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Building a callous

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Stuart

There are positives to beating your head against a wall. For one, you build yourself a nice callous, and lord knows they’re handy for Glaswegian kissing. Also, learning to live with a perpetual headache is handy for building your emotional and psychic toughness. And your freaky leathery forehead is a talking point, I guess.

In the mid-90s I spent four years as a bicycle courier, some of that full time in Sydney and some part-time here in Melbourne. I’d come out of University with a powerful lust for this REAL LIFE thing my non-University friends told me I was missing out on. Having moved from Newcastle to Sydney and having no clear path towards making my Arts degree into anything resembling a career, it seemed like a good option at the time.

Even for a ‘look on the bright side’ jackass like me, being a bicycle courier was a miserable, demoralising experience. I took some good things out of it and look back on it with vague fondness, but if I’m honest, Jesus, it sucked enormously at the time.

Bike couriering was hours and hours of boredom and repitition punctuated by moments of great excitement and pants-filling terror. It was hard work for not massive pay. It was quite terrific fun when the sun was shining and there was plenty of work on – two conditions that rarely coalesced. It was wonderfully free of any kind of meaningful responsibility, and at the end of every day I was utterly physically exhausted and grateful I’d survived.

The ‘great excitement’ part of couriering is when you’ve got a big money job on. You’re not a waged employee when you ride. Rather, you get a percentage commission on every job you do. And not all deliveries are created equal: some need to get to where they’re going more quickly than others – some a LOT more quickly – and punters will pay for the privilege. And if you’ve got a dispatcher who knows their shit and you can get a run of high-value jobs together and you get them all there on time…well, it’s very, very exciting. Like, heart-pounding, red light running, bag’s-on-fire, get out my fucking way exciting.

The high-paying jobs are just what you do to make bread and butter. The short term lucrativeness of couriering and how you will build big bank is greatly talked of and mythologised by anyone who’s done a stint, and whilst it’s true that many couriers make some good coin in the day, it wasn’t anything that wasn’t quickly pissed away on dope, beer and bike parts. And though I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs for the years I was riding, I was funnelling my money into re-edumacating myself out of what was clearly a dead-end existence. I know some guys who did alright and got the hell out, but they are the exceptions. For most blokes there was no way out. I still see some of guys I rode with in Melbourne some thirteen years later, and a few of them were old timers when I started.

The ‘pants-filling terror’ part of couriering was just the fact of riding in traffic all day. You’re this slow-moving unprotected little fleshy thing moving amongst steel rhinos who don’t want you there. In Sydney particularly it was a case of fighting for your lane, sometime literally. I had my share of bingles both with and caused by cars, but I had many more near misses that would have left me shaking were I not in such a hurry to get to the next job. Jesus, the close-calls no-one will ever no about and that hopefully one day I’ll forget. Just too many to even think about.

The ‘boredom’ part is everything else that takes up a day, including the people I worked with. The pre-Hipster bike courier scene of the 90s was mostly regular dudes who’d continued on the same developmental arc they’d begun as disinterested 14 year-olds. Sitting around talking shit with chick-obsessed guys about how much money they’re making or how fucked-up they we’re planning to get later on would get kind of old, and when they got too depressing to be around I’d find myself seeking out the quiet places to hang out in the city. Sitting in alleyways shivering or rolling around the oily streets slipping on tram tracks waiting for jobs to appear. Pushing up hills on baking dry heat days, air like a kiln, so you can drop a shitty standard job and collect your $1.40, after tax. Was a strange way to spend your days.

I’m glad for the experiences, and I have a lot to be grateful for as a result of those years. For one, it taught me a work ethic, something I didn’t have when I started. Everyday I mechanically did the same thing: Woke up exhausted and forced myself out the door to do another day’s hard-grind in awful weather for a boss who didn’t give a shit and customers who barely noticed I was there. Lots of people face this in the work they do their entire lives, and the staggering knowledge of that has helped inform my perspective no end.

Physically, I got some pretty good bike fitness out of it. I had a couple of years where I’d ride nine hours a day for the work week and go mountain biking on the weekend, so damn, I was fit on a bicycle, no doubt. No amount of concerted training now could ever get me near that again, but I do have this weird thing where my fundamental level of bike fitness never goes too far away. It seems to work that I get way, way out of shape for some reason and then I get on the bike for a ride and I suffer, but I can do it. And then I seem to recover miraculously overnight and am able to get on a bike the next and do it all again, pretty much feeling no pain. It’s a weird skill, and not one I can think of too many uses for, but it’s something.

The other thing I’m grateful for from those years was growing a skin towards weather. I just don’t see bad weather as an impediment – indeed, sometimes cold and dark and pissing rain is exactly what I feel like. People make comment when I get to work shivering and dripping “Oooh, you’re brave”. But I’m really not. I honestly do not think about it. It’s all just riding to me.

The shadow of those lean, hungry years looms over me now, and it gives me a valuable perspective on how things are for me in my current work life. I ride thirty minutes to work and I sit in a warm office at a comfy desk and do something I’m passionate about that I know makes a positive difference. It’s fucking great. I don’t always love everything about it: some parts of this wonderful, comfortable existence are sucky and boring. But I love that I have some context that helps me understand the relativity.

And I seldom fill my pants in terror these days. At least not at work.

Posted in cycling, worldview | Tagged cycling, endurance, fitness, hardcore, inspiration, work | 1 Comment

Blurgh

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Stuart

Two days flat on my back in bed with some kind of phlegmy, sad, coughing affair. I watched so much quality downloaded American TV that I think I might have gout of the brain.

I watched most of season one of Justified, a series about a modern day Marshall who chases bad guys around Kentucky. It’s got that old time western feel in a modern-day context, and the stories that are told each week don’t follow the easy-to-pick formula of most cop shows. The lead actor, Timothy Olymphant, is very cool, very intense, very handsome, and has the subtle eye-brow raised humour down pat. It’s great TV.

To break up my time with the serious Southern lawman I caught up on 30 Rock, Veep, Parks and Recreation, and when I needed a break from all that I hit up iView and saw most of Agony Uncles. Geez, that’s a fuck-tonne of watching stuff. I could have written, I could have read, I could have done a bunch of things. But all I felt up for was watching teev. So that’s what I did, yo.

My missus’ Helen’s help was invaluable. It had nothing to do with bringing me boxes of tissues or bowls of chicken soup. It was keeping the children occupied so I could sleep and lie around unharrassed. Any kind of time off from my two small boys is like a holiday, snot or no snot, so yeah, it was good to have some space.

Something I was reminded of yet again is that bodies – or mine, at least – are not designed to lay around all day in bed. Two days of not straying far from it and my back felt ruined, my legs sore and stiff, my neck in pain. My lungs felt tiny and sore from the lurgy and the lack of movement, and I’m sure the headache I had was from being trapped in the room with all my own bad air. I love our bed, and it’s in the top three actual physical objects in the world I value, but absence makes the heart grow fonder.

But I hit a wall with this ‘being sick’ business. Last night I considered whether to take a third day off but goddamn it, I couldn’t face another day in the sick room or another minute’s TV. So I turned off the iPad and got up, did some stretching, a got myself ready to come in. And here I am. And I feel better for it.

Posted in home | Tagged family, fitness, health, sick, sleep, teev, tv | 2 Comments

Older, sweeter

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Stuart

Rainy ANZAC Day morning spent at a friend’s house celebrating his son’s sixth birthday. Sugared-up kids going sick in a small space. Brilliant. At the height of the craziness my two year-old Tom yells out “Make more noise!”. Hells yeah, he’s going to be trouble.

My birthday in two days’ time. Forty-freakin’-four. Somehow forty-three still felt vaguely youthful – yeah, right – but there’s no pretending I’m not well and truly middle-aged now. But at least I’ll get a nice piece of cake. And maybe even someone will wheel me into the sun to sit for a while.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged birthday, friends, tom | 1 Comment

Fast as I can

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Stuart

So, tried to take up running. Didn’t work out so good.

Running is a hard, hateful thing and it’s a matter of historical fact that not one person has every actually enjoyed doing it. But as far as time-efficient exercise options go, it’s a winner: You can get smashed in a very, very short amount of time. If you’re keen on some exercise and your schedule is so super-busy that you can’t fit some running in, you should be seriously reconsidering some of your life choices.

But at its core, running is horrible. And if you’re one of them who tells me how much you like it and it comes kind of easy and really it’s your way of communing with nature and it frees your spirit and such, well, I call you a goddamn liar and I will punch your face.

I approach running more through the eyes of a dude who’s been through a divorce and has moved home to live with his parents for a while: Shit is bad, and you’d rather be any place else, but for now you do what you have to do. But hell, Stockholm Syndrome is a thing: like brussell sprouts, vaccuuming, or the music played on commercial FM radio, force enough of something onto yourself and you start to imagine you actually like it.

Last year I got to running regularly, and I fancied I was actually starting to be not so shitty at it. As it does for many 40-something year-old dudes too cash-poor and unimaginative to have a proper mid-life crisis, the word ‘marathon’ entered my mind. I thought that might be something worthwhile, and lo, I started training. And it went well, and I got better at running.

Then one day a little while later, it was all over. That niggling pain I had in my knee just seemed to be getting more niggling, more painful. I went and got it checked out by my osteopath and he made one of his extremely rare ‘this is serious’ faces. He sent me off for an MRI which confirmed his suspicions: excessive wear on the medial meniscus. In plain-speak: my poor knee was showing the signs of overuse and old age. My osteo’s strong recommendation: no more running.

This bummed me out because, goddamn it, I was into it now. I wasn’t naturally very good at it but I’d persevered, built myself a base and had watched myself improve, and I could do fifteen kilometres at a steady clip and finish feeling pretty good, and now goddamn-motherfucker I had to give it all away, just like that.

Or maybe not. The issue with my knee was brought about by the heel-striking style I’d been using. But I’d heard a lot about barefoot running, which requires using the front of the foot for landing and take-off. There’s a growing, somewhat militant movement of barefoot runner’s who contend that the barefoot style of running is a much better way for the human body to move. I asked my osteo and he said “Sure, give it a try. And if it hurts, stop”. So, armed with this, I got hold of a pair of the barefoot shoes – still feels stupid to say that – and had a crack.

And it worked out, sort of. I found I could run short distances on the front of my feet without pain but anything over four kilometres and bad technique led to me to old habits, and I’d end the run plodding and hobbled. So, the long distance thing: not so good. Or rather, not going to happen without a shitload of really focussed attention and work. I’ve run long enough to know that it’s not something I’m so passionate about that I wish to spend that amount of time and dedication on. So I changed tack and started sprinting instead.

Yes, sprinting. Ye olde style full-blast, full-bore, running hard-as-you-can for a short amount of time. And the results have been…well, kind of spectacular.

Every few days I huff on down to the oval and do some flat-out running across the length of the oval. I try a few at moderate speed, a couple at high speed, and a couple as flat-out fast as I can. I’m not an especially heavy dude, and I’ve got that residual running base, so I find I go okay. Plus sprinting really lends itself to the barefoot style: up high and pelting forward at high speed, I’m naturally up on my toes and concentrating on the form.

Old-guy plodding is all very well, but there’s something very pure and fundamental about running as fast as you can until you want to vomit. It’s hard to do, but it feels pretty awesome to run flat-out. Reminds me of when I was a kid, albeit one trapped in the body of a forty-three year-old with a dodgy knee. Taking off at full pelt and getting up to speed you feel like an Olympian. After 15-20 seconds of really pushing the body complains – burning legs, heaving lungs – and you slow down, gasping for breath. Definitely not so Olympian then.

I’m still trying to work out why this isn’t all the rage. I hear a lot about old-guy long-distance running but not so much about sprinting. Maybe I’m doing something foolish? I honestly don’t know. But I figure as long as I don’t try dodging too quickly and rupture a ligament, or have a good old-fashioned heart episode, there’s not so much wrong with running flat-out in a straight line, making like the forebears escaping wild animals.

I might go chill with some FM radio right now.

Posted in running | Tagged endurance, fitness, hardcore, health, running, sprinting | 1 Comment

Wild and wooly: Easter 2012

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Stuart

Back from five days camping in the Grampians, and my, that was some big challenges faced and overcome.

I go camping and climbing with my oldest boy Ned quite a bit – see here, here and here – but this Easter trip was super-special as it was two year-old Tom’s first trip. Given that he is a tantrum-throwing, mischief-making force of fricken nature and will not be contained, this was always going to be something of a mission.

A big part of our success depended on Tom’s comforts being looked after. Thankfully my other co-pilot on this mission was famed reluctant outdoors-person Helen, who managed the essentials like nappies, toys, nutritious food and clean clothes. Of course, she in turn required comforts, but even a chump like me can provide coffee in the morning, red wine at night, and a steady stream of warm hot cross buns throughout the day. We had plenty of other really good people around to share the load and a messy rabble of kids for our boys to run with, so it was hard to go too wrong.

Speaking of rabble: The Easter Egg hunt on Sunday, or ‘Running of the Eggs’, was a hit. It was like the small-person’s version of a gold rush. Such frantic lawlessness, excitement and desperation. Many tiny minds were blown, much chocolate was consumed before a decent breakfast.

I got my own Easter delights in the form of climbing. On Saturday the women-folk took the kids to Halls Gap for mini-golf while me and a good bunch of other crew went to Upper Tribute Wall for a full day of sport climbing. In our group was a laconic Canadian, a chatty and hilarious Horsham local, and an older guy who’s only just started into the rock-climbing racket but was keen to push himself. Good times watching him go for it.

It was one perfect day all to myself, which I’m more grateful for than I can adequately express. I certainly didn’t let a total lack of fitness get in the way of me cranking out some great routes on quality rock. And, with the appreciation of a thirsty man coming out of the desert, I savoured and appreciated every single moment.

The next day I had an afternoon of bouldering, just me and the two boys. I carried Tom up to Andersons bouldering area while Ned walked the whole way and back himself. Couple of nice lads I bumped into shared their mat with me, and while my back was turned Tom climbed his first boulder. That was a surprise. I turned in time to see him halfway up a large rock, following Ned. Boy, did I get up that rock behind him and quick.

There were a couple of things that could have made the trip really shit but, fortunately, turned out okay. For one, the extremes of weather. We pretty much had a taste of everything, but there was a fierce dust storm on Friday afternoon that threatened to derail the whole she-bang. Some of our people decamped to motels in Ararat but the hearty few of us who stuck it out in shaking tents were rewarded with a perfect morning on Saturday. And yea verily, once the meek had returned to camp, much punishment and mocking was laid upon them.

The other shocker was the car situation. On Saturday we woke up to flat tire. No problem, a quick change and we were away for the day. Then, coming home on the public holiday on Monday we got another flat. We hadn’t had a chance to repair our first, and we were in Ararat on a public holiday. We had a frantic 30 minutes of phone calling the RACV and all the local mechanics but there was nothing to do but head to the nearest motel and wait till the tyre shop opened the next day. Suddenly the holiday is in to a weird extra innings but hell, we had the credit card and time on our hands, so we relaxed into it.

There’s not much to do in Ararat on a public holiday, but we made the most of it. We checked out Gum San, the Chinese museum, and it was pretty great. We went to the Salvos’ op-shop and bought-up the board games that had the most pieces intact. We checked out Lardner Bros Bicycles, Locks and Gun shop – Ned took a particular liking to a black semi-automatic he saw – and we ate a pretty wicked meal at the Ararat RSL.

It’s years since I’ve been into an RSL, and for the most part it was a warm, friendly atmosphere. But damn, the poker machine room really did my head in. Tom was getting restless through dinner so I did the responsible thing and took my two year-old into the room for a closer look. Wall-to-wall silver boxes and blinking lights holding tremendous promise of the wealth that could be yours. There were about thirty old people sitting unblinking at their screens, and the place was quiet like an opium den. Fucking sad.

We wandered around for about ten minutes being dazzled by so many bright lights when a barman came by and said. “Geez mate, you can’t have him in here or you’ll get us all shot”. I hustled us out, noting there were no signs saying kids weren’t allowed, and also thinking that none of the old folk had said a goddamn thing about it.

The next day was action stations as I got tires fixed and wheels changed, then it was back to Melbourne. We smiled the whole way, leaving the bright lights of downtown Ararat behind us. A great family holiday.

Posted in climbing, fun | Tagged bouldering, camping, climbing, easter, family, food, friends, fun, Grampians, inspiration | 1 Comment

Purple reign

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Stuart

I’m not immune to the siren call of a new ‘superfood’. I like to tell myself I eat well but there’s no way a few veggies and a multivitamin can make up for the bread, rice, oil and sauces of my weekly baseline diet. Add to that the alcohol, caffeine and sugary things I seem to be constantly treating myself to and, well, as every school teacher who wrote every report card I ever had might say, ‘there’s room for improvement’. So if I see an article about a new food that will let me pack a little bit of good in amongst all the crap I cram down my gullet, then yeah, I’ll investigate.

There’s a lot written about so-called superfoods, and it takes proper research – certainly more than I’m prepared to actually do – to understand what’s shit and what’s shinola. I’ve got some rules-of-thumb: If the latest new saviour is created in a lab or has a massive price tag attached, it’s probably bullshit. But sometimes something’s too scientifically proven, too affordable and makes too much sense to not to fall for. And then it’s up to you to work out if you’re getting value.

Purple carrots are the latest messiah I’ve been looking into. Once upon a time carrots came in all kinds of colours, and the darker coloured ones had all the best nutrients and vitamins in them. For patriotic reasons the Dutch favoured the cultivation of orange carrots over all others, hence the carrots we know today being mostly orange. So when I saw some of these purple bad-boys, all gnarled and nutrient-crammed, hanging out at the local market for the same price, I thought I’d give them a burl.

The articles I read were right about there being no big deal taste-wise: they don’t taste much different to regular carrots. Maybe a little less sweet, but I tend to eat carrots raw or in juice and there’s barely any difference as far as I can tell. But boy, they sure are purple. Like, beetroot intensity, knife-staining purple. I’m not a food racist and I got nothing against the colour purple, so whatever. But woah: quite, quite purple.

Yesterday I cooked up a huge pot of chicken soup using all fresh, all natural ingredients. I thought I’d add some carrots and super-charge that soupy goodness. I figured the purpleness that came out of the carrots when I cut them up might be an issue when it came to cooking so I prepped them separately and then drained and rinsed them really well before adding them to the finished soup, just to be sure.

A few hours later I opened the pot, and lo, I discovered the chink in the armour of this latest superfood: this is a purple that will not be denied. It had stained everything. The chicken and the potato where solidly purple, and even the corn and green beans had gone deep evil-looking purple-black. The soup still smelled amazingly good but it looked completely inedible. It was like something a zombie would vomit. If you went to eat at The Joker’s place, this is what he’d serve. It wasn’t food. It was an abomination.

I presented my creation to the family and tried not to make eye contact. I sat at my soup bowl and forced myself to focus on the smell, not the sight, and started in, enthusiastically praising aloud the taste of my Frankenstinian creation. I glanced up at Helen’s face, which said two things to me very clearly: ‘You’re fucking insane’ and ‘I’m not eating this’.

The Dutch were onto something. I think I can see why purple carrots died out.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged carrots, food, nutrition, purple, super | 5 Comments

Too close for comfort

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Stuart

I’ve always considered zombies a purely fun-time novelty entertainment. Other kinds of monsters are scary as hell, all sentient and intelligent and intent on getting you. Ridley Scott’s ‘Alien’ or John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ or Clive Barker’s ‘Hellraiser’: brilliant, terrifying creations that still give me nightmares. But zombies? Oh please. Lop off their head with a handy machete and down they fall.

The zombies I grew up watching were just not that scary. Putting aside George Romero for a moment, the slow-moving stalkers in the Fangoria-style 80s schlock zombie films were more cheesy and gore-tastic than outright scary. Something about the slow, mindless wandering that made them hard to take seriously. Indeed, zombies are inherently comedic, and there are more great horror-comedy films that do the idea of zombies better than the films that take them seriously. Think of the brilliant and very funny ‘Shawn of the Dead’, ‘Army of Darkness’, ‘Braindead’, ‘Zombieland’ and the all-time modern classic, ‘Zombie Strippers’. That zombies are funny is a no-brainer. ‘Scuse the pun.

When the Danny Boyle film ’28 Days Later’ came out, the zombie genre really revved up, for me at least. Boyle’s 21st Century zombies, the victims of the fast-acting ‘rage virus’ that made infected people instantly devolve into insane, enraged bezerkers, were a truly terrifying change-up. The zombies would RUN at you with the sole desire of tearing you apart. It was the first time the concept of zombies seemed genuinely scary to me, and the thoroughly plausible context – that a lab experiment had got out of control and turned humanity into rage-driven monsters – had just enough verisimilitude to ring true.

It was after ’28 Days Later’ that I went back to George Romero and looked at his work freshly, finally understanding the implications and context of the zombie apocalypse. Quite the wake-up. But still, it’s movies and a bit of a scare, right? All just make-believe.

A few years ago I read Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. Everything changed for me after that. The novel has nothing to do with zombies: the horrors portrayed are all enacted by the living. But the post-apocalyptic setting of the novel laid out a world that had lost order and any sense of a moral compass. Maybe it’s because I was a new father when I read it, but I was jarred into confronting and dealing with McCarthy’s vision of what the post-order world would look like. And I was horrified.

The thing about ‘The Road’ that bothered me, and bothers me still, is that it made me aware of how tenuous is this unspoken contract of ‘society’ we are all party to. That contract – that we will obey the rules, that we will stick largely to what is right, or at least we will while we know we’re being watched – underpins everything. To a large extent we depend on others to do their part so that the fabric of ‘the whole’ stays intact. Law and order and the rule of what’s right is all very good, but I couldn’t get past what ‘The Road’ put to me: a vision of world where something had happened that threw the conventional controls away, took the governors off, and let human nature do what it would do unrestrained.

When I look at the real, actual world around me, I see so many of the threads of what a world without law might be. Riots, road-rage, assaults, opportunistic crime: these things happen all the time, and that’s just when things are going well. When a natural disaster comes along, not long after, so do the looters. When food or petrol runs short even for a few days, how quickly the hoarding begins. The mainstream media pushes an ‘end of days’ narrative – ‘news’ that keeps us fearful is the lucrative kind. Still, bad shit happens, and it’s easy to project and speculate what it would be like if a catastrophe came and took that rule of law away. How soon would you need to think about arming yourself to defend your family?

All of this coalesced for me in the last few weeks as I’ve been escaping real-world horror through a humble TV show: the second series of AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead‘. Killer plague that makes the dead walk, post-apocalypse landscape, the collapse of law, desperate people, defending your family, friend against friend: it’s all come to a head in one package.

‘The Walking Dead’ as a TV show has it’s problems. The acting is not terrific. There’s some physics that’s questionable, everyone’s too good a shot with their hand-guns, and the zombies have often shown up just in time to teach someone a life lesson or despatch a problematic character.

But I’ve been gripped. It feels like the makers of this show have found a way to tap very keenly into my well of anxiety around the very plausible scenario that one day you might wake up to find that whatever it is that keeps us all in line, whatever it is that stops the bad guys from killing and taking what they want, will be gone. And the zombies, finally, seem like the personification and embodiment of all that horrifying death that is waiting once that facade is dropped.

Here’s a scrap of a thing I made a before I found out zombies were scary:

Posted in worldview | Tagged familiy, horror, McCarthy, The Road, tv, walking dead, zombies | 7 Comments

Of beer and justice

Posted on March 5, 2012 by Stuart

I spent last Saturday’s rainy afternoon tucked happily inside a beer hall in East St Kilda with some very good friends drinking very good beer.

The Local Taphouse was decked out in the finest Americana celebrating what was billed as a “Star Spangled Spectapular” – the chance to sample from 20 assorted craft beers from the US on tap. It was a great afternoon in it’s own right, but mostly it was a chance to catch up with some of the most excellent folk I know, Chris, Matt and Simon.

Many topics were discussed at length, but the meat of the day was the behind-the-scenes insights and discussion around the Jim Schembri story that set the internets afire on Thursday and Friday of last week.

You need to read the article to get some context, but essentially Schembri, an infamously catty and unpleasant film critic in Melbourne, compromised his journalist principles by using his position as a journo with The Age to settle some personal scores. He engaged in some clandestine weight-throwing and bullying with members of the public he felt had wronged him on Twitter, privately contacting their employers and trying to get them in trouble. He got caught out doing it, and the articles and attendant ridicule he’s received serve as something of a comeuppance.

Two of the sources mentioned in that article were sitting around that table on Saturday. As a group we’ve been talking about the bullying incidents for months, both the wrongness of it and what might be the best way to address it. Chris told us how he was ready to let it go but Schembri trying to name and shame him publicly like he did made him want to let people know what was going on. So, when he was contacted by Crikey and the opportunity arose, his input to the the article came to be.

Somewhat more personally, Chris talked about his late father, a journalist in Melbourne for 50 years, who he thought a lot about while this was going on. Suffice to say that the Crikey piece feels not only like a vindication, but a kind of tribute to honesty and ethics in journalism.

I have nothing but pride and respect in my friends for how this all broke down. I think it’s terrific when someone doing the wrong thing is caught out and shamed. I think it’s great when a bully is taken down.

Nice follow-up to the main story here, as I published this, a sort of postscript.

Other revelations, observations, asides from the day:

• I’ve been to the States but I never got to try the ‘Classics’ of American food, like Key Lime Pie, Buffalo Wings, traditional Mac and Cheese. I have now. Mac and Cheese is nasty.

• Matty hates Radiohead. He’s listened to me playing all the albums on vinyl and carping on about them forever, but finally, with enough beer in him and in the spirit of honesty and uncovering the truth, he admitted to our group of Radiohead lovers and admirers that he cannot fucking stand Thom Yorke’s voice.

• Captain America enjoys a drink.

We drank a lot of terrific beer and had a many belly-laughs, amongst the serious stuff. It was with a happy, dopey grin I turn my wobbly-booted self toward a taxi and found my way home. I certainly won’t be needing to drink that much beer again for a least a day or two.

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Darwinian

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Stuart

I’ve just finished watching the excellent documentary series Metal Evolution. In eleven one-hour episodes I travelled through the history and stylistic evolution of heavy metal music from the 60s to present day. What a trip.

The series creator, Sam Dunn, made a fantastic 2005 film feature documentary on his love of heavy metal called Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. That film had a graphic in it that showed the family tree of metal. It’s this family tree that the Metal Evolution series spends time exploring, using each episode to focus on a particular movement or sub genre.

I had the best time watching this. I got to see and understand so much about the music I was listening to at various times in my life. I also got a context for what came before the bands and albums I loved so much, and could understand how one style of music became something else. There’s so much muscial history and music that I just didn’t know about.

The first metal I was really exposed to was the hair metal coming out of LA in the early 80s – Poison, Bon Jovi, that kind of stuff. And I hated it. But I didn’t know that at the time there was this reaction to it happening in the form of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) – Iron Maiden, Motorhead and the rest – that some of my friends were into at school but I never was. Now I get it. I also understand what I was responding to when I finally did come around to metal in the early 90s, and what the origins of that music were.

The series is great because Dunn is an anthropologist and an unabashed fan, and he’s looking to really explore and understand the people and the music they created. And he gets to talk to some incredibly interesting and originals: The inventors, innovators and champions, the bad guys and cash-in copy artists, and everyone in between.

Check out the trailer.