Apologies to the Que

159 STGOOBF - Yesterdayyyy

2012-01-22T22:52:00.003+11:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Folk Arc (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 1)

School Daze (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 3)

Yesterday

Yesterdayy

Yesterdayyy

Andy Prieboy - Tomorrow Wendy

I've already mentioned Johnette Napolitano, lead singer of Concrete Blonde, once in this stop-start, engine-coughing, will-it-ever-end (probably not) series of posts, when writing about The Pixie's song Wave of Mutilation, where I also said that wouldn't be the last time we'd be hearing of Leonard Cohen in the 159 (then 158) STGOOBF. That was written 552 days (13,248 hours (794,880 minutes (47,692,800 seconds))) ago, and whilst we're seemingly no closer to finding out what Leonard Cohen track gets me out of bed, and Concrete Blonde doesn't even rate a mention in the 159 STGOOBF, here I am again, writing about her. 'Get back on track!' you may justifiably be yelling at your computer screen, if you hadn't given up on me many moons ago (which, let's face it, you probably should have), but, if by some stroke of massive ill-fortune (on your part) you have made it this far I'd implore you not to let this be the final straw, because Johnette Napolitano does, in fact, appear in the three main versions of Tomorrow Wendy I'm aware of.

She (not surprisingly) provides the lead vocals on the Concrete Blonde version of Tomorrow Wendy included on the 1990 Bloodletting LP, which was actually released before Andy Preiboy's 1990 effort ...Upon My Wicked Son (where she sings backing vocals) - meaning this is a (presumably rare) example of a cover version being released before the original. (Thanks Wikipedia for that factoid.)

I'll include the version from ....Upon My Wicked Son here, partly because I can't find a video of the third version (which I'll discuss below), partly because I've always loved the guitar bit 39 seconds into this version - desperate, discordant, and almost rebellious or dissident - capturing the feeling of one of the key messages of the song (refusal to give up control), and partly because it's another film clip from rage:

The third version is the one I own, where Ms Napolitano is again in the role of backing vocals, in a live version from November 1990 which contributed to the first Triple J Live At The Wireless compilation (released in 1991).

I feel then, a couple of decades back, artists used to actually play live sets specifically for JJJ to broadcast and/or record - and 16 of the 19 tracks on this CD list an ABC studio as the location (one of the exceptions is Kiss Off by the Violent Femmes from a concert at The Palace in Melbourne [also in Nov 1990], a concert I reckon I recorded when Triple J played it over 2 sets on a Friday night once) - but to be honest for all I know they may still do that (play live for the Js) - I hardly ever listen to the radio anymore.

This compilation has some other awesome songs on it, including Falling to Pieces by Faith No More, Miles To Go by Nick Barker and The Reptiles and the aforementioned Femme's offering, but it's certainly fair to say it was Tomorrow Wendy which drove me to buy, let alone get out of bed for, it.

159 STGOOBF - Yesterdayyy

2011-11-23T20:03:00.001+11:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Folk Arc (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 1)

School Daze (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 3)

Yesterday

Yesterdayy

Therapy? - Screamanger

As was yesterdayy's (get it?) entry into the list of 159 STGOOBF, I have my brother to thank for this tune, but I really have to thank him not once, but twice.

First, for putting me onto Therapy? in the first place, and hence being directly responsible for the heaviest entry in the 159 STGOOBF, though there's a real chance they wouldn't be the heaviest entry on his commensurate compilation; I have a very distinct memory of being in a nursing home and my paternal grandmother asking my brother who 'Ron Maiden' was (with the 'I' hidden by a crease in his t-shirt), and though I don't know if they made the leap to his CD (and now increasingly vinyl) days, he did, back in the cassette era, count some Slayer among his collection.

Secondly, for a hot chocolate he bought me once, specifically on April 15, 1995, at Eastern Creek Raceway, in Sydney, at the Alternative Nation Festival. The Wikipedia article what I linked to just there notes, correctly, that constant rain during the day turned Eastern Creek into a mud bowl, but what it doesn't say was that it was also cold, and it also neglects to mention that I, in particular, was very cold, and that having lined up for an ungodly and wholly unreasonable length of time my brother bought me a hot chocolate which made my day better by a massive amount. A moment of fine fraternal forethought, a moment which has stuck with me this 16 years, a moment he'll likely now ruing by piping up that it was actually coffee he bought me not hot chocolate.

But just to finish up, I'd like to point out that Therapy?'s website has the url http://www.therapyquestionmark.co.uk/ which I think is very cool. And to include a video of the song in question.

Nine Inch Nails - Something I Can Never Have

All set up for a segue based of NIN also playing at Alternative Nation, subtleties around this being either the second or third heaviest song in the 159 STGOOBF depending on your perspective, giving my bro' yet another gong as inspirer of my love for this song (this one, in particular, on the top floor of my parents' place when they lived in Randwick), pointing out that my sister-in-law (brother's wife) had a different NIN song in her votes in JJJ's Hottest 100 Of All Time which led to the commencement of this compilation, or noting that the mate mentioned in the Pink Floyd entry here was also a big NIN fan, I went and searched for 'so,ething I can never have' (that text, including spelling mistake, being my actual entry into the search box) on YouTube, and found, unfathomably for the first time, the version below.

I was never a particularly (I hope) angst ridden adolescent or young adult, but I reckon I used this song to variously describe, dampen, amplify and project what angst I did feel, and this stripped back, almost solo and almost acoustic version is, even from the few times I've managed to get through it and hit repeat while penning this brief missive, even more so than the original, album version, if you'll excuse yet one more bout of self indulgence on my part, an epitomically fading fucking reminder of who I used to be (or at least who I was in the infinite number of parallel universes where both I was actually angst-ridden and hearts are, in fact grey, or gray).

And there've been more than 5 million views which agree with me, apparently.

A bread video

2011-11-22T22:29:00.001+11:00

I baked bread.

I downloaded Windows Live Movie Maker.

I combined the two and uploaded it to YouTube.

But I also used annotations which don't appear properly in this resolution offered me if I embed the video here.

So I'll just include this link.

159 STGOOBF - Yesterdayy

2011-11-22T21:05:00.001+11:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Folk Arc (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 1)

School Daze (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 3)

Yesterday

Dramarama - Anything, Anything (Live at the China Club)

"This song's called Anything, Anything"

So, this entry in the 159 STGOOBF will not be featuring a link, a YouTube clip, a video, a destination. This in one you'll need to track down yourself, trawling through the second hand section of your local purveyor of fine vinyl vendibles, your garage sales, your op-shops, your cousins' CD collections, your local markets, your foreign markets.

Or you could buy it on iTunes.

But the point, the very point, is that this entry in the 159 STGOOBF is more specific than the song, it's the version the song, it's from the1990 live EP which followed half a decade after the confused-for-French debut album which featured the original, it's power pop (apparently), it would appear in a much shorter list than 159 of my favourite songs of all time, it is, whenever and wherever I hear it, not quite loud enough. It. Fucking. Rocks.

This is one of the many (and I'll need to count eventually) songs in this list for which I have my brother to thank, as it was his version of the song I first listened to. (I also went on a mission to buy Dramarama's debut effort Cinema Verite for him at one point in time when we were living in different cities, I believe him in Sydney and me in Canberra - which was an infinitesimal price to pay for the joy this song, and particularly this version, has brought me over the years.)

Which is not, at the risk of contradicting myself, to say that version on Cinema Verite, isn't great, it's just that when I decided this was the next song I'd write about in this tooth-pullingly painful epoch of self indulgence there was no version I could find which could hold a candle (or a last cigarette) to track 1 of the 1990 EP Live at the China Club.

Now, two more things to say about this song, not connected to what has come before or to each other, but just such strong memory associations of hearing Anything, Anything I can't not speak of them. And if you haven't worked out by now how much I like to crap on unnecessarily when I finally get around to actually wiriting blog posts then all I can say is 'Welcome!' because this is obviously your first visit.

Memory 1 - the year (I think) was 1998, the location (I'm sure) was the Wendys in the City Market block of the Canberra Centre (which apparently is now designated as an historic site due to being the first shopping centre in Canberra to have a car park operated by ticket machines, as you do). Wendys do this thing with hot dogs where they poke a hole in the bun rather than cut it. They also always put too much hot English mustard on them, but it never stopped us from asking for it. On this particular bun poking and sinus clearing day the radio on at Wendys was playing Anything, Anything. Certainly the greatest hot dog I ever had from Wendys, and by some margin, and without a doubt, the most memorable.

Memory 2 - the year (I'm sure this time) was 2002, the location was Kings Way in Melbourne. Not too specific a memory except that I know I was driving home from work, I was in a bad mood when the song came on, and in a much better (albeit ear bleeding despite being still not loud enough) one when it finished.

So please, do yourself a favour and listen to this song, and please, do yourself a bigger favour and find and listen to this version.

"Yeah, yeah yeah."

Android Polar Bluetooth Heartrate Thoughts - SportsTracker FTW

2011-10-26T21:54:00.000+11:00

I've recently switched phones to an Android powered Samsung Nexus S, and shortly after acquiring it I bought a Polar Bluetooth heart rate strap - hoping to use my phone as the receiving unit and consequently save a decent chunk of coin in the fitness peripherals space.

It's fair to say the reviews of this product on Amazon are pretty mixed - with 1 out of 5 being the most commonly awarded score (which I only found out after I'd bought it), but my experience with it has been extremely positive - and for that I largely have the SportsTracker app to thank.

I'd been a huge RunKeepr fan during my iPhone days, and it was one of the first apps I installed on the Nexus, but at time of switching (and I believe also time of writing) there were four important things I reckon that SportsTracker does better than RunKeeper, which are, in roughly descending order of importance (to me):

The 'HR Only' mode - meaning I can use the heart rate monitor indoors. RunKeeper simply won't work if it can't pick up a GPS signal, so it can't be used a heart rate monitor in the gym,
Ability to download data. SportsTracker lets me download data from recorded tracks as a .csv file - allowing me to compare performance over multiple executions of the same run - see for example the chart below form three runs I've done recently (which are incidentally over a course for which GPS is pretty useless due to vegetation and direction change), which isn't an option offered by RunKeeper. I'm fascinated by how similar those charts are, and I think the ability to do analysis like this actually encourages me to do more exercise - which as to be a good thing,
Ease of use. The Sportstracker app picks up the Bluetooth signal first time every time,
UI - there's a great option to have heart rate as the main metric displayed, which his ideal when using the app in the gym, and it does a really nice job of charting HR as well.

The only issue I've had is that I don't actually think the GPS in my phone is great - I can't get a constant signal if, for instance, I run home which takes me through Sydney's CBD, and it seems for SportsTracker, as for all the other apps I've tried, if they're in GPS mode but can't get a signal they won't record any data. I can live with that though - happy to just use the phone as a heart rate monitor + stopwatch, and use a site like gmap-pedometer to work out how far I've run!

Almost No Knead (Metric) Bread

2011-10-23T20:11:00.000+11:00

425g Strong (bread) flour
0.25t Yeast (all the instant stuff works and doesn't need to be proved)
1.5t Salt

200g H2O
85g Beer (here James Squire 150 Lashes Pale Ale which at time of writing doesn't seem to be rating a mention on the James Squire website)
1T Vinegar (and here I'm actually using a US i.e. 15ml T as opposed to an Australian i.e. 20ml T)

Mush all of that together to give:

8-18 hours later (in this case I think about 14 or 15) it'll look something like this:

Which following 10-15 kneads and some shaping inverted into a proofing basket looks like this:

I forgot to take a photo after the 2 hour final rise (which I really wish I hadn't given the dramatic rise relative to that last pic) then having pre-heated the oven to maximum and then turned down to 220 C after 30 minutes in my Le Creuset with the lid on and then about 15 minutes with the lid off I had the loudest loaf of bread I've ever made:

Yummo!

But it was seriously loud - the cracking noise a just taken out of the oven loaf of bread makes is always pretty cool but this one was full on screaming!

With due consideration to Breadtopia, where I found the recipe on which this is based and Cook's Illustrated who were responsible for the original.

BTW - not at all relevant here, but I recently found out that 1C in Australia > 1C in the USA - who'd'a thunk that?

159 STGOOBF - Yesterday

2011-10-23T17:21:00.000+11:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Folk Arc (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 1)

School Daze (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 3)

Right, time to get this long (and for everyone except me potentially quite pleasantly) forgotten thread of musical memorialisation up off the canvas and back kicking.

Any attempts to do multiple songs here is bound to fail so I'll just pick a single track and be done with it.

The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings

I've never bought a Smashing Pumpkins album, or seen them live (or, indeed, I was about to say, even ever gone out of my way to listen to a single one of their songs other than this one - though it turns out that's not true - see below for details).

The lead single of some album of their's I obviously don't own based on the last sentence (though I did buy the single), this song came in second in JJJ's Hottest 100 in 1995 (presumably the year of it's release), and 51st in the Hottest 100 of All Time, 2009.

My strongest memories of listening to this song place me at the residential college I lived at whilst at University, and I'm almost wanting to say the timing is the start of 1997 when I lived in a particular room for a few weeks before moving out, but given the evidence of poor Smashing Pumpkin's listening memory mentioned above (and see below for details), I could be way off there - and it may have been in 1995 when I lived in another room in the same part of the college.

What I can certainly accurately remember though is that I used to listen to this song LOUD - and for a couple of different reasons.

It rocks. (Well duh!)
When I did listen to it really loud, I thought it may be evidencing some weakness or limitation in the ability to handle really loud music of the audio setup I was using at the time (two thirds [amp and speakers] of which I'm listening to as I write this - somewhere between 14 and 16 years later depending on how bad my memory was above) due to some fuzziness I believed I could hear, which like an almost appropriate simile I couldn't stop poking at. I've certainly had many, many, many hours of awesome listening on that equipment since however, so I guess the fuzziness was one of just part of the song itself, only evidenced at volumes I rarely, if ever, reach, or simply not significant enough to materially impact my listening enjoyment.

Apparently The Smashing Pumpkin's playeda lot of different versions of this song over he years, but here I'm going to run with the album version with music video because

It rocks.

Finally, getting back to my memory mistake above turns out I actually own two Smashing Pumpkin Singles - I also bought the CD single of Perfect - predominantly for the Nellee Hooper remix I seem to recall now that I see it sitting on my iPod...

I didn't kill the cow

2011-05-29T21:53:00.001+10:00

But that's about the only part of this burger I didn't make myself.

OK, I guess I didn't actually grow the rocket either, or the mushrooms, or cornichons, or actually make the mustard or the mayo or ... jeez, get off my case already!

What I did do was two interesting (at least to me) things, in ascending order of interestingness:

I bought a steak and minced it myself (actually a scotch fillet that had a nice vein of fat to keep the patty moist)
I made the bun (which is really the point of the post)

A mate from uni and her husband own the awesome and environmentally friendly La Madre bakery in Geelong, Victoria, Australia, and she recently suggested I follow Dan Lepard on Facebook and Twitter, which I did.

I noticed a Facebook post from Dan on Saturday morning mentioning the shopping list required for Saturday's Guardian recipe for 'poppyseed onion bbq buns' accompanied by a ridiculously awesome photo.

I immediately jumped on the Guardian website, and was slightly disappointed not to find the recipe until I realised that at that stage it was still Friday in the UK. So, I checked back later, grabbed the recipe and made it today. Definitely different to the doughs I've been making recently (as would be expected for a dough intended to be used as a roll), lower hydration, instant yeast, an including all of egg, honey and onion.

The method however, with only a few bursts of short (10 seconds) kneading at 10 minute intervals, before a 1 hour rest, shape, ~90 minute proof and then baking is not completely different in principle from the distributed stretch and folds I have been using a fair bit, and was really low effort. At least the second time, as on my first attempt I realised as I added the water I'd halved all amounts other than it - whoops!

I steamed the oven a bit, and cooked the rolls on my terracotta tile at 200C for ~15 minutes, producing this:

Certainly very happy with the aesthetic outcome of this effort, and the texture was spot on, a really light and soft crumb, but with enough integrity to comfortably hold together as I chomped my way through the reasonably chunky patty pictured above.

The real winner though was the taste. Just a little sweetness from the onion and honey (but not too much), and the mild aftertaste of poppy seeds (an absolute must I'd suggest), this was a tremendous hamburger bun, far better than any I've ever bought, and also superior the those surrounding the vast majority of burgers I've had at restaurants, if I do say so myself. Which I do.

As it turned out the whole burger was great, but I was just completely stoked with the bun, and really can't see myself having hamburgers at home again in the future without making the buns, and in particular without making these buns.

159 STGOOBF - School Daze (Part 4)

2011-05-01T17:17:00.019+10:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Folk Arc (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 1)

School Daze (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 3)

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Higher Ground

This song probably, nay, definitely, deserves better than the treatment it will receive here given the role the Red Hot Chili Peppers (RHCP) played in the parturition of my love of music. If ever there were a song for which my terrible sentence structure, self-referential verbosity, and general attempt to be cleverer than I actually am could at least be tolerated in the list of 159 STGOOBF I really think the entry from RHCP would be it, because in a lot ways this is really where it all began.

However, the 15 month delay since my last entry in this series weighs heavily on my mind, and recognising the risk that an attempt to carve out prose which has an investment of effort (though in all likelihood not, let's face it, quality of output) commensurate with the role of RHCP in my musical inamorata would introduce into the likelihood of me ever getting to the point of hitting the 'Publish Post' button on this effort, I'm going to eschew such an approach, and instead just run with a list of suitable facts to round out the School Daze group of the 159, which will hopefully in content, if not tone, go someway to conveying the gravitas of the Chili Peppers in this list even existing.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers represent a lot of firsts for me, with none of those more significant than being the first band I ever really, truly fell in love with. The first band I was ever obsessed by, the first band whose music I would put on repeat over and over and over again, laying my hands on any singles, compilations or bootlegs I could, the first band I could just seriously and completely not get enough of.

I recall with particular fondness one period during Year 12 in 1992 when the Chili's second album Freaky Styley was the focus of my obsession, and I'd come to school extolling the virtues of whatever particular song had been the acme of my Red Hot rapture over the previous evening to Some Bloke (of earlier posts on my blog fame).

Higher Ground is actually not from Freaky Styley, it's from RHCP's fourth album Mother's Milk, the first album featuring John Frusciante on guitar. Mother's Milk was the first Chili Pepper's album I heard, and consistent with the paragraph preceding the paragraph preceding this one was the album which started it all - the first album I was ever obsessed by, the album which caused me to fall in love with RHCP, and, I think it could be reasonably argued, the album which caused me to fall in love with music. (Over time I had similar reactions to the other four of the Chili's first five albums, including Freaky Styley, but I really think it was all downhill after Blood Sugar Sex Magik.)

The Chili Peppers were the first (and only, as it turns out) band whose (official) Fan Club I became a member of.

The first poster I ever bought was a massive rendition of the front cover of Mother's Milk (appropriately re-dimensioned) - and I've gotta say it was a pretty good addition to my bedroom wall.

The Chili Peppers were the first band I ever saw play live in Sydney, and the first band I ever travelled interstate to see play live (those two events both taking place at the Hordern Pavilion on the very day of my 18th birthday). I must have been reasonably vocal about my appreciation of RCHP at school, because I recall writing an essay in Yr 12 English about music which mentioned the (at the time) impending concert referenced above, and the comment I got back from my teacher was 'I was wondering when the Red Hot Chili Peppers were going to make an appearance'!

The Chili Peppers were also the first ever band I owned a t-shirt of (referenced in this post), and boy have there been a few band t-shirts in my wardrobe since then!

And so why Higher Ground you may be wondering (if you haven't by this stage forgotten what this post was all about). Named by British magazine Total Guitar the second greatest cover version of all time (with the original being, I'd suggest obviously, by Stevie Wonder) Higher Ground was the second single from Mother's Milk, but again, for me, was a first. Featuring prominently in the pre-launch test transmission of radio station JJJ on whatever frequency they started on in Canberra (as noted here it was something other than their current location), I'd reckon there's a very, very high chance it was the first Chili Pepper's song I ever heard, and is certainly the first I can remember hearing, and so from this album of firsts, of this band of firsts, of such profound importance to my love of music, when I line up their discography, and ask the question which of their songs I would be most likely to GOOBF, it's this one, not necessarily because it's their best song, or the one I've listened to most, or in some sense even my favourite, but certainly the one which is most deserving.

Wow, having said I was just going to list some facts about the song I did crap on a lot, didn't I?

So I'll stop now, with one final thought before embedding a video of a performance of the song from the Arsenio Hall show in 1989.

If there was one item of clothing in my life I wish I had posessed but didn't, it would be my own pair of the stuffed animal pants Flea wears in this video (and also in the video for Young MC's Bust a Move). I read here (where you can also see the official music video for Higher Ground) that those pants were stolen, and Flea then gave the chick who made them some money to make another pair, but she never did and didn't give him the money back!

Sourdough Starter Timelapse

2011-04-29T21:18:00.000+10:00

The video below shows the development of my white sourdough start over a period of about 11 hours today (so the video is about 600x faster than reality). It's essentially a 100% hydration starter - meaning equal parts flour and water by weight - though its condition now does suggest to me I might have gone slightly heavy on the water.

I'd say when I fed it this morning shortly before starting the time lapse capture the ratios of starter: flour:water would have been around 2:3:3, meaning the existing starter was about 25% by weight, but that's only a very rough visual estimate - I certainly didn't weight it.

Looking at the time stamp on the video the starter grows over the first 2.5-3 hours, peaking at a volume more than double the original (confirming the health of the starter), and then for the next 8 or so hours bubbles along happily, and I actually think the patterns of bubbles on the side of the jar from about 4pm onwards are kinda cool.

Even More Bread

2011-04-24T19:48:00.000+10:00

My current bread obsession has led me to do approximately googol Googles, and a fair few of those have led me to the excellent The Fresh Loaf.

One post of particular interest I stumbled upon was this one, and despite my relative lack of sourdough experience, the completely irresistible nature of txfarmer's crumb left me utterly unable to not try this 36 hours+ dough as a part of my most recent bout of baking beserkness. So I did.

Using the quantities detailed by txfarmer I did a 12 hour autolyse starting on Thursday night, then added my 100% hydration starter and did 3 hours of fermentation on the bench with S&F at 30 minute intervals (which was actually the same 3 hours as the bulk fermentation of the Tartine bread I made in this post). That took me till about midday Friday, at which point the dough went into the fridge, and whilst it was obviously very wet, it was beautifully smooth, and really seemed to be developing some nice strength (from my limited experience).

I didn't get back to it until about 26 hours later, by which stage I reckon it had almost doubled, and I then took roughly two thirds of the dough out of the fridge. Here I deviated from txfarmer's post a bit (but consistent with some of the comments in the original post), and did a pre-shape with the cold dough. At this stage I was also doing some other things, so didn't really pay attention to timing, so at some point later (maybe about 15 or 20 minutes), I did a final S&F like the shaping phase of the Tartine country bread, shaped it into a boule and then put it seam side up in a flour coated tea towel lined bowl.

Another note here - I always intended to cook this in my enamelled cast iron casserole as opposed to steaming the oven, so didn't really consider either batard or baguette. This also had the advantage that with a wet and airy dough I wouldn't be getting too far out of my shaping comfort zone!

I let the loaf proof on the bench for about an hour or so, while I got the oven + pot as hot as I could. Given the challenges of upending the dough into the pot with with the tea towel also to deal with and the relatively small size of the loaf, I actually inverted the dough onto my palm, and then dropped it gently into the pot, did a single slash, and put the lid on. I was pleasantly surprised at the structural integrity of the loaf in this final step and the shape it held on the bottom of the casserole before I put the lid on.

40 minutes later (20 with lid on, 20 off) I had this:

Which after being allowed to cool completely revealed this:

This boule had a diameter of about 15cm, and without overly relying on parallax error, I'm comfortable saying that the top of the ear was 10cm from the base. I certainly reckon this would make this the most ever oven spring I've got in my baking. And whilst nowhere near at the level of txfarmer's I'm also absolutely stoked with the crumb.

Great flavour as well - a little more subtle than my recent Tartine efforts (which obviously have some WW in them), but with slight sweetness and a great lingering aftertaste.

So I'd regard this as a great success. The uncertainty around the timings means I'm not sure I'll get exactly the same results next time - but am looking forward to trying!

Oh, and finally - the rest of the dough - used it for pizza, which also got a fair degree of oven spring. Mmmm - Jamon.

Tartine - that's bread for 'too many photos'

2011-04-23T17:09:00.007+10:00

The phrase 'food porn' is much overused these days, but one instance in which it is well and truly deserved is the cover photography of Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread.

I bought this book a couple of weeks ago, and am having increasing success cooking the basic recipe which is so colourfully and lovingly described over 25 pages of the book, including many wonderful photos of the process, photos which I've also found very useful (though some others seem to feel they border on overlay artistic).

I certainly haven't yet achieved crumb at the incredible level Chad does in the book, but am making progress, and I've got to say, my last effort on this has gotta be the best tasting bread I've ever made, resigning, I feel, the recipes used in the efforts here, here, here and here, to, at least temporarily, the back bench.

And so now here's an unnecessarily large number of photos of two small boules I made from a half-quantity of the basic country bread recipe yesterday, kicking off with a funky Hipstamatic effort.

Welcome Back!

2011-04-12T22:40:00.001+10:00

2010 World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest – a little bit Master Chef and a little bit B&S

2010-06-27T19:52:00.017+10:00

Pre-amble

It’s worth starting this post by pointing out (as I have done at least once before for anyone who’s been unfortunate enough to read a significant portion of my writings), that whilst containing the phoneme ‘Que’, the name of my blog is not taken from the culinary genre to the competitive pinnacle of which this post relates, it’s actually a concatenation of the first 17 non-space characters in the title of the Wolf Parade album Apologies to the Queen Mary (which is all that appeared on the screen of my first iPod when this particular piece of digital vinyl was playing).

Introduction

Anyone who attends an event like the Memphis in May World Championship Barbeque Cooking Contest (WCBCC henceforth) will have a personal view of the experience – it will sit at a particular relativity to their expectations and there will be predominant features or themes, highlights and memories specific to the individual.

However, having been to the Friday and Saturday of the 2010 edition of this annual (33 year old) event, it is the very distinct bucketing of potential experiences and the ‘distance’ between these experiences which struck me most about the occasion; whilst your mileage certainly may vary should you ever find yourself in Tom Lee Park during this festival of pork I now feel I can give you a very good idea of not only what you will find there, but perhaps more importantly what the folks on the other side of the fence have already found.

The bad news is that you could potentially be somewhat underwhelmed; whilst there is stuff to see and do, unless you have other reasons to be in Memphis at the time or not too far to travel I wouldn’t recommend attending the WCBCC solely as an unconnected spectator, the reasons for which I’ll detail below, and the good news (for me at least) is that through a great deal of positive fortune this was not the bucket of experience into which I ended up, and so whilst quite different from my ingoing expectations, I had an absolute rip-snorter of a time, and amongst the obtuse rambling to follow I’ll also do my best to explain why that was so.

And now, onto some actual content, such as it is, grouped into what struck me as the key dimensions of the WCBCC.

The Booths

The first point of the Team Area Instructions in the WCBCC 2010 Team Manual states 'Team areas less than 20’ X 30’ are limited to single story structures. This includes all Patio Porker areas (15’x25’) and all 18’x 20’ areas.'

If, as I did having read the above before arriving in Memphis, it’s not clear to you why people would choose to construct multi story structures given that the WCBCC is an event which only lasts for three days, your confusion may well be eased by learning that when defining ‘multi story’ some teams don’t stop at two:

‘Best Booth’ is actually one of the 3 non-food divisions at the WCBCC (the other two being ‘T-Shirt Contest’ and ‘Ms. Piggie Idol’), and ‘The Ques Brothers’ placed second in that division this year. (Pig themed team names proliferate, a couple of my favourites were ‘Slab Yo’ Mama BBQ Team’ and ‘Ribbed For Your Pleasure’.)

And here are a couple of others I took photos of. Retrospectively, whilst I’m happy with all of these shots I feel like there were lots more booths I should have happy-snapped to give a true representation of the creativity, energy, and pig-theming some folks put into their porcine palaces, but hopefully this small selection gives you some idea of the effort people go to.

The more astute amongst you may have noticed a certain Northern African undertone to those snaps above, and may even have picked out a particular country’s flag on one or two of the booths. That’s because every year Memphis in May, the festivals of which the WCBCC is but one (albeit the most calorie laden) aspect has an ‘honoured country’, with this year’s choice being Tunisia.

Finally, just to partly make up for the shortcomings in my photography skills with some copyright infringment, here’s a photo from 2009 I snaffled off the web:

The Serious Pig

I mentioned above that there were three non-food divisions of competition at the WCBCC, and there are 15 food divisions, of which four are by a considerable margin more important and prestigious than the other 11. Quoting again from the team manual ‘at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest barbecue is considered pork meat (fresh or frozen and uncured) prepared only on a wood and/or charcoal fire.’

All teams at the WCBCC enter one of the four Official Competition Categories of Rib, Patio Porker, Shoulder and Whole Hog.

Borrowing a third time from the team manual for the definitions, in a little more detail these four main categories are:

RIB - Pork spare ribs or loin ribs. Country style ribs are not a valid entry. (There were 113 entrants into the RIB category in 2010.)

I’ve cooked a rack or two of ribs in my time, and have probably stretched to three racks at once on occasion, but despite only having to turn in a tray or two of actual barbecue for the judging, the serious entrants in the WCBCC don’t leave anything to chance, and make sure they have enough product from which to cherry pick the best portion to submit for judging:

Patio Porker – These teams must cook ribs for the competition. Teams are limited to 15 square feet of grill space. (This is the division for the less experienced teams, and there were 39 entrants into this category in 2010.)

SHOULDER – The portion of the hog containing the arm bone, shank bone, and a portion of the blade bone. The pork ham, considered a shoulder entry, contains the hind leg bone. Boston butts or picnic shoulders are not valid entries. (65 teams entered this category.)

A whole pork shoulder is like to weigh in the region of 15 pounds, and whilst the teams in this category also only have to provide a tray or two for judging, it’s again a case of better safe than sorry:

WHOLE HOG – An entire hog, whose dressed weight is 85 pounds or more prior to the removal of the head, feet, and skin. It must be cooked as one whole unit on one grill surface. (29 teams entered this category.)

For the four main categories there was a specific 15 minute window on Saturday May 15 in which entrants had to hand in their barbecue for judging, and for the Whole Hog category it was from 11:45am to 12:00pm. Some teams would choose to cook their whole hogs for near on 24 hours, and so the serious action in this category began at or before lunchtime on the Friday. Due to the size and cost of a whole pig most entrants in this category would choose to cook a single animal:

But even here some teams had significant planned redundancy:

People’s Choice Contest/ Bog Standard Spectator

So, with these ridiculously excessive quantities of pork being prepared at the WCBCC (not even a fraction of a minuscule sliver of which is pictured above), you’d think that most attendees would literally be swimming in pork fat, lazily backstroking their way across a lake of liquid lard between the booths, deservedly stopping every 10 or 15 feet to refuel on ribs, partake of some pulled pork, or, (for the really hungry), masticate their way through the entirety of a distant branch of Babe’s family tree.

But you’d be wrong.

And here’s the bad news, taken from the WCBCC website:

'Local codes prohibit teams from selling barbecue to the general public.'

Boo!

That’s right, of the hundreds, if not thousands, of racks of ribs being lovingly marinated, rubbed, smoked and sauced by arguably the most passionate and skilled pit masters ever to open a bag of lump charcoal Joe Public gets to eat exactly none.

Oh the humanity!

That’s not to say it’s not possible to eat barbecue at the WCBCC as a lowest rung punter, in fact there are two ways you can do this, but in my opinion neither of these warrant attendance purely as a vanilla spectator should such involve significant travel (from, for instance, Australia).

The People’s Choice Award is decided by popular vote and gives you the opportunity (for $4) to taste five entries into category. After buying our tickets we lined up for ~45 minutes to get in to the People’s Choice tent, and were presented with 5 little plastic cups of pulled pork. Better than a slap in a face with a wet fish I’ll allow, but not really enough actual pig to enthuse us sufficiently to line up again for another 45 minutes.

Some people in the tent seem to have more than one ticket per person, and so appeared to be getting 10 tastes in one sitting. I don’t know if this involved doubling up on the samples (i.e. getting the same 5 samples twice) or different samples, and if we had our time again I reckon we’d have got more than one ticket each, but even so suspect we’d have walked away still feeling like we’d wanted to eat more.

There’s obviously an upper bound to the amount you could eat – limited by the number of entries (51 this year), and the pork for this category is provided to entrants free of charge, but I certainly think a concerted effort by the organisers to increase participation in this category, and subsequently reduce waiting times and/or increase tasting portion sizes would be a good thing.

It’s also the case that the entries for the people’s choice award were turned in between 12:15 and 1:30 and then served between 2:00 and 6:00, and whilst I’m sure they were kept above the 155 degrees Fahrenheit required to maintain food safety, and barbecue of this nature can be held for a significant period of time without a serious loss of quality, to do so does require some care from those doing the holding, potentially spritzig, saucing or rubbing the meat prior to serving to optimize the eating experience, and it’s understandable that the care provided by the volunteers in the People’s Choice tent may not have been at quite the level which would have been provided by those for whom this particular pork shoulder was their baby (not literally), or pet (perhaps literally).

Finally, I really hope the judging mechanism for the People’s Choice award is fair. The results for this category (won by the 'South Carolina Swiners', not one of the 5 entries we tasted), simply lists a ‘number of votes’ by team, rather than a ‘score’. We were asked to vote for one of the 5 samples we tasted, and you might think simply by ensuring that each team is tasted the same number of times that the team getting the most votes would be a deserving winner, however that need not be the case. We were all given the same 5 entries, as were all of the other people sitting at our table, and the people who’d been there before us judging by the empty cups when we sat down. If this grouping continued throughout the People’s Choice judging, the entries would not actually be being judged against the other 50 entries, but only against those with which they’d been quinteted, potentially resulting in an entry of middling quality getting the most votes solely due to having the good fortune of being grouped with four others at the lower end of the scale (say, of the standard I’d be likely to produce).

And in reality, I don’t have any solid evidence that the People’s Choice award wasn’t in fact scored using one of the many methods which would produce an objectively deserving champion, but the lingering suspicion of a less than scientific approach is either caused by, or adds to, my overall feeling that the People’s Choice award missed the mark a bit, feeling a bit lower on the organisers’ priorities than it ideally would have been – and as the only real way those attending the WCBCC purely as a spectator could taste anything produced by the competing teams, slightly disappointing.

The other option for barbeque consumption for all and sundry were the stalls amongst the concession stands selling pork shoulder and ribs, but these offers too seemed somewhat token given the size of the crowd, were undersupplied in terms of seating areas and completely devoid of any seating under cover (not ideal in the 30+ and humid conditions), and it strikes me that if you did go to the WCBCC and bought barbeque from a retail outlet, it’d be bit like going to the footy and then watching the game on a TV in the bar.

The Judges

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the bog standard spectator (and their paucity of hog), is the experience of those lucky few individuals who have undertaken the necessary qualifications to be charged with the task of choosing the best barbequers on the planet through a combination of blind tasting and booth visits, a task which whilst undeniably onerous, does, in essence, mean they get to eat large quantities of glorious, glorious pork, which clearly compensates the fact that I’m only allocating 93 words to them in this post. (Or 95 if you include the heading, or now it’s up to 108 if, wait, 111, oh, bugger ...)

The Competitors Themselves

The real stars of the show, the third of my ‘buckets’ of potential experience are the actual entrants, the competitors in the WCBCC, who invest a huge amount of time, effort, and in many cases money (some of the folks we talked to said the week of the WCBCC was likely to set them back around five grand), for their passion.

Some had travelled fair distances – Norway and Denmark were both represented by their national barbecue teams in 2010, and the most serious would have been sleeping in Tom Lee Park overnight to monitor temperatures and give their shoulders and hogs the required amount of TLC. Many would also be on the circuit, competing in barbecue competitions all over the South, and doing so on some pretty impressive pieces of kit:

Whilst some other use grills with a bit increased visibility (the pig is a reflection from the both across the way – it’s not in the grill):

Or just a bit more character. Sooiee! (This entrant was in the Patio Porkers division):

The grill is obviously only one of very many factors which determine the quality of the finished product however, with the list of additional considerations including, but realistically not being limited to:

Source of meat
Meat preparation – trimming, tying and otherwise shaping
Pre-cooking flavours – rubs, pastes, injections and marinades – not only the recipes, the details of which, like so many of these factors, are closely guarded secrets, but also how and when they are applies (covering your shoulder with mustard before rubbing it may help the rub stick, but does it help the flavour?)
I meant pork shoulder in the last bullet point, not the cook’s shoulder
Temperature of the grill when the meat goes on
Temperature of the meat when it goes on the grill
Choice of fuel (brand of charcoal)
Choice of wood(s) to add smoke flavour (hickory is the most common, though it can be overpowering and fruit and nut tree woods in various combinations are also popular
Temperature at which meat is cooked
Application of sauces, bastes (and additional rub) during cooking
Wrapping part or all of the meat in foil (with or without juice or other liquid) for part of the cooking time
Cooking time and temperature at which meat is removed from the grill
Resting time
Post-cooking flavours –one last addition of sauces and rubs, that final touch to complete the magic.

And it’s the serious competitors’ fastidious attention to detail, almost religious fervour with which they support their choices across the dimensions above, and cultish air of secrecy around the details of those choices which has me including ‘a little bit Master Chef’ in the title of this post.

The Hangers On

And now, the final category of experience at the WCBCC and the one into which I fell. Team S201 at the 2010 WCBCC was ‘The People’s Republic of Swina’, where through three degrees of separation (friends of a colleague of an ex-colleague of a friend) I was connected to the competitors, and so had the incredibly good fortune to be amongst the crowd of hangers on in this booth for the duration of our stay at the championship.

We made a (in my mind very modest) contribution to the funding of the booth, and in return were not only subject to two days of absolutely top notch Southern hospitality (with Mark in particular going out of his way to make sure we were having a good time and being a significant contributor to just how much fun we did have), but also gained access to seats, shade, a team t-shirt, cup and stubby holder, a seemingly never ending supply of beer and snacks, and, most important of all, the team’s barbecue!

Regardless of the final position of the team in the rankings, the barbeque we ate in the tent was great, and there sure wasn’t any lack of it. When we arrived on the Friday morning there was already a pulled shoulder ready for the eating, and during the rest of that first day there was barbecued chicken, pork loins (wrapped in bacon), sausages (and how), as well as salad, rolls, the bases and cheese used to make both BBQ pizza and quesadillas.

Now, if you’ve made it this far I’d like to thank you for your dedication (though I would question your choice of literary material), but you may recall ages and ages ago, after some but before more of this seemingly never ending stream of self serving verbosity, there were some photos of food, including one of 5 whole pork shoulders on a grill.

But wait, I’m not going to make you scroll all that way back to try to find it, here it is again:

And that photo was, taken on the Friday evening in the booth of the People’s Republic of Swina; during the early phases of a long slow cook in preparation for the shoulder turn in at 10:45 on the Saturday morning. As I mentioned above, only one tray worth of this product actually had to be submitted for judging, leaving approximately 20 pounds of pork for us and the rest of the crowd in the booth to, in the words of one of our hosts when we did arrive on the Saturday morning (but after consuming the compulsory jelly shot required for entry on that day), ‘eat the stink out of’!

Now, if we think about the drivers of success at the WCBCC, and why The People Republic of Swina may have finished where we (okay, not we, they) actually did, I really feel it comes down to balance.

Whilst some other teams lacked balance, not having a non-stop flow of kegs throughout the duration of the festival and spending all of their time focused only on the pork, both the 12 or so actual competitors and varying but on average somewhat larger number of hangers on in The People’s Republic of Swina had plenty of love for the ‘que, but not at the exclusion of other important recreational activities.

And this important balance appropriately achived by The People’s Republic of Swina was epitomised, not, in my mind, by the fact that the team had their own, logoed beer pong table:

Or even by the fact that the beer pong table had speakers, so that you could listen to music while you played (though not needed in this case doe to the much larger sound system in the tent):

But was, in fact most elegantly captured in the placement of the team logo not only on the beer pong tables, but also on the beer pong balls:

I had a go (or two), and in the following photo you not only get a view of the front and back of the team t-shirt, and of the temporary team tattoo on an ankle in the foreground, but also learn that I stick my tongue out when trying to throw a ping pong ball into a plastic cup half full of beer.

Some final thoughts:

Well, I appreciate this has taken you about as long to read as it took me to experience, so rather than keep you any longer, I’ll just finish with a couple of closing thoughts.

I went to the award ceremony, where there was a (successful) marriage proposal, some pigs (just in case anyone had forgotten why we were there):

Some whopping great trophies:

And quite possibly the greatest outfit of all time (older gent on the left, as if I needed to point it out).

The awards ceremony on the Saturday night was the last part of the WCBCC I attended, and after two solid days with lots of beer, lots of pork and lots of laughs, with our hair and clothes all thoroughly stinking of smoke, there was only one thing to do. Eat more barbeque. So we did.

I’m terrible at taking photos of food that other people cook, I always intend to but invariably only remember when I’m halfway through, but sincerely hope our tolerance for more barbeque at this stage, and my photo-opportunity-wrecking enthusiasm to get stuck into the rack of ribs that was laid in front of me at Rendezvous only serves as evidence that with, in my opinion, a much richer and more complex experience than attending purely as a spectator, complete avoidance of the stress of being actual competitors and leaving something to aim for in the dream of one day achieving the Sus domesticus utopia of being a qualified barbeque judge, we had a truly awesome time at the 2010 WCBCC.

Momofuku Pork Buns

2010-06-13T21:50:00.009+10:00

In addition to owning approximately six New York restaurants of which approximately five include the word 'Momofuku' in their name, David Chang listens to The Hold Steady and Modest Mouse and drinks Pappy Van Winkle, for which reason I'd hold him in reasonably high regard even if I hadn't had the chance to enjoy his pan rattling par excellence on a recent holiday to NYC, a holiday which I'll hopefully get around to writing about one of these days, but about which I will say now did include a 'pork bun challenge' in which Momofuku scored a unanimous victory over Ippudo.

So enamored was I with the culinary experience of Momofuku (and in particular their little bundles of piggy goodness), so engrossed was I by the introduction to the Momofuku book Chang and Peter Meehan released last year, and so essential were some rehearsals before preparing pork buns for one of my NYC hosts when she's back in Oz in September (as I've committed to do), that I bought the Momofuku book, brought it back to Sydney with me, and tonight had my first attempt at making them.

I've written before that I'm sometimes underwhelmed by the outputs of my kitchen endeavours, however as for the post linked to above, I'm delighted to say this was not one of those times, I really, really enjoyed these pork buns, and am confident that whilst obviously not at the standard of the original, will also get Ce's seal of approval when I cook them for her later in the year.

The pork bun dough contains skim milk powder, which it took me a few stores to find today. As it also includes water (obviously), I did wonder if you could just omit the powder and substitute some of the water with milk, but I've got the whole box of powder now - so I can't see myself testing that modification in the next few attempts. The dough calls for pork fat or vegetable shortening, and I didn't have either of these, but I did have some duck fat in the freezer, which I was happy to use instead. I also don't have a stand mixer, so kneaded the dough by hand for about 10 minutes, at which point I had this:

The Momofuku recipe for pork buns uses a piece of skinless pork belly, but I decided to cook my pork belly with skin on for a couple of reasons. Partly it was by buying a piece of belly just for me I went about as small as I could find, and the piece I got wasn't very thick, so I was hesitant to make it any thinner by removing the skin.

The other (and lets face it main) reason I left the skin on was to have some crackling as a side dish, for the crunchiness of which I've found going heavy on the salt is a big help:

Chang's pork is prepared with a simple rub of salt and sugar, but I also deviated here, making a paste of garlic, bay leaves, fennel seeds, chili flakes and oil (and the afore mentioned salt). I prepped the pork nice and early to let the flavours get in, and give me the flexibility for a long slow cook.

After about 90 minutes the dough had risen nicely.

So I punched it down, made some little dough balls, and let them rest for a second rise:

The next step is to roll out the balls into little ovals, and then fold them in half into their bun shapes. The photo in the Momofuku book has some ridiculously uniform buns, my first couple of efforts were pretty woeful, but even over the course of twelve buns I saw some improvement.

I let the buns sit again at this stage, and then steamed them in batches, during which time they not only cooked, but also fluffed up significantly. You'll notice there are only 11 buns in the next photo - I had to eat one just to see what they were like!

I'd cooked the pork at a reasonably low temperature for long enough to be confident it'd be cooked, and then as I got into the steaming I cranked the heat to max to help the crackling.

At Momofuku they actually chill the pork to make it easier to slice then reheat it before bunning up, but the sight, smell and taste (just from licking my fingers) of the pork when I took it out of the oven meant there was absolutely zero chance of that happening in this case.

I'd made a very simple cucumber pickle (just cucumber, sugar and salt), had shallots, hoi sin sauce and sriracha, and put a bit of each, with some pork, on the buns.

Fold them up and eat them, and that's all she wrote. Actually, that'll be all I wrote here, just going to finish off with, lets face it, far too many shots of the finished product! Yummo!

Yorkshire Pudding Yorkshire Pudding Yorkshire Pudding

2010-02-28T20:52:00.003+11:00

Yorkshire Pudding Yorkshire Pudding Yorkshire Pudding
Yorkshire Pudding Yorkshire Pudding Yorkshire Pudding

159 STGOOBF - School Daze (Part 3)

2010-01-30T19:27:00.004+11:00

School Daze (Part 2)

Big Audio Dynamite II - The Globe

What a great song to finally get back into the list on! The Globe is the title track of Big Audio Dynamite II's 1991 effort, which was the second album released with the suffix 'II' in the band's name, the addition of which was to recognise the change in personnel from Big Audio Dynamite, and by the release of The Globe only Mick Jones remained from the original lineup. Mick Jones was (obviously) also in The Clash (on guitar and vocals), which (no brackets this time) obviously also featured Joe Strummer, who was temporarily in The Pogues and is mentioned in a song by The Hold Steady (we'll be hearing from them later). In addition, The Globe samples a Clash song written by Mick Jones - Should I Stay or Should I Go.

Every time I hear this song I think back to the time at which I really got into it, when I was living with my uncle temporarily because my father was the Administrator of Christmas Island (which has obviously been in the press a fair bit of recent years due to issues of refugee detention), a role which included marrying people. Performing the ceremony that is, not actually getting married.

Falling Joys - Lock It

You know, I only just found out right now that the Falling Joys were from Canberra, so this process has been as educational for me as it has for you! You can watch the video of this (to quote JJJ) 'magical alterna-hit' here, and the fact that the You Tube clip is from rage is awesome, because even if I don't watch it much any more I sure used to back in the 80s and 90s when the Falling Joys existed.

Other than that I don't really have too much to say about this song to be honest, but I do remember a friend from high school being a particularly big fan because of the line 'Christ I really like you...' at the end of the second stanza; she felt it really captured the moment of clarity when all of a sudden you realise you're head over heels for someone, and it's that great mix of hope and excitement and happiness, with just a dash of fear. At least based on my memory that's what I assume she meant, that is I assume we were able to feel like that, have such experiences and such emotions as school children, obviously we've now had all potential for real joy mercilessly ripped from our hearts and souls by the flagitious reality of adult life in modern society...

Guns n' Roses - Don't Cry (Original Lyrics)

There were two version of Don't Cry released by Guns n' Roses on their studio albums, the version I include here on Use Your Illusion I, and a version with alternative lyrics on Use Your Illusion II; a third version was not on any albums but appeared on the Don't Cry single.

Now, why would I choose this Guns n' Roses song for the 159 STGOOBF you may ask, above all of their other more notable efforts? Well, really it's a combination of two factors, neither of which would necessarily be looked upon favourably had this list been complied under the auspices of serious musical criticism, but given the drivel I've produced about these songs so far I'm sure that's hardly a surprise.

The first reason is another place/time memory inevitably triggered by hearing this song, the place being a holiday house in Shoreham (Victoria), at which I spent many incredibly enjoyable fortnights over the summers of my childhood, and the time being a particular one of those fortnights, in the summer of 1991/92, which also happened to be smack bang in the middle of my short, but sweet, first real relationship.

The second (and no doubt to the detriment of my romantic reputation almost certainly the stronger) reason is the video, not only because it featured Stephanie Seymour (and other similarly attractive females) in a range of figure hugging singlets, sweaters and bodysuits, showing just enough promise of what lay beneath to bring any reasonable adolescent male back for more, but, and this was the real clincher, because in the video Axl Rose wears a t-shirt which I owned, giving me (at least on my scale) a massive amount of cool points, a t-shirt of a band, and a band which will feature in the next installment of 159 STGOOBF. I can't find a great version of the video, the best I could do is here.

Neutral Milk Hotel Footage - Awesome!

2009-11-21T09:29:00.001+11:00

This post used to have a really cool Neutral Milk Hotel video.

It doesn't anymore.

That makes me sad.

Mumford & Sons

2009-11-02T22:20:00.001+11:00

This has just convinced me I need to go to St Jerome's next year.

Awesome.

159 STGOOBF

2009-09-13T21:07:00.002+10:00

I'm not going to go and edit all of the times I've used 158 so far, but the list has expanded to now contain 159 pieces of musical awesomeness, and I'll try to describe it thusly going forwards.

This isn't a song I've only just got into, but one which somehow got lost from my iPod and so wasn't picked up in the original list creation process.

Shame on me.

Give me your eyes, I need sunshine

2009-08-18T21:24:00.005+10:00

Certainly only one of these started the night full, but they all ended up at the same level.

If I could take the fire out from the wire I'd share a life and you'd share a life.

Interesting?

158 STGOOBF - School Daze (Part 2)

2009-08-18T19:14:00.011+10:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Folk Arc (Part 2)

School Daze (Part 1)

R.E.M. - Stand

What do I have to say about this song, other than 104.7? And that's not some obscure reference to the number of times I listened to it on repeat, it's the assigned nominal centre frequency of the Canberra radio station with which I associate this song. Quite possibly before JJJ's launch in the nation's capital, and certainly before my migration to 101.5 (or the frequency JJJ launched on in Canberra, which was something other than 101.5), I was an enthusiastic listener to, and often voter in, FM104's 'hot eight at 8', a (week)nightly compilation this song certainly made a Stand in. (158 bad puns TGOOBF).

It's not the only entry in the 158 STGOOBF which I associate with FM104, but its partner in crime will come later, so I'll just close here by pointing out that each of the last two choruses moving up a major second is an example of truck driver's gear change and including a link to this live version.

Pink Floyd - The Gunner's Dream

I was in Merbein on the weekend, and whilst there I saw a photo of my great-great-great-grandmother, which I think is pretty cool. Also in Merbein was my uncle, who I lived with for a couple of periods of a couple of weeks towards the end of my secondary schooling, and listening to Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, the album upon which this song appears, always brings back strong memories of living with my uncle, and hot dogs, and raspberry/blueberry pie. Go figure.

The Final Cut was the last Pink Floyd album including Roger Waters, like a number of their other albums is best appreciated as a whole rather than as a sum of its parts, and features a fair old whack of holophonic sound effects.

And speaking of sound effects, I got into this album via a mate at school who was regularly in charge of sound for the school's dramatic productions, and used bits of The Final Cut for a production I also worked on. A few years ago I stumbled upon this particular mate's blog when it was the second result returned in Google to a search for 'margarita mix', as you do.

Here's the song's music video.

158 STGOOBF - School Daze Part 1

2009-07-19T13:47:00.017+10:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Folk Arc (Part 2)

Eric Clapton - Wonderful Tonight

This song was written by Eric Clapton for Pattie Boyd in 1976. As well as being married to Eric Clapton, Pattie Boyd was married to George Harrison, had an affair with Ronnie Wood, and turned down several years worth of advances from from Mick Jagger - that's some heavy hitting musical success in the participants of your love life right there!

My primary association with this song is a locational one, lying on the lounge room floor of my house listening to the song over and over again whilst drifting in and out of consciousness one day towards the end of 1990. I wasn't hung over (being only 16 and not turning to drink till a number of years later), but I had had a very late night the night before at my high school's 'Spectacular' (annual talent show), in which I'm sure I'd been involved, though I can't remember precisely how. One of the musical acts in that year's Spectacular had been a band performing Wonderful Tonight, a song I hadn't heard previously, but which my brother owned on CD, much to the appreciation of my sleep deprived brain.

My other distinct memory from that Spectacular (obviously significantly more distinct that the details of my involvement) occurred during a rehearsal, when the singer of one of the musical acts (maybe, maybe not, the same group of kiddies who performed Wonderful Tonight, again a detail which has been lost over time) knocked over the microphone he was singing into, but was so drunk, stoned or otherwise chemically altered that he didn't notice and continued singing, somewhat uselessly given the amplification of the band's instruments. This particular memory has stuck with me, I assume, for two reasons; first, due to the shock to my rather straight-laced (even more so than nowadays) system from seeing an (underage) peer so obviously whacked off his head on goofballs during the middle of the day at a school function, and secondly due to the surprising reaction to this obvious display of offchopedness by the teacher in attendance which was, it seemed at the time, to do absolutely nothing.

The Doors - Hello, I Love You

Another song with a locational connection - the inside of my parents' mid 70's red Volvo ('The Brick', which I'd like to point out was not the same Volvo mentioned here), on the road between our house and a local shopping center which at one point of the halcyon days that were the late 80s and early 90s had not one, but two video game arcades, of which my brother and I were frequent and enthusiastic customers.

Street Fighter II, Bubble Bobble (my personal favourite), Double Dragon, Midnight Resistance, Cabal, Cadash, WWF Superstars, and from the pinball side Pin*Bot are the games from those particular pinny arcades which immediately spring to mind, bringing with them many very happy memories indeed.

But why this song by The Doors you might ask? Well, to be honest I think a real contributor was the fact that at only 2:15 we (excursions in The Brick to empty our pockets of 20c pieces began before I had a licence, so my brother was driving) could get through the whole song on the way to the shops. Not that the rest of the offerings on Waiting For The Sun are operatic in length, but at 4:26 we weren't guaranteed to get through my brother's chosen track, Five To One.

Dire Straits - Romeo and Juliet

It's strange, the things we remember (or at least the things I remember). I remember that in February of 1991, on a day I didn't go to school because I was sick (though probably not so sick I couldn't have made it through the day at school), I went to the post office at the set of shops mentioned in the Hello, I Love You blurb above, to post the first mix tape I ever made to a girl.

I know that tape had just four songs on it, and that three of those songs were the first three songs in this post, but for the life of me I can't remember what the fourth song was, which makes me just a tiny bit sad.

I do also have some other memories of Romeo and Juliet which I'm not going to detail here, but suffice it to say they make me anything but sad, and also make me sincerely hope that the days of making mix tapes are not all behind me.

Simple Minds - Don't You (Forget About Me)

This song, from the seminal 1980s teen film The Breakfast Club was not written by Simple Minds, and they were not the first choice artist to perform it, with Brian Ferry and Billy Idol both rejecting the song (though Billy Idol did include a version of the song on the 2001 greatest hits compilation Greatest Hits). I'm often a big fan of cover versions, but I've got to say the Billy Idol version doesn't quite do it for me - feel free to form your own opinion here.

There's definitely an extent to which it's the movie as well as this song I'm GOOBF here, and I'm certainly not alone in the film having an important place in my heart, Matt Groening took Bart Simpson's 'eat my shorts' catchphrase and the character name of Futurama's Bender from the movie, and it's also been referenced in other such important TV shows as Family Guy and Degrassi: The Next Generation.

The Pixies - Wave of Mutilation [UK Surf]

With a release date of 1990, Pump Up The Volume, though less critically successful and with less direct influence on the careers of its cast, the genre of film from which it's drawn, or popular culture of the years following its release, had a greater personal impact on me than The Breakfast Club, (in fact I'd go so far as to describe it as the iconic film of my teenage years, and in fact I've done that once before here), and as a film about a pirate radio station it's not surprising a significant portion of that influence was musical.

This was the first soundtrack I ever bought, and features some great songs including Concrete Blonde covering Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows (both versions of which appear in the film, and it's fair to say this isn't the last mention we'll hear of Leoanard Cohen in the 158 STGOOBF). The singer in Concrete Blonde is (rather than was, I think they reformed a few years ago) Johnette Napolitano, and I only found out that's how her first name is spelt in the process of writing this post, which is knowledge which would have stopped me wondering, when in the USA in 2003, if she'd become Governor of Airzona (but that's Janet Napolitano, now Secretary of Homeland Security).

Wave of Multilation is certainly my favourite song on the album however, and I prefer this version to the original, more upbeat recording from The Pixies excellent third album Dolittle. In JJJ's Hottest 100 Of All Time there was one song by The Pixies, Surfer Rosa's Where Is My Mind? which is another awesome song, and in fact there's probably an infinite number of alternative universes in which it's my favourite song by The Pixies. Not this universe but.

I haven't cooked popcorn in oil for a very long time, and you can listen to a partial cover of the song by Beck here.

158 STGOOBF - Folk Arc (Part 2)

2009-07-07T18:40:00.003+10:00

Intro

Folk Arc (Part 1)

Dick Gaughan - Ewan and The Gold

For there's some who use their dreams to tear themselves apart

And some who never find their dream at all

But how many find the courage to look deepest in their heart

And find a dream they can follow till they fall

Moving from Irish to Scottish folk, Ewan and the Gold was written by Brian McNeill, I've included here the Dick Gaughan version, though in fact, tying this to the last song of the previous post, it was the Mick Thomas version on The Horses Prayer which I first heard and became enchanted by.

I've only seen Mick Thomas play the song once, and as an introduction he explained that having seen St Kilda lose to Adelaide in the 1997 AFL Grand Final and as a result wanting be as far away from Melbourne as possible he went to Scotland, only to be reminded of his recent sporting disappointment by the presence of St Kilda, an archipelago containing the western most islands of the Outer Hebrides, after which the (now) suburb in Melbourne was indirectly named (via the schooner Lady of St Kilda, itself named for the islands).

Unfortunately Mick's subsequent decision to embrace his despair and visit the islands was thwarted by the fact that St Kilda is now permanently inhabited only by military personnel, and your average punter can only go there during northern summers as a volunteer to conduct restorations to the historic buildings which get knocked down each winter by the atrocious weather. Not to be completely denied, Mick took up the cause of this song (written about Ewan Gillies, a St Kilda native who emigrated to Australia) a process which, Mick assured us, took almost as long as if he actually had had made it to the islands.

The history of the island though, inhabited for 2 millennia until 1930, is fascinating. You can read about it here and hear the song (with accompanying slide show) here.

Stan Rogers - Barrett's Privateers

Across the Atlantic to Canada, but connected to Ewan and the Gold by being another song Mick Thomas performs a mean cover of (in this case from the Weddings Parties Anything days), Barrett's Privateers was released by Stan Rogers on his 1976 album Fogarty's Cove, and despite being the style of a sea shanty regularly switches between common time and 5/4 time (I love a good change in time signature) which I learnt here.

I've got two Stan Rogers versions, of which I prefer the looser, louder, live offering, though to be honest neither matches the delicious raucousness of the opening track on WPA's legendary live recording They Were Better Live, and it's only my aversion to inter-compilation artist duplication which stops me getting out of bed for the for the Wedd's a capella effort, so to speak.

This video of Stan Rogers has about the right amount of belly-fire, in my opinion, plus some good beards, and an awesome Monty-Pythonesque facial expression at 1:09.

Simon & Garfunkel - So Long Frank Lloyd Wright

Other than the fact I'm not the first person to put this song and the previous together in a playlist I haven't found any compelling link between the two, but I'm not going to let that stop me including them in this order.

Popular interpretation of this song is that it's Paul Simon saying goodbye to Art Garfunkel as it comes from their last album together, with Garfunkel's intended (or perhaps even realised) study of architecture driving the elaborate nickname by which he is referred to here.

Now, I'm not sure if my tendency to live in the past or dwell on decisions long made is greater or lesser than your average man on the street, I'm pretty sure in general it's better to do less of that than more, but however much I'd like to minimise my 'what might have been' time, I get a an unavoidable bout of it whener I listen to this entry in the STGOOBF.

With a connection driven by my only (conscious) exposure to Frank Lloyd Wright's work, the resigned wistfulness of this song always makes me think what might have been, and the experiences I might have had, all the way from the fairways where the wind of freedom blows to a party in Fitzroy and back again. YMMV.

Counting Crows - Blues Run The Game

No, that's not an error, it is Counting Crows, it is folk, and I think I'll repeat here the text which accompanied this song (though the original, Jackson C. Frank version) the last time I put it on a compilation CD:

The Counting Crows covered this the first time I saw them play live, and it was one of those songs I just absolutely loved the first time I heard it. This guy had a very interesting life story, including a schoolyard fire, huge insurance payout, production of his only album by Paul Simon, and a long period of homelessness before being ‘rescued’ by a fan for the last few years of his life.

I don't often love songs the first time I hear them, but as mentioned above I sure did this one, and this remains my favourite version of the three I have, Counting Crows, the original, and, as he covered it as well as producing the album the original was from, Simon and Garfunkel.

The first time I saw Counting Crows play live (of two times I have) was on February 27, 2003 at the Enmore Theatre, and this track was clearly the highlight for me. The second time I saw Counting Crows was a week later at the Hordern Pavilion, and that night we met a couple of chicks who were students at Macquarie Uni, one of who became quite infatuated with the close friend I mention in this post, (as, it must be said, chicks are often wont to do) and over the course of the next few months he replied to every SMS he received from her with a Counting Crows lyric, which in most cases were eerily appropriate.

Ah Reidy, I miss you mate. (Not dead, he just caught a boat to England baby, maybe to Spain.)

Continuing the theme of not always linking to the version I chose in the STGOOBF, here is the original.

158 STGOOBF - Folk Arc (Part 1)

2009-07-06T19:14:00.007+10:00

Intro

The Pogues - The Auld Triangle

What a great way to start. Written by Irishman Domenic Behan for his bother Brendan's 1954 play The Quare Fellow, this song has become an Irish folk standard, and in addition to great versions by more traditional performers such as The Dubliners, it's also been performed acts as diverse as Dropkick Murphys, Bob Dylan, and The Doug Anthony Allstars.

I love the Pogues version because of the guttural, painful desperation in Shane MacGowan's delivery - there's an admission of defeat, saved from utter hopelessness only by the very recognition that it is in fact an admission of defeat.

Wow, can you imagine having to put up with 158 comments of that pretentiousness? They'll make a Pitchfork contributor of me yet! Seriously though, that'd kill us both, so I'll try to tone it down. Honest.

I'll also try to resist the temptation to have Graham's number of hyperlinks through these posts, because even above I could have linked to a large number of great alternative versions of the song, but I feel once I head in that direction it'll be a very slippery slope, so I'll just link to one here, a beautiful version by The Dubliners and friends, where the latter includes, amongst others, The Pogues. Listen to me here!

Christy Moore - Nancy Spain

Also appearing in the video linked to above is Christy Moore, whose first album was recorded with Dominic Behan, and who's brother Barry performs under the stage name Luka Bloom. I was introduced to Christy Moore by Mr Hero, (who has Irish ancestry) during 1998 at Miller St. Happy, happy times. The version I first fell in love with is from Christy's truly wonderful 1994 album Live at the Point, featuring Seamus Begley from Dingle, and Stephen Cooney from Australia (the latter of whom Mr Hero and Mr Hero's old man were lucky enough to see perform last year). The version from Live at The Point can be found here.

Juliet Turner - I Hope That I Don't Fall In Love With You

Too late for that Juliet, as you continue the Irish theme of my folk songs TGOOBF with surely the most heartbreakingly beautiful voice I've ever heard, and your treatment of this Tom Waits classic is simply breathtaking in the power of emotion conveyed.

If this song wasn't awesome enough as it was, it also appeared in the final episode of one of the greatest TV shows ever (BBC's Life On Mars). The first half of this link is a demo version Tom Waits recorded in 1971, 2 years before the studio album it appeared on. Interesting that 2 of the 3 actual song links I've included so far are for versions which aren't the version I picked in the 158 songs...

Mick Thomas - The Cap Me Granda' Wore

Finally from an Irish point of view, here in subject matter if not performer, Mick Thomas, who was, to quote Bert Newton a 'founding member, singer, songwriter, for Weddings Parties Anything', and is the single artist I've seen perform live more than any other, performed The Cap Me Ganda' Wore the first time I saw him play, at the Annadale Hotel on December 19, 2002.

In the MT link above I threatened to include the body of the e-mail I sent the day after that performance but couldn't find it. Well, I've found it now, so here it is, and whilst it doesn't specifically mention The Cap Me Granda' Wore, the tone of the e-mail is certainly consistent with my feelings about this particular little ditty:

So, I went to see Mick Thomas and the Sure Thing last night at the Annandale Hotel. Mick Thomas was the lead singer/songwriter of Weddings Parties Anything, a band I’m sure you’ve all heard me crap on about at least a bit.

Basically it was the best concert I’ve ever been to in my entire life. Certainly over the course of 2002 there is no band I’ve listened to more than WPA, and being someone that doesn’t mind my live music, I had bloody high expectations, despite the fact that WPA doesn’t even exist anymore, whilst I like the stuff Mick has done since I don’t like it as much as the WPA stuff, and I didn’t expect him to play much, if any, WPA stuff, and he was only scheduled to play for an hour. Still, I was just absolutely blown away, by both the songs I knew and the songs I didn’t. There was only one WPA number in the set, ‘For a Short Time’, which has, I understand become his standard closing song, and was just awesome last night, particularly because it included the 4th verse I’ve only ever heard before on live performances. Also just amazing was a version of the Sure Thing song ‘You Remind Me’, around which Mick wove a fantastic story about being confused for Things of Stone and Wood.

I won’t crap on for ages about how good it was, cause I couldn’t really so [sic] it justice, but I have to tell you about the encore. www.ubl.com describes WPA’s music as: ‘One part rock, one part punk/alternative, one part country, and one part whatever strikes their fancy’ I think there should be folk in there somewhere as well, but anyway, after playing ‘For a Short Time’ and going off, Mick came back and played a one song encore, which, if you’ll fucking believe it or not, was ‘Made of Stone’ by the FUCKING STONE ROSES! FUCK ME! And when Mick was signing my T-Shirt after the show he said they’re going to put it on their next album.

I’m going back again tonight and seriously considering driving to Gosford on Sunday night as well.

Anyway, just thought I’d share that with you all.

[Apologies to the Que].

PS – I was particularly struck that as I stood in a TISM T-shirt listening to the singer from WPA sing a Stone Roses song that three of the four bands making up the posters in my room were at that moment featured in a juxtaposition that could only be described as – [Apologies to the Que]!

Well, all that and I've only got through 4 songs! This could take a while. (Or I could just lose interest and end up listing the last 120 odd!)

Apologies to the NeoCube

2009-07-05T21:25:00.006+10:00

First, some preliminaries.

Apologies for the poor picture quality - the webcam on my laptop isn't great;
Apologies for the clunkiness and poor quality audio - this is my first ever attempt at editing video, and not only did I think I'd leave changing the audio track till lesson two, I do like the cool clicky sounds the magnets make when they join;
Apologies to Wilco for any copyright infringement on the sound. Go buy Being There so I don't feel so guilty;
Apologies to szakiii, whose YouTube videos are at least 216 times better than mine!

But now that's out of the way, the point of this post is to put up a NeoCube video. Described on the website as '216 individual high-energy rare-earth magnets, the NeoCube allows you to create and recreate an outrageous number of shapes and patterns', this is in my (rather geekish opinion) seriously cool, and would be even if it weren't for the fact that as you get eight spares and I bought three, I actually have a total of 672 (3 x [216 + 8]) spheres.

The strength of the magnets, the effect on their polarity when they're joined together in one, two or three dimensional forms, and the impact of the combination of these first two factors in the process of making shapes makes this an intellectually stimulating and incredibly fascinating toy (though not for kiddies - swallowing these bad boys [especially more than one] would be seriously bad).

My analytical nature leads me to being a big fan of symmetry, and so some of the shapes I've most enjoyed creating with the NeoCube are the Platonic solids or variants thereof, such as the dodecahedron frame I construct in the following video:

Just one more point before I go, which is that another brand of these small spherical magnets is Zoomdoggle's Bucky Balls, and in my travels around the wide wide world of web I have noticed a couple of questions raised as to the relative merits of the two brands. I actually bought a set of Bucky Balls prior to purchasing my NeoCube (x3), and in my opinion the NeoCube magnets are superior by a significant margin; they just seem stronger and more obedient, making a much cooler clicking noise when they join together, but more importantly being far easier to manipulate.

158 STGOOBF - Intro

2009-07-05T18:41:00.007+10:00

Whilst listening to alternative Australian radio station JJJ's Hottest 100 of 2008 on Australia Day this year, I was tickled to hear that in 2009, the 20th anniversary of the first Hottest 100, (if we only start counting from when 2JJ became a national broadcaster) JJJ would be running a Hottest 100 in the middle of the year, replicating the format of 1989, 1990, 1991 (and another mid year emprise in 1998) by not restricting the voting activities of participating punters to songs released in the previous 12 months, but rather offering open slather to champion the cause of any song from any year in the creation of a Hottest 100 Of All Time.

I'm sure I wasn't the only listener prompted by this announcement to consider creating their own, personal, Hottest 100 Of All Time, and in fact you need look no further than JJJ stalwart Richard Kingsmill to find an example of the very same.

However, when I did sit down to my iTunes library (sitting at 10,851 songs at time of writing) with this concept in mind, I quickly reached the conclusion that for in my case a personal Hottest 100 Of All Time was impractical, for at least 3 reasons:

First, I have a strong and potentially unreasonable aversion to including two songs by the same artist in any compilation I create, be it a disc I give someone to introduce them to bands they haven't heard before, an excuse for some low budget photoshopping of a CD cover, or a collection of soppy faves for some chick I'm in lurrrrrve with. And that really stuffs things up, because The Hold Steady are certainly responsible for more than one of my favourite 100 songs ever.
Secondly, in my mind the ordering of a personal list becomes pretty meaningless once it gets to this length - I mean, how could I really choose which was my 87th favourite song of all time and which was my 88th?
And for that matter, how could I choose which was my 100th favourite, and which was 101? Why Hottest 100? I think picking 1, or 10 (as you actually had to to vote in JJJ's poll) is reasonable, and obviously an ordering based on a count of votes gives a completely objective number 100, but when it's just little old me the pain involved in trimming some longer list down to exactly 100 is, in my mind, simply unnecessary, and easily avoided just by coming up with a list of whatever length seems right.

So, for those reasons, I just started going through my iTunes library, restricting myself to one song per artist, and picking songs which have been of significant importance to me, which I've gone out of my way to listen to, or which I just think are really cool, and came up with a list of 158. A couple of things I noted during the process were:

I don't think I've included any songs I only heard for the first time in 2009 (giving me comfort my 158 songs are songs with long term appeal).
One of the beauties of not restricting myself to 100 songs is being able to add new songs as required, I was comfortable I'd finished with a list of 156, but at time of writing it's now at 158.
I did buy some songs from iTunes in order to be able to have a playlist of the 158 songs on my iPod, and there are other songs I don't own which if I did I would have included, but which I didn't buy. Confusing? Inconsistent? Irrational? My compilation. My rules!
Mucho cover and alternative version action, but more on that later.

I needed a label I could use to refer to the list, and have settled on 158 Songs to Get Out Of Bed For (158 STGOOBF) an acronym which, should you by some most unfortunate stroke of luck have cause to read more than one of my blog posts, you'll probably be seeing a bit over the next few weeks, as I attempt to set our a few posts detailing the list of 158, and a label I felt was a suitable indicator of the effort-to-listen-to inducing qualities of the contents of said list.

(And at this point I should just say that as much as I appreciate the flexibility of being able to add or remove songs as I go, I hope I don't too much while I'm banging out this series of posts, I've already used the number 158 eight times - it could be a pain to update all of them should I make any changes!)

Despite my incredibly low post count of late I'm not giving into the temptation to have a post for every song, I've actually split the list into 10 groups with some themes that seem sort of sensible to my listening history, it feels like one post per group (and this post as an intro) is probably about the right balance, and I'm going to be flexible about the amount of commentary I add to each song. It also would have been cool to have streaming mp3s for your (both of you) listening pleasure, but anticipating some combination of bandwidth, technical and legal issues I'm gonna let that one slide.

Enough of an intro, onto the list!

Any way you look at it my popularity is waning - please send me your cookies!

2009-05-23T10:20:00.019+10:00

In December 2007 I wrote typically self-referential post, which, amongst other things, noted the presence of the tracking code of two web analytics vendors on this here blog.

I just re-read that post, and it reminded me of better days, well, not necessarily better, but certainly different, days where my prosaic verbosity flowed seemingly unchecked, Yorkshire puddings rose without a care in the world, and I still owned some cows.

It cannot be argued, however, that my post count is down, and so it should have come to no surprise to me when I looked at the data from my two analytics vendors this morning that traffic to my blog is heading in the same direction.

Due to different technologies I wouldn't expect Google Analytics and StatCounter to give me exactly the same data, but you'd hope they would be close, particular for a simple metric such as 'Pageviews' in Google and the analogous 'Page Loads' from StatCounter. Both of these metrics should be a simple count of the number of distinct times pages have been sent to my audience's browsers, should only include pages displayed completely (as the tracking code which registers a pageview/load is at the bottom of the page), and should also include pages loaded from caches and via F5, as both of those would cause the tracking code to fire again. As shown in the chart below, the monthly totals of these metrics are pretty similar, at least since Jan 08 once I'd re-installed the Google tracking code. (Click for larger, more legible, version.)

To be honest though, with such a simple structure to my blog, I'd expect these metrics to be even closer than they are. I mean, it's not like I've got any Ajax elements installed inside Flash modules which have slide shows that default to auto advance but actually skip back a frame on mouse over, have a pop-up of college football scores on left click, launch a brand effectiveness study on right click and make you poached eggs on sourdough if you hop in three clockwise circles on your right leg with your left index finger on your nose, so differences of 10% in February and April this year, are, in my mind, sub-optimal. But then again, as Rick Stein would say, you pays your money, you takes your chances.

A statistic less often comparable between web analytics vendors due to the complexity of its calculation is the number of unique 'people' reading my blog in any given time period. I put 'people' in inverted commas, not because I think there are any cats reading my blog (though if there were they'd presumably do so whilst eating cheezburgers), but because, despite both of my vendors using the label 'Unique Visitors' for the metrics I'm about to compare, they are not, in reality, a precise measure of 'visitors', or, for that matter, 'people'.

Google Analytics, StatCounter (if you want to learn more about them there are links to their websites in the post linked above - go on, click it to get those links, it'll get me another page 'view'), and the vast majority of other web analytics vendors use cookies to identify 'uniqueness' of anyone reading any website their codes are placed upon, and base their calculation of 'Unique Visitors' on the total number of cookies on all of the browsers of people reading those websites. There are, however, many reasons why a count of cookies can be significantly different to a count of people/lolcats:

If you look at the same website on two different computers you'll generate two cookies, but you are only one person;
If you look at the same website on different browsers you'll generate distinct cookies, but you are only one person - at home I regularly use all of IE, Firfefox and Chrome;
If multiple people look at the same website on the same browser on the same computer they will only generate one cookie despite being two people;
If you delete your cookies and then look at a website you've been to previously you'll generate a new cookie despite only being one person;
If you block cookies on your browser you won't generate any cookies at all, despite being a person;
If you have JavaScript disabled tracking tags which don't have a 'noscript' option will not work.

The first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth of these would, in general, significantly outweigh the third, so one would expect a count of cookies to be significantly higher than a count of people, and there is really nothing any web analytics vendor can do about the first three without having direct contact with the audience member themselves.

Some vendors attempt to combat the fourth by using a combination of cookies, IP address and some other 'unique' identifiers (like some quasi-cookie thing that you get when you install Flash that doesn't get deleted when you delete your cookies), but the main difference between unique visitor/browser/users counts from various vendors is their treatment of the last two, which again vary for a number of reasons, not all of which I'd even pretend to begin to understand, but which include:

The use of 1st party vs 3rd party cookies and the relative blocking rates of each;
Capture, analysis and treatment of 'spider' and 'bot' traffic;
Having a 'noscript' option to capture data from browsers with JavaScript disabled;
Adjusting raw cookie counts (cooking probably not really inappropriate!) to take account of cookie blocking, spiders, bots etc.

Being fairly small 'v' vanilla web analytics solutions (with a price point to match), Google Analytics and StatCounter both employ very simple, albeit different, methods to deal with cookie blocking. Google Analytics ignores it, so if you block cookies as far as GA is concerned you never read my blog (from a 'Unique Visitor' perspective - the 'Pageview' still counts, and StatCounter regards each 'Page Load' from a browser with cookies blocked as a new 'Unique Visitor', which I expect is the major driver of Statcounter's monthly 'Unique Visitor' metric being, on average, 18% higher than Google Analytics', over the period January 2008 to April 2009:

But really, far more important than the absolute measures here are the relativities, and the undeniable conclusion that my traffic is trending southward. Always keen to extract the 'so what' from any burst of frenetic analysis I undertake, the obvious direction to head here is to identify options to end this fame slump, turn things around and get those graphs heading back up baby.

And the best option?

DELETE YOUR COOKIES AND THEN COME BACK! You'll count twice and before you know it I'll have more traffic than Nat over at Community Channel.

But really, that would be about as satisfying as low fat cheese, so the only real thing to do, is come up with some content, some posts discussing meaningful, interesting topics which people will want to read, which they'll send to their friends, which they'll put on Internet message boards. (I have actually had that happen a few times, only once by me[!]).

And let's face it, a post like this one about the traffic to my blog should do exactly that.

As should randomly including references to obscure internet memes. Chk chk boom!

Seriously though, thinking about this whole traffic accident that my website traffic has become has re-enforced what I already knew - I've only got myself to blame, and I just need to pull my finger out and write some stuff, because I still do things equally as interesting relevant as all the crap I've written about in the past!

Last week I went to the Australia's 1st Annual Pinball Expo, and I've seen some awesome concerts recently - Mraz, (where playing Rand McNally was enough to make it awesome), The Grates, and OMG OMG OMG Okkervil River (Read Wayne's typically top notch review of the Friday show, where he got to see A Stone). Here's Rand McNally:

The Grates would prefer I don't embed their videos, so go here to see one of their best songs, and I found this witty and insightful blog with a couple of great posts about Okkervil River here and here. Bet the guy who writes that is great in bed too.

But I didn't write posts about them, and the only post I wrote about my road trip trip incorporating CMC Rocks the Snowies was just a series of photos of Old Crow Medicine Show interspersed within the lyrics of one of their songs. Not only do Old Crow Medicine Show deserve to have universes of blogs written about their greatness with some actual, honest to God, original content, but heaps of other cool stuff happened on that trip too, for instance I saw Corb Lund play three times, and got a photo with him:

I also saw Catherine Britt play Fred Eaglesmith's Drive In Movie. She played it whilst supporting Corb in Sydney, and when I was speaking to her afterwards I told her if she hadn't played it I would have driven out to Orange the next night to see her again so that she might (which was obviously a lie, as I was going out to Orange anyway, and to be honest more to see Corb than her). So I guess it serves me right that even though she said she'd play it again in Orange, she didn't!

But it doesn't really matter, because at least I got to see it once (see also Rand McNally above, A Stone here, Caring is Creepy here and Ask Her for Adderall here), she has a beautiful voice, writes great songs as well as doing great covers of other people's, seems really sweet, and is absolutely gorgeous - I have quite the crush on her. Got a photo with her too:

Hmm, maybe if I sent her some cookies she'd go out with me...

The Ash Pole

2009-05-23T09:02:00.014+10:00

Which Ash song is better?

Wagon Wheel (Pork and Beans) (Old Post Thredbo Show) (Bob and Ketch)

2009-04-16T21:09:00.003+10:00

Headed down south to the land of the pines
I'm thumbin' my way into North Caroline
Starin’ up the road
And pray to God I see headlights
I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Pickin’ me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I'm a hopin’ for Raleigh
I can see my baby tonight

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

Runnin' from the cold up in New England
I was born to be a fiddler in an old-time string band
My baby plays the guitar
I pick a banjo now
Oh, the North country winters keep a gettin’ me now
Lost my money playin’ poker so I had to up and leave
But I ain’t a turnin’ back
To livin’ that old life no more

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

Walkin' to the south out of Roanoke
I caught a trucker out of Philly
Had a nice long toke
But he's a headed west from the Cumberland Gap
To Johnson City, Tennessee
And I gotta get a move on fit for the sun
I hear my baby callin’ my name
And I know that she's the only one
And if I die in Raleigh
At least I will die free

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

Barnbougle Tunes

2009-04-14T21:39:00.012+10:00

The 4th. Only 177m to the front of that massive bunker from the Boobyalla tees (recommended handicaps 5-17), more space out to the left, but that can leave the pin completely hidden.

Same shot with some zoom.

The 5th. First hole pointing East (so down[prevailing] wind).

Same shot with some zoom.

The 7th. How hard can a 98m hole be? I hit a 5 iron.

Same shot with some zoom. 5 iron also had some zoom - that's my ball on the green. Rolled that one in for a 2 as well. :)

The 8th. Longest par 4 (417m from Boobyalla) and index 1, with a massive landing area (effectively two fairways) but a very difficult approach to the green for such a long hole. First time we played it I hit the fairway, was on the green in 2, and then 3 putted!

Even with my camera's maximum zoom that green still looks a long way away...

The 9th green, with just a glimpse of the spectacular beach coastline that runs along the length of much of the course in the background.

The 13th. A great links downwind par 3. (Boobyalla = 167m.)

Same shot with some zoom.

The 14th. A downwind par 5, which is a healthy 556 yards from the back pegs, and 515 from Boobyalla. Second time we played the course I had 164 yards left for my second shot. You do the maths. Oh, okay then, I'll do it for you. 350 yard drive baby!

I assume it's some sort of bizarre reverse karma event that by describing my drive length in yards above so that the number would be bigger I ensured that on what will probably be the only time in my life I have an 8 iron into a par 5 I put a terrible swing on it and leave it short, even though it happened a week before I'm writing this post.

Awesome. Go there. Play it. Love it. Take plenty of balls.

Not Dead

2009-04-14T21:19:00.002+10:00

Better than Birchip (metadata Vanilla Slice for SEO)

2009-03-23T20:50:00.007+11:00

With reference to.

Nom nom nom.

Whilst rejoicing in the glorious combination of butter, eggs, flour, cream, sugar and vanilla pictured (albeit inadequately to do said combination any justice whatsoever) above, I was struck by the thought that there was an almost literally infinite number of distinct layers in the pastry of this vanilla slice, and that if there had have in fact been an infinite number of layers of pastry, whilst that would have had to have been a countably infinite, as opposed to uncountably infinite number of layers, that would still have meant there would have been a countably infinite number of gaps between the layers, and so just by putting one sub-atomic particle of matter between each layer of pastry I could have fit the whole universe inside my vanilla slice.

A vanilla slice which had an unusually high pastry to custard ratio mind you, but a ratio which worked awesomely nonetheless - for two key reasons:

The custard was very soft - almost to the point of being runny. For this reason the large amount of pastry (including a middle layer in this dose of double-decker deliciousness) added some much appreciated structural integrity
The pastry was just so dam light and tasty I could have eaten a large block of it on its own - see also thoughts regarding infinite number of layers above

And the custard wasn't too runny, it was spot on, and tasted sublime.

All of this (taste, texture, and crazy trains of thought inspired by the experience) combined to make this, in my opinion, the best vanilla slice I've ever eaten.

And that means the only thing left to do is tell you where I got it.

The Hold Steady @ The Metro Feb 3, 2009 or My 100th Post Extravaganza!

2009-02-05T14:54:00.031+11:00

Given that this is my 100th blog post, I thought I might kick it like this:

100: If she wants a scene report, don't tell her 'bout the kicked in doors. Tell her we ain't even keeping score no more.

99: Last night I went to see The Hold Steady (THS) at the Metro Theatre Sydney. It was f**king awesome.

98: Raise a toast to St. Joe Strummer. I think he might’ve been our only decent teacher.

97: According to here THS was inspired by a movie about The Band, who were a Canadian, well, um, band, whose members originally played together in support of Ronnie Hawkins. There's another great Canadian musician of almost the same name, Ron Hawkins, lead singer of Lowest of The Low. Rosy and Grey is one of my favourite songs of all time.

96: Everyone's a critic and most people are DJs.

95: I realise this stream of statements might not have enough information about the concert itself for anyone who was trying to get an idea of what it was actually like. But honestly, do you think if I could write a proper review I'd resort to gimmicks like this?

94: She said always remember never to trust me. She said that the first night she met me. She said there's gonna be a time when I'm gonna have to go with whoever's gonna get me the highest.

93: Another great thing about THS is their sincerity.

92: It was hard to describe, so she kept it a secret.

91: I highly recommend The Hold Steady Taped Show Archive.

90: Seeing lousy movies but only for the a/c.

89: In the last year or two I have eschewed concert positionings contiguous to stage fronts or crowd control barriers, feeling that what I was gaining in sound quality/balance more than made up for the reduced ability to see the musicians facial expressions. I picked absolutely the right concert to make an exception to that behaviour.

88: I ain't ever been with your little hoodrat friend.

87: Highlight - Ask Her For Adderall

86: I put a milkcrate on my head and surrendered in the corner.

85: The rest of these statements won't be as long or OTT as number 5 - I promise.

84: Our psalms are sing-along songs.

83: By the time the first song was finished my face was already hurting I was smiling so hard.

82: Arms and hearts and alcohol and faith we pull each other in and then we push it all away.

81: If I had any criticism of the sound, it would have been that I found the bass a bit overloaded for a few songs early in the set. This may well have been because I was standing against the crowd barrier, right in front of Galen and was just hearing a lot of his amp, but in any case this situation was only temporary and did not have a material impact on my enjoyment of the concert.

80: Because the kids at the shows they’ll have kids of their own.

79: There seems to have been significant paternal attendance connected to THS's visit to Sydney. (If you include Laneway - see also 35). The girl on my left at the concert was down from Brisbane with her father (I gather from here her name was Jemma), and a guy two to my right is going to Laneway, and is doing so with his father! That guy was also JOY. (See 57).

78: Yeah, sure I'll tell my story again.

77: My brother went to see THS in Melbourne on Monday. He sent me the following SMS the next day:

THS were awesome. I don't think I've ever seen a lead singer so into their own music!!!!

76: If she happens to suggest a love based on trust and respect tell I've been wasted since last week.

75: I'm sometimes surprised that I love THS's music so much, given that there are some many references to drugs and religion, neither topic of which are high on my agenda. It also makes me wonder what I'd think if I had kids who were into THS. (See also 79, and I guess, perhaps 53). Having said that though, there's also a gazillion geographic references to places I've never been and I really shouldn't be surprised, because (see 21 for the source of this quote, which I've modified slightly) - 'THS disguises universal themes in hyper-specific scenes.'

74: I'm gettin' pretty sick of this interview.

73: Wayne has, unsurprisingly, written a great review of the concert here. Actually, he published it while I've been putting this monstrosity together, in my first list I was just going to post a link to his Flickr photos which were up earlier.

72: I know it’s unlikely she’ll ever be mine, so I mostly just pray she don’t die.

71: Ybor City is a nightclub-heavy district in Tampa, Florida. A fast-paced party town.

70: When there weren't any parties, sometimes she'd party with townies.

69: I sometimes find early stages of a concert before, during and after the support bands, can really drag. Given the almost irrational degree of anticipation I felt about seeing THS last night I was amazed how quickly 9.45 came around.

68: Holly was a hoodrat. Now you finally know that.

67: Statement 67 left intentionally blank.

66: She stole it fast and with a multitude of casualties.

65: I'm going to agree with my brother here and say that Craig Fin is the most passionate musician I've ever seen perform. (See also 77). He moved constantly around the stage, mic-lessly repeating lines or answering his own lyrics' questions (where strangely enough the fact there was 0% chance of hearing what he was singing at this point didn't make it any harder for him to get his message across), arms flailing as if he was about to burst with the sheer emotion of everything that was driving him to create, to communicate, to entertain and to perform.

64: Let this be my annual reminder that we can all be something bigger.

63: I went to Melbourne for the day yesterday, and came back in time for the concert. The last time I did that was when I sent to see Okkervil River in March of last year, and we all know how that turned out! (Or at least we do if we follow that link). I should go to Melbourne for the day more often...

62: Hey citrus hey liquor I love it when when you touch each other.

61: Some Bloke (of earlier appearances in this here blog) reckons Bono once looked him in the eye during a U2 concert. I've always been a bit scepitcal to be honest, but I know Craig Finn looked me in the eye last night. Multiple times. Honest.

60: We're jamming jetskis into the jetty now.

59: For the last 48 hours, half of which was spent in pants-wetting anticipation, the other half in wonderful afterglow, the experience of seeing THS live has made issues which would otherwise warrant consideration, such as the environment, the global financial crisis, and my utter inability to meet single women pale into insignificance. Bliss. Bless.

58: He got messed up with some messed up magicians.

57: There were three people at the very front of the crowd who had lined up at the venue at 3pm wearing t-shirts which said (one word each) 'SO MUCH JOY', Craig's standard set closing statement. (See also 79 and 1.) Craig was suitably impressed, pointing them out on a couple of occasions, and I'm pretty sure they (deservedly) got to meet the band afterwards.

56: I guess you're old enough to know. Kids out on the west coast are taking off their clothes screwing in the surf and going out to shows.

55: I'm left with a bit of a problem now that I don't know what to do about my facebook status, which for the last couple of weeks was counting down STTHS (sleeps till THS). Not only does SSTTH not have the same ring - it gets worse over time, not better.

54: She said father can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?

53: The girl standing next to me (Jemma I think, see 85) said she doesn't plan to have kids, but if she ever did she'd call them Hallelujah and Gideon.

52: You're up to your neck in sweat and wet confetti.

51: I was almost disappointed I wasn't a bit more sweaty by the end of the concert. Given that situation typically means only a small portion of the sweat is my own, I find this reaction surprising and slightly disturbing.

50: Me and my friends are like double whiskey coke no ice.

49: During the concert Craig was drinking Pure Blonde out of stubbies. When we went across the road for a beer afterwards I really wanted to have one, but they didn't have it in bottles. There's really nothing special about it at all, I just really wanted to drink it because that's what Craig had been drinking.

48: And we couldn’t’ve even done this, if it wasn’t for you. We gotta stay positive. We gotta stay positive. We gotta stay positive. We gotta stay positive.

47: It's really great how appreciative the whole band are of the audiences attendance, enthusiasm and encouragement. Wayne nailed this in his post. (See 73). At the risk of undeduplication, also see 9.

46: I saw you making eyes at some quote/unquote gorgeous guy.

45:

44: I got bored when I didn't have a band. So I started a band.

43: It would be terribly remiss of me not to mention all of the band members. Craig has obviously got a fair mention both above and below here, but it would be ludicrous to suggest the whole isn't much, much greater than the sum of these parts:

Craig Finn - vocals and guitar
Tad Kubler - guitar
Franz Nicolay - keyboards, accordion, harmonica
Galen Polivka - bass
Bobby Drake - drums

42: Went through a skater phase. Went through a raver phase.

41: As I was compiling the list of thoughts about last night I wondered if I'd be able to make some connection between THS and golf. Then I realised I already have.

40: I know I look tired but everything's fried here in Memphis.

39: I took a day of annual leave today, so that I could enjoy last night knowing I didn't need to get up and go to work this morning. That was so much the right thing to do. However, I did just look at my Blackberry which tells me I have 39 unread e-mails from today. Ugh.

38: I've survived the 80s one time already and I don't recall them all that fondly.

37: wrt 41 this makes this my third post mentioning THS - see also this post.

36: She's got blue black ink and it's scratched into her lower back. It said 'Damn right I'll rise again,' yeah damn right you'll rise again.

35: I get to see Hold Steady again at St Jerome's Laneway Festival on Sunday. You beauty!

34: She said we never really made it that far west.

33: Here are a couple of Australian articles/reviews about THS I think it's worth reading. Here and here.

32: Sweet Saint Paul. That must be the hardest luck saint of them all. We met him in some suburban Saint Paul mall.

31: 31 is a prime number.

30: You had that text across your t-shirt. It said 'What would Judas do?'

29: Concepts. Holly. Arcs. Gideon. Themes. Ybor City. References. Mississippi. Recurrence. Hoodrats. Culture. Actors. The rest is history? Murder mystery? THS don't write songs, they tell stories. I don't have my head around half of it, let alone the ability to adequately describe it. I'd suggest starting with the wiki (see 11) and dig like you mean it.

28: I've been trying to get people to call me Freddy Knuckles. people keep calling me Right Said Fred.

27: Before last night THS was the band I most wanted to see that I never had. Wolf Parade - time to come to Australia.

26: And I’m almost busted, but I bought back the jewelry she sold.

25: Last night's concert was not sold out. WTF?

24: We were kissing in the center while the band played 'Ice Cream Castles'.

23: Just like my favourite musicians of the country genre, THS pay fair homage to those who have come before, making regular reference to their influences in interview and lyric. I'd recommend the wiki (see 11) as a good source for further information on this.

22: There's always other boys, you can make him like you.

21: I thought this was a really interesting article about THS, well worth a read.

20: She came off kind of spicy but she tasted like those pickle chips.

19: I had a hamburger for dinner tonight. I ordered double pickle chips. They were good.

18: Lord to be 17 forever.

17: I don't know why, but I really was struck by the thought last night that THS makes me wish that I was a teenager again.

16: Lord to be 33 forever.

15: Even 16 (statement, not age) won't cut it, I'm 34 (age, not statement).

14: Charlemagne don't seem the same he's skinny, scared, and off his game. He's been hiding from those gentlemen with the same tattoos as Gideon.

13: 16 and 14 come from the song Stevie Nix, from THS's second album Separation Sunday. I really love the breathless desperation of third time Craig Finn sings 'the banks of the Mississippi River'. It might just be desperation to get to the end of the line so he can take another breath, but I still like it.

12: I always dream about a Unified Scene.

11: The Hold Steady Wiki is great, with lots of definitions, and explanations of the references and meanings of the songs.

10: She said it's good to see you back in a bar band baby. I said it's great to see you still in the bars.

9: THS are wonderfully unpretentious. Sure, Franz was dressed to the nines, and Tad pulled out a twin-neck at one stage, but I think this (the unpretentiousness) is just really consistent with everything else I've been trying to say. It's the combination of THS's talent, motivation, passion, sincerity and enjoyment of what they do which makes them so great. Asking the t-shirt crew backstage (see 57) was way cool too.

8: Got coaxed out by a certain perfect ratio of warm beer to the summer smoke.

7: Song I would most like to have seen which wasn't played - Most People are DJs. Two of the THS concerts from Nov 08 I've been listeing to (see 91) both had it in the encore, but I found out today that the Melbourne show had neither this song nor Ask Her For Adderall (see 87), so really, I'm not complaining.

6: We got to start it off with a positive jam.

5: Positive Jam was, for me, the very best song THS could have started the set with by a considerable margin. Not only is it a song of beginning, but as the opening track on THS's first album Almost Killed Me it's the first of their songs I ever heard, and so the very beginning of all the emotion and energy thier music has brought me since.

It's also a song which builds during it's course, begining with just some simple guitar as an accompaniemnt to the vocals, making it the perfect vehicle for the first time I ever saw Craig Finn sing. Finn's voice is wonderful and wise, telling stories with such sincerity and passion that I cannot help but be effected everytime I hear him use it, and so to be so close, to see as well as hear those first lines emerge from his mouth was as pure an example of everything that is great about live music as any other I could offer you.

4: But you know you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with.

3: At this stage could I just say how glad I am I don't write my 100th blog post every day. This effort Almost Killed Me.

2: Certain songs they get so scratched into our souls.

1: SO MUCH JOY

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street Mr Radin?

2009-02-03T22:30:00.003+11:00

Wow. Just wow.

An Unsupposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do Again

2009-01-15T23:21:00.013+11:00

I’ve previously written about David Foster Wallace (DFW) here, here and here.

I wish I wasn’t writing this post about DFW; he committed suicide on September 12, 2008 having suffered from depression for many (we’re talking decades here) years.

I’m not going to write about his suicide in this post; for those who wish to appreciate the public reaction to this immensely awful occurrence I’d recommend here, but there is something I’d like to say about a particular piece of DFW’s writing and the role it played in my thoughts about him – the title and final essay of his 1997 nonfiction collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (ASFTINDA), an essay which originally appeared with the title Shipping Out in Harper’s magazine in 1996, and which involved DFW reflecting upon his experiences on a 7 night Caribbean cruise, and whilst certainly nowhere near the chronological conclusion of his coruscations with pen & paper, the last piece of his writing I read before learning of his tragic death.

Prior to reading this particular essay I had considered David Foster Wallace to be somewhat inhuman, possessing a literary talent seemingly too enormous to be contained within a single person, and by necessity to enable this talent to in fact be contained within a single person, somehow bulletproof, with the flaws, fears and foibles that weigh down mere mortals such as yours truly either totally absent, or at least obscured by the magnitude of his genius’ glare.

In fact, I think it’s fair to say that my opinion of DFW was neatly encapsulated by two short quotes from reviews of his life and work, firstly this article following his suicide which includes the quote: ‘without even trying, he was cooler than everyone else,’ and this review of the essay collection Consider the Lobster which contains the quote: ‘call him publishing's Magic Johnson.’

I’d actually recently considered a sporting analogy to describe literary talent myself, not DFW’s (talent) funnily enough, but Neal Stephenson’s. After I read Stephenson’s novel Diamond Age, I contemplated writing a post titled ‘Neal Stephenson is the Phil Mickelson of Geek Fiction’ in which I was going to compare Stephenson’s mastery of the written word to Mickelson’s mastery of irons with loft over 45 degrees and other displays of golfing alchemy such as playing two drivers at Augusta, (i.e. it was going to be an entirely positive comparison). I didn’t get any further in the planning than that, and I’m not really sure if I would have had much to say, and I haven’t seen any reference to the genre ‘geek fiction’ other than inside my head, but one thing which did strike me would work about that screenplay was the convenient ability to cast David Foster Wallace in the role of Eldrick Tont Wood.

It’s also fair to say that my opinion of DFW, and the eubstance of the pedestal upon which I’d placed him prior to reading ASFTINDA was based on a reasonable volume of reading. I own the following DFW books which were read, with essentially no relation to the chronology of their creation, in the order 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 5, 1, 6.

Novels

1. The Broom of the System (1987)
2. Infinite Jest (1996)

Collections of Short Stories

3. Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
4. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
5. Oblivion: Stories (2004)

Nonfiction

6. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
7. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
8. Consider the Lobster (2005)

(In terms of ‘books’ this is almost a complete bibliography [DFW did co-author a book about the interaction between rap and American culture in 1990, and one of the essays from Consider the Lobster was also published on its own]. In terms of total work this collection is far from complete, [for instance there’s an essay about the tennis player Roger Federer here], and for information on DFW’s writing outside of the books listed above see the Howling Fantods linked above or here.)

And what really struck me when I read (the essay) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, was that after all of the other work I’d been exposed to, it was the first piece of DFW’s writing in which I really felt like I learnt anything of elemental significance about David Foster Wallace the man, and to be honest, as a result of this learning process the first piece of his writing which led to me actually considering him as anything other than an ostensorium for the quintessence of literary chutzpah, as described above.

I certainly hadn’t been blind to the autobiographical influences in his fiction, for instance the tennis proficiency and drug dependence in Infinite Jest, or direct relation of personal experiences in his non-fiction, including tennis proficiency again in Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), DFW’s personal struggles with the ethics of eating live lobster in Consider the Lobster’s title effort, his attitudes w.r.t. sloganed t-shirts and competitive baton-twirling in Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All (also from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), and from my links in the first sentence you can also see that I was actually somewhat disappointed with DFW's dabbling in the world of math reference.

But I really felt that in ASFTINDA David Foster Wallace revealed some different things about himself; things which made me see him in a new light, a more human light, where the stresses suffered by your average punter were able to get to him too. And then, 12 years after it was written, but only weeks after it was read (by me), this was shown to be tragically true in the most horrible way imaginable.

And look, I’ll readily admit there may be many other pieces of his work to which I could (should?) have reacted this way, but even thinking about why I was prompted to write the first phrase of this sentence makes me realise that all I’ve been trying to relate here is my perspective, and notwithstanding any limitations on my ability to gain full value from post-modern, post-post-modern (or any other genre, real or imagined, of) fiction, that’s all I really can do. YM, as they say, MV.

And finally, I must just say that the process of writing this post really has made me very sad, but has also motivated me to investigate the nooks and crannies of DFW’s writing into which I haven’t previously crawled, and catch up on some of the obituaries I missed the first time through. Infinitely bitter, infinitely^-1 sweet. Vale DFW, my favourite author, you will be missed by very, very many, and you will be missed by me very, very much.

In Yesterday's Blinding Sunlight

2008-12-07T20:20:00.007+11:00

Last week I went to The Vanguard in Newtown to see Mick Thomas and the Sure Thing, as you do, and the support act was The Aerial Maps, who shall be the subject of this post.

I'd never heard, or heard of, The Aerial Maps before the concert, and that has to be at least partly driven by the fact that despite my intense passion for music I have of late been woefully deficient in actively seeking out exposure to new material, relying exclusively on the passive channel of receiving recommendations from friends, family and fate.

I did, however, hear On the Punt, the first track on The Aerial Map's debut album In the Blinding Sunlight on the radio whilst buying a coffee before work last Wednesday, (surely an event of sufficiently low probability so soon after simultaneously seeing the band play live and being made aware of their existence to prompt a discussion about the misuse of the term 'coincidence') to which my reaction was slight disappointment that I hadn't bought the album when I'd had the chance at the concert the previous Friday, to which my reaction was trying to buy the album when I was in town yesterday (but failing), to which my reaction was buying the album on iTunes last night.

It's probably also fair to say the song jumped out at me from the coffee shop's audio system so strongly not only because of the impact the aroma of freshly ground coffee was having on my pre-work state of awakeness, but also because of the almost monopolistic position that MGMT's Kids seems to have attained across all forms of broadcast aural experience of late; be they taxis, record shops or the soundtrack's to other people's personal spaces. (And that's not meant to be a negative comment about that song at all, it was just surprising to hear anything else.)

So, The Aerial Maps.

The Aerial Maps are a spoken word band built around the lyrics and vocals of Adam Gibson. As you can learn from their website (link above) Adam is more appropriately described as a writer than a musician (should there be a one noun limit), having published several books of poetry and a novel. Apparently (according to my companion for the evening) there's a bit of spoken word going around at the moment, which was news to me, and a bit more evidence for the thrust of the second paragraph.

I haven't really seen much spoken word work performed before, and obviously not having ever heard of The Aerial Maps, didn't realise during the first couple of songs that all of the lyrics would be spoken rather than sung, and I did find myself thinking a couple of times during the show how awesome it would be if Adam switched from speaking to singing and had a really, really cool voice, and then wondering if that thought (and the associated potential of the uncertainty/unknown) was actually increasing my enjoyment of the show.

It was obviously ignorance which led to me having the somewhat convoluted thought detailed above, ignorance both of the band in general and Adam in particular. The first of these ignorances was addressed just by seeing The Aerial Maps play - if I saw then again I certainly wouldn't be wondering if Adam was about to magically becoming Andrea Bocelli, Isaac Hayes, Juliet Turner or Cerys. However, I'll be honest and say that I assumed Adam was speaking because he couldn't sing (very well), not because he simply chose not to, and now knowing that he's a writer the latter of these possibilities (that he simply chooses not to) has become entirely possible which does, I guess, increase the chances that he actually will in fact burst into song next time I see him. But before this post either gets any more confusing, should that be possible, or I even begin to contemplate using the word ‘ironic’ or ‘paradoxically’, I’ll move on to what actually drove me to make this post.

And that is concern. Concern caused by the almost total penetration of retrospection in In the Blinding Sunlight. In my mind, the strongest theme in the Aerial Maps music is the sentimental recounting of events past, the combination of the volume and tone of which recounting smacks, somewhat disconcerintngly, of ‘better times’.

Be it childhood foodstuffs (pies, custard tarts, neenish tarts, Coke, lemonade, Sunny Boys - man does that take me back), parenting habits (father’s punting, mother’s management of recreational activities), break-ups, breakwaters, saving sharks or living in London, I can’t help interpreting Adam’s songs as not simply stories of his past, but stories of a past he’d rather still be living, which causes me concern about his feelings about the present, and the future. Essentially, the Aerial Maps music makes me worried that Adam Gibson is unhappy.

Now, we’re obviously all of us the output of an infinitely complex function with the entirety of our accumulated experiences as fundamental inputs; for which reason in some way all music is influenced by the experiences of its creators, and indeed much great music across many genres makes direct reference to those very experiences. And it’s very natural that Adam should write/perform about particularly significant events from his past, such as his father’s death and his subsequent reaction to that, but I’m still worried. I think there’s a significant difference between acknowledging how our accumulated experiences shape the way we look forward and using those experiences so that we don’t have to look forward (or even around) – looking back not for explanation or inspiration, but for escape. And should Adam or any of his friends or families read this, my apologies if I’m off the mark here, but this was the main thought which struck me as I listened to the album the first few times. I’m concerned Adam is unhappy and so he’s hiding in his past.

And perhaps why I made that connection, be it accurate or complete horseshit, and again perhaps what my reaction this album was really all about, was that this very habit, this seeking refuge in younger, simpler, innocenter, and allegedly happier times, is exactly what I find I do when the numbers aren’t adding, the putts aren’t dropping, or the soufflé’s aren’t rising.

Cookie Dough Kit Kat

2008-10-12T16:24:00.005+11:00

I missed the boat on this one, or if not the boat whatever method of locomotion it was that Nestle used to transport vast quantities of these chocolate bars. That's not to say I didn't eat my fair share of Cookie Dough Kit Kats while they were still available, it's more that when the warning signs appeared that their glorious tenure in the candy aisle of my soul (and local supermarket) was waning I chose, for some reason I'm not quite sure of, to ignore them, and continued to buy the bars (occasionally) singly, (most often) in pairs, or (sometimes) in quantities of three or four, rather than by the box, which would have been the far more sensible option.

I'm not sure I ever ate three Cookie Dough Kit Kats in one sitting, but I certainly ate two plenty of times, with the transition from empty-wrapper-one-disappointment to first-bite-two-joy being a chunk of space-time I was not in fully willing control of, with the stopping at two being primarily driven by that being all I was in the possession of at the time. There must have been occasions I stopped with one or more bars uneaten, but I can assure you they would have been few and far between. The Cookie Dough Kit Kat was, by a considerable margin, my favourite candy bar of all time. The gooey concoction of sugars, flavours, colours and other ingredients (no doubt predominantly artificial) which composed the 'cookie dough' aspect of the bar's interior, was, in my mind, right on the money.

And having just re-read what I've written so far the second paragraph actually makes me think not buying these bars by the box load probably was the more sensible option after all...

In any case, it's a moot point, because Nestle don't make them any more, caused by falling sales and confirmed by feedback I received to a query to Neslte's customer service division (feedback which unfortunately wasn't accompanied by a box of Cookie Dough Kit Kats that just happened to have been saved for such an occasion).

So, as a tribute to the end of an era of cocoa inspired happiness, here are some links to some kindred souls who went before, which, in the interest of impartiality, aren't all positive reviews by any means (left as an exercise for the reader to see which reviews fall into that category):

And while we're talking about negative perspectives, Nestle's customer service certainly didn't mention the massive recall of Cookie Dough Kit Kats which occurred last year to me, and let's not even mention their behaviour w.r.t. breast milk substitutes in the third world...

Sourdough

2008-08-31T20:28:00.005+10:00

The next two photos are not the same. Can you spot the difference?

Yes, that's right, there's a noticeable bubble about halfway top-to-bottom and a third of a way in from the right which is in the first photo but not the second. That's because it burst in the 15 odd seconds which elapsed between these two photos being taken - my sourdough starter is alive!

Sourdough starter is a natural leavening agent which relies upon the wild yeast naturally occurring in flour (and the environment), and is used as an alternative to commercial yeast when making bread. My sourdough starter was made from flour and pineapple juice (and water) a couple of weeks ago, and has subsequently been fed with flour and water at intervals I considered sufficient to keep it alive, active and vibrant. I baked my first loaf of bead with it today, and eschewed commercial yeast, though to be honest there was some beer in the recipe, which I guess does have some yeast in it too.

When it came out of the oven the loaf looked like this:

And when I cut it it looked like this:

Now, this particular loaf didn't have very much sourdough starter in it (it was one of the low knead, long proof jobbies which are so popular amongst all echelons of the breadarati nowadays), but, not only was it delicious, if I do say so myself, it certainly contained (albeit subtlety) the distinct tang I was after, giving me great encouragement that as my starter and baking prowess mature together, there'll be many a fine sourdough loaf to be enjoyed by all in our futures!

I opened a beer before breakfast for which there was almost no knead

2008-08-06T19:48:00.004+10:00

Briskly back on the basic bread baking bandwagon, beer before breakfast boded bounty bellissimo.

Linky.

Juxtaposition

2008-08-06T19:13:00.002+10:00

On the weekend I was watching The Nationwide Tour on TV, and when throwing to a review of the leaderboard (not of the 728x90 type, my even thinking of which is somewhat disturbing), the commentator pointed out that the musical accompaniment to said review would be The Hold Steady's Stay Positive, which was an extremely, but I'd say pleasantly, unexpected coming together of two of my favourite things.

It's almost like if David Foster Wallace wrote a book about maths. Oh, hang on...

Seriously though, any potential negative connotations w.r.t. the joyful noise of Craig, Tad, Galen, Bobby, Franz and sometimes Peter being sold out, or commercialised, or mainstreamed, dumbed down or diluted hasn't really crossed my mind, maybe because I've been too busy enjoying the fact that the last two pubs I've been in have been playing The Shins and Wolf Parade respectively.

Screw You, Hippies!

2008-07-27T13:52:00.008+10:00

W.r.t. the introduction of here, I lose.

She packed my bag pre-flight,
Zero hour 9 a.m.

Well, probably this was zero hour, at 12:43 p.m.

16 minutes, and for this and the following I apolgiestotheque but it had to be covered, and the sequence is motivated by growth rather than texture.

30 minutes.

46 minutes.

69 minutes.

80 minutes.

129 minutes.

235 minutes.

332 minutes.

401 minutes. Yeah, we get the idea already. Just get on with it!

1182 minutes, cling wrap removed.

1186 minutes, and the fact that the cling wrap was removed meant that when I dropped my camera it fell in the dough, but I couldn't take a photo of it becasue it was in the dough, so I just took a photo of the hole which was left when I pulled it out.

1438 minutes, though obviously the transition from the previous photo to this one involved more than just letting the dough sit on the bench while the yeast did its thing.

1469 minutes, the last 31 of which involved much wicked cracking noise from the bread and much dribbling saliva from my mouth. Deja vu?

1475 minutes. Lurpak for the win.

A Yorkshire Pudding you'd be proud to take home to Mum

2008-07-05T20:24:00.003+10:00

I realise this is my sixth consecutive post about food, and that is a sub-optimal outcome. I could say that this is an unfortunate outcome of me not having anything else to write about, but even if, in fact especially if, that is in fact the case, I think there's a lesson in this, for me, not for you, that I need to commit to engaging in some blog-worthy activities forthwith. Tally-ho!

This post has no title

2008-06-29T19:30:00.001+10:00

Pizza stone FTW

2008-06-22T20:13:00.005+10:00

I'm often, to be honest, slightly disappointed with my culinary adventures; I'll invest a large amount of time and effort only to produce a result which would have been equalled or exceeded in taste (and certainly exceeded in required washing-up effort), by take-away.

This was absolutely not one of those times:

Sure, some of the passata did get a little dark, but this was by a considerable margin the best pizza base I've ever made. I could eat another one right now.

The pizza stone was a great investment. All $9.95 of it.

Going buy pizza stone

2008-06-11T20:24:00.004+10:00

Don't get me wrong, it was bloody good, just think a pizza stone might give the base a bit more crisp, and the wide wide world of web suggests I might be able to hit one up for sub-lobster, so it's really a no brainer.

Would also allow a return to the classical pizza shape, which would please me because, in Britt Daniel's words, 'my mathematical mind can see the breaks'.

Going use more pepperoni too.

The upchuck, ah, I mean, upshot

2008-06-01T20:15:00.003+10:00

Read me first.

Well, here it is. And it's fair to say the stock is safe. If I get thirsty during the night I'll just suck back on a bit of the left over sauce. Mmm.

Good luck chuck

2008-06-01T17:48:00.011+10:00

Yesterday

About 800g of chuck steak from my local purveyor of chunks of dead animals:

Cubed:

In a zip-lock bag with bay leaves, garlic, peppercorns and thyme:

And half a litre of red wine:

Into the fridge!

Meanwhile, très traditional mirepoix of carrot, onion and celery, along with leek, mushrooms and garlic on left, about 1.5kgs of veal bones on right:

The latter of which, after a painting of tomato paste, looked like:

All of that then went into a hot oven. Well, actually, they went under a hot grill because I stuffed up, but then I actually set the oven to oven, and they spent about 40 minutes in there before going into a pot with lots of cold water, which became pretty dark pretty quickly:

The stock was simmered with skimming for 6ish hours, then strained and refrigerated.

Today

Following refrigeration, the stock looked like:

Where the process of refrigeration had caused the fat to collect at the top, fat I scraped off thusly:

And then reduced the volume by about a half, leaving me with a litre and a bit. To be honest, in a perfect world I'd have had more bones, used more water, made more stock, and then probably reduced it more, but then again, if my grandmother was a bus she'd drive me to school.

Meanwhile, after 30 hours in the vino the chuck looked like this:

I browned this in my bestest casserole container, before removing it and again doing the mirepoix thing, and when it had browned I added a fresh litre of red wine (all this fermented grape juice coming from a 2L box of Banrock Station Cab Merlot, which I used most of in this endeavour and haven't actually drunk any of yet, but set me back about sixteen bucks).

That litre of red wine was heavily reduced (like, by about three quarters), before I added a couple of tablespoons of flour I'd cooked in a moderate over for 10 minutes (heaven knows why), a bit less than three cup of the stock, and about a cup of water, largely because after all the effort I went to yesterday to make the stock, I'd have felt a bit ripped off if I'd used it all tonight, so I wanted to save some for later uses (for instance, if I wake up really thirsty during the night tonight).

Once that concoction was boiling again I put the chuck back in, lidded up and stuck it in the oven for a bit over 2 hours.

And the result? It was awful, I threw it out and ordered pizza.

I kid, I kid, it's still in the oven. Meant to be served with mash, but I'm just going to use bread, because, to be honest, I prefer it. I got this recipe from the food supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald this week, and it was written by Jeremy and/or Jane Strode. Apologies if I've infringed copyright. Honest.

The plane dipped resultant

2008-05-31T12:13:00.010+10:00

My copy of James Ellroy's The Cold Six Thousand has 672 pages. The full pages have 42 lines, and an average line probably around 12 words, but even if I round those two numbers down to 40 and 10 respectively to take account of paragraphs and chapters, that gives me 268,800 words.

Which means, in the space of the prose taken up by my copy of this book, the sentence

The plane dipped resultant.

could be repeated something in the vicinity of 67,200 times, and having just finished reading this book, I've got to say it feels like that is exactly what happened. The part of my brain that deals with sentences ending (which to be honest anyone who's read even a small part of this blog may feel is seriously under-developed) hurts.

I think one of my problems was that the book, which had been strongly recommended to me by Some Bloke, had been recommended to me a long time ago. For that reason I couldn't remember the detail of the motivation for the recommendation, only that it had included some reference to David Foster Wallace.

Having read the book, I've recalled a few more of the details, and it'd probably fair to say 'the comparison waxed antithetical'. The Wikipedia entry on James Ellroy (linked above), describes his writing style as 'telegraphic', stating that Ellroy 'omits words other writers would consider necessary', and this is diametrically opposed to Wallace's approach, which occasionally includes sentences lasting several pages (and could potentially be accused of including purple words monkey others dishwasher would consider unnecessary).

So enough of the style, what of the plot? The novel is set across the time between the assassinations of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, and features a cast of characters who were integrally involved in those two events, and an almost unimaginably diverse set of illegal activities in between, with racism, violence, extortion, money laundering and drugs all playing a fair part. The characters are almost universally troubled, making the book on the whole rather dark, which I gather is a consistent theme throughout Ellroy's body of work.

I don't think I'll read any more of his books on the basis of this experience, and I am kinda glad to have finished it and be able to move onto something else. It's not that I didn't enjoy The Cold Six Thousand at all however, in fact there were a couple of times when I got off the train in the morning that I decided to hop the monorail for a few more minutes reading time rather than do the 10 minute walk to work, though TBH laziness could be playing a part there too.

The editorial review on Amazon (where some of the readers' comments suggest it isn't Ellroy's best work) begins with:

With its hypnotic, staccato rhythms, and words jostling, bumping, marching forward with edgy intensity (like lemmings heading toward a cliff of their own devising), The Cold Six Thousand feels as if it's being narrated by a hopped-up Dr. Seuss who's hungrier for violence than for green eggs and ham.

Which is certainly a description of a book I'd want to read, but unfortunately in my mind not an accurate description of the one I just did.

I'm a celebrity chef get me out of here

2008-05-31T12:06:00.002+10:00

Nick Nairn: The intense flavours and aromas,
Nigella Lawson: could not be simpler.
Gary Rhodes: Literally.
Neil Perry: Again.

Nick Nairn: The intense flavours and aromas,
Nigella Lawson: could not be simpler.
Gary Rhodes: Literally.
Gordon Ramsay: F**k!

Modest Mouse

2008-04-13T11:27:00.003+10:00

There have been quite a few concerts in the last 18 months which I've been to that Wayne has reviewed at Oceans Never Listen, and I'd say on the whole his thoughts and mine have been in reasonable agreement.

I don't think there's been a single review however which has captured my thoughts as closely as his review of Modest Mouse @ Luna Park, where I'd really have to say 'I couldn't have put it better myself,' with the possible exception that my favourite MM song is Cowboy Dan, not Broke, but we've got to leave some room for personal expression here!

And that's been the main reason I haven't written a review myself, I didn't really feel there was anything left to add. That and the fact every time I even tried to think how I'd describe Isaac Brock's performance I needed the phrase 'focused maniacness' which I'm pretty sure is wrong on so many levels it's better left unused.

Corb Lund - Could this night get any better? (Apparently it could)

2008-04-01T23:47:00.003+11:00

A few years ago I saw this music video on Australia's Country Music Channel:

And then, subsequently, but still a couple of years ago (on quite high rotation at its peak), I saw this catchy little effort (mighty neighbourly, mighty neighbourly):

Now, both of these songs are fine tunes in their own right, but it was the distinct feeling of 'I've seen this guy do another cool song' whilst watching The Truck Got Stuck that prompted some internet investigations on my part, investigations which were unbelievably well timed as it turned out, because they revealed that the band in question, Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans, was playing in Sydney nary a week hence - that being the Thursday before Easter of 2006, at the Sandringham Hotel, in King St, Newtown.

I found myself at the Sandringham (a pub which, whilst having undergone a couple of renovations over the last few years could still, in my opinion, validly be described as 'colourful') again on Friday night (and, as it turned out a fair old chunk of Saturday morning) for exactly the same reason, and with exactly the same outcome, an adventure dominated by copious quantities of all-round excellence, already leaving me eagerly anticipating the next time our states (or provinces, I guess) coincide.

(Eagerly to the point that I also went to Katoomba for the evening last Wednesday to see Corb play, which would have been so worth the drive even if I'd been the one doing the driving.)

The concert space at the Sandringham has a physical capacity of under a couple of hundred, and an air conditioning capacity of about a couple, but nonetheless great sound/acoustics, a raised bit at the end of the room which acts as the stage (requiring the performers pass through the punters to get there), and most importantly a great atmosphere for Pub Rock, or, in this case Pub Country.

The night was opened by Morgan Evans, who won the 2007 Telstra Road to Tamworth. I thought Morgan's set was very impressive; he has an assurance that certainly belies his 21 years and a really strong voice, throwing a couple of great covers (Springsteen, Nelson) amongst his original work, which certainly warrants being sought out. (Nice bloke too.)

So, this was the third time I’d seen Corb play, and the second time on this tour, a tour which concluded with the show which is the motivation from this post. Talking to the guys afterwards I got the impression that they were ready to go home, but nonetheless it was an awesome evening, and one I hope they feel was a suitable an ending to this trip to Australia.

They’re an interesting bunch, Corb Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans. Corb Lund is the ‘band leader’ playing acoustic guitar and providing the bulk of the vocals, and cut his musical teeth as bass player for the punk/metal band The Smalls. Kurt Ciesla (bass), has a background in jazz, funk and classical, Brady Valgardson seems far too intelligent to be a drummer, and Grant Siemens, who plays lap steel, Telecaster, dobro and banjo, has a side project called ‘Matt Monsoon and the Riff Ryders’, which Grant himself describes as a ‘crazy, garage, surf, instrumental band.’

It may not be despite; it may in fact be because of the eclectic backgrounds and interests of the band members that they produce such high quality Country music, which excels on so many dimensions. They’re all very talented exponents of their chosen instruments, with Grant’s more frequent solo opportunities invariably drawing greater attention guitarward, and I think a fellow punter I overheard at the Katoomba concert put it perfectly by opining that ‘he’s a f**king good guitarist’, one who for me seems to produce such rich, thick, powerful output seemingly effortlessly.

There are some great individual lyrics in Corb’s songs, including, but certainly not limited to, this effort from Always Keep an Edge on Your Knife:

A good sharp edge is a man's best hedge
Against the vague uncertainties of life.
Yes a good sharp edge is a man's best hedge
Against the uncertain vagaries of life.

I couldn't work out if I should include:

Them windy B.C. mountain passes finally flatten out
Hairpin turns and PST got my heart up in my throat
It’s hairy haulin' horses up across the great divide
And them wild chilcotin buckaroos, they sure know how to ride

or:

Well Saskabush is pretty, yup she's pretty flat
And lord knows I'm a prairie boy so I’m pretty used to that
But farmers facin' off with gophers, man it ain’t the same
As bein' home at the Saddledome for the Oilers at the Flames

From Hurtin' Albertan, and finally, from Short Native Grasses:

The prairies of Alberta, they ain't never hearda'
The things that are keepin' you down
And the short native grasses don't care that the ashes
Of your dreams match their dry shade of brown

Beyond individual instrumentation or lyrical detail however, in my opinion the greatest thing about Corb Lund is that he performs exceptionally well on the characteristic of Country music which I find most captivating - he is a truly great story teller.

With just the right mix of compassion and humour, respect and 'tude, Corb's songs range over topics which have shaped his country, shaped his countrymen, and shaped himself. From the encroachment of society on nature, to the ranching and rodeo heritage of his family and his affinity for the geography in which that heritage was created, to chewing tobacco, bootleg liquor, poker, and see the two music videos above, Corb's music strikes me as 'Canadiana' (not my word, did see it in a review but) at it's best and that as a homage to Canada's history and culture and the Country genre, Corb's work would make a perfect musical time capsule. He even works in the odd (lost) love song.

The quality and variety of his storytelling continues on Corb's most recent album, Horse Soldier! Horse Soldier!, with the serious efforts regarding war, and specifically the predominantly now redundant role of Cavalry sitting very comfortably next to songs about an incompetent handyman and unknowingly dating his cousin.

And so it was a great night. I saw them play, I got to chat to them afterwards, I got them to sign the CD I bought, it was all good. And in fact, Some Bloke (of, for example, Mildura fame), who was also at the Sandringham, did turn to me at about this time, and ask if the night could get any better.

Well.

Presently we were back in the bar, and I noticed a young lady talking to Morgan Evans who looked familiar, and when she stepped outside momentarily he confirmed for me that it was, as I'd suspected, Catherine Britt, an excellent Australian artist of the Country genre, who also tells a mean story, gives great props to those who came before (Merle, Hank, to name two) and it turns out has a personality about as lovely as her voice, which is no mean feat believe you me.

Whilst I'd obviously already had the chance to meet Corb and the band that evening, so it wasn't the first time a face from a cover in my CD collection had come to life, meeting Catherine was obviously completely unexpected, and certainly appreciated, as it gave me the opportunity to tell her how much I love the cover of Fred Eaglesmith's song Drive In Movie she included on her 2002 effort Dusty Smiles and Heartbreak Cures, which is, really, one of my absolutely favourite songs. In the process of relaying this information I was suitably chastised, however, by both Catherine and her agent Brooke for not owning Catherine's most recent album, Little Widlflower, which also includes a cover of Drive In Movie, a situation I committed to remedy the following day, and did. It's a great album (showing some more American influences methinks), with my personal early pick being Not Your Cinderella. I do really like its Drive in Movie, but the version on Dusty... is still my fave.

And I guess I expected that'd be about the extent of my brushes with fame for the evening, but over the next however long (with the bourbon intake being sufficient by this point that keeping track of time had slipped down the priority list a bit), all of Morgan Evans, Catherine Britt, and Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans were still scattered around the bar, and happy to chew the fat with those punters who remained in situ, such as yours truly, allowing an awesome, awesome night to wind down gracefully to its rightful end.

Wicked.

I feel sorry for Jason Mraz

2008-03-30T10:49:00.005+11:00

If you look up Stage Presence in the ApologiesToTheQue Dictionary of Modern English Usage, you'll see a photo of Jason Mraz.

Now, I actually contemplated completing that sentence not with a link to Jason's official website, but with either a picture or an embedded video, however I really struggled to find a single taster which did justice to what I'm trying to communicate there, so should the remainder of this post whet your appetite to find out a bit more about the truly awesome music of Mr (Mr)az, I really would encourage you to do as many as possible of the following yourself, in no particular order:

Visit Jason's website, the destination of the link above;
Buy some of Jason's albums, or in my opinion for a truer appreciation of the real magic of his music;
Download some of the (entirely above board and explicitly artist approved) concerts at the Internet Archive, where the number of downloads is a pretty suitable choice function to pick a few out, but you really couldn't go wrong with either this one or this one;
Look at some of his stuff on YouTube, though unfortunately some of the clips don't seem to be available to Aussie punters, so YMMV;
Check out Right Kind of Phrase, a discussion forum full of lots of useful information and lots and lots of very enthusiastic fans, with no greater portion of those fans bordering on the obsessive than is warranted by just how bloody good Mraz is.

And it's not listed above, but actually seeing Mraz live (which I did for the third time last week at The Metro) is in fact better than all of the above put together.

Jason Mraz is truly an artist about whom written description could very quickly become unwieldy on several dimensions, including, but not limited to, the genre of his music, any appropriate treatment of which would really want to include all of pop, rock, folk, jazz, country and hip hop (and there's others what wouldn't be out of place). Another candidate to become a powerful verbal laxative is appropriate superlatives, because, to be honest, you'd run out before you'd done him justice (as well as making yourself look like a bit of a Pitchfork wannabe, certainly not out of the question for me and the rest of this post).

I must obviously, however, make some effort to explain to you why Mraz is just so incredibly good, so I'll chuck out just a couple of thoughts here which I hope get you at least a little excited, and apologise in advance in case those thoughts descend into an incomprehensible stream of awkward adjectives and obscure analogies which try to be a bit too clever for their own good, and fail.

Thought 1:

Eschewing the long list of options above, an (admittedly ill-advised) attempt to pigeon-hole Mraz would put him in 'pop rock', but it's great, talented, pop rock, with lyrics simultaneously thoughtful, poetic, personal and playful (I assume describing lyrics as 'acrobatic' would be a bit beyond the pale). Playing just acoustic guitar, and accompanied typically and recently by 'the sixth member of The Jackson Five' Toca Rivera playing a djembe, and Ian Sheridan on electric bass, Mraz spans genres not only between but also within songs, with some of his best works being wonderful mood changing efforts in the mold of the Femmes' Never Tell and Joel's Scenes from an Italian Restaurant, (just being two songs I'm familiar with, the latter of which's link actually describes the song as being 'effectively a medley', which I wished I'd thought of, because that's much better than my 'mood changing effort' effort) allowing him, amongst other things, to seamlessly incorporate partial covers of songs within original works (including my personal Mraz favourite 0% Interest, and, of course Rand McNally).

Thought 2:

A short lived theatre school education may have helped, as may have his cumulative experience playing live to date, and there's no doubt a huge amount of natural talent in there too, but whatever the mix of factors the outcome is still the same - Jason Mraz is the greatest live performer I have ever seen, being both overwhelmingly entertaining and completely natural at the same time. Energetic, enthusiastic and engaged, Mraz interacts with his band and the crowd in a seemingly effortless manner that is magnetically charming. But it's not an act, I mean, it can't be, and in fact, I'm going to steal a quote from David Foster Wallace here, not written about Mraz, but spot on methinks, which is that Mraz performs 'so gracefully and with such basic decency that that if it was some sort of act then [Mraz] is the very devil himself.'

Bonus Thought:

Everyone I have ever recommended Mraz to has also loved his stuff, so have a crack - you won't be disappointed.

End of Thoughts.

And I'm actually going to leave it there, but as a final note, when writing the opening of this post, and using the if you look up [blank] in the dictionary you'll see [blank] device, I did wonder if there exists X such that I could say:

If you look up X in the dictionary you'll see 'if you look up [blank] in the dictionary you'll see [blank]'.

To which I had two ideas, the first of which is that X may equal 'meta-epitome', and the second of which is that I may equal idiot.

And as a final, final thought, the title of the post can be explained quite simply, that of all of the people in the room last Wednesday night, the one person who could not enjoy one of my very favourite things in the whole world - seeing Jason Mraz play live, and who will unfortunately never be able to have that truly wonderful experience, is Jason Mraz himself.

Here's one I prepared ealier

2008-03-07T21:20:00.004+11:00

With reference to my last post, here's some evidence my memory is not yet completely shot, thanks to a carton's carton which has been floating round my abode for a few years:

I have a beer issue

2008-03-03T23:07:00.005+11:00

I have a beer issue, and it's this:

James Squire Golden Ale. For the last three years, this has been my favourite beer in the whole world. And now I don't like it any more.

It wasn't the first time I had it, but Christmas of 2004, which I spent in Terrigal with my parents, brother, sister-in-law and sister-in-law's parents, was the first time I truly appreciated the 'tropical fruit aroma' and 'thirst slaking' nature of the beer, both of which I've enjoyed many, many times since, but which just aren't doing it for me any more.

So what's changed? Either I have, or it has, (or both), and obviously I could have just drunk too much of it. With a gun to my head I'd have said the brewer's description of the beer was 'stone fruit' not 'tropical fruit', but not only would a minor wording change not be a reliable indication that the beer had changed, I'm not sure any of us should be putting much store in my memory being at its sharpest if I had a gun to my head. Anyway, recent history suggests I probably wouldn't notice even if it had.

Such an occurrence is not without precedent however, and I would say I went through a very similar experience of lost love and broken heart with the draught version of Redback some years ago, which particular defenestration of gustatory passion happened at around the time of (but was certainly not certainly connected to), my believing I gained the information (where I'm now prepared to allow not only the impact of the information but even the information itself to be questionable), that the vessels in which Redback was brewed had been tipped 90 degrees on their vertical axis, going from standing on their ends to standing on their sides, with the argument being something about surface area.

So now I'm stumped. Not only do I no longer have a favourite beer, I can't think of a good way to finish this sentence.

Shameless post count inflation

2008-03-03T22:33:00.006+11:00

A taste of the magic I experienced firstly last Wednesday at the Manning Bar, and then again on the weekend at the St Jerome's Laneway Festival:

Obviously I thought about recreating the whole Manning Bar concert in You Tube glory, and I may in the future, but I'll just run with these six for now.

I am drowning in Okkervil River

2008-03-01T07:57:00.005+11:00

And I think I believe that, if stones could dream, they'd dream of being laid side-by-side, piece-by-piece, and turned into a castle for some towering queen they're unable to know. And when that queen's daughter came of age, I think she'd be lovely and stubborn and brave, and suitors would journey from kingdoms away to make themselves known.

On Wednesday night I saw Okkervil River at The Manning Bar at Sydney University.

It was, utterly inexplicably in my mind, not sold out, which left me wishing I'd cloned myself and bought two tickets, so that I could have seen twice what was a performance of such simultaneous power, tenderness and beauty that the only criticism I could possibly level at it was that it finished.

I mean, seriously, would it be excessive to fly to New Zealand on Tuesday so I can see them again? It was like they took everything that is great about their albums, and just made them all a bit better, and you can't really ask for more than that.

Okkervil River are from Texas, loosely, but you should go to the website above and click on the 'BAND' link, where they do a much better job of describing themselves than I ever could.

You should also buy their albums.

You should also invent a time machine so I can go back to Wednesday and see them again.

I'd only been to Manning Bar once before, which would have been in 1997, and it was certainly a bit different now to how I remembered it. It's reasonably small (I'd have guessed the capacity to be only 6-700, though the website reveals the true capacity of the concert area to be 927), and the area in front of the stage is a few steps lower than the main part of the floor, producing a slight amphitheatre effect, and ensuring the vast majority of punters have a choice view of those strutting their stuff on the stage, a situation I'm certainly a fan of.

Even more impressive though, (in terms of dimensions of the venue), was the sound quality. My brother saw Okkervil River in Melbourne twice last week (at their solo show and then at St Jerome's Laneway Festival), and the focus of his effusive extolment of those performances was the quality of Will Sheff's voice, and the passion with which he used it (his, Will Sheff that is, voice, that is).

I thought the whole sound was mixed really well, with all of the instruments coming out just right, but the balance and clarity of the vocals were particularly good, from the (what seems to me) infectious, syncopated, desperation of You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man, to the (what seems to me) raw, unadulterated, honesty of A Girl in Port (which obviously in one sense aren't that far apart, being contiguous tracks on the stupidly good album The Stage Names, but I feel are a good example of the variety across which the awesomeness of Wednesday night's performance was maintained).

And whilst I certainly wasn't surprised that over at Oceans Never Listen Wayne also really enjoyed the concert (given previous Okkervil related writings on his part), I was actually more interested to read the review he wrote of the Broken Social Scene concert he saw at Manning Bar on Thursday night, where he said, "No matter how great a band is, and Broken Social Scene are a great band, if they sound like they are playing through a meat grinder it can only harm the experience," which certainly caused me to question my suspicion from Wednesday night that the acoustics/mixing/sound quality at Manning Bar are just universally good.

I do think there is also another important factor at play here however, which is a bar set impossibly high by the previous night would have made any performer, any show, any concert on Thursday night slightly disappointing. Unless it was Okkervil River again.

And I think that I know the bitter dismay of a lover who brought fresh bouquets every day when she turned him away to remember some knave who once gave just one rose, one day, years ago.

Beer and chocolate work IMO

2008-02-16T23:23:00.003+11:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've enjoyed complementing my refreshing lagers with Peanut "M&M's", but tonight I kicked it old school - Crown Lager and Freckles (which apparently don't warrant a guernsey on Nestle's website).

I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.

The National - Mr. November

I'm back in my cage, and I'm happy about that, I think

2008-02-10T10:21:00.001+11:00

I recently read the novel Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and in the book one of the main characters, Kilgore Trout, has the following interchange with his pet parakeet, Bill:

'Bill,' he said, 'I like you so much, and I'm such a big shot in the Universe, that I will make your three biggest wishes come true.' He opened the door of the cage, something Bill couldn't have done in a thousand years.

Bill flew over to a windowsill. He put his little shoulder against the glass. There was just one layer of glass between Bill and the great out-of-doors. Although Trout was in the storm window business, he had no storm windows on his own abode.

'Your second wish is about to come true,' said Trout, and he again did something which Bill could never have done. He opened the window. But the opening of the window was such an alarming business to the parakeet that he flew back into his cage and hopped inside.

Trout closed the door of the cage and latched it. 'That's the most intelligent use of three wishes I ever heard of,' he told the bird. 'You made sure you'd still have something worth wishing for - to get out of the cage.'

I really enjoyed the book, but I've got to say this passage raised a a real dilemma in my mind. With Geelong winning an AFL premiership and my handicap hitting single figures within the the last six months, two of the things I've wanted most in my whole life have happened, two of my three wishes, if you will, have now been granted.

And obviously that's great and I wouldn't change either of those experiences in the slightest, but I have to ask, what should I do if I ever get the opportunity to cook pancakes for Rachel McAdams?

They don't write 'em like that anymore, and apparently they don't make t-shirts either

2008-02-06T22:40:00.000+11:00

Let me begin be recapping the concerts I'd been to recently before last night:

Jose Gonzalez, on Dec 29
Sufjan Stevens, on Jan 14
The National, on Jan 22
Arcade Fire (supported by Spoon), on Jan 23
James Reyne, on Jan 25

And I have coming up:

Okkervil River, on Feb 27 (which means I'm having to miss Clap Your Hands Say Yeah)
Feist, on Feb 29
St Jerome's Laneway Festival, including both of the above and a host of other good bands, on March 2

And I think those two lists, plus potentially some of my other musical musings are actually important context before pointing out that last night I saw Glen Campbell. Yes, that Glen Campbell, where only my desire to keep ApologiesToTheQue family friendly stops me dropping the F-bomb between his two names, and I'd obviously mean that in the nicest way possible.

Mum, who is quite the Glen Campbell fan, had heard a less than encouraging interview on the radio last week, and it was only after she did I found out he was playing, at the Sydney Opera House no less, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra no less. The tickets weren't cheap (two pineapples plus change), but worth every cent.

He was great. He used an auto-cue, and a couple of times he forgot that he'd already told us he was getting forgetful in his old age, but in fact I think they may have made the brilliance of his voice and axe work shine that bit brighter.

For mine the highlight would have been Wichita Lineman, which was apparently the most played song on US radio in the last millennium, if Glen hadn't played MacArthur Park, a song which not only has some components in 9/8 time, and which I only found out was written by Jimmy Webb after the I saw The Simpsons episode in which Homer sings both it and Wichita Lineman, but also brings back many fond childhood memories of my mother singing this odd lyric about cakes in the rain. Happy times. Thanks Mum.

Last night, watching Glen Campbell, I was struck by how much pricelessly important musical history could be so directly connected to the man in front of me, not only through his awesome catalogue of personal work which has seen him sell 45 million records, and release 75 singles, 27 of which have been top 10, but also through the incredible range of people he worked with (Elvis, Sinatra, Cash and being in The Beach Boys to name a few), not to mention those he's interacted with in his career spanning almost five decades.

And the recognition of history is one of the really great things about country music (along with the banjo and sparkly jackets of course), and it's a genre I have neglected of late, or I think I should say had neglected, because last night was awesome, and it woke my bluegrass beast. More country to follow (for me that is, you're probably safe).

You see, this is the sort of stuff I was talking about

2008-02-03T13:13:00.000+11:00

Lately I've been watching a literally stupid amount of Grey's Anatomy, and whilst I'm not here to promote or defend all aspects of the show, one dimension upon which it definitely excels is the music played during the episodes.

You'd have to have been living under a rock to not know the Snow Patrol reference, but that's far from the prime examples of what I mean.

The following list is not intended to be comprehensive, but is just three cases of songs so good I've stopped the episode I've been watching to buy them from iTunes, interestingly two of which are covers:

The Last Town Chorus covering David Bowie's Modern Love,
Grant Lee Phillips (of Grant Lee Buffalo fame) covering The Church's Under the Milky Way,
OK Go's Here it Goes Again (UK Surf).

Where the whole point of this post is actually what's in the brackets of the last bullet point. When I noticed a remix of Here it Goes Again while watching the show I went here, and the first thing which struck me when I saw it was the 'UK Surf' mix was a possible connection to Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) by The Pixies from the Pump Up The Volume soundtrack, an awesome version of an awesome song from the soundtrack of a great movie.

I actually wanted a better adjective than 'great' for the movie, and was thinking of 'defining' or 'crucial', in relation to my adolescence, but whilst looking at potential synonyms on teh internet and considering 'crux', I learnt that 'Crux Australis' is the proper name for the Southern Cross, obviously an important component of the Milky Way for an antipodean such as myself, and thought given the songs mentioned above pointing that out was more important than some flowery description of how much a movie meant to me as a teenager. It's a small galaxy after all.

But back to OK Go. I'd heard the song (and watched the music video) many, many times, but it was only when I head the slow(er than the original) Here it Goes Again (UK Surf) that I noticed the reference to Surfer Rosa, The Pixies' first album, in the lyrics. As it turns out the naming of this version is an homage to Wave of Mutilation, and it's just another example of the cool connections between stuff I like which I seem to feel are worth clogging up a few kilobytes of the universe with.

I now play off single figures - YOU BEAUTY!

2008-01-20T18:19:00.000+11:00

Settle in, this could be a long one.

I am very confident that last Sunday I achieved the most significant event of my golfing lifetime. Certainly greater than anything I've achieved before (where before is over 20 years and includes a hole-in-one), and almost as certainly greater than anything I could realistically achieve in the future (which I hope to be considerably more than 20 years).

Last Sunday I reduced my handicap from 9.8 (rounded up to a playing handicap of 10), to 9.0 (which obviously doesn't need to be rounded at all), meaning that for the first time in my life, I now play off single figures. This was a very significant personal achievement, and one which brought me tremendous happiness, and the greatest sense of achievement I've had for many a year.

The method used to calculate handicaps in Australia (which I'm going to try to avoid describing in what would undoubtedly be painful detail in this post, though if I can't avoid it completely I'll at least try to keep it to the bits that really matter) is different from that used in America, so the following stat may not be of complete relevance, but I did find this link which would suggest a handicap of nine puts me in the top 20.44% of handicapped golfers (and it's fair to say ahead of the very vast bulk of those without handicaps).

That statistic isn't actually important though, because the value of this achievement doesn't come from me comparing myself to others, it really is a very personal thing, and a very special very personal thing.

Now, obviously there's an argument that being off nine is only as much better than being off 10 as being off 10 is better than being of 11, so the dropping of this stroke from my handicap should not be treated any differently to losing any of the other strokes from whatever value my handicap originally had (I think 21), or any value it's been at since, but really, let's face it, that argument is crap.

This is obviously a 'career' achievement rather than an single performance, so the analogy of scoring a century playing cricket isn't completely representative, but from a significant marginal value perspective there are some strong parallels, and no-one could realistically argue that the run which takes you from 98 to 99 is the same as the one which puts you into triple figures. I think in any field with quantifiable achievement there will always be benchmarks, critical values, or special levels of performance which are significantly more important than the level marginally below them, and reducing your handicap to single figures is certainly one of those.

This is something which I've had as a stated objective for a long time. When I began my period of non-employment some months ago I sent my friends who didn't know I'd left my previous job an e-mail which, when talking about plans for my period of non-employment, stated simply that trying to finally get the handicap to single figures seems like the best plan of attack. And to be honest, this most recent period of not working wasn't even the first I'd entered with the specific goal of handicap reduction, I took eight weeks off work in 2001, beginning I believe off 15 (and hoping to hit single figures then), and despite only losing a couple of strokes, enjoying myself nonetheless.

The irony of achieving this long held ambition only after returning to work is not lost on me, nor is the peculiarity of playing as well as I did given that I haven't actually been playing very much at all recently, but I'll excogitate on those points internally for a bit longer, and then potentially do so externally later in this post or at some other point in the future, and for now dive into a detailed, hole by hole description of the round itself, why not.

First though I should point out that the event last Sunday was a four-ball Stableford, which means (the four-ball bit) that you're playing in a team of two, and on each hole the team score is the better of the two individuals' scores. Being a Stableford, each individual's score on each hole is a non-negative number of points (with the higher the better), based a comparison between the number of strokes taken and the par of the hole, adjusted for handicap, where a handicap-adjusted par score is worth two points, each stroke better than that scoring an additional point, and each stroke worse scoring one less, with the additional condition that you can't score less than zero on a hole.

So, playing off 10, I would get a stroke on the 10 hardest holes on the course, and on each of those holes scoring one over par would give me two points, scoring par would give me three points, one under par four points and so on, whereas on those holes scoring two over par would give me one point, and once I've taken three shots more than par I can pick up my ball whether it's in the hole or not, coz I'll get zero. On the other eight holes I wouldn't get a stroke, so I need a par for two points, one under par for three, &c.

To make the example one step more explicit, the first hole at The Lakes, which is my home course, is a par 4, and is rated as the sixth hardest hole on the course. This means I get a shot on this hole, and so score two points if I take five, three points if I take four, and only one point if I take six. As it turns out, on Sunday I was in the water after three shots, and my partner (dad) was one the green with two putts for two points, so I picked my ball out of the water, which was not a great start, but was certainly the low point of the round, as I'll go on to describe now.

Also, as I've mentioned we were actually playing in a four-ball, but as it turned out I completed every hole bar the first, so in the following all the scores, marginal and cumulative, are mine. The implications of team scores and handicapping four-balls is of some significance, but I'll possibly get to that after I describe the round.

Okay, third time's a charm, here we go:

1. Par 4, I got a stroke. In the water after three shots with dad on green for three, picked up the ball (I scored 0 points on the hole, for a cumulative score of 0).
2. Par 5, I didn't get a stroke. Greenside bunker for three, sand wedge to about 10 feet, made putt for par, I have no idea why I specify putt lengths in feet (2/2).
3. Par 4, stroke. On green for three (though third shot was terrible), two putts, two points (2/4).
4. Par 4, stroke. On green for two, three put (grrr, but would be only three putt of the day, which is bloody good for me) for two points (2/6).
5. Par 4, stroke. Terrible drive, absolutely horrible, into brush just in front of tee. About 100m out after second shot, third on, two putts, two points (2/8).
6. Par 4, stroke. Drive in left rough but playable, on green for two, two putts and finally make a three pointer (3/11).
7. Par 3, no stroke. 6 iron to about two feet always nice, straightforward birdie (one under par) for three points (3/14).
8. Par 5, no stroke. This is a hole which is much easier for me when playing in a single grade event or four-ball, as in a three grade event when I have to play off the blue tees the hole is about 40 meters longer, and I can hardly even see the fairway, let alone hit it. Not issues with that last Sunday though, and after a really good drive I jumped all over a 3 wood to be just off the front edge for two, up and down for a second straight birdie and three points (3/17).
9. Par 3, no stroke. Tee shot came up short, but decent chip to about four feet and rolled it in for a two point par (2/19).
10. Par 4, stroke. Fuelled up on an egg sandwich and a couple of Gatorades, the 10th is nonetheless a very hard hole, a narrow par 4 with a water hazard on the right, and some horrible trees and other crap on the left. Now, I'm a left hander with a pronounced fade, meaning my shots travel from right to left, which you'd think would take the water hazard out of play here, but there is seriously some sort of magnet in that water hazard off the 10th. I mean, I can have been hitting banana balls all day, still aim it at the fairway (and risk going way up into the trees), and the ball will still fly dead straight, and dead right, never to be seen again. It is uncanny, and a great example of the role psychology plays in golf. Having said that, this didn't happen last week, I actually went part of the way into the crap on the left, but was able to punch out, put my third on the green and two putt for two points (2/21).
11. Par 5, stroke. After two fairly average shots, I was still a fair way from the green, and my third was an incredibly average shot which somehow got over the water and on the green. A great first putt very nearly went in (though I certainly didn't deserve a birdie), so happy with a five for three points (3/24).
12. Par 4, stroke. Long one, uphill. About pin high (level with the hole) for two, but a terrible first chip didn't even make it onto the green, the second did, and then two puts for a crappy double-bogey six, and only one point (1/25).
13. Par 4, no stroke. I always find it hard to line up my second shot on the 13th, and feel like I hit it on average further left on 13 than I do on other holes on the course, but this time managed to just miss the green on the right, leaving myself with a bloody difficult chip, which I played bloody well (if I do say so myself), and then sank the putt for a par and two points (2/27).
14. Par 5, no stroke. This par 5 has water all the way down the left, and then the green on the other side of that water, and a really big drive does give the option of going for the green in two, but I rarely hit it far enough, and certainly didn't in this round, but hit third shot over the water onto the green, and two putted for par and two points (2/29).
15. Par 3, stroke. 4 iron onto the front of the green, two putts for a par and three points (3/32).
16. Par 4, stroke. Any par 4 with a double water carry is going to be challenging, but after a great drive I hit a really good second shot into the wind and onto the green, and two putted for a par and three points (3/35).
17. Par 5, no stroke. Another hole with a double water carry, neither of my first two shots were great, but they both ended up in the middle of the fairway, leaving me 53m to the middle of the green, with the pin slightly back from that. Dad said he thought from my practice swings I was going to hit it about 50m over the green, but the contact was crisp, the ball landed softly a few meters short of the pin (wind behind, downhill and not full swing all reducing effect of backspin), and gently rolled down to about a foot, tapped in for birdie, and three points (3/38).
18. Par 3, no stroke. To be honest, standing on the 18th tee I knew I'd done enough, but what the hell, one more par, after a tee shot that came up short of the green, for two points (2/40).

So there you have it, one under par for the last six holes, only three over par on the last 17 holes (so I'd only taken 72 strokes for those 17 holes including for me an extremely respectable 28 putts), and 40 points in total, four better than the 36 which would be achieved if I'd 'played to handicap'. Whilst I can't say it's the best round of my life (having picked up on the first) I can say it's as good as I've ever played, particularly in the stretch when the prize was in site. I knew with a few holes to go I was on track to reach single figures, which obviously had the potential to increase the pressure I was feeling and consequently reduce my performance, but thankfully did not do so. Right to the end all of the shots over water, greenside chips and three foot putts which are so typically the undoing of any promising round went over, up and in respectively.

So let me take this opportunity to get back to the handicap thing for a bit, and say that in general your handicap will not be adjusted after playing a four-ball round (primarily because of the fact that your score only appears on the card for those holes where you have the higher score of the team or were in the hole first if you had equal scores, and the method which is subsequently used to estimate your score for those holes where you weren't on the card), and this raised the possibility of me submitting an individual card purely for the purposes of handicapping to achieve the single figure mark. Unusually however, and caused by dad having basically had a shocker and only appearing on the card three times, my 'adjusted' score based on the four-ball card we submitted was also 40 points, meaning in either case an individual card or our team performance was sufficient to reduce my handicap from 9.8 to 9.0, as whilst on nine or 10 you lose 0.2 for each stroke by which you are better than your handicap.

That did also mean, as mentioned above, that standing on the 18th tee with 38 individual points I knew I was going down to nine whatever happened, making it without a doubt the most enjoyable hole of golf I've ever played.

But where to from here? What is there left to achieve, and how will I react if (when) I go back out to 10? Discussion of that, my friends will need to wait till another time - I've got golf to play!

For a few seconds I was Lara Croft

2008-01-20T10:22:00.000+11:00

I live in an area of Sydney known as the Lower North Shore, and as a result the shopping centre of significant size closest to me is Chatswood. My primary method of transportation to Chatswood, not owning a car, is train, and the station at which I both board and alight trains at that end of my journey is called, appropriately, Chatswood.

Now, for a number of reasons Chatswood train station has been undergoing major deconstruction and reconstruction work for a couple of years, and one of the implications of this considerable structural re-engineering has been significant disruption to the experience of commuters using the station. One of the things I've thought of doing since this work started was to get some more information about how long it was going to take to complete the renovations, and what the station would be like (from a logistic and visual design perspective) when it was finished, but I haven't.

What I have done, however, is experience the disruptions mentioned above, and most recently that disruption came from the temporary access arrangements in place in the second half of 2007. During the months concluding last year, to get from the platforms at Chatswood, which run essentially north-south, to the western most point of Victoria Avenue on the eastern side of the station (which for the purposes of this post I'm happy to regard as the 'start' of the shops) required the following journey:

Down a flight of stairs, the second half of which was heading east;
Turn left and walk north (now under the platforms) for about 30 meters;
Turn left again (so now heading west, away from the shops) and go up either three flights of stairs or an escalator conveniently having the same change in altitude;
Turn right and walk north about 40 meters, the end of which involved going up another flight of stairs;
Turn right and walk east across a footbridge over the train lines;
Turn right again and walk south, first down about three flights of stairs and then along level ground for another 20 meters or so to reach the point of Victoria Avenue mentioned above.

Some astute arithmetic based on the above bullet points suggests that after these somewhat convoluted wanderings a commuter ended up on about the same level as (s)he started (i.e. shops on same level as platform), and whilst that may not be precisely the case due to the rather loose usage of the word 'flight' in my bullet points, I am comfortable the description given above is a fair indication of the travails required just to get off the train and buy an ice-cream.

I also really don't want this to come across as me having a go at the Transport Infrastructure Development Corporation (TIDC), because I'm not trying to do that at all, and I completely recognise that some short-term pain is more than justified in the quest for longer-term public transport melioration.

For example, the entire North Shore train line was closed between Christmas and New Year, and that didn't really bother me at all (the replacement bus service was actually bloody efficient), and this particular closure was, I believe, to allow trackwork to take place in addition to a couple of major steps in the upgrading of Chatswood station (or, referring to it by its proper name, Chatswood Transport Interchange).

The second of these two reasons was definitely mentioned in some TIDC, City Rail or other public sector organisation published signage relating to the line closure over the Christmas period and whilst I can't remember the exact wording, that signage must have indicated that the station-to-shop odyssey was going to be changed (and I don't think it's a stretch to say that from a commuter's perspective any change was going to be an improvement) during the line closure. I'd actually forgotten all about the signage and it's promises of digression regression until I got to the start of the second bullet point in the description of last year's station-to-shop schlep at about 8pm on a Friday night a couple of weeks ago - on my first trip to Chatswood since the line was re-opened.

At this point memories of this transit betterment proclamation came flooding back, along with significant disappointment, as upon turning left to face north I was greeted by a vista that was not significantly different than the one I'd faced so many times last year, and not having a copy of the promulgation which promised so much to refer to, it's the strength of the memories and depth of disappointment I felt simultaneously upon making that fateful left hand turn which leaves me confident to use the phrase 'must have indicated' in the paragraph above.

But my disappointment was short lived, and replaced with a joy of magnitude (in absolute value terms) far, far greater than the disappointment it replaced, when by the time I got barely half way though the second bullet point from my list above, my aspect had developed to this:

The far wall in this photo is the end of the northern journey segment in bullet point two, and this photo also shows the option to turn right (and face east), which when I took it revealed a walk of about 20 meters to a single flight of stairs (or escalator) delivering me at that point of Victoria Avenue I've designated as the 'start' of the shops. Now, this option to turn right certainly didn't exist previously, was obviously what was promised in those signs displayed before Christmas, and made me very, very happy. In the same way I've had recent experiences with custard and beer glasses from which I've gained more than may be objectively expected, the discovery of the right hand turn in the photo above was an incredibly positive experience for me. And not because of the reduction in trip length (though that's not a bad thing), in fact, not for any easily describable reasons; but as I've said before, that doesn't bother me. I'm perfectly satisfied to enjoy experiences such as this one without, and here I was going to say 'over analysing', but the length of this post would make that rather inappropriate(!), knowing or questioning why I enjoy them so much.

There is one other thing I want to talk about though, which is the other primary dimension of the feeling I had when I found the right-hand turn in the photo, and it's the motivation for the title of this post. In December 1997 I bought a Sony Playstation in preparation for some anticipated convalesce given an impending knee reconstruction, and one of the games I purchased was Tomb Raider III, which I thought would be a good way to soak up a few bed-ridden hours. In the 3D, adventure style Tomb Raider games you take control of Lara Croft, an intrepid archaeologist in the mold (though not gender) of Indiana Jones, and an essential component of the instalment I had, and I'm sure the entire series, is that as well as finding stuff and killing other stuff, actually getting through levels of the game requires switches to be flicked, panels to be pressed and so on, which then opens doors, or walls, or whatever, revealing passages, paths, rooms, routes &c. which were not accessible before, and the entrance to which you may have passed many times, potentially not realising how important it would become at some point in the future. The tendency to die, or not find the switch, panel, key &c. also results in playing any given level multiple times, meaning you may have passed an important piece of wall &c. many times before its removal on the way to ultimate glory, which increases the sense of discovery, achievement (and quite probably level of happiness) you feel (and here by you I mean me) when it is eventually removed.

And whilst I obviously hadn't played any direct role whatsoever in the removal of this particular piece of (real) wall, I had passed it many times and been forced to turn left, and the sense of discovery when the lack of wall and resulting opportunity to turn right were revealed to me was overwhelmingly reminiscent of that I felt when I played Tomb Raider near on 10 years ago. And in fact reminiscent isn't even a strong enough word, because it wasn't just memories, it wasn't a flashback, for a few seconds I was Lara Croft.

Juno

2008-01-19T00:04:00.000+11:00

I just saw Juno. And while I'm at that link, what the hell did they do to Rotten Tomatoes; if it ain't broke don't squash it I say! Anyway, I thought the movie was really good, as does the (now somewhat screwy) Rotten Tomatoes, aggregating reviews which come out at a very ripe 93%.

I wonder how many people who were in the session I was in made a special effort (like going to more than one store if required) to buy tic tac orange mints on their way home.

I know I did.

Sufjan Stevens Addendum

2008-01-18T23:56:00.000+11:00

Since writing this post, I've been listening to a fair bit of Sufjan Stevens, and whilst it is certainty still the case that his live performance outshone the studio efforts, the latter has in fact been benefited by the former, due to the greater appreciation I now have for the excellence of his voice, resulting in me getting more out of said latter listening, and the awesome memories of Monday night now brought back to me when I hear his music.

Tute on son, tute on!

Sufjan Stevens is a Potential Pareto Improvement

2008-01-17T21:53:00.001+11:00

If I am alive this time next year...

...I hope I've seen Sufjan Stevens play live again, because I did on Monday night and it was absolutely f**king awesome.

Wot he said.
And wot he said here too.

I'd only read Wayne's first review when I went to the concert on Monday, so I went not knowing if I'd get the same set list as the Saturday, but that issue was immediately cleared up with the first song, an almost impossibly beautiful solo version of Romulus, from Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State.

This was a concert where the live performances of the songs left their studio counterparts for dead. And don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of Sufjan's studio albums, but having seen him live I've got to say they don't do justice to the tenderness, depth of emotion and at times almost raw frailty of his voice. To be fair, the last of these descriptors could have been a function of him playing three nights in a row, but for mine only added to the experience.

In addition to the extra dimensions of Sufjan's voice communicated in a live setting, the 'less produced' nature of the live arrangements and excellent contribution by the brass section (including a couple of choice little solos), all led me to the conclusion above, that as good as his records are, Sufjan Stevens live is something more special indeed.

So I liked it, assume that's pretty clear from the above, and hence I'll move on to mention the other thought which really struck me on Monday night, just after the band reappeared for their third (that's right, third) encore. It was getting pretty late by this stage, they'd already been playing for one and three quarter hours, and in addition to mentioning how sweaty he was, Sufjan was starting to look a bit tired, completely understandable given how much of himself he had given us over the previous 105 minutes. Based on these factors and that they'd already played two encores, and played Chicago, I'd say the band may have preferred to stop, and could have put forward a justified argument for doing so.

But in a moment of almost perfect quiet just before they started to play again, a voice from near the back of the auditorium (female, most likely from North America), timed perfectly to hit this moment of quiet, called out, simply, 'thank you Sufjan', and as much as what I'm about to say applies to me too, it was the outsider's perspective I was able to apply to this young lady's experience which made me realise this so clearly:

However tired Sufjan and the band were and however much they would like to have stopped, and it's absolutely not that they behaved like they didn't want to be there or that the third encore wasn't good, that's not my point at all, however much it 'cost' them to use up their final stores of energy on those last, wonderful songs, that 'cost' was undeniably and overwhelmingly outweighed by the joy they brought to that single young lady who had called out.

Not to mention the rest of the crowd.

Hell, by this stage I was emotionally drained, the concert had been that good, I can't imagine how the band, having played three nights in a row must have felt, but by coming out that one last time, they absolutely made the world a better place. It was a potential Pareto improvement, or Kaldor-Hicks efficiency.

Thank you Sufjan, thank you very much indeed.

Confluence and Motivations

2008-01-12T12:38:00.002+11:00

A few weeks ago I went to the SCG to see a cricket match between Australia and New Zealand. As it turned out, persistent rain meant that in the six hours we were sitting there we only saw six overs, so the primary activity of the day turned out to be drinking, but that's hardly the point.

A couple of my drinking buddies for the day and I were going home by train, and as we walked into Sydney's Central station, we passed a busker, playing a song which I knew I'd heard before but could not immediately place. It took me a couple of minutes to work out what song it was (and how I recognised it), but with a bit of help from my iPod (160GB FTW, it's precisely situations like this which make me want to have my entire CD collection with me at all times), I located the only version of the song I knew, on the 3rd disc of Johnny Cash's Unearthed box set, released in 2003 on American Recordings. This is a great disc from a great box set, including versions of A Singer of Songs by Tim O'Connell, Father and Son by Cat Stevens, and Wichita Lineman by Jimmy Webb which is a truly awesome song, also excellently covered by the Australian 1990's alternative rock band The Clouds. (Or see here)

However, the song in question, that is being played by the busker, was none of those mentioned above, it was in fact Redemption Song, originally by Bob Marley, and covered on Unearthed with the late (obviously only now, not when it was recorded) Joe Strummer, lead singer of The Clash (and interestingly also temporarily a member of The Pogues).

I may well have heard the original version of the song before, but certainly not as many times as I'd heard Cash's version, and in fact, to be honest, I didn't even know it was originally by Bob Marley, until it was played in the closing credits of I Am Legend, which I saw last Saturday. Now, I thought this sequence of events was a pretty strong sign that I needed to get a better appreciation for this song, including the original version, and I think it's safe to say I've done that, iTunes tells me I've listened to the original version (which I subsequently purchased) no less than 35 times on my computer and an additional 20 times on my iPod in the last seven days!

It also got me thinking about how much I like having events such as the above lead me to a particular song, album or artist, as an alternative motivation to recommendations, reviews or radio listening. In addition, I get a bit of a buzz out of musical connections between, again, songs, albums or artists which I have come to from independent directions, with a prime example of the latter being Weddings Parties Anything covering songs by both The Stone Roses and They Might Be Giants (that's the Wikipedia entry, see also here and here).

Another good example of discovering links after I've got into bands independently of each other is the cover of The Postal Service song Such Great Heights on the Garden State soundtrack, the original version of which was basically my favourite song in the whole world at the time I saw the movie. Keira Knightley also likes that song, she put it in a playlist on Rhapsody (a playlist which also includes Modest Mouse and The Stone Roses). I saw Atonement, which Knightley is in, last week, and I thought it was really good, and man is she ever hot, though I think she'd be even hotter after a few cheeseburgers (her that is, not me). That soundtrack (Garden State) which also includes two songs by The Shins, is not the only example of Zach Braff popping up in my musical universe by any stretch of the imagination. There've been numerous awesome songs used in his TV show Scrubs, including Heartbeats, which is what first got me interested in Jose Gonzalez. Another, and I think the best, example of the Scrub's confluence, is the Colin Hay song Beautiful World which was played at the end of the last episode of the first series of Scrubs. As I only got on the Scrubs bandwagon well after the show's original run (and props to Some Bloke for putting me on the track to salvation Scrubs-wise), I'd probably watched many episodes in a row when I saw the last episode of the first series, and I was particularly struck by that song played over the conclusion of all that had gone on to that point in the show. Obviously in these days of digital downloads music cravings can be instantly satiated at any time of day, but on that evening I was particularly stoked when, after searching around in the internet for a while, I realised I already owned the song, on a Head Records compilation I'd bought somewhat randomly at some point in the past, and obviously listened to just enough times for that little light to go on in my head at the appropriate time!

Now, I could crap on about this stuff all day, but I won't, I'll just finish by sending out some more props, this time to Nick Earls, whose excellent modern Australian fiction had directly led to me purchasing albums by The Go-Betweens, The Smiths, and Warren Zevon. Warren Zevon is also quite heavily referenced in the TV show Californication, including a cover of Reconsider Me in the last episode of the first series.

Egg Whites FTW

2008-01-05T09:59:00.000+11:00

Round two (well, when I say that I guess I really mean the second round of which I'm prepared to share photographic evidence, though there haven't been any intervening rounds since this one) of me versus Yorkshire Pudding, with some sausages thrown in (giving us Toad in the Hole, and with onion gravy, and less directly related, a bottle of Jack Daniels, in the background):

And whilst I was in an egg white mood, I knocked up a cheeky pavlova as well (opted for slightly reduced diameter to increase height and hence marshmallow component):

Edit to add: tonight's dessert. Passionfruit.

Jose Gonzalez

2007-12-30T22:37:00.000+11:00

Last night I saw Jose Gonzalez at the Enmore. He was brilliant.

The last two comments I've had from friends regarding my blog (and these are friends who have met once, in passing, at a bar, in October, of 2002), have been basically identical, and have been that the strong theme to emerge from my blog, predominantly written whilst I was not employed, is that I needed to stop being not employed! What, me verbose? Chicken stock FTW.

And I include that brief flection for two reasons. First, because one of those two people was my companion at Jose Gonzalez last night, and secondly, because I'm going to try to keep this short.

Wikipedia says that Jose's 'trademark sound is classical guitar with soft vocal melody'. My companion last night described his vocal style as (in a positive way) 'eerie', an adjective I think is more appropriate than 'other-worldly', which is how I was leaning. I also made the comment that I could see some similarity between his vocal style and that of James Taylor, which I meant as a good thing. It was only when I read the Wikipedia entry hyperlinked above that I learnt Jose has covered Joy Division's Love Will Tear Us Apart, to which learning my immediate reaction was to purchase the song from iTunes, it being far too late for a trip to the CD store, and in that process I read the first review in the iTunes store of the EP on which the Joy Division cover resides, a review which includes the (again complimentary) statement that seeing Jose play live 'must have been what it was like to see James Taylor as a young man'. I'm not always an idiot.

Another important thing that my companion and I talked about last night was the tremendous emotional depth of Jose's performance, particularly his singing, and even more particularly the depth achieved under the (I would assume fairly safe) assumption that having been born and raised in Sweden, and with Argentinean parents, English is not his first language. The linguistic power and beauty retained in the translations of Haruki Murakami and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were two complementary examples of such vernacular transcendence.

And so I'll implore you to give his music a try, and then leave you with this quote from his website:

The music of Jose Gonzalez is hardly reminiscent of fireworks and confetti, but still that's exactly how his last album was received - all over the world. His low-voiced, serious and introverted music has almost been hugged to death by everything from the indie crowd to your grandmother.

No Country For Old Men Or Other Incontinent Individuals

2007-12-30T22:29:00.001+11:00

Today I saw the latest Coen brothers' flick No Country For Old Men.

It was excellent. I'm not however, going to make any attempt to explain why that was the case, preferring to be deferring to those more qualified, more talented, and better paid movie goers conveniently aggregated at Rotten Tomatoes.

I will, however, point out that between the start of the 'session' and the start of the actual movie, a full 30 minutes had elapsed. Now, I love a good preview before the feature presentation, but I really thought that was a bit beyond the pale.

ApologiesToTheNathanAblett

2007-12-30T22:12:00.000+11:00

At the time I wrote that post I honestly believed Nathan Ablett did not wear a mouthguard whilst playing AFL.

At the time of writing this post, I'm not sure if he'll ever play again.

In either case, earlier this evening I was watching a replay of Geelong's glorious 2007 Qualifying Final victory over North Melbourne, and, in the spirit of a picture telling a thousand words (and with the post linked to above rounding things out for those who like a bit of, shall we say, context), I give you:

It's the little things

2007-12-17T22:08:00.000+11:00

The other night I was at a local purveyor of brewed beverages, at which I had a simple, but profoundly pleasing experience which I feel compelled to share.

To protect the innocent I'm going to avoid excessive specifics, but suffice it to say, one of the brewed beverages offered by this particular purveyor in draught form is Asahi. Now this is a beer I rate highly, despite strong opinions to the contrary of some of my close friends, and so I was slightly disappointed when my first request for a pint was rebuked with the comment that whilst purveying said brewed beverage, they only did so in lesser containers. But I stress the disappointment was slight, and I was still perfectly content to have a 'glass', which set me back a somewhat less content $6.50. Welcome to Sydney!

Requiring more than one brewed beverage to completely wash down my steak, I returned to the bar during my meal, fully intending to be content buying another 'glass' of Asahi, but curious at the volumetric limits apparently being imposed by the purveyor's management. Upon enquiring as to the origin of said volumetric limits, the barman obviously misinterpreted my question as disputing the validity of the range of options of Asahi container sizes, and replied (in a completely friendly way) that if I really wanted a pint of it that bad he'd give me one, which he did, whilst delivering a negative opinion of Asahi which would put a combined effort of all of my friends mentioned above to shame, and then proceeded to only charge me $1.00 more than he had for the first 'glass'.

Now, it wasn't the amount of beer, because I would have had three 'glasses' if I hadn't had the pint, and it wasn't the money, because I can't really be moved that much by five bucks, but getting a pint of Asahi made me really, really happy, in a way I can't explain, and probably can't justify, but am absolutely not going to question or attempt to dilute. It was just a really cool experience, and, at least in my mind, was a great example of the pleasure which can be gained from the simple things in life, like getting a bigger glass of beer than you expected.

Vanilla slice anyone?