Sometimes I wonder if Nick Cave ever gets tired of being so awesome. But what could he do, at this point? Pick his nose and eat it? Fine. He could be a nose-mining snot-eater, be as big a shithead as the Gauguin figure in The Moon and Sixpence, enjoy the novels of Ayn Rand, cover it all in an anorak, and still remind us he's the awesomest pipol person in circulation with a double play of the a capella "Black Betty" from Kicking Against the Pricks and his narration of The Cat Piano:



Oh, how I wish normal Australians actually sounded like that, it would make my post-this-October life so much more pleasant. It's all enough to reconcile me to "Brompton Oratory". Although actually I think "Brompton Oratory" is enough to reconcile me to "Brompton Oratory". The tune is very pretty indeed and I really love the second verse for some reason:

The reading is from Luke 24
Where Christ returns to his loved ones
I look at the stone apostles
Think that it's alright for some

(BTW, we saw Brompton Oratory when I was dragging my niece and nephew around London the other week. What the fuck is it with Anglicans and Anglo Catholics, incapable of constructing a pretty bit of religious architecture; the fucking Methodists were putting up better things than they were. Anyways, a bit of a squat of a church but better than the Basilica here in Brussels, which is certainly the building I'd choose to demolish by fucking hand if necessary if they were handing out demolishing licenses. Seriously, it's piss-ugly inside and out; more basilisk than basilica. I have never seen such a hideously ugly place of worship anywhere. It's like a toad that looked at Medusa).

So he's all awesome, but does he write poetry? I keep thinking his lyrics flirt with poetry - cross into it very often. Certainly more often than most people's, and sometimes absolutely undeniably, like "The Curse of Millhaven". Probably that wouldn't surprise me or even present itself in my mind as a question, except he is a pipol person, and The Boatman's Call in particular is so problematic in those terms because it's such common knowledge that it's about a relationship with another pipol person. And my feeling of what art is, that it's a thing that speaks meaningfully to our collective unconsciousness on purpose, is hard to reconcile with songs about a specific pipol person relationship.

I think the only thing I can do is avoid reading about any pipol person there's even a possibility I might respect as an artist - reviews included, and certainly interviews included - and concentrate any coverage I read on people like Mel "give me a blow-job before I burn your house down" Gibson.

Crack chi

Wow. The kim chi, which I thought went so badly, actually went really, really well. How well exactly I have a hard time saying because it's been a good four years since I had kim chi prepared by a Korean, and because I have another couple of days to go before the first symptoms of botulism would be due to appear, but it is damn good and I can't stop eating it. I think at the point where I'd tasted this batch before it just hadn't aged enough; it's still crunchier than I remember kim chi being but no longer burningly, insufferably hot - the right amount of hot now. I think for the next batch I'll make it less hot because the F-word isn't into super-chili anymore but still, for me it's ace.

So ace has it been, in fact, that on Saturday when I realized how much I'd eaten in such a short space of time, I had the kissing cousin of a panic attack upon realizing there was a risk of me being once more without kimchi. So I decided to blow off the hammam and run to the grocery store to get the ingredients for a new batch instead, which is currently stinking up our kitchen with goodness.

For the current batch I used this recipe, and for the batch that's aging now I'm using a recipe from a book Sam recommended, Wild Fermentation. I'm making ginger beer from a recipe in the same book. It's a good read - God, I love gay hippies, I wish there were more of them - and it's totally firing me up to ferment everything. I'm putting the F-word on the case today to make some peach vinegar while I'm at work, and I'm going to order kombucha gunk, and kefir grains, all of which home-raising of live food is starting to suggest to me that I'm insufferably broody (did have a dream last night about being five minutes away from going into labour). Anyways, I'll wait to second the Wild Fermentation recommendation as cookbook until I manage to prepare a few of the dishes all the way to the end, but it's a nice little read in the meantime if you find it.

Also wanted to flag up to you something I found when looking for more kim chi recipes: pay particular attention to the "shit needle" entry. Koreans, man. Holy fuck. The way the blogger breaks it down makes it seem like there's something, somehow, kind of awesome about that. In the abstract. I'm happy enough to not be subject to it here.