There was a fire somewhere over the hill as the sun was going down. I couldn't choose the best shot. The streetlight throws some dramatic shit down on the Fucraea by our driveway at night. I exaggerated the spikiness but I think I love the super-degraded version below. * Our Photography * Photoessays * Port Chalmers, New Zealand *Young New Zealand Fur Seal Arctocephalus forsteri chillaxing by the 30 sign around Back Beach. She was a wee bit skinny and this isn't a regular haul out spot so we called DOC in case she was harassed by dogs etc. They said she seemed okay and we didn't see her again. NZ Fur Seal populations are recovering which is fantastic and it's great to know they are returning to old haunts like Otago Harbour. The best way to tell the difference between a Fur Seal and the local Sea Lion is the former's pointy dog face as opposed to the latter's stouter bear schnoz. Mushroom season. These are Parasol Ink caps, I think. Larch Boletes. Unidentified Amanita shrooms, possibly. * More of our Photography * Port Chalmers, New Zealand *
The sort of stranger who will gratuitously knee-check your fleeing arse and then stomp your hands into the concrete if I catch you ganking my spray-free business because the justice system is just a hostile farrago of flatulent, exiguous platitudes to me. Furthermore I will absolutely exploit the highly ironic misogyny of its attitude toward feminal violence and totes get away with that shit. You will lose your crap retail gig because a lack of viable phalangeal cartilage means you can no longer fold clothing and you'll be forced to move back in with that guy who gave you herpes and sniffs your friends' bike seats when he thinks no one's looking. He'll sell your painkillers to people you hate for half their reasonable value and spend the proceeds on ratchet MILF cam porn. So buy your own fucking garlic next time.
* The Ravings are Selected * Read the Book onsite *Due to a an epically shitty spring we only grew six apples :( I always want to call this variety 'Explorer' for some retarded reason and can never, ever remember its correct name. Discovery is a lovely heritage cultivar with a neat, smallish tree and crisp, slightly tart fruit that are still sweet enough to appeal to modern sensibilities. I can confirm that it's also a solid candidate for organic cultivation since we never do shit to it and it always produces an edible crop: not a single spot of moth this year. * See more of our photography here *another good detail shot by R. I take these lovely blue (only the extreme centre has this pink flush) flowers for granted because they are so easy to grow, split up and move around. They're one of the first things to flower here in early spring along with the Persicaria knotweeds. They have a fucking peculiar smell which is quite pervasive on a still day; crushed strawberry + juiced violets + household bleach + foxy, animalic musk as per Lilium pyrenaicum. It smells medium blue, if that's any help to you. It's just that I'm bored with my own faineant xmas blobiness, and mired in that peculiarly tractionless stage of building planning whereby one draws and explains essentially the same shit over and over again to no discernable effect. Nothing is happening, nobody can tell you anything for certain and no structures are even close to being erected. I'm all about the erecting. We begin the year without George Michael. Still can't quite believe it. on a stormy afternoon the other day from my mother's verandah I'll start posting (something) again this week. Warm and sunny here, just come back from a walk with a friend alongside Blueskin Bay. Tomorrow it's eating and chill. Have a very spoonbill xmas from us both.
Décor-wise, we generally hack a bit off a feral Pinus radiata, stick it in a bucket and asphyxiate it in daggy 20 year old tinsel. Monterey pines suck as xmas trees because of their droopiness and sparse branch arrangement but they're free, so whatever. No presents this year. We are having a stuffed turkey and a profuse selection of minor numminess because fupas don't grow themselves.
Arrgghhhhhhhhh! Arrrrrgghhhhhhhhhhhh! We bought a used dragon. It came in pieces. I'll post it when we've put it back together. no, that's not my ugly-arse foot. duotone B&W I was standing on the steps halfway up to the top garden the other day when something large and dark swished by my head. It was a Magpie, Cracticus tibicen, unrelated to the Old World Corvidae version you might be familiar with. We don't often see them here. They are denizens of open farmland and only occasionally vagrant to our adjoining township. This one landed on the hillside next to us and stalked beneath the trees, looking for foundling chicks and treating R's attempt to photograph it with frosty contempt. There is something deeply and inexplicably sinister about these birds, far more so than the crows and ravens I met in Australia. They are accomplished mimics and soon master anyone afforded the dubious privilege of their adoptive company, bending them to their inscrutable avian will. I have tremendous respect, if not too much affection for them. Watching this one stride between the pools of shade beneath the trees was like spying on a shapeshifter satisfying its appetites in an alternate form. A native fruit pigeon or Kereru is frequenting the lower garden at the moment. It is an enormous bird, at least half a metre long, although it was chilling in a small kowhai tree the other day just a metre or so above R who was busy weeding and we didn't notice until it shat voluminously and went to sit in the adjoining paper birch. From there it lumbered into the rowan next door and commenced stripping all the new leaves, consigning them to its capacious gullet. I thought it would prefer the flowers, but apparently not.
When it has crammed as much of the rowan as it can fit into its crop, the pigeon retires to the shelter of the alder to sleep for the rest of the afternoon, where it would snore like a fat drunk after a lunch bender, if birds could snore. Trees are reward in themselves, but when you can stand in your own garden and photograph beleaguered native species enjoying the amenities, you know you've gone a small way towards making amends for your presence on this overcrowded planet. If you don't have a yard to plant, consider joining a local conservation org. The rewards go far beyond personal gratification. * Port Chalmers, New Zealand * Our Photography * Selected Ravings *R took this lovely detail shot. I have three different clones of this sought-after variety; one super-large and sprawling with a weirdly cinereous, bruise-coloured flower that nudges ugliness, and two smaller, slightly frillier plants with a sweeter plum bloom, of which this is one. So not all Patty's Plums are created equal and this may account for the mixed regard in which this variety is held. I personally went to great lengths and some expense to secure this poppy, and while they will flower well in half shade and do look great with roses, all in all I prefer other varieties, like the deep reds and large whites. My fucking poppies are flopping this year on account of all the bloody rain. Poppy flop sucks. I think this is a really spectacular image and one of R's best. Almost straight out of the camera after three months of rain in the top garden. Nice work babe. * Our Photography * Port Chalmers, New Zealand *A very satisfying image courtesy the Lovely R. He posted it in his section too but whatever 😀 Another busy busy week so you'll be getting a lipstick review unless I get time off from designing wedding shit and property upkeep and spring cleaning etc. to write something else for you. Someone should be paying me for something but they never do. There are apparently many educated people who believe that we are simulated creatures living in a synthetic world, a system modelled by advanced persons in an attempt to retrospectively understand their own development. From whence they derive this notion is somewhat hazy; some of them sound bereaved by the notion of a creator. Others just love maths and want their imperfect quantifications dignified or supplemented by some deeper, less dismal certainty. All of them need to be fired into the fucking sun. The paper birch pumps rain into its brand new leaves. Its cells divide. Division of these fundamental units is governed by both chance and certainty and these two elements are the twin gods in any given process, organic or synthetic. Some argue that chance is just an artefact, a representation of our imperfect perception of certainty, and that this underlying certainty implies some sort of fundamental administration; that we are somehow curated. But a stopped clock is only right two times a day if no one smashes it to shit with a cricket bat. Live long enough and you'll feel that cricket bat of randomness, wield it yourself and recognise its disordered nature. Personally, I think the kind of mastery of inputs and systems required by a universal simulation renders any such simulation utterly fucking redundant. Unless our future selves are the kind of people who sit staring at their phones while out at dinner with a dozen of their own species, in which case The birch, the quince flowers and the magnolia are made of certainties and chance. Their beauty denies and rebukes the purpose of creators and simulations and every other fucking thing that smells of savoured fart. They don't care for our bullshit and will ultimately feast on all physicists. Shithawks, people. Shitropes. * The Ravings are Selected * Ethnographica * Kitchen Bitch * Book * |
Independent Creativity
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