What I Cooked Last Night

—I remember the brutalist concrete building that was built in Swanston Street in brave 1972. Its stark grey edge cut the sky like a battleship from Franklin Street to Storey Hall and teams ran through its knife-shadow from April to September. Years later, some craven architects adjudged that clean lines were no longer au courant , and the silent structure underwent plastic surgery. It was given prosthetic coloured blobs, and cute holes were punched into its scarp so that occupants could look out, like children in a playground castle. —Decades later. William and I are sitting at an open-air café table in Swanston Street, opposite the great grey building. Its censored fascia is further obscured by the now-ubiquitous urban street trees. We are early for a screening of short films made by graduate film students. William is a film student; my film studies days ended before Woody Allen made Radio Days , Crimes and Misdemeanours  or  Husbands and Wives: or to make it perfectly ...

The bookshelf, the other bookshelf. … Let’s start again, my writing runs ahead of itself.  There are—were—three built-in bookcases in the old house, the house that shrank around my growing years. It was bulldozed late last year. It disappeared one day between 9 a.m. and noon, as if scissors had cut a house out of a picture. After the lumbering trucks ground away trailing broken tiles and cracked beams and wind-blown plaster, I moved across the wounds in the ground imagining the rooms. Shards of a mirror winked where the bathroom had been. The earth in which it glinted hadn’t seen sunlight for seventy years.  I changed direction and walked into the ghost of a kitchen. Its wall once held six shelves, a 1950s showcase for kitchen kitsch. It held ceramic teapots no one used, café salt and pepper sets in diagonally-cut glass with chromed rocket ship tops, a flour canister filled with old stamps, and a bronze buddha someone brought home in 1972 from either India or that incense shop...

My top five songs of the 1990s, originally posted in 2004 on an earlier weblog. (See 19 September for songs 6-10.) No. 5: 'Over and Over' - Neil Young From Ragged Glory , released in September 1990. Two Neil Young tracks in the top ten, and he can't even sing!   Ragged Glory  influenced many of the grunge acts that followed ... After an opening guitar salvo that sounds like it wants to go on forever, Young's declamatory whine cuts in ... The song is a sad nostalgia trip tinged with regret, and the guitars are just an attempt to deafen the pain. It works. They deafen the listener too. ... But we paid the price of time/and now it's out of reach/And so the broken circle goes/Over and over again   ... the guitars fuzz out to one long, sustained, distorted note - finally dying away like the embers of love's fire.  —posted on 3 June 2004 No. 4: 'November Rain' - Guns N' Roses This 1991 song is a tour de force , a knockout blow to people who thought they c...

Biggest Earthquake In Three Years Rattles Victoria, gushed The Age earlier this week. (What, all of Victoria?) Victoria Wakes To 4.8 Magnitude Earthquake, contended the Herald Sun; while News Ltd's leonine-rhyming international arm invoked the beast: Aussie city jolted awake by monster quake . Most powerful in years (unspecified), gossiped other news outlets.  * Geoscience organisations report 500,000 similar-sized global earthquakes annually.

Must I know how long it will take to read an online news story? Apparently, yes. What next? Restaurants?  Coq au vin: twenty minute eat.   Three minutes. Walk once around a tennis court. Rinse the afternoon tea cups. Decide whether to get a dog or a cat. Read-time tags are useful in one way, like tram trackers. God knows how anyone ever caught a bus before the internet. Actually, no. The latter are far more useful. It could be raining. — It helps the readers, says the editor. You can’t see the length of online stories like you can in physical newspapers . — I thought all newspapers were physical, replies the writer. Like physical cash, or physical shops. Why is everything real called ‘physical’ now? And you should be able to roughly judge the length of a story by its headline. — How?  says the editor.  — Moreover, some newspapers have always split stories across pages. I’ve never seen a printed front page messed up with ‘15 minute read’ . —(Pause)  Did you jus...

The middle child—teenager for a few more weeks—has confidence in the kitchen, throwing things around with abandon. He did the same when a chair-bound infant, but they all do that, except the ones who studiously pick things apart on their plate, as if having just discovered their fingers. They will be lawyers.  As a kind of purist (the quality jumped a generation here) he insists, for instance, that cream must not be in the same kitchen as spaghetti carbonara, lest someone combine them. (And here I was, a kitchen charlatan, disparaging  al dente pasta.) In all seriousness, he understands that true purism is not perfectionism but a perceptive understanding of an original idea. Roman standard cacio e pepe  is ideal, being disarmingly simple but surprisingly tricky to execute, according to some ‘experts’.  Cacio e Pepe Use long pasta. The idea is to allow the strands to finish cooking in a cheesy ‘sauce’—really just a coating; an oleaginous dressing. This comprises grat...

In 2021 I posted a list of songs, ranked in order of personal choice, from one hundred to one. I was fascinated by the obsession with ranking things, and tried to demystify the process by making one myself; a kind of contrary similia similibus curantur . Of course, having posted my top hundred I immediately disagreed with many of my own selections, vindicating my scepticism about lists*. But I had already undertaken the experiment a couple of decades earlier and completely forgotten about it. The older list was a top ten of the 1990s, published on one of my early 2000s nouveau siècle weblogs, of which everyone seemed to have several at the time. It surfaced recently out of the internet like a lost vegetable peeler turning up in the compost. For purely historical interest, here is the initial post followed by the first five songs. * It’s 2004: time I posted my favourite songs of the 1990s. There's no point rushing it. Time gives you perspective. … In the 1990s, my first marriage ha...

A large television screen cast a lurid blue glow over the foyer. On the screen, an exclamation mark inside a triangle, like a road sign warning of a bridge down, drew attention to the words below:  'This show contains guns and physical violence, firearms, death, explicit language, sexual content, apocalyptic themes and depiction of a nuclear disaster. Please be advised that this show contains loud noises, flashing, intense lighting and the use of haze.' I thought it was parody. Of course, it might have been both warning and parody at the same time. You can’t tell. The last play I saw in the university, decades ago, was Oedipus Rex, performed in the old Union House theatre near Wilson Hall. Years later the theatre moved a hundred metres to the arts and cultural centre, a swirling architectural fantasy that has an interior with no straight lines and a colour scheme like blueberries in a blender.  * He took a hansom to the university. The drive occupied twenty minutes, but by the...

His fingers—hands—were always busy. They had a life of their own, drumming, twisting, elucidating; not in the Neapolitan gesticulating sense, but in a kind of hand language of his own.  We sat in the cafe—teenagers on the brink of twenty—and drank coffee, and talked about our lives, because they were ahead of us. David’s hands unfolded like a bird’s wings or a carnate Greek statue, his symmetry disturbed only by the heavy black curl over his pale forehead. So there was European in his blood, probably Spanish. The café, at the top of Bourke Street, was long and narrow, with red-topped stools running in a row back to the kitchen. Behind the bar, the bow-tied waiters smiled and made coffee and spoke stage Italian. After drinking coffee, enlivened, we would cross a lane into a cramped bookshop, and browse, and envisage our unfolding lives represented in the pages of the authors and poets to which we gravitated: Whitman, Genet, Joyce, White, Bellow, the usual French and Russians; the Be...

Of course, I would never dream of serving pasta any other way than al dente . Social ostracism might ensue, if you’ll pardon the sarcasm. I was standing by the pot, watching the steam rising frantically in baroque curlicues; little parallel curves like a Don Martin cartoon in a magazine circa 1968. I turned it down to ‘simmer’ and wondered how generations of Italians managed to instantaneously transport themselves from the threshing fields, the horse and plough, the FIAT production line, or the corner garage at the very moment nonna drained the cooked-to-the-second yellow strands. Maybe they did, but it seems unlikely. Forgive me, padre, for I have sinned (SFX: jiggle of rosary beads—use uncooked rigatoni if unavailable: shaken, they sound uncannily like chunky wooden beads). The sin : I once broke the al dente mantra, enthusing on this weblog about well-cooked pasta—in that instance a thick, muscular, robust bucatini paired with a meat ragu made from the leftover semi-solid fluids f...

In 1948 she was already 27; over the hill, as her American-slang-talking buddies might have said, jokingly; or not. Some of them had actually married American soldiers during the war. Years later, when I was writing a history of the college she had attended, a clear-memoried ninety-year-old who knew every stitch in her darned woollen gloves told me one or two had returned to Melbourne after the war accompanied only by a child. Kathleen was an amateur thespian; local theatre companies, play-reading groups, poetry recitations, that kind of thing. She was tall and willowy, and had a face that smiled crookedly; she was no beauty. She lived with her parents and wrote diaries. She worked in a city office and wore fawn gabardine coats in winter on the tram into town and home again. The house was an untouched Edwardian, of the kind you expect still to be lit by gas, on a triangular corner block below the rail bridge in Ascot Vale, and from the east window of its heavy-sofaed sitting room, you ...

This old house has no built-in wardrobes, so we ordered a new freestanding one from the furniture store to replace an old one that was too small for a teenager's fashion ambitions. The new wardrobe came flat-packed in three huge packages, like the monoliths in 2001:A Space Odyssey . The monolith packages contained innumerable pieces of particleboard, some main strut-type wooden beams, scores of shiny metal items that looked like pieces of hinge, and hundreds of tiny metallic screw-like objects. Attached, and nicely protected inside a ziploc plastic bag, was an authorless book entitled—I think— Instructions: The Seque l. I might have embellished that last bit, but the book is gone; it could have been A Long Day’s Journey into Night or Ulysses . There was an option. By paying an extra fee you could have the million pieces magically transmogrified into an actual wardrobe, 'magically' because the assembler would not need to read Instructions: The Sequel or A Long Day’s Journe...

Shchi?  It looks unpronounceable* to the English speaker's eye, trapped by the double digraph. It’s just cabbage soup. It features enticingly, within cosy steamed-up café windows, in Hal Porter's The Paper Chase  (see post July 9). For a couple of fleeting years, Melbourne’s late-1930s intelligentsia gathered at Café Petrushka, where discussions of fascism, philosophy, borscht, communism, and wall paintings forestalled looming premonitions of a new world war. Porter's autobiography exhumes artists, dancers, chefs, writers and drunks; and they live again, dustily, gold-specked, spectral, in the memory-shroud of history. The cafés owners bought their cabbages—and everything else for their kitchen—a few blocks away at the Victoria market. My grandmother shopped in those post-Depression days at the same market, approaching at a similar distance, but from the opposite direction. Cabbages, cabbages. Cabbages stacked in four-in-the-morning darkness by the sleepless; carried from t...