Mapua

Thursday and Friday last week I made a flying visit to Mapua, near Nelson, to catch up with my work assisting the clean-up of the former Fruitgrower's Chemical Company site.

Mapua is a lovely-enough place, but unfortunately it's somewhat overrun by hippies, Germans, patchouli oil, and abominable art. Actually, there's nothing much to distinguish it from the rest of the Greater Nelson and Tasman region, aside possibly from the 30-year legacy of the chemical-dump and it's associated health hazards. There's also a proper "naturalist" colony somewhere about.

But I fear I am being somewhat petty; the sun was shining, as it is wont to do, and the birds were singing, and you could hardly hear the Environmental Decontamination Ltd. plant rumbling away barely 100 metres away as it did it's thing; it's thing being to treat truckloads of contaminated material using a world-beating NZ-invented nil-environmental-impact treatment method of blasting the soil with ball bearings and glass marbles until all of the nasty chemical compounds break down. At the right we have my view of the treatment plant, taken from the stylish temporary-office-in-a-container on the site.

At some point on the Friday afternoon, somewhat overwhelmed by the glorious weather and the spectacular scenery, I went and stood on the front balcony of the world-reknowned Smokehouse restaurant, and shot for you, dear readers, this panorama:



It's a truly magnificent vista, as we sweep around from the view of the island directly opposite The Smokehouse, across the beautiful Waimea estuary, and fetching-up on the shore-frontage of what has been shown to be one of the most contaminated sites in all of New Zealand.

The coffee at The Smokehouse is truly some of the most awful I have ever tasted, but it's not the coffee they are known for. They are famous for their smoked fish of various sorts; all, presumably, caught right there in the estuary, and all, presumably, [sarcasm] relatively-free of the Aldrin, Lindane, Dieldrin, DDT, and other highly toxic dioxin pesticides which have been leaching into the water for at least the last 30 years. [/sarcasm]

On the Thursday night I got unfeasibly drunk with my brother, sister, and some of their friends - it turned into one of those "stay up all night and drink everything in the house" nights - and spent an uncomfortable couple of hours face down on the couch fighting a losing battle with the urge to expel the highly-acidic toxic-feeling liquids in my stomach. Eventually I gave up. Not really any kind of remediation, but a definite and successful decontamination, at the very least.

Bling of a Saturday night

While not even remotely in the league of the $1600 bottle of Hennessey cognac I spotted coming through duty-free recently, my $90 bottle of Herradura on Saturday night was by far the single-most expensive alcoholic beverage I've ever bought.

And, like the Islay single-malts it occupies this kinda price-bracket with, it's utterly delicious, and worth every cent. And in this writer's humble opinion, the nicest tequila around.

Storm-water my bitch up

So I get back from a couple of days in Nelson to this sight, across the road from my house:



and the sudden horrible realisation that my life is going to get considerably louder in the next few months (see second paragraph).

UPDATE: What I'd quite like to know, though, is how the goddamnhell they managed to get a resource consent which allowed them to start work at 6.30 in the morning.

Coming-up on Drinks-After-Work...

We examine the differences (and similarities) between a 1951 Martini made without gin, and a Dirty Bastard Bloody Mary made with horseradish sauce.

In the soon-to-be-bigger-and-better MP3-blogger section of our show, we will present no-fi electro (Coin, TV On the Radio), quite possibly the funniest album title ever (TV On The Radio's OK Calculator), greatest pop moments in Norwegian black metal (Emperor's Anthemn to the Welkin at Dusk), my new favourite band (Animal Collective), possibly even better than all this, brand-new-unreleased-and-quite-feasibly-never-to-be-so tracks from your gracious host; and many, many, more.

Also: local bar reviews (in the section entitled If Wellington Never Had Another Like This We'd Never Miss 'Er, Truly); smarmy-twat 'travel' writing (in the 101 Reasons Why No-one In Their Right Mind Would Live Here section); Blog-reviews (in the Sad, Miguided Also-Rans section); and the Definitive Compendium of Obituaries of Bob Moog (starting with the Economist one, probably).

EDIT: How much like Dr. Strangelove does Robert Moog look? Uncanny... kinda...

Obligatory post-election post

It was a good night, there at J's, watching the election-sport on the box. Drinks and pasta and friends of friends and shouting witticisms at the telly. That sort of thing. The only thing that would have made it sweeter was if one or more of the following had been banished from NZ politics forever:

Winston Peters (I guess you could call 16 hours in bed on Sunday with the mother-of-all-hangovers a "tangi", if you really wanted to)

Peter Dunne (I guess you could call being a snide petulant twat after the results came in "showing a bit of personality", if you really wanted to)

Rodney Hide (I guess you could call spending 5 weeks bullying the poor people of the Epsom electorate "time well-spent electioneering", if you wanted to)

Don Brash (I guess you could call not conceeding on election-night "a victory of sorts", if you wanted to)

But it was as if the Nation of New Zillud, like some sort of collective Powdered Toast Man, cried "cling tenaciously to my buttocks!" And by 'eck, they all did. And all lived to collect another MP's salary.

But I fucking swear, if Winston Peters somehow pulls another 1996 trick and ends up forming a government with the National Party after keeping the country on hold for 3 months, I'm going to steal a light-plane, fill it full of explosives, and fly the bastard into Parliament myself.

PS. The irony is, Mr "yawn yawn" Styles, that if your fucking product was as half as good a tool as it was sold to be, I'd have enough time to post three times a day. Print that out and stick it on your white-board of shame, you seedy Churton-park-poon-chasing prick.

I'm back. I'm bad. He's black and I'm mad.

Yep.. back. To be honest, not particularly thrilled about being so. Not that the internet appears to bear any proof of me ever having been away (apart from on this discussion forum).

I'm a little sleepy and I feel like I left my head in Sydney at the bottom of a bottle of Smirnoff Blue. I'm truly sorry for the lack of blogging. Oh, and get fucked Styles.

How's your day going? Mine is going:

Oh, am I awake? Must be time for a bloody mary and to go to the pub. Do I have to move any gear anywhere today? No? Good. Oh crap. I have to put on clean clothes and go to work. What's this strange feeling I am experiencing... why, I think it's hunger. How strange to be feeling hungry before 11 at night. Whatever can be going on. Ewww.. people I have to talk to about work stuff. Even worse, I have to make some sense. Can I go to the pub now? What about now? etc.

I've brought back some photos, and I'm pretty sure I didn't bring back any communicable diseases. Stay tuned.

[want good food on the airplane? then read this...]

I found this and thought I'd share. It's about the last time I went on tour. I published it once in my 'zine Looking for a fish-drying plant.

...so a few months back I was in this band and we were playing gigs in christchurch and dunedin... and we flew to chch and back on air new zealand and we told 'em we were a cultural group and registered to receive special meals of various types -- the guitarist got vegan which was pretty bad and the drummer got islamic-halal and that was worse but i really scored -- i was jewish-kosher and that was really quite a good deal... 'course i nearly gave the game away when we boarded the the flight attendant asked me if i wanted to open the meal tray myself and here's me thinking "oh yeah you cook it and i'll open it alright" so i said yeah ok and we sit down and then there he is with this sealed tray full of all this kosher food and i looked at it and said thanks and then he sez "are you going to open it sir? because we need to start preparing it right away because this is just a short flight" and i realise that i had to open the fucken thing then and there and verify it's kosher-ness or something and pro'ly say a prayer or something but i just sorta broke the seals with my thumbnail and looking kinda stupid gave it back to him... but the meal was pretty good when they brought it... and it even had a certificate of kosher-ness signed by the rabbi who prepared it... so that night we played christchurch and the next day we went in a car to dunedin and played that night and the next day we came back to christchurch quite late and i went to this party with some people i knew and we ended up going to denny's y'know the all-night restaurant... we went there at about 4.30 a.m. and we had some food and then it was pretty much time to go to the airport for the 6.20 flight back to wellington.. and by this time i was having trouble staying awake on the plane for long enough to eat my kosher breakfast of course which the flight attendants had to prepare specially 'cos of some administrative error and it took them ages -- we could see wellington by the time they presented it to me -- and i couldn't eat anyway cos of going to denny's and all but i felt compelled to try so i wolfed a bit of it and i got indigestion and then had to work real hard to stop myself from laughing when three of them came up and started apologising for their incompetence and virtually bowing and scraping (seriously -- there was no placating them -- they were acting as if i was some kinda v.i.p. and was going to order them to be executed or something or that they were going to pop off to the galley and commit hara-kiri) and the head flight attendant made a special point of pointing out the junior f.a. whose fault it all supposedly was which was a really uncomfortable moment because initially i said "oh it's no problem" and then she pointed her out again and virtually commanded me to commit the hapless girl's name to memory -- actually i felt like a victim of some sort of cultural stereotyping -- are jewish people particularly reknowned for complaining and merciless filling-in of customer satisfaction surveys? (only perhaps in the popular-media seinfeld-woody-allen sense of jewish people)... it was really ridiculous... simultaneously feeling annoyed at this racial discrimination as well as being annoyed and embarrassed that, travelling as i was under false pretences, i wasn't actually deserving of such discrimination, and frustrated at the culture of complaint and litigation we now seem to belong to where something like that can't go wrong without people having to both feel like they have to make a big thing out of it and defend themselves in pre-emptive strikes against the making of the big deal, and appalled thinking "how often does this happen to other people"... especially real jewish people maybe even not from n.z. who really want their kosher breakfast and might get it a little late on an early-a.m. flight from christchurch to wellington, and have to put up with these horrible desperate fawning arseholes... maybe they mistook my tiredness for grumpiness -- should have just told 'em i'm not a all-nighter-and-then-morning person!

so i was going to say next time you fly air new zealand tell 'em you're jewish and sit back and wait for the fun to start but about a week after this air n.z. announced they were stopping serving meals on domestic and short haul flights and i couldn't help feeling more than a little bit responsible.

Going to Sydney-o with my effects units in my pack...

Yeah.. going to Sydney on Thursday morning, to play some The Stumps shows and a solo gig too. Here's some links with info if you think you wanna make it.

Friday night (2nd Sept) I'm supposed to be doing a solo seht show at the latest Impermanent Audio event, and on Saturday night The Stumps are playing in the Sound No Sound extravaganza at The Mandarin Club. No idea where the show on Sunday night is; guess we'll find out when we get there.

UPDATE

Sunday September 4th
The NZ Possie @ Yvonne Ruve {104a Hibernian House / 342 Elizabeth St, Surry Hills}
plus whoever you wish to collaborate with.

Spam, spam, spam, spam...

In the last few days I've received various unsolicited messages from Puffin A. Earthward, Recollection T. Geometry, Senselessly P. Angioplasties, Dionysus Schwartz, and, uh, Himmelfarb.

Working for a living never looked like so much fun.

Blog, death, and blog-death

Because every other bastard has been posting (even Kate), I thought I'd better do something. So - since we have several orders of business, let's get into it.

1. Charles is a dirty ho.
The other morning she woke me around 5.30 making all sorts of racket. "Oh" thinks I, "Charles has brought a mouse in" for she was making all the right sorts of running and tossing and jumping noises. After a brief period of silence I got up to check and she surely had caught a mouse, for I saw her sitting there in the cold grey of dawn, looking very pleased with herself, chewing with a mouse-tail hanging from her mouth. "Good on ya Charles" I thought, "give it what for" and went back to bed.

An hour later I was again roused from my slumber by Charles doing her daily morning-wake-up routine. This involves jumping on the bed, standing on my chest, saying something like "rrah rrraow" and giving me a big wet sloppy Charles-kiss. A big wet sloppy Charles kiss is a strong nuzzle/headbutt where she sticks her big wet sloppy cold nose in my face, and sometimes licks me on the mouth as well. Usually I manage to avoid the licking; this morning I did not and I spent several minutes feeling sick and trying to convince myself that I hadn't just earlier seen her chewing on vermin. I succeeded partially; the self-deception lasted until I got up and stood on a still-juicy mouse-tail in the bathroom.

2. Java my script up, masher
Hey the second piece of Java-script I've ever written is now live on this page. See if you can spot it. (Tip - you might have to refresh the page a couple of times).

And of course if you're enough of a nerd you'll know how to inspect the page source and so on. So get fucked. I'm mainly talking to you, Styles.

3. My new site.
I've been working on an electronic bio/portfolio. It's as simple as possible - it's all HTML with no scripting or anything, 'cos I want to be able to drive off of a CD-ROM. To test it I loaded it onto stephenclover.sphosting.com. I'm also experimenting with an idea to foil email-address harvesters - encoding my email address backwards in the "mailto" link. I'm not sure that it's so obvious what to do once your mail app fires up, though. Ultimately I will write a piece of code which decodes some sort of an encoded email address - like my own derivation of base-64, or the weird encoding they use in SMS messages or similar... and this will work like a treat!

Anyway if you wanna check it out go right ahead but be warned; pop-ups galore!

which leads me to...

4. Good, free, no-ads, no-pop-ups web-hosting.
Is there such a thing? Any suggestions. Subdomains are ok. Or else, anyone want to lend me some webspace and a subdomain while I get this thing going? I plan to ultimately get a domain and proper hosting and so on, but for the moment, I'll consider anything.

5. WTF of the week.
Is it my imagination, or are cullottes somehow back in fashion? Perhaps not ones like those (right) but cullottes all the same?

Floaters

I just found out that the new girl one of my friends is seeing is someone I was seeing for a while about 18 months ago. This's never happened to me before; it's a bit weird.

I recently worked out that one of my favourite blogs, one I read all the time, is written by someone I went to high school with. Now THAT's even weirder.

Oh, and I just discovered something floating in my coffee. Which is weirdest of all; since I made it and I definitely didn't put anything in it.

*sings It's a small world after all...

Sightings and double-takes

Really irritating not to have my camera on hand this morning as, riding the bus downtown to work, spied groups of people dressed almost exactly like the wonderful and enigmatic The Residents, prancing along Lambton Quay. Was enough to cause me to violently double-take, injuring my neck slightly. Principal difference between these folk and The Residents of course is that The Residents tended not to wear sandwich-boards advertising brand new Vodafone 3G services (sorry, not going to link to Vodafone).

Wonders at feasibility of following...
me: "Hey, Boss, gotta go home sick, neck hurt quite badly."
Boss: "Oh yeah? How'd ya do it then?"
me: "Turned head sharply cos thought spied lengendary San Francisco anonymous art-concept multimedia pop-band walking along Lambton Quay. Cricking noise, yelps, etc."

All downhill from there, one suspects.

More The Residents here (erm The Residents 'bog' [sic]), and here.

Geek slut

...is one of my favourite blogs. I've been meaning to link to it for ages. His tagline reads "Geek. Soldier. Slut. A glimpse of an American horn dog" - and what else do you really need to know? Well, it's insightful, entertaining, and usually more than a little frightening. WARNING: this blog may or may not be work-safe; depends where you work, really.

Ross P. Kettle's newest cartoon is again a damn funny one; at least for my New Zealand politics-enabled readers.

NP: La Monte Young's A Well-Tuned Piano. I'm not going to upload it, because it's about 5 hours long.

NZD and a QP

Tonight I went to the launch of the new Quality Planning website. Minister for the Environment Marion Hobbs (you'd think I'd be able to link to her somewhere.. but no..) spoke, and everyone was happy and clapped. I drank wine, and then I drank some more. I wasn't exactly responsible for the QP site; but put it like this - if certain parts don't work, it's definitely my fault.

This is my new NZD profile photo. I really like it. It's from my blue period. I think I look really hot and I hope all the ladies do too. I quite like how it looks like someone has smacked me in the eye. Actually it looks like someone - or even different people - has smacked me in both eyes. In reality it was about 4am when I took the photo and the only thing that had smacked me in the eye was a dozen beers and several martinis. I particularly like the ambiguous way that it looks like I've got two double chins; or else only one chin and two Adam's apples.

If you couldn't tell, my webcam sucks. Actually, it's not my webcam; that's all we're going to say about that.

Tonight the rest of The Stumps came around. I played them the new album I've been mastering for several months now, and only just completed. They loved it. We got drunk and played it very loudly. We were supposed to be practising but we never got around to it. It's only two weeks now until we go and play gigs in Sydney.

Last night I dreamt - once again - that I was having sex with one of my workmates. Well, it wasn't even just sex - it was a full-blown relationship and house-buying and interior decorating and all that crap. And the workmate in question was someone with whom I have hardly had anything to do; have hardly spoken to for more than 12 months, even. Am looking forward tonight to finding out if the curtains arrive and if we get the loan approved. And so on.

Love is a fist

I felt sick all day today. Sick like going to get sick, like soreness building up in my throat and so on. Had to go to the doctor (The Mill Liquorsave) and get myself a script (1 litre of Teachers)... just took my medicine (a COLOSSAL belt of whiskey followed by another big glass to be sipped) and feel a lot better. Hence I am sitting here, eating my tea (stir fried bubble'n'squeak - leftover rice, leftover pasta, some chopped cocktail olives...) and blogging.

For weeks after The Jarman left, I was telling everyone that I was loving living alone. And I was.. I mean, I wasn't lying. I really was enjoying my new-found freedom and ability to do whatever I wanted and get really drunk all the time and be a bit of a slut. I just realised, however, that it's all bullshit. I hate living alone. What I meant, when I told ppl I was enjoying it, was really just that I was enjoying feeling less bad about coming home after 9 or 10 hours and spending several more hours on my own stuff. I was feeling less guilty about working late into the night every night recording new solo seht material, or building the next The Stumps album, or correcting the artwork for a new release, or making up 20 parcels of CDs and sending them to radio stations and magazines all over the world... fuck I just read all that and it makes me sound like such a shit boyfriend; forget you ever read it and just carry on about yer business, ok?

I'm listening to the first Mr Bungle album, and it's so GREAT! Goddamn it, it's nearly 15 years since my best friend Iain Wickens brought it to school and said "Man you gotta hear this album, it's got the new Faith No More singer on it, it's INSANE". And it's nearly ten years since one of my 'friends' (read - fucken loser who I lived with for a while) stole my CD copy of it. To this day I don't believe that the dick realises that I knew all along. Arrgghh.. long story, ok?

The other day I was feeling adventurous so I whipped up a profile on NZ Dating; "I'm gonna wreak some havoc" I said to myself (and to the_sifter, if I recall correctly). Wish I'd never bothered now.. just keep on getting emails from people whose feelings I can't bring myself to hurt.

Ms. Brown is going off, if you hadn't been keeping up. Also the_sifter aka J 'to the muthafucken dancing-with-myself" S has appeared in the drinking buddies on the right. *hic*

There's no place like home... there's no place like home... there's no place like home....

Ross P. Kettle's latest cartoon...

is really funny.

Good weekend, all?

NP: The proto-goth/industrial granduer of the Cocteau Twins' Persephone, from their 1984 album Treasure.

By the way, calling it proto-goth/industrial isn't by any means intended as an insult; just trying to place it, y'know?

A good bloody mary, these days, is hard to find

I like Bloody Marys a lot, but I often find other people don't. Possibly it's because they're piss-weak (the Bloody Marys, I mean); possibly it's because they (the non-believers) don't know any better. Either way, I myself like them very very hot and strong. I could number the bars where they make a Bloody Mary to my taste on the fingers of one hand; the number of bar-staff who do the same are even less numerous. So obviously, I had to start making my own.

I've linked to this Bloody Mary recipe [drinksmixer.com/drink581.html] before, but to be honest it's on the piss-weak side. There's a good number of variants if you inspect the table on the right side of the page, and some of them get pretty fancy - clam juice? Wasabi anyone?

Ultimately, however, I had to come up with my own special recipe. I've been working on it for weeks and weeks now, and I'm finally ready to share it with the world. It's not actually too special, but without any further ado, I give you:

Stephen's "Dirty Bastard" Bloody Mary

90 ml (3 oz) pure tomato juice, chilled
60 ml (2 oz) vodka of moderate quality, chilled
30 ml (1 oz) sherry, preferably dry
15 ml (1/2 oz) Worcestershire sauce
8 very generous dashes of Tabasco sauce
a big squirt of fresh lemon juice, preferably straight out of the guts of a fresh lemon
a large pinch of sea salt
a big grind of pepper
at least a tablespoon of horseradish cream
a big ol' dash of celery salt

Combine in a shaker with ice, shake long and hard and then pour the lot - ice and all - into a shortish, round glass.

Forget about all that celery stalk shit, just slug it down. You'll possibly be left gasping, and with a very tingly feeling in your guts. That's exactly the point.

Notes:
1. All liquid measures based on the rough equivalency that 1 single measure = 30 ml = 1 (liquid) oz.
2. Chilled vodka is vodka kept in the freezer. The better the quality vodka, the less it freezes, or so I understand; conversely, the more it freezes, the more of those really sexy ice crystal thingies form inside the bottle.
3. A generous dash of Tabasco sauce is obtained by upending a bottle of Tabasco sauce and thumping it with the heel of your hand. The ejaculation is voluminous and spectacular, so make sure your aim is true.
4. For sherry, Noilly Prat will do. Whaddaya mean you don't have any in the cabinet!?
5. You'll wanna be careful with the horseradish cream: not too many additional ingredients, and no chunky bits. Seriously, the chunky bits are EWWWWW.
6. The name? The resulting drink is not not the most attractive shade of red - any painters out there will know what I mean when I say it's as if I hadn't cleaned the all the green out of my brush before I used it in my red.

Ms. Brown got over it...

... and now she's been added - in her rightful place - to my drinking buddies.

That's not her picture, though... that's just an image of Melissa Ethridge (following chemotherapy) I'm temporarily leeching from some website. I found it by querying google images for "ugly lesbian", and it returned pictures of Ethridge. Wow.

Melissa Ethridge rocks. So does Ms. Brown.

Miscellany, thirst

I feel I should point out that I am fucking terrified is some sort of a new-lad response to the somewhat-earnest I am not afraid (thanks to Smackie for this link too), which went up following the recent bombings in London.

Cereal disappointment of the week: Kraft's Grape Nuts, which bear no relation to grapes or nuts, but are rather much more like little pieces of barley shrapnel which have a tendency to shred the roof of your mouth.

I wish I would stop dreaming about having sex with my workmates. And mainlining heroin into my large intestine (I don't even know if this is possible, let alone a common-practice).

Oh, and right at this moment, I really really really need a drink.

Fear is what I feel...

I am fucking terrified (thanks to Smacked Face for the link).