an hour now - can we get on with the action at hand?'

No, the characters in Fast'n'Furious are superheroes. They jump through walls. They drive through walls. They lift people with one hand. They drive at 200km/h while making out and not even needing to look at the road. They fly. They just do. The things they do to and with cars aren't the product of engineering miracles, or shoddy script-writing; these people are superheroes! Of course they can drop it into 9th gear and speed up and win! Super! Hero! POWER!

Every single movie is about superheroes who can change the world and triumph over adversity and they don't even know it. The why isn't important. It's the how that makes Fast'n'Furious a modern fable of gods walking among humans. As bright and escapist as Lord of the Rings and subtle as Tree of Life.

And don't even get me started on the gay subtext.

And someone else has already won a Pulitzer by making the very salient point that the F'n'F movies are the most important movies about race in 21st Century America extant.

*I know that the point has been made in the past that the Fast'n'Furious movies are about superheroes, but I'll be damned if I can find the original article. Anyone want to find it for me?

Singing requests considered

I'm currently in the process of backing up all of my precious precious millions of blurry personal photos. While going back through the pages of history, back to when I could be bothered scanning all of my non-digital prints, I found a picture of me when I used to be a clumsy Simon Le Bon:

This scar? That's a low doorway, ladies.

My friend Kath just posted a sad blog about beauty. This is my response.

I'm sorry, but beauty is no measure of worth. The genetic lottery receives far more attention than it ever should, and I'm only talking about women here.
Intelligence.
Strength.
Generosity.
Humour.
Passion.
Imagination.
Curiosity.
These are beautiful things.

Not the immeasurable, millimetric increments of perfection that gets blazed at women every second. Not these subjective lies that stack up like an endless library of reasons to hate yourself when someone you love tells you that they think you're beautiful.

Beauty is bullshit. Beauty for a woman is just gambling her spirit away in a casino that never pays out. No matter how much self-esteem you hang upon the right hair, the perfect make-up, the excellent nose job, that awesome photo, the great top, the rockin' skirt, the brilliant shoes, the wicked skin, it will always fade, blow up, rip, go away, leer at you in the mirror, squish the wrong way, hang limp, sag and leave you, strung out and empty. 

This isn't a "should" blog. I'm not even pretending for a second that 'real beauty comes from within' is ever going to catch on. 

It was a happy new year

Sometimes I just like the old style photos.
Funny focus. Square cropping.
Just a little moment.

1st January, 2013.
Maslin Beach.