Use your words people

I’m a sucker for a good cooking show. I’ve been all over India with Rick Stein searching for the perfect curry, floated on the Mekong with Luke Nguyen, surfed the Menu, ridden with Hairy Bikers and meandered through cottage gardens and woodlands with two fat ladies. 

Lately I have been inside the instant restaurants, food truck and kitchen HQ  of the latest My Kitchen Rules contestants with their flirty Nana flutters, witchy Cheshire grins, shoulder charging for the ‘best crate' and general self promotion that defies any notions of humility. I get that it’s all cast and cut for maximum dramatic impact, but that’s not why I watch. I love seeing the results of a meal cooked under pressure, or the décor selected for a pop up dining experience.

So while I am bemoaning the focus on poor character traits, what gets up my nose more than the assumed aromas from the dishes, is the hackneyed phrases that have become part of the genre. I know every industry has its jargon, but I swear that if I have to hear any more of the following I will stuff my ears with olives - only those macerated in the finest garlic and olive oil of course.

Take it up a notch: I know that means do it better than before – deconstruct that lemon meringue pie. Crumble the  buttery shortbread into a million tiny pieces like it has been living at the bottom of the kids school bag for a week -we call this edible sand-, put a dollop of lemon curd in a test tube and lay it on top, and add yellow stained rice paper cut outs of three meringues on the side. 

What I should really read into these words  is that if I continue to sit on that couch watching shows like this and then experimenting with the recipes, those jeans I fitted into last year will never get past my crotch .

Take it to the next level. I’m inclined to think that this really describes the act of walking up the stairs to take the dishes to the judge’s table – or is it just another way to say take it up a notch. 

Again, I know I’m supposed to believe that as the competition ramps up everyone will do better and better starting with a tin of baked beans on toast (cheating because the contestant didn’t grow and process the beans and didn’t make their own bread) and culminating with a Heston like, larger than life, desert sculpture of beans made of honey puffs dipped in strawberry coulis sitting on two gigantic slices of marshmallow bread dusted with toasted coconut. 

The hero of the dish.  I can’t see how the pig’s tongue in this dish gets to be a hero. It can’t do deeds of great strength- unless it has some magical properties I am unaware of; is not a crusty roll with meat and cheese (sic the American hero sandwich), nor is it the offspring of a Greek god. 

It’s a bloody pig’s tongue, and it’s on a plate!

You’ve nailed it. Oh no I gasp as the judges bite into the dish . I really hope those little silver sparkles are the dragees that I put on the top of my cupcakes not the brads I buy from the local Bunnings.

The beef needs to shine. So, here is where my imagination just loses it. Does that actually mean that if I had gone out in to the paddock before this beast became steak I would have seen it emitting a radiant glow like Homer Simpson’s fluorescent fish? And, if so, is shining beef better than matte fish, or do I care?

It has to be perfect. If one more contestant says that and then delivers a plate of beige mash topped with bleating lamb followed by a flood of tears for letting down their team mate I swear I will take all my toothpicks and pin my fingers to the floor so I can’t use the remote control to turn on this drivel any more!

And finally aliments – you know: How many aliments can I get on the plate? All the aliments have to shine.

Pa…lease!  

If I ever get polled about this what will I say?

Use your words people. Use your words.

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Art Work of the Week

 Just a little cupcake I nailed recently

 

Of Tim and God

It’s been a Tim Winton sort of week -the man of the muted Hawaiian tea shirt, sand swept shorts and tied back pony tail-  master of the Australian language and psychic of the landscape.

'For while Perth had bulldozed its past and burried its doubts in bluster, Fremantle nursed its grievances and scratched its arse'

Tim is God- literally- omnipresent at the moment.

He’s been on my bedside table; on telly; in The Big Issue; on the stage; in my weekend magazine; across the screen; and talking to a middle aged,  middle class melange at the ANU last week where the theatre booked out and he was beamed like Scotty into the adjoining spaces.  

Someone asks him if he keeps notes or a diary and he responds that he ‘sort of does’. I’ve seen what a writer’s notes look like: scraps of paper torn off the ends of monthly bills and junk mail fliers with snippets of observations, crumpled and crinkled and poking between brick stacks of newspapers and sniffed and thumbed magazines – a mind map in chaos.

I’ve had Eyrie since the day it was released, but I have been resisting the temptation to open the pages as I want the ‘time to be right” – the time when I can put everything else aside and just read from cover to cover, immersed again in a world drawn by a master craftsman with his pencil and paper manuscript.  

The Turning is playing at the Nishi building with it’s challenge to completeness – fitting given Tim’s reply that he doesn’t need a story to have a nicely tied ending. Here the scaffolding is the building, the timber cut-offs the substance, is it coming or going or being?

The Western Australian government site says that: Travelling to Wittenoom presents a public health risk from exposure to asbestos fibres which may result in contracting a fatal disease, such as mesothelioma, asbestosis or lung cancer.  But the ghost town is in the news again with proposed changes to legislation to allow asbestos related disease sufferers  to make a second compensation claim on their illness. And I’m back to Dirt Music – the words and the music, its verandah wines and the bone in the bed. 

And I wonder is that is Lucky Oceans playing with his back to the camera framed in a doorway sliding up and down the frets?

Maybe it’s the vastness of the landscape, the fury of the sea, the remoteness  and ruggedness, the sense of coming into being, a place where escape, forgottenness and isolation is still possible, that produces the likes of Tim Winton, Archie Weller, The Pigram Brothers, Robert Drewe, the Waifs.  

My granddaughter came back from One Direction gasping for air – Tim’s writing does it for me!

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Art work of the Week

The Nishi Building New Acton

     

Media Blockout

I have torn out my fingernails, stapled my eyelids together and stuffed my ears with peanuts, but I can’t keep the static out. I will be so pleased that next week will bring an end to the polling, the speculation, and the endless dissections; if not to the entertainment that will arrive if indeed Tony is let loose and we are ricochet back in time.

Now everyone knows I’m not averse to time travel and that a good TARDIS  could pop up in my front garden anytime it likes – provided of course that it is still being piloted by David Tennant and has Capt’n Jack Harkness on board. I keep looking for the rift in time to appear on my wall, but have to really concede that the crack in the lounge room really means I have to get someone in to look at a mundane problem that will cost me a motza..........................  I’m off the track again.

Oh yes….Back to the Future….but alas, I fear it will be Back to the Past, and I just never looked good in shoulder pads and frizzy hair.

Given it’s election eve, I’m wondering if tomorrow at the ballot box I will get a surprise that some vertically challenged little fellow from a far away northern place has tinkered away at. Oops I hope it’s not another fantasy dinosaur or titanic replica . 

I think I need an escape plan, so it’s off to Norfolk Island for me.

PS: I still haven’t been polled!

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Art work of the week

The tea cosies just keep on coming - at least they will fit in a new retro world

Cumquat juice

Drawing a line

I live in a city that has injected funds into public art- albeit that the policy is coming to an end. 

Like everything that happens in a public space, everyone had an opinion about it. I’m not so sure about the gigantic owl that appeared in Belconnen only to have to be taken down shortly after for repairs as the coating was peeling.  But I love the controversial pile of rocks and logs that is growing in to the landscape on the verge of the never ending saga of Ginninderra Drive.

One of the suburban shopping centres nearby has a flock of metal mesh sheep who graze away with great consistency on the adjacent slopes. People express their approval of the benign creatures at  Christmas by draping them with tinsel. They don’t seem to mind.

Some time back a couple with land around Lake George installed gigantic animals in their paddock. They were a delight for motorists until a would-be art critic smashed them to pieces.

When I visited Egypt eons ago I was fascinated with the graffiti that had been left by centuries of tourists, travellers and invaders. 

Commenting on public art is nothing new.

But I draw the line at appreciating a badly drawn dick and balls on the giant orange moth on the Tuggeranong Parkway.

Maybe that comes from my experience as an art teacher. Badly drawn anything gets up my nose.

The thing is, adolescence has a bad habit of injecting in youth a fascination for male genitalia and female breasts, and an uncontrollable desire to describe representations of them in paint, texta and clay.

I often fantasised about the comments I might write on bad artwork had I not been contained by the need to keep my job by displaying restraint and decorum. 

I have clear recollections of examples of student work which deserved the following remarks:

·         If you have any visions of becoming and artist or an anarchist give them up. You have neither the talent nor the wit for either. I suggest you talk to the Careers Advisor and peruse the list of possible careers starting at B.

·         Derivative, mundane and bland – look up these words

·         50% of the population has/had/will have an ejaculating penis. The other half have or will see one.  What would be interesting would be to see a piece of work without one.

·         While puberty is a novelty for you, I get to experience it every year. There is no illustration of a male appendage that I have not seen before. Look up Juan Davila

·         If I see another badly drawn unicorn or fairy I swear I will poke my eyes out with a bodkin. Just because they are imaginary does not mean they do not follow the laws of anatomy. Look up Bodkin.

·         If you do manage to achieve your dream of becoming a tattoo artist, do not do dolphins. They deserve respect.  Read So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.

I’m thinking of becoming a vigilante critic. I will sneak around at night with my red texta putting marks out of 10 on public graffiti while writing my comments for the vandals’ education and my own edification. 

All I have to do is decide what colour undies to wear over my tights.

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 Art work of the week 

Writing on one's own art work doesn't constitute graffiti

Hitchiker's Breakfast. Acrylic on paper. 500x350mm

Building Bridges

I always loved Mathematics. When I was a small child I would have my mother set sums on scrap pieces of paper – the backs of envelopes, the torn off ends of cereal cartons- and while she beavered away ensuring the house looked like it should have been shining off the cover of Women’s Weekly, I would solve the additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions.

Education was delivered differently. We sang song our tables with no real understanding, drew a working out margin to show the thought processes we had used, wrote pages and pages of numbers, and had daily mental Arithmetic. Calculators, if you discount the abacus which we did not have access to and didn’t even know about in my parochial little school, were not available for general consumption. 

I arrived at boarding school at the start of my fourth year at high school and discovered to my horror that I couldn’t do Maths. Or so the teacher finally convinced me. She was known to have a brilliant mind, but to be an absolute dud in transferring knowledge to fertile minds. I laboured for hours, filled pages and pages with working out, setting out, pondering and solutions. But if the answer was wrong, her response was that I had not done my work. And if I laughed, she smacked me with the ruler.

Moving in to my final years I took the basis course that I could get away with.   At the trial external exams no-one in the class go over 15%. Thank god for my father’s foresight in booking me some private tuition with a local teacher who helped me to get a decent pass and restored some faith in my ability to understand.

At university I found logic –The  highest form of Mathematics they say- an discovered what it was to shift into an entirely new brain space.

There have been some light bulb Mathematical moments over the years. 

One was when the new Mathematics syllabus was being introduced into NSW and I had the regional consultant on my staff. His responsibility was to shift thinking about ‘thinking mathematically’. I went to a professional learning session with him where the teacher asked people to do a particular mathematical problem in their head and then to explain how they had arrived at the answer. There were as many different ways of reaching the solution as there were participants in the room. The second thing the teacher did was give us a solution and ask us to devise the problem- The answer is 7, what is the question? This was my sort of Mathematics.

Another was on reading Steven Hawking's And God Created the Integers, when I discovered that the square in Pythagoras’ theorem (which I know and have applied a thousand times) actually means a physical as well as a mathematical square. The theory suddenly made sense.

I read somewhere that 70% of all scientific knowledge is proven to be inaccurate or downright wrong, over a thirty year period. It doesn’t seem to be the case with Mathematics.

This year I am doing  Year 9 Maths. My granddaughter and I tackle it each week. I’m amazed that as I look at the text book I am seeing exactly the same things I remember from my youth – except it now has cartoons. We’re up to quadratic equations and parabolas. This is where my confidence begins to slide and I get flashbacks to Year 10.  But we are saved by a Year 11 student demonstrating solutions on YouTube. 

And we both get it. 

I  recall asking my high school teacher when we would ever use parabolas in real life. She said I would need it to build bridges. 

Metaphorical or physical? I ponder.

I haven’t built one yet

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This week's Art Works

 

Still creating tea cosies. Now for the Epic Christmas Markets to be held on December 14 and 15. I am applying my mathematical skills, but not a quadratic equation in sight.

Pencil me in for tea