soup

sun day

i wanted to go and sit by merri creek
and weep
'cause that's what yer supposed to do
right?
but there were signs
and fences
and people on bikes
so i left the trickling thing behind
and headed south
where i found all manner
of things.

high thirties

Was it the shock of suddenly being outside for the first time, today? I'm not sure. But it was very quiet. Cars purred by softly on the main road. Even passing aircraft seemed a bit further away, a bit less harsh. The sun beat down on the concrete under my feet. I wouldn't be out for long.

On returning, I poked around in the cellar at our sump full of water. The cat danced around the hole in the floor above me, wondering what I was doing, and how he could get down to investigate. I drained as much as I could, wondering how a whole room could stay so damp on a day so hot and dry outside.

comfort noise

The day after we moved in, I could hear the sounds of people playing sport in the park out the back - soccer perhaps, I didn't look. It took me back to growing up in the sprawl of the south-eastern suburbs where there was an oval a couple of streets away. On a lazy weekend you'd hear the same background sound occasionally punctuated by an air horn. And so, while sport's never really been my scene, there's something about this particular situation that makes me feel like I'm at home.

on my block

i checked on our new house on the way home, as you do, especially when it's so close. at the exact same moment, the current owners came home from work. as they opened the gate and walked to the door, i wondered - should i say hello? but no. coincidences are only significant because we make them so. so without breaking my step i left them alone, wished them well, and kept walking. they're starting a new life in a new town. we'll be starting a new life in the same part of town. things change, things remain the same. as i turned down a main(ish) road, i found myself smiling at strangers. this is my town. this is my part of town. it has been. it will remain so. it behooves me to be friendly. after all, what have i got to lose?

The work of mourning

Let the dead bury the dead, as it says in the Bible. But the problem with that is they've got to be dead, not just moribund. Which is round about the problem for the ALP when it comes to Paul Keating.

Keating seems to be going through a resurgence both in interest in the world and attention from the world. His latest intervention is about how generally useless Rudd's team is. It's a surgical strike, if the surgeon you have in mind worked during the Civil War in the US.

Even though he is shaping up as a freelance column-filler, I think Keating is actually correct. Leaving aside the unacknowledged bad blood between Keating and Gary Gray, Rudd's team is a poll-driven bunch of dullards. The depressing thing about them is that they're not in character different to the people who ran Beazley's campaigns, but they could well win this time just because they read the polls better. So in short, no ideas, but they have better timing and a less tin ear for what people want to hear.

The even more depressing thing is that I think Keating's hatchet-job actually works in Rudd's favour in the long run. The ALP's big problem is that they've never really been able to kill Hawke and Keating. Every successive ALP leader has been in the double bind of being simultaneously less colourful and appealing than Keating and yet tarred by association. The more colourless they get in an effort to distance themselves from Keating's perceived economic lunacy, perversely the more unappealing they are.

This time round, Keating might do them a favour by burying himself. The more he appears like Crazy Uncle Paul, the more the ALP is able to say that they've moved on. Sure, he's funny, but he's also mad, so it's kind of a good thing that he's bagging us. And thus the work of mourning can be forgotten - the ghosts of the early 90s will serve only to signify that something died, even if it hasn't been buried.

But that would mean that we'd also be locked into another 10 years before we started to understand exactly how much damage the Howard years have done. Keating is right; Rudd's poll-watchers might get him a win or loss, but either way, they aren't going to offer anything in the way of a new vision.

Musician as Lab Rat

There's a good project in looking at why post-war North America generated so much social and psychological research. And the character of that research is often darkly fascinating; the McGill sensory deprivation experiments present an opportunity to wonder how much detail you need on the behavioural consequences of locking people in white rooms.

Lucky for us in Australia then that our concerns are more mercantile when it comes to social research. To wit, an RMIT student is examining the business sense of musicians. My favourite quote from the promo is this: "The study will test how musicians react when asked to carry out simple management tasks". My fond hope is that there's a question which tests the artist's ability to maximise transactional efficiency in setting pharmaceutical supply.

The best part of this project is that it's both insane and demeaning. The premise seems to be to test whether musicians have the cerebellar wherewithal to do without the massive business nous injected by managers and labels. Imagine a world without Malcolm McLaren: is it really possible? It's hard to imagine anyone having any sort of knowledge of music from, say, Mozart onwards without forming a fairly jaundiced view of the general human worth of publishers, label owners and managers (Ahmet Ertegun excepted).

My lofty pronouncement of the day is, therefore, that no research projects to do with the music business should be allowed to proceed unless the candidate can demonstrate knowledge of the works of Steve Albini and Dave Gedge.

lifestyles of the inwardly hopeful

A second weekend checking out the same suburb, the same home for sale. Just to be sure. We arrive early, so walk up the street and around. 3 kids come out of a house - can't be more than about 10 - and one of the girls says "she's lying about her weight. she can't be less than twenty-eight." - and I wonder at the precise age when I used to hear my friends talking about weight. It certainly wasn't 10.

Inside the home, carefully arranged to "look nice" for the public, teddy bears sit in a row across a bright purple bedspread. Downstairs, I notice a copy of FHM in the corner, next to a "how to get rich" book and a John Farnham CD. It's not as showy as another place, nearby, which was more expensive and had a flat screen TV in the wall, playing "chill out" music as people gingerly stepped through a place they knew they couldn't afford.

What's news?

Apparently News Corp is seriously thinking about turning MySpace into a Digg-esque news aggregator and headline popularity contest:
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article1676602.ece

Two thoughts occur to me in relation to this.
1. Genius. That's like asking Big Brother voters to rate the works of Virginia Wolf.
2. Madness. What are News thinking? Who goes to MySpace for news?

With any luck, this will turn out to be one of those doomed one-site-for-your-life ideas that explodes on the launch pad. But the interesting thing is what it says about news.

By rights, the MySpace audience should be *anti*-news. Every bit of received wisdom and poorly interpreted research says that the MySpace profile should run from newspapers and green-Pental-pen wielding serious TV journalism. The explanations vary a bit (too boring, too serious, don't care, really don't care) but the general conclusion is the same: MySpacers mostly aren't experiencing a problem with trying to juggle the Fin Review site and the most recent YouTube school bullying videos.

Which can only lead me to conclude that some visionary, albeit slightly mad, social researcher has the reigns at News and is trying to see what sort news MySpace folks would actually read. In other words, it's a big, cheap focus group for the perceived future market of the News Corp news titles.

Chuck Palahniuk writes about his instinctive horror at the way in which we are all now encouraged to re-package our lives' events as stories, even as they're happening to us. Perhaps News are just making a little more explicit the same process for events that are further removed from us: tell us how you want to process the world's events, so we can package it that way for you.

how to reconnect with melbourne after a month-long holiday

get out of the house (sometimes it's harder than you think).
walk around. hop on a tram to get a bit of distance between you and home, if necessary. but then get out and keep walking.
find confusing street art (see above).
keep going.
poke around in a quaint little second-hand record shop (while there's still one around) that either plays old blues men, or Tangerine Dream, depending on which day it is. find a few old 7-inches going cheap.
walk all the way home under a warm but non uncomfortable sun.

Dusk

At dusk the bats come. I sit on the balcony watching them scribe their ragged lines across the sky. Some fly low, allowing me glimpses of their leathery spread wings. Others fly high, barely discernible against the darkening sky.

Watching them, I wonder where they've flown from. Botanic Gardens? Somewhere along the Yarra? I've seen them hanging like dark commas from a large fig tree near Bridge Road, but above my apartment, they always fly in from North-West.

Yesterday morning, I walked out onto my street and found a bat lying dead on the sidewalk. I crouched and studied it closer. It looked smaller than the ones I watch and ants had begun their march across its dark fur. Dead bats are not a common sight and for a couple of minutes, I considered photographing it for... something. But, perhaps this was just for me.

I stood up and walked through 4 suburbs to my office, scribing my own ragged lines across the city.

Manoeuvering

The tactical game of politics is attractive and repulsive in equal measures. Well, for me anyway - I suspect most people find it more on the repulsive side of the scale. But acquiring a taste for the more technical aspects of political activity means that you can generate a whole new set of theories about why things happen.

For example, the splendid piece of opportunism that has seen Maxine McKew pitted against John Howard on his doorstep. This, to me, is a prime bit of political manoeuvering. My suspicion is that this is as much about tying Howard down, clipping his campaign wings, as it is about trying to win Bennelong. McKew is a high-profile enough candidate in a marginal-enough seat to mean that Howard must put at least some effort in to holding on to his own electorate. And the more time he has to spend tending the home fires the less time he has to fight the national campaign. In short, I think the ALP's trying a distraction trick - he now has to fight both locally and nationally, and the ALP will be hoping to capitalise on his divided energies.

This leads me to think that we can expect the national campaign in microcosm in Bennelong. Howard is not a fox, he's a hedghog with a nose for the quick win - he tends to stick to one or two big ideas and look for ways to exploit them. So the Bennelong issues will be the national issues, and I wouldn't expect Howard to run a Bennelong Special. Ideally for the Liberals, you'd want a boatload of refugees looking to land somewhere on Lane Cove River.

The interesting thing is that the ALP's current approach (It's All About Kevin) is actually going to limit them here. McKew, like Gillard and Swan and Garrett and Macklin and Fitzgibbon, is positioned at the moment as "helping Kevin to become PM". Which means she'll be her own candidate to the extent that the Liberal dirt machine can target her personally and Kevin's candidate for everything else. I don't think this gives McKew a lot of room to run locally in her own right, which is why I suspect this is about trying box Howard in rather than a serious grab at Bennelong.

I think the history of Brand over the past decade is instructive in this matter. Kim Beazley could offer some insight on how to run campaigns in marginals while running a national campaign. Of course, Howard could just decide that it's all too hard and now's the time to pursue other interests. No, didn't think anyone else was buying that line of thought...

Strange attractor

Every now and then, weirdness seems to cluster. Like the past twenty four hours, for example. Last night, someone described a friend's baby as being in the "oral asphyxiation" stage of development. This morning, I saw a woman shaving her legs, which is not strange, but it was at a bus stop and she was using a razor, which definitely is. And then when I got to work, I find that investment scams in China involve giant ants. It's funny, but there's also a death penalty attached - fantasy does have consequences, kids.

Art is not needed

Following up on my discovery of catfish extrudate, it turns out that there's an entire industry devoted to snack food research and design. Papers in the field abound. Sub-specialties have proliferated. Most promising of all are the areas of acoustical and mechanical analysis of snack foods, i.e. how they crunch and how they sound when they crunch.

For example, these guys report that "an optimal process resulting in an expanded peanut product with a crispy texture have [sic] not been reported". Their research follows an elegant design: make snacks, crunch them up in a crunching machine, record the crunching sounds, analyse the sounds. Their conclusion (that "crispy peanut-based snacks can be produced by extrusion cooking and frying, and that acoustical properties can provide valuable information in evaluating them") is a bit of a let-down for those looking for something more hard hitting. Still, it's good to know that low shear strength (how much jaw you have to apply before the snack crunches) correlates well to a loud crunch.

But for a maximally impressive conjunction of research themes du jour, these guys take the Cheezel. Using that trendiest of techniques, the neural net, the researchers have developed a method for predicting the crispness of a snack by its sound alone. Again, it's an elegant design: crush snack with pincers, record sound, analyse sound. Imagine the benefits that acrue. Process control will become a, er, snack when you can just crunch up a few bags on the line to see if there's undue sogginess. Marketing gets a whole new tool if it can ran sample product through the crunch simulation before focus group testing.

And this is why I believe there are no art installations anywhere near as strange as what happens in "ordinary" industrial life. If an artist proposed a sound installation based on crunching up bags of chips, the project would be canned within five minutes of Alan Jones broadcasting his opposition. But this sort of surrealist art is actually the very heart of industrial society. If modern art is accused of having no ideas, it's because manufacturers and marketers and designers have nicked them all. In a society where serious people conduct serious tests on little orange crispy things, the surreal cannot shock, it can only seem out of context.

It's a difficult predicament. For art to function as a way of enlivening us to the strangeness of our own lives, art itself has to be capable of being strange. But I wonder if art can be strange any more, or at least any stranger than what supports our day to day existences.

Fishing in shallow waters

Reading the first of David Foster Wallace's stories in Oblivion,"Mister Squishy", all the usual David Foster Wallace sensations overcame me. It's a funny, hugely dense, over-written, verbiage-laden goose chase. As always, there's lot of attention given to the language and thought structures of a highly technical sub-specialty of modern work, in this case the field research efforts which support the marketing of a new packaged snack cake.

But having come across this paper in the Journal of Food Processing Preservation, I can see that the background work for a Foster Wallace story is easier than it looks. For those not inclined to browse lengthy PDFs describing snack food production research, the gist is this:
* lots of Americans eat snack foods, and it's only going to get worse
* we're all professionals here, so let's not pretend snack foods have any nutritional value
* catfish have a bit more nutritive potential than your average grain/styrene based snack
* it turns out you can process, extrude and puff catfish mince into exactly the same sort of shapes popular in other snack foods and they don't taste fishy either
* let's make snacks out of catfish.

But the true joy of the paper is in its language. The title, 'Extrusion of Minced Catfish With Corn and Defatted Soy Flours For Snack Foods', is just a hint. Try some of this from the abstract for taste and texture: "Response surface methodology (RSM) with a rotatable central composite design was used to determine an extrusion condition that would produce extrudates of a maximal expansion ratio from blends of catfish flesh"; "The snack food made with the aforementioned combination and 74.74% corn flour in feed was slightly less dense than malted milk balls and much less hard than cocktail peanuts, according to a trained sensory panel"; or "No fish flavor note was perceived in any of the extrudates".

The main problem we have with snack foods is that we think of them as foods, when they're really industrial products susceptible to the same kinds of process control, materials technology and user experience-derived design techniques as hard goods. This shouldn't be thought of as an irony. "Consumption", the term used to describe the act of buying things or paying for getting things done, is a dead metaphor - we don't fully recognise its former connotation of taking in, especially with regard to food. Once consumption is cleansed of its food contexts, is it any wonder that our literal consumptions are cleansed of their origins?

Web 2.0 must die

One of the problems I have with the giant popularity contest that all the Web 2.0 gizmos revolve around is that it's become normative. That is, a whole bunch of uppity Web 2.0 apps are now taking the audacious tack of telling you that you're wrong when your interests don't happen to match what's in their feed/scrape/stream/web/tag list/FOAF db/whatever. For example, Spotback, a "personal tag tracker" which promises to present you with relevant news only. The sign-up process invites you nominate up to four things you're interested in while it goes and configures feeds in the background.

In my case, it gratuitously commented that three of my chocies were "hmm, not popular" and the fourth was a complete mismatch. Cheeky, I thought, but not unexpected given that they are fairly specialist tastes which don't group tightly around any one particular source. On instructing it to proceed with setting up my customised tracker, it then asked me if I wanted fix up the "errors" or "ignore" them. Apparently, being interested in something which doesn't turn up on a news feed is an error.

And that's the charm of these sort of apps. Rather than let you find stuff for yourself, they pre-emptively decides that if they can't find stuff, you won't either and therefore it doesn't really exist. If it existed, it'd have a feed, right? And you could tag it and track it and aggregate it and rate it and rank it and send it to a friend. Bah. It's all just a big school social with stick-on name tags.