You know what I was saying the other day about Arcade Fire? Final Fantasy is also very sweet. And also very tinkly. It's like a Belle and Sebastian that can actually play their (his?) instruments properly. And any musical entity that calls its debut album He Poos Clouds is all win, even if I don't understand Dungeons and Dragons. I wonder if people still play that.
Anyways, look at this Owen Pallett, it's ridiculously awesome:
giovedì, ottobre 15, 2009
mercoledì, ottobre 14, 2009
Take your tradition and shove it up your revolting dairy farmer
The natives are restless, to the degree their protests - oh, it's the one and only thing I love about the fucking Belges, they are walking surreal - have made it into Picture is Unrelated. I buy directly from the farmers at the market, and fail to understand why the entire city of Brussels doesn't do so. So I don't really care if the farmers feel like their wholesale prices suck. And frankly I'd be wallowing through a bit more tearjerks of fucking sympathy if I didn't remember the rabidity with which our vendor jacked up the farmer's market prices in 2007 when there was an upswing in wholesale prices. Didn't hear them fucking whining about a free market then.
But still, this is Europe and what do you expect. Farming is tradition, as is assaulting working class police officers who didn't cause and can't fix your fucking problems, and some of these families have done nothing else in all of recorded history, why should they stop now just because any value-subtracted, long-life dairy product like skim milk or butter is much, much cheaper and not worse if you source it from some poor country somewhere where farmers are too busy starving and killing themselves to spray milk on a cop?
My attitude to tradition is undergoing a bit of a walloping at the mo, by the way. I guess it's hearing all the North American outrage about those dumbass Australians who minstreled up the Jackson Five and got told by Harry Connick Jr. Everybody mentions it to me because everybody knows I intend to go there and everybody wants to know what I think about living in such a fucking racist country.
And my answer to that is that racism in honky Australia is one of the top three things making me nervous about living there. The way they treat Aborigines makes it look like honky Canada is giving the First Nations a fucking multi-generational spa-and-tonguebath treatment (and honky Canada really isn't giving them a spa-and-tonguebath treatment). I'm guessing already that as soon as I start shit-talking to anybody there about how cuntly that is, they'll dismiss my "ooo er so they don't have any fucking land rights" as Yankee political correctness, even though I'm not Yankee, and even though I'm pretty sure I'm not politically correct, and then I'll get mad, and I understand they're punchy sorts of people, and then, you know, it'll just be a bad scene.
But you know what happens to children at Christmas if they'd bad where I live now? Zwarte Peter (who by different accounts is either Sinterklaas's Moorish 'helper' who he liberated, or a black devil he enslaved) carries some willow switches down the fucking chimney to beat the kid up. And people black up to play him, on television, on the streets, at kid's parties, with big fucking red Meg Ryan lips and everything. It causes the absolute minimum of outrage and nobody uses Zwarte Peter to talk about how fucking racist Belgians and Dutch people are, even thought Belgians and Dutch people have a couple of the most august and recent histories of massive colonial exploitation and slave trading. It causes the minimum of outrage because it's fucking tradition.
So you know what I think living in a fucking racist country like Australia is going to be like? Like here but better. Fewer goddamn traditions. Cultural bankruptcy, I'm starting to think, may not be 100% bad.
But still, this is Europe and what do you expect. Farming is tradition, as is assaulting working class police officers who didn't cause and can't fix your fucking problems, and some of these families have done nothing else in all of recorded history, why should they stop now just because any value-subtracted, long-life dairy product like skim milk or butter is much, much cheaper and not worse if you source it from some poor country somewhere where farmers are too busy starving and killing themselves to spray milk on a cop?
My attitude to tradition is undergoing a bit of a walloping at the mo, by the way. I guess it's hearing all the North American outrage about those dumbass Australians who minstreled up the Jackson Five and got told by Harry Connick Jr. Everybody mentions it to me because everybody knows I intend to go there and everybody wants to know what I think about living in such a fucking racist country.
And my answer to that is that racism in honky Australia is one of the top three things making me nervous about living there. The way they treat Aborigines makes it look like honky Canada is giving the First Nations a fucking multi-generational spa-and-tonguebath treatment (and honky Canada really isn't giving them a spa-and-tonguebath treatment). I'm guessing already that as soon as I start shit-talking to anybody there about how cuntly that is, they'll dismiss my "ooo er so they don't have any fucking land rights" as Yankee political correctness, even though I'm not Yankee, and even though I'm pretty sure I'm not politically correct, and then I'll get mad, and I understand they're punchy sorts of people, and then, you know, it'll just be a bad scene.
But you know what happens to children at Christmas if they'd bad where I live now? Zwarte Peter (who by different accounts is either Sinterklaas's Moorish 'helper' who he liberated, or a black devil he enslaved) carries some willow switches down the fucking chimney to beat the kid up. And people black up to play him, on television, on the streets, at kid's parties, with big fucking red Meg Ryan lips and everything. It causes the absolute minimum of outrage and nobody uses Zwarte Peter to talk about how fucking racist Belgians and Dutch people are, even thought Belgians and Dutch people have a couple of the most august and recent histories of massive colonial exploitation and slave trading. It causes the minimum of outrage because it's fucking tradition.
So you know what I think living in a fucking racist country like Australia is going to be like? Like here but better. Fewer goddamn traditions. Cultural bankruptcy, I'm starting to think, may not be 100% bad.
martedì, ottobre 13, 2009
A statement of the obvious
The Arcade Fire is fucking ace. That's so obvious I feel a little silly typing it out. But I've forgotten about it for awhile as it's a bit too tinkly for the F-word so it doesn't get played at home, and for the past year or so my work has been so wordy that I don't think I've listened to music at the office for ages. But now that it's getting a little more spatial I can listen to music in a serious way at the same time, and it's been so nice to have Funeral and Neon Bible playing away.
Aside from the charm of the music, which I do find charming on its own merits, the Arcade Fire gives me pleasure by making me imagine a world where mainstream soul and R&B and fucking everything didn't suffer from a massive and indiscrimate uptake of electronic musical effects. Obviously I love electronic musical effects, but something went wrong somewhere. We're not in a situation where everybody is still touring with horn sections and that lots of big bands are soaking up all of those wandering lost uni music grads. Nope. Just Arcade Fire, and Final Fantasy, and a bunch of other Canadian and European weirdos who I never hear of until it's far too late - case in point:
Broke up ten fucking years ago . . .
Aside from the charm of the music, which I do find charming on its own merits, the Arcade Fire gives me pleasure by making me imagine a world where mainstream soul and R&B and fucking everything didn't suffer from a massive and indiscrimate uptake of electronic musical effects. Obviously I love electronic musical effects, but something went wrong somewhere. We're not in a situation where everybody is still touring with horn sections and that lots of big bands are soaking up all of those wandering lost uni music grads. Nope. Just Arcade Fire, and Final Fantasy, and a bunch of other Canadian and European weirdos who I never hear of until it's far too late - case in point:
Broke up ten fucking years ago . . .
lunedì, ottobre 12, 2009
Take your culture and shove it up your abandoned paper mill
It's sinking in that in the best-case professional scenario of the moment, I'm going to be working two jobs for the next eleven months. Or 1.5 jobs. Oh well, if I'm awake and forced to be at my desk I may as well be working. It's all for a good cause - working from home in a self-directed manner in the Antipodean subtropics - and hopefully I'll find out whether it's a realistic cause by Christmas.
A European friend of ours who recently moved to the Antipodes was over recently and was enthusiastic about the Antipodes, but said that she missed European culture. Missed walking into an old cathedral or something and breathing in the musty, aging air of culture. Me . . . I'm fucking sick of culture, as evidenced by my shitty, ungrateful attitude to Istanbul, which has more culture in its little finger than this whole damn stupid country I live in has in all its museums and churches sewn together. I never really thought I'd get to this point but here I am. I look at a lovely church and see underpaid tradesmen who kept falling to their deaths in defence of a spiritually neutered, murderous state religion. I look at castles and I see an army barracks housing bands of armed fucking thugs. I look at a museum and I see an august history of theft and colonial exploitation. I'm having a hard time appreciating things.
But what I am appreciating in Europe, and I don't know if this is from the part of me that liked the Cure when I was a teenager or if it's just some sort of shift in my brain that's making a Marxist cycle of history the driving thing behind how I'm looking at the world, is the rot and the abandon. The old factories and mines and rotting bourgeois homes, the remaining evidence that this is a continent that used to really, really matter, and now it fucking doesn't. You know where this is going, right? Pictures to follow.
A European friend of ours who recently moved to the Antipodes was over recently and was enthusiastic about the Antipodes, but said that she missed European culture. Missed walking into an old cathedral or something and breathing in the musty, aging air of culture. Me . . . I'm fucking sick of culture, as evidenced by my shitty, ungrateful attitude to Istanbul, which has more culture in its little finger than this whole damn stupid country I live in has in all its museums and churches sewn together. I never really thought I'd get to this point but here I am. I look at a lovely church and see underpaid tradesmen who kept falling to their deaths in defence of a spiritually neutered, murderous state religion. I look at castles and I see an army barracks housing bands of armed fucking thugs. I look at a museum and I see an august history of theft and colonial exploitation. I'm having a hard time appreciating things.
But what I am appreciating in Europe, and I don't know if this is from the part of me that liked the Cure when I was a teenager or if it's just some sort of shift in my brain that's making a Marxist cycle of history the driving thing behind how I'm looking at the world, is the rot and the abandon. The old factories and mines and rotting bourgeois homes, the remaining evidence that this is a continent that used to really, really matter, and now it fucking doesn't. You know where this is going, right? Pictures to follow.
domenica, ottobre 11, 2009
The gamut from delicious to creepy
True to my word, I spent two or three hours of the weekend foraging. Though probably a better word for it would be exploring, since we stayed in the city. The thing that I failed to mention last time was that Europe is very dirty, particularly its cities, and Brussels is one of the dirtiest as far as the north goes. So I hesitate to pick and eat things that have spent their entire life cycle being peed on by dogs or drunks, or inhaling car exhaust straight from the muffler. For example, we have a chestnut tree nearby that I was going to strip until I actually took in its position (dog park, next to busy road, with two drunks sitting at a park bench nearby) and sqeamishness won, especially as I don't like chestnuts all that much.
Mushrooms, however, are fair game. They don't spend that much time growing above ground, so I figure if I find them when they're young, they haven't had time to get peed on or exhausted or such like. And we've had a bizarre combination of patches of warmth with patches of heavy rain, so this weekend there were quite a few mushrooms in my secret mushroom hideouts. But again, the right word is still 'exploring'. I found enough of the very recognizable stump mushrooms to get us the base for two meals, so that was nice, but then I found two other kinds of mushrooms I'm still trying to identify. (Everything I know about mushrooms I learnt from my father, and father only picks four, maybe five kinds, and I don't know everything my father knows. So I don't know all that much.)
One of the other kinds were growing on a stump too, so I have a good feeling about them. In fact I wanted to eat them instinctively. But I have a very bad feeling about these, so much so I didn't even take a sample home for photographing to send to my father:
Don't they look like little ghosts? Like dead things coming out of the soft ground after a rain. God, mushrooms can be creepy. But these ones are extra odd. They don't have any gills underneath - the underneath is as smooth as the outside. Fucking weird mushrooms. I wonder if they came from the same beginning-of-life event that plants and animals did. I believe I've read that sponges may not have. I wonder.
Mushrooms, however, are fair game. They don't spend that much time growing above ground, so I figure if I find them when they're young, they haven't had time to get peed on or exhausted or such like. And we've had a bizarre combination of patches of warmth with patches of heavy rain, so this weekend there were quite a few mushrooms in my secret mushroom hideouts. But again, the right word is still 'exploring'. I found enough of the very recognizable stump mushrooms to get us the base for two meals, so that was nice, but then I found two other kinds of mushrooms I'm still trying to identify. (Everything I know about mushrooms I learnt from my father, and father only picks four, maybe five kinds, and I don't know everything my father knows. So I don't know all that much.)
One of the other kinds were growing on a stump too, so I have a good feeling about them. In fact I wanted to eat them instinctively. But I have a very bad feeling about these, so much so I didn't even take a sample home for photographing to send to my father:
Don't they look like little ghosts? Like dead things coming out of the soft ground after a rain. God, mushrooms can be creepy. But these ones are extra odd. They don't have any gills underneath - the underneath is as smooth as the outside. Fucking weird mushrooms. I wonder if they came from the same beginning-of-life event that plants and animals did. I believe I've read that sponges may not have. I wonder.
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