We spent most of Australia day sheltering in the darkened house, although we went down to a park in Canada bay in the afternoon to catch the late breeze. Most of the parks around our side of Five Dock were full of bogan picnics.
The house across the road from us has new tenants. That was where Rod and Dot lived, before their ugly murder/suicide last year. Now their son has rented the place to some disgusting characters. One is a thirty-ish woman, wears white clothes all the time, deep fake orange tan, drives a white hatchback, bleached hair. She's not so bad, but she seems to be having a relationship with a prize bogan. Bullet head with close cropped hair. Usually wears Jackie Howe and shorts. Drives a black 4-seater ute with highly polished roll bars. We can't be sure of their relationship because they fight all the time. It usually begins with the loud arrival of the ute, screeching to a halt across the driveway. He jumps out, tries the gate, which is usually locked, then immediately scales the wall and marches up to the back door and starts knocking loudly and shouting. He'll then start wandering around the outside of the house, shaking the windows and threatening to bust in, until she opens the door. He then barges inside, usually emerging several minutes later, storming down to his ute and taking off again, only to return a few minutes later to repeat the performance. This goes on for hours. Sometimes they carry their pushing and shoving arguments right out into the street. He loves to do that threatening maneuver where he suddenly jerks his head forward as though about to give a Glasgow Kiss, making her cringe. He's obviously an expert at humiliating women. He also loves to grab her wrist and jerk her a bit, but obviously not enough to leave a mark or invite an assault charge or anything.
I remember when the abuses in Abhu Graib were revealed, and people were saying that the expert torture techniques in use were evidence it was ordered from the top. Otherwise they wouldn't know how to break their prisoners spirits so efficiently. That may be true, but some people, like our new neighbour, have it instinctive. Like the technique of leaving, driving away with a loud screech of tires, only to circle the block and come back again immediately, to resume the argument, whetever it's about. Standard interrogation tactics - let your victim think it's over, they relax, their defenses go down, and then when you resume they are weakened and don't want to resist any more.
Anyway, they and their friends were in the park across the road yesterday, burning meat and drinking and playing cricket, right next to the toilet block. Apparently they engaged in a mass punchup as the afternoon wore on. It's good to know the old ways are being observed.
2010-01-15_1040.08_Acid_mow
Originally uploaded by mattspong
Hibiscus as Tempeh Starter (page 78):
Aubert(1983) records that Dutch prisoners-of-war extracted the molds for tempeh from the withered petals of hibiscus flowers, and so made a nutritious food from soybeans. Flower yeasts and moulds are often mentioned in the "secret recipes" of traditional peoples. Tempeh provides 60mg of niacin per 100gm, a vitamin lacking in polished rice. Soy ferments contain 10mg thiamine per 100gm, riboflavin. Tempeh contains vitamin B12, probably from Bacillus subtilis or other bacterial sources.
Now that is useful info, especially if you ever find yourself a prisoner of war with access to soybeans and no other source of protein. Honestly though, if you were interested in trying to capture and cultivate an alternative fermentation agent to the usual miso cultures, you've just been handed a huge clue. The book just goes on and on like that, exhaustively listing every recorded method of preserving and sometimes capturing and cultivating food. There is a fascinating entry for catching the allates (flying form) of termites, by putting basket over the exit from the termite mound when they are flying away, and putting a light source at the right location to attract the insects, so they crawl across the basket, shedding their wings as they go, and then drop neatly into a well placed jar.
I've long been interested in low-tech methods of preserving food, possibly because many of the foods I like have been processed in some way which was originally developed to preserve them. Pickled olives, salted fish, dried sausage, fermented beer, smoked meat, Worcester sauce, cheese etc.
As Mollison constantly details, the process of preserving the food often adds to its nutritional benefit, especially with fermentation. The bacteria and yeasts create vitamins and modify proteins and turn sometimes quite worthless foods into super foods. Of course, the reverse is sometimes true - unless you're a hard-working farm hand, eating duck confit can hardly be called healthy. But if you are, it's just the heavy burst of calories in the form of animal fat and protein you need!
I bottled a couple of dozen bottles of tomato pulp last week, thanks to my new tomato press. The ironic thing about preserving food like fruit and veges is the time they ripen is the last time you want to spend a whole day in a steamy kitchen. I've still got a box of mangoes I was gonna bottle, but I can't face the thought of getting sticky juice all over my hands and seating down my glasses while slinging boiling hot bottles around.
If you have an interest in this book, drop me a line, I might be able to help you out...
x
Anyway, yesterday I looked it up and found the book at the Customs House branch of Sydney Library. I caught the bus into town, joined for $15 and checked it out! What a beautiful library, too. They have the city council developer model there, in the foyer, under a glass floor so you can walk around over the top of a miniature Sydney.
It's a fascinating book, but actually getting hold of it and reading it is a bit disappointing. Basically you soon detect a pattern - get some food, bury it in a hole in the ground, wait for it to go off, then dig it up and eat it. There are hundreds of entries where you can make an Eskimo delicacy by catching some auks, wrapping them in a seal skin, burying them in a hole in the ground, and then digging them and eating them. Or, an African practice of mixing up some millet with honey and milk, burying it in a hole in the ground, then digging it up and eating it. Mollisons thesis is that fermenting food is as radical and important a development in human evolution as cooking with fire, but because it's a slower and more finicky process, and because of our Western dislike for decay and germs and smells and yuck, we have grown blind to it's importance. So he has collected as many records as he could about the techniques and practices in this volume.
A: We had lunch at Petersham RSL.
Q: How did that work out?
A: We sat at a table in a large room with black walls, decorated with a pattern that looked like the wifi symbol, made of copper. A demented troubadour with a wig like Prince Valiant played lite Elvis classics on an acoustic guitar while we ate luke-warm turkey slices with transparent gravy. Old men wept bitterly into their hands. The conversation limped like a soldier with a bullet in his leg. The smell of regret mixed with the faint odor of colostomy bags and beer. Everything was in short supply: there were bread plates but no bread.
Q: Sounds grim. Why the big change from last year?
A: Michelle's mother Pam didn't want the responsibility of cooking Christmas lunch again.
Q: Why does she have this responsibility usually?
A: Because she won't let anyone else do it.
Q: How many people usually come for Christmas dinner?
A: Two, apart from ourselves. That is, Pam's stepfather Ken and his friend Bill. I can't invite anyone because Ken objects.
Q: Why is it such a big chore to cook for 6 people?
A: She has to cook baked ham, chicken wings, barbecued sausages, steak, chops, rissoles, roast pork, turkey, boiled eggs, salad, 3 kinds of dip...
Q: All that food for only 6 people, why?
A: Because Pam wants to absolutely ensure that nobody can say "What, no chicken?" or "Why didn't you cook the rissoles like last year." By "anyone" I mean Ken.
Q: Are you angry about another Christmas spoilt by these people?
A: What do you mean, "spoilt"? I've always been fascinated by the "other world" as represented by movies like Eraserhead and books like Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, TV shows like Jam, etc. Having the opportunity to visit this place is always welcome. I grew up there, suspended in slow time like poisoned amber, uncomfortable off-kilter social situations are easy for me! It was kinda nostalgic, in a way.
Q: What about next year?
A: Despite the nostalgia, Michelle and I agree we will be in another city. Perhaps another country. Hopefully one that doesn't celebrate Christmas.
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2009-12-04_2236.16_Portuguese_bingo.mp4
Originally uploaded by mattspong
Carlos is Michelles ex boyfriend. The last time we saw him before this year was back around 1998. He was stalking us through the streets in his Mazda RX7. I remember one day when Michelles nans dog was sick. We took him to the vet on Glebe Point Road. All the way there we were aware of this revving little white secret agent car shadowing us. At the vet, as I was trying to carry the dog inside, he parked across the road, got out and stormed towards us. I was wondering whether he would be bastard enough to start a fight while I was holding a sick dog, but all he did was hand Michelle a bundle of completed animation cels with a dramatic flourish. (They used to work together in an animation company, until long after their relationship broke down, which caused me a lot of confusion when I was chasing Michelle, I didn't know if they were still an item or not.)
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It was a pretty good night regardless, most people got dressed up. Michelle went as a ghoul, I wore a Cthulhu mask I bought in San Fran. Big props to Miss Jane for her "preppy zombie" outfit, and there was a perfect Invisible Man, some skeletons, a viking etc.
There was a girl in an awesome Elvira costume. Not a character most people can perform, but she was lucky enough to have the necessary attributes. She was accompanied by a friend wearing a mask like an old women wearing a spooky white Venetian masque for the carnivale. Her costume was a ghostly floating draped shroud. In fact, she was an actual old women, introduced as Elvira's mother. Michelle recognised her as a stallholder at Marrickville markets. She sells raver clothing and hand painted T-shirts.
"I hope you don't mind me peering at you" she said when we were hanging out on the balcony with the smokers. "I'm legally blind. I call my clothing label Wonky Wear, because I can't sew straight. It's best to just admit it, then people actually like it." She had a friend with her as well, a bit younger, not in costume, who looked a little nervous but was having fun nonetheless.
We were joined by an old man who had a cane with a bone handle. He wasn't costumed either, except in a black overcoat and Greek fishermans hat, so he could have claimed to be Ernest Hemingway. I would have added a blood-spattered head and a shotgun to complete the outfit. Miss Jane complimented his cane. "It's a mutton bone" he told us. "I like the way it represents the sheep it came from." Indeed it did, the flanges around the joint looked like curling rams horns. "Of course, when I go to the Hellfire Club, I tell them it's the thigh-bone of an Ethiopian boy! They like that one much better." he deftly unscrewed the handle to reveal a joint, ready-rolled and stuck in a holder, which he extracted and lit, then kindly passed to the two older ladies. They gratefully toked it up, and passed it on to me. I've always been told to respect my elders, so of course I accepted. "It's not great, but it's better than the stuff in Amsterdam" the old man told us, and went on to explain his theory that the quality of pot in a country is basically inverse to how legal it is.
Later in the night our host Miss Death explained where the man came from. He had turned up late for the garage sale they held a couple of weeks ago, hoping to buy some esoteric books as offered by Lee, who is in the process of selling of the largest library of such works in Australia. He inherited them when his lover died, and isn't much interested in them, or the work involved in listing them on Ebay, so he sells them for pennies whenever the Mu Mesons have a sale. The old man turned up arund 6PM, well after the sale finished, right in the middle of Miss Deaths stitch-n-bitch. They gave him a program and sent him on his way, and here he was. Meanwhile Michelle was listening to the two old ladies, fresh off the dance floor where they had been grooving for some time, arguing about who would "get with" the geezer. "I'm 89, he's 17 years younger than me, I think you should approach him" said one, the Wonky Wear lady. "Never say that!" the other scolded. "Anyway, I feel a bit peaky. That pot was too strong." They wandered off and found Jay Katz, who settled the peaky one down on a couch with a nice cup of tea.
Meanwhile her friend wandered out to the balcony again, where the old man was still holding forth, now about the amount of stand-over activity in Sydney. I never thought about it, I'd always assumed that we were pretty clean of that kind of thing except maybe in Chinatown, where triads might shake down illegal sweat shops by threatening to out them to the police, but he insisted it was the reason for a lot of restaurants shutting down. I told him how, in Sicily, they have an organized fight-back campain now called Addiopizzo where they refuse to pay tithe, and actually stick a banner in the window of their shops to advertise this fact so the tourists can support them. He seemed amused at the concept. The lady was holding back, nervous as a young girl, obviously wanting to talk to him but intimidated by his carefully cultivated aura of evil he obviously enjoyed wearing, and scared of rejection. Of course the guy got bored, we were just too straight for his taste, and besides, Miss Death was playing a medly of 80s bands like Bronski Beat that were really annoying. Soon after the lady went inside to check on her friend he made his adieus and left. Better luck next time, babe!
It gives me great hope for the future when you see older people with real lives, refusing to do what our culture still encourages them to, i.e. dig a hole and bury themselves. It isn't that way all over the world. In Portugal Michelle saw the large clubs they have, which are usually multi level with different ages and music on each level. Most clubs have a room where they play "fado" the traditional dance music. The whole family goes out, the wrinklies dance all night to fado and have a better time than their kids and grand kiddies who are acting all cool in the disco rooms.
recently. I mean, extended upwards. Had a new floor added. But my first choice of word is definitely edited, because the second story is made from some kind of grey fibre board which looks like freshly rendered polygons in Second Life. Not only that, they were so pleased with the effect they literally rendered, in cement, the ground floor to cover up the brick and make it flat and paint it the same colour as the extension. I wish it was edited, because then
they could control-Z back to the way it was.
Not that that was anything special. It was a typical Five Dock house,
meaning it was a Federation era bungalow made of red brick with a tile
roof. The previous owner was a creepy old Italian man called Fernando. The creepiest thing about him was, his wife never emerged from the house. Apparently she had had a mastectomy some years ago, and was ashamed of that and the fact she couldn't speak English. "Always she cry for the sponge booby" explained Fernando one day, when he had caught me mowing his grass verge. He invited me in for a glass of grappa, which he flavoured with sprigs of rue in the bottle. The rue would turn a weird grey colour, and the grappa acquired a disgusting flavour like a mothball cocktail. His wife shyly shuffled into the room, avoiding my gaze, and placed a tartan thermos and a tray of sad-looking biscuits on the table. He ignored her completely, and poured me out a shot of the strongest coffee, thick and black as molasses. She vanished so expertly I wasn't even aware she was no longer in the room. I felt she had had a lot of experience at that trick.
The grappa was his own, distilled many years ago and put aside. he used to brew red wine in stainless steel beer barrels, he gave me one when I showed him my fruit wine efforts. It's still under the house, I can't use it. It's about the size of a wooden wine barrel, that is, about 10 times the size of a normal beer keg, and I'm not really planning on producing industrial quantities of my hooch yet. Michelle's grandmother (who never liked him that much) nevertheless refused to rat him to the cops when they came knocking about the strange smell they had noticed, the one somewhat like an illegal still running full blast. This was back when the laws against home distillation were being enforced. Now pretty much every home brew shop sells super mutated yeast, the kind whose sole rationale is to brew cheap alcohol from sugar water, and also sell flavourings to turn the raw ethanol into something like bourbon or Drambuie or chartrues. Back then Fernando would give the wine away to his large family and gratefully mash up and distill the skins and stems to make his grappa, which hadn't mellowed in the bottle at all by the time I got to taste it. It was like printers fluid, even without the rue.
Fernando was a melodramatically melancholy guy. "What can you do?!" he would exclaim when he had finished reciting his current list of ailments, including tight congested chest, some unspoken heart ailment too terrible to name, breathing difficulties which were always worsened by the weather, regardless of whether it was sunny or cloudy. "What can you do? Kill yourself?!" and he would draw his finger across his throat with a loud garroting sound, like a child would, staring at me wide eyed, demanding an answer. I've never been very good at these situations. "Ah, no, not usually a good idea" I would tell him in my usual nasal geek tone. He was barrel chested and still very strong. he loved to crush my hand when I shook it. I learned to wince early and exclaim at the strength of his grip, so he wouldn't actually break any bones. He emigrated to Australia during the building boom of the early 50s, when immigration laws were relaxed and large numbers of wogs were shipped out to lay bricks and hammer wood and basically house the baby boom.
The other creepy thing about him was, he used to hint at being a member of some kind of fascist group during the war. he never actually said "I was a fascist" but he would say such provocative statements as "During the war... my friends and I..." and look very smug and creepy, and refuse to elaborate on the subject. Rumour had it he still owned a pistol from this time, nan claimed he had shown it to her once.
He had subdivided his block to build a house for his son next door. This meant he had almost no yard. Almost every inch of the land had been paved. He was extremely proud of the fact that, when the council came to rip up the old concrete path which ran down the street by his house, he had importuned them to give him the chunks, and had used them in his paving. Often he would take me to the side of the house and point to the ground, at the irregular chunks set in a matrix of newer cement, and explain how he had done this. The cement was almost covered in bundles of rebar and stacks of breeze blocks anyway. He had the urge to conserve, to stockpile building material when it was available, because someday it would prove useful.
Not that his garden was barren, he had a thriving garden growing in troughs and pots. He grew all the herbs he needed, including the round-leafed rue for his grappa, plus the usual Mediterranean herbs like rosemary, bay tree, oregano, sage, hyssop, also showy beefheart tomatoes, some elderflower bushes, and an unproductive avocado.
Actually my mowing his grass verge annoyed him, and he would sometimes rush out and try and reason with me when he heard the engine of the mower outside. "It is the council!" he would exclaim, meaning, the verge belongs to the council and is therefore their responsibility to mow. Especially since they had been idiotic enough to rip up the perfectly good concrete path and replace it with sod. But, since the council tends the verges perhaps once a year, everyone mows them, or else they cultivate long rank grass that catches and holds blowing trash and looks terrible. That wouldn't have bothered Fernando, but we couldn't stand it. What I usually would do is mow the whole street, pushing the mower all the way up the hill to the corner and then back down again, and once that first strip had been shaved in the long grass outside his house, he couldn't say no to me finishing the job I started.
Then his nameless wife died, and they carried her out of the house on a stretcher. I wonder if they buried her with the sponge booby? Fernando was always melodramatically cursing the universe for it's cruelty, but in that automatic habitual way that many people do nowadays, as though they want to conceal their own fortune from the luck fairy who might seek to balance the books of favour if they don't conceal their happy circumstances under a camouflage net of misery.
Fernando lived on, descending slowly into genuine sadness, for a year. He acquired a puppy, tied it on a long rope lead in his concrete yard. It barked, and his family didn't like it, so he gave it away. They looked after him as best they could, until one of his maladies proved itself real, and did him in. His house sat empty for a year, with a creepy white wreath on the door, while the family presumably argued over it's disposal. Obviously they didn't reach any settlement amongst themselves, so they put it on the market and sold it. Now we have this bunker like a freshly extruded lego brick. I miss the old fascist.
http://mspong.s3.amazonaws.com/music/Li
Most of it is the classic sounds of perky corn, full of plucked strings and tootling clarinet, even though I picked all the good sounding titles like "Approaching Doom" and "Foreboding to Climax". Some of it sounds quite avante guard, which is why we like Library Music, isn't it?
On Thursday we had a scheduled expedition to St George, which is the original settlement at the east end of the island. There we learned that our old friends the Masons were highly instrumental in setting up this colony! The old state house is basically a Masonic lodge, both by design (note the twin pillars) and in modern usage - every year they have a colourful ceremony where the Masons pay the town council the peppercorn rent, with an actual peppercorn in a box. This building is one of the oldest surviving in the new world, constructed 1620.
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The Cahow is a petrel, now the Bermudan national bird. It doesn't look particularly fascinating. It has an amazing call, which apparently sounds like "cahow" to someone. It changed the course of history. The Spanish discovered Bermuda first, but they never settled, because the Cahow calls made them think the island was infested with devils and demons. They called the island chain the Devil isles, put some pigs ashore so they would breed and provide food for future shipwreck survivors, and left.
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Breakfast at the Fairmont is a dangerous time, because there is a huge buffet and ones instinct is to dive into the bacon and smoked salmon and pastries and so on, which can really ruin your day, especially when you consider the rich food they fed us for dinner. I tried to virtuously stick to the fresh and canned fruit selection. I chatted with a lady with pearls who at first I thought was on the staff, perhaps the owner, turned out to be an Este Lauder rep. She told me she had never seen the hotel so packed. Apparently her yearly routine includes holidays at Bermuda, Sydney (so her husband can play a game of tennis with old friends) and various parts of Europe. Nice.
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