Is the experience of university study changing, becoming a harsher, higher-pressure set of years? I'm certain it is. Tertiary study is a speeded-up and Fordised version of its past, particularly for students, even at universities where the administration hasn't turned two semesters into three. In this sense it's worth experiencing nostalgia for a passing institution, and particularly for the time-freedom that it used to represent. Just as lunchtime day-drinking is no longer part of Australian working or corporate life, and as universities are deliberately becoming workforce preparation colleges, so fewer students will ever remember sinking beer before afternoon tutorials. If it's a tragedy, then it's a piss-ant, typically Australian, high-whinge but low-stakes one.
Nostalgia is a fundamentally human impulse and a means of making sense of the passage of time, but it's no way to run a society, and it fools us. We mistake the stories we tell about the past for the past's actual presence in our lives, and the other potential futures that are now closed to us. David Lowenthal was onto this in the 1980s:
If recognizing the past's difference promoted its preservation, the act of preserving made that difference still more apparent. Venerated as a fount of communal identity, cherished as a precious and endangered resource, yesterday became less and less like today. Yet its relics and residues are increasingly stamped with today's lineaments. We may fancy an exotic past that contrasts with a humdrum or unhappy present, but we forge it with modern tools. The past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today's predilections, its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges.1
There is an exotic past, and it is the weird memory of pleasantly unmanageable time, and underemployment that didn't mean anything. Manning Bar serves today for men and women of my class and generation as a common experience of that youthful spare time. But who cares, apart from those of us who enjoyed it? Public remembrance of schooners sunk on weekday afternoons on the balcony is a shibboleth of a mutual elitism, and it should point to the ever-concentrating domination of People Who Went To Sydney Uni In The Nineties in our cultural and political life. Nostalgia should sometimes be disgusting, and, to quote a hit from the era, we should sometimes look back in anger.
Contemporary memory of Manning Bar is a symptom of the kind of society where all our journalists and politicians and writers had the chance to meet in the same tutorials; where it's unheard of to join even the most junior grades of the public service without a degree or two; where two Miéville-city-and-the-city universities exist in parallel, one a stripped-back job-ticket stamper, the other a middle class marriage club; where a savage and ruthless ruling class hypocritically consoles itself for domination with a youthful-lefty self-image of having once seen The Whitlams at Manning.
Lowenthal, David. The Past Is A Foreign Country. CUP, Cambridge, 1985. p(xviii). ↩
The brief to participants is as follows:
1. bourbon
1. scotch
1. beer
All participants, please have your third party reports filled out for recognition of competency by recognition of prior learning (RPL).
]]>The brief to participants is as follows:
1. bourbon
1. scotch
1. beer
All participants, please have your third party reports filled out for recognition of competency by recognition of prior learning (RPL).
]]>Light rums are clear and sweet, dark rums the colour of tea. You have it in cocktails or on the rocks if you’re a wanker, you have it in pre-mixed coke cans if you’re a yob (to extend TISM’s dialectic). Eighteenth century definitions of ‘rum’ were more broad, really encompassing any kind of distilled spirits made from other bases, in the same way ‘corn’ was used interchangeably with oats, wheat, and other staples. Everyone knew, though what they were talking about when the first barrels of it were brought over ship sides with the salt pork and flour in 1788, and what it was for. It was two things: a currency to trade, and a commodity that got you drunk.
There’s some historical argument about how corrupt and how rum-sodden the first British settlement in NSW was. Were the first military and land elites of the NSW Corps primarily motivated by honour, greed, boredom, avarice, sex, racism, ambition, anomie? Did exile to the Antipodes make them worse or better than their violent, grasping, crooked counterparts back Home? We know they fought viciously amongst themselves, we know they—and the new colonist society generally—drank to destructive levels, we know they were violent expropriators of land and life, we know lots of them looked to the main chance and whatever they could lay their hands on. It’s only a wonder there are not more Australian Westerns.
There’s a familiar refrain that we hear every now and then about corruption in NSW, that it’s an endemic disease of our politics, our own peculiar heritage. It’s true that the basic pattern is depressingly unchanged: access to political power brings favoured businessmen wealth in the form of land deals, business concessions, and most of all, rights to minerals. Good government delivers the goods, whether you’re dealing with your mate the Mayor for your DA, the Minister for your exploration licence, or the Treasury for your Casino. Sydney is after all, when you look at the maps, built upon successive concentric rings of really good business deals.
As attractive and literary as it is, I don’t accept this attitude that their corruption is ours. It elides everyone’s civic responsibility to not be corrupt, which ought to be a starting point. We are profoundly unlike the red-faced wool-coated elite of the 1790s to 1810s, and they are strange foreigners to us. Our politicians no longer insist upon points of honour, and the Domain doesn’t ring with gentlemanly pistol shots. Though I enjoy and admire her The Secret River, I don’t agree with Kate Grenville that we are able to so easily draw direct lines of inheritance from Colony to modernity in these things, or that the crimes of past people whose city we inhabit are necessarily our crimes too. Apart from any other matter, Sydney, even more than Australia, is an immigrant society, with a variety of increasingly different cultural traditions of politics (and different traditions of corruption!) from which to choose.
Heritage is a lot of things, valuable and loathsome. The attitude that crookedness on the part of public officials and the State is normal and somehow natural (if frowned upon) removes individual agency from our modern-day crooks. It’s not good enough: the equivalent of an historical Hey Officer Krupke argument, ‘I’m depraved on account I’m deprived’. New South Wales has a corrupt history, but that doesn’t excuse a current lack of integrity.
]]>Consequence follows action, like night from day. We mark the occasion with cold roast chicken, chip packets, and champagne, scoffed from about eleven onwards at work or at parties. As if in anticipation for the starter’s signal, the pressure builds, grey-greening, until some time in the afternoon, the liquid burp emerges as the inevitable consequence of the one-too-many. Urrrrk! It’s off and racing, up the straight!
If you haven’t already watched someone throw up today, you will. A woman on my train threw up at 8.25am, just outside Redfern, a new record for my Novembers. (I don’t think she was actually drunk, but every little bit counts on Cup Day). Barry McKenzie put the sentiment to music, and sang in the film:
I’ve had liquid laughs in bars
And I’ve hurled from moving cars
And I’ve chundered where and when it suited me
But if I had to choose a spot
To regurgitate my lot
Then I’d chunder in the Old Pacific Sea.
Drink it up, drink it up
Have another dozen tubes or two with me…
It worked as comedy then because of the levels of irony: Barry Crocker, ex-crooner and musical straight man, sang in character as drunken yobbo on a world tour, both parodying the counterculture both celebrating and damning Australian philistinism, exporting Australian culture to the world at the same time as it cringed at our boorishness. Later in the film, though, Bazza throws up on a psychologist in an act of symbolic resistance—cop that ya pommy bastard—and all the irony is gone. It’s simply straight slapstick and a celebration of spewing. Laugh all you want, but The Adventures of Barry McKenzie is a reminder that vomiting is central, cultural, fascinating.
Is vomiting unpleasant, hilarious, disgusting, natural, dangerous, infantile? How are we to judge this bodily function? Is the vomiter to be pitied, helped, scolded, ignored, condemned, or just to be moved towards a basin? Is sick on the toes of your shoes a badge of pride or disgrace? When the next edition of Jacobin includes a tendentious take about bodily morality and class mores will the Brooklyn puritans decide drinking yourself sick is Very Problematic or Actually It’s Good?
Throwing up is a dialectic affair, when you really get down to it. The spew is the negation of the meal; your stomach’s antithesis to your appetite’s thesis; the after-drinks chunder is the Revolution’s inevitable Thermidor. Internal contradictions lead to the crisis, which must eventually be resolved. The driver of the porcelain bus has no more control over their direction than the engine driver in the locomotive of history. Once the chuckup is on its way it is an inevitable, necessary, endpoint. Trying to hold it in only accelerates the inevitable conflict.
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your lunches!
]]>Thoroughly sterilise all your equipment. To a supermarket-bought kit of lager, add dextrose, the yeast that comes with the kit, stir, then leave in your friend’s laundry for a week or so. The brewer’s yeast will turn the sugar into delicious alcohol. Into each sterilised bottle, add a bit of sugar for carbonation. Wait a couple of weeks. Crack open and enjoy!
Mix up developer, stop bath, and fixer, according to the manufacturer’s instructions. This is as simple as (for the developer) dissolving the contents of bag A at 40ºC, then adding bag B, adding cool water to make a litre, (for the fixer) mixing 1:4 stock fluid with water, (for the stop bath) mixing water with a decent squirt of cheap vinegar, then cooling to the lot to 20ºC ±1º. Obviously on a hot Sydney day that last step is the most difficult. Use ice cubes. I hope you’ve got some thermometers, because the temperature matters.
In a changing bag, transfer the reels of exposed film onto developing spools, then put the reels in the light-proof tank. You can’t open the bag until you’ve closed the developing tank! It’s very easy, but if you haven’t done it since 1998 you’re probably going to exercise your vocabulary.
The rest is reading developing times from tables of temperature, and taking account of how many films have already been developed. It gets weaker each reaction: each film you put through the developer increases the time for later films. Remember to keep the lot in a temperature-stabilising tank of water.
Rinse, using the garden hose, dry the films from a coathanger in the shower, and admire your handiwork.
]]>There were two critical institutions in the 1990s that changed New South Wales politics forever, one temporary, the other (hopefully) enduring: the Wood Royal Commission into Police Corruption, and the Independent Commission against Corruption. Justice Wood broke the hold of the Police over corruption in the State, which had been chronic and oppressive since the first European proto-coppers waded ashore in red coats and wigs, and, as an unexpected encore, tore the mufflers off the silence around child sexual abuse in institutions. We’re still feeling the effects of those hearings today. ICAC, which still sits, was a model copied shamelessly from Hong Kong, and is a permanent institution to investigate and prevent corruption in public administration.
It’s often misunderstood. ICAC aren’t cops. They do investigate people, yes, but the point isn’t to get prosecutions or catch baddies by their collars. Their bread and butter is the institutions of power and the decisions made there: who’s favoured, who’s unfairly out of contention, and why. The classic ICAC hearing is the town planner taking kickbacks for DAs, or the railway contractor inviting juicy sole tenders from his sister-in-law, or the prison administrator who ‘arranges’ work release if the prisoners will do a bit of work on his house while they’re there. It’s an office that tries to get at the eternal problem of decision makers’ integrity with public money and assets, and the spider links of mateship and family that make them complicated.
Keep this in mind when someone you know observes how odd it is that a Premier would resign over ‘just a bottle of wine’. That it’s ordinary and banal is just the problem. If it were a mayor taking similar ‘insignificant’ gifts from a property developer, or a public sector tenderer expecting some kind of gift from every subcontractor for allocating them work, it wouldn’t be so bizarre. These kinds of relationships are what ICAC does, and is absolutely meant to do.
Alan Davies, who writes Crikey’s excellent urban affairs blog, observed yesterday that the actual artefact of a $3,000 bottle of wine is a clever variation on a customary practice. He’s right. It is customary Australian practice to give gifts of wine, chocolate, and other edible stuff, especially commemorating events—like getting new jobs, or winning elections. And when you go to your mate’s house for dinner, it’d be very bad manners of her or him to judge how expensive is the bottle of wine you brought. The choice of wine, in this case, is exquisitely ambiguous: it’s meant to send a message of financial apprecation and obligation, without looking like anything but a simple gift. Like wedding gifts of money, the point is the giving, not the sum: thinking about it as an actual cash transaction of monetary value makes it sordid.
That’s precisely why the pecuniary interest disclosure system exists, of course. It forces MPs to consider the big questions of ‘how much’ and ‘for what’.
The real problem is that these kinds of winked-at and tacitly-accepted forms of corruption and unintegrity are simply part of the way the modern State works. One person’s open society, and liberal regime of property rights, is another’s playground for doing business with your particular friends in office. As long as the State is a machine for managing public resources—mineral and natural ones, in particular—part of the attraction of office in it is making arrangements, being lobbied, rewarding your supporters and punishing your enemies. The idea of a mythological ‘private sector’ insulated from the decisions and role of the necessary State is laughable. It’s not a public sector problem, everyone’s implicated in this.
When ICAC tears strips out of people on my side, I’m glad. That the Commission, de temps en temps, drags someone in a suit in front of their bad memory pour encourager les autres, is a wonderful and laudable thing. This is an invitation for my friends and readers on the political Right to view what’s happened in the same way: the Premier hasn’t resigned over a bottle of wine, he’s resigned so that future lobbyists think twice about slinging fancy gifts at Ministers.
]]>GLUTTONY, AS ONE OF THE main canonical Sins, is pretty encompassing. There’s a lot to it and if you want to do it properly, it needs hard work. It’s not quite like Lust or Wrath which you can get done in a morning, or—so I’m told, if you’re into that kind of thing—have them together, bash out a couple of hundred thousand words and publish the results as an erotic fan fiction bestseller. No, to be a Glutton one has to put in the hard yards.
So I’m not one to celebrate the increasing tendency amongst brewers, especially gourmet or niche brewers, to eschew the 750ml longneck or half-litre bottle in favour of 330ml, and four-packs instead of half-dozens. With a small bottle you can’t pour yourself a glass and expect there to be more in it when you get to the bottom, and you certainly can’t share it with a mate or a loved one. To me it’s a victory of packaging and marketing over what should be the main and brutally simple appeal of the product: delicious malty liquid that gets you drunk. Is a small bottle a form of torture invented by advertisers? I think this is a theme I’ve expanded on at length previously so I won’t go into more condemnation of the worst aspects of commercialism.
Mildura Brewery’s Choc Hops is guilty of terrible crimes in this regard. 330ml? Check. Four pack? Check. $16 for that four-pack? Check. Claims of organic, fair trade ingredients? Check. Little signed picture of a chef with his signature? Check. At every stage you’re confronted with the market decision you’ve already made, as if congratulating you on your superior good taste: you have to hold the tiny little bottle in your hand and be constantly reminded by the label—the plastic, hard-to-remove label—of what you’re drinking. Frankly, this kind of thing is frustrating and should be enough to turn me back to old cheap standards that come in a long bottle in a paper bag.
Except that it’s delicious. It’s a really really good beer. The jolly chef on the side of the cardboard packet is not lying to you when he says that it’s rich: it’s as rich as Hell. This is a beer that tastes like the choc-tops your parents used to buy you when you went to see films as a kid. This is a beer that tastes like an illicit block of Cadbury’s on a stressful day at work. This is a beer that now, the morning after having had a couple of these beers last night, makes me think that a chocolate bar might be a good option for morning tea.
And I don’t even like chocolate that much! Save your two dollar coins and buy this beer.
]]>GLUTTONY, AS ONE OF THE main canonical Sins, is pretty encompassing. There’s a lot to it and if you want to do it properly, it needs hard work. It’s not quite like Lust or Wrath which you can get done in a morning, or—so I’m told, if you’re into that kind of thing—have them together, bash out a couple of hundred thousand words and publish the results as an erotic fan fiction bestseller. No, to be a Glutton one has to put in the hard yards.
]]>THE OWL IS EITHER A symbol of wisdom or bad luck, depending on which pagan tradition you prefer. The eyes on this one also stared out at me from the “Assorted” fridge at the local bottleshop, where the curious are tempted by the unfamiliar and challenged to test themselves against Beer Lotto. When the going gets tough the weird turn pro, as Hunter S (pbuh) remarked. Owl Stout went straight to the counter. Hitachino! Espresso! Hoooooooo!
Hitachino Nest Espresso Stout |
To quote the back label:
THIS ESPRESSO STOUT IS BREWED USING WELL-ROASTED ESPRESSO BEANS. THE RECIPE IS BASED ON THE IMPERIAL STOUT LOVED BY THE RUSSIAN EMPEROR. PLEASE ENJOY THE BALANCE OF ITS RICH TASTE AND COFFEE FLAVOR.
Which really raises as many questions as it answers. Nicholas II, one of the Alexanders? Peter, perhaps? The internet claims an association of Imperial Stout as a genre with Catherine’s court, and yes, Catherine was supposed to have drunk coffee something like fifty-fifty ground beans and boiling water, and yes, as a good Prussian she had beer in her blood, but I can’t quite picture her ordering the two to be mixed. I suspect a bit of clever marketing along the way. She was a truly strange ruler, but cultured.
It’s a baffling mythology. The Slavophile monarchs might have been [ahem] spirited souls but the more Western inclined nobles surely would have preferred putting away the burgundy and beaujolais like proper little quasi-French absolutist liberals. Did it come across the Sea of Japan via Vladivostok and thence by Siberian train, did the Kiuchi brewery get it via the British concessions in Imperial China, or was there a local franchise of Japanese-British coffee brewers to the Tsars in St Petersburg?
You know what, who cares. Crack the bottle top (with another cute cartoon owl) and marvel at the 7.5% alc/vol smashing black malty coffee syrup. Frothy like a newly snow-bound steppe or cherry blossom falling in front of Fuji; black and bitter like the Romanovs’ moustaches, or the seaweed around a fresh nori roll. As a metaphor, it’s a very pleasing two standard drinks.
]]>THE OWL IS EITHER A symbol of wisdom or bad luck, depending on which pagan tradition you prefer. The eyes on this one also stared out at me from the “Assorted” fridge at the local bottleshop, where the curious are tempted by the unfamiliar and challenged to test themselves against Beer Lotto. When the going gets tough the weird turn pro, as Hunter S (pbuh) remarked. Owl Stout went straight to the counter. Hitachino! Espresso! Hoooooooo!
]]>Alcohol marketing is traditionally the worst of all forms of advertising. As the prolific blog commenter Nabakov once observed—and despite creative use of Google I haven’t been able to find the original source—expecting intelligence and taste in a beer commercial is like owning a dog and being disappointed when it farts. It’s true, on one hand, that some of the best ones end up in the national vernacular, and some of them are just cheap and ludicrous enough to step onto the right side of the invisible shifting line dividing a good joke from failed, embarrassing humour.
More often, though, you get internally incoherent, chauvinist, far too often unfunnily sexist dross which gives advertising and alcohol itself a bad name. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using sex as a marketing tool; but most often it’s exploitative, crass and simply not very good at selling booze. I have a feeling Fast Forward did a sketch about a the latest wine cooler on the under-18s market called “Legs Opener”, which was a truthful reflection of the genre if any example of comedy ever was. Anyone who watches televison though could probably name half-a-dozen commercials without effort that insult drinkers’ intelligence with stereotypy.
I mean really. Alcohol: a habit-forming substance that tends to produce mild euphoria, reduces social inhibitions and is entirely, immovably embedded in Western culture of food and social gathering. The stuff sells itself, or it should do.
Less reprehensible than the bimbos-and-bogans environment of Australian beer advertisements is, alas, the Craft Beer Fridge at your local bottleshop. Next to the very small bottles of mind-smashingly alcoholic beer brewed by Belgian cultists, and the water-coloured half-litre German objects, with pictures of goats and unpronounceable names, and genealogical claims back to before the Reformation that defy suspension of belief, lie the Australian small-brewery beers. They’ve got names like “Twenty Lashes”, and “Admiral Byng”, and “For The Term Of His Natural Life”, suggestive of a fashionable colonial brewing history. (I’ve suggested “No Chinese” and “The Other Side Of The Frontier” as potential brandnames, without luck). Some of them are good, some of them appalling.1
So, to Four Pines, the stout in my hand. On the one hand, it’s purple, it’s got a picture of four pines on it, and big claims of being brewed in Manly. On the neck it’s got an overly-sincere couple of sentences, sentences you have to uncomfortably turn the bottle in your hand to read, about four pine trees on the peninsula that were cut down in the 1940s to make way for machine-gun pillboxes and artillery spotting bunkers. It’s a decent enough story, and so far it’s so good.
But then? Then there’s the rocketship. The brewers sent this pine-themed beer from Manly to a group of scientists who drank it on a plane making parabolic zero-gravity arcs. And then they had a dress-up party and put pictures of themselves on a website.
That’s called diluting your brand. Are you suggestive of WWII sacrifice? Are you a Northern Beaches niche product? It it a beer made by astronauts for astronauts? Is science involved in the brewing? Does it appeal to a market of Warringah cosmonauts I’ve never heard of? More importantly—what kind of beer is it, and what does it taste like?
I can answer that last one. It’s pretty good, and better than a lot of over-crafted stouts that go flat too fast and smell like air freshener. There’s no mucking about with chocolatiness or hops, or special effort to make a stout taste like anything but a stout. It’s dark, bitter, heavy and one-point-three standard drinks.
Ticks all the boxes except for the very strange, very incoherent marketing.
1 “Like licking the bottom of an opened golden syrup can past its expiry date” was the fruity description of one woeful Australian small-brewery craft beer I won’t name.
]]>I’m certainly returning to my class roots at the moment. Though I have enrolled in my course in defiance of one of Sydney’s most enduring concrete boundaries of class, ethnicity, religion, influence and opportunity—ANZAC Parade—I find that things aren’t so different at Kenso. Higher education is as familiar an environment as I left it, rather like putting on an old pair of football boots. True, some things are different, thinking in particular of the ironed, well-dressed, made-up students who seem to have replaced the ones I recall who went unshaved to class in tracky dacks. Apparently journal articles aren’t accessed, these days, through heavy lifting and photcopying. And it seems that access to university IT services is a great deal more difficult and tedious than it was in the late 1990s.2
Some things, though, never change. All universities like to play on their status and boast to their students, professional jargon is a universal peacemaking language of love which unites cultures and warring peoples, the beardo wierdos still use 40pt Impact on A3 with the same clipart for their “forums”, decyphering classroom numbering is an ordeal you need a savant to do properly, the card-circle transport concession of a full-time local student is a prize more valuable than rubies, and always, always, at the bottom of the hill, lies a shitty, shitty bar to sell you expensive beer in plastic glasses.
I shared one this afternoon, rainwater sodden from the soles of my feet to the waist, with an old comrade N, who is forsaking a profitable lawyer’s career for teaching in high schools, and more power to him.
He reminded me that my enrolment in this degree makes me a student over three decades. Thanks, N. That was just the encouragement I needed.
—-
1 “There had been ‘some restructuring done with the whole company’“.
2 Blackboard, what excuse can you make for your own existence? None? That is just as I thought. I shun you. You are to me as a Gentile and a tax-collector.
]]>