ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: around town

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the setting: the gaelic club, where the floor is always sticky. an extremely self-conscious “band” called the kills is artfully jerking itself about on stage. they are tiresome to begin with and then quickly yet gradually improve and then possibly become tiresome again. i lose track. there are many many studded belts in the room, the most i’ve seen gathered in a single location, except for the accessories rack at sportsgirl.


but we are really here to see hot hot heat. there are many enthusiastic girls up front, one group with ziggy stardust haircuts and sharp tailoring and another in netting and stripy knits. nellie has learnt all the lyrics by heart and is ready to go woo as required. hot hot heat play like a cartoon band, with struttin’ and tight jeans and sweat exploding out of hair like a fireworks display, and as nellie says, all the members look like duckie. which is untrue because there is the bass player who has a rockstar thing going and manages to keep his big north american rock hair perfectly bouffant through the night (where “night” is an efficient forty-five minute set).

who doesn’t like bass players?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 August 2003 at 7:50 am
permalink | filed under around town, nellie

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ahhh… evan dando. having seen him play twice before in the last several years or so — once a poppy lemonheads type show, then a solo amplified accoustic thing where he wore like, a metallica tshirt — i saw the scariest show last night in which, with a scruffy rocking young band he played a scruffy rocking set (and then a seamless accoustic medley in the middle) but sang without joy. the last time i saw him he was american golden boy with gentle smile. last night he was gaunt of face and hunched and bony. but it’s the music that matters right? his voice is second only to eddie’s. next cd purchase: baby i’m bored… and the avril lavigne album (!).

posted by ragingyoghurt on 6 August 2003 at 11:26 am
permalink | filed under around town

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yesterday, being shockingly wintery (and normally it would not have being shocking, since it is after all, winter, and in retrospect i suppose last week’s sunny clear blue days were the unseasonal ones), was a perfect day to buy a bag of hot chips and stroll towards the water, feeling the cold wind raise welts on my cheeks. it was doubly good because in a surprising turn of events, the boy who was overseas decided he’d had enough and jumped on a plane and returned, and strolled and ate chicken salted chips with me.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 July 2003 at 10:24 pm
permalink | filed under around town, boy

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you spend a month and a half sweating your insides out in the tropical swelter, waiting for the day you get back to winterous sydney, and then suddenly it’s the coldest second of july in twelve years. with nonstop rain to boot.

this made it the perfect evening to walk out of the cinema (“whale rider”) and head straight to a table at bar italia where the prompt waiter delivered a plate of veal under a garlicky napoli sauce full of zucchini, mushrooms and chili, and served with a head of steamed broccoli, carrots and herby roast potatoes. yum.

i missed italian food while i was away, and despite all the laughing cow widely available in vietnam, i really missed cheese. in the last three days i have had a four-cheese borek and a greek salad with salty crumbly fetta. i’m looking forward to saturday when i head out to the growers markets and buy a quantity of smoked mozzerella, and maybe some marinated goat cheese. it’s time to fire up daisy, my jaffle machine which is also a cow.

scientists have discovered that dairy fat may reduce the occurance of asthma in children.

and then.

after spending almost a decade in the US, pouring money into the university industry and significantly boosting the national retail economy, my sister had her latest visa application rejected. because you need to be outside of america when you lodge your application, she now has an apartment full of cool stuff and a place at columbia to study french lit that she isn’t allowed to go back to. the bastards! obviously i will have to stage a boycott by refusing to watch any more of that reality crap they keep sending over to clog up the tv programming. i wasted an hour the other night because i couldn’t pull the plug on “celebrity fear factor” where david hasselhoff, donny osmond, coolio, chyna the scary lady wrestler who i’m positive used to be a dude, and two blonde actresses, got their heads locked in a box of worms and scorpions.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 3 July 2003 at 6:01 pm
permalink | filed under around town, dinner, grumble, misc

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today i voluntarily ate rabbit. the last time i ate a bunny was by default, when i was maybe like, 14, and we went to a french restaurant for my mum’s birthday, and it was prix fixe, and the appetiser was, from memory, some sort of gelatine engulfed rabbit roulade, which my sister refused by saying, no thanks, i have a pet rabbit.

but today at lunch, the tastiest-sounding thing on the blackboard menu was bucatini with rabbit in a butter, white wine and parsley sauce. in fact it was supremely tasty, which is why danks street depot is my favourite place to eat, which is not to say i go there often, but that whenever i do go i feel happy and lucky (distinct from happy-go-lucky, which i feel, like, never).

i guess for some people out there, eating rabbit is a normal occurance. it’s still exotic to me, like some shellfish, and offal.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 April 2003 at 10:27 pm
permalink | filed under around town, lunch

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last night i dined with the effusive and stylish lena at an unusually narrow korean restaurant in burwood. bemused by the sudden wintery turn that autumn took, we had cups of thick murky sweet ginseng tea while waiting for salmon nori rolls and two tofu dishes (pan fried and spicy hotpot). and then, surprise! the waitress brought us pickles: sure, a little dish of kimchee, but then also four other little dishes of chili pickled cucumber, julienned carrots and zucchini in sesame oil, beansprouts in vinegar and sesame oil, and strips of marinated chewy tofu. yum. free pickles.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 4 April 2003 at 11:10 am
permalink | filed under around town, dinner

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my new material possession, which i purchased from the sunday markets in the shadow of (depending on the time of day i suppose – in fact there was no shadow while we were out there, blinded by midday) the sydney opera house, after the lovely little puppet show “a world of paper”, in which, around a little japanese actor playing a small child, two japanese puppeteers clad in black ninja gear bring to life all manner of washi paper bird, butterfly, squirrel, tortoise and horse. and raincloud! and fire goblin! the lady puppeteer was quite inscrutable but the guy would put on a facial expression that matched the animal character he was… becoming. when he operated the prancing horse, he had a horse face! and they scurried about the floor on their tip toes while crouched on their haunches! so light and quick! how did they do it? i just tried, and besides feeling like an ungainly, waddling duck, i think i also put my knee out. ow.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 30 March 2003 at 9:42 pm
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snow pea shoots are really good stirfried in an oyster sauce thickened with cornflour, with the fried puffy tofu that soaks up half the gravy before disgorging like a sponge in your mouth.

i was standing by the chinese vegetable stall at paddy’s market, clutching a box of them and looking for someone i could give some money to, when the chinese vegetable auntie came up to me and pressed a longan into my hand. $2, darling, she said, smiling. don’t need a bag? good girl.

swiftly unpeeled next to a pungent rubbish bin, the longan was sweet, a wobbly globe of juice.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 21 March 2003 at 3:46 pm
permalink | filed under around town, snacks

an act of war

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a year and a half ago, on my way to work, i passed through a food court to get a blueberry sugar bagel for breakfast. the multi-tv screen display was showing over and over footage of planes flying into the world trade center buildings.

this afternoon, by coincidence, i went into the same food court after a trip to art express at the art gallery. lunchfolk gathered around the tvs; missiles had just fallen in… on iraq. oddly, a reuters cameraman was there filming the tv footage — maybe he had missed the plane to the gulf, or flunked out of the military-run media training sessions.

i asked the girl i was having lunch with if she would go to the rally on sunday (12.30pm, belmore park, sydney), which led to a discussion on whether or not war was the right thing to do, and why we shouldn’t just accept that these things happen. i was having trouble following her argument on why “collateral damage” was, y’know, fine, when the bombs would get rid of an evil dictator in the end. obviously it was fine because it’s an anonymous bunch of dusty, brown people on the other side of the world who don’t hold western values.

i said, it’s like when you were at school and there was this one bad girl in class, and the teacher punished the whole class for something the one bad girl did.

the girl i had lunch with said, oh! well when you put it that way…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 20 March 2003 at 8:27 pm
permalink | filed under around town, misc

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two hours into “the pianist”, after the pianist has just been cast out of his latest hiding place by nazis with flame throwers, something that sounds like an air raid siren goes off. and goes on and on. eventually it becomes clear that it is not part of the film, and is actually coming from outside our cosy cinema. no-one seems too fussed, though some guy down the front heads out into the corridor to investigate, and returns to his seat like everything’s all right.

the pianist clambers and falls over a wall into a deserted street, flanked to the horizon by pale shells of previous buildings. the air raid siren continues. does anyone else feel a little ill at ease? the screen goes blank and the lights come on. for an audience who up till now seemed unperturbed by the siren, we sure stand up really quickly.

polite and orderly, everybody files out the fire exit, through the concrete bunker that is the belly of the multiplex. i’m thinking that maybe the war has begun, and maybe we weren’t in first with the bombing, but then beyond these last doors there is clear blue sky. out on the pavement we wonder what has happened.

on the other side of the world missiles and men (and women) wait for an order; a mystery epidemic sweeps through south east asia, baffling the experts; i’ll have to sit through the first two hours of “the pianist” again, to find out how it ends; not even ten minutes after hanging out a load of laundry under clear night sky, it starts to rain…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 16 March 2003 at 9:16 pm
permalink | filed under around town
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