Mud opens on the Arkansas stretch of the Mississippi, where two boys just lurching into adolescence, Ellis (an astoundingly good Tye Sheridan, poached from Malick’s Tree of Life and given a chance to be more than a cipher) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), are doing what kids that age will do when their world is comprised of rusting houseboats, truck tray rides and selling fish door to door—they’re sneaking a skiff out to what seems to be a desert island in the river. There, as Neckbone’s uncle and sort-of father figure Galen (Michael Shannon in a refreshingly low key, un-bugeyed role) has told them, is a remarkable thing — a boat, fully intact, high up in the trees, washed there by a storm. As they clamber the branches and jump inside, they find a fully intact, dirt-crusted freeze frame of life on the water. It is a treehouse heaven, stocked with tins of Beanie Weenies and well-thumbed porn magazines.

But the boys are not the only ones to have found this impossible treasure. Somebody else’s life has washed up wrecked on this otherworldly, snake-riddled, bone dry, lush green island, and his name is Mud. Enough has been said over the past couple of years about the remarkable resurgence of Matthew McConaughey, but Mud is his first classic role in this mini renaissance. Like the best of McConaughey characters, he’s equal parts charming and skeezy, and (only once) shirtless, but he’s something else too, a mythical creation of snake tattoos and superstition, a man bound not only by helpless love and devotion, but just as bound by a barely contained violence in his soul. He’s the sort of character only adventuring Mississippi children can discover, and yet as far from a cliche as you could imagine. When Neckbone calls him a bum, he recoils—he’s happy to be a hobo, sure, who works for a living, or homeless, because he is, but a bum he will never be.

Seduced by secrets and adventure, the boys later sneak food out to Mud on the island. He is, of course, a fugitive. He did something stupid, he tells them, and he did it for love. He did a bad thing for a girl called Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), and now he waits there until she can join him, until they can sail far away from their troubles. He has a plan, see, and it involves that boat up in that tree, but if he’s going to find freedom, to liberate Juniper from her DeWitt motel room and sail her to the open seas, he’s going to need the help of these two boys.

As perfect as McConaughey is, as blurry in the borders as his Mud remains, this is really Tye Sheridan’s film. Ellis is a classic creation, a fourteen-year-old who never hesitates to open a conversation with a solid punch to the face. He tackles every threat, regardless of scale, by charging straight at it; bruises can always heal later. On his houseboat home, his parents’ marriage is falling apart, and with it any hope of a future on the river. Senior (Ray McKinnon, as marvellous as he has been in anything since Deadwood) and Mary Lee (Sarah Paulson) are falling victim to the passage of time as their way of life has; their houseboat is sinking under the weight of crumbling pride and dissolving futures. Between Mud, his parents, and May Pearl, the sweet-fringed girl with two first names who is drawing the obsessive attention of his developing heart, Ellis is searching for an idea of what love can mean, or proof that it can mean anything at all. He is not somebody who accepts the defeatist trajectories of the adults around him—if love exists, and it must, then isn’t it worth fighting to the bloody death for?

This will all eventually lead to shootouts and high drama, of course, and Nichols hasn’t shied away from the grand narrative myths he’s invoked. Gangsters, even, show up. This is a film that creeps out of a downbeat indie heritage and goes big, goes Hollywood, and is all the better for it. It’s an adventure, after all. The great Sam Shepard shows up in a small but important role as a man with a mysterious past on the other side of the river (he may even have been a spy!), and I can’t help but wonder if his presence is some kind of seal of approval. But this is ultimately a story about being fourteen, about shaping yourself, learning that adults will let you down, and charging on regardless. Rare is the film that ends with such hope, even as everything that mattered is gone. That’s a tough thing to pull off, much tougher than the cynical or the bleak, and so this is the film in which Jeff Nichols shows that he is, and will be, a great.

• The May 2013 issue of Monocle will feature an eight-page feature by yours truly, as well as some shorter political briefings.
• I’ve been appearing regularly on Monocle 24, across several of their shows. It’s tough to link directly to these, particularly the live crosses for breaking news, but have a rummage through their archives anyway — they’re full of great content. My pre-recorded work has featured on The Stack and The Entrepreneurs.
• Smith Journal have been giving me all kinds of fun projects, including their regular “Things I’ve Learnt” series of interviews with excellent men who have, well, learnt good things. For the last two issues, I’ve had sprawling conversations with that most erudite and angry of restaurant critics, A.A. Gill, and Tim Keck, co-founder of The Onion and the man behind Seattle’s The Stranger. For volume 7, out soon, this interview was with a personal hero — more to follow on that.
• One of my last pieces for Dumbo Feather is one of my favourites – a profile of the force of nature that is Vandana Shiva. Our conversation jumped from quantum physics to food security to childhood discos in Delhi.
• I was asked to guest-edit a Perth-centric edition of your favourite literary journal and mine, The Lifted Brow. This was excellent fun, and I’m really happy with the strange and beautiful beast we produced, full of marvellous non-fiction reporting, very odd fiction, comics, photography and recipes. I’ve posted my editorial comment here, in which I tried to make some sort of sense of what that city means to me, now that I’m far away.
• After more years than I can count, Sam Fox and I finally put the finishing touches on the script for our theatre work Prompter. While we were doing our final edits in a couple of intense weeks of workshopping in February, we also found out that we’d received the Australia Council funding which will enable us to stage it, in August, at a major Melbourne venue. To be announced when they have. Sam’s now in deep development with the actors preparing for that staging.
• I am editing and writing a book to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Engineers Without Borders. This has been another epic project, which will take the form of an oral history, in the voices of hundreds of volunteers, staff members, community partners around the region and others who’ve been directly involved. I’ve been interviewing all of them, and shaping it into a story that makes sense. This will be out later in the year, and it’s been a great adventure learning about the work of the organisation, and meeting some of the excellent people they work with, all of them full of fight and fire.
• Keeping the programming part of my brain fit, I’ve been doing lots of interesting work with the kids at Nazori. One of the main things I’ve been working on (that I can talk about) is a new membership system for Writers Victoria.

Okay, promise, next time I do this, it’ll be leaner and more wieldy. Totally promise. And the next thing I post here will possibly even be more interesting.

As Dr Jonathan Sterne tells it in MP3: The Meaning of a Format, the story of music as we hear it today begins with the cat telephone. It’s 1929, and an unfortunate cat sits in a lab with part of its skull removed. An electrode is attached to its right auditory nerve, and the electrode is, by turn, attached to a vacuum tube amplifier sixty feet of cable and a room of soundproofing away. Ernest Wever and Charles Bray are taking turns to speak into the cat’s ear and listen at the other end. One of them is counting. The other, to his astonishment, can hear it. Fast forward a century, past the rise and fall of the wax cylinder, of the 78, of vinyl, of cassette, of compact disc, to our digital present, where we find the music industry on its knees, with the entirety of modern music never more than a click or a swipe away. In every corner of that vast archive, if you listen very closely, you might just hear that scientist, still counting into the ear of the cat, marking out the beat of the revolution to come.

Sterne teaches at Montreal’s McGill University, treading the turf between the guitar string and the ear, the technologies that come between the music maker and the listener—“stuff that is to audio as cooking is to food,” as he explains it. “It’s all the stuff that happens between the initial moment of recording and the final playback.” In MP3, he unpacks a century-long story, taking us from early experiments in audio transmission at the birth of the telephone to a present where we just don’t know any more what kind of thing music is. MP3 is the three-letter file extension that changed everything, and the story of its genesis is the story of how we listen, how we perceive, and how we share.

“I’m a historian in orientation, if not always a well-behaved historian,” Sterne says. “I originally thought I was going to write a book that started in the sixties and went up to the aughts. But if you say MP3s are part of a history of compression, then you risk doing one of those monumental histories of human civilisation. Why do letters fold? Why do records spin? Why does tape spool?”

So we journey back to the cat telephone—and, more horrifyingly, the apocryphal cat piano of the sixteenth century, made of nails and tails and kitty cat screams—and the early work of the telephone engineers of Bell Labs, testing the limits of human hearing. Through seventy years of psychoacoustics, we arrive in the early 1990s, where labcoated engineers are listening to Billy Joel, Suzanne Vega, Led Zeppelin and Ornette Coleman, rating their annoyance on a scale of one to five. Their annoyance at the compression, that is, not Billy Joel. These are the listening tests that created the sound characteristics at MP3’s core.

“The technology behind the MP3 is called perceptual coding,” he explains, “which is basically the idea that the ear doesn’t hear all the vibrations that a microphone would pick up as sound. If you get rid of those on the encoding end, you make a much smaller file that’s easier to send over the internet, or you can put more of them on your hard drive, or whatever. The thing that fascinated me was that somebody actually tried to code a mathematical model of human hearing into the encoder.”

The internet was always going to detonate the music industry like a neutron bomb, whether it was ready or not, but the staggering ubiquity of the MP3 was not preordained as those engineers were still struggling to shake ‘Tom’s Diner’ out of their head. For years after the format was enshrined in 1991 as Layer 3 of the Moving Picture Experts Group MPEG1 compression standard, it was not the cash-cow its key patent holders, German research organisation Fraunhofer, had hoped for. Nobody seemed to have much interest in licensing such an efficient, processor-intensive format. Until, of course, the hackers came along.

“There were all sorts of experiments in things like portable audio players somewhere between a Walkman and an iPod, and attempts to sell music online,” Sterne recounts. “Basically people tried everything they could. As part of the marketing effort, Fraunhofer released a shareware application which would only encode low quality audio. An Australian hacker got hold of it, cracked it and rereleased it as Thank You Fraunhofer. All of a sudden there was this free online encoder right at the time that people were starting to create these large collections of music files for people to download, like the Internet Underground Music Archive. By 1997, MP3 was a more popular search term than pornography.”

As the industry’s story usually goes, this is where the pirates sail in and destroy the joint, torching the royalties relied on by indie bands and long-retired supergroups alike. But Sterne suggests that what’s really going on here is not users sticking it to the man, or greedy pirates ruining it for everybody. Nothing happens in technology, he suggests, without somebody benefitting.

“You have encoders and decoders licensed in Windows, in Apple and on various kinds of consumer devices, because people are trading MP3s online and they want to be able to play them,” he says. “The massive wave of filesharing gets used as a loss leader to sell computers, soundcards, consumer electronics, and you could even say bandwidth through ISPs. The real story here is that the consumer electronics industry and the ISPS and people like that really benefit from filesharing financially, and if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have made it so easy.”

Today’s music listeners have rapidly shifted from the idea of music as an artefact, to, as Sterne says “a kind of utility”. CDs stack up in boxes in garages, our MP3 folders are being replaced by Spotify and other streaming services, and the audiophiles retreat to vinyl in a last attempt to have something physical to hold on to, to sink into.

“In human history, you tend to think about it from the perspective of the end user,” Sterne says. “When people think of television they think of the box that is the television, or when they think of cinema they think of the movie theatre. For a long time we thought of sound recording in that way, in terms of records or tapes or whatever. The experience of music is very much tied to this much broader social and technical complex in which music making and listening is embedded. What’s interesting now is that the changes are happening above and below the level of what’s perceptible to you as an end user.”

MP3: The Meaning of a Format is published by Duke University Press.

As they spill out of a burnt yellow taxi cab, the light of a hotel entrance ushers the guests in Frank Soltesz’s watercolour nighttime inside. The hotel’s walls are sliced open like an autopsy, its inner workings laid out for forensic examination. In the rooms upstairs, couples dress, pants variously on or off, preparing for the night ahead. A man stands at a bathroom mirror shaving; in the adjoining bedroom, a shadowy figure stares into the distance, pressing against the window as, a few rooms away, conference-goers are subjected to a presentation. Diving down through the ballroom, the restaurant, the kitchen and the meat lockers into the basement, a man sits slumped on a rickety chair near the boiler. He folds his arms, waiting for something to happen. Anything. This is America in 1947. And this, courtesy of your friends at Armstrong’s Industrial Insulations, is an inside look at “How A Modern Hotel Operates”.

At the tail end of the 1940s, the war machine had turned America, a nation still half-stuck in an agrarian mindset, on its head. The depression had given way to freeways and factories. Industry was not the domain of smokestacks and dirty-faced labourers but the shining road towards prosperity and freedom. This was a golden age, too, for advertising and illustration. Quiet masterpieces were created on commission by jobbing illustrators, uncredited paintings destined not for gallery walls but for eventual pulping as magazines passed shelf dates. In the almost-but-not-quite forgotten work of Frank Soltesz, these two worlds combine. Soltesz passed away in 1998 at the age of 93, barely remembered and long retired, but brilliance can be a stubborn thing. Sixty years and more after the fact, his work is re-emerging online, shared amongst a small but growing horde of illustrators and enthusiasts, a new generation seeking information on an almost forgotten man. When Smith tracked down his wife Loretta, now 94, and his youngest daughter Peggy Sue Gildart, we were surprised to find that it was the first time they had been interviewed about his work.

Soltesz was born in rural Pennsylvania to Slovakian immigrants, his father a saddle and harness-maker. His upbringing was humble, his life modest. “He had a good sense of humour and he was kind of soft spoken, kind of quiet,” recalls Peggy Sue. “He never thought that he was a really good artist. He’d say, ‘I should be like the great masters!’ But he was a very religious man, a very quiet, very loving father. He wasn’t the ’eccentric artist’ type. His tastes were very contemporary and tasteful — not weird and excruciatingly different. He was very mild mannered.”

Commissioned by a Madison Avenue Agency on behalf of the Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and appearing in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, Soltesz’s remarkable cutaways tear open the shells of industry monoliths — a brewery, a paper mill, an ice-cream plant, a fish pier, an industrial bakery and an office building. The idea was to show how Armstrong’s Cork and insulation products were used in these settings, but Soltesz took things further. In all 29 of them, he combines an eye for industrial accuracy with a flabbergasting sense for human detail.

In the frozen food plant, where his brief was to explain the modern miracle of quick freezing and the wonder of out-of-season peas, his painting is alive with the rattle of the assembly lines and the rumble of harvesting equipment outside. In the rooms past the rows of pea-green line workers, lonely men in heavy coats and mittens stack boxes high, while outside, itinerant young workers kill time in the empty tray of a truck. In his cutaway of an office building, look beyond the board meetings and elevator conversations upstairs, and find the forgotten folks running around the basement, keeping the mail moving, the pipes pressured, the files sorted. He hasn’t forgotten any of them.

“He was very precise. He’d take hundreds of photos,” says Loretta. “Every single one of them. He went to the Kodak photo factory in New York. He would take pictures of the interior of the buildings so he would get it completely accurate. When he painted them and peeled away the walls it showed all of the details of the insulation, but he always set up things like that so he could work very accurately.”

Beyond the Armstrong cutaways, some of Soltesz’s most distinctive work was for the airline TWA, painting the romance of the jet age in fantasy escapes to Bombay and a meticulously rendered Rome. In the war, he’d avoided conflict by working for an agency drawing planes, propellers and skyscapes for companies like Curtiss Propeller Co, Wright Aeronautical and Fairchild Aircraft. His way around an aircraft fuselage proved handy for his TWA work, where he also managed to sneak in his love for the cutaway, showing pilots and navigators hard at work while the silver craft streak through the sky.

His success as a freelancer allowed him to work out of a studio at home and spend  time with his family. When Patty Sue describes her dad, and Loretta her husband, both return to this point. “Dad always had the radio going; he’d listen to it as he worked. He’d have paper and paints and I would sit there and paint with him,” Patty Sue recalls.

Though precision and realism were high priorities, Frank also found witty ways to be creative. “I remember he did an ad for Curtiss to depict the smoothness of the engine,” says Patty Sue. “He drew two men playing a game of chess. But when he drew that chessboard, he didn’t just draw the pieces, he drew them in such a way that they were two moves from a champion win. He did little things like that in his work, but he was always very, very accurate.”

Frank also regularly painted covers for men’s adventure magazines popular in the 1950s and 1960s. With titles like Stag, Male and Men, they featured high drama tales of intrigue with action and sultry ladies aplenty. Even working on such lurid publications, Frank’s obsessive desire for realism was never far away. Patty Sue recalls one painting for a magazine called Men. “It’s a diver in a diving helmet and he’s got a knife and he’s being attacked by a giant octopus. When Dad submitted the original drawing there was no blood, because octopuses don’t bleed. They sent it back and said, ‘We need to see blood.’ He said, ‘But octopuses don’t bleed,’ and they said, ‘That’s alright we need blood.’ So he had to put the blood in there and it really disturbed him. He did not like the fact that the octopus was bleeding.”

The commercial imperative for Soltesz’s meticulous craft could not last forever, and inevitably advertisers turned to photography and more modern styles than were his strength. Later in life when his eyes started to fail, he shifted his attention from industrial precision to fine art. He started to paint with transparent watercolours, creating picturesque scenes from family holidays around the States. “He loved the outdoors,” says Loretta. “And he loved sports: skiing, ice-skating, cycling, hiking, camping and anything that took him outside. He loved the scenery and he loved being around it.”

Towards the end of the ’60s, he found most of his remaining work was in greeting cards, specifically for the Red Farm Christmas Card Company. But even that couldn’t last forever. “The man he worked for paid him very well and always had the top of the line,” Loretta explains. “When this man passed away, his son in law took over. Frank, as usual, sent the sketches he had drawn for the Christmas cards, and he didn’t hear from these people, so he called them and asked them what sketches they’d like him to do and the man said, ‘None of them.’ He didn’t want to pay Frank what his father in law had paid him. And Frank said, ‘My work isn’t wanted anymore’. It just about killed him.”

In 1974 came one of his proudest moments, becoming accredited as an active member of the American Watercolor Society. “He became a fine artist,” Loretta says. “He wanted to give up the commercial work because it was so precise and the colours had to be so harsh and he wanted to have a looser technique, so he studied water colour from people different people who he admired and who had more experience.”

These days, Soltesz’s cutaways and airplanes and angry octopii are shared on blogs and Flickr sets by a new generation of enthusiasts, many graphic designers and art professionals among them. To this writer’s eye, you might even see a hint of them in Wes Anderson’s busy cutaways of boat life in The Life Aquatic, or the elaborate underground burrow world of Fantastic Mr Fox. At the time, Armstrong would provide a complimentary print of the cutaways to anybody who wrote in for one, but these days, short of a few ripped out magazine pages circulating on eBay, they’re tough to come by. “I have about 40 paintings hanging in my house and the kids all have them and my grandchildren all have some,” Loretta says. “He sold a lot but we regretted it.” When asked to choose a favourite, she couldn’t pick. “They are all special.”

Paul C Mawhinney has pulled out a stack of records to talk about, beginning with his self-described theme, John Miles’ ‘Music’ (London, 5N-20086). “Music was my first love, and it will be my last,” bellows a one-hit wonder Brit from the mid 1970s. “When you listen to the song,” Paul says, “it’s my life. I get tears in my eyes every time I listen to this song. I’m serious.”

Paul is 72 years old. He has diabetes. He is legally blind. Down at his old warehouse, his life’s work, what has been called the world’s largest record collection, is being packed into boxes. It began with Frankie Laine’s ‘Jezebel’, and after not too long, the one-time travelling paper salesman found himself in a new, and self-declared, profession—archivist of the American bandstand. At this end of his life, after shedding bits and pieces over the years to put food on the table, the collection stands at about one million 45s, perhaps quarter of a million albums. To catalogue a record, he lays it under a camera, blowing it up sixty times larger on a special screen, where he can make out the details of composers, catalogue numbers, and labels that passed through history without the internet writing them down. He types all of these into the same database he’s been using for decades. Two letter codes: “XM” for Christmas songs, “PA” for Pittsburgh.

“If you put a name like Elvis in this database,” he says, “I’ve got 1,170 titles. Just to give you an idea of how deep this thing goes. Sometimes you might get ten pressings of the same song by the same artist. They released over and over with different numbers. I’ve got them all.”

After Frankie Laine and Elvis, the young Paul’s musical interests were led by the unfamiliar sounds of black America coming in over the Pittsburgh radio. “I was into the King and Federal and Deluxe labels, all the doo wops.” He was a sucker for the drinking songs that formed the foundation of early rock and roll, like Sticks McGhee’s ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-dee-o-dee’, a searing jump-blues footstomper later recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis. By 1968 he had accumulated 160,000 records in his home basement.  “I had little aisles around the laundry tubs and the washer and dryer,” he says. “My wife Collette told me, you’ve got to get that stuff the hell out of the cellar, we can’t even move down there any more.” She told him to open up a record store, and she told him what to call it. “Record-Rama.”

“I got my first store for thirty-five bucks a month,” he says. “You should have seen that place. I used to be able to get scrap carpet for nothing, so I just made the whole floor from little pieces of carpet all glued together. I had one room painted totally black with purple day-glo lights in there, and fluorescent posters.”

Over the next four decades, across multiple locations, Record-Rama kept Paul and Pittsburgh in records. By the time it shuttered in 2008, driven out of business by the march of time, it lived in a 16,000 square-foot warehouse. Paul has spent what he figures could be close to a million dollars on records over the years, buying up trailers and train-cars full, and what remains still lives in the back half of Record-Rama’s final resting place.

He’s been trying to sell it all for years. Problem is, the world stopped caring. Some people wanted some of it; he would only sell all of it. About five years ago, there was a brief frenzy as he tried to sell it on eBay. The winning bidder (at three million dollars) punked out. His life story is strewn with tales of the people who’ve let him down, from David Bowie’s American labelmasters at RCA (who he claims never gave him credit for drawing ‘Space Oddity’ to their attention from the basement where it gathered dust, a neglected soon-to-be hit) through to Tom Hanks, who he helped out with the soundtrack for That Thing You Do, to be recompensed only with an autographed picture. Only weeks ago, another potential new buyer let him down after he had everything boxed up and ready to go.

From the archives, he pulls out the El Reys, John Harrison and the Hustlers, and The Vibra-sonics—Pittsburgh groups that went nowhere but his shelves. As he digs through the collection, historical gems emerge. Take, for instance, the one and only release from California four-piece The Survivors, ‘Pamela Jean’/‘After the Game’ from 1964. The lead vocal, he points out, is the work of Brian Wilson, head genius of the Beach Boys. This is a legendary rarity, also written and arranged by Wilson, backed by three other friends. “The last time I looked it up,” he says, “it was listed for $1,000.”

Amongst those 1,170 Elvis titles, Paul has a few treasures. One prize is ‘Joshua Fit the Battle’, an early promo from RCA, never commercially released. “As a promo with a picture cover, they’re worth $400 to $600 a piece,” he says. Going back even further, we find the King’s first five 45s on the Sun label. As a set, he thinks they could fetch up to $36,000.

Skipping past a mountain of Rolling Stones rarities, we end up on the other end of the spectrum, with a rare ZZ Top cut from 1970, ‘Miller’s Farm’. “In one of those big loads I used to buy, a hundred thousand at a time, there was a hundred-count box of these on a label called Scat. It has a cat jumping out of a garbage can. That’s my favourite label because it’s so beautiful. I only have three left, and they are worth $200 a piece.”

When asked what the one record would be that he would never give up, he has little hesitation. “The most released non-hit record in history,” he says. ‘Let Me Love You’, by George Goodman and the Headliners. Unless you’re a seriously bad-ass Northern Soul aficionado, or a Pittsburgh old-timer, you’ve likely never heard it. But the first time you hear its eerie backing vocal descend from another planet and cut through its doo-wop skin, you’ll get it. His fascination with the track started in the mid-1970s, when he discovered five separate pressings spanned across a decade. The song having possessed him so completely, he bought the rights.

‘Let Me Love You’ was first recorded by George Salovich, a vice-president at Atlantic Records, under the name Jeannie Salo. It was cut at a local business where you could record in the front room and press a few hundred at the back. After Goodman leased the rights in 1964, cutting a new vocal, the song lurched, over five years, from major label to minor, hitting number two in Pittsburgh and Baltimore, and bombing out twice, disastrously, on the national stage. Goodman never had another release, and after its final stab at national success, with ‘I’m So Tired’ on the flip, fizzled, he moved to New York, where he took his own life.

“I’ve tried to get a picture of him my whole life, and I still have not acquired one,” Paul says. “It’s a wonderful record. It wraps you up, and you get stuck in. I kept seeing the damn thing come up on different labels with different numbers, and I thought, this is ridiculous, I’ve got to find this thing and find out what the hell’s going on. I looked up Augie Bernardo, an old Pittsburgh label guy who owned the rights, and asked, would you like to sell that to me? He said, ‘Hell, yeah, I’m out of the business, I bought a flower shop.’ So he sold me everything, lock, stock and barrel.

“I knew these guys were in poor health, all these guys that had owned labels in the fifties and sixties, and I started going around and buying them up. I’d never let these go. I’m going to pass them on to my children. I think that some day the world’s going to realise what an important record this was.”

Meanwhile, Paul’s slowly fixing for retirement. Having all but given up on finding a cash buyer, he now hopes to donate the entire collection to the Library of Congress, in exchange for a modest retirement income. They’re tearing down the shelves in the old store now. Dropping plastic sheets over the boxes. When the Library ship out the boxes, as he’s sure they will, he and Collette will shut down the database computers one last time and head back out onto the road, travelling the world like they used to. Back when people bought records, and you could make a good living selling them.

“I’m a little bit crippled and I’m a little bit blind,” he says. “But my wife does the driving and I can see enough to get into trouble, believe me.”

“This old crone has claws. One has to yield, or else. We would have to set fire to it on two sides, at the Vyšehrad and at the Hradčany; then it would be possible for us to get away.” — Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak

“Well nothing happens here. Not too much gets done. But you get to like it. You get to like the drinking and the swimming around.”
 — The Triffids, ‘Bottle of Love’

We arrived here, like we arrived everywhere: for the time being. Until the next stop. We rode the coast down from Darwin, as we had ridden the skies before from Scotland, and from Canada before that. On the tarmac at Broome, our dog howled for us from the cargo hold, left on his side in his cage. There weren’t direct flights back then. You arrived in Perth by increment.

We arrived and the suburbs sprawled. There were beaches, there were unfamiliar trees. There was the light. This piercing, blistering thing that reshaped your eyes. You forgot about it after a while. People would come to visit from the East and shrink from the sun’s attack. We presumed, like we presumed they knew how to swim through an oncoming wave, that they knew how to squint when under our sky. And we would look at them afterwards on the sand, their knees scraped red, their mouths spitting out water. And we’d say, Welcome to Perth, and we’d laugh, and we’d help them pick the grit from the graze.

When the boom boomed, it boomed long and loud. It came, like all of these things do, when we weren’t ready for it. The cranes went up and our rents went up and the flights out of town became more frequent, though always loaded with fly-in-fly-outs still inexplicably in their high-viz gear, as if their presence required warning. The cracks in our walls first appeared when they gouged the tunnel underneath. Soon our houses were half-slumped into the ground, held together with Polyfilla and Blu-tac.

We used to say we’d never get broken into, because why would the junkies break into houses on their own block? And then the burnt-out car a street over became a BMW and we’d skulk out at night to a bar with no stage, and we’d watch friends fuck up and pour feedback into the ears of locals playing dollar pool, and then two dollar pool, and then four dollar pool, and then no pool, and no bands. We’d watch over Northbridge from the balcony. The screams and the vomits and the collars turning upwards. We’d watch the arrest tents go up on New Year’s Eve in Russell Square and the posters go up outside the clubs, warning about one-punch deaths. The snaking lines and the breathalysers and the fingerprint scanners and the metal detectors: we walked past them all on the way home, trying to make eye contact with nobody. In the morning we’d clear the bottles from our front yard and wonder at the type of person who could afford to throw a half-full bottle of Maker’s Mark at a house. We’d hear of the master plans for growth, for renewal, and we’d wonder where we fitted in.

We’d get pissed off when people who weren’t here talked about ‘isolation’. We’d say it was cheaper to live here so we could get more done. And then it wasn’t cheaper, but we still got more done. Every year, just after February — because who would leave Perth in February — the planes would come and take a new batch of us away, most of us to Carlton North or North Melbourne, where the departed were all waiting. The traditional greeting was two pronged: It’s a pot here, not a middie, and, What took you so long?

The thing about isolation is that it doesn’t really exist anymore. We didn’t grow up isolated. Maybe they did, the ones we read, the ones we listened to, the ones at whose work we gazed: the writers and musicians and artists that came before us. But we didn’t. The Noongar people grew up isolated. They still are. But isolation is mining towns and endless stretches of desert, not a red-eye and a few hundred bucks out of your bank account. There was no bullshit about something in the water. We had a canvas we could paint on here, and we had pretty sweet arts funding too. We would stare at each other over the top of our too-expensive pints and talk about building things. Occasionally, we’d build them. We said if we built enough, people might stay. On those nights in those bars, and on those stages and screens, and eating burgers with cops around the fire at Alfred’s, we’d stop talking about getting out and ask, Why wouldn’t people stay? Where else would you be?

We left Perth by increment. We intended to leave. Next year, maybe, but we’ve still got stuff to do. One day, it seemed, we were washing graffiti off the Northbridge mosque after watching the towers fall. And then we were all on the porch by the park, watching Howard gazump Latham, us declaring an independent state. And then we were on the same porch in our Kevin07 shirts, glad that our secession was never formalised. Next year, maybe, but we’ve still got stuff to do. And then we were standing on the cliffs at Blackwall Reach, lovers below in the water, screaming, Jump!, friends beside wondering whether it was really deep enough down there. And then we jumped, though we’d never leapt off a cliff before, and we smacked the water hard because we didn’t know how else to do it, and then the Swan was all around us, its postcard blue stinking like fetid river water will when it’s rushing up your nose. We got back to the surface and looked up. A child stood gripped with terror on the lowest ledge of the cliff, a man — his father maybe — down here next to us, yelling at him to be a man. Above him, teenagers, throwing each other off without warning. Arms flailing as they hurtled down to us. And still our friends at the top, and us, twenty and thirtysomethings, screaming, Jump! And above that the sky, bright as it ever was.

When it came time to leave we had to do it by road. To make it feel like there was distance where there wasn’t. Loading life into the car and driving out through the woods of the South West, camping on football ovals and keeping on into the desert, keeping on until we could escape that sky with its particular light. We’d wonder if we were failures for leaving, for giving in. Mouthing the phrase pot of beer repeatedly. Getting ready. Getting the playlist right. Making sure The Triffids would kick in just past the Vincent Street on-ramp. Trying to feel how it must have felt, back then, when we really were isolated. And then we arrived in Melbourne, and we showered, and they all said, What took you so long? and it was like that bit at the end of Lost where every character is gathered in the same church. And we remembered how much we didn’t like that ending.

When we came back, by plane, by direct flight, we’d forgotten how to look at the sky. We shielded our eyes like outsiders. And we saw a city that hadn’t stopped when we left. The gigs were different and the bars were different, but it was still Perth, and it was still February, and there may have been sharks at the beach but don’t you just want to jump in anyway? Just strip off all your clothes and jump in? The sharks don’t feed at night. We’re still pretty sure about that.

This wasn’t our city anymore, because different imaginations were holding it together. Still building things. Better things. Things on top of the things we built. And why would they leave? You do remember how to swim through a wave, don’t you?

“A groovy scene in Australia,
I will move
Take my surfboard
Maybe I’ll groove
Noise addicts and other folks, oh yeah!”
 — Pavement, ‘I Love Perth’

There’s a Canadian film from a few years back about a competition to discover the saddest music in the world. I’ve thought many times that if that competition truly existed, we’d soon enough find the English composer Richard Skelton trudging down from the hills to ask politely for an entry form. To hear his music is to stumble upon the secret sounds of an ancient forest. It is sparse, built on bowed strings, guitar and the occasional hint of a piano. If you listen closely, you’ll hear the sound of birds, of leaves drawn against wire, of the mud of the English moors underfoot. It is music to turn up, in an empty house, and be transported in your bodily entirety to worlds long lost, but perhaps to come again.

For many years, Richard was a mysterious musical figure to me. His music was never released under his own name, rather under a series of pseudonyms, such as ‘A Broken Consort’, ‘Clouwbeck’ and ‘Riftmusic’. He only began to seriously release music in 2005, following the passing of his wife Louise, a mixed-media artist who left behind a legacy of artwork in sketchbooks and folders. In tribute, and as a way of working through his grief, Richard began a private press called Sustain-Release, which would issue limited handmade editions of his music, accompanied by her work. These beautiful packages are gifts that reach out across the world, not just with hand-pressed CDs and notes but with fragments and found objects from the land itself.

Sadness is not an end. It is part of a cycle, as with the seasons of nature. While he continues to issue his own work, Richard has also been championed by some of the most innovative record labels I’ve come across, such as Australia’s Preservation Records, New York’s Tompkins Square and the pioneering British label Type. His most deeply personal project, Landings, was created over four years of meticulous archaeology on the Anglezarke moors of his youth, documenting and calling out to the things that once existed but are now lost.

Last year, Richard married again. He and his wife Autumn have spent a year and a half on a stunning new work called Wolf Notes (released under the name *AR), which took them to an entirely different landscape.

Our conversations began with a handmade copy of that album received in the post, and continued over cross-world Skype and subsequent emails. Throughout, Richard’s kindness and deep sense of giving continued to astound me. He’s far from home now, living quietly with Autumn on the west coast of Ireland, surrounded not by endless countryside, but by roadworks and traffic lights.

“I see music as life affirming and life-giving. It’s energy, but somehow it’s viscous and physical.”

What brought you out to the west coast of Ireland?

I don’t know if you’ve heard of a place called the Burren? I think it means ‘stony place’ or ‘rocky place’ in Irish. It’s an area of exposed limestone with beautiful hills that are grey and skeletal. It’s an absolutely spectacular landscape to witness. Autumn and I had been here quite a few times before we met, and one of the things that we initially bonded over was our experience of this landscape. We met in England and our relationship flourished there, but after we got married last March, we both decided that we’d like to visit the Burren and experience it together.

You’ve just released a collaborative album with Autumn―tell me about the landscape that inspired that.

Wolf Notes took about 18 months to make, six months of which we spent living in the environment that it was written about, which is the uplands of Cumbria in northern England. It’s about the landscape around Ulpha, which is an old Norse word that I think originally meant ‘wolf hill’ or ‘wolf grave-mound’.

During our time there—and through our research—we slowly came to appreciate the loss of the landscape; the loss of flora and fauna; the loss of wolves, foxes, deer and all kinds of other animals and plant life. At the time that the Norse people would have called it Ulpha, there would have been a lot more trees, but the landscape now appears quite barren. It’s still a beautiful landscape, and it’s really rich in a different way—rich with grasses and a different ecosystem—but we were interested in what had gone before, and maybe what will come again in another thousand years. Wolf Notes is about looking into the lifecycle of an environment and seeing how it’s changed, to memorialise it and to express sadness about the loss of certain things, but also to hint at a possibility that these things will come again—that it’s part of a cycle.

That’s something I’ve found in your music. Ideas of loss and change and decay are very clear themes, but it’s never hopeless, there’s always a sense of renewal in the your compositions.

That’s important. Even if you’re creating something that is filled with despair, you’re still creating something, so you’re being positive in making that creative statement, even if it’s one that’s completely desperate. But that’s not been my desire. I’ve not been wanting to despair, I’ve been wanting to acknowledge pain and loss, but very much to connect that with a larger process of renewal, within seasonal changes, and to align my own experiences with those of the natural world.

That’s been my process over the past couple of years, to try to connect with something that’s larger than myself, so I could come to terms with my very small changes and my very small experiences of loss and bereavement. I’m glad you picked up on that, because it’s really important to me.

That process, of connecting yourself and what you’ve been through to the larger stories of the land, is most apparent in the Landings project—you spent four years working on what became a book and an album. What drew you to spend so long, deep in the Anglezarke landscape, one you’ve previously said just doesn’t look that interesting?

It started out with me visiting the landscape around my hometown, which is situated not far from the foothills of the West Pennines in northern England. It was the process of coming home and trying to reconnect with a landscape that I’d left behind. Not that I’d gone very far, certainly not as far as you’ve gone, but I had the sensation of revisiting a landscape, seeing it with fresh eyes, and trying to connect with my former self as well. So I started writing at the same time as making music. The book is elliptical and oblique in a way, it’s not a straightforward ‘this is what I did and this is why I did it’. It’s a series of diary entries, and some of them are quite personal, and some of them are more impressionistic. Sometimes I would just make lists of words that resonated somehow, or fragmentary observations about the landscape and its natural inhabitants. One of the things that is perhaps not apparent in the music, is that I connected with the landscape through discovering that it isn’t a wilderness. The moors bear the scars of humanity over centuries. It’s quite a sullied landscape in many respects. There are these vast reservoirs that were built to service the growing populations of towns like Liverpool and Manchester, but in building them they flooded valleys and in many cases it resulted in the expulsion of the people who had previously lived there. People were urged to move out of a farming way of life and to go and live in the towns and cities instead.

So Landings, in a way, is my own personal story, but it’s also the story of a rural exodus, the depopulation of this landscape over the past couple of centuries. What’s left behind are the crumbling ruins of farmhouses that you find dotted across the moor, and it’s really quite an overpowering sensation when you come across these places. There’s such a sense of pathos about them. That’s one of the things I immediately connected with. Partly because when I visited them, I was deep in the throes of grief, so when you find something that seems to symbolise that loss, you’re strongly magnetised by it.

There’s a song on Landings called ‘Scar Tissue’, which was recorded in one such ruined farmhouse, with my guitar and a portable recording device. In the book I say “to pour sound between wood and stone, like rain on an April morning”. I wanted to express the idea of trying to fill this place with life. I see music as life affirming and life-giving. It’s energy, but somehow it’s viscous and physical. Just by simply plucking a string, you can generate that energy, so I would feel a real sense of meaning in these simple gestures―by going and sitting in one of these ruined dwellings, really early in the morning, and playing music. In ‘Scar Tissue’, you can hear the sound of curlews―they’re the birds that come and nest on the moors in March and April―and they weren’t too happy about me going in there. You can hear them in the background, wailing, saying “who’s this intruder?”

Shut up! Stop drawing out history with your strings!

Exactly! Just leave us alone so we can do our thing. So that’s another undercurrent in the book―feeling in some respects like an intruder in some of these places, feeling like I’m actually upsetting a really delicate balance.

There was a line I really liked in a review describing what you did as a “collaboration” with the land, which I suppose is a different way to look at that.

Definitely. It didn’t feel one-way. In many respects, I felt that I was a receiver ―that I was giving the landscape an opportunity to be heard. Simple gestures can be quite powerful. It could just be a case of picking up something like a loose bit of wood, a stone or feather, and integrating that in some way into the music. You can use it as a plectrum, you can rest it on the strings, or create different sounds in the way that it interacts with an instrument. More generally, the place itself is going to impress itself on the recording―even if it’s very subtle, it’s going to leave an acoustic trace. The whole process was about trying to find a meaningful connection with the landscape―so, ultimately, even if those actions weren’t audible, they were meaningful gestures for me. It was about trying to create meaning through action, and discovering the redemptive qualities of private gestures.

You talk about the recordings bringing that sense of the land in, but it seems to work both ways. When you play in those spaces, there’s something of the music that goes into that land, and perhaps there’s something of the music and of the space that work on you?

Often I would make a recording somewhere, and then the next time I would go out and visit a place I would take the recording with me and ‘return it’ to the land. In the book I talk about a place called Noon Hill Wood, and replaying the music I recorded there, so that the wood can listen to itself. It’s about reactivating a moment within a particular place, and creating a bridge between the past and present. Going back to the farmhouses, one of the things that creates that sense of pathos is their isolation. These dwellings are out there on the moors and there’s no sense of connection with anything else. No sense of community. So I would make a recording in one particular ruin and play that recording in another ruin, a mile away. All the while I would be able to see the first ruin, just on the brow of a hill, and by hearing the sounds that I’d made there, I would feel a sense of connection between the two.

In a sense, Landings was about trying to reconnect all of these places that had once been connected by footsteps. People would walk between one farmhouse and another and there would be a sense of community that now is completely lost, so it was about trying to create a web of connections through these simple gestures. I would sometimes simply pick up a stone from one ruin and walk across to another and deposit it there, and then take another stone back across to the first, so that those two places were then connected in my mind. To anyone else they’re still the same, but for me they’re now completely different places―two places that are joined together. It’s gestures and rituals like these that are important for me in trying to overcome a sense of isolation, not only a personal one, but also one that I see in the world.

I wanted to talk about how the musical expression came about. You’re quite self-deprecating about your own musical ability, but has it always been a natural instinct to need to play that music in these spaces, or is that something that’s developed later?

I think it’s something that has developed, slowly, over the past half-decade. Sustain-Release began as a way of commemorating the passing of my wife, Louise, and of celebrating her own life and creativity. She was a mixed-media artist, and we worked on something together which became Heidika—a limited edition of music and artwork, in 2000, or 2001. We sent it to John Peel, the Radio One DJ, who played it on his show. We put about a hundred packages together with a little three-inch CD, and we’d give them away to anyone who wanted them. Within six hours of him playing it, we’d had two or three hundred emails. We sent them all out, and that was that. Louise died in 2004, and I returned home to live with my parents and tried to come to terms with what had happened. A year later, I decided that the best way I could honour her memory was to continue what we had started, and to take it onwards in a meaningful way. She’d left me lots of artwork in various sketchbooks and folders, so I began a process of looking through them, and making music again.

The first release was under the same name, Heidika. I made 50 copies and I sent it out, and that was the beginning of Sustain-Release. Now, just as we’re speaking, I’m putting together a 20-CD box set of my complete recordings.

The works that you’ve put out on Sustain-Release over the years continue to be a collaboration with Louise, don’t they?

That was the whole point of it. I get asked quite a lot why I use pseudonyms and not my own name, and it’s quite difficult to explain. When I started Sustain-Release, I very much wanted to give equal importance to the artwork, so one of the ways I thought of doing that was to use a pseudonym—something that could refer to more than one person. I didn’t want it to just be about me. I also wanted the name to somehow encapsulate the music and artwork. So why not change it, if it felt right, with each new work? Similarly, at one stage I actually made a unique print of Louise’s work for every customer—each one was subtly different. It was incredibly time-consuming and ultimately unsustainable, but it felt like a meaningful thing to do.

But when you did come to release stuff under your own name, on the amazing Australian label Preservation, was that your decision, or their encouragement?

Up until that point, everything that I’d done, I’d more or less had a different name for every release. It was a way of trying to keep an inner ethic to the work, and to stay true to an idea, and I wanted to preserve that and keep it going with the material I published through Sustain-Release. So when Preservation contacted me, it felt right to do something different. I could have come up with another name, but it seemed appropriate to use my own. I think it was something Preservation wanted as well. I can understand it from their point of view—they saw my name as the connecting thread throughout my previous work, so it would make sense for them to put something out that had a history to it. By that point it was late 2007, early 2008, and my own name, whether I liked it or not, was becoming more well-known and more associated with just the music. Preservation also had their own very strong visual identity—and so they provided the artwork and packaging design of the release. In a sense, therefore, I was standing on my own for the first time, and it seemed appropriate to use my own name. Back with Sustain-Release, I’ve carried on using the various guises, and it’s only really with Landings that I’ve used my own name again. I think the only reason I did that was because it’s such personal recording. The Landings book is my own reflections on the landscape, so it made sense to put the music out under my own name too. Since then, I’ve reverted to using pseudonyms again.

Quite a few people have thought that *AR is our initials, Autumn and Richard. I think it’s nice that it could be interpreted that way, but it’s actually a really old place-name element that you find in certain river names. That hits to the heart of what Wolf Notes is about, which is place-names, and the way that different communities and different peoples have connected with landscape through the power of the name-giving gesture, and how those names have become a legacy, and how we still use them even though we often have lost the meaning behind them. They just become signifiers of nothing.

With Wolf Notes and generally with the work you’re doing now, how have you found that bringing a collaboration with Autumn into your musical work is changing or growing what you do?

I’ve not really collaborated with anyone before. I’ve done a remix or two, and I’ve contributed some material that Rutger Zuydervelt of Machinefabriek turned into a piece. They were as collaborative as it’s possible to be, these days. It’s often a postal thing—you send off your bits and pieces and somebody else does something with them. It’s great that somebody would take the time and effort to do something with your material, but Autumn and I collaborated by actually going and living in a landscape for six months. We collaborated by living together, experiencing and writing about that shared time. I’ve never been able to do that before, so it’s been something of a revelation to me.

Up until that point I’d been very much working on my own, and you have to get used to trusting your own judgements. Let’s face it, we all make dubious decisions on our own, from time to time. So working with somebody else whose opinion I really value is good because we can discuss and refine ideas, we can reject them, we can be completely brutal in one respect and say “this doesn’t work”. The great thing is that there’s a complete lack of ego in all of this. When collaborating with somebody who you don’t really know, you might have a certain guardedness, a sense of self-protection and even competitiveness, because you’re working with somebody else and you want to do as well as you can. But with the work that Autumn and I do together, it’s not about that. It’s about putting personality and ego completely out of the frame and just letting the inspiration take the centrestage, to try and be the best possible conduit for the landscape speak through.

When we’ve got all this creative material in front of us, it’s then a case of whittling it down to what we feel works the best, and then it’s not a case of “I did this bit and you did that bit, and this bit’s better than that bit”, it’s just a case of what works and what doesn’t. Musically it’s been completely different, it’s been an education, because it’s about learning to be sensitive to somebody else’s creativity and the way that they create music and express themselves. Before we worked on Wolf Notes together, we worked on Autumn’s record, which is called Stray Birds. It’s a collection of her songs that she’d written over the space of quite a few years and honed them and got them to a state where they were pretty much perfect as far as I could see it. She asked me to add some arrangements to them, and, if it were up to me, I would have just left them, like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. It would have just been voice and guitar. But she wanted me to contribute, so it was a case of listening to them for a long time, finding my way into them, almost like a landscape, trying to find a path that was not in any way treading over what was already there before, and to accentuate and bring out the beauty in it. I learnt a lot musically, because I was working with songs, not compositions. Most of my compositions are quite linear, in a musical fashion, there’re no great key changes or chord changes, it’s very much about building layers of discrete musical figures and themes, to create a sound world, whereas with songs, you have to start paying attention to the lyrics, the phrasing, the changes and the tempo. It’s something completely different and I honestly didn’t think I was equal to it. It took quite a few months of coming up with a new musical vocabulary.

With Wolf Notes, we discovered a little holiday cottage high on the fells, situated right in the middle of the landscape that fascinated us. We simply thought that it was meant to be, and we scraped together all the money that we could and went to stay there. We took all our recording equipment and instruments and spent a good while just working together. It was a case of pooling our resources, seeing what melodies and ideas came. Autumn said to me, “my voice, in this context, is an instrument, and it should be like an instrument.” The human voice in many respects is the most expressive instrument you can have. Her voice appears very much like one of the violin melodies in Landings, it’s a repeated refrain that is woven throughout the composition. In that way it’s consistent with what I’ve been doing before musically, but I think listening to it is a completely different experience, because the human voice does have that power to magnetise us, and to draw us in, in a way that purely instrumental music can’t. I talk about Wolf Notes trying to give voice to the landscape, to give voice to what we feel has been lost in the land, so in a sense that’s what Autumn’s voice is doing in there, it’s hopefully quite a powerful thing.

Receiving music from you in the post is such an exquisite experience, walking down to the post box and opening up a beautiful, hand-made, loved artefact. You’re using the CD, a dying medium, and reaching across the world to generate an emotional connection. It seems to me like you’ve never so much been reaching out and pushing your work as offering it. People, ever more so, seem eager and responsive to that offering. Do you feel connections grow when you send those packages?

I think people do respond to a physical object, but the connection is fading. That’s the strange thing about the way we consume music at the moment. There will be a generation of people who don’t consume music as an object, who don’t respond to a physical, tactile thing. I can remember, and I’m sure you can as well, that you’d go down the local record shop, you’d almost choose a record by the cover, because you would be attracted to the album artwork, especially if it was a gatefold. I can remember getting the first Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, and just being completely blown away by it. I can remember similar experiences with Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. You’re right, the CD is becoming an antiquated thing. In the mainstream there’s apparently a real decline in people consuming physical formats, but I think there’s also a groundswell of deep attachment to physical objects. There are people who are almost doing things in a militant way, they’re trying to stick it to iTunes by continuing to release vinyl and cassettes. I’m not really trying to engage with that whole debate. For me, going back to the reasons why I started Sustain-Release, it’s about continuing a collaboration.

The physical thing is actually important. When you lose something, when you experience bereavement, you experience the loss of the physical, you experience a loss of touch, so for me to create an object that celebrated a person’s life was a very profound thing to do. For me it was so important that it was Louise’s artwork that carved out a physical presence for my music. In a sense, the loss of her physically was counterbalanced by her artwork giving form to my music. The packaging gives the music a landscape which it can inhabit. When you used to get an LP, you’d put the record on, you’d hold the cover and you’d read the liner notes, and there would be a sense of connection with the artist or the music through a sense of touch, as well as through listening. That’s why I continue to make what I hope are beautiful artefacts, to continually make that gesture, to give music a space in reality.

You mention ‘offering’ and it feels like that, in the sense of trying to make a connection through a ‘gift’. If someone has taken the time and effort to get in contact with me to buy something, then the least I can do is put their name on the artwork as a dedication. With Wolf

Notes we made an edition of 44 initially, each with the recipient’s name, and we really wanted to make it a beautiful package, so we made hand-sewn chapbooks of poetry, which we wrapped in cloth, and we made a little glass vial of incense. So the idea was that when the person received the package, they could listen to the music, read the poetry and maybe light the incense. It would be almost like a ritual. By doing these things it would be a way of connecting in the most direct and meaningful way with the landscape itself.

Do people share their responses to these packages with you?

Yes, indeed—it’s like a conversation. Ultimately, I suppose, we’re selling a product to someone and it’s a financial transaction. There’s no getting away from that. Perhaps one day we can secure some funding to finance a free release. But nevertheless, people do respond to the gesture of personalising the artwork, and they respond to the love and effort that has gone into the creation of something. It took us nearly two months to put together 44 copies of Wolf Notes. We were working from pretty much eight in the morning until eight o’clock at night at the cutting board! So it is lovely to receive feedback. Some people will actually write to us, and we have a shelf here that’s brimming with things that kind people have sent us—artwork, music, and poetry. It feels like an exchange, that there’s a little community of people, many of whom have become friends. It’s definitely been for me a really beautiful experience, and it’s one of the reasons why I continue to do the things that I do—to make these handmade releases and to send them out into the world. It’s been proof to me that there isn’t simply a corporate paradigm for how you have to do things, that you can do things on a small scale and make a meaningful connection with people.

It is based, very loosely, on Lucy Alibar’s equally delirious and exquisitely written play Juicy and Delicious. Alibar cowrote the film script with Zeitlin, keeping its base of wonderful Southern dialogue, transplanting the action from Georgia to Louisiana, its protagonist from a teenage-ish boy to a six-year-old girl, and most everything but the central conceit turned on its head. Young Hushpuppy (the remarkable Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry), live in the Bathtub, a bayou hamlet strung together with spit and spare tires, cut off from the world by an imposing levee. Hushpuppy’s mother is a long-disappeared idea who visits her now by way of a ratty basketball vest, strung against a wall, filling in as best as anything can. Wink drinks hard, loves his daughter toughly, letting her live in her own separate mess of a trailer, teaching her to fend for herself, or maybe just wishing she would. They live surrounded by pigs and chickens and wild beasts, some of which are pets, some of which are dinner.

The daughter has inherited the father’s loud and fiery temper; they argue, they scream, they wish each other out of existence. They burn things to the ground. But Wink’s health is fading, and, not coincidentally, so is the planet’s. A sick father throws nature off its axis, and the icecaps can’t withstand that for long. “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right,” says Hushpuppy. “If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the whole universe will get busted.” Hushpuppy’s teacher, Miss Bathsheba, tells her a tale of an ancient and terrifying race of beasts, the aurochs, trapped in the glaciers at the ends of the earth. The beasts haunt Hushpuppy’s every thought, and with a crash, the icecaps are gone. The waters rise. The Bathtub overflows. Hushpuppy and Wink drift together in the severed tray of a pick-up truck, catching fish with their hands, looking for life, for survivors, for a drink. But Wink is still fading, the beasts are on the march, and Hushpuppy is still a long way from knowing what happened to her mother.

The score, by Zeitlin with Dan Romer, gives the film the feel of a messy booze-fuelled night in a bar at the beardier end of New Orleans, all flashes of half-remembered dancing with a fiddle and a banjo skipping over the top of the madness. But what will remain clear from that foggy night is Wallis. It’s often too easy to praise the performances of young children in films, as we overlook failings for novelty, but Beasts of the Southern Wild would fall apart without her to hold the centre. She is the film’s narrator, its soul, and its fire. She is a barely contained maelstrom of rage and uncertainty, a screaming beast in fear of losing her father, her only constant. Wallis was only five when the film was shot, having lied about her age, and you’ve never seen a performance quite like this one. Some of the other non-professionals are a little more workmanlike, but it hardly matters.

It’s not a film about Katrina, no. But it may just be the best post-Katrina film so far. Alibar meant the original play as some kind of working out of her own relationship with her father, through a lens of surreal possibility. Zeitlin and his construction of ramshackle beauty have taken it even further; with nothing much more than an endless supply of water, rusted car bodies and twine, he’s made one of the most thrilling expressions of moviemaking joy that I’ve seen in some years. It is a film that, in its own words, beasts it, the universe spilled messily on its bib.

The heavens are threatening to open over Woodend. Hundreds of farmers have made the pilgrimage to Taranaki Farm to sit in a tin-shed lecture theatre and receive the dangerous ideas of a self-described lunatic. That lunatic, armed only with the pens in his shirt pocket, is Joel Salatin, an unassuming radical and possibly the world’s most famous farmer.

Like many of the people on this farm, I first came across Joel in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s mega-bestseller about the realities of modern food production. Pollan paints Salatin as a maverick agricultural auteur whose methods push way beyond organic. Out here in the shadow of Mount Macedon, not far from Hanging Rock, he’s a long way from his Virginia home, where he has labored for 30 years on the farm he inherited from his parents.

If you want to buy food from Polyface Farms, you’ll have to make your own way to the Shenandoah Valley. Joel doesn’t deliver anywhere, not even to markets. Buying clubs have sprung up in the areas around to make it practical for his devotees to buy his meats, raised in stubbornly old-fashioned ways that have somehow, along the way, become radical.

This is his last day at Taranaki. After this interview we will wander around the vast property, drenched from one of the first big storms of the Victorian summer. He will dispense deeply technical advice to the devoted few that remain and hang on his every word.

He will attempt to mend a buzzing electric fence with a handy twig, shooing away the curious pigs that come too close to the shorted wire. For now, I’m sitting with Joel on a fallen log, as the chickens and farm dogs of Taranaki go about their business around us. In the field just over the hill, the cows are huddling in the corner of their movable pasture, waiting for the storm to break.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma describes the way you do your work quite beautifully. In the way the animals work, the way the land works and the way you orchestrate it all into one cohesive expression, Michael Pollan sees your farm as a dance.

Oh yeah, sure. We view it as a choreography. I talk about how we’re creating a ballet of relationships in the pasture. First of all, the cows are on the pasture and we’re moving them every single day to a new paddock. This makes the grass dance, because it allows the grass to have a rest period long enough to re-accumulate all of the energy that was expended in sending forth the original shoots. It sequesters all the carbon down in the ground because of the root structure that prunes off to create balletic symmetry at the soil horizon.

If we think about biomass as a solar collector, the herbivore is what restarts that solar collection panel. Without that, the biomass just gets old, dies, falls over, and sends carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Behind the cows come the eggmobiles, and the eggmobiles follow the cows like the birds follow herbivores in nature—the egret on the rhino’s nose, the birds that follow the wildebeests in the Serengeti. The whole idea is that the birds then sanitise behind the herbivores and scratch through the cow patties, eat out the fly larvae, spread the cow pats into the soil service, and so there’s that dance going on.A lot of people say ‘what drives you?’ I say I’m excited about getting up every day, because there aren’t very many people that can make this many beings happy. The pigs, of course, they’re in pasture and we move them every couple of days to a new area. They’ve got a new salad bar to be on, a new place to explore and discover, and of course this exercise, fresh air and sunshine makes their meat completely different to normal, factory-raised pork.

These don’t sound like new ideas. They sound like the oldest dance in the world. How did feeding grass to a cow become a radical idea?

I know! That is an amazing thing. It was a confluence of a lot of things. The first is that it’s easier the other way. You don’t have to look at growth patterns, you don’t have to look at the weather. You just push the button on the grain bin and there you have it. Number two is that, at least in the US, there are major subsidies for growing corn. Not for growing grass, not for growing peaches or apples, but for growing corn. That creates an artificially low price and a competitive advantage over other traditional feed sources that are not subsidised. Cheap energy has masked the true cost of grain production worldwide. In cultures where energy is expensive, they tend to be less grain– and perennial herbivore-oriented.

In cultures that have artificially pushed the price of grain low, the cost of tillage, planting, weed control, harvesting, drying, storing, distributing, all of those high energy requirements, is kept artificially low, and prejudices the society towards an annuals-based production model as opposed to a perennials-based model.

When you’re working with the animals in this dance, how do you learn their steps? Does it take a life spent with them to understand their needs?

I don’t know if it takes a lifetime. We learn things every day and we’re constantly refining our infrastructure. Of course, technology has given us some wonderful tools that we didn’t have in grandpa’s day. When people come to the farm, they say “oh, wow, this looks like Grandpa’s farm!” I say that it doesn’t. Grandpa would have given his eye teeth for the stuff that we have.

You’re not afraid of technology?

Absolutely not. We want to use technology. Microchip energisers with electric fence pulses, polyethylene netting that keeps out black bears, coyotes and wolves from the chickens, and keeps the chickens in, and 150 feet of it only weighs 12 pounds. One person can take it up and put it down in 10 minutes. That’s unprecedented in the history of civilisation. The question that we ask is: what allows the animal to fully express its animalness? What allows the chicken to fully express her chickenness, the pig its pigness, the tomato its tomatoness? What we want do is provide a habitat that allows that full physiological, phenotypical expression to reach its ecstasy. Let’s take the herbivore. If we look at them in nature, we notice they’re constantly moving, they don’t stay in the same place, they’re clumped up in a group for predator protection, and they’re mowing. They’re eating forage. They’re not eating grain, they’re not eating dead cows, they’re not eating chicken manure, they’re eating forage. So you take those things—the moving, mobbing and mowing—as a template and you say, okay, on this commercial, domestic production model, how can we most closely approximate those natural patterns? You can’t completely mimic every single one. In nature, obviously birds don’t lay except when they’re hatching babies, so the unnaturalness of a domesticated chicken, selected over centuries for egg production without fertilisation, we can argue that’s unnatural, but that’s the trade-off with domestication, civilisation and agriculture.

You proudly call yourself the lunatic farmer, you have a book called Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. What is it that makes what you do so radical, or so… nuts?

Hahaha, nuts! At the outset, you have to understand that if what we do became normal, again, it would completely invert the power, position, prestige and profit of the entire world’s food system. That’s pretty revolutionary when you think of it. That’s pretty radical.To be sure, there’s a lot of inertia in universities, in corporations, in government programmes, in the thinking of the peasants on the landscape, in the industrial model that the world embraces right now. Some people, who are my friends, think that there’s this great conspiracy, that there’s this industrial food system that’s conspiring. I don’t call it a conspiracy, I call it a fraternity of ideas. They’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid from the same place.

I think they’re well-intentioned, but I actually do believe that most people in the industrial food system think that if I am allowed to continue to survive, I jeopardise the world’s food system. They think that if my pastured chickens, without vaccinations and medications, are out in the pasture, consorting with red-wing blackbirds and such, they’ll spread my diseases to the science-based confinement poultry houses and threaten the planet’s food supply.

But how does what you do, and your process, how does that scale to become the world’s food supply? How can it possibly effectively replace the industrial scale of agriculture?

Pretty easily, actually. Let’s stay with the chicken house for a minute. Look at the big confinement factory chicken house—the corporate people are standing there and the farmer is saying “look at the efficiency of this, the amount of chickens we’re producing in this one little spot, the economies of scale, this is how you feed the world.” What you don’t see, what the camera doesn’t see, are the hundreds of acres of grain required to go into that house to feed those animals. Then there are the major pollution and waste and excrement problems of having all those animals confined in one space. If we take all of those animals out, and put them out here on pasture, and give them a much better life, allow them to have fresh air, exercise and sunshine, it doesn’t take one more ounce of feed to feed them out on pasture as it does on those houses, and they spread their own manure. Everything that’s a liability in that system becomes a blessing in this system.

So you find the land for your animals by freeing up those feed sites?

Absolutely. There’s no reason why the animals can’t eat on the same ground that produced their feed, or on ground that would currently be receiving their manure. The point is that there is plenty of land for all of the animals that are currently in confinement operations to be divested, decentralised, spread out, diversified, on the landscape, and all of the confinement factories could be shut down, without requiring one more acre of total land. Are you with me? They’re eating the same out here, even if we say they’re not picking up any from the pasture, even if we say the pasture doesn’t give them anything, they’re not eating any more grain out here than they do in the house, the only difference is that here they’re spread out and they’re getting fresh air, sunshine, and of course grass. The manure becomes a blessing instead of a problem. If I could just move one more step forward, in the US we have 35 million acres of lawn. In 1946, almost 50% of all produce in America was grown in backyard gardens. That’s not that long ago. We have 35 million acres of lawn, and 36 million acres housing and feeding recreational horses. And I haven’t even gotten to golf courses yet. As you start looking at it on this scale, we have so much vacant land it’s unbelievable.

What do you think about the new ideas coming into urban planning and imagination about vertical farming, building structures that will move our agriculture upwards rather than across, as we need to sustain larger populations?

You know what? I think most of those structures are pie-in-the-sky. I think to grow things without soil, to grow things without wind and air isn’t realistic. In real-life situations, greenhouses typically have problems in three or four years, unless you have really significant cycles. These sci-fi things I’ve seen with high-rise greenhouse buildings and hydroponics and all of that— we don’t control nature that cutely, and to think that we do is arrogance beyond belief. I think the guys that are designing those systems have spent too much time playing video games.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m such an advocate of gardening for children. When you spend all your life just playing video games, and you have your car race, and your car wrecks, you wait 10 seconds and the machine gives you a new one. You have your battle and the good guys are fighting the bad guy, and your good guy icon gets killed, you wait another 10 seconds, and the machine gives you a new one. But that’s not the way life is. You go out and wreck your car, you don’t sit by the side of the road for 10 seconds and get a new one. If somebody near to you dies, you don’t wait 10 seconds and they resurrect. I think there’s something about gardening and raising food for children that creates an awe, a mystery and a respect for the death and regenerative cycles of nature, and to the reality and the finality and responsibility of life, that young people coming—full of hubris—to ecology need to learn.

Let’s look at the question of scale from the side of consumption. The last study of nutrition in this country that I know of was 15 years ago, and it said that 5% of the respondent adults had, at some stage in the last year, not had enough money to feed their family a meal. If that’s the situation we’re facing at lower income levels, and if the food that is affordable is the nutritionally empty junk that leads to malnutrition—the quick food, the fast food, the food that can be bought for a dollar because of subsidies—how do you get your food, and food produced with your philosophies of production, into the mouths and stomachs of those people who need it the most?

A couple of responses. First of all, a very politically incorrect one. I would guess that many, many, many of the people in that statistic are drinking soda, alcohol, using tobacco, and spending their money on foolish things. They don’t need more money, they need budgeting, and I know this is very politically incorrect to say, but the fact is that many of the poor don’t need a hand-out, they need discipline. I’m not saying that they don’t have problems, but what I am suggesting is that the issue is not food production, it is food distribution, it is other things. Half the human-consumable food in the world spoils before it ever gets to a plate, because of long-term inventory spoilage, blemishing, sell-by, use-by, best-by confusion, and all sorts of other problems. That being said, what are the primary impediments to being able to get this food to, if we’re taking a broad brush, the impoverished? The largest impediments of course are that the food safety laws, the food regulations, I call them the food police, will not allow ready access of food entrepreneurism into communities. That even includes a commercial kitchen in a residential zone—we can’t have a business here because this is where houses are. If Aunt Matilda could make pickles in her sink and sell them next door without the intrusion of a bunch of food police, you can bet that the price of artisanally produced, high-quality pickles would drop to the floor. In fact, our side would spin circles around the industrial side, which enjoys corporate welfarism, subsidies and the economic benefit of scale in food police requirement and capricious regulations that are not achievable for small-scale producers. I’ve met tonnes of people already in New Zealand and Australia on this trip that are poised, they are ready, to do home-baked quiche, and pastured poultry, and all these things, but it’s illegal.

A lot of my vegetarian friends have opted out of the industrial meat-production-and-consumption system for a lot of the reasons we’ve been talking about. When I put forward a position that eating meat ethically, and with consideration for the wellbeing of the animals, can be a much more effective and sustainable way to attack the status quo, the response is that the consumption habits of one person don’t mean anything to a system so devoid of soul. Do we really get any kind of vote with our individual choices in consumption?

Oh, oh, absolutely. In fact I would suggest that the act of eating is one of the most empowering ecological acts you can undertake. On our little cooler bags, we have written “healing the planet one bite at a time”. I’m not saying you can never have a Coke or a Snickers bar. What I’m suggesting is, at the end of the week, when we look back on our food choices, which system did we feed? Did we feed one that builds soil, or did we feed one that reduces soil? Did we feed one that stimulates the hydrologic cycles and puts more water up on the land, or did we use one that drains water, drains aquifers and creates desertification? Abused animals, unabused animals. Respect workers, not respect workers. You can go on down this whole litany of things, there are certainly plenty of them, but which system did we patronise? The beauty of this to me is that we don’t have to wait until there’s an election, until there’s a bill in parliament, we can register that vote every single day, on our own volition, by the kind of food choices we make.

You inherited Polyface Farms from your father. How did it come into the family?

Well, Dad and Mom just bought the farm in 1961. You’ve got to realise the land prices were completely different than they are today. At that time, land was still affordable, we hadn’t had the dot com revolution to inject all this artificial wealth into the economy that then created a glut of demand for residential estate. Anyway, Dad and Mom bought the farm in 1961 and worked out to pay for it. Dad was very much a visionary, he got into this grass-based stuff, direct marketing, portable infrastructure. I started with chickens when I was 10, sold them to customers in the area, a couple of schools, a couple of restaurants, and at the local kerb market, which was the precursor of today’s farmers’ market. So I had my roots there, and did it all through teenage years, high school, and then came back to the farm full time September 24, 1982. Basically, Dad and Mom said “here’s the land, see if you can make a business on it”. Theresa and I have been working at it ever since.

Did you think that you were going to end up back on the farm running it before that, that it was what you wanted to be doing?

Absolutely. I don’t remember ever wanting to do anything else. From my earliest memory I wanted to be a farmer. But I was under the illusion, like so many, that in order to be there I would have to have an outside source of income. I had a gift of speaking and writing so I figured I’d go out and write a bestseller or two and then hopefully retire to the farm. Hopefully that would be before I was too old to enjoy it. I worked out for a year and a half as a journalist. Theresa and I saved up enough money by living in the farmhouse, we made an apartment in there, it was probably illegal, but anyway, we did it. By living in that apartment without a mortgage, we were able to live very cheaply. We grew all of our own food— we always said if we could figure out how to grow toilet paper and Kleenex, we could have pulled the plug on society.

We had our own firewood for fuel, we had our own food, we bought clothes at the second-hand store, we drove a $50 car. We lived cheaply, on $3500 a year, which was unheard of, but we were able to save enough money that I was able to leave the newspaper. We figured we could live for one year, and then we’d run through our savings, and then I’d go back to work, but the progress we would make by me being there full time for a year would maybe shorten the time away from 10 years to five years, or 15 years to 10, or whatever. As it turned out, I never went back to work.

So in that year, it just all clicked?

Yeah, well, you know, suddenly I was home for every calf that was birthed. Timing is so important in horticulture, and I was there to do everything in a timely way. That reduced slippage, it reduced loss. Of course, we were able to grow everything that we ate by being there full-time. I went from a tank of gas in the car once a week to a tank of gas once every six weeks, because we didn’t drive anywhere. I didn’t have to have good clothes anymore, I could wear rags. A lot of living expenses are just in living this high-paced lifestyle we have. If you don’t have to drive to work, if you don’t have to buy good clothes, and you grow all your own food, and you have all your own fuel, and you don’t have any housing expense, what do you need? There’s not much more.

When you’re living that life, does it feel to you like you’re being an activist?

Absolutely. Oh, we absolutely realise that this is an absolutely revolutionary thing to do in the world. If everybody lived like us, if what we did became normal, it’s hard to believe the large structures of the world… for one thing, we don’t even have a TV, so there wouldn’t even be a Hollywood. Imagine a world without celebrity worship. There wouldn’t be fast food—imagine a world without Taco Bell, McDonald’s and KFC. This is revolutionary, this is huge. But imagine a world where, instead of food being inventoried in warehouses a thousand miles away from production for months before being utilised and manipulated and agitated and prostituted and adulterated before it’s used, imagine all that food being grown in backyard gardens, and housed in peoples’ pantries in their canning jars, or I think you call it, you don’t call it canning, you call it…

Mason jars? Jug…

Jugging!

You make it all sound so easy. Isn’t farming all about debt traps and the struggle and the strife and working the land until your fingers bleed? I see you talking about farming with such a rare joy. Shouldn’t it be hard?

Well, sure it’s hard! But so is going up and working hard for the man. But it’s a different kind of hardness. Like I said, very few people get to get up in the morning like me and make this many beings happy. Whether those are tomato beings or cow beings or chicken beings, to make these many things happy, to nurture, massage. I think perhaps I’d like to share a story here. One of our apprentices, who came to us at 30-years-old, as sharp as a tack, he was a software engineer for Bank of America or one of the big banking institutions in New York City. He was a sharp, sharp fellow, who just got fed up with it one day and said, man, I gotta go out and breathe some air and see some trees. He went on the computer, found us and came and did a one-year apprenticeship. About halfway through it, we were building a portable shelter for chickens, we called it the Millennium Feathernet, and all the interns and apprentices were working on this, nailing cutting boards, putting the roof on. It took them about two days and they got it done. At the end of the two days, he came in for dinner, he got real quiet, his lips started trembling. He was so moved with this. He said, “You know, when I was working at my cubicle doing the software thing, I could never touch what I made. I made spreadsheets, I made stuff on a computer, I made stuff that went into cyberspace, and the members of my team, one was in Thailand, one was in Hong Kong, one was in London. And we designed virtual spreadsheets and financial papers and all this stuff. At the end of the day you push a button and the screen goes blank and it goes into cyberspace.” He said, “Today, my team, I could touch them, I could feel them. We could hug, we could talk. We bantered, we communed, we hammered, we built, we listened to each other, and we built this thing that at the end of the day, I could touch, I could feel, it became an extension”. He started to break down, and I mean I am too just now talking about it, the strength and the power of doing something physical and real and visceral that is an extension of my being, and not just nebulous and out there for the man somewhere, is powerful, powerful stuff. Most people think there ain’t no money in farming. But that’s why we farm differently.

And there are systems of pasture-based portable infrastructure, direct marketed carbon-sequestered hydrologic-cycled forgiving systems that are far more enjoyable, rewarding and profitable, both ecologically, emotionally and economically, than most systems.

When you run the kinds of workshops you’re doing at here at Taranaki, you must get farmers coming to you that are in a different situation. Their land does belong to the companies. They’re on razor thin margins, they’re hardly making anything, they’re just keeping away from the breadline. They want to be doing what you’re doing but debt owns them. What do you say to those farmers when they come to you?

Those are hard ones. First of all, my heart breaks for them. I’m so glad that I come from a lineage of parents and grandparents who lived a little below their means instead of living a little above their means. The fact is, there’s no easy answer. We haven’t gotten where we are overnight, and if you’re in a pickle, you can’t get out of it overnight. The bigger the operation, the harder it is—it’s a lot easier to turn a speedboat than it is an aircraft carrier. And so I wish that I could protect people from the disturbance that will be necessary from, as Einstein described it, the destruction that’s necessary before construction must happen. I wish I could hug every one of them and protect them from that. The fact is, I can’t. Nobody can.

And there is no magic bullet. But, there have been enough people, I can tell you this for sure. The answer is not continuing to go in the wrong direction. The sooner you turn around—and I mean turn around, I don’t mean just slow down in the wrong direction—the more realistic it will be. There are lots and lots and lots of alternative practitioners and thinkers who have turned their ship around, and these folks need to start seeking counsel from people who have done that, not from government agents, bureaucrats or so-called experts in the industry who are continuing to make money off of extracting rural wealth and centring it in urban centres. The teacher is responsible for what he teaches, but the student is also responsible for the teacher he chooses to listen to.

Do you see the results? Do you see them making changes after they’ve seen what you do?

Absolutely, there are thousands and thousands of people around the world that have made huge changes. I get letters from them, emails, I meet them in workshops like this, I mean I just had a couple of families say that if it wouldn’t have been for me, they wouldn’t be farming. I can’t tell you how gratifying that is. It’s better than money, it’s better than anything. The fact is these systems work, because they work with nature instead of against nature, they work with people instead of against people, they work with your heart and your passion, rather than prostituting your heart and passion for somebody else. All this wonderful energy that’s out here to tap into, it all works in this system, so once they make that world-view jump, then it’s just a matter of execution. You’ve just got to figure out your weak links in your execution and go.

The first time I saw this wave coming was when Eric Schlosser put out Fast Food Nation, and that blew a lot of people’s minds at the time.

Oh yeah, it was major.

Since then, it seems to have been a growing wave.

It’s a tsunami, let me tell you.

Does it feel like that, when you’re in the middle of it?

Oh it does, it does, it’s a tsunami. The important thing to realise though is that, as this movement grows, and it’s extremely small, don’t kid yourself.

It’s a small tsunami…

It’s a growing movement, but we’re still only 2% of the food system. That ain’t much, but as it grows and the powers that be recognise the new world that we would create, there is a tremendous and a growing backlash. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, as we have created this movement, this action, there’s an increasingly militant reaction against us. For example, to brand me a bioterrorist because my chickens threaten the science-based Tyson chicken factory, and so these folks can go and sit in their pew and take the sacraments and be very righteously pleased with themselves that they are saving the world from the calamity that would come if my system became normal. And it’s important for me, and for all of us in this movement to appreciate. I don’t think it’s helpful for people like me to just brand those folks as conspiracists, not at all.

There’s a scene in Food Inc., a film which featured your work in some depth, in which a person walking around an organic fair points out all of the organic companies that are owned by Coke, by Nestle, and so forth. How does that increasing co-option of the slow and the organic by the very multinationals you set out to replace make you feel?

I don’t think the industrial food system wants to embrace what we do, but they’re always looking to tap into a scheme to make some more money, and of course it scares me to death. It subjects these good clean food systems to the thinking of Wall Street-ification, and Wall Street-ification and empire building have no conscience and no morality. The only morality is money. Any system that is predicated on that, on only stockholders and shares, will have an exploitative agenda. It will never take a long-range view. It’s not capitalism, I mean, goodness, plenty of indigenous tribes in the world exploited the landscape. This idea that they were all pristine ecologists is a joke. The advantage was that they didn’t have the tools and the infrastructure to destroy it any faster,

but there were in fact tribes that were very ecologically minded, with a long-term view, and ones that were exploitative. People are the same. It doesn’t matter whether it’s communism, capitalism, socialism, tribalism or oligarchism or whatever, royalty, it doesn’t matter. That’s why I don’t make a big deal about political systems. What I’m trying to do is get the individual stewards of the land, and individual eaters, with the power of one, to make these decisions, and the power of one plus one plus one plus one is what changes the world.