I find Americans’ “Summer Camp” fascinating. My childhood school holidays were typically spent at the beach with my family, hanging out with my friends, or in later years, on the internet.
Here are some things that kids from New York will apparently do this summer:
I’ve written about Kickstarter before. The Boy pledges to a lot of projects. I pledge to some. Usually when there’s something on offer that I want. Very occasionally out of the goodness of my heart.
Matt Haughey recently wrote a good post about a bad experience he had with the site. I haven’t had anything bad happen (though I acknowledge there’s always a risk), but I have had a really good one, so let’s talk about that.
I rarely pledge to food-based projects. Even though I am obviously a confirmed fan of food, most of them tend to be people trying to start businesses without enough money. Food businesses don’t just need money to begin, they need excess money. Relying on donated funds just to open your business means you have no wiggle room if you don’t break even or make a profit straight away. Others just seem to be unoriginal ideas — you wanna make cookies or brew beer? Great, but there is basically no incentive for me to support you, as good bakeries and craft breweries are hardly in short supply here (though The Boy did help fund one micro brewery in return for a tshirt, and displaying the name of a brewery no one has heard seems to earn him kudos with beer nerds).
But here’s a food project I did pledge to, and I’m really glad. Lofty Pursuits is an old school soda fountain (apparently THE old school soda fountain; check out the graph pr0n here) in Tallahassee, Florida (no, I have no idea where that is) which also specialises in “Victorian era candy”. When I first saw it, I though, “Hmmph, just looks like boiled lollies to me.” And that’s because it is. Some backstory:
When public primary school kids from my home state of Victoria went on school camps, we’d inevitably go to some dinky little former gold (if you’re lucky) or coal (if you’re not) mining town where we’d spend a few days sleeping in cold dorms and eating terrible food and teasing the kid who has to bring plastic sheets. The one thing these towns usually have going for them is an “olde lolly shop” that sells traditional boiled sweets—humbugs, barley sugars, lemon acid drops (my favourite) and maybe some Castlemaine Rock if you happened to be in that part of the state. Our parents were allowed to give us a maximum of $5 to spend at this store.
I thought these sweets were all pretty standard. Apparently not. It turns out that Australia is one of the last places in the world that still practises this kind of lolly making.
So there’s this lolly store in Lake Mary, Florida (also have no idea where that is), with owners who learned to make boiled lollies in Australia. Then this kid ends up learning the trade from them, and eventually ends up working at Lofty Pursuits, where he now makes them as a sort of performance (and, of course, to sell and eat; because boiled lollies are delicious).
So the owner has been buying Victorian candy making equipment and restoring it to use in the store. And that was the point of the Kickstarter campaign.
This is one reason the campaign was cool (to me, at least). They have a successful business. They are experts at what they do (also, being an expert at soda drinks and candy making are such cool things to be an expert at). But they wanted to use both of these things on an unnecessary, but totally awesome project. It would be hard to read about what they wanted to and not want to help them do it.
So that’s part of it. But they also went about it in all the right ways.
The Kickstarter campaign ended today, raising $7,172 — $1,322 above their goal — amongst 180 backers.
If you’re lucky, I will share my boiled lollies with you.
It has been a while, hasn’t it?
Reading
Townie by Andre Dubus III
Reading about other people’s dysfunctional childhoods makes me realise how easy and white bred mine was.
The Monthly magazine
My folks got me a subscription for my birthday. I try to keep up generally with shit that’s going on in Australia, but it’s pretty hard when you’re not there to live it. Sitting back with a magazine every month is easier than trying to navigate the trainwreck that is The Age’s website every day.
Watching
The Slap
I, er, legally acquired the ABC TV series of the Christos Tsiolkas novel (which I never actually read). I thought it was generally excellent — great acting and script writing, the people and dialogue ran really true (though I did enjoy this Chaser parody — even if it dragged up a 10-year-old Big Brother joke — do middle class, inner city Melburnites use more cocaine than I realise?). Though I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the ending. Should there not have been more consequences for the girl lying about being raped?
Spy
Hulu is putting up new episodes of this great UK comedy series every Friday. Darren Boyd is brilliant. Everyone else seems to hate the kid, but I love him.
Playing
Boxing
I have started boxing. Again. This time more seriously at a real fight gym. After months of inaction, it kicked my arse doing exercise, but just three weeks in, I’m already seeing pretty big improvements in technique, speed and strength. Now I just have to start running again…
Cycling
It’s that time of year again, when the weather turns to shit, and all the fairweather cyclists leave the road. Not that I’m oh-so-hardcore, but I just have no other transportation method than my bike, so I cover myself in rain gear and get on with it.
Hearing
Kyuss Lives
Kyuss is probably one of my favourite bands — it certainly was when I was a teenager — and Kyuss Lives is Kyuss reunited minus lead guitarist Josh Homme. It played in Portland on Monday, so I felt I should go, even though I have mixed feelings about reunion shows. Most non-local bands I liked as a teenager were from before my time, and now every band that ever released an album is reuniting, I always feel I should go for the sake of it. But they’re often not quite… right. It feels like a tribute show rather than the real thing. I enjoyed Kyuss Lives, but I couldn’t say I loved it.
We’ve been in Mexico the past 10 days. First Oaxaca and now Mexico City. Today is our last day. I’ll do a full post eventually, but in the mean time here are some photos:
There’s a bunch of cafes in Melbourne’s CBD called Blue Bag, several of which are close to my old office at Crikey. I used to call it “blue balls” because I’m 12. It sells pre-packed sandwiches, salads, soups and coffee (and by “coffee”, Americans, I mean “espresso”). At some point, the owners created these reusable plastic coffee cups called KeepCups that were shaped like paper coffee cups, so they fit under the espresso grouphead and kept your coffee warm. This was a good thing, because we went through an embarrassing amount of paper cups. So we all bought one, and every day, we would send the intern off to get coffee with our KeepCups, smug with non-Earth-destroying satisfaction.
Like most of my things, I left my KeepCup behind in Melbourne. And for a long time, I didn’t think of it, because I was mostly drinking coffee in cafes.
Then when I went to London, I stopped for coffee in an Aussie/New Zealand-run cafe called Flat White (it’s named after an espresso drink in Australia and New Zealand; it’s kind of a cross between a latte and a cappuccino) and, lo and behold, it was selling KeepCups. “Wouldn’t it be funny to have a cup with ‘Flat White’ written on it?” I thought, because smart arse baristas in the US are always saying, “Aha, do you want a flat white?” (No, I want the drink I ordered….) So I bought one and brought it back.
Then like a week later I lost it.
I was annoyed but didn’t really think much about it until three things happened: 1. I started working in an office 2. There are no decent coffee shops within walking distance of my office so I was often riding to work with one hand on the handlebars and the other holding a coffee, so one of my workmates bought me a coffee-cup holder for my bike, but it was too big for the average sized espresso cup, and 3. Some friends from Melbourne came to Portland and brought their KeepCups with them and used them everywhere and I was jealous.
By that point, just two years after that little Melbourne cafe started selling colourful plastic coffee cups, they were being sold all over the world. You could buy them at the Whole Foods across the road from our apartment and you could buy them on Amazon. But I wanted my Flat White one. Fortunately, The Boy was going to London for work, so I wrote down the address and gave him instructions.
A few weeks later, he returned home with a Flat White cup. Even better, he had told the barista the story, and they’d thrown in a free coffee next time I’m in London. Even better, it fits perfectly in my bike’s coffee cup holder.
Now I can buy a good coffee in the morning and carry it on my handlebars to work. Like a total wanker.
Playing
Doodle or DieThis game is so freaking addictive. It’s like Chinese whispers, but with drawings. It’s annoying when people interrupt the flow of the game with pictures of cocks, but other than that: massive time suck. Beware. Watching
AuntieI thought all the ABC’s online content was geolocked, but recently discovered the ABC 24 stuff isn’t, so I’m eating that up because I feel stupid and ignorant over here.
GleeUgh, I know. I avoided it so long, too. Then I got bored and watched the whole first two seasons in one weekend. I was actually looking forward to the start of season 3 the other day. Lame.
Drinking
Too MuchThe Boy’s cousin was in town this past week and we went drinking almost every night. Good times, but ouch. I had something good with tequila at Kask and something else with spicy vodka at a new joint called Dig a Pony, which I reviewed here. Really nice place; brought a pretty eclectic group in and everyone liked it.
Eating
Banh Mi OpThere’s a new banh mi place near my work, Lela’s Bistro. It’s far from the best banh mi around, but it’s easily the best around this side of town. It does one with a sunnyside-up egg which I seem to crave for lunch multiple times a week. It’s $4 and the egg splooshes out everywhere.
About a year ago, I bought a box of 50 garbage bags. I remember buying them, because I usually buy small amounts of things at a time (one tube of toothpaste, one can of beans), even when it’s clear we will run out eventually and I’ll just need to buy more. I don’t know why I do this. But this time, I talked myself into buying the 50 bag box of garbage bags and I was inordinately pleased with myself, because there’s nothing worse than when you run out of garbage bags but have something stinky to throw away (yes, nothing worse; war, disease, famine—these things are all secondary), and I knew this would not come for some time.
And finally it has come, a year later. That seems a pretty long time to go through 50 garbage bags. It’s less than one a week, and we have a pretty small bin. I’d like to think it’s because we’re not wasteful, but that can’t be true. I think we are more wasteful in America than we were in Australia. Things come in more packaging. We buy food more often than make it. We definitely do more than one bag of recycling a week: cans, bottles, newspapers, boxes, junk mail, food containers. I guess recycling is better than trash.
I hate a lot of things about living in an apartment building, but one I like is the trash shoot. When the bin gets full, I take the bag to the trash shoot and drop it into a black hole and, I assume, someone else takes care of it. I don’t have to sneak garbage bags into the neighbours’ bins after forgetting to put our bins out for the garbage man and running out of space. I used to do that a lot.
Recycling here is separated into glass in one bin and paper and plastic in the other. In Melbourne, it all went into one bin. Houses also get a bin for green waste and in November, they will also get a composting bin. I think that’s neat.
Less neat is the lack of bins on Portland’s streets, especially recycling bins. There’s a pod of about 40 food carts near our building and a park next to that pod where everyone eats their meals when the sun is out. That park has two bins and no recycling bins, even though many of the food containers and utensils are recyclable. The bins fill up quickly and overflow. The City is otherwise obsessive about cleanliness. People clean the downtown streets in the middle of the night and it’s pretty much spotless by morning. There is almost no graffiti (which is a shame, in my opinion, but that’s a post for another time). But there is a serious lack of bins, and every Australian friend and family member who has come to visit us here has commented on it.
Today I bought a box of 78 garbage bags.
The Boy really likes Kickstarter. We both do, but he pledges to far more projects than I do. So many, he forgets who’s who. Every few days in the mail, he receives postcards thanking him for his support to so and so project. By the time they arrive, he has often forgotten exactly what the project was. And so we get mystery postcards from mystery people. It’s fun to guess what the project was from the picture.
Here are a few postcards we’ve received recently:
People who tweet conferences. Speeches can’t typically condensed into 140 characters. The reason a speech is good is largely because the SPEAKER is good. They’re rarely conveying ground-breaking information. It’s usually just a pretty simple point, well presented.
“@speaker says newspaprs r vital”
“@speaker says media is not dead yet”
Just watch the fucking speech you company coughed up $1,500 for you to watch.
People who tweet all their meals. Yeah, tweet a great/funny/terrible dish once in a while, but unless you’re eating at El Bulli (which, you’re not, obviously), no one wants to see grainy, dark photos of each plate in your ten-course degustation.
People who thank other people for re-tweeting them by re-tweeting their re-tweets. It just seems so desperate and self-congratulatory and redundant. I think it goes without saying that everyone is appreciative when they’re re-tweeted. Stop clogging up my feed.
Follow Friday.
Twibbons.
This is one for the Americans:
Lately, Netflix Instant has put a heap of Australian films. Cheap I guess. Some of them are good ones. I really have no idea what made it to these shores and what didn’t, but here are the ones worth a look:
He Died With a Felafel In His Hand: This is based loosely on a book of true(ish) stories of share-house living in Australia by John Birmingham, who now writes more serious shit (and a great newspaper column). The stories are from a golden time when pretty much any layabout kid and student could get the dole, which was well over by the time I was at uni and living in filthy share houses, but the stories and characters still ring scarily true. The film stars Noah Taylor, who often plays British characters in supporting roles in US films.
Two Hands: This was Heath Ledger’s breakout Australian role just before Ten Things I Hate About You (and to a lesser extent, Rose Byrnes’). It’s a good little film. The scenes in Pando’s house crack me up, as do the kid’s pin-up Adidas pants.
Cosi: This film is the film version of a play written by Louis Nowra, who was probably the only notable alumni (other than me, of course) from my high school. The play was set at a psychiatric hospital right near the school (it’s now a bunch of McMansions), though the film has been moved to Sydney and in a more modern setting. It has David Wenham playing a sex-crazed pyromaniac, as well as Toni Colette and Rachel Griffiths before they were so famous.
The Sum of Us: Also based on a play, a young Russell Crowe is gay and not as objectionable as you now believe him to be. Go Russell!
For bonus point, Netflix also has what many consider to be the worst Australian film ever made, Deck Dogz.
