Brunswick Cassoulet

WARNING: THIS IS NOT VEGAN FRIENDLY POST

It's not an anti-vegan post - but is about the gratuitous consumption about the flesh, fat and bones of fellow living creatures... hmmmm,

Ducks are one of the few animals I like living as much as I like them roasted and succulent and sliding down my gullet.

Last week Melbourne faced a big fat chill that had everyone grumbling in public, fumbling with woollies and thermals and rugging up.( I know Sydney is miserable in winter but it isn't actually cold). I spent about 3 days in thermic misery before my New England cellular memory kicked in and I started feeling ok with the bracing feeling of cold pores and goose flesh wherever my thermals or polar fleecy had slipped...

It isn't that cold either - hovering around ten degrees, and 6 at night... but the feeling of cold and a deep need for slow snuggle food, reminded me that unlike Sydney, melbourne does facilitate the cooking and consumption of one of the great northern European comfort foods..... hmmmm..... cassoulet.

Cassoulet sounds like french for casserole - and it's kind of what it is, basically beans cooked in duck fat. My gallstone rotates just thinking about it, and my arteries harden..... -oh - but it is so unbelievably succulently wonderful, that....

My first cassoulet came out of a tin in Belle ile en Mer, about 8 years ago. I'd been sitting on a cliff face, doing my standard hypothermic plein-aire in ski gear act, when I heard a strange low moan howling around me, and realised it was me, involuntarily groaning as the wind gushed and ocean pounded and roared beneath me, and salt spray rose and stung me on the face.


At the time, I wasn't sitting on the exact cliff face shown in the pic above - but I have sat there before and since, and this pikkie gives you the general impression of intense cold and wind.....

Anyway - after catching my moans, I packed up my oilsticks and canvas, and staggered back to casa abel, were I gulped down some whisky while she opened a tin, and poured it into a pot on the stove......

In france - even tinnned food is gourmet - and this was an amazing revelation of the divine power of fat, to warm, soothe, comfort and tantalize the tasetbuds.

The key to cassoulet is 'confit de canard', for which the crude translation is 'duck jam'. It's a way of preserving the duck thighs in a generous amount of duck fat and salt, somewhat akin to corning beef. Our local deli sells confit style prepared duck legs for $5 a pop - but the proper ones are still almost raw, and need to be cooked slowly with some exquisite grease absorbing vegetable or bean...

I was inspired to buy some tinned confit de canard, combining them with fresh toulouse sausages and the special type of haricots blanc, that in Chili are called "porotos granados" and that you can get fresh once a year in long grainy red bods..... so that was how I learned to make the mayhem cassoulet.

Back in the antipodes - it never got that cold, so I'd never bothered, till now.

I took the tram into vic Markets and wandered over to the gourmette deli section, asking for duck confit. the french stall had some Perigord confit for $52 a tin (note to self, I thought: must stock up on 11 euro tins of duck confit if I ever go back to Europe), but after my eyebrows ascended my chrome dome in flabbergastination, they directed me towards the gourmette fowl stalls on the other side - where I could procure ONE confit thigh - shrink wrapped in vacuum sealed plastic for a mere $12.50. It would have to do. I wandered around the various sausage stalls till I found the nearest continental approximation of Saucise de toulouse ( Chorizo and Karakowska don't quite work for this), and picked up some dried canneloni beans, got the tram home, popped the beans in some water to soak overnight, and went out and got drunk.

Fortunately I'd had the foresight to prepare some stock a few months earlier from a peking duck that we bought from Footscray late last year to share with Renaissance girl's mum. We've also inherited her crock-pot - so this seemed like a fitting tribute, as well as a cosy entree into winter.

One saturday morning, I plugged in the crock pot, extracted the confit duck leg, and plonked it in the bottom, with the duck grease. I chopped up an onion, and some garlic, and put them in the fat. I then threw on the four italian sausages (which kind of doubled as a bouquet garni) and the drained beans. I then hauled the block of frozen duck stock and fleshy bones out of the freezer and banged it on the top. then I went back to bed for 12 hours. (OK - I turned the crock pot down from high to low after 7 or 8 hours)

When I recovered from the hangover, Renaissance girl and I filled our bellies and our souls with soft, creamy, beany, meaty goodness. Yum Yum.

post-protodoctor purgatroid

It is done. finally.

Five years, two months, four deaths, 107000 words, two volumes, five countries, 54 subjects, a messy divorce, two heartbreaks, two house moves, two departments, a stomach ulcer, lots of blogging, lots of chocolate, lots of codeine.

Submission was - of course, delightful - so was sydney - for the first 4 days - and then I came down with a chest infection, that kept me huddled over my laptop, slicing words off the enormous expanding tome, so it could conform to the faculty limits of non-insane theses (ha ha).

I spent the final week feeling weak and wet and overwhelmed, and regretting all the things I couldn't go to, all the people I couldn't see - and then I realised what a relief it is to live somewhere where the pace of life is slower than I am.

On my last day in Sydney - I did two wonderful things - going into AGNSW to sit through the entire Phil Collins (the artist, not the pop-singer) karaoke installation of "the world won't listen".




I don't think I've been as moved by something since hanging out in the Rothgo Room at the Tate Modern.
Inspired - I wandered lonely as a cloud through the botanic gardens down to circular quay where i caught a ferry out to cockatoo island to catch Ken Unsworth's grand piano tribute to his wife, called "a ringing glass".

The space itself is so enormous and overwhelming - it's hard to discern whether I was being affected by the site, or the work. the first four rooms were small, and contained discrete mobile musical installations: a dancing skeleton, a dream sequence, and then a series of miniature grand pianos, and angels - and then finally a discombobulated grand piano suspended from the ceiling.

After this, I walked through two enormous rooms: one set up as a large golden curtained salon with a baby grand in the corner, and the final being an enormous hallway - flanked by parallel sets of five elaborately curtained mirrors, and eight small chandeliers, up to a rather disappointing finale assemblage on the stage, flanked by two large monitors screening the dream sequence projection from room two,

This felt like an interesting translation of the experience of playing piano (the symmetry of left hand and right hand mirrored by the bass and treble clefs, as they span the 5 black keys and 8 white) into walking through a piano playing experience. but the whole thing was so nice and classical, it reminded me of being 10 years old, being a good girl, a docile, well trained, well managed classical music box fantasy of feminine musicality that at a certain point I found it a bit sickening.

Maybe the ghostly emptiness is supposed to evoke grief and nostalgia and the gaps between memory and longing, but I'm not entirely convinced. It's definitely worth the voyage out to cockatoo island - but I felt like I was being let into one man's rather indulgent fantasia - enabled by scale, status and cash, but without a dialogue with the materials or others that would let it transform into something more alive.

So now, I'm back in bleak city, feeling mightily relieved - but - mostly weird.
Lots of people say this is what happens - they describe an emptiness, a feeling of anti-climax, of let-down.

I'm finding it hard to string two words together, and trudge slowly through lukewarm fiction: jeanette winterson's boating for beginners, and gunter grass's memoirs. the weather has hurtled down to single figures and I huddle in bed in my thermals, heater blasting, wondering why I feel so cold here when I survived real winters in the northern hemisphere.

Feeling wary of my tendency to crawl into the study with my morning coffee and sit in front of the computer immobile for hours and hours, I dragged myself into the cold and wet last night to catch Lauren Browns installation at Bus Projects.

After negotiating the treck from the north western to the mid-eastern point of the city, scurrying along and past a myriad of melbourne's famous alleyways with other bay-whipped weather beaten sods, I saw a cluster of jackets outside a doorway, near some bright graffiti and the handpainted number 117 and so I climbed the stairs.

Imagine a stairwell somewhere between 'lanfranchis' and the old 'mop' gallery, opening into a small foyer not unlike 'knot', without the feeling of imminent collapse.

A small foyer, chugged with dark jackets and bare bobbing heads. white painted brick walls, covered with straight red stripes of adhesive velveteen, defining the blobby mob within. someone (the co-colaborator Gemma?) had the canny sense to wear a matching cotton striped top, and the bravery to remove lumpen woollens to display. I wanted to get a photo of stripes on stripes but thought it remiss.

I pressed through the bodies, proffered gold coins for red wine in a white cup, twisted arms towards catalogues, contact lists, and slowly edged my way inwards. Saw a black curtain on my right, and a darkened room on my left. headed to my left, and wandered too close to wear LED's and Bunnings power spots blasted into my retinas,embraced the scheining glare of glittering gold towers of spray painted monochrome glory from the Moreland hard rubbish month, all piled into shrines of mammon.

*sigh* this show was like a jewellery box already; red velveteen fuzz, lining the opening for gloriously glittering golden trash.

I tried to read a catalogue essay from the glint off a spray painted monitor and felt a bit overwhelmed, so I pressed on into the final curtained room, revealing an installation by Julie Traitsis & Rebecca Joseph of lots and lots of speakers and audio players, and monitors, all sequentially squeaking staticky fuzzbots of song fragments. It reminded me of the "guess that song" from triple m, and also of ricky's room in "American Beauty" and I got a bit spooked, and started wondering about cultural capital after I seemed to recognise most of the songs, so I had to leave.

Standing in the golden aweness I overheard one girl saying to another "Yeah... I dunno how someone can come up with an idea, and transform it into.... this, ay? but i guess that's what makes them an artist, and me not". I felt a little more relaxed about my cultural capital and crept on into Lauren's curtained room.

First thing: two death certificates. Second thing, the coffin from her blog, cleaved by white flouro light boxes. Third thing, the row of red painted jack in the boxes, lining the wall. I crept around, felt the objects in the space, wathced others interacting with the works, before winding the handles myself. I don't want to give the game away. It's hard to believe that installation art can have a plot, but sometimes it does...

Opening the curtains, peeking back to the golden room, I wondered why it was arranged like a proscenium, an alter, and why people were gathered around as if it was a stage. Two black clad figures walked into the middle of the set up and animated a couple of suspended golden puppets. To the chants of tibetan throat music, the artists, Nicole Dominic & Sarah Bunting, then garbed each other in golden raiments and latex gloves, and then kneeled at their floor alter, and started to perform a ritualised alchemy of dripping stuff into golden paint. It was so silly as to be exquisitely delightful, and watching the fuddle of the crowd, fumbling for objects that could be dipped and transformed from garbage into glory, spread an ineffable golden warmth throughout the space, of participation, relationship and play. I think that "saints of the apocalypse" is a bit of an OTT title for what was sweet, warm, shiny and funny, but the piece and the performance left me glowing.

Sydney, Here I come!

Ohhh - god and there's so much happening I'm in a whirl just thinking of it!

fortunately some of it is in cyberspace too.

Jane Polkinghorne has just launched a new project - aka 'the year of denim' whihc is being assiduously blogged.....

and Carriageworks is hosting the laucnh of ' there goes the neighbourhood' the Keg & Zanny/squatsapce/redwatch collaboration.... its on friday night

versions of what its about are at redwatch

Plus there's stuff ant MOP, the red rattler, firstdraft.... and my last chance to cathc the MCA drawing show that has sparked all those silly reviews in the SMH... (which were a handy last minute motivation to finish the tome - on life-drawing, and all those silly debates about drawing and 1970s art schools - coz now, I can officially claim to have researched the matter thoroughly - and..... Peter Fuller died in the 1980s but art school drawing did not)

and somewhere in this I'll be handing in my thesis too. About bloody time,

Fernando Solanas - El Sur

This is still one of my favourite films ever, though I'm losing my Spanish... the '90's was The Orb and Astor Piazzola

The Orb - A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain...

Protocrastination can sometimes be taken a bit far...
(this one is for Renaissance Girl)

Death, Discourse... err... dahlias?

At about 1.30 last Tuesday morning, I had one of those swirling vortexes of a moment in which time, experience and everything seemed to turn into the tunnel that runs during the credits of Dr. Who.

I was sitting here, at this desk, tippy-tapping away on the keyboard, editing my intro for the thousandth time, and chugging away, cutting, pasting and knitting together all the little bits of insight and exegesis with reasonably grammatically correct signposting sentences, and accurate footnotes.

then i came to the bit about feminist ethnography and cultural studies, where I'm meant to spend 200 words succinctly encapsulating why i shifted from Art History to Gender and Cultural Studies, and the value of cultural studies methodologies to my inquiry, analysis and findings. I felt a rather dreary sense of trudging back to 2005 and 2006, when i was reading/teaching/loving raymond williams, beverley skeggs, and lugging around Denzin and Lincoln, and the earnest optimistic afternoons in my supervisors office in the quad, as we sat on the carpet, and mapped out the great inquiry, which I presented in manifesto form in 3 papers at conferences and seminars... But this time it felt so cloaked in a haze of amnesia, and buried under so many other thrilling findings and meanderings, that I couldn't bring it up or face it.

I looked at the clock, and it said 1.48am, so I closed the document, and popped online to check on the blogosphere, to wind my brain down before heading to bed. Noting that Lauren had added another post, I popped over and had a look.

I hadn't really expected the image or the coffin, or the musings on death, or the netiquette of online notification and discussion. My eyeballs started swimming, and I felt blushings of shame, and a bit queasy in my belly. Ever the egomaniac, I feared that it might have been an insinuation directed towards my last post, and I wondered if I'd overstepped the mark, yet again. Kept reading, wondering, thinking, brain humming, belly churning.

then I heard Renaissance Girl wake up and head to the phone. Heard her voice on the telephone, asking if she should go back to the hospital. shit. I closed the document, mind reeling, heart racing. We packed bedside camping supplies into shopping bags and I sat with her as she drove to the hospital, sat with her, and her mum during the night, and the next day, and evening.

what happened during that time, is not my story to tell, much lest post here in this blog. If nothing else, Renaissance Girl is a writer herself, and could probably describe this most intimate, terrible and sacred of experiences with more courage, sensitivity and clarity than I could ever hope for.

If that is not my story to tell, then I wonder what is, and why I need to tell anything at all, and what point does it serve, and who do I write for? for me? for her? for the imaginary institutions of community enunciated, iterated and moderated by the discourses of blogging?

I've got a few passionate theoretical threads running through me, that somehow wind themselves between my work, my writing, my life, my feelings.

the first comes from ALphonso Lingis, who, in the introduction to my charcoal scrawled and tear stained copy of "Abuses" says:

"One only speaks for others when they are silent or silenced. and to speak for others is to silence oneself"

and then this takes me back to feminist ethnography - hell! to feminist theory 101 - which was based on the critical imperative of finding way to describe the indescribable, unmentionable, ignored and trivialised reality of women's emotional reality and daily existence. My own feminist journey occurred in the early '90's, where the ACTUP slogan "silence=death" coincided with a 3rd wave take on the "personal is political" and we believed, I believed, still believe, that the work of feminist consciousness involves facing the silent, visible, unmentionable horror of sexual abuse, pain, shame, death, and finding words to wrap around it, bringing it forth, making it a social issue, framed, visible, insistent; one that can be articulated as part of, but separate from us, so that we are no longer consumed by the wordless horror of private suffering.

And then I think of the tome, and the manifesto proclaimed in my Prologue, that I wanted to find a way of enunciating and articulating irritation as an epistemology, not pain as an instrument of torture or horror, but the grinding banality of minor pain, formed in a condition of work, that doesn't quite destroy language, but still remains outside of discourse, and still silences those that experience it.

And I'm thinking that ripped tendons, nerve damage and pulled muscles of artists models have no place of comparison to what I witnessed last week, and quoting Elaine Scarry just seems silly. Bad pastiche, bad opera, bad taste.

So my story, is one of witnessing pain, and not knowing how to bear that witness in an appropriate manner. I don't believe that silence is appropriate, but it is not my place to howl the pain of others. I bury myself in books, cloak myself in words, nestle in the gaps between elucidation, comprehension and understanding, allowing feeling to bubble up in between phrases, as my glasses fog, tears cloud my eyes and my thoughts meander between feelings, sensations and insights. Renaissance girl cries, we cuddle, make soup, casseroles, warm milk, and slowly breathe our way through this.

Plague

Is it just me? is it just the universe? is it just bad timing?

One of my colleagues made a joke last year, saying 'hell! I'm scared to be your friend! Look what happens to them!"

Now i'm wondering if it's really funny. A close friend has come out of remission, and is about to go into the scary phase described by Predator 5 years ago, and quoted by me 2 years ago:

Cancer treatment is a stop/go journey.
Find something wrong, chop it out. Wait.
Find something else wrong.
Try and find someone who'll chop it out.
Chop it out.
Wait until, inevitably, something else goes wrong.
Can't chop it out this time.
Cry a lot. Get dead. Zzzzz.
My story has been played out in a million other abdomens and I've never heard about them.
Maybe it's like mine.chop it out, what do I do

but wait, that's not all! Over the past 6 weeks, or 8 now - during some kind of weird late feb, march, now april time slowing, spinning weirdness - the missus and I have been facing another Mack truck, creeping slowly, slowly, slowly forward, growing inexorably immense and scary (and I don't mean the linfox supplychain behemoths outside the front windows). My Missus's mum went into the Palliative care unit this week. the missus cries, cries again, and copes.

I never imagined the end of the tome would be dwarfed by so much... err.... ok cloaked in a miasma of anxiety, helplessness and grief. I started the tome as predator quickly succumbed to cancer, and now, as I finish, I'm watching people close to me wrangle with the implications of scary mutant organ eating cells.

The horror of this mutes my capacity to describe it, or to even try. I send kind messages, hug the missus, cook meals, chase up foontotes, consult my style guide and plug away at the tome, watching, waiting, working towards things that come to an end, even if I don't want them to.

Wrapping words

A couple of my blogopshere compatriots have been going a bit of handwringing (if such a thing is possible while typing - maybe my crappy spelling proves that it is ).... and I've had my knickers in a know this afternoon - trying to devise a pithy exegesis of Foucault's anit-humanism - for a footnote.

while taking my eyeballs for a walk I came across the following and fell in love -literally:

[...] I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyong all possible beginnings. at the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an isntant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path - a slender gap - the point of its possible disappearance.

Behind me, I should like to have heard (having been at it long enough already, repeating in advance what I am about to tell you) the voice of Molloy , [WTF - no idea who Molloy is - but I know how he feels] beginning to speak thus:
'I must go on; I can't go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me - heavy burden, heavy sin; I must go on; maybe it's been done already; maybe they've already said me; maybe they've already borne me to the threshold of my story, right to the door opening onto my story; I'd be surprised if it opened.'

A good many people, I imagine, harbour a similar desire to be freed from the obligation to begin, a similar desire to find themselves, right from the outside, on the other side of discourse, without having to stand outside it, pondering its particular, fearsome, and even devilish features. To this all too common feeling, institutions have an ironic reply, for they solemnise beginnings, surorunding them with a circle of silent attention; in order that they can be distinguished from far off, they impose ritual forms upon them.

Inclinations speaks out: 'I don't want to have to enter this risky word of discourse; I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final; I would like to feel it all around me, calm and transparent, profound, infinitely open, with others responding to my expectations, and truth emerging, one by one. all I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck,' institutions reply: 'but you have nothing to fear from launching out; we're here to show you discourse is within the established order of things, that we've waited a long time for its arrival, that a place has been set aside for it - a place which both honours and disarms it; and if it should happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that power.'

Foucault, M, 'The discourse on language', Swyer, R (trans) Social Science Information, Sage Publications, April 1971, pp. 7-30, reprinted in Kearney, R & Rainwater, M (eds) The continental philosophy reader, Routledge, London & New York, 1996, p. 339.

the typos are mine....