In Cooking on
18 May 2012 with no comments
- Burgers like flame, whereas sausages don’t. Keep you sausages away from the flame as they’ll quickly release their fat and massively increase the intensity of the flame, and they will burn very quickly and taste dry and unpleasant. Burgers take a lot longer to burn and are usually enhanced by bit of charring. You also want to cook burgers as quick as possible to keep them a bit rare in the centre. So just stick them right over the flame.
- BBQ mushrooms whole skewered through the stem on a metal skewer. This will help them keep their moisture and thus their size and cook evenly. Rub them with a little bit of oil first and sprinkle with salt and pepper as seasoning.
- Chicken breasts taste great with a bit of charring but they often need a bit of something on them to stimulate this. Try a simple paprika, cumin and salt rub. Also, mix in a little oil so they don’t stick.
- I don’t do fish, so don’t ask me how to BBQ it.
- Don’t cook steak on the BBQ unless you have a hotplate that gets really hot. It just won’t cook quickly enough. Unless, that is, you like your steak ‘well done’ in which case you can’t really call it steak, but rather you should refer to it as ‘burnt cow’.
- Cook lamb chops very quickly on a very hot bit of the BBQ – you want them a bit charred on the outside and medium on the inside.
- You can BBQ cheese you know. Indian cheese Paneer is great marinaded in tandoori spices then BBQ’d on a skewer. Serve it on top of salad leaves. Also Haloumi is great BBQ’d too.
- If you’ve got buns, ciabatta or any other bread with yer BBQ, remember to grill that up for a minute or 2 as well for a nice smokey flavour.
- Skewering chicken? Stick some chorizo chunks on there too (cut from the sausage, not the sliced stuff).
- BBQ’s are a ritual as much as a meal, and as such the food should be consumed as it’s cooked, rather than at the end when it’s all cooked. Don’t leave meat around to dry and veg to shrivel. As soon something is cooked, hand it out so that it can be enjoyed in its freshly charred state. Repeat until everyone is full.
In Noises on
13 May 2012 with no comments
Debates around sound quality aside, music on vinyl is unquestionably a better experience than tacky CD’s or ephemeral computer files. Most folks don’t really care that much for the experience of music outside of hearing the music or seeing a band live. It may be a hangover from my youth (staring intently at Iron Maiden’s prodigiously detailed Derek Riggs masterpiece Somewhere in Time while listening to the album), but the whole package that goes with a well packaged album adds to the music, and brings it to life. The physical manifestation of an album (or single) isn’t just packaging, a storage medium, or a souvenir – when done well it is a real world projection of the spirit of the music and as much a part of the experience as the music itself. Vinyl is the ultimate expression of this. The music exists, by way of tiny dimples, as a part of the physical item that is the record, rather than just data stored on it. It’s in the grooves – the record is the music. If there was no longer any electricity you could still find ways of hearing the music. And due to the medium’s necessary size, the packaging is has so much more presence, and is able to carry very detailed imagery and readable words.
A lot of the vinyl I purchased when I was a kid (when the only other alternative was cassette tapes, which were horrible) has gone astray (I still have the Somewhere in Time LP though). These days I listen to new music on Spotify, then buy the stuff I really like on CD – this is fine (and much more cost effective), but the whole experience is lacking something. I don’t want all the music I buy to be on vinyl (nor would this be possible) but I find myself desiring the vinyl versions of the records that, through the years, I’ve really loved. So I’m about to embark on a journey – probably an expensive one – to compile a collection of vinyl of the albums that really mean something to me, for the music, for the artwork, for the band photos, for the very celebration of music, and finally, to give a little something back to these bands for bringing such joy into my life.
So here is a working list of the albums that I wish to purloin, in no particular order. It is not a comprehensive list of my favourite albums – some I have no love for the packaging (eg. Warrior Soul – Space Age Playboys) of and some I already own on vinyl. There are also albums of which the music I’m fairly so-so on, but the artwork I adore (various Ed Repka covers). This is a living list, so items will be added and struck off as time goes by. Here goes.
Alice Cooper
- Killer
- Billion Dollar Babies
- Schools Out
- Welcome to my Nightmare
Alice in Chains
Amplifier
Anthrax
Alcest
Barkmarket
Baroness
Black Sabbath
Cathedral
Cobalt
Coven
- Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls
The Darkness
Darkthrone
- A Blaze in the Northern Sky
Death
- Scream Bloody Gore
- Leprosy
- Spiritual Healing
Deathspell Omega
- Si Monumentum Requires Circumspice
- Kenose
- Vas
- Paracletus
Deicide
Devin Townsend
- Terria
- Accelerated Evolution
- Ziltoid the Omniscient
- Addicted
- Deconstruction
The Dillinger Escape Plan
Earth
- Pentastar – In Style of Demons
- Hibernaculum
- Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull
Electric Wizard
Guns n’ Roses
Iron Maiden
- Iron Maiden
Killers- Number of the Beast
Live After Death- Piece of Mind
- Powerslave
- Somewhere in Time (a less love-worn copy)
- Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
- (plus various 12″ singles)
Krallice
Massacre
Megadeth
- Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying
Metallica
- Master of Puppets
- And Justice for All
Misfits
- Walk Among Us
- Earth AD/Wolfs Blood
Morbid Angel
- Altars of Madness
- Blessed are the Sick
Motley Crue
Motorhead
- Overkill
Bomber- Another Perfect Day
- Orgasmatron
NWA
Obituary
Opeth
Pavement
- Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
- Brighten the Corners
Pink Floyd
Sepultura
- Beneath the Remains
- Arise
Slayer
Skid Row
Soundgarden
- Badmotorfinger
- Superunknown
Stetsasonic
Torche
Ultramagnetic MCs
Yob
- Elaborations of Carbon
- Catharsis
- The Illusion of Motion
- The Unreal Never Lived
- The Great Cessation
- Atma
UPDATE #1: Iron Maiden’s Live After Death received via a nice man on eBay complete with guide booklet and original fan club flyer. It’s an absolute pleasure to behold. So pleased. I’ve not listened to this album for a while. It’s easy to forget just what a landmark live album is. By that point in 1984 Maiden had produced 5 of the best metal albums ever produced, before or since. The performance is exemplary and Bruce’s intra-song banter is the stuff of legend (“The moral of this story is this is what not to do if a bird shits on you, RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER!!!”). Four words “SCREAM FOR ME LONGBEACH!!!”.
In Cooking on
29 April 2012 with no comments
- Unless the recipe specifically requires, use chicken thigh fillets instead of breasts. They are must cheaper, tastier and hold their moisture better
- Always have a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil handy. The tomatoes themselves can really lift a tomato sauce and they’re great on salads. Better though, you can use the tasty olive oil from the jar as a sauce flavouring to add an extra dimension to various dishes, plus it’s a great salad dressing
- Don’t buy dried coriander, parsley or basil. You may as well just use flakes of green paint, as it will have more flavour. There is simply no substitute for the real thing. Dried thyme, rosemary and sage (among others) are fine though, although still inferior to their fresh counterparts
- Woks aren’t just for stir-fries. Due to the large surface at the top of the pan water evaporates off very quickly, making it perfect for many other types of quick dish, such as curries and pasta sauces. My wok is the single most used pan in my kitchen by a long way
- Don’t buy your soy sauce from the mainline supermarkets. You can buy a litre of the stuff from your local oriental supermarket for a similar price to what it costs you for on of those pissy little Kikoman bottles from Tesco.
- Smoked Paprika is one of those wonderful all-round ingredients. Use it to add smokey jazz to any number of sauces – Chilli con Carne, tomato sauce for pasta, curry, BBQ chicken/Pork etc.
- If you’re wondering why your dishes don’t pack the flavour punch of the restaurant counterparts, it’s because you’re not seasoning them properly
- If in doubt, add chilli sauce
- Shave Parmesan on top of your salad using a potato peeler
- Stock cubes are fine for a soup base, but fresh stock, or the stuff that comes in ‘jelly’ form, will take your soup to a whole different level
- Always make enough food (assuming that it’s that sort of recipe) so that you can have some the next day – you’ll enjoy it more if you haven’t just spent 2 hour cooking it
In ignorance on
1 April 2012 with no comments
You were told many times today how to make yourself happy. Advertising, magazines, TV, workplace, friends, music, career. Just about every situation you find yourself in is geared to make some passive or surreptitious judgement on your relative happiness. RELATIVE happiness. It seems that this elusive quality can only be measured in the context of someone else’s quotient of it. Now, I’m not going to get involved in a philosophical debate about the existence of ‘happiness’ and what qualities it may imbue. Suffice to say that it is something that most people seem to believe is both achievable and desirable.
So everyone has this internal, all encompassing, 3 dimensional diorama of what happiness represents to them. It’s not something that exists now, it is something that can (and should) be built. How did this vision of happiness come to be the shape that it is? Well let’s examine a few of the major dimensions:
- The job X rungs up from where we are now
- Y% more money
- The new Z car
- a house with 2 extra bedrooms
- X% bigger tits
- Fitting in with the crowd that has all that stuff
These are some of the trinkets of prestige. Why do you desire these things, and what evidence do you have that they will increase your happiness? Mostly you have seen other people with these things, and more. You have seen visions of these happy objects and situations in relation to happy people. You have been told they are good. Any maybe they are. They may well be good for those people who already have them. When you find yourself with these things maybe you will be happy. But are those two advents correlated? Maybe, but more likely not. It may well be, that when you find happiness it will be despite those things, not because of them. Another way to look at this is what you also get when you have these things:
- Longer hours and more stress
- Higher tax
- Higher insurance and maintenance
- The requirement to sustain a higher level of earnings to maintain the repayments
- Men looking at your tits and making you feel a bit uncomfortable & an insecure husband
- Bad company
To add insult to injury you’ve spent the last X years feeling like your life isn’t complete, slogging your guts out trying to attain your dream, only to find a jug of sludge, rather than the fabled pot of gold.
But you know all this already don’t you? You know these things won’t bring you happiness, but are just another ratchet in the machine. But you are a slave to your desires, at least that is what you believe. Your place in happy, wealthy, prestigious society depends on them. How do you escape the vicious cycle?
You already answered your question. The problem is the desire. You are so convinced that things can make you happy, the status and wealth will afford you, the respect and happiness, that you’ve lost site of the real enemy. The enemy is the desire itself. If you get a splinter in your finger, you don’t try and replace the finger, you remove the splinter – the cause of the pain. The same goes for desire – concentrate your energies on reducing these desires, and you’ll slowly but surely become more comfortable in yourself, and thus more content. Stop focusing on what other people have, that you have not, but rather consider what you already have and celebrate this. Stop focusing on other peoples’ expectations of you, and concentrate of what will bring about the best for you and those close to you. Will this bring happiness? Possibly. At the very least you’ll be in a better position to judge what happiness is and what further steps need to be taken to achieve it. You should not curtail your efforts to find this ephemeral quality of happiness, but rather stop labouring for someone else’s version of what qualities constitute happiness.
Stop comparing yourself and your life other people. Start looking around you at what you have now, as these are the building blocks for your future, not dreams based on others’ reality.
Don’t take my word for it, read these words from some much cleverer people on the subject.
In Noises on
25 March 2012 with no comments
When the sun comes out it’s not time for pop music. It’s not time for processed beats and stuttering, homogenous melodies. These plastic posies are the soundtrack to dull, drizzled Mondays not sunny Saturdays. When you hear Kiss FM you are hearing the sound of people drowning out creaking bones and grinding cogs. Pop music, like florescent lights, dully illuminates grey spaces, full of hunched people waiting for anything to happen.
As the sun warms you through, you should relax and change down a few gears. Sweep away the polythene clutter of the daily grind. As the sun’s radiation, it’s photic flow, bombards your skin, lay back and take it all in. The soundtrack of the sun is layed-back and fuzzed up. It’s both warming and foreboding. Harsh and smooth. I have made a soundtrack to these hazy days to be experienced alone, reclined on grass, medicated with whatever pleases you. Feel it, and forget everything else.
In effluence on
28 January 2012 with no comments
Apparently guys don’t get Pinterest. This is not just a sweeping generalisation based on idle speculation, figures released by the service back this up stating that Pinterest’s user base is 80% female. Statistics aside, a cursory glance at this media sharing site’s content will convince you of this, as it mainly consists of pictures of shoes, dresses and cakes. Not man fodder. Man no like. Where are the pictures of Kelly Brook in a bikini and stills from the new Batman movie?
This shouldn’t bother me. I have no interest is shoes (although I do wear them, they’re quite useful you know) and even less in sharing pictures of them. I should move on and watch some porn while sharing pictures of fast cars on Facebook. You know, man things.
But the thing is, the entity that is Pinterest – a site where you can collect pictures (and other media) of stuff – really appeals to me. You can do this in a way with various other tools, like Facebook or with bookmarking sites, but it’s not the same. Pinterest makes it easy to grab images from any page, comment on them and categorise any way you wish by ‘pinning’ them to one of your ‘boards’. I like to ‘collect’ pictures of old sci-fi and horror movie posters, unusual art, album covers, amusing retro-computer posters, geek stuff, arty stuff, stuff that I like. The fact that this is then shared with anyone following you, or anyone who stumbles across your profile, is a peripheral bonus. As is being able to ‘follow’ people who like the same stuff, so that you can ‘like’ or ‘repin’ their stuff. Oh no, wait, I can’t do that because there’s no one on there pinning the sort of stuff that I like to pin. Bugger. But I can follow plenty of ladies who share pictures of salads and cute kitties. Great, that’s me all over.
I have no idea whether Pinterest meant to be niche-female, but the site design is certainly conducive to it. Certainly, any bloke who takes a cursory look will bugger off pretty swiftly and cleanse his assaulted eyes with some videos of cars crashing. This makes me sad. I’m not aware of any other site that makes collecting cool stuff so easy. So my plan is to claim Pinterest back from the shoe-huggers.
Guys, please join me on Pinterest. Post pictures of chicks, action figures, games, spiderman, cars, steaks, football, movie posters, those amusing images with the black borders with the weird photo and amusing slogan, SKCD, Dilbert, bands, comics, blah, blah. You know, guy stuff. If you do, I’ll follow you, promise. And we can make Pinterest a place hospitable to males and transmit our ambient testosterone across the interwebs into each others manly eyeballs. You know it makes sense.
In doom on
24 January 2012 with no comments
Other than The Walking Dead (which is a TV series not a film), I’ve pretty much eschewed new zombie films. As a genre it’s all become so hackneyed and repetitive, like vampires and pop music. But on reading the summary of Pontypool (even the name offers an air of incongruous mystery) it didn’t seem much like a zombie film at all. So I gave it a go, and I’m glad I did.
Pontypool is a 90 minute exercise in claustrophobia and slow-building terror. It’s a distinctly atypical and cerebral take on this flagging sub-genre, both thematically and in structure. It’s also laugh-out-load funny (in a blackest of black ways). Set almost entirely in a local radio station housed in the basement of a church, it revolves primarily around words, voices and language. Yes, this IS a zombie film believe it or not. Anyone who’s read Neal Stephenson’s iconic novel Snow Crash will realise the debt of gratitude this film owes to it – the makers make no secret of this, tellingly featuring a copy of the book in the foreground of one of the scenes. Stephenson’s concept of ‘neuro-linguistic hacking’ is mutated into an ultra-infectious, word-transmitted neural disease that turns its hosts into the crazed, human munching monsters we expect from a zombie film. Except that you rarely see them. You hear them, and the havoc they reek, a lot.
For a change, the stars of the show are the performances, the script, and for the first 60 minutes at least, the execution. Stephen McHattie’s absorbing performance, as a derelict and defeated DJ stuck in local radio announcement hell, delivers the film’s most entertaining and moving moments. The other stars, the voices over phone and airwaves, are chilling, and effected in such a way that their illustration of the catastrophic events are more terrifying than if we were actually shown them, which we are not.
Pontypool’s climax is somewhat less than satisfactory, but given the nail-biting build up, it’s hardly surprising that they struggled to follow through. The film’s strengths are in its ability to shock and confound, and its demonstration that, even in the jaded and much maligned horror genre, characterization and scripts are king.
An absolute must see.
