Monthly Archives: February 2010

by | February 27, 2010 · 18:11

I Love Patti Smith

by Ben Kritikos

How is it possible that I went 30 years without being obsessed with Patti Smith?

This world is insane.  Nothing makes sense, and maybe it shouldn’t.  People kill each other, and do worse.  Poetry is gone from our language, half-dead, imprisoned in books and open mic nights.  Rock and roll is moribund merchandise used to drug the baby boomers.   I can’t stand it.  I’d go mad if it weren’t for the existence of something, some one who breathed fire and dug her heels into the fleshy undersides of city streets, poked at the open wound on the face of civilisation and cried out in a hoarse and primitive howl from the other side of the dark corridor of time and memory.

“We shall live again”, and it will be Easter when the clocks stop, time dies running, and everything is green, gold and answers to the touch.

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by | February 26, 2010 · 09:00

Top Five Bad Memories (Part VI)

AFTERWORD

Far from enjoying a public confession of my lowest moments and most tender vulnerabilities, I found relating these things slightly embarrassing. Maybe that sounds obvious, but some people enjoy relating these kinds of things.

Why share them at all, you may wonder. To tell you the truth, I believe it’s important to face down one’s embarrassment, to learn to stand face to face with the ugly bits of one’s personal history and own them. Besides, in my case, I’m genuinely not the person I used to be.

Memory is a function that constantly thwarts and baffles us, ruffles our feathers — but it also plays an integral part in our self-opinion. Some Buddhists believe that the ego is illusory, that it is an accumulation of “facts” drawn from memory (oftentimes of dubious accuracy), which we unconsciously, unknowingly assemble into a shape. That shape is “who we are”. Of course, it’s plain to see that “who we are” is many things to many people, even many things to ourselves, depending on our mood or the circumstances we find ourselves in.

I’m not proud of the bad things I’ve done, but neither am I truly embarrassed. I don’t regret having made mistakes. I regret the hurt I’ve caused others in my stupidity, of course. In a spirit of contrition, I’ve attempted to reward myself with a more fulfilling, more dedicated life in which I can test out and refine my personal ethics. I find a life in accordance with my personal ethics rewarding; and I find that rewarding myself has the knock-on effect of rewarding others.

It is through the constant rewarding of one’s own best instincts that we cultivate empathy. To deny oneself the belief, nay, the knowledge that change is inevitable, that one’s very self is a process, a flux rather than an entity — this is tantamount to self-mutilation. I think this is how people end up hating themselves.

Empathy, goodness, all the enjoyable and pleasant things about living (of which there are regrettably fewer than the bad ones) come from humanity’s ability to renew itself, to reinvigorate itself, to evolve and change and adapt. After all, we are organisms like any other. Except bankers.

Empathy is a skill, and a rewarding one at that. Cultivating empathy requires a sort of creative use of memory. We’ve got to remember the feeling of being lost at sea, the feeling of vulnerability and not knowing what the hell is going on, in order to truly understand the behaviour of others. It’s hard, I know. I’m the first to admit my hypocrisy: I take particular delight in watching two self-important yuppies with their noses stuck in iPhones and their ears stopped up with the latest disposable music almost crash into each other because neither was watching where they were going.

Everybody has memories they wouldn’t relate to just anybody. The fact that they’re so delicate, so embarrassing, makes them that much more special to relate. It’s precisely these bad memories that we serve like gifts to people who we want to love. Whether these memories threaten one’s idea of oneself as a “good person”, or whether they bring to mind old unresolved pain, we truly are like magnificent flowers growing out of the dung heap of our past when we share them.

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by | · 00:00

Top Five Bad Memories (Part V)

A Compromising Position

You may have gathered from the past four posts that I spent my adolescence struggling with various Powers That Be in one form or another — that is to say, I had a pretty standard adolescence, if a little on the colourful side.

Like many of my generation, this struggle with Powers That Be moved from an outward struggle to the more internalised struggle of growing frustration, self-destruction and barely concealed disgust with society as a whole — society as a hole, as I liked to think of it then, in which I found myself plummeting like Alice down the rabbit hole toward some 20th century suburban American Wonderland.

At the bottom of the rabbit hole I found nothing but — a bottle. At 18 drink helped me bear the brunt of my frustrations … or perhaps it numbed me to the weight. At any rate, drinkers never struggle for company. Ernie, Anthony and I never parted ways for a good four months. We worked together at a small computer shop, we flopped on Ernie’s floor, and we shared 30-packs of cheap beer more often than most people sit down to eat.

Ernie, Anthony and I would drink ourselves silly and usually top off the night with a big drunken wrestling match to equal anything Andre the Giant ever did. Except, of course, that the matches took place in Ernie’s bedroom where next door his grandmother wandered around in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. Occasionally she’d wander into the room at 5am to find us completely pissed, half-naked, sweating — maybe even bleeding. Ernie’s solution to these unexpected visits was to stand completely still in hope she wouldn’t notice we were there. He reasoned thus: to her dulled senses, a still room was an empty room. It usually worked. (Curtis Mayfield said it: if there’s hell below, I’m surely going to go.)

When simply drinking beer out of a can became too slow, too cumbersome a way to imbibe the frothy nectar of the American corporate gods, we devised a way to drink faster, and in abundance. Enter: the beer funnel. Continue reading →

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by | February 25, 2010 · 00:00

Top Five Bad Memories (Part IV)

A case of mistaken identity

Did you know that police in Middle-Of-Nowhere towns find strangers asking for directions suspicious? No, I’ll bet you didn’t. I didn’t either. “Protect and Serve” my arse.

Gary, Melanie and I went to a party but didn’t enjoy it, so we left. The party was full of friends from school, and as we’d just finished school we’d had about enough of them. Melanie went home to my girlfriend Alice’s house where she stayed while Alice was up in B***** in University; but she forgot her jacket in the backseat of Gary’s car.

We picked up our friend Albert from the party. He didn’t want to be there either. He had just come back from training with the Army Reserves. It was early so we decided to drive aimlessly onto the back roads, out into the sticks where we could just drive and talk and listen to music.

In an American suburb you’re never far from a city — that’s why they’re called suburbs. But a suburb is also never far from the Middle Of Nowhere. You have only to drive 20 or 30 minutes in any direction down a high-speed-limit tree-lined road away from the centre of town to find yourself rightly and properly in the Boondocks. This was the one thing about growing up in the suburbs that I liked. Continue reading →

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by | February 24, 2010 · 00:00

Top Five Bad Memories (Part III)

Getting caught egging cars

At 16 I was not a bad kid but I looked quite threatening. All the boredom of being riddled with hormones, stuck in a suburb, a chronically sensible and sensitive boy, you could read the frustration on my face. That, and I wore a piece of chain around my neck held together with a padlock, and I put glue in my hair to make it spikey.

By junior year in high school (that’s the third year of high school, to you non-Americans) I had been so often mistaken for a trouble-maker and even unjustly punished for trouble I hadn’t made that I set out to actually cause trouble. Why not? I’d be punished whether I did something wrong or not.

So I started throwing eggs at moving cars.

My friend Lorenzo and I bought two 40 ounce bottles of cheap malt liquor (the American equivalent of a flagon of Special Brew) and took them down to the parking garage underneath my parents’ apartment. A few weeks previously we’d bought four dozen eggs and left them to go off. Drinking our 40s we planned our course of action. The apartments sat next to a wide busy road where cars sped past. Between the apartments and the road grew a hedge. This hedge grew thick enough to hide in. Continue reading →

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by | February 23, 2010 · 00:00

Top Five Bad Memories (Part II)

Operation Desert Storm

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 the television went crazy. As a kid you got the impression that Saddam Hussein was this text-book bad guy from a Superman comic. In retrospect, it wasn’t just the kids who got this impression.

By the time we were back in school, some kids had t-shirts with pictures of Saddam Hussein being anally penetrated by a rocket and the caption “This SCUD’s for you!” referencing a Budweiser advert of the period. It was clear and easy to understand: Iraq were bad guys and we, the United States Of America, were good guys who were going to save the day.

In early January of ’91 the war drums were banging full-throttle and every other 11 year old boy I knew had learned everything there was to know about the US war planes and battleships that had amassed on the coasts of the Persian Gulf. Operation Desert Storm was on its way and we could hardly wait.

16 January 1991 was a school night. Just before my bedtime my parents and I were watching television. The US had begun its aerial bombardment of the Iraq forces in Kuwait. The screen alternately showed a journalist on top of a building watching the bombs go off in the distance, fighter planes taking off from aircraft carriers, and grainy black-and-white shots from the top of missiles being launched into buildings. The journalists and commentators could barely contain their excitement.

It was the first time you could watch a missile hit its target. The news stations were eager to show this new visual phenomenon to garner viewers and ratings; the Department of Defence was keen to show it in order to demonstrate the accuracy of its weapons.

My mother noticed I wasn’t looking well. I was sent off to bed. My bedroom was dark and I could hear the telly in the next room giving moment to moment details of the bombardment. It felt wrong. The excitement leading up to this conflicted feeling of something essential to me being wrong simply overwhelmed me. I cried.

My mother came in to comfort me. She asked what was wrong. I articulated the best I could. My mother explained that sometimes people do bad things and have to be stopped by force. I felt a weird kind of darkness inside me and it felt awful, like a cold hand. Something was wrong and I couldn’t understand what it was. My mother tried to explain that sometimes doing good meant hurting people. Somehow I didn’t believe it. I still don’t.

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by | February 22, 2010 · 00:00

This Week: Top Five Bad Memories (Part I)

by Ben Kritikos

“Only those who keep changing remain akin to me.”
-Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I’m a bit of an idiot — I’m not ashamed to admit it. The other day, I dropped a plate for no reason. I got distracted by a thought, and the thing landed on my foot. It broke, and Anna got cross with me. These things happen regularly. Like I said, I’m a bit of an idiot.

In the past, I’ve done some incredibly stupid things. I don’t know why. They didn’t seem so stupid at the time. Rather than call myself a victim of circumstance, I’d rather take the view that conditions were ripe for moronic behaviour, and I was a prime candidate. Sometimes, in retrospect, my behavoiur wasn’t so stupid in the grand scheme of things.

Memory is a funny thing. Like sound, it gets distorted over long distances: the further away you get from the event, the more the event looks like something altogether different. Funny how some of the things we mis-remember could have had a profound impact on our development. I know this is the case with me. Certain events in my life were indicative of my development, and (to my embarrassment) they don’t progress from “idiotic”, to “immature”, evening off in the near-past at “relatively understandable”; rather, they’re all jumbled up in no fixed order.

Some memories resist revisiting; they hurt too much. It is just those memories that usually need a good square looking-at. For one reason or another, they beckon a part of us normally kept under lock and key. Just getting to these memories often requires navigating in dark, ugly places full of stagnant air, and mirrors reflecting what look like the faces of strangers.

These are my top five bad memories, which, when I look back over the traveled road, I see as sign posts — some of them unrecognisably covered in grafitti.

If we didn’t change, we wouldn’t be human — and the creationists would be right. But we are human, creationists are idiots, and — to quote a famous Asian man — “nothing is forever but change.” Continue reading →

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by | February 20, 2010 · 11:00

This Week: Top Five Jazz Saxophone Solos


by Ben Kritikos

The saxophone was the first instrument I ever played.  I remember my teacher: an overweight, slightly Buddha-shaped man with a penchant for falling asleep with half-eaten doughnuts in his hand.  I don’t know why I took up saxophone (an alto, incidentally), but it didn’t last terribly long.  My parents supported me by not complaining of the racket I made; my teacher gave as much support as one can give to an easily distracted eight-year-old; but learning jazz standards didn’t hold the appeal of, say, setting things on fire, or making sling-shots out of wood and rubber bands.  In the end, I lost interest, a fact I’ve regretted ever since.

The saxophone came into this world through the efforts of a Belgian man living in Paris in the 1840s by the name of Adolphe Sax.  The son of instrument maker Charles-Joseph Sax, Adolphe studied flute and clarinet in Brussels, where his father sold instruments, including horns with modifications of his own design.  Adolphe Sax followed his father’s lead, designing and modifying instruments, and at the age of 20 he patented a modification to the bass clarinet.

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by | February 11, 2010 · 16:36

We Love… Sauerkraut

This post should, for accuracy’s sake, be called “Ben Loves… Sauerkraut”.  And how.

For those of you unfamiliar with the fermented cabbage goodie, let me explain.  Sauerkraut is finely shredded white cabbage, jammed into a jar with salt, and left to ferment.  It releases its fluid, softens, changes flavour, and becomes a very nutritious and versatile pickle.  With nothing but salt!

Health nuts may tell you about all the enzymes and friendly bacteria in raw sauerkraut, and why that’s really good for you, blah blah blah.  I’ll spare you the health lecture, and in its place show you a picture of one of my favourite sandwiches of all time, which uses sauerkraut to amazing effect: the Reuben.

This is my favourite American food.  If it weren’t for the Reuben, I’d probably be a vegetarian; but a world without Reubens is a world devoid of meaning, as far as I’m concerned.

In the US, there’s a slang/derogatory term for British people: limeys.  The British on trans-Atlantic passages in the 18th century sucked on limes to avoid scurvy, a common disease afflicting seafarers with a lack of sources of vitamin C.  But before the Royal Navy administered limes, sauerkraut was the source of vitamin C most commonly brought on board ships crossing to the New World.  This practice continued on German ships throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, which is why to this day some Americans (much to my embarrassment) call British people “limeys” and Germans “krauts”.

Put that in your air-tight jar and pickle it.

This afternoon I’ve taken the plunge and attempted to make sauerkraut.  I used some leftover cabbage from when Anna and I made dumplings last week, and put the whole shebang in a jar that previously housed Sainsbury’s brand sauerkraut.  I got the recipe from a Jewish cookbook.  It sounded easy.  Let’s hope I end up with sauerkraut, not just a stench in the house.

If all goes well, and our little flat doesn’t smell like a mouldering granny in four weeks’ time, I’ll have a go at making gherkins.

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by | February 8, 2010 · 00:00

This Week: Top Five Albums For When You Feel The World Is Shit

by Ben Kritikos

You know those days when you’re so frustrated with the world, so itchy and restless that you could scrape your own face off with a tennis ball?  I have more of these days between the months of January and March than all the other bits of the year combined.  It’s the winter blues.

Some people don’t get the winter blues.  Lucky bastards.  But I do.  I used to get solemn, depressed, melancholy — like a teenager constantly on the verge of tears because his/her hormones are more imbalanced than Mel Gibson.

That doesn’t happen anymore: now I go stir-crazy.  Menopausal.  Borderline personality.  And it happens out of nowhere, not just on gray, dismal, drizzly days when the 214 drives right past you without stopping, as though the poxy cock-nose driving the thing didn’t see your schizophrenic semaphore.  The 214 is the quintessential London-in-winter experience — it’s the bus from hell, the bus they refuse to upgrade to a double-decker, or even an articulated bus, because people may actually be able to sit down on it; the bus driven only by less-than-domesticated primates who seem to take pleasure in accelerating fast enough to splatter old ladies against the grimy handrails.

Enter the Dragon: the 214

Continue reading →

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