Lately

The price of a thing is largely wages. (What proportion is wages? I guess it depends on the thing. But, say, a computer or car is mostly wages; a restaurant meal has a larger real estate component.) Anyway, if you buy a Prius, but Toyota’s workers spend their money on virgin forest furniture and dirty electrical power, have you really achieved anything at all? Does the environmental behaviour of a company’s employees matter? If your Prius is chauffeur-driven, do you need to monitor your chauffeur’s spending?

Time was so short, the Executive Committee [of Chicago's World's Fair of 1893] began planning exhibits and appointing world’s fair commissioners to secure them. In February the committee voted to dispatch a young army officer, Lieutenant Mason A. Schufeldt, to Zanzibar to begin a journey to locate a tribe of Pygmies only recently revealed to exist by explorer Henry Stanley, and to bring to the fair “a family of twelve of fourteen of the fierce little midgets.”

The committee gave Lieutenant Schufeldt two and a half years to complete his mission.

— Erik Larson, “The Devil in the White City”, p. 121.

A game played by Statesman staff: think of the phrase least likely to be uttered by each member.

Christopher Hitchens got:

“I don’t care how rich you are, I’m not coming to your party.”

Martin Amis got:

“You look a bit depressed, why don’t you sit down and tell me about it?”

(From a profile of Christopher Hitchens in The New Yorker, 2006-10-16.)

I bought Kate Bush’s Aerial yesterday, and it’s, ooh, about the most indulgent album I’ve ever bought.

• It’s a double album.
• The discs have names: the first is A Sea of Honey and the second is A Sky of Honey.
• The second disc has both a “Prelude” and a “Prologue.”
• One song consists of her reciting the digits of pi. (Also, the song is called π, not pi.)
• Another ends with bits of whispered, breathless French.
• Another starts with a very softly-spoken sound engineer saying: “Yeess, I need to get that tone a little bit lighter there … maybe with some dark accents coming in from this side. Mmmm, that’s good…”
• The title track has Kate Bush giggling for over a minute, to the sound of birds chirping.

It’s very lush and mostly pretty though.

You might like: King of the Mountain clip, high quality .mov, works on iPod.

Isn’t it a beautiful thing to, after two years, go back to your little neighbourhood Japanese restaurant and find that everything’s exactly the same as when you left ? The prices haven’t changed (except for Coke), the little cardboard “Sold Out” signs are still in operation , the charming hand-illustrated sign on the front still advises “No alcohol / No bare-feet” , the staff still consist of Japanese exchange students who take your money with both hands, and who are presumably responsible for the hand-lettered cardboard “business cards” that you get with your take-away .

Actually, maybe it is depressing that nothing has changed. (Are you surviving, little Japanese neighbourhood restaurant? Are you prospering?) And why is charm so important? Why do I want you not to change?

It’s all about the food , right?

(Miyoshi is 85 Swan St, Richmond, Victoria, Australia, and is rated T for tasty.)

“I sell Honda auto parts. … I wanted to be an artist. And I did pursue that for a while, but I became disillusioned with it in college. I was trying to follow a more traditional pathway, and I used to get into fights with my professors about that. I went to North Texas. There was a professor up there who did ‘sound painting.’ He ran around with a tape recorder, taping various noises. Set it up in the auditorium and you’d listen to all these sounds. His philosophy was, the more outrageous the better. Kinda, try to break the boundaries of tradition. Meanwhile, I’m doing these landscape paintings, you know? Trying to be the next Van Gogh. [Laughs] We’d get into awful fights. Then I saw other people who were doing well—and this one guy’s project was shaving a baby pig and then tattooing it. He got an A for that. There’s another guy who went around killing blackbirds, and he would snip off their wings and their feet and gul them onto a canvas. He was getting A’s for this, and I was going, what the hell am I doing here? Why am I doing this?”

(John Dove in Gig.)

China Bar, Swanston St.

Is anyone bothered by Mao being used in this way? Should he be made out to be a portly, iconic, inoffensive, figure of fun?

It only recently occurred to me that some people might find this sort of thing in poor taste; since then I’ve asked around and not found one—even people from mainland China seem to be okay with it. Why is this? Why is the architect of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution celebrated like this? Is no customer ever offended?

(I don’t care terribly much, I just find it odd. (Imagine Hitler in his place!) Perhaps Warhol is to blame.)

Last night, as I shopped for oranges and pears, the greengrocer asked me where I was from, as if it couldn’t possibly be Australia. (This was partly because I’d never heard of some type of Australia pear but whatever.) Why is this? I get this quite a lot. Do I speak funny?

I saw The Matrix Reloaded yesterday afternoon. (In the afternoon because it was part of a work “team building” exercise. It was really weird to come out of the cinema and have it still be daylight, let me just say.) Anyway, it’s quite good! Visually, it’s not as strong or cohesive as the first, and Neo is way too powerful, but there’s an amazing amount of interesting philosophy of the traditional sci-fi sort (i.e. the topics of free will (most of the characters who have an opinion about it insist there is no such thing), the nature of time, multiple universes, perceived reality versus reality, and so on) as well as the nature and implications of belief, and the possibilities of love. (Actually, it occurs to me now that the whole thing could turn out very religious in the end. Which I wouldn’t mind.)

Other notes: (1) there’s an incredibly long wordless rave scene that fortunately stops at about the same time you realise that no-one has said anything for quite a long time, and begin to wonder why the Wachowskis have inserted a music video into the middle of a movie; (2) there’s a trailer to the next Matrix movie after the credits; (3) the power-station hacking scene is surprisingly realistic; (4) Morpheus’s speech desperately needed a rewrite; (5) the Oracle died almost two years ago!

“It was so hot in the club that it was difficult to breathe, but Puffy was still wearing his suit, and not one button was undone. His tie was so tightly knotted it seemed to put a strain on his Adam’s apple. A diamond stud was planted in each earlobe. A thick rope of a diamond bracelet-from Jacob, the New York jeweller to the hip-hop elite-adorned his wrist. He said, “From my manicure to my pedicure, from my head to my toe, it’s the swagger that I show the world, it’s my face, baby. It’s my walk, my attitude.” He rubbed the wisps of hair on his chin. “Fashion is about leaving on your jacket and tie when other people are too hot to bother.”

— Puff Daddy (“I Am Fashion” by Michael Specter in The New Yorker, 9 September 2002)

Finally got some photo-album software together, meaning that I can now share photos like never before!

Jen’s Birthday

Chris Goes Away

Rock the House #1, Rowena Parade

Favourites are: the “Douglas G. Eyes Wide-Open/Eyes Wide-Shut Triptych” (1, 2, 3); Chris and Jenni, Brad’s cut, Chris posing; Oliver and Beth, Caz and Kenny, the “Andrew C. Re-hydration Triptych” (1, 2, 3).