What I Cooked Last Night

I keep seeing the expression 'comfort food'. Isn't all food 'comfort food'? No. Comfort food is food that (a) makes you feel good when you're eating it; and (b) allows you to think about something else while you are eating. Anyone who continually talks about what they are eating is not eating comfort food. Pasta carbonara is a prime example, like lamb shanks, or beef goulash, or shepherd's pie, or loaded mashed potato. I've been making carbonara for years; went through a phase of ordering pasta carbonara on hot summer Fridays for lunch inside darkened Ti Amo in the 1990s, anticipating the efforts needed on Saturdays. Carbonara-loading. Sitting up at the bar, pasta on an oval plate, heavy on the bacon, rings of buttered pasta dura to mop up the cheesy residue, astringent coffee afterwards. Unbeatable. Pasta carbonara. Bacon or just about any variety of salted, cured meat is fine. Anyone insisting on guanciale is forgetting rule (b) above. If you h...

Love Machine , an unexceptional folk rock tune recorded by by US west coast band The Roosters, didn't chart in Australia. It probably didn't even get any air play. However, a bunch of musicians in Sydney and Melbourne noticed it in 1968 and thought they could do a better job. (The Small Faces had just released Itchycoo Park , Cream had The White Room ; and The Legend of Xanadu , Pictures of Matchstick Men and Lazy Sunday Afternoon were the psychedelic soundtracks to my Grade Six life at St John Bosco's where I sat at my desk virtually levitating.) So the musicians who thought they could do a better job of Love Machine did. The result , co-produced by Geoffrey Edelsten, was a swirling symphony of psychedelia complete with synth, keyboards, feedback, phase, reverb, swell, mind-altering drugs and the kind of harmonies the Twilights took to the outer limits with their later incarnations of Axiom and the Little River Band among other projects. The song was recorded under ...

Sydney Road shoots straight out of Melbourne like an arrow and becomes the Hume Highway, an ant trail of roaring B-double trucks on four, six or eight lanes connecting the two cities. The concert was in a venue about twelve miles out of town; one of those places that does big outer-suburban weddings. It was raining when I drove through the hipster suburbs where they ask you five questions before they make your coffee. About 7 p.m. I passed the border, which used to be Bell Street and then Gaffney Street; but which is now Camp Road where a checkpoint charlie stops cool people getting out and non-hipsters getting in. It's called Campbellfield. Then Campbellfield's yellow brick veneers gave way to concrete depots, and empty manufacturing plants, and breaker's lots, and half-built orthodox churches, and signs spruiking new suburbs with names like Eden Rise. I did a U-turn just south of Craigieburn where Supreme Caravans stares across Gasoline Way to Northern Fleet Care and ...

This piece of pop perfection , also buried and forgotten under layers of post-twentieth century sonic silt, saw on-air sunshine today for the first time in decades. From the days when they used to cram the local symphony orchestra into the sound booth. As one commenter noted: "I had forgotten what a bright and happy world it was in 1969."

FM radio is full of singers who sound like they are about to cough in between notes, or who ululate as if they are gargling gravel while taking part bin a prehistoric mating ritual. I have lived through some grim fashions in music but the current crop takes some beating. There are small pockets of resistance. Someone who goes by the on-air name of Ghostrider puts out three hours of gold on Mondays featuring acts you should know but most don't. Drowned in a sea of mediocrity, these names surface and then disappear again for decades at a time. Yesterday's feature artist: Esther Phillips. Listen and weep. Or try this link . MDR has the wrong track listing.

I wasn't sure who had put the gum tree in all those years ago, or the unidentified tree next to it with the long poplar-like trembly leaves on long stringy liana-like branches that hang down and catch your neck as you try to mow under them (despite not much grass surviving down there in the semi-darkness); but he or she must have had the idea of creating some kind of 'indigenous' garden of Eden in which nymphs dance and cavort amidst the native flora; but what they ended up with was untrammelled undergrowth into which sunshine barely penetrates so that while the monster gum tree expands exponentially everything else dies. I was in the front garden. (I dealt with the back garden quite some time ago.) Garden aside, there was a new dilemma inside the house. I had, of course, done some work in the house on many occasions, removing piles of old newspapers that had built up on, beside and behind chairs and sofas. I had also removed hundreds of plastic food containers that ha...

BARRY THE BARRISTER: Now Gordon, this Folau business ... GORDON THE JUDGE: What would you expect of an uneducated Pacific Islander, Barry? BARRY: That comment is offensive. GORDON: Only when amplified in public, Barry, where the great unwashed roil around in confected outrage twenty-four hours a day. But here in this comfortable bar where intelligent adults can have a conversation without stamping their feet or throwing a tantrum worthy of a two-year-old, the question is both rhetorical and ingenuous. And therefore by definition, inoffensive. What would you expect of an uneducated Pacific Islander? – or, indeed, Barry, of an educated one? And the answer, my friend, is that you would expect exactly what we have seen. BARRY: Stop talking in riddles. GORDON: That, from a barrister! BARRY (TO THE BARMAN): Another whisky for my loquacious friend here, please, Charles. (TO GORDON) Then get to the point. GORDON: There's no point. Only a collection of random observations. Th...

Having lost his father at three and his mother at twelve, the breach of a close familial circle would always weight heavily on J. R. R. Tolkien. It is the theme of Tolkien , the movie. The young Tolkien is placed in foster care under a Catholic priest who later bans his girlfriend Edith, insisting the student go up to Oxford. There, Tolkien bonds with three fellow poets, the quartet calling themselves the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS). The scenes of their poetry meetings at the Barrow are realistic and are devoid of the slow-motion filmic tics and posh-Brit characterisations typical of the genre. War ensues. The company is burst asunder. In scenes of blood and death in the Somme, an injured, fevered Tolkien staggers through mud and gore in a fruitless search for two of the members of TCBS. Delirious, he thinks he hears the voice of one who is already dead calling desperately. As soldiers and horses are cut down and fire burns and blood pools into small dams of red, walled b...

The sun was out but a cool late-autumn breeze was just enough to put jackets on the golfers scuttling down out of the green hills and heading greenwards. I locked the cabin and pointed the car south, back alongside the river through shopless Kelso, tiny timber houses either side of the road, and past the dock at Beauty Point where the estuary is still deep enough for a 100-berth marina. A right turn just before Beaconsfield brought some low mountains into the middle distance. We wandered through high farmland and tree plantations that were partly-logged, leaving mohawks of forest on otherwise bald hills. Then the road went around a high spot and after a long curve, a mountain moved out of the way to reveal the sea down below. A town appeared, crouching on a long low hill that faced the water. Ulverstone sat in the sun doing nothing as we approached. The road went through several roundabouts full of no cars, and suddenly we were in the main street. Unusually for a coastal town, it w...

(GetUp chief lobbyist) Mr Oosting ... said the campaign in Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton's seat of Dickson had been partially successful because the swing to him was weaker than the swing to the Coalition across the rest of Queensland. The Greens' road trip to re-educate outback Queenslanders also went well: "The Stop Adani convoy in particular reminded locals about everything that's wrong with elitist politics. ... (they) decided to get in their petrol-fuelled cars and drive thousands of kilometres to a place in central Queensland to tell them they shouldn't have a job." Well done, everyone.

The road had ended in a short curve that wound into itself at the entrance to the caravan park. The only movement we had seen last night in the utter blackness on those last few kilometres had been hundreds of small hopping shadows reflected in the headlights. Some kind of marsupials jumping like abandoned soccer balls in an earth tremor. I had finished Deliverance some time after midnight on the deck of the cabin under the yellow light of a single globe. This remote place is probably the best place in the world to read the book if you exclude the actual Chattooga River. Far off, a muffled crash of distant surf carried in on the wind. I went inside. Now it was morning and the sun had jerked the black curtain back to reveal a bay washing onto a shore that curved around to a point at the western end and a lighthouse the other way. Directly in front of the cabin a pathway broke through scrub and led down to the water, probably fifty steps away. The children had stolen out of the cab...

There was once a poet who won the American National Book Award in Poetry, and then got appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. After that, he was hired as poet-in-residence at the University of South Carolina. In the end he must have tired of rambling around empty halls of learning like a kept ghost, albeit a scholarly one, while stroking his beard and frowning as if trying to give birth to a sixty verse epic. So he wrote a book. He called it Deliverance . I may be exaggerating a little, but just about the entire world has seen the movie 'Deliverance'; or if they haven't, they know what it is about. But most people have never heard of James Dickey. My copy is a Pan from its tenth printing in 1976. One of the reviews on the back cover states that it ' ... achieves what it sets out to do ... ' and even the word 'brilliantly' prefixing that snippet doesn't really detract from the quote's air of faint praise. Time called it a ...

It was a late afternoon flight – the only one available – and daylight saving had ended the day before. The plane rode cloud cover all the way across Bass Strait and in just under an hour it came down out of the clouds and banked and frail dying orange light came into the plane as the sleety runway rose up and hit the wheels. We climbed out of the rear of the plane and walked a hundred metres through light warm rain to a square terminal that seemed a lot bigger once you got inside. A trained beagle led by a uniformed customs officer greeted the passengers and pushed into someone's bag and pulled out an apple. No fruit admitted. I've seen this trick several times and every time the perpetrator looks guiltier than a terrorist. For some reason it always seems to be a well-dressed upper middle-class lady who has forgotten about the no-fruit rule. Bailed up by a beagle, hands in the air in dismay. Or just well-bred embarrassment. I had wanted light so I could see where I was goi...

The punch-line is that they re-named the award after the bureaucrats themselves. Now that's funny.