Beaut Commute

A very sad and slightly damp story about an iPhone 3GS

 

So. It’s been a while. I have been… distracted. I have an iPhone. I do understand I could have waited until July when the iPhone4 came out but I just don’t think I can cope with the pressure of people thinking I am an early adopter.  

Instead, I gets myself an iPhone 3GS and it is lovely and shiny and white and like a little LED friend in my handbag. I have it a good four days before I manage to hiff it into my skinny flat white.  All that desk space and just one little cup of coffee on it.  The iPhone moved in a perfect arc and with some force hit slap bang in the middle of the full cup. I couldn’t have got it in if I aimed. I pulled it out and quickly wiped off what I could but you didn’t have to be a gadget loving early adopter to see that it had been damaged.

So. I googled ‘I threw my iphone in coffee’ and started scrolling through various helpful solutions.  Dunk it in turpentine. Um. No. Put it in the freezer. Ummmmm. No. Store it in rice for a couple of days. Oh alright then. That sounds fairly safe. So off I trotted to the work café and asked for a container of raw rice. I kept the phone in the rice for about a day but did check whether it would turn on every now and again (which you really are not supposed to do). And it did. Sort of. But it kept getting crankier and eventually it just stopped.

It was after I found a grain of basmati had wedged itself into the headphone jack that I finally admitted defeat. The nice young man at the Apple shop said, with just the faintest hint of derision, “this phone is f*#cked”.  Long story short I was able to purchase a ‘refurbished’ phone for $300.

So. That was the most expensive cup of coffee I have had recently – how bout you?

(Once over the trauma I shall be back with my favourite commute crushing apps.)

 

Tender

The Aubergine seduces. No other vegetable can offer flesh so soft, silken and tender. You don't so much chew an aubergine as let it dissolve on your tongue.I fell in love at first taste: baked till its flesh had almost melted, heavy with olive oil, musky with cinnamon and allspice, cumin and ginger, sweet with golden sultanas. 

The introduction to Nigel Slater's chapter on aubergines in Tender, page 39.

Nigel has been a friend and saviour to me for some time now. In times of sorrow, when others may turn to god, wine, self-help books or chocolate, I turn to Nigel. I have many of his books including Real Food, Appetite, Kitchen Diaries and now Tender. I don't even need to read them, I can just sit on the couch flicking through the images of dusky apples, fresh asparagus shoots, nutty roasted pumpkin, or plump raspberries. 

I turn to him for seasonal guidance and inspiration. I don't always follow the recipe but garner inspiration on how to put together ingredients. So a roast leg of lamb may be served with a cumin and chickpea mash rather than beans and spuds (which also have their place). 

My one, minor, gripe to date is the amount of meat and cream that he uses. But with Tender it would seem, Mr Slater has turned a corner. My favourite sentence so far is;

 "While still enjoying my crackling pork roasts and chargrilled lamb, my baked mackerel and crab salad, I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in 'greens' than it is in meat - both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that go beyond me and those for whom I cook."

After nearly two years spent with my Vegan love, vegetables have a new place in my heart. I consider meals around a vegetable rather than a piece of meat. A glossy purple aubergine will be seasoned with coriander seeds, cumin and baked in a fresh tomato sauce, kidney beans will go in with onion and garlic and some chilli for heat and be served with fresh coriander, an entrée may just be steamed asparagus shoots served with lemon and salt. My kitchen cupboards are never without tins of beans or chickpeas and packets of almonds or cashews.

Cookbooks hold escapism as well as a sense of hope and opportunity. Nigel Slater is on the money with understanding the whole sensory experience of cooking - handling the vegetables, the fragrant scent of cooking and the pleasure in seeing your loved ones eat. I think the reason why I turn to him when my life feels troubled is that I am reminded of the simplest joy in my life.

The lovely thing about taking a cookbook with you on the bus, train or tram is that you can plan the evening meal as you travel. What a nice way to transition out of your work day and into your evening. 

A2 and Ruth Quibell

Two recommendations for commuters in this post. First of all, newspapers. I get my news at the beginning of the day on the wireless (by which I mean radio and by radio I mean ABC National) and then by... wireless (by which I mean online news sites). But ach, I do like the crackle of the weekend paper. In fact, my weekend is often defined and paced by a weekend paper. And The Age does do a good, thick, satisfying Saturday paper. Sometimes I even save A2 (the arts and culture section) and Good Weekend magazine to read on the tram because the length of each story is just about tramride sized. 

So it was like getting extra lashings of ginger beer this weekend when I found the cover story of A2 was written by Ruth Quibell. Ruth is a sociologist who is interested in the pleasure that we get from the objects and 'things' in our lives. She is an intelligent, compelling and often touching writer. Her blog,Precious Things, focuses on why we are attached to objects not because of their status, but the stories behind them that make them important to us.

Guest Ross: An Oceanic Commute

It’s 07:30 and the Nautical Almanac says the tide turned a quarter of an hour ago, if I don’t catch the first of the ebb within 15 minutes my yacht will be stuck on the sand-bar that guards this estuary!

The seas are steep over the entrance, as the outgoing current meets the ocean swells, but I’m in the channel and it’s only a few minutes before the diesel’s switched off and the genoa is sheeted home.  The yacht heals over as it catches the gusty warm nor’wester that blows off Canterbury’s plains. “The wind on the Island” a poem by Naruda, is a sailors song to recite in the cockpit.

Wellington lies 165 sea miles to the north - a long way in a slow boat, 40 hours most likely. Not quite a commute in the normal sense, but I am going to work (managing a friends bookshop while he’s in the U.S.A.), and it’s how I like to travel, also my personal effects can come along for the voyage. With over 200 books on board it’s good to know I’ll not be lost for words.

Usually I have five or six titles on the go at any-time,  a bit like web-surfing before the web, some poems, a novel, bio’, history and a cookbook at least.

Set the self-steering, check the horizon and it’s time to refresh my memory of the various rocks and reefs that might sink an unwary sailor. The NZ Pilot flops open at the usual place, namely Cook Strait and I start to re-read the passages that warn mariners to take EXTREME CAUTION.

A fresh, chill, southerly blow should kick in behind this hot foehn wind, it’ll drive me through the Strait. At least I hope so, as the memories of bashing away the hours struggling into head-on northerly gales are not pleasant. One book I’ve got open is Reed’s “Treasury of Maori Folklore”, the pages on the Taniwha’s of Raukawa  (Cook Strait) are particularly interesting; one named Tuhirangi is apparently quite friendly. I’ll drink to him and Tangaroa and maybe the wind will be in my favour.

After the sea serpents some of James Boswell’s “London Journal” is good post meridian entertainment. He acquaints me with the bawdy sexual mores of 1760’s England. 2010 seems quite tame and discrete in comparison. But thank God (really Fleming) for penicillin!

So much to read so little time, after all there’s only 36 hours to go.

Captain Blacksmith is a husband, father, sailor, antiquarian book dealer and water colourist.

Wolf Hall

 “I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person."

Thomas Cromwell, son of a brutal blacksmith in England in the 1500s, through a lot of hard yakka manages to position himself as the right hand man firstly of Cardinal Worsley and then of the infamous King Henry VIII.

He is the main character of Hilary Mantel’s Booker winning Wolf Hall, and he is a cleverly chosen vehicle to provide a perspective of what went on behind the scenes during a period of this very interesting reign.

Thanks to the television series, The Tudors and historical novelists such as Philippa Gregory, a wider audience is perhaps now more familiar with the story of Henry VIII and Mantel’s book seems to assume its reader will have some understanding (or will resort to Wiki to get an overview). This means the pace and weight of the story can be more substantial than having to explain every character or event.

Cromwell’s position means that he is close to the King and Anne Boleyn and often acts as a messenger between the two. I like Wolf Hall because it’s like King Lear – it shows how fascinating and orchestrated politics is. Love, religion, family are smokescreens – this is really a story of strategy, risk and calculation.

Like The Lacuna, Wolf Hall is a big book, the sort you might think twice about lugging onto a tram. However, lug it people do because in the last month I have seen at least three other people reading it on Public Transport.  I imagine, like I did, they find it so gripping that leaving the house without it is not an option.

Guest Candy: Bitchin commute

Beaut's guest Candy La Coque (Angela Meyer) is a mother, dancer, artist, sailor and blogger - read her adventures as she sails halfway round the world here. 

As a newish mama, I think it would be fair to say my commute involves walking down the hallway to the lounge, from the laundry to the washing line and on a good day from the front door to the letter box. Gone are the days of long bus and train journeys when I could get stuck into a book or listen to an album.

With only three and a half minutes at my disposal (I have small feet and a long hall) I have loaded my iPod with the genius that is the 80’s pop song. This little gem of synthesized goodness fits perfectly into these commute times.

My love of 80’s music has been long, it has been there since the 80s.

It was only natural then that in  2005 a friend and I decided that it was time to mix Dirty Dancing meets Flashdancemeets Footloose meets The Solid Gold Dancers meets you in your lounge when you were 11 and so The Real Hot Bitches was born. We love dance routines, have a real fondness for legwarmers and sweat bands, Lycra G Strings, and have no training as dancers but what we lack in technique, boy do we make up for in PASSION!

Fast forward five years and not only do I have a bitchin soundtrack to my life,  I have kickarse routines to bust out at playgroup. Each Saturday I commute to Island Bay Surf Club ( No 1 bus)  to join the other bitches in a homage to all things 80’s.

On my play list are these hit songs. They make putting the washing out fun.

Poison by Alice Cooper. The is my all time favorite routine.  It speaks to me.  Think snakes, arse slapping and death by  poison. We first learnt this routine in the Palmerston North Deerstalkers Hall.

Edge of 17 by Stevie Nicks, a beautiful song about a cougar stalking a her prey. It involves flapping of wings, pretending to walk down stairs, a canon ( that is a dance term) and it is quite long so it is a good work out.

Shot Through the Heart by Bon Jovi.  We broke the world record for the largest synchronized dance routine dancing to this.

Pour some Sugar by Def Leopard.  A classic. One of the first routines we ever did.   Great chorus to sing along too.

Doves Cry by Prince.  How satisfied is your mother eh?

Push it by Salt ‘n’ Pepa. The day we first learnt this, David Lange died. We also performed if for the Lithuanian president. This is where the bitches get political.

So if this sounds like you check out www.real-hot-bitches.co.nz  for more info and as luck would have it there is aMelbourne chapter.

Our next hit show The Fierceness opens at Downstage in Wellington in August.

Bitch out

Candy xx

 

Guest Imogen: Staff Benda Bilili - Tres Tres Fort

I live in deepest Africa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. My adopted home Goma is a chaotic dusty town on the shores of the magnificent sparkling Lake Kivu, half buried in lava and teeming with life and noise. Goma is in the troubled eastern Congo, but its more a Wild West kind of town. Due to a variety of contributing factors, not least the lack of a functioning State, Goma does without a few things that we take for granted; things like a reliable water and electricity supply, telephones, a postal system, metal roads, police and public transport. Just to name a few.   

Most locals get around on foot. Only if they are very well off do they take a moto (motorbike taxi). Goma also has a special kind of commuter indigenous to our town – the chukudu driver. Chukudus are huge scooters made from wood. They are used to transport heavy goods to the market, to the port and around town and they can carry up to 500kgs – that’s half a ton!  

 

I don’t really commute as such. I get around town on foot (only in some areas and only during daylight hours), by moto or by large white NGO 4x4. My office is really close to my house and I usually walk which takes about five minutes. Five minutes of scrabbling over lava, inhaling dust, shaking kids hands, dodging motos, and saying ‘bonjour’. Past the palatial grounds of the International Red Cross, and the men sitting across from their gates each morning hoping to earn a few francs as a day worker. Past the dilapidated, weed- eaten building that houses Goma’s High Court. Past the little roadside shacks selling mobile phone cards, the mamas with babies on their backs and huge tubs of pineapples balanced on their heads, the man who sits under a pock-holed umbrella repairing shoes, and the soldiers sitting guard outside the home of the Army General. Past all that I find the office of the international NGO where I work, and the gates are opened to me by the smiling guards. ‘Jambo mama’ they say. Nope, not much room for books, podcasts or crosswords on my commute.  

But if I were able to take the bus or tram or train to work in Congo, I would be listening to the amazing Congolese band, Staff Benda Bilili. Staff Benda Bilili are a group of paraplegic musicians living on the streets of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. This is how they are described on the back of their album Trés Trés Fort: "Four senior singer/guitarists on makeshift wheelchairs are supported by a young, all-acoustic rhythm section and a 17-year old prodigy performing infectious guitar-like solos on a one-string electric lute he designed and built himself out of a tin can."

‘Benda Bilili’ means ‘look beyond appearances’. Their music is at once melancholic, funky and playful. Their songs talk about Congolese life – being a street kid, the need to vaccinate your kids against polio, and the importance of family and African pride. My favourite song is called ‘Tonkara’ (Cardboard): 

I once slept on cardboard

Good luck hit me, I bought myself a mattress

It can happen to you, to him, to them

A man is never finished

Chance can hit you without warning

It’s never too late in life

Someday I’ll make it too 

Staff Benda Bilili on My Space

Imogen Prickett is an aid worker, communicator, writer, blogger & photographer living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

The Lacuna

So I've been umming and ahhing about recommending this book for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is quite a large tome and so not so easy to lug around with you on public transport. Secondly, I LOVED Barbara Kingsolver's previous books The Poisonwood Bible and Prodigal Summer. A lot. Read them both twice. And for a while I wasn't sure whether I LOVED this book.

 

But.

 

It's stayed with me you see. Residual wafts of characters and colours and thoughts keep coming back. I think I do love this book but not the way you might have loved Molly Ringwald. More the way that you realised you actually loved Ally Sheedy.  

 

Kingsolver is such a master of narrative style that all her books are interesting to read simply to see what devices she has chosen. In The Lacuna the story is told through letters and diary entries (nothing new there) but also newspaper stories and reviews.

 

The latter two I found a fascinating method of storytelling because an issue I am very interested in which is whether there can be more 'truth' in 'fiction'. By this I mean whether the constraints of newspaper requirements (sell papers, make it snappy and sensational) can mean the real emotion and honest motivations behind an event is lost.

 

For example, in 1936, New Zealand journalist Robin Hyde wrote her first novel, Passport to Hell which related incidents in the life of a James Douglas Stark (Starkie), a returned WWI veteran. Two years later the sequel, Nor the years Condemn, was published. This time Hyde had written a fictional account of Starkie's life in the post-war boom and bust environment of NZ.

 

NTYC, to me, provides the emotion behind Starkie's actions and I think, more accurately portrays to me the frustrations and challenges that these men experienced. Certainly, I engage much more with Hyde's story than carefully (positively) worded newspaper articles of the time. The truth of how people 'felt' at this time was better conveyed by a made-up story.

 

I think I would have liked the opportunity to have had a glass of red and a talk to Hyde about truth. She once said:

"Shakespeare kept saying, ‘to thine own self be true’ … I began to wonder, which self? True to which self … I was always in bad trouble with the truth. Not so much knowing what it is, as knowing which it is. My truths had second selves, split personalities, double faces… .”

 

Anyhoo. Back to The Lacuna. The story is told by Harrison Shepherd, a writer cum cook for Mexican surrealists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. His diaries and notebooks document the relationship between the painters and exiled Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalya. After Trotsky's assassination Shepherd returns to his native America and writes books with the help of his able stenographer.  For more about the plot and a great review I would recommend this from the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

Okay. Crikey. That's a long post. And I'm currently reading Wolf Hall, another big book that will also deserve a rave. Interesting that three books mentioned in this post have fascinating male narrators written by women….

 

Birdman goes wild

 

The last few days I have driven to work. I feel guilty but I also do love to feel the hum of an engine under me. Even if it is a Nissan Pulsar.

Anyway, this does mean I listen to breakfast radio. Earlier I said that if I could, I would marry The New Yorker. I stay true to that vow, but it's entirely possible I'd have a steamy affair with ABC National Radio.

 

I was a passionate listener of Radio New Zealand National while living in Aotearoa. In fact I recall a housemate in New Zealand once saying to me 'I heard two male voices coming from your room this morning - do you have something to tell me?". To which I replied "Uh huh. It was Geoff Robinson and Sean Plunket". (Radio NZ 'Morning Report' presenters. They were on my radio. Not my bed)". (Funny story about Sean Plunket, he once announced his newly discovered Italian ancestry in his work office saying something like, 'Who'd thought! I'm a Count!" to which some smart alec replied "Sure there's an 'o' in that?").

 

So yes, I love Breakfast with Fran Kelly, the AM team and the wonderfully witty Warwick Hadfield. But my favourite morning radio is BIRDMAN GOES WILD on RRR at 8.15am Thursday mornings.

 

Birdman, Sean Dooley, is a comedian, writer and a twitcher. What a bloody perfect mix.  This week he was talking about his close encounter with a Cassowary, a beautiful, strange and frightening bird. His storytelling is funny and evocative and a welcome relief when you are tackling the Eastern Freeway of a Thursday morn.

 

Those in Melbourne can listen to "Birdman Goes Wild" with Sean Dooley on 102.7 FM. Others can download some of the excellent RRR podcasts, including the breakfast shows with Birdman, here.

 

Zines

 

Before we go any further there's something you should know. I am not cool. I love The Bill and the ABC and can't use predictive text.

So, I was a fish out of water when I stumbled into a zine scene recently. In fact I was a fish on a bicycle who found themselves on 'So you think you can dance'. However, the beauty of being over thirty is being able to fiercely muster up confidence and remind yourself you really, genuinely, honestly don't care what a twenty year old in a neon hoodie thinks of you. At least not much.

Soon enough I lost my angst and instead lost myself in these remarkable little things.

I don't say 'little' patronisingly… maybe I do. I mean little in the sense of being cute. I like miniature things. I likeSlinkachu and Gulliver's travels. And zines are like the cute nerdy baby of magazine that mated with a graphic novel. 

They are perfect fodder for commuters because they are little, cheap (prices range from .50c to $7) and once you are done you can leave them on the train for someone else to enjoy.

You gotta pick the zines that suit you. They are often used to push political agendas which may or may not interest you. For me, I went for the more humorous and whimsical.

Here are a couple of the little literary morsels I picked up:

 

Epitaph for my heart. Sweet musings and instructions for those who struggle socially. From someone who knows. 

 

 Dealing with post human abilities: a brilliant satire on DHS pamphlets for people who 'suffer from conditions such as self propelled flight.

Melburnians can pick up enough zines to sate them from Sticky.

The Wellington Public Library has a collection of 600 zines.

More on Sydney zines here. 

And there's a great NZ blog on Zines.

Auckland based Cherry Bomb comics.