Bringing Sexy Back To Sydney

Yours truly, the second sexiest Irish crime writer, will be reading in Sydney tomorrow Tuesday September 1 at 7pm at the Mosman Art Gallery on Myahgah Rd. phone (02) 9978 4178‎. Contact: Jon Page. I'll be appearing with the far more sensible and crowd pully: Barry Maitland, Kathryn Fox and Robert Wilson. And to be honest I'm not feeling that sexy at the moment (an admission you will never hear from Justin Timberlake). I've just got back from Queensland and the humidity has done amazing things to my hair. I now look like Sideshow Bob on a very off day, but if you want to hear me read Fifty Grand or talk about Cuba or just gape in wonder at a 70's fro, I'll see ya there.

Silent Running's Second Coming

Moon by Duncan Jones is the second film I've seen in a year which pays homage to the cult sci-fi flick Silent Running (1972). The other film was Wall-E whose first third is in some ways almost a direct sequel to Running.
...
Moon is the story of an astronaut on a mining colony on the moon trying to cope with isolation and paranoia. The plot, of course, is another take on Robinson Crusoe but the visuals, the pace, the themes are homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running. Everyone has seen 2001 but few people outside sci-fi geekdom have caught Running, which is a shame because it's a good film. Here's the excellent Wikipedia summary of the story:

Silent Running depicts a future in which all plant life on Earth has been made extinct, except for a few specimens preserved in a fleet of space-borne freight ships converted to carry greenhouse domes. When orders come from Earth to jettison and destroy the domes, the botanist aboard the greenhouse-ship 'Valley Forge' (Bruce Dern) rebels, and eventually opts instead to send the last dome into deep space to save the remaining plants and animals. The film costars Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint.

I thought I was the only person who'd actually seen Running which tended to be shown at 1 a.m. on BBC 2 in the 1980's, but clearly people at Pixar watched it and liked it and Duncan Jones liked it too. Anyway you can get it on Amazon and some sneaky fellow has uploaded the entire film onto YouTube in 10 minute segments here. It's Bruce Dern's best role and although a little bit hokey near the end I think you'll like it.
...
Ok, that's it, I'm proud of myself that I got through this whole blog without mentioning once that Duncan Jones is David Bowie's son. . . Oh crap.
...
I should also add that I'm going to the countryside for a few days so if I dont respond to your comments its because I have no internet connection (or have been killed by the terrible and dreaded bunyip)

What's Wrong With Mad Men?

Unlike a lot of Johnnie come latelies I've been watching Mad Men since season 1, episode 1. I was impressed by its complexities, its pacing, its acting, its dialogue and of course Christina Hendricks's formidable assets. Season 1 was as good as TV gets, especially Roger's one liners, everything about Pete Campbell, and Betty Draper's slow burn mental breakdown. Season 2 fell off a little, but so far season 3 has been very disappointing, almost sloppy in its writing (that flashback, the fire alarm, yikes) and its directing. (The acting, fortunately, is still brilliant). So why has everything gone pear shaped? Some possible reasons:
...

1. It's AMC's fault. Episode 1 was a reboot for all the new viewers AMC was expecting following the good Emmy news, which is why they made Matt Weiner recap so many old stories instead of advancing into new territory. It felt like we were treading water, but we had to do that to give new viewers a chance to catch up. Episode 2 was the real episode 1 laying out slowly the themes of the new season. Things may therefore get better as we go along.
...

2. Mad Men has jumped the shark. Comedy series usually hit their stride in season 3 but drama series tend to stumble in their third year. The writers used all their best ideas in the pitch and season 1 and their next best ideas in season 2 and by 3 they were exhausted. This is true of: The Sopranos, ER, Battlestar Galactica, NYPD Blue and many other shows.
...

3. Hubris. Matt Weiner has forgotten that you need a slave standing next to you in the chariot whispering "you too are mortal and will die some day."
...

4. They wrote themselves into a corner by letting Betty get pregnant. A pregnancy is usually a very bad thing for a show, cf: Lucy, Bewitched, The Flintstones, Friends etc. etc.
...

5. Nothing's wrong. All we are doing now is slowly circling the major themes in typical Mad Men fashion. This isn't Law & Order or House, chum, Mad Men demands viewer attention and patience. Just relax, sit back and all will be well.

13 Ways and 1 Way of Looking at a Blackbird

A blackbird was sitting on my bicycle saddle today. I hadn't seen one in Australia before although apparently they are quite common. I wasn't in a rush, so I sat down a little bit away and watched it. I sketched it on the back of my notebook and it sang a few times and flew off. I forgot why I wanted to go out in the first place so I went back inside and read Wallace Stevens instead.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Dances With Wolves In Space

In a rare misstep Gary Larson once published a cartoon showing an empty hall with a couple of sad-sacks standing in it and a caption underneath that read: "Didn't Like Dances With Wolves Society". Only a fool, Larson seemed to suggest, could not have fallen for the splendour of Kevin Costner's masterpiece of the American West. I guess I was one of those fools. I thought the film was ridiculous: hokey, clunky, silly, emotionally retarded, obvious, dull-witted, predictable. I saw it in the old ABC cinema Belfast just before the IRA blew it up (not moments before) and I have to say that getting near the end I was praying for one of those bomb scares that would have allowed me to evacuate the movie theatre and get my money back.

...

On Friday I had a wee bit of a similar experience. I was one of the fortunate few who got to see an extended preview of James Cameron's Avatar, a film ten years in the making, the most expensive film of all time (Cameron's previous film Titanic used to hold that record) a movie which Fox claimed at Comi-Con would "revolutionise cinema going". Maybe it will, I don't know; visually it's a striking film and the 3D effects are absolutely spectacular, but oh man that story: an Earthling soldier undergoes a body transplant to infiltrate an alien arboreal society (with whom humanity is at war) and of course falls for one of the elfin alien girls and goes native: Dances With Wolves in space.

...

Don't include me in the James Cameron haters club. I liked T2 and T1 and I loved Aliens. Titanic made me long for the cold embrace of a watery death, but on the whole I think Cameron is a pretty good director. I hope I'm wrong about Avatar and of course it's completely unfair to judge a film just from a trailer. And anyway it doesn't matter what I or anyone else says. AICN has been hyping it for months and the fanboy audience is a lock. (That, er, includes me). The film is utterly critic proof, but if you're expecting originality in story telling to go along with originality in cinematography I have a feeling you are going to be disappointed.

...

You can see the two minute teaser trailer on Apple here. Oh and BTW if Gary Larson reads this somehow...listen mate, I'll take it all back, declare DWW the greatest film of all time and buy the DVD if only you'll start cartooning again.

Brad Pitt Is The King of the Potheads But You Didn't Hear It From Me

Its been an open secret for a long time that Brad Pitt is the reigning champ of the Hollywood pot-heads. Many people have seen Pitt getting baked at parties, in hotel rooms, his trailer, beaches, elevators, public transportation, parks, sidewalks, cafes, bars, sandwich shops, Pink's Hotdog Stand, cinema foyers, planetariums, ceramics warehouses, farmers' markets, outdoor Scrabble tournaments, pool halls, and, presumably, the comfort of his own home after a long day's work. Pitt's commitment to marijuana is legendary: he buys ornamental bongs for his friends, he used to take buddies to Craig Z. Rudin's smoke shop 2000 BC on Melrose Avenue and sometimes he'd get so wasted the poor love would forget to button his shirt (right). Of course Pitt could never seriously compete with the all time king of the Hollywood stoners Robert Altman who may have single handedly kept Jamaica's economy going through the dark days of the 1970's, but after Altman's sad passing and Woody Harrelson's odd disappearance from the Hollywood scene Brad Pitt has had no other true contender in the lists.
...

As of last week this "open secret" is secret no more. On Friday's Bill Maher HBO show Real Time, Pitt admitted his "past" pot use and Maher mentioned how he had been at a party once and watched Pitt's amazing reefer rolling skills with a profound sense of awe.
...
I was annoyed about this for one reason and one reason only. We'll get to that reason in a minute but first let me clarify my position on marijuana. I have no problem at all with marijuana. I think it's much less dangerous than alcohol and properly regulated could be a terrific cash crop in parts of California where farmers are struggling to make a living. Willie Nelson of course famously founded Farm Aid, but if we want real farm aid we might want to think about legalising Willie's favourite herb.

...

No my problem isn't pot, and it's not with Pitt either who's a pretty good actor, no my problem is that the fact that I could have scooped everyone on this story if it hadn't been for the British laws of libel. WTF? I hear you say. WTF is right my friend. I published a book early this year called Fifty Grand which had a scene in it where Brad Pitt attended a righteous pot smoking party, however because of Britain's terrifying libel laws I was forced to cut almost all of that scene for fear that Brad Pitt would sue me and my publishers Serpents Tail; and he probably would have won too because in Britain the burden of proof is heavily on the publisher to prove the substance of what they print. Serpents Tail were completely correct in protecting themselves and me when we cut the Pitt scene, indeed earlier this year another of Serpents Tail's authors David Peace was sued by an individual over an allegation he made in his book The Damned United, an allegation that I wont repeat here. Anyway, as I say, I could have scooped Maher but didn't, not really, unless you were clever enough to read between the lines of what I actually did say in the book. However now that Pitt has come clean about his, er, "past" as a pothead you can re-read that bit in Fifty Grand and imagine the scene as it might have been. Maybe for next year's paperback release I'll rewrite the whole chapter or maybe other well known actors will make revelations about their lives and perhaps the cut party bit will resurface at last. Am I still being a bit cagey about what I say even now? Damn right I am, I don't have David Peace's nerve or financial resources, and I know that no jury in the world is going to be able to resist that million dollar smile and accidentally unbuttoned shirt.

Life And Death At Camp Bastion

While I spent the weekend trying to figure out just how cool I was (see post below) my little brother was spending another weekend at Camp Bastion in the Afghani desert just trying to live as normal a life as possible. Three years ago there was no Camp Bastion, it was just an oasis in the middle of nowhere, but now there's a tent city, hospital, airstrip and Task Force HQ. I've only got a vague notion of what things have been like there, my little brother has been very busy and has had the time for only the occasional email and phone call. However I read a remarkable piece in Friday's London Times by Tony Loyd about one day in the Bastion hospital. Here's how it starts:

Beneath the warmth of the early morning summer sky a familiar routine begins at Camp Bastion’s hospital. The bodies of three British soldiers, brought in by a Chinook medical emergency response team shortly after 6am, are already lying in the mortuary.

Two were killed in action, the third died of wounds before he could be operated on. A fourth British soldier, an additional morning arrival, lay sedated in intensive care, with a leg blown off.

A team of medics and two chaplains were waiting at the main hospital entrance for the next helicopter to touch down. “We’re in the middle of a shit morning and it’s getting worse,” remarked Captain Cat Kemeny, the hospital’s adjutant. “We’ve got four more UK casualties coming in from three incidents. The next we’re expecting is a double amputee.” She had barely finished speaking when a Chinook landed near by and unloaded the newest casualty.


The rest of the story can be read here. Gareth (my little brother) not only read The Times's story but in fact was actually in the hospital that morning because of an injured arm, although of course he was way down the triage priority list. Gareth may be used to it, (this is the kid's third war and he spent most of last year in northern Iraq) but I'm not, and although I write fairly violent - and hopefully fun - crime novels for a living his life is lived at the tip of the spear and he is, without question, the family badass.
...
Anyway, I don't know how the Afghani war is going to end, but for the sake of all the Brits, Danes, Yanks and other soldiers on the front line I hope that it gets resolved sooner rather than later.

Dude, So, I'm Like, You Know, Totally Cool

Sometime in the 1930's the world capital of cool shifted from Paris to New York, and its been there ever since. Sure there have been pretenders over the years (anyone remember Cool Britannia?) but none has ever worked out and New York City is still where hip gets decided. Of course not all of the Big Apple is hip to the same degree. Queens isn't cool, Staten Island is decidedly uncool and the Bronx is mostly too scary to be cool. When I lived in Harlem I thought that was pretty cool and Harlem does produce its share of street clothes and rap attitudes, but the true centres of New York hipness are to be found either in lower Manhattan or increasingly in Brooklyn. Brooklynites have always had an attitude problem. Just look at David Blaine and Jay Z. And I've never understood why Brooklyn is so special that it refuses to join the New York Public Library system. Anyway, according to The New York Times Brooklyn is now the centre of the hepcat universe and Brooklynites are arbiters of the cool look for men.
...
We've gone through the leather jacket phase, the skinny jean phase, the khaki trousers phase and if last week's Times Style Section is to be believed Brooklynites have now rejected the Washboard Abs Mens Health Magazine look in favour of (drum roll please): worn jeans, dishevelled baseball hats, old t shirts and - this is the best part - beer bellies. You heard me right. Guts are in. Apparently with the hyper skinny Obama in the White House the way to rebel is to look as if you don't work out and you don't wash your clothes that often: abs and a close shave give off the air of pathetically trying too hard - they are so Bush era. Bellies and a scruffy face imply beer drinking (microbrews natch) knowledge of arcane folk wisdom and the baseball cap of course means that you reject the macho posturing of American Football to follow the geekiest and most insiderish of all American past-times: baseball. (Minor league if possible, naturally, and especially the Brooklyn Cyclones).
...
I nearly keeked my whips when I read this, you see I've been ahead of this trend for decades. That is my look (the photo is me, somewhat dazed, this morning). It's been my look since the early 90's. Finally the world has caught up to me. At last and for this brief shining moment I can gaze in the mirror and see a cool person gazing back. Oh thank you Brooklyn hipsters, thank you. And please, I beg you, don't be fickle, don't start cutting your hair and shaving your chest and going back to gym; I like being on the cool side of the playground. I've never been here before. Come on guys lets ride this trend together at least until grey hair and baldness come in.

The Wig Interpretation of History

Item#1: Before Tuesday's Yankees-Blue Jays game in the Bronx the NYY held a closed door kangaroo court in the locker room. It was the Yankees second court of the season and various fines were handed out to players and coaches for real and imaginary 'crimes'. The courts, needless to say, aren't serious at all, they are merely an exercise in team bonding. What was interesting to me about this kangaroo court however was the fact that judge Mariano Rivera (the Yankees' future Hall of Fame closer) was wearing a robe and wig supplied to him by Marilyn Milian, the real life "judge" of the TV show The People's Court.

...

Item#2: From 2003 - 2004 Max Kellerman ESPN's boxing analyst appeared on the show I, Max with Bill Wolff in which the latter also pretended to be a judge and also wore a wig and gown.

...

Item#3: I used to teach a little civics class to 11th graders in Denver where we would pretend to be the Supreme Court deciding some of the famous cases of the twentieth century (Brown v Board of Education etc.) One of the classes decided that it would be fun to dress up in the garb of Supreme Court judges so they came to school wearing robes and wigs.

...

Item#4: Go to any fancy dress shop in America and look for a judge's costume and chances are that it will come with a wig.

...

This is interesting to me because no one has worn a powdered wig in an American Court for at least 150 years. Judges don't wear wigs, lawyers don't wear wigs, clerks dont wear wigs, and if you watch Law & Order or the Peoples Court or any John Grisham movie you'll know that this is true, so how come a lot of people still think that to be attired as a judge in the US you need a wig? How come this false meme is so persistent in the American psyche?

...

Well obviously British TV shows have had an impact, where, of course, barristers and judges do still wear wigs, but if you look at the ratings for PBS you'll realise that that can't be the only explanation. I think there's two things going on. First, a folk tradition of judges wearing wigs has never quite died among school children so that when they draw cartoons of judges they draw them with wigs: this folk tradition persists in comic books, in newspaper strips etc. and if a kid draws a judge with a wig on no teacher in their right mind would ever correct them. Second I think George Washington has something to do with it. Although the first president was never on the Supreme Court his image is associated strongly with the sort of gravitas you expect in a judge and in his picture, most famously seen every day on the dollar bill, President Washington is wearing a powdered wig.

...

Are powdered wigs a good thing? Well, in my very brief legal career I've been in court with bewigged judges and barristers and I've been to the House of Lords a couple of times where the Lord Chancellor wears a really long, interesting wig and I have to say that I like them. They're both silly and charming at the same time. Although slightly older than Scottish kilts, policemen's hats and guardsmen's uniforms they're still a relatively modern invention in the 1000 year history of the British legal system, but I'm in favour of keeping them for the Oakeshottian reason that tradition itself is a living argument and a bridge between the past and the future; and the US experience shows that even if wigs were scrapped tomorrow (which some people are calling for) 150 years from now people will no doubt still think that that's what judges wear to court.

How To Tweet God

At the end of the 90's I lived in Jerusalem for a year. On the whole I liked it there: every morning I would go for a walk in the Old City through alleyways and narrow streets, usually taking in The Church of Holy Sepulchre, The Western Wall and The Dome of the Rock as well a few other sites here and there. Jerusalem was very interesting back then - as the millennium was imminent the city was filling up with crazies confidently expecting the end of the world. Jerusalem has a high proportion of crazies to begin with (there's an actual psychological condition known as Jerusalem Syndrome where people start hearing voices) but leading up to 1999 it got even better. Religious pilgrims and psychotics started flooding into town from all over the world. There were quite a few Jehovah's Witnesses and evangelicals who gathered on the Mount of Olives on December 31 1991 and I can only imagine their disappointment as morning loomed on January 1 2000 without Jesus riding a donkey through the Golden Gate.

...

Incidentally, just to be on safe side someone (the Mufti?) has had the Golden Gate bricked up and when my brother and I tried to get near it to take some photographs we were chased, but that's another story and not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the Western Wall, the holiest place in Judaism. What's it the Western Wall of? I hear you ask. Well, it's the Western Wall of the Temple (Solomon's and later Herod's) and is the closest place Orthodox Jews can get to the site of the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant once stood up on the Temple Mount itself. I say Orthodox Jews because anyone can go up to the Temple Mount and visit the Dome of the Rock which is the mosque built over the site of the Holy of the Holies (and a Roman Temple to Jupiter). I went there literally hundreds of times and you really can imagine the Ark of the Covenant resting there on the sacred stones.
...

Religious Jews won't set foot on the Temple Mount itself because no one actually knows where the Ark was placed and it would be blasphemous to walk on the ground where the Ark could have been. For most religious Jews the Western Wall is close enough and it itself is a special place, a kind of conduit direct from Earth to Heaven. Many people (not only Jews) leave messages or prayers between the massive stones of the wall in the hope that this "direct telegraph to God" will help grant their prayers. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of prayers are left at the Western Wall every day and it's quite affecting watching people leaving little scraps of paper between the stones.

...

For the last decade you've been able to email prayers to Jerusalem and have them placed in the wall. The service is completely free and anyone can do it. But now they've taken it to the next logical step and I'm not sure about this at all. I'm still only vaguely aware of what Twitter actually is, but apparently now you can Tweet God by texting a message to these people and they will place it in the wall for you. Apparently Twitter only permits 140 characters maximum thus encouraging text abbreviations of the LOL variety; word of advice though, if this service actually works, I'd be careful with WTF, OMFG and LMFAO, there is that pesky 3rd Commandment to consider.

Blowing My Own Trumpet

I am a Presbyterian from deepest County Antrim in Northern Ireland which means that - among many other hang ups - talking about myself does not come naturally. However in Saturday's Guardian, there was a review of my latest novel, Fifty Grand that I thought I should share with everyone here. I am professional writer after all and these things matter. The review was written by John O'Connell, a man who is not only smart but completely au fait with modern crime fiction; so, overcoming my reticence, (essentially what this entire blog experience has been about) here is the Guardian's verdict on 50G:

Fifty Grand

by Adrian McKinty

The Guardian, Saturday 8 August 2009

Adrian McKinty's wonderful Dead Trilogy confirmed him as a master of modern noir, up there with Dennis Lehane and James Ellroy. Fans nervous about where he might venture after the retirement of his "un-fucking-killable" antihero Michael Forsythe at the end of The Bloomsday Dead can, however, relax. Fifty Grand is a blast: a standalone effort which again showcases McKinty's brutal lyricism as well as his sensitivity to the indignities of the immigrant experience. Forsythe eescaped to New York from Troubles-torn Belfast. Mercado, the heroine in Fifty Grand, is a hot-shot Cuban cop who has fluked a visa to Mexico City so that she can travel from there, via a coyote road, to the Colorado town of Fairview. Here, for reasons she doesn't understand, her father worked as a pest controller and posed as a Mexican - even though, as a defector from Cuba, he was entitled to a green card. Mercado is on a mission to avenge his death in a hit-and-run accident; also to find evidence that he didn't mean to abandon her on the eve of her all-important 15th birthday.

To do this she must make herself invisible. And Fairview, an upscale ski resort favoured by Hollywood types, is the easiest place in the world for brown-skinned people to pass unnoticed. Illegals are run by Esteban, a spineless pimp; Mercado's duties as a maid include hiding drugs, which Esteban supplies, in celebrities' bathroom cabinets and being sexually available at all times.

On the list of suspects her journalist brother has drawn up for her are an up-and-coming actor, Jack Tyrone, and his manager, Paul. Though dim and narcissistic, Jack has an open, ingenuous quality which attracts Mercado, and it's thanks to him that she - and we - get to hear some hilariously bitchy, self-serving film chat, much of it centred around Tom Cruise, whose huge house looms at the top of the hill - at once a goal and a rebuke. These scenes generate a frisson of verisimilitude as Cruise does indeed spend much of the year in Telluride, the Colorado resort on which Fairview is clearly based.

Mercado's soft spot for himbo actors belies her cop's acumen and awesome defensive skills. En route from Mexico, the Land Rover transporting her and her fellow wetbacks to their new life in "the land of Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Lopez, Jorge Bush" is held up by a couple of chancers. When one of them tries to rape her, Mercado shows us exactly what she learnt in her PNR training in a fight scene of fist-chewing gruesomeness: "I was covered in blood and brains and bits of skull."

McKinty keeps the fish-out-of-water satire to a minimum. It's enough for Mercado to be beguiled in Starbuck's by the scent of vanilla, then floored by the realisation that her espresso costs more than the average daily wage in Havana. Besides, Fifty Grand is as much about Cuba as it is about America - a country "on Deathwatch, waiting out the Beard and his brother's final days" (ie Castro) ; frantically trying to appease a freshly Democrat America. "Now," Mercado observes drolly, "we were supposed to gather evidence and arrest people in the modern manner."

The mystery of Mercado's father's death is resolved easily - perhaps too easily. But it doesn't matter. What matters is Mercado herself, the one-time winner (she tells us proudly) of the Dr Ernesto Guevara Young Poets' prize. It's a pleasure to be around someone so sharp and resourceful, noticing what she notices and feeling what she feels.

Birthday Greetings From Philip Larkin

Tomorrow is Philip Larkin's birthday. He would have been 88 had he not shuffled off this mortal whatsit in 1985. Since his death it's become increasingly apparent that he was England's most important post war poet. I'd go farther and say he was England's most important poet of the entire twentieth century (and that includes some stiff competition). He also wrote Jazz criticism for The Daily Telegraph and two excellent, hard to find novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter. His novels are so good, in fact, and were written when he was so young, that I think he could have been a major British novelist had he stuck at it. But he didn't. He settled for poetry. This is one of my favourites:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

This Coffee Nonsense Has To End

I've been living in Melbourne for a year now and I like the place a lot. The weather's agreeable, the people friendly and the architecture around St Kilda reminds me a little of the South of France. One of the biggest irritations however (and if you're a regular reader of this blog you knew that that sentence was coming) is the coffee situation. In the late 1940's Melbourne had an influx of Italian immigrants who brought their coffee worshipping culture with them. In this schemata drip or filter coffee was verboten and every cup of coffee had to be individually made on an espresso machine. You could of course get an espresso itself but Melburnians became hooked on lattes and cappuccino. Gradually this sophisticated culture spread displacing the old diners and restaurants who sold drip, filter or even instant coffee. Now you can't get American style filter coffee anywhere.

...

Anti Starbucks snobs are probably cheering as they read this and when Starbucks announced that they were closing almost all of their Melburnian outlets it was greeted with rejoicing in the Melbourne Age and even the tabloid Herald. "How dare these Yanks try to impose their weak kneed filter coffee on us when we are light years ahead of them," was the tedious refrain. There are two big problems with this entire grand edifice, however. If you want a standard cup of black coffee in Australia you have to ask for a "long black" which is an espresso shot mixed with hot water. The first issue I have with this is that it tastes like crap. The espresso and the water don't mix properly, it's grainy, either weak or too strong and it's basically inferior in every way to a good cup of filtered coffee (tell this to Australians and they will snort incredulously). The second problem is that it takes fecking forever just to get a bloody cup of coffee. Yesterday I was out for a walk and I dropped in at a busy coffee shop on the water front, I ordered a long black, paid my money, got my change. In the US or UK I would wait for a few seconds and then someone would hand me an excellent freshly brewed cup of black coffee and I would leave. At the Portabella coffee shop however I was informed that it would be a "thirty minute wait" for coffee. Since you have to brew every cup individually and then clean the espresso holder and fire up the machine again, this makes sense. Thirty minutes standing around with sweating, Lycra clad bikers for a crappy cup of joe. I don't think so. I got my money back and left.

...

Australians really need to get over themselves with this coffee nonsense. Drip coffee is fine. It's cheap, fast and really good. Did you ever go to Malaysia? There they make fricking Nescafe with condensed milk - bloody delicious, takes two seconds.Watch 30 Rock sometime, everyone's drinking those blue takeaway cups of New York diner coffee which costs 99 cents - you add sugar, half and half - again, bloody delicious. I'm sorry Australia, I like you, but this cult you've joined has taken you down a bad path, you need an intervention. Just try brewing a big pot of filter coffee in the morning for people in a hurry or who think "long black" tastes like shite - you might be surprised by the results.

...

The picture BTW is Aussie icon Nicole Kidman exiting her local Starbucks in Nashville, Tennessee.

...

Oh and apologies for two beverage posts in a row, won't happen again.

Bud Light Mr President?

If you're not American you may have missed the Gatesgate story (lucky you) so I'll summarise: black Harvard Professor, Henry Louis Gates, locked himself out, broke into his own house, got spotted by a busybody neighbour who called the cops, the cops came, harsh words were exchanged, the cops lured Gates outside and arrested him and then all the charges were dropped. Gates is a friend of President Obama who said that the Cambridge police were "stupid" for arresting him. End of story, right? Wrong. Right wing nuts on the Fox network (who called last year for Candidate Obama to be assassinated and successfully incited the murder of an abortion doctor earlier this year) are now saying that Obama hates all cops and white people. Instead of ignoring this nonsense (Obama of course has a white mother and was raised by his white grandparents) Obama said, look guys lets get together and have a beer: Henry, the cop, me and Joe Biden.

...

They met on Thursday at the White House for this ghastly sounding party and I really couldn't care less about any of it except that it's interesting to learn what they actually drank:

...

First, Joe Biden: Bucklers - a non alcoholic lager. This tells me a lot about JB. Only two types of people drink Bucklers. Designated drivers and alcoholics. Biden has a secret service limo to take him around so it's not the former; could it be the latter? Well, he's working class Irish, he used to drink heavily and he's had a lot of family tragedy. Draw your own conclusions.

...

Second, Dr. Gates: Reports differ on what Henry Louis Gates drank. Some say Red Stripe, others Sam Adams Light. Red Stripe is an awful Jamaican beer which is watery, tasteless, chemically and insipid. There's only one place to drink Red Stripe and that's the beach at Negril when the sun's setting and you are toasted out of your tree on fresh cut gange. Dr Gates may have had a good holiday to Jamaica once but trying to recapture that experience by drinking Red Stripe in America is a huge mistake. Sam Adams Light is the worst beer Sam Adams make. Good company, very bad beer.

...

Third, Police Sergeant James Crowley: Blue Moon Wheat beer. Not a bad choice from Sgt Crowley. Blue Moon wheat isn't as good as their Winter Ale but I've had worse. It's got a slighty lemony flavor and a moderate kick. Good for a summer's day and you could knock back 6 of them and still hold your own with the President.

...

Fourth and last, President Obama: Bud Light. There's a pretty good chance that Bud Light might be the worst beer in America, possibly the world. I had it once at a party and to me it tasted like mild washing up liquid in a glass of coloured water. Beer Rater has no good things to say about Bud Light. They give it a rating of 1.15 and its in zeroth percentile for good beers. Yes, it is that bad. What was Obama thinking? He's a sharp guy with taste and discretion, he can't actually like the stuff. Maybe he was influenced by his good pal George Clooney who, short of a few bucks, shills for Budweiser, doing the voice overs for their commercials? Maybe it's because the company gave to his campaign? Perhaps, but actually I suspect that Obama thinks that drinking Bud Light will make him seem more of a "man of the people" or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. It makes him look like George HW Bush in a supermarket or Sarah Palin in a library - weird and out of place.

...

Life is too short to drink bad beer. Don't do it. Not everyone can get Westvletern (though I did) but if you go to Beer Rater's best of page you'll find something good for you and your pocket and please never drink Bud Light not even when it's to placate the tinfoil heads who watch Fox News.