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A New Post in this Wilderness of Slackerdom & Futility: Yes, this is really happening.

27/8/2023

 
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Hello and greetings from our post-Covid shitscape of slimy robot learning farts, pre-fascist posturing, stolen creative valour and the death of all worthwhile human endeavour.  Yes, it is I, your favourite inactive blog creature, resurfacing for a long-overdue gasp of such public gasses as are nourishing to my murk-softened lungs.  

​What have I been doing?  Watching geology videos on Youtube (I know my ophiolite from my mohos and my arkosic sandstones, if nothing else), making stuttering attempts at fictional composition and creating a self-sewn wardrobe of infinite proportion and modest expense, as is my avoidant want.  
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I note that some people are still checking these pages despite Googles' earnest attempt to stomp them into oblivion, and I've received some encouragement to resume posting, so maybe I should, fuck it all. 
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At this point we indie creators are just paying to provide tasty scrapings for the bots who will one day replace us, but when has reward ever reflected the actual value of ones' efforts?  Fucking never, that's when.  And I like talking to people I can't see.  It's almost the best kind of talk.

​That kind of talk includes my intermittent communiques with the lovely and talented Jamie L, a Friend of the Blog who purveys compliments and even bagels through the mail from his perch in crusty olde Ashburton***, a strange choice of provincial seat in my hopelessly jaded opinion.  It is safe to say that here in New Zealand, one does not much associate Ashburton with the artistic struggle or the elevation of the individual and perhaps it is best to draw a polite curtain around my views on the subject, because I completed a 6 month farming course back in the day and I could very well go on to call it a pointless fucking cow town overburdened with agrestic fuckwits and a nitrate-slathered blight upon the landscape.  Which would be really fucking rude!  Jamie knows his own mind, and a fine mind it is.  I trust his judgement.
Anyway, Jamie knocked out a zine recently and did me the honour of sending it to me.  I was shocked by the refreshing immediacy of handcrafted print after so long in the digital wilderness. I'm old now, but everyone had a zine in the 90's; some peeps had several, and you could barely move for all the hand drawn, drug-addled and highly politicised scribblings of people you sort of wanted to sleep with in the casual manner.  We remember it fondly.  But I can't recall the last time I personally handled a home made corporeal volume and it was a big fucking treat.

So thanks Jamie for thwacking us about the mazzard with your efforts and reminding us to return to the keyboard, because there are certainly worse things we could be busying ourselves with.  I have not forgotten the Musc Kublai Khan obligation and quite frankly it is the least I can do.
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I ask the Questions, Mister!  Q + A with the Jamiemonster
-Everyone comes into their creativity in a slightly different way.  When did you realise you could whisper to all those unseen molecules and charm them into something new?  ​Looking back , it seems like true creativity was hibernating inside of me. I had complete access to it as a child with the ability to act it out in play. Infusing the world with alien dangers and delights. But when teenagehood lurched into the scene creativity became a facade. But in recent years with the encouragement of my D.H  I have nurtured the brain-garden, tending to the foetal muses and dropped the mask of transgressive pageantry. Creativity is part of my spine now, 

Ashburton. Why?  How? A dreamland nesting between braided rivers or ute-infested moo-cow madness?  Ashburton  (Why) does it feel so pressed and flat yet rich with verdant nutrition. Looking at its expanse in satellite view I imagine running my hand over it, Cool velvety fields for miles, the river running through it like a cold artery under my thumb. The town looks delicate with tough woody roods burrowing deep into the earth. Ashburton (How) does it make me feel, I can only think of the hive mind of the humans living there, A world of Tractors, Moo cows and sensible footwear. But I wish for it to have under the surface a gossamer web of beastly and beautiful strangeness. 

What speaks to you about the zine expression?  Is it the paper?  I miss paper.  The whole Zine idea was born out of complete spontaneity. I awoke at 4 am one morning and my brain vomited up the raw material..... "Make a thing! It can be whatever you want! Something tactile, quaint, and energised!"  And paper is nice, something real to hold in your hands. 

How do you deal with those moments of ‘oh fuck/I suck’ and the general pointlessness of everything?  The Oh Fuck / I Suck exists as a mental roundabout. That requires you to squeeze your eyes shut and yank the steering wheel in the opposite direction to get out of. When I went looking for inspiration and read some posts on your blog, it was so fucking good and interesting. The photography and writing, so professional.   That must mean I am an amateur, that must mean I am a shitty writer/creator/human. And like that you are in the roundabout.  Content wise I was happy with Volume1, But V2 felt like a pale and disappointing middle child . But slowly and with the encouragement of my lovely muse I was able to focus, pay attention to the things that crack the atom, like smiling to myself as i drive past a tiny dog shitting on someone's front lawn, Lying on the floor drinking Sake talking about Wormholes and Dogs in space. And looking at the world around me through a broken 1950's Camera.

Which potential creative direction frightens you with its impossible allure?  Something that frightens/fascinates me is the art of Mischief. For example: collecting Cicada shells with a friend and then walking into a loud and highly flammable women's clothing store and attaching them to polyester sweaters ( we were young, and this was crossing a line) And lightly trespassing to take  photos of some wonderful graffiti. There is a thrill , a spark. And It makes for a colourful memory to cherish. 

Words or pictures?  Which side wins if you could only choose one?  Pictures, without a doubt. There is a pile of books that I keep meaning to read, they are dusty, and I have stopped adding to the cobwebby pile. But Film and visual art are like oxygen for my psyche. 

You’re trapped aboard the cut-price cruise ship Rabies of the Sea, everything is hideous until 3.33am one night in the darkest corner of an obscure upper deck cocktail bar, red tinsel fluttering under the row of brown liquor overhead; a single historical figure of your choosing looks up from their tequila sunrise and puts you on their tab.  Who is this paragon and why specifically did you summon them from nothingness?  What happens next???  Curiously, at first, I approached this as a right or wrong question, One historical figure kept appearing and seemed to stick, except the one time that Nancy Reagan surfaced (umm No) So I am going with the one that wants to stay. 

I am staring at the pitted and sticky surface of the bar and the regrettable brown liquid in the tumbler I am nursing. Then I look up, At the end of the bar I see a woman through the blue smoke,  she has a froth of red hair and a pale moon face and is dressed in a white man's dress shirt with bare legs and feet , the bartender brings me a barely cold tequila sunrise from the woman and she waves me over. I shake her sweaty hand and introduces herself " Mary Magdalene". I have a hundred questions to ask her, but we just talk. She tells me that redheads have a naturally higher pain tolerance and that her heart is a sad and small brown bird. She gives off waves of intense shadow and flashes of light. This is a soul that has lived lifetimes, I feel that some liberation is required.  I order many shots of Poitín (Irish moonshine)  and we chain smoke her hand rolled cigarettes.  She feels at home on this dreadful cruise ship, untethered and anonymous. We dance to good disco music playing loudly through shitty speakers pulling at the chintzy Christmas decorations hanging above us and mussing the hair of the gloomy bar patrons. I stop and ask her one question, shattering the moment " What was he like?" .................. she frowns but then smiles drunkenly....... " His tears are salty like ours."  ​
As you can tell, Jamie has incredible taste in blog material 😃  And yes, Ashburton (minus rustic overburden) is rich in geographical and experiential splendour.  Jamie informs me that he recently attended a printmaking thingy which fills me with feelings of displaced jealousy and frustration because I have not.  

​Please enjoy a brief foretaste of further work in the images below, even if they belong to the self-maligned, above-mentioned Dread Volume II.  Everyone thinks their second efforts suck, man, but do they really?

***  Somewhere in the course of our communiques, the peculiar and frankly derogatory notion that Jamie lives in Ashburton entered my estimation like some sort of notional shithouse rat, scurrying past my ahem, critical thinking skills and lodging itself in mah brainal region, where it feasted and became some sort of odious, rotund certainty.  I apologise unreservedly and am pleased to report that Christchurch, not Ashburton, rejoices in his presence.  Although- I have to say, the bit of Chch he nominated is but one full hour's drive from that aforementioned blight upon the Canterbury Plains and is thusly still sort of suspect.  

Feel free to treat my error of placement as a harrowing thought experiment and test of character.  I do still assert that we should all ponder the possibility that we may, one day, wake up in a centre of dairying excellence.  Fortune favours the prepared mind.

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More Selected Ravings   *  Verse


A Young Welcome Swallow (Hirundo neoxena)

27/1/2020

 
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A family group of swallows has taken to nesting around the boat sheds at Back Beach and we have been watching the babies fledge and get their insect-grabbing wings over the last couple of months.  Unfortunately one of them had been downed by unseasonal southerly gales and sat huddled on the road, dazed, possibly with strained wings and definitely  just moments from being run over.  Luckily R saw it and carried it home, from where it was delivered to the Dunedin Wildlife Hospital.  A big shout out to the DOC weekend operator who went the extra mile and picked it up for us.  Fingers crossed that it just needed a couple of days to rehydrate and recover.

Good luck, little bird.
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Photo du Jour: Argosarchus horridus, a New Zealand Stick Insect

20/12/2017

 
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R was trimming the weedy vines coming through the ivy in the front yard, and an hour or so later noticed this fucking monstrous stick insect hanging from one of my tree aloes.  Stick insect doesn't really cut it- it's more of a log beast.  It's the biggest one we've seen and after consulting the literature, about as big as these things actually get.  They are utterly harmless, but life in the tropics has left me with a lasting reluctance to tangle with anything larger than my hand possessing more than four legs.

It's a lady Argosarchus, because the males are far less impressive and, in some populations, entirely absent; parthenogenesis renders them obsolete.  Lady Argosarchus have it sorted- if a male tried any shit with this big bitch, she'd just stamp him into a paste and go back to munching leaves.  Sounds awesome, doesn't it?
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The detail and accuracy of their mimicry is astonishing.  This is just one of the rewards of going spray-free, so please consider it in your own horticultural practise.  We returned her to the remaining vines, and found another species wandering the yard a wee while later, so perhaps we should all be a bit more circumspect when we're hacking away at something.
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Monday slash Tuesday slash Primitive Technology

23/5/2017

 
I stumbled over this shit on some other totally unrelated website.  For those of you unfamiliar with the phenomenon, Primitive Technology is a nameless Australian guy running through various practical experiments in the bush with well, primitive technology, to achieve basic levels of anthropoid comfort and functionality. He makes a kiln, simple forge, baskets, prawn trap, pottery and various huts etc. from the modest resources of his northern Queensland bush setting and if that doesn't sound especially riveting it's because you've never experienced his delivery.
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It is minimal.  Silent.  Unsmiling.  Largely devoid of eye contact or indeed any of the extraneous and highly execrable elements now sadly synonymous with Youtube presentations.  

There is no calculated self-aggrandisement; no desperately studied tattoos, no chicken dos, no notice-me piercings, no branded items.  Primitive Technology man wears crap board shorts and a series of inexpensive haircuts to get shit done.  The episodic demonstrations are like plunging one's face into clean meltwater after extrication from the synthetic ooze that is the rest of the internet (by and large, present company excluded).  His delivery rides the line between meditative and ruthlessly purposeful and I find myself watching the episodes over and over in bed late at night.  R doesn't even mind.  I think he's a little bit in love with him too.

Having grown up in Arnhem Land, I guessed where he was from the eastward shift in the otherwise similar birdsong, especially the Peaceful Doves warbling away in the background as is their charming/fucking incessant wont.  I've lit friction fires.  Whittled poky things from those white-wood saplings, constructed coil pots from the slippy clay gouged out of riverbanks, made bush cubbies and hardly ever worn shoes.  All this is tremendously significant and formative and Primitive Technology really plucks that atavistic string.  If you've never done any of this stuff you have never really contacted your inner feral.  It's my contention this constitutes an important deficit that many more people should concern themselves with.  In the absence of other, more explicit causation, it might just be why you're having those panic attacks and eating your feelings.  I'm not joking.
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Against all those nobler considerations I will admit to finding Primitive Technology more enjoyable for being shirtless and well-made, because I am a hopeless voyeuristic hobag.  

​The sight of a semi-naked idiosyncratic sort of person glowing roseate in the light of a hand-built forge or mutely treading clay in the middle of nowhere moves me deeply.  There is something oddly fetching and completely un-gratuitous about that stoic, rain-shaped thatch of possum-coloured hair, silty fingernails and robust architectural pallor, especially whilst demonstrating that most erotic and beguiling of all personal qualities: 
competence.  Together they are a slutty primal bush-pig banquet.  I don't know how Primitive Tech man would feel about my unseemly objectification but that just sprinkles his sexy mystery with more sexy mystery.

Primitive Technology: would, hard, repeatedly.  Highly recommended.


Photo du Jour: Greenie the budgie

19/3/2017

 
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Mr Greenie: represent
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​None of us will ever be even half as beautiful.  Nice job R.

Happy Solstice Everybody

22/6/2016

 
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It's the shortest day down here in the midst of a freakishly warm winter.  We're sitting here without any form of heating about to go for a walk in a long sleeved T, so global warming = no complaints so far.  Wishing everyone good luck on the other side.
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Take it away Wikipedia:
"A solargraph taken from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment at the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory in the southern hemisphere. This is a long-exposure photograph, with the image exposed for six months in a direction facing east of north, from mid-December 2009 until the southern winter solstice in June 2010.[4] The sun's path each day can be seen from right to left in this image across the sky; the path of the following day runs slightly lower, until the day of the winter solstice, whose path is the lowest one in the image."


The New Zealand Poultry, Pigeon & Cage Bird Association 2016 Show, Dunedin

31/5/2016

 
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We are both notional bird fanciers, R especially since his earliest years as a little r breeding budgies and canaries, so when our friend Tenoch informed us that she was covering the regional bird show as part of her journalism course we were enthusiastic accomplices.  Bird shows are like catnip and indeed crack cocaine to the aspiring fowl enthusiast.

​It's an old-school scene undergoing something of a renaissance with the increasing popularity of domestic poultry in general and fancy breeds in particular.  We're pleased to witness any trend that might reconnect urban people with their fellow creatures and remind them of our relation to, and reliance upon other species.  

Perhaps you don't care for the thought of birds in small cages; neither do we, but the ones you see here are just judging units designed to keep stress to a minimum on these two days a year when the birds are assembled for the purposes of highly particular comparison. 
These guys are all accustomed to human interaction and lead pretty enviable lives outside the show ring on farms and lifestyle blocks.  None seemed unduly perturbed by proceedings, something you might be able to ascertain from the pictures we took.  Another encouraging trend was the appearance of organic drenches and insecticidal agents on the sales table; birds both wild and domestic are subject to parasites, and the fanciers' world was previously awash in hardcore toxic compounds.  It's great to see them being relegated.

Chickens come in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes with Bantams representing the smaller end of the spectrum and heavy breeds being the largest.  Confusingly, some breeds come in two size versions so a trip round the various cage lanes can make you question your relationship with the physical universe as identical birds appear to shrink and expand every time you look away.  

How big is a chicken anyway?  A small Game-type bantam may be scarcely two hands high on tiptoes and so closely-feathered and elegant that it looks more like a tiny bipedal dinosaur than a bird, while the largest breeds are huge pillowy beasts with spangled bouffant manes and massive day-glow headgear.  We'll try to name the breeds depicted here but will undoubtedly get some of this shit wrong, so apologies in advance for our ignorance.  ABOVE a fine Chinese Silkie Bantam rooster with his alluringly gelatinous lilac wattles.
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LEFT  Unknown ginger Bantam- possibly an Old English Game.  ABOVE  a fine Rosecomb Bantam, one of my favourite varieties and possible future feathered friend. 
The white earlobe is apparently the mark of a good laying breed (although Rosecombs have an uncertain reputation in this respect); in life it has an intriguing and tempting textural quality, looking exactly like a squashed milk-bottle lolly or expensive marshmallow.  I wanted to touch it quite badly.
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ABOVE LEFT another Silkie mister.  The smaller breeds seemed to be the freest with their remarks and walking around a hall packed with competitive roosters of every description is not a sound one soon forgets.  The heavy birds tend to be baritones, producing rich, almost laconic crows while some of the little guys have shrill, gurgling and peculiarly disorganized outbursts that once again recall their saurian forerunners.  

ABOVE RIGHT a splendid Rhode Island Red rooster.  They might be the archetypal chicken but there is nothing basic about this breed; the lustre of their mahogany and peacock-green plumage is difficult to capture in this crap light.  

LEFT a stoic Barred Plymouth Rock rooster.  The difference in temperament between breeds and individual birds was very apparent; we didn't photograph the ones that seemed to object to our proximity. 
 But a lot of them responded to positive attention and particularly liked the shiny lens glass, examining it closely.
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ABOVE  I think this is an Old English Game Bantam.  We were impressed with the hard-feathered lizardy Bantam varieties and will possibly end up getting some for our place, something we've been procrastinating about for a couple of years now.  While researching the various breeds I came across this piece on OEG bantams, with references to the inevitable cockfighting association and the tremendous peanut-headed secret-society bullshit that surrounds this moronic practice.  There are a few lulzs to be had.  BELOW  A fabulous Sussex breeding trio.  Swaggy.
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BELOW  I think this is the Pyle strain of Old English Game and is apparently very prestigious.
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ABOVE  a Welsummer hen?  I know we're getting this wrong, again- sorry about that.
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On to the ducks.  

ABOVE  We were confronted by a wall of white Penkins who had a lot to say about their confinement, all the other ducks they were going to beat down, the inferior status of chickens and the inadequacy of their human servitors.  Walking past these ducks made us feel like hapless junior defence lawyers negotiating the Aryan Nation section of the death row gauntlet.  There were extremely serious threat displays and a shitload of rage-quacking.

RIGHT the exquisite American Wood Duck, Anas sponsa.  There was a lovely pair on show, the first we had ever seen in the flesh; this is the cock bird.  Their colouration is vividly and almost arbitrarily ornamental and yet this is a wild-type animal with very little human intervention in its appearance.  It's great to be able to say this species is doing well after a concerted conservation effort across the US mainland that brought it back from serious decline.
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ABOVE I think these guys are Appleyard Ducks, another first for us.  They were placid and enormous.
​BELOW the highly glamorous Cayuga.  Their plumage is like opalescent moiré satin.
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Muscovy Ducks, Cairina moschata.  I could have sworn these strange fowl were cooked up by some mad duck-altering wattle fanatic but they are actually a species native to South America. They are enormous and pretty phlegmatic in comparison with the angry, entitled Pekins.
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Another chicken interlude.  ABOVE LEFT silver Sebright Bantam.  The hand-painted effect is called lacing.
ABOVE ​RIGHT an impressive Dorking rooster.  This is an ancient, possibly Roman breed ideally possessing five toes.  His comb speaks his truth.  BELOW  not sure about this guy... some sort of bantam; a Silkie variant?
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BELOW  the Leghorn.  They're an Italian laying breed; I thought they were American meat birds, lol.  Durr.
BELOW THEM a ginger Buff Orpington rooster. We were hugely impressed by this breed; so buxom and bouffant.
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Pigeons, which we know even less about than we do chickens.  Or ducks for that matter.  These are the 'fancy' breeds, bred for their exaggerated lines and jewel colours.  I do know that these puffy birds directly below are Pouters.
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The Cage Bird category, home of the budgie, canary and finches etc. There were some seriously dope high-end budgies in the house but this pied guy to the right was the shit if you're asking me.  BELOW AND BOTTOM RIGHT the undeniably spectacular Ringneck Parrot, who, like many people, are ideal companions until they open their mouths.  Despite their metal-scraping shriek, they're a charming and extremely intelligent bird and the sweet moves in this male Ringneck's courting display should be an inspiration to us all.
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Another Rosecomb.  Look at his comb.  Look at it.
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ABOVE I think this superior creature is a lavender Orpington rooster.  He glowed with otherworldly significance under the slightly creepy tungsten hall lighting and expressed the tranquility that is a breed hallmark.

It was nice to see so many contented and highly appreciated animals.  The decline in fowl-keeping was generally attributed to people abandoning rural lifestyles and to industrial egg and meat production, but I'd like to add that the hostile demeanour of certain factions of the bird-fancying establishment has been a problem too.  We've gotten attitude from overly-proprietary stalwarts at shows in the past despite our enthusiasm; possibly not an ideal approach to recruiting interested newcomers.  So while we were too busy taking fifty thousand chicken pictures to talk to many people, it was encouraging to hear from Tenoch that the NZ Bird Association members were very friendly and helpful and represent a great resource for anyone thinking about keeping birds.  You only need to watch a few Youtube posts by chicken enthusiasts to understand how the habit takes hold.

New Zealand NZPPCB page HERE    South Island NZPPCB page HERE    Dunedin Association page HERE
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The show definitely renewed our chicken intentions.
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Monday slash Tuesday slash David Attenborough: nature wizard slash sexual chocolate

10/5/2016

 
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David was just the person who knew about all the things that moved me as a child.  I can't remember the first time I became aware of his existence.  I didn't know who he was or where he'd sprung from; it didn't even really register that his strange way of talking was a nobby British accent.  He was neither father nor brother nor friend.  When I think about my idea of David Attenborough, it strikes me that he represents quite a unique sort of concept; not mundane flesh, not quite humanised abstract like a conventional schoolteacher and yet not exactly disembodied mentor either.  I'm having a lot of trouble articulating exactly what I thought he was and I had no fucking idea how he knew all that stuff in the first place.  Just that it all seemed to make sense, that I should definitely listen, and that it was really fucking important.  Life on Earth was my scripture, an explanation cleansed of the shabby anthropocentric shite that was so patently and distressingly fictitious.  What a relief it was to find out I was a primate, not a fucking catholic.

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While he was of course informed by a gifted and unprecedented network of naturalists in the field and emerging technologies, full credit must be given to the unique personal imperatives that made David Attenborough midwife to our understanding of the natural world and our relative place in it.  Without knowing me from a poop on the ground, he has told me more vigorous truths about myself than everyone I've ever known mushed together.  My creativity is a blood-sister to all that David-purveyed revelation.  R and I are incredibly lucky to have experienced his benign, heuristic ubiquity.  

​R's always been a DA devotee (along with the rather more scurrilous and um, earthy, Gerald Durrell) and knew a lot more about his origins and personal life than I did when we met, pointing me toward his autobiographical accounts and unwittingly introducing me to Hot David- shirtless smoothie, Madagascar-bound khaki enthusiast, tranquil gorilla whisperer.  But reading such stuff is also a rueful exercise these days, laden with reminders of everything we're losing; extraneous curiosity, broad access to a decent fundamental education, functional literacy, societal equity, the appreciation of merit, authentic and effectual idiosyncrasy.  ​

Let's not lie face down in the gross mud of social decay at this juncture; David Attenborough is 90.  Smarter than all our elected representative dickwads tied in a too-tight bundle on purpose.  Hotter than a thousand malignant Instagram narcissists tricked into a basement and doused in overdue accelerant.  More influential than any stunting, stunted bubblehead or flabby phalanx of Twitter warriors.
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"In the past, we didn't understand the effect of our actions. Unknowingly, we sowed the wind and now, literally, we are reaping the whirlwind. But we no longer have that excuse: now we do recognise the consequences of our behaviour. Now surely, we must act to reform it — individually and collectively, nationally and internationally — or we doom future generations to catastrophe." DA,  2003.  We know, thanks to him; to act on that knowledge is our individual responsibility and privilege.

David Frederick Attenborough, thank you.

Alexander McQueen: a personal retrospective.

12/4/2016

 
Been reading a McQueen biography. I've been an admirer for a long time and his experiences remind me that some things are universal and eternal; I'm going to bang on about them in semibulletpoint form whilst posting a few of my favourite pieces throughout just so it won't be a dead loss.  

- Then as now: art school bullshit.  The pitting of creative people against one another right from the fucking get-go in a scrabble for the shitty resources and grudging recognition artists are schooled to accept.  Inculcated on this fundamental level and virtually impossible to exorcise afterwards.  Although Lee was a wee bit of a native arsehole, he (and many like him) might still be with us if he had not been compelled to cannibalise so many relationships in his struggle to do anything material.  

Related: the depressing virtual impossibility of being paid a decent wage for a decent day's work as an artist of any kind.  We are either flat-out exploited, blithely under-compensated, or paid ridiculous sums to do impossible things for people who expect obscene returns.  McQueen was either eating someone else's cold chips in a mangey squat or wallowing in megabank and neither condition does anyone much good for long.
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Why does it have to be like this? The financial insecurity of so many talented people is fucking outrageous and a cancer on every society that tolerates it.

- Isabella Blow might have briefly been the wormhole between worlds that sucked McQueen into the one containing notoriety, but she was also a controlling attention-seeker, dramatic leg-dragger and bottomless psychic vampire who probably did as much harm as good with her toxic nuttiness.  We've all met them.  She blew through the kind of (entirely undeserved) opportunity that truly capable, productive people would have killed for, and to hear her whine incoherently about her self-inflicted predicament from her husband's historic country house makes me want to stab something with a fucking fork.   I don't credit her with much in regard to McQueen's output- he would have done all of that shit anyway- and find the hyperbolic posthumous homage distasteful.  Bona fide patronage is important but all these overprivileged do-nothing bitches who want mad props for wearing hats can fuck right off.  

- After learning that he was routinely expected to produce ten collections a year by various parties, most of whom were in a much better position than McQueen to know exactly how sisyphean that task would be, I am prompted to dump a shitload of credit in the lap of his production team.  Like, 80% of the damn credit.  Anyone involved in practical creation knows just how much unglamorous piecemeal drudgery and desperate last-moment expedient genius must have been poured into those frocks by a gifted support crew.  So massive claps and flowers to all those nameless techs and interns and cutters etc who were the ribs and femurs of his operative giant.

- McQueen's darkly legendary personal indulgences are an object lesson in the afferent dangers of overdoing shit.  Overdoing anything will reverse its polarity; the sustenance it initially provides becomes poisonous and bleeds into everything you're trying so hard to sustain.  Too many drugs sounds like an oxymoron while you're huffing booger sugar on an Olympian scale, but it really is bad for you.  Fucking too many predatory or indifferent strangers will turn the dial sinister, too, which is a shame because fucking while fucked up can be a merciful escape from one's own shrieking consciousness.  All things considered, Lee's nuclear gimptastrophe is a cautionary tale for the ages.  The stuff his arsehole went through gives my arsehole the cold sweats, and it too has done... questionable things.  Seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  You know what?  Never mind.

Which brings me to my next point: Blade Runner, specifically the costume design by Charles Knode and Michael Kaplan.  I've never seen any critical mention of the utterly obvious and almost explicit references McQueen made to their work in his own and I can't really be bothered looking, but it sticks out like dog bollocks as far as I'm concerned.
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- It's very interesting to me that so many of my age cohort have embraced the destruction of the human exemptionalist paradigm in their métiers.  I'm convinced that comes from the thousand televised hours of natural history we were treated to as children and thank fucking christ for it every day of my life.  McQueen's abolition and hybridisation of the human form is as much a child of Attenborough's relentless advocacy as his own internal prerogatives.  Thanks, David :)
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​- I think my favourite McQueen show overall was Horn of Plenty (2009, above), ​because it had everything; awesome staging, consistently brilliant technical accomplishment and that shit was ready to wear, motherphuckas.  Everyone loves Voss and Widows of Culloden and they are both the shizniz in their own ways, but to me they lose points for... I dunno... resorting to emotive, slightly gimmicky staging.  They lacked the utterly unassailable coherence and fuck-you assurance of Horn, which was all about the clothes and pulled completely clear of art skool stunting.  Each piece was an entire world within its greater universe and I doubt we will see its equal any time soon.  See also: Dante (1996) for the nasty spectacle, Joan (1998) for the slick lines and sanguine, pro-femme symbolism, The Overlook (1998) for its nonpareil goth-o-rama and The Girl who Lived in a Tree (2008). 
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- Re the contemporaneous charge of misogyny (though I see that once-popular stance has given way to universal acclaim now that the poor bugger's dead).  I didn't think McQueen was a misogynist back in the day and I'm even less convinced of it now.  He admired, befriended, consulted and employed women.  In his rejection of feminine aesthetic norms he both empathised with the ferocity of our desire to kick away the deadweight of tradition and dared to express the darker ghost of that aspiration; the self loathing and masochism of victimhood, into which he had been initiated courtesy of the sexual abuse he experienced as a child.  In his sexuality he was formatively monstered and discounted- just like we are.  McQueen knew what it was like to have to eat shit and shut up and smile like a good girl.  

His work and its performance expressed all that angst, contempt, violence, fragility, sarcasm and hypocrisy alongside celebratory grandeur and this is not anitfemale- it is honest.  Like it or not, women are still deformed by the weight of all those oppressive millennia.  I personally find the work most derided in Eshu and La Poupée incredibly valuable in its vicious, unapologetic bulldozing of traditional notions of beauty and believe that is precisely why people were so fucking determined to characterise it as derogatory.  They were mad at his pissing all over pretty, as though this sick convention was the most precious thing imaginable.  As a woman, I feel the gross confines of pretty like a plastic bag around my head and take solace in living outside it, in solidarity with other creatures, in our rhythmic affinity with the organic world.  McQueen celebrated this in virtually everything he produced.
​
To me it seems obvious that his own wish to escape the physical cards he had been dealt was utterly and perversely seminal to his aesthetic.  McQueen yearned with the diametric vehemence of the incorrigible self-loather to be everything his body was not- thin, athletic, ethereal, elongate- subjecting himself to the kind of excoriations only too familiar to women for far too long.  That he could not apply his boundless talents to celebrating personal diversity, to the very things he lamented about himself is hardly surprising and ultimately pretty forgivable.

​It is painfully ironic to consider the sort of compassionate, comprehensive self-acceptance that can come to those of us who make it into our forties, knowing it will forever be denied to the people who did not survive its absence.

How powerful that realisation might have been to someone like Lee Alexander McQueen.  RIP.
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Sweetmeat: Eddie Izzard

16/12/2015

 
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His insane lurch from chunky indolence to running a charity marathon a day for I think the entire length of England was perhaps the only sort of batshit fuck-yeah example that could have helped propel me from my own similarly fat, louche stasis. One doesn't have to be a slender whippet to enjoy terrifyingly kinetic half-bestial health and I owe that realisation in part to this dubious and exceptional transvestite.
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As a fellow spark of dainty luminous femininity trapped in the body of a big butch bitch, let me correct the oversight that was my omission of la Izzard from this catalogue of androgenic excellence. Sarcastic men in frocks are one of my favourite things ever.

Eddie would be my spirit animal if I believed in the necessity of remedial transubstantiation. Which I do not.  

​Everything is everything.
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That brings me tremendous joy.
​
I prefer his earlier, bitchier work to the sort of stadium-pleasing recitals he does now, but whatever- I'd still still exploit him physically if I ever caught him in a vulnerable moment.  

​Lol.
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liked this work by Meghan Howland

2/12/2015

 
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Another something beautiful: Bird Attack by Meghan Howland.  

​I bought this enormous print some time ago and had to wait for a year to summon the courage to have it framed because it was so spookily evocative and well... personal reasons.  Now I just regret I didn't do it sooner.  Thanks to Tenoch at Mariposa Framing for a nice job.

The camera has a bit of a hard time exposing it correctly in our dark bedroom, which annoys me because its delicate tonality speaks volumes.  You can see the original web image here.

Meghan's work is powerfully transcendent. But don't take my word for it-  visit her site.

liked these Racka sheep

18/11/2015

 
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While I consider myself something of a livestock aficionado, I had never heard of,
much less seen,
a Racka sheep before. (pic: Wiki) The horns.  That fleece. There is a black version.   
They're Hungarian.  They make me happy.

Ever seen a Markhor?  Do yourself a favour.

Monday slash Tuesday: Fuck everything slash alright, maybe not *everything*

17/11/2015

 
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Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons  
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Kinpusha Toyomaro  Courtesans Parodying Kanzan and Jittoku 
​
 Ito Jakuchu  White Plum Blossoms and Moon
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Birds and Flowers of the Four Seasons
As a rebuttal to the violence so recently exemplified in France, and wherever it occurs (let's remember this shit happens every day in a dozen other countries), this week @ The Blackthorn Orphans will be exclusively devoted to beautiful, meaningful objects and images inspired by the natural world.  By spirituality and individual experience of the divine instead of religion.  A celebration of those tangible physical truths that seem to so offend brutal fucktards everywhere.

Sometimes I need to remind myself, hard, that we aren't all just a swarm of gibbering bloodthirsty monkeys going batshit because there are far too many of us.  This idea haunts so much of my writing and private rumination already, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

​So let's stick our fingers in our ears and go la la la la with the help of some Homo-genic wonders.


First off- beauteous moments from Japanese art as currently presented at The Met.  
​You can see more in the NYT.

​
And something from Björk, because we can all do with more of that.

Monday slash Tuesday: Fuck moderation- treating oneself with handmade New Zealand chocolate because who could be more deserving slash shut up stupid pancreas.

17/7/2015

 
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No one really says this out loud.

But one of the most unquestionably awesome things about losing a lot of weight is setting aside your tiresome, abstemious sanctimony for a day and oinking loudly as you roll off the wagon into a great big pile of artisanal chocolate. 

Knowing you're not going to wake up fat* the next day.

Just sayin.
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* It takes 7000 extra calories to create 1 kilo of onboard lard.  This is nowhere near that amount.  Edumacation- never a waste.

Chilling at home as midwinter rolls around needs a little something to take the stabby edge off.  I'm a veteran chocolate whore with surprisingly high standards and a few years of professional tasting under my belt so all this was inevitable.  In my commentaries about weight loss I discuss why you shouldn't expose yourself to binge cues, but let's just stuff a rag in that shit's mouth for a moment and rip the postbags off the goodies my onboard Satan ordered online.  First up- a few small-scale delights from Shoc Chocolate including these gorgeous marzipan fruits.  
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Look at these little faux fruits- so cute.  And so dead now.  

This is their only memorial.
Marzipan- a lot of people shift uncomfortably when you discuss it but I urge you to expose yourself to the good stuff.
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I picked up a block of their (Shoc) white (judge me all you like) + cardamon.  See it below left.  Pretty good; smooth, quality fats, nice mouth feel- not at all waxy, excellent ratio of chocolate to spice and the fragrant pounded pod bits were exactly the right size.  We were a little less enthusiastic about the dark chocolate-robed apricots; you need really great fruit to support this simple treatment and the quality was mmm... not quite there.  We ate them, alright, but they were a 6/10 sort of thing.
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Moving right along to Patagonia Chocolates.  Ran into a little bit of ordering drama as they were revamping their site but they were very nice and comped me a truffle.  That's all it really takes to secure my eternal loyalty.  

Embarrassing, isn't it?
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 < I got the make your own choice of slabs box and a random selection of truffles.

R loves dark and I have broad tastes, so it was great to be able to compose our own mix.  His standout: Dark+candied peel. Mine- white+fig.  8.5/10

One of the best ways to really put an unfamiliar food purveyor to the test is to order something you wouldn't normally choose, and in accordance with that principle I picked out both a boysenberry and a passionfruit truffle.  Fruit truffles are something I steer clear of because the ancient trauma of Cadbury Strawberry Roses is a scar that never heals.  Am I right, fellow Commonwealthians?
In my extensive experience they're often full of inexpensive gack no matter how high-end you go. 

Whatever Patagonia puts in their truffles sneaked past my Cerberus tongue and pleased the rest of me greatly.  They were so utterly delicious that I forgot to photograph their innards so... I don't know... just imagine someone else biting into a fucking delicious handmade chocolate right in front of you and really enjoying it without offering you any.
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I also judge a chocolate house on its caramel.  
So rude.  Another 8.5/10 moment.
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No decent caramel = no dice.  The Patagonia Caramel Peak was crammed with silky old-school condensed milk home-made-type goodness.  Like tonguing a sylph.  A sylph who's been stuffed full of sugar and suspended over a gas burner for some time.
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I swiftly became one with that Caramel Peak and regret only the impulse-control that limited my order to a solitary example.

A solid 9/10.
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So to summarise; no one died and New Zealand chocolate is in good health.
(I buy all my own review items @ full retail and have no association with any of the suppliers mentioned.
This is more gratuitous oversharing than a review anyway lol.)

This week I think the Lovely R is writing something about photography on a budget; which gear and why, where to start etc.  He knows what he's talking about and he's cheaper than a cold pie so I'll just let him get on with it.

*  Reading the latest Book serialisations but missed the start?  Read it onsite here   *   Photoessays  *
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Monday slash Tuesday: My dog is always with me.  

8/7/2015

 
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Wild at Heart. So stupid and threadbare and yet so utterly, comprehensively glorious in its chunk-blowing emotional impact and motherlode of gross eternal truths.  So many eternal truths are at least vaguely disgusting, don't you think?  Love is a negotiated chokehold and its exigence can be the most humiliating force on the planet; no real good can come of it.  There's always a whiff of Bobby Peru in the only kind of sex worth having; it doth liberally mock the meat it feeds on, making you a fucking slave to the slippery vagaries of genitalia- is that not the dumbest thing in the world and also seething with functional blerg?   

A lot of people were mad at WaH back in the day, waaaay out of proportion to any offence its artless dumbness should have inspired, which tipped me off to the real reason for the foaming at the mouth; all surrealist drag aside, Lynch (praise be upon him) was bitchslapping us with too much holistic, discomforting authenticity and that shit catches in a lot of perceptual windpipes.  Wild at Heart is the feral, airless passion, the witless devotion and the trip to the clinic afterwards.  They don't make them like that any more.

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I first saw it with someone more Sailor than Sailor and it reminds me of him, always fondly, sometimes agonisingly, but he would have hated to be the cause of my avoiding an earthly delight and so I watch the damn thing anyway and am always glad I did.

Laura Dern was so great as Lula and never gets any credit for what was a fantastically instinctive performance- brittle, unfortified, slutty and stainless, the like of which we almost never see in these dry times with all the meta-meta bullshit and watchful posing that latterly passes for performance.  Dern extruded Lula from her own darn flesh. You need to stand in front of a mirror and try it yourself in order to truly appreciate her achievement.

Twenty five years.  Wild at Heart stomps that time down into an arm's length, so that it just seems like the distance between you and the overloaded ashtray into which you flicked your Camel, back when you still smoked.  It reminds me to fuck and to be fucked, to embrace intoxication in all its many forms, and that my beard-scissors hairdo is a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.


liked this view of earth from space by Dmitry Pisank in the Guardian

26/6/2015

 
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If you need more reasons to treasure our home watch this lovely visual by Dmitry Pisank.

How distressing to see our webby orange infrastructiure crawling over so much of the planet.
But the great oceanic voids and the blank cloak of night- beautiful still.

Photos du Jour: Eucalyptus blossom, NZ

18/6/2015

 
Unsure what species we're looking at here, but it's Silver Dollar Gum-esque, with smoother mottled bark, slightly more elongate leaves and these rayed anenome flowers that burst from their glossy little cups in the middle of winter.
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Many Eucalypts are incredibly beautiful, though they are hardly recognised as such in New Zealand where they are regarded as an 'introduced' group, viewed more as a timber prospect and windbreak than appreciated for their innumerable aesthetic and environmental merits.  Pearls before swine.  Hardly anyone knows they were in fact native here until very recently, though you can guess this quite readily from both their obvious affiliation to much of our endemic flora and our native birds' response to the flowers, which verges on rapture.

Without Eucalypts, I very much doubt our populations of Tuis and Bellbirds would have recovered to their current extent.  Wish people would consider that before poisoning and felling them just for the hell of it.

The Lovely R took these.  He's a good boy.
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Maximum Respect: Siouxsie 

29/5/2015

 

Happy birthday Siouxsie 58 today!

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liked these studio portraits of African owls by Brad Wilson

18/5/2015

 
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Eurasian Eagle Owl.  Below: Spectacled Owl.  From his book 'Wild Life'.   More in the Guardian
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Frida Kahlo's wardrobe in the Guardian

8/5/2015

 
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I don't know how to feel about this.  Frida blogged herself through her work but how would she feel about her things being documented and exhibited like this without her direction?  I make a lot of my own clothes and they are some of the my most personal items; part of me would like them burned when I am over, but the other half likes the thought of someone else rocking the shit out of my pink and blood paisley dress.  Does it matter once we're dead?

So many people assume exhibitionism when they see a creative personal presentation, but that can be such a misunderstanding.  You can see her strangely beautiful effects  H E R E

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