Bubble n Squeak

For a moment I toyed with calling this post 'Rain and Bird shit' as a way of registering my irritation with some of the comments over at The Orwell Prize blog. In particular I'm talking about those comments which express dismay that things Political didn't occupy Orwell's thoughts all the time. On this point, that many of the comments take the liberty of referring to Orwell by his birth name, Eric Blair, rather than his pen name, strikes me as especially ironic. What after all are the expectations of the personal diaries of a man with whom they presume such familiarity? It seems to me that there's a mordant fear of banality, in the sense of something trite or trivial, evident in the comments. It's as if the commenters are convinced that if they betray any interest in someone interested in the change of seasons or the ripening of various fruits and crops or, yes, the colour of the local birds' shit, then that will somehow reflect upon them in such a way that is incommensurate with their sense of themselves as people who only think Important Thoughts.

One can only hope, on their behalf, that Orwell's perspective on the outbreak of WWII will prove to be a suitably interesting contrast to all that terrible banality. Hmmm, isn't that an old Chinese curse?: 'May you live in interesting times'.

I suppose my irritation with these comments arises from the fact that I have a less fractious relationship with banality. Meaghan Morris reminds us that banality also means 'commonplace'; it is the ordinary and everyday aspects of life that many humans have in common. When banality is understood as a 'common place', then it is a place to arrive at rather than flee from. This is much of what cultural studies is concerned with. So, on that note, I will say that it's also getting warmer here in Brisbane as Spring is officially but a couple of days away, and the shit that concerns me most right now is that of fruit bats: why do they have to splash it all over the side of house?

***

I eventually decided upon 'Bubble n Squeak' because, although you wouldn't know from that diatribe above, this was planned as a kind of bits and pieces post. I have a few things to mention that probably warrant dedicated posts, but I don't really have the stamina to write all the posts I want to, or think I should be writing, right now. As well, I can't resist a culinary pun when there is one to be had.

So, I'm sitting here, with a glass of red wine in hand--my first since my sister scared me with all her talk of fatty liver disease--and munching on vitaweats with hummus bi tahina and roast capsicum, trying to figure out how to make my thoughts concise and orderly.

Even as I say that, I have to go off on a tangent immediately to tell you that I did have a glass or two of white wine last Friday when I went over to Clare's new house-sit. There, I was commandeered as a pillow by the cat of the house. All was going very well until even this cat-deprived cat lover had to go to the bathroom and so disrupt said cat's slumber. Who needs LOLCats to interpret the language of cats? It was a very clear message: 'Pillow. Ur doin' it wrong'.

***

I wrote some notes on the way home, on the back of a template for a mask I picked up from the kids section of the 'Picasso and His Collection' exhibition, to remind myself of the things I wanted to tell you. Let me go and get it.

***

I pilfered the 'Make A Mask' template to give to my niece next time I see her. I did the same with the Kids' Activity book from the Andy Warhol exhibition that GoMA hosted earlier this year. She had a fun time with that. Now, whenever she says something is boring, I ask her 'What did Andy Warhol say?' She's never terribly impressed by that come back.

These exhibitions, along with the Meaghan Morris lecture I linked to above, are definitely events I think I should have blogged about, not here so much as over at Sarsaparilla. I haven't posted over there for a while, and I do feel some responsibility to represent Brisbane and Queensland since I'm the only contributor from these parts.

Anyway, just briefly, I enjoyed both exhibitions. I liked the way the Picasso exhibition placed the artist so firmly in the context of his influences, making the point that he was able to make something new because he was an avid collector and admirer of other artists' works. Like writers who read, he was an artist who was better because was literate in his chosen medium.

Overall, I think the Andy Warhol exhibition was better as an exhibition. Perhaps that's due in part to Warhol's own marketing savvy (certainly the gift shop offered a better range of merchandise). It felt far more dynamic than 'Picasso and his Collection'. I'll make special mention of the time-line in the Picasso exhibition, which was just so wordy and cumbersome, a blockade in the middle of the exhibition. I decided I could read about Picasso's life in the exhibition's catalogue that I would inevitably purchase.

I suppose one could argue that the equivalent of the time-line in the Warhol exhibition was the cabinets jammed with the ephemera of Warhol's shoe-boxes, but perhaps because it was ephemera and not an historical time-line, I was happy to take a far more aleatory approach to the material.

It was good to see some works by Henri Matisse that I hadn't before. What colours!

***

Looking at my notes, I seem to have been a bit crankier on the way home than I am now. I've noted that while looking at the exhibition there were a couple of times when I hung back to let a few voluble 'experts' move ahead of me. I like silence when contemplating pictures, or rather I like the head space to think things through. A ridiculous expectation to have in a public art gallery, I know.

I did have to laugh when one young boy was acting as a guide to some younger children, pointing out the various anatomical features in Picasso's more abstract works so they could make sense of the figures.

***

On the way home, I walked across the Victoria Bridge and saw the preparations for the Riverfire fireworks tonight. There were people waiting on the bridge, up to 2 hours before the fireworks began. That's committment.

On the bridge, there were tubes filled with those plastic bread bag seals, accompanied by signs that said some extraordinary number of them had been fished from the river. I've forgotten the number. The statistic that stuck in my head was the one that said if they were stacked on top of one another the line would extend 1km.

It's Been Three Years Since My First Post...

Chicken Tonight and Mushrooms for the Next Two Days

I'm waiting for my dinner to cook. It's chicken, Super Tasty Spanish Roast Chicken, in fact. Since it's a Jamie Oliver recipe from Jamie's Dinners, you all probably have the recipe so don't need me to replicate it here.

I'm also making some Real Mushroom Soup from the same recipe book, although my substitutions have rendered it Swiss Brown Mushroom Soup, rather than the 'authentic' wild varieties gathered in the English or Italian countryside.

In combination, both of these will be lunch and dinner over the next two or three days. I took a mobile phone photo of the chicken before it went into the oven, dotted with chorizo and stuffed up the nether regions with a couple of hot lemons and some parsley stalks, but I haven't taken the time to transfer the images to my laptop just yet.

What I do have on my laptop right now are some photos of another meal that I prepared quite some time ago. I only discovered these photos fairly recently; I'd completely forgotten about them, but it's clear that I had intended to blog the recipe since the photos are of the step-by-step variety. Such attention on my part to documenting the preparation process is fortuitous because just as I managed to forget about the photos, I also forgot the origins of the recipe I prepared and recorded so diligently.

So, here's a photo-recipe for salad. Coincidentally, it also has chicken and mushrooms as feature ingredients:

Dried wood ear mushrooms, reconstituted. I don't think that many are actually required.

Sliced spring onions. Looks like one, maybe two. Whaddya reckon?

Peeled Lebanese cucumber. Fluorescent glow optional.

Here I seem to have sliced the mushrooms and added some chopped coriander.

That looks like some julienned celery on the left. I do know that chicken on the right is poached thigh, because that's what I tend to buy. The recipe probably asked for breast meat.

I'm guessing: soy sauce, maybe fish sauce, peanut oil, a dash of sesame oil, dried chilli? It's the kind of thing you can probably make up.

Toss it all about. Fresh, crispy, tasty.

Take Two

For my own amusement, I decided to have another go at making my Manga self. This time I discovered another nose option that I hadn't noticed before, and another hair option as well that allowed me to account for its curl/general messiness and my habit of tucking my hair behind my ears.


I think this one is a bit more reflective of the cultural studies chick in me, but my head still isn't that big in proportion to my body. I do have red lounge chairs at home, but they're a bit more 70s retro in their style than this stuffed-armchair look. Some of that padding should be transferred to me, really.

Meanwhile as we're sitting comfortably in cultural studies mode (we were, weren't we?), I finally finished watching Boys from the Blackstuff, the British social-realist drama from 1982, written by Alan Bleasdale, and constantly cited in academic writing on television as the epitome of television at its most critical of government policy.

It's difficult to discuss this mini-series on its own merits 26 years after it was first broadcast. As viewers we have become far more used to advanced production technologies, even in works of social realism. Boys from the Blackstuff shows its age, not least because Julie Walters was, for me, virtually unrecognisable as Angie Todd, but also because the Play for Today model is very much in evidence; each installment could feasibly stand alone and at times the dialogue is so labored and didactic that it does seem better suited to the realm of the theatre.

Still, having expressed these reservations, it would be impossible to deny that at the time of its release, two years after the Brixton Uprisings, amidst rates of unemployment in Britain greater than those of the 1930s Depression, Boys from the Blackstuff would have been incredibly resonant with the greater British public. Each of the characters is metonymic of the experiences of the working classes under Thatcher's Tory government. There's George who epitomises the old union leader, committed to improving the lot of manual labourers and their families. He is dying. There's Chrissie, who used to be positive in the most dire of circumstances, but who has been ground down by unrelenting unemployment and poverty, and the strain it has put on his marriage.

The plight of Yosser Hughes is the most confronting, even while it's here that Bleasdale's script is at its most self-conscious. This character put me in mind of R W Connell's description in the first edition of Masculinities of some young men he interviewed who exhibited a 'tense, freaky facade'. I've always thought that the most perfect articulation of some young men I've encountered, those who you're never quite sure what their next move will be, except to say that it could easily be violent and so a direct threat to your personal safety.

Bleasdale makes a clear connection between the social effects of Thatcher's policies and the deterioration of the mental well-being of Yosser. His catchphrase is 'Gis a job' and he repeats it over and over while using his physical presence to intimidate his target. It's frightening. His friends begin to avoid him and his children are taken from him after his wife leaves him. Completely isolated from his peers and society, he returns home to his mother. He is a child again, his deteriorated mental state precludes any hope he will be fit for any kind of work again.

Overall, I do think it was important for me to see Boys from the Blackstuff, for many reasons related to appreciating television as a distinct medium. I'd be interested to know if anyone reading this managed to see this mini-series when it was originally broadcast, either here in Australia, or the UK, especially. Did it seem like significant television at the time to you?

If I Were A Manga Chick

Heads up to Sophie for directing me to this site where I created my Manga self.


Of course the resemblance is superficial, but I do often wear pink and can frequently be found in the kitchen (at parties and otherwise).

I did try and achieve some veracity by giving myself some crow's feet, but the glasses I added have effectively hidden them. Although if that happens in real life, then I do look this good. Except for my hair. And my head is not that big in proportion to my body. And that mole should be a bit more centred on my cheek and it would probably have a hair growing out of it, if I hadn't gotten around to plucking it lately. Heh.