S e l e c t e d   R a v i n g s : my shit in your head on an irregular basis

This is more of a mixed lolly selection than a comprehensive overview.  
If you would like to wander chronologically through all the ravings including the
Monday slash Tuesday weekly pieces, just click here.

2013 -

Maximum Respect: my vintage Ibanez P/J bass  This is my lovely, lovely Ibanez 2369B olympic-white electric bass guitar.  A P-J Bass clone from 1976, made in Japan during that golden 'lawsuit' period when everything Matsumoku was absolutely primo; ebonized inlays, supermodel neck, great frets, fat, apocalyptic sound.  They have a cult following and that does not surprise me.  I don't hate Fender, but many P-Basses are shameless hunks of overpriced glue-smeared doodoo with streaky paint jobs and screechy pups and most of the Japanese lawsuit babies are you know... not.  She is the colour of homemade icecream and I love her.
Walking the Black Mile: on Depression and armed resistance, Pt I  I aspirated a sliver of bone while eating a roast for lunch this afternoon.  I felt my breath whistling past this brittle fragment as it sat pinched between the walls of my trachea.  I got up, went into the kitchen, suppressed the gag and swallow reflex, worked it out of the place into which it was wedged and eventually spat it into my hand.  It was almost an inch long and maybe a millimetre thick.  Then I walked back out onto the deck and finished eating lunch.  That's flattened affect for you, when it's at home.  
Walking the Black Mile: Pt II  So much discussion of depression is centred around lamenting its personal and cultural impact crater, and grieving, sometimes gratuitously, those who fall under the wheels.  Undue attention is paid, in my opinion, to the mechanics of suffering at the expense of any serious communal effort to understand or circumvent it.
Softcore Rendition template: dropping it from ground zero  It struck me recently that stony-faced misanthropy is but one of my personal aspects and in truth I have occasional access to a wide group of interesting fellow bipeds.  I intend to corner these unfortunates and siphon their personal truths in the nicest possible way for your edification.  And because everyone loves the sound of their own voice I will start with myself.  If you've ever imagined interviewing someone else, I can tell you its vexed.  You can almost hear the dry squeal of arsecheeks converging in that most primordial of mammalian defensive manoeuvres.
The Fox Joseph Glacier, Westland, New Zealand  I am not sure why people insist on portraying glaciers as icy white and pristine, as though they must glow and even fluoresce in order to be significant to the human eye.  Glaciers are not generally white and do not possess that kind of energy; they are dirty, injurious and protean, hungry monsters chewing and scraping the mountains as they plough downward, cleaving and collapsing on themselves along the way.  What they have done is all around us and there is a terrible irony in the fact that we are now returning the favour, clubbing many of them to death with our own flatulent emissions.  This is the Franz Joseph glacier in Westland, situated on the far side of the South Island as the crow would fly if any lived here.
Fuck the Word Police: in defence of profanity in fiction  According to Potter's The Singing Detective, the most beautiful word in the English language is elbow.  That's difficult to argue with; it is ribbon-like, deliciously measured and interfluent as it issues from beneath my trusty artline and it definitely guides your mouth through a small woodwind concerto of its finer accomplishments as you emit those silky syllables.  But it is not my personal favorite by a long shot.  I spent most of my formative years in a shitty mining town in outback Australia and my favorite word is fuck.  Fuck is no elocutionary supermodel; it emerges like a little bucking horse or miniature percussion grenade, all squared off and spiky.
The Color Out of Space by H.P Lovecraft  My relationship with Lovecraft's work is a love/hate/polyamorous thing, to be sure.  Though I've been reading him for fifteen years, his stuff neatly embodies almost everything about the fantasy genre that gets me stabby; the man-centred myopia, the negligible, risible characterization, rudimentary description, the pompous strains of pseudoscience, anoraky style- I could go on.  My lovely assistant is far more of an apologist on his account but this is precisely why I am forced to be strict with them both.  But on the other hand, Lovecraft was a nutty genius, all the more so for being gifted in ways I wonder if he fully understood; it's almost as though he sat down in glue and glitter and never knew the joy he gave to fellow pedestrians for some time afterwards.  
The Vampire in recent fiction  I once dreamt I had died.  It was mundane; I woke in a suspiciously quiet hospital ward, felt weird, walked home and tried to engage my associates.  My dog barked at me and my partner treated me as though I was some reprehensible impersonation.  Even the house seemed to reject me, all going on as though I had never existed, or at most, had been some brief aberration.  It was… lonely.  So far beyond motorcycle emptiness or simple abandonment that elaboration is entirely redundant.  But I am grateful for the experience because it had finally handed me the upyr; I could crack that stubborn metaphorical ribcage and wear that sucker like a pea coat.  A leaky, smelly pea coat.
Maximum Respect: Rangda  Brushing up on the Celtic mythos (as I've been doing lately) confronts us with the story of Cú Chulainn .  And a strange one it is, dragging the skull bag out of preRoman obscurity and pinning its contents like sticky fluffy dice to a suspiciously medieval chariot.  So many of the Irish oral traditions entrusted almost wholesale to monastic scribes have since been bowdlerized by the Victorians and systematically cleansed of the Celts' less romantic proclivities that you think of farthingales before arterial spray.  But make no mistake, they were all about the cranial bling and there's not enough vaseline in the world to soften up that little detail.
Neovelociraptors
On considering this picture I ask myself; is there anything stranger than a chicken?  For instance:
- Why wattles, in a sane world?
- When one rooster crows, does another's dreams die?
- Do they always recognize their own feet?
- When does confidence become arrogance, in a rooster?
An interview with Robert Scott of The Bats and The Clean  If New Zealand music was a can that had lost its label, The Bats and The Clean would lie like the very best kind of sardine, gleaming in close proximity as you peeled back the lid as a reward for your intrepidity.  Scott, as a member of both bands and Flying Nun veterano, has been purveying devil music to nigh-on two generations of impressionable young people, earning himself a handy degree of infamy as the two bands' cultish followings spanned the known world.  
An interview with Dr Jo Stanton, NZ Life Scientist  As promised, I've been out working my little fingers to the bone, cornering interesting members of the community, coring the truth from them in a complex medical procedure and stuffing the remains into an industrial incinerator, all in the name of science.  How germane then that my first real victim should have been an actual scientist. 
Maximum Respect: The Fall of Icarus, Bill Hammond  This has long been one of my favourite works by a New Zealand artist.  I know virtually nothing about its inspiration and execution and even less about Bill Hammond himself, other than his being a bit of a recluse (whatever that means) or at least not given to airing his figurative underwear in interview.  But when it comes to images, I've learned to trust and even prefer this ignorance; the only requirement I have of art is that it speaks for itself.  There's not much worse than coming to an unknown work loaded down with other peoples' praise and slag.
The Novice Blogger: a month behind the wheel and no fatalities.  Maybe I should take the handbrake off.  What's it like, blogging for the first time and trying to sell a book?  Pretty strange, actually.  Sit cross legged with me now while I pick the white chocolate drops off the ganache covering my one month on the internets cake.
The internet looms so large and loud in our estimation that I've always thought of it as noisy.  Once you're inside it falls strangely silent, sharing qualities with an abandoned picture theatre and some sort of particle accelerator that fires atoms through your person. 
Maximum Respect: Die Antwoord- werewolf techno  So, Die Antwoord.  Flipping off Lady Ga Ga after she offered a support spot on her last tour (no I can't name it, no I don't care) certainly landed them a few glistening tonnes of global eyeballs but some of us were onto them before that and feel a bit above all the hissy hoo ha.
I love the Antwoord unreasonably because they are the lost twin to the paint-huffing retard taking up far too much square footage in my psyche.  They feed it and caress it.  I love Yo-landi's boobies and Ninja's chatty penis.
Development Hell: designing your own book cover- my own experience
It's probably safe to assume that not everyone has subjected themselves to the process of designing and producing a book cover.  Some of you might be interested in having a little peep behind those images that eventually stare at you from atop that endless pile of words. 
Maximum Respect: The Triumph of Venus  I first saw this work on the cover of Reay Tannahill's classic book, Sex in History, (1992, required reading) and have adored it ever since.  While historically some commentators have attempted to frame the imagery within christian terms of reference, good luck with that because it's hard to imagine anything more pagan.  The six male figures are supposedly the half-dozen famous 'lovers' of the European tradition; Achilles, Tristan, Lancelot, Samson, Paris and Troilus, not really the first candidates that spring to mind when I'm compiling my own historical to do list.
Antichrist, Lars Von Trier: in defence of  Von Trier's incoming Nymphomaniac prompted me to think about his back catalogue and ponder his peculiar genius at some length (fair warning).  He provokes such lavish scorn from so many directions and I do know why; the public likes their weirdos humble, charming, unassuming, mannerly, and most of all, grateful.  Sort of like Tim Burton, that cheeky little scamp (dry heaves).  Personally, I love that Lars will bite virtually any hand that comes at him, flying the black flag with his sulky, spiky, depressive awkwardness, the unblinking refusal to moderate in a world oozing with reptilian accommodation.
Morbid Thoughts about Death Mortality has loomed large this year, walking up to us under a number of guises then ripping off the hood and blowing its smoke in our faces.  Death is a lot of things- expected, unexpected; affecting and indifferent.  Sometimes it's not about the demise, but more the life- what it was and what it could have been.  Death narrows the field, both for the living and the deceased; it removes another friend, lover, familial figure, whatever from the living spectrum, and, inversely, turns off the light on everything the dead once were, so that they exist only in the impressions they have made on us, no matter how resplendent and deserving.  That is so fucking bitter and almost impossible to come to terms with.  No one gets a statue any more.
On Appreciation: following & liking & why we will have none of that here  I was talking to someone the other day about this site and how I thought it was A- going well and B- far busier than I ever imagined it would be, especially at such an early stage.  "That's great..." replied the Person.  "So how many followers do you have now?"  Again, I was surprised; that A- they cared, and then B- that anyone would care.  Do you?  With the notion still rolling around my head I had a quick look over a few other blogs and found that at least half had a wall of faces depicting their loyal legions. 
My Grandfather died  A few days ago.  We were estranged; not on bad terms, just lost, more or less, to one other.  I have since found out that he had had a change of heart and intended to reconcile with the people he had withdrawn from, and it pains me greatly that we couldn't find the opportunity.  But it seems pointless to regret what was tolerable to us both for so long.  Life is both what we have done and did not do.
Carnivoriana: on consuming the flesh of our fellow animals  During the recent earthquakes in this country I was reminded of something that had often intrigued me; the human reaction to danger.  When the ground begins to ripple and everything around you starts to tremble as though with terror, I responded like the predator I am, standing still and taking stock instead of bolting into flight like a typical prey species.  Tigers detecting the whir of the camera trap shutter do exactly the same thing as the infra-red triggers.  In nature, it is a reasonably robust differential between consumer and consumed.
Bill the Intestinal Bear  Unfortunately this blankety little guy has already attracted the unwelcome attention of Felix, obsessive Toy Inspektor (First Class) and scourge of anything stuffed, tufted, furry or pliant.  It suffices to say that he will be living strictly above navel-level from now on.  Leigh in Greymouth (NZ) is the mind behind the beast and constructed him from recycled blanket and various vintage fabrics and findings.
His Hands, my Feet  After coming in from planting roses we were sitting in the darkness of the bedroom drinking tea and I noticed the cut on his hand.  And how much I loved all the details; sinuous turquoise veins, the plicated reciprocity of the lines and indentations, thickened skin, wear and tear, even the slightly dirty fingernails.  His hands are much softer than they look and far more picturesque than mine.  How homely are our extremities, and yet how utterly fundamental to everything we've ever been.  They are functionally mute but so horribly, indelicately indiscreet
Vintage Greenstone Pendant, circa 1970  Having bought this beautiful jade online yesterday under extremely serendipitous conditions, I was equally astonished when it turned up this morning, and overjoyed to say the least.  Greenstone (the typically reticent NZ epithet for this mineral) should always come to you, it's said, and I feel this was the case in this instance.  It's an estate piece from the carver's family and is apparently from an historic stone discovered by the late Jean Derry, one of New Zealand's foremost jade prospectors back in the day.  I believe it; it is manifestly a taonga (treasure), strongly coloured and fine-grained and possessed of that soft, sensuous lustre that so invites the hand. 

Strictly speaking, there is no jade to be found in New Zealand; it's virtually all nephrite, which is a blend of actinolite and tremolite or Ca2(Mg, Fe)5Si8O22(OH)2  (my face is as blank as yours right now). 
Christmas dinner at home with my Boo  Produce gloat!  Our first zucs of the season and a shitload of tiger prawns.  We didn't, you know, farm the prawns, but we did grow the summer garlic and these pink fir new potatoes.  We had some elderly and decidedly unimpressive examples lying around from last season and sowed them in early spring.  They're much nicer as a new spud than a main crop, yielding a very clean, waxy tuber with the famous creepy nodules very much in evidence.  We almost heard screams as we rooted them out of the ground.  Not that that would have stopped us.  They're pretty fucking delicious.
Modding another pair of Doc Martens  It's probably safe to assume I'm not the only person with a shitty pair of Docs choking on dust in some forgotten cranny.  I have several pairs of DMs in varying heights, colours and vintages including these old nanas here- Made in England 10-ups in eternal black. They've seen better days; haven't we all?  Because no one really wants to see my creepy hand-feet naked and nothing says fuck christmas like black leather in the middle of summer, voilà; still bid'nuss in the front..............
We LOVED This: best of the Blog, 2013 Firstly, a big wet kiss (some tongue, maybe an opportunistic arse-grab) to the 50 000 + visitors who've thrown caution to the wind and patronized this blog thus far.  


It's a slightly orgasmic feeling, going from a readership you can count on one hand to what a friend of mine would have called, in the spirit of recurved persiflage for which he was rightly feared, "a good door.  On a quiet night."  

2014 -

Words I've Never Really Known  I'm going to start this category as a subset of 'Selected Ravings'.  Blogging tips you off to just how many misappropriations you've been cheerfully trotting out to the sound of tumbleweed impunity, simply because no one else knows what they mean either.  So instead of nodding like you're forty and of course you know what didactic means because you're so comprehensively erudite, or gently weeping for the future of prose in private, let's stop being too fucking lazy to look them up and start with one that's been biting my nuts for a while.  Je ne sais pas it well enough to throw it squarely at some other pretentious arsehat in an argument.  For shame.
A Dog's Nose  Have you ever really considered a dog's nose?  Is it not beautiful in every possible way?  Shape, texture, colour, potential... look at the perfect reciprocity of the structure in the image to the right.  It is both Art Nouveau and Modernist, atavistic and futuristic, pointless flourish and brutally utilitarian appointment.  Ce n'est pas une le nez d'un chien.
Flipping Off Good Taste: Big Black Bedroom  Painting the bedroom black using the fullest resources of my zombie tradesman inventory.  Tired of the chromatic quotidian, we decided to go full teenage with four litres of boundless sable.  It was a good decision.  Our walls were chronically fucked up after 15 years of banging in nails/gouging the hell out of them with furniture; dramatic amendment was long overdue.  I might post another pic once everything's back up, but in the meantime I wanted to memorialize the transcendent cosmic eternity of these pristine black walls.  Well, sort of pristine.  Looks like there used to be a door back there at one stage, doesn't it?  
Plum 'Prune Stanley': we pick ours  But in breaking news, we have a runner bean intrusion.
Scarlet runners, to be precise.  Just thought I'd get in a produce gloat since these are our best beans ever.  Guess which one is my favourite.  Owing to shit weather/general laziness, I hadn't been up to the top garden for at least a week; last night I had a tremendously green dream dense with beans that just got larger and larger as I picked them and wouldn't stop growing on the vine.  Deciding that I was remote viewing my scarlet runners, we went up with a colander to visit the gigantic sagging teepee of leguminous abundance and could have filled a coal bucket, so yeah... some monsterism.
Blood  I realise this is a confronting image for some, but I was bleeding the other day and was struck by the result, the lush and saturate intensity of the scarlet against the powdery paper towel.

This is what I look like on the inside; this what we all look like, regardless of all other distinctions.
Words I've Never Known: Bagatelle  Come on now.  Look me right in the third eye and tell me you knew exactly, precisely what this word meant with not a shadow of a fucking doubt.  That it wasn't just something ye olde timey you'd heard kicking around and sort of nodded in response to but never really bothered with.  I've always heard it and thought one of two things (and sometimes both): small ribald purse or talkative breadstick.  The sound of it has always annoyed me faintly for some reason.  
Repotting Your Aloes  Let's view a few crime scene images.  
The victims in question here are a young Aloe broomii, to the left, which has been knocked over in a too-small pot at some stage and stuffed back in halfway.  This has caused it to send out a spiral of adventurous moisture-seeking roots which is a typical response to hardship by this tough species.
Please don't judge me.
Happy Birthday Blackthorn Orphans: Blogging for an entire year.  Shit.  Firstly, let me apologize for not assembling some gismantic audio-visual glittering spectacular like I sort of intended.  And I did intend to, because you, the reader, have exhibited incredible taste in continuing to patronize this blog and read my shit and stare and point.  :)  The Lovely R and I have been super-busy this month still working a house renovation; the solvents have been fucking with our mental processes (and not in a good way) and it's fair to say we haven't been all we could be.  But we should be fully back in the saddle this week. 
Kurt Cobain  I remember exactly where I was when I found out about Cobain's passing; walking past the Galaxy record shop in Christchurch with my partner on a sunny afternoon and seeing 'RIP Kurt' scrawled on their sandwich board.  We were surprised.  It's difficult to imagine now, amid all the nostalgia-soaked hindsight, that no one outside Kurt's circle and certainly no average fan on the street knew what the fuck was going on with him, aside from the fact that he'd taken up with Courtney Love, and that was possibly not the trajectory we would have chosen for ourselves.
Words I've Never Really Known: Asshat & Variations  Arsemonkey Arsenate Arseclown. As a result of our abiding love for our own species and general unfailing generosity of spirit, these three terms have been creeping into our personal lexicon for some time now without the benefit of precise or specific definition.  Therefore we will wander from the usual WINRK format in pursuit of clarity.  After a good afternoon's worth of argument we have ranked the trio thusly in order of heinousness, although they all enjoy parity with the standard and wellbelov'd arsehole, which we still treasure.
How I lost a lot of Weight. Why Dieting is Bullshit. Thoughts on Body Image & the Paleo Regime  
Part I  Reality, Identity and Judgement   Fat is a wonderful thing. It is a miraculous physical resource, an emblem and artefact of success, an architect of beauty, intelligence and wellbeing and a mighty aegis against hardship and ill-health. If it were not for our ability to store delicious fat, our species would undoubtedly be a grunting footnote on an evolutionary flow-chart to something that could.
Part II Goals and Methodology  Some people have flying dreams, but I used to dream that I was smaller.  That I was as I had been at 18; limber and blooming and voluptuous.  At 40 and peak fatness, that me always seemed lost and distant even though its fundamentals, as well as the potential for so much more, resided under my own skin.  It resides in all of us.  Youth is wasted on the young.  It is easy to despair for all we've relinquished if we don't remember everything we've become and accomplished in the meantime.
Part III Cake or Death: Paleo for skeptics, elimination, moderation and glorious, actual food.  Food.  Delicious, isn't it?  I used to love sucking down a big-arse block of chocolate or enormous wedge of Black Forest cake or three as much as the next blue-ribbon eater.  But I've stopped loving how it made me feel, look and live.  There are other things and better ways; I'll devote the final part of this endless monologue to my quest to eat like an adult, for general health and weight reduction.
On Reading Vogue the Other Day  This is an unformed, freeform set of observations.  They might not even be related.  Sorry about that.  I was reading Vogue for the first time in a couple of years the other day, sitting in a café and flipping through those lissom pages.  The cover was slickly reflective and the strong overhead light merged with the content into an almost physical impression. 
Planting Garlic at Home: riveting, I know  This is a totally unglamorous and  yawn-inducing post to anyone neither interested in gardening nor food, so philistines falling laxly into either category are excused and can go back to fondling their piercings (noticed how many fresh lip hoops there are lately?  Is there a 1994 wormhole out there?) and sending nudie selfies to randoms.  
Liked this Anti-Monetarist Agitprop by Toothfish  I was walking to the butcher's shop on saturday and was stopped in my tracks by this fucking fantastic election propaganda by Wellington collective Toothfish, hanging in the window of the local record store.  Awesome aesthetic tour de force and succinct scrape-up of all our bitter feelings toward National and their cannibalistic monetarist fuckery.  For those of you unfamiliar with New Zealand's, lol, politics, this is John Key, our odious multimillionaire PM and notional head of the National Party
Words I've Never Really Known  Discrete/discreet  As an incredibly verbose and often pretentious exploiter of the English language, I use and abuse a great many words on a daily basis, pounding them out with my monkeyfingers, emitting them as a gas and generally tossing them about with gay abandon.  Turns out I've been tossing discreet around with a little too much abandon, blithely employing it in the course of implying that something is contained, separate, isolated or distinctly of itself.  Turns out the actual grown-up word for that shit is discrete.  
Tiny Little Dinosaurs finally goes Live and How to Write a Childrens Book at Home  Don't let anybody tell you you can't write a children's book.  That it's some... dazzling bastion of creative and intellectual excellence ordinary mortals can only view obliquely due to the scintillating magnitude of its (runs out of words, lacks the will to go on but you get the idea).  If you can muster the intellect to read a kid's book out loud, you can probably put one together yourself- I promise.  I mean, it may not be very good but jesus, who cares?  Your audience is four years old and it's all over in ten minutes or less.  
Planting and Growing Potatoes at Home in New Zealand  Potatoes- simple, nutritious and unsightly; the Homo sapiens of the vegetable world. Not that I'd ever eat people (literally, lol, or unless I was hungry); who the fuck knows where they've been?  Luckily we have potatoes.  They don't contract oozing green sores 'backpacking' in Thailand and nor do their screams tip off the neighbours when you're cutting them into bite size pieces.  Growing potatoes at home is possibly the easiest thing you'll ever do in the average garden as far as bang for buck is concerned, especially if you ignore the complex apocryphal bullshit that's grown up around the practice.
A Kungrad Tent or Yurt Band  From what I can discern, the Kungrad (or Kungirat or Kohngirad, which are the most widely recognised English renderings of the name) are a somewhat amorphous nomadic/formerly nomadic group, strung out between the Khazaks and Mongols and sometimes identifying with these and other neighbouring tribes.  
The Light Between Oceans: set images from filming, Port Chalmers, NZ  We'll kick off coverage with some set shots. There's no Fassbender werqing the shit out of some vintage trou here, but as we were walking past anyway, we dropped in on the two Port locations before every barking arsehole in Dunedin was crawling all over them, as will probably happen tomorrow.  We heard some sort of production person lamenting the fact that they could only afford to work on the front of the buildings; luckily Port is a pretty comprehensive anachronism before a bunch of techs and (rather pissy) dressers get their mits on it.

2015 -

Rest in Peace, Beloved Moo  This is a sad post so if you're already bummed or dealing with bad shit today, you might want to give it a miss.

I was set to get the next book instalment ready when my mother discovered that our cat Moo had been struck by a car and killed instantly outside our house last night.  Needless to say, we are completely devastated.  So I'm postponing the resumption of normal posting for another week; I'll post the instalment in the next few days when I get my shit together.
Monday slash Tuesday: Morning Wood  Yes, it's the last month of summer and that means our thoughts turn to the acquisition of winter fuel.  Preferably gratis.  

Midway through any given January we become obsessive chattering wood monkeys, always looking looking looking for the free stuff.  To that end we have been depredating massive rounds of cypress and pinus felled by contractors in an extremely awkward place on public land before xmas.  We have to get it over a chainlink fence, up a 45º hill, down the road and into the front yard by wheelbarrow, where we hit it with a log splitter and sledgehammer and stack it, in the hope it will be dry enough for winter. 
Fish of the Otago Museum (deceased)  We reside beside the sea and enjoy taxidermy, and if our lives or at least our collective bent could be expressed in a single intersection, stuffed fish wouldn't be too bad a choice.  Piscine taxidermy has always intrigued; I am leery of penetrating its silvery mysteries but still the question remains- is that fish skin or are they just from-scratch reproductions?  

Blink once for yes.     
Today in Reactionary Clickwhoredom: Tourist Drivers in NZ  Stopping the tourist driver and confiscating the keys of their rental vehicle has been trending here in New Zealand of late, driven by a local media more than willing to conflate statistics and stoke xenophobia in their search for relevance.  You probably won't hear about it overseas because hobbits, but yes, you read that first bit right and you should know about it if you're thinking of heading here on a driving holiday.  
Kitchen Bitch: Tadka Dahl- Yellow Lentil Curry  Properly Dal Tadka,but we've always spoken of it the other way round in our extended family so that's the way it stays for this recipe.  I think this is a Punjabi dish originally and a favourite of my Tamil aunt, who was raised in Malaysia and now lives in Australia; she passed this version to me, which I cook in New Zealand.  It's a big old citizen of the world, lol.

The dal pea looks like this (right) in plant form, and yields these pretty orange split peas as pictured below.  From these the finished dish derives its mild earthy savour while copious turmeric furnishes that lovely ocherous hue.
Homosexuals are Possessed by Demons and will forever tarnish the spotless dignity of marriage which is a Blameless Institution just like Heterosexuality.  < Exhibit A: What that fartsnuffling nutsack wrote on that there placard.  The prosecution rests.

Since that was pretty much the entire conservative judicial pitch, I'm not 100% shocked to see gay marriage made legal in the US at this juncture.  Hearty congratulations to all my geys Stateside.  I get excited for the people who now have access to the legal entitlements they were denied for so long on such ludicrous fucking grounds, but just can't get excited about the institution per se, and say that as someone legally married for 20 years.  Because, at least notionally, it's a shitty institution originally designed to control our sexual conduct and publicly identify and punish dissenters.  
Why Catcalling is Fucked: by a Feminist Bitch who really Likes Cock in case you were wondering.  Everywhere I look recently there's been a tonne of online comment about public harassment of women by men.  Women expressing anger and the idea that it's getting worse, male commentators reacting both defensively and offensively, disparaging the complainants for being disingenuous and oversensitive, and feminism per se for encouraging women to reject the sentiments involved.  We're all heartless bitches, uppity sluts and emasculating contrarians; catcalling perpetrators are misunderstood heroes of romance and round and round it goes, devolving into trolling and #sloganeering and no one is the wiser or happier for any of it.  
Obsolete & Inexpensive: Photography for the Fiscally Challenged.  There are many people who are keen to explore photography beyond just snapping a picture around a table in some crappy restaurant and I have noticed that for someone new to the craft it can be complex, intimidating and full of confusing and conflicting information.  Plus possessing an opaque jargon and being seemingly magnetic to bizarrely aggressive old geezers online when you want to ask questions.  So I thought I'd attempt some advice on digital photography and equipment; how we've minimised the cost, the choices we've made and why, with results as illustrated on Kelly's blog.
My Dog is always with Me.   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...
The South Island of New Zealand through a windscreen & a Jaundiced Eye  Part I.  It was long past due to attend a birthday so I caught a ride with Mum to the West Coast of the South Island.  We live in Dunedin and were headed to Granity, just north of Westport, which meant this was going to be a round trip of about 1300 km, skidding along through Otago and the Canterbury Plains before turning northwest at Christchurch and crossing the Southern Alps through the Lewis Pass.  I overdrew the route in fat red photoshop for you.  I took 90% of these shots from a moving car so you'll have to excuse the technical failings.  There will be no selfies.

So much rosy-tinted inexactitude is written about New Zealand and that blag starts to get on the figural dick of someone living in the distinctly browner reality of this stony little sliver over time.  In the spirit of responsible redress I will attempt to call shit as I see it for the benefit of all.
The South Island of New Zealand through a Windscreen & a Jaundiced Eye Part II  As I've already intimated, the Southern Alps and the West Coast of the South Island are hardcore Nothofagus country i.e. smothered in old-growth, evergreen goth forest; hylophobes should look away now.  Personally I could stare into this endless heart-of-darkness human-free landscape forever, but someone else gets bored and demands some sort of forward progress.  So onward over the pass into Westland proper and our convergence with the fucking mighty Buller River. 
Compulsory Migrant Crisis Polemic slash talk is really fucking cheap when you're not drowning within sight of the coast of Greece.  Migration. Refugees. Influx thereof into western democracies precipitated by war and economic hardship etc.  Are you sick of hearing about it?  Too bad, bitches!  I don't live in Calais or southern Italy and I don't have to watch thousands of desperate strangers battling local police or washing up with nothing and nowhere else to go, except in the media.  But I think about it as though it is happening next door.  I'll admit to being more moved by the idea of of hundreds of thousands of women and girls having to choose between ISIS/Assad and destitute exile than I am by images of a single drowned child.  But if people need to see that to give a shit, whatever makes it happen.
The South Island of New Zealand through a Windscreen & a Jaundiced Eye Pt III  The cold inland had been oozing over the mountains and spilling out onto the coast the whole time we were in Granity, so I knew it was going to be icy on the way home.  We were on the road by 6am which is like another planet altogether as far as I'm concerned, but we needed to get back before sunset to avoid the frost that would possibly close the hill roads around Dunedin.
Monday slash Tuesday slash big bras  Bra shopping.  It's been a while but I seem to remember being happier to dash a jug of sulphuric acid into my own fucking eyes than have to find an entirely new brand of bra.  Turns out I was right.  I've been looking for a new one since bloody Kmart decided to rejig the cups on their $9 T-shirt jobs, the fucking bastards.  In honour of this shitty duty I commissioned, directed and shot a highly symbolic series of images around the item in question juxtaposing exploitative intersectional commentary with the fetishisation of ritualised interpersonal violence and gendered objects in the domestic context.  

Your gratitude is my oxygen. 
Vintage Fabric Prints: Paisley & Mid-Century from the Blackthorn collection
As a child of the Seventies I used to sit staring at the violent blue paisley and peacocks papering the walls of my great-grandmother's new summerhill stone flat and let my eyes go out of focus until the feeling of tilted dissociation became too intense for my small brain.  The sight of my dad, a deep russet ginger, in his goldenrod-yellow terry towelling top with laced-up neck is another enduring aesthetic memory of the period.  If you were there too, you know how deeply that shit soaked into our DNA.

I've tried to prod and coax and nag the reason why these perfectly normal, conservative people suddenly decided to dress both themselves and their houses like opiated nightmares but no one really seems to know.  Rejection of postwar austerity yeah yeah blah blah; all that academic rationale gets us no closer to the empirical truth.
Monday slash Tuesday slash $$$ slash WTF  According to Credit Suisse, New Zealand is the second wealthiest country in the world, after Switzerland.  And the Lovely R and I enjoy a rarified position as part of the top 10% of wealthy individuals currently encumbering the planet.  Are you as stunned as we are?

Don't be too impressed.  Let's put those revelations into perspective.

To make the top 50% in the world team, you have to be able to come up with... wait for it... about three grand.  In order to qualify as part of the top 10%, you need a net worth greater than $69 000 US.  No, they're not typos and that's where we're at as a species.​
Our Favourite Bits of the Book  in no particular order, because I'm taking this week off.  We're allowed thirteen because that is traditional.  I've linked each bit to the relevant chapter; sorry I can't be more specific but this platform doesn't allow hyperlinks.

The Lovely R's selections:

Scene with Edward and Helaine in the snow talking while tracking the intruders on her land.
Why? I don’t know, it's just very intense and reciprocal between them; their remorselessness, and at the same time their intimacy and Helaine's ability to deal with him.  Edward is showing her why everyone fears him, and she loves him for it, which is mad but true.

Opening scene with William ‘at this moment I would have to say no’.
Because it’s sexy.  He’s lying in a bunch of girls and he’s a dirty boy.  Guys hate guys like him.  Ha ha ha.  The bastard.
Neutral Lipsticks, Contouring and why you probably Shouldn't  This public service announcement is brought to you by the letters Oh honey, no.
If this applies to you, please consider it a lovingly-intended intervention.  

Take a good look to the right there.  Forget the tupperware titties and non-ironic nose jobs, just for a moment.  

What do they have in common?  

They all thought they looked dope in the bathroom.
43 slash Crusty Pearls   I really am that fucking old now.  It's weird, though- I don't feel old.  I feel maybe... twenty five.  Perhaps because we don't have children, we've always had the luxury of not giving a fuck about adulthood in any dreary tangible real-world sense and that makes a difference to one's chronological perception.  There's no brace of haughty spawn informing me of how decrepit and embarrassing I am.  You may be thinking it regularly, but I can't hear you.  

​Nor am I scrabbling on any greasy careerist downslope, battling perky interns etc.  The only real somatic difference between myself now and at twenty five is probably... a much better VO2 max, a more stable mental health situation, minus fifteen kilos and plus a medium set of crows' feet.  It could be a lot worse, and I am very grateful.

So I can't really speak for the shitty bits of getting older and I'm not one to sugarcoat any shit so please do take encouragement from that, especially if you're twenty and despairing.  Indulge me while I ladle some sloppy slow-cooked advice into your unwitting cranial crockery because it is honestly intended and I'm going to do it anyway.  ​

2016 -

Fat Beyoncé slash fictional diversity slash delicious chocolate apologia  Is Beyoncé fat?  By real-world, disinterested, comparative anatomy standards, no.  Thick yes, fat no.  If she were a horse, I would call her well-covered, which is a positive designation.  I'm well-covered too.  It's a nice place to be, and nothing that should concern anyone.
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Is Beyonce fat compared to the misogynistic media standard she seems determined to submit to with her bizarre überSpanxed faux thigh-gap post-factual presentations?  Fat as a fucking house, man.  Just ask Karl Lagerfeld.  Which just goes to prove how ludicrous and harmful those standards are.  And adds unfortunate weight to the Beyoncé-dumb-as-a-box-of-hair+delusional+narcissistic+slightly-deranged narrative.  
Hitler Micropenis slash Hard Truth about Cock Size  I'm just going to cut right to one of the most important issues facing our ailing society this week.  Actually, that's a complete lie and I'm going to bang on about the penis instead, since its been incessantly nudging my consciousness for a while now, sort of like Lassie.  Normally I'd swat that shit with a rolled up newspaper but I'm feeling generous.  Adolph Hitler Micropenis Revelation: Apparently Adolph was technically pathological in the junk department, presenting with micropenis + penile hypospadias which are fairly common congenital conditions.  
​No, I am not going to draw you a picture. 
Heishi Beads slash Dunedin student balcony collapse social Darwinism Dunedin in a university town.  A couple of weekends ago a bunch of first-years and associated organisms were injured when the wooden juliet balconies they were heinously overloading whilst watching a shitty band do a street show unsurprisingly collapsed onto people below.  That no one died is a minor fucking miracle.  A quick look at the scene will illustrate the excruciating degree of inevitability in play here, exacerbated by local police who decided they simply 'couldn't' (quote/end quote) do anything about the egregious overcrowding and general jejune fuckery that had unfolded.
Alexander McQueen: a personal retrospective  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.  ​
Poultry Show madness & fuck you Johnny Depp for making me write in defence of bloody Amber Heard.  And Courtney Love, goddammit.  Our heads are full of chickens and that is no coincidence, seeing that A: they tend to be anyway and B: we attended a local poultry show over the weekend in Northeast Valley. It's difficult to explain the appeal of rows and rows of freshly shampooed and variously jööjed fowl. 
Monday slash Tuesday slash Orlando  I'm only half a fag, but I've had to waste precious time inside the buzzer 'airlock' door of gay clubs until the drunk mouth breathers, waiting outside to hospitalize the first person who emerged, forgot what they were doing and drifted away.  I've been assaulted, verbally and physically, by bigots who knew they were acting with something like impunity because the local police and judiciary broadly shared their ideology.  
A fat bitch's guide to losing weight & maintaining health.  Part 1: I Dream of Normal- why are people so fucked up about themselves & why fat acceptance can go straight to hell.  True story.'Why diet and exercise don’t work’ shrieked the headline from a fairly respected local magazine as I stand at the supermarket checkout with a bunch of fruit and milk.  It's lunchtime, and I'm experiencing the still-novel sensation of being the least-fat person in the building, having lost around a third of my bodyweight a couple of years back.  It’s not that I’m anything approaching slender- thickset is my morphological middle name- it’s just that everyone around me is fucking enormous.  

​As a forty-something punter I've been party to the entire extraordinary arc of personal expansion afflicting Western society, but still, it's scarcely creditable, even when explicitly exemplified as it is today.  Every last one of the variously fat people nearby are unloading home brand fizzy drinks, shitty icecream, bags of biscuits and frozen yellow-encrusted shit from their trolleys onto the checkout conveyor, having completed the most strenuous part of their day- collecting that rubbish from the supermarket shelves and wheeling it to their cars.  
Today in WTF Guardian Fetishisation: 'Come with an open mind' What life is really like in New Zealand.'  An attempt to stop overseas mouthbreathers who believe this shit at the border with the maladjusted German Shepherd that is my detailed rebuttal.
Okay Guardian, enough with this shit.  I was born here, have lived elsewhere, have been all over the fucking world and am by now feeling tingly in the arsehole- not in a good way- with this obsessive fondling of a mythical NZ from afar.  Let's look at the latest runny verbal poos opinion item and examine its contents, both gaseous and solid.
Watched Basic Instinct (R calls it Budget Instinct but still ogles it with me) again last night.  I get this peculiar occasional thirst for it even though I consider it both baffling and theoretically repugnant.  Subjecting oneself to BI for the hundredth fucking time is like eating all three remaining pieces of monster lemon cheesecake, even though you already have the sugar shakes and they would have fit comfortably in the fridge as you well know.  Or going back for that last spot on the hot knives when you're dicing with laughter incontinence and only semi-aware of the thumbtack buried in your right foot.  It's not good.  But you keep doing it.
Because Satan rides a Flaming Mars Bar: all the Bad Shit no one ever told you about Losing Weight.  I drop the dime like it was burning my fingers.  What's it like to ditch the chunk as a middle aged person?  Do you know, because I bloody well didn't and a lot of what occurred has deviated somewhat from standard media assurances of instant sexual chocolate and general sylph-like infallibility.  No one warns you that your nipples will turn purple- that was a complete shocker.  Even though I'm just fucking with you about the nipple thing, the newly-shrunk, including myself, often wank on about the incredible benefits of being smaller whilst neglecting to elucidate the negative aspects of getting and staying there.
My White Arse braves the Cultural Appropriation Shitstorm.  Cultural appropriation, eh?  It may have been getting a shit tonne of attention lately but it was not invented by frothing Tumblrite fanatics and in my capacity as a socially-conscious person, subcultural adherent and admirer of Other Peoples Shit, I've been giving it thought for some twenty five years.  

As a coherent, drivable hypothesis, cultural appropriation has big- I suspect insoluble- problems centred around definition and intent. Fucking define cultural appropriation in a way that does not negate the concept right into the ground, for one thing.  
The Dentist Dodger's guide to Orthodontic Extrication: I go and get a Tooth Pulled- a Review  Recently, a toxic moron was elected to the American presidency by a herd of hooting munters who thought tearing up the social contract they rely upon for everything they cherish was the smartest thing they've done in years.  Given that he's more emblematic than germinal, meaning the whole fucking world is already scooting on its anus toward some sort of greasy combed-over oblivion, I thought I'd pop a matte brown cherry on that umber sundae and get my dodgy tooth ripped out.  Why the hell not?

It was a good call in a heaving main of terminally dumb shit, so I'd just like to take a moment to conceptually pat that ham-faced, doily-headed ball bag of a creature on his leaky old man arse and thank him for positively recontextualising my orthodontic pain.  If that's wrong, I don't want to be right.

2017

Mist slash Round Earth Realness  Autumn.  At some point in the dead of night the clocks lurched backward and the time on the phone display once more aligns with accepted reality.  It's not cold enough to light the fire but cool enough to fog your bedroom windows on occasion and prompt that seasonal wardrobe edit.  I love that my boiled wool and floor-length skirts come out like floppy seal skins, am relieved that I still fit into last year's shit and lament the dick-width holes in my most comfortable gardening cardigan.
​
Am I Even Liberal ?  Le Pen face-planted in France which is fantastic and perhaps signals that the world's trifling ho voting bloc is actually seeing the Trump novelty presidency for the defective carny trinket that it is.  But I've learned never to underestimate the global net volume of stupid and with all this greasy right wing tonnage (feels like squid guts, smells like Kardashian bum cleft) dumped on our unsuspecting doorsteps by various leagues of petulant morons, I'm starting to share their confusion re the political spectrum and where my fat arse sits on that lateral.  I mean, I am, in many ways, the right-wing/conservative nightmare; vindictive feminazi, refusenik uterus, fagfancier, potty mouth, pervert, indifferent to performative capitalist mores- the list goes on.  
Amanita + Grizzly Man: a hater's perspective  We heart Amanitas.  Apparently you can eat them safely in certain regions and some people are more affected by their toxicity than others, but we're not that hungry.  So if you see us skipping naked under a full moon and maybe shrieking and fighting ourselves, there's probably another explanation.

Speaking of wilderness, we watched Grizzly Man over the weekend, the Herzog piece about that execrable dickhead Timothy Treadwell who was apparently so determined to be eaten by bears that bears eventually lost their shit and ate him (and his marginally-smarter girlfriend).