Popeye’s chicken tenders with two biscuits eaten with leftover curry. Now I know what I don’t like about Popeye’s- it’s the beef tallow. There was a strong beef smell which I thought was from the heated curry, but it was the tenders. When I’m eating chicken I want it to smell the way it has always smelled. The claim that beef tallow gives fried chicken a richer smell and a deeper umami flavour is BULLSHIT.
Doing gym AND kettlebells. I feel like shit today (made worse by the awful Popeyes meal I just had).
Not eating sufficiently prior to doing gym AND kettlebells. All I had was a large cappuccino with almond milk, an espresso and a pre-workout drink with creatine.
A failed DIY of cutting off the hood off a hoodie
Sunday
It was so cold and wet even the cat wouldn’t leave the bed.
The gift that keeps on giving is cleaning the house so thoroughly because guests are coming over, that for the entire weekend, all you needed to do by way of chores was dishes and laundry. Moving about to get some warmth going underneath your thermals would’ve helped. But I love it; I’d rather freeze than melt in the heat.
My day’s budget was $70. We had coffee ($14); bought acrylic markers ($25) and cake tins ($15) at Spotlight and a loaf of Jalapeño bread for lunch ($9) for a grand total of $63.
I didn’t really know but apparently, the type of cake you’re making dictates what kind of pan to use. Thinking of baking this for work and a cake tin as opposed to a springform pan which is all I’ve ever used and have, is what’s appropriate to bake it in.
Purposeful (such a pretentious word isn’t it??) cooking and personal art keeps the devil away.
Friday night
The Weekend (late post)
Dear Diary,
My sister Binky had a diary, pretty sure she did. As a child, most of my thoughts weren’t really about my feelings so I guess there was no compulsion to write them down. And hard to believe, but whatever fantasy world I created and was living in, I was actually happy in it.
Plus, my penmanship was horrible. Still is.
One of my creative writing classes at the UP was memoir writing and I went all in. At the end of the semester, it was over a hundred pages long, held together by a binder clip, typed single-spaced and filled with sketches, collage and paintings. Ninety-eight percent of it wasn’t real of course- my life then was nothing, but in my head it was rich, boundless and exuberant.
I lost that book after showing it to someone and I still mourn its loss to this day.
I found an old Moleskine notebook that I started writing on in December 2019 with the entries petering out when the Covid lockdowns happened and I thought why not, let’s continue writing and recording if only for the simple and uncomplicated reason of writings for it’s own sake.
Cassia
So Michelin stars were given out recently to a smattering of New Zealand restaurants and while Cassia was on the guide, it didn't get a star. Not that it matters. We’ve been wanting to try it out for the longest time and when we did, they were in the middle of a renovation. So the new (pop-up) location is at this Grey Lynn cafe called Ozone.
The cafe leases its space so the restaurant staff literally carts all their stuff in and then out every single night; they could have closed temporarily, but…
The only drawback is that we were offered an abbreviated, but still very satisfying menu. Spoiler alert if you ever book before they reopen (with a full menu) sometime in August- don’t order the curries (there are only three anyway). If the sirloin steak with rogan josh was any indication, it was just okay and not Michelin okay. We figured that a sampling of the smaller plates would have been the better strategy, but three outstanding entries in spite of their size, was quite filling.
Skip the wine, not that I’d ever order one anyway, but the cocktails were sensational and satisfyingly boozy. It’s a shame to skip the reopening, but we’ve already booked at Ahi- and yes, they do have a Michelin star lol.
Favourite winter meals on rotation
Let's take the train to get some Spanish bread
I did the same when I had a craving for (French) canele. But that was a disappointment when the canele was burnt and the custard inside tasteless (Asian bakers attempting French stuff!).
But you can’t fuck up Spanish bread can you? I’ve loved every version I’ve tasted, and this one wasn’t any different- soft and airy, the butter and sugar just right. I remember even eating some where the butter (probably margarine which actually tastes better) had gone a bit rancid from the heat and it was still delicious.
And in this economy, a $1.50 Spanish bread beats an $8 canele any day.
(Dosena Bakery in Papatoetoe)
Did you know it's 164 days before Christmas?
Our dining table is literally how life seems to be these days; it’s clean and empty at the start of the week, then as the days pass, the surface blooms with books from the library (The Trauma Cleaner, Exhalation by Ted Chiang), stuff from the supermarket waiting for their turn to be stuffed into the pantry (which needs reorganising too), personal cosmetic stuff (because I log the products I buy, what skin concern they’re currently addressing, and what ingredients they have), art stuff (because the table is the de facto work table too) and home DIY stuff (there was a wall-steamer on the table last week, and shelving from Ikea, and this week, a spirit level to hang art that is yet to be created, if I ever get there).
And where did the time go? We all blinked and we’ve eased past the middle part of the year, and the end of it seems so much closer when you have an actual number of days counting down to Christmas. Nobody book ends their year with the New Year btw. So what do I want for Christmas? What do I want to give? Believe it or not, I usually start my lists in June, and then I start buying when sales happen from September to October. Pricier gifts get purchased when there’s enough money saved. I’ve never really cared about ‘budgets’ and even in this economy, I’m not about to start. I’ve given and I’ve received, and each year has been filled with much (material) joy so I’ll leave it at that. When I’m retired and poor, I may need to gift my ‘art’ as gifts, so I better hurry and start now to perfect it; don’t want to be that crazy uncle handing out crafty, tatty shit.
Word-association Tuesday
Madonna
confessions
guilty
death penalty
fallout
punishment
collapse
vibe-shift
change
revolution
justice
temporary
reprieve
habits
END
Saturday (morning)
Lily has a routine and she sticks to it no matter what. She paws my face and failing to get a reaction, does it a second time but with her claws out. I hide under the covers, but she just steps right up, literally standing on my face. What about that?
But I can see the sunlight on the deck through the duvet and the promise of a perfectly sunny winter’s day is enough reason to get up (grudgingly) at 7:30am, cat or no cat on top of my face.
I go upstairs and spy the kettlebells. Mmm, maybe later (sore) alligator.
Need to eat and remember that I have those protein oats. I assemble a bowl with banana, berries and granola. I arrange all the components around it and take a photo thinking, well, will you look at that? So social-media worthy..hmmmmm.
Three minutes and 10 seconds later in the microwave, the bowl is a bubbling slate-grey sludge that probably resembles the surface of an alien planet.
But looks aren’t everything, if you don’t know that yet.
I dig into the oats and it’s warm, comforting and delicious.
Happy birthday L (from Claude)
She sits in the frame
like someone who has learned
that softness is not the opposite of strength.
The trees rise behind her,
straight with purpose,
while she folds herself into the moment
as if time can be held gently.
A small smile—
not asking to be noticed,
not trying to disappear.
Just there.
Like a quiet path through a forest,
certain of where it goes
without needing a signpost.
Jacqueline Fahey, Protest Paintings
I’m adding Jacqueline Fahey to my list of favourite New Zealand artists.
The problem is, I’m not feeling her later works. A survey of her work is on display at the Gow Langsford gallery until the 20th of this month, and while the exhibit focuses on her ‘unflinching eye for the sociopolitical world (which) has only grown more piercing with time,’ I’m going to venture my uneducated opinion that it’s not her best work, for me anyway. And the latter works are the ones on sale- a triptych (Whatever Happened to Bernadette Devlin) is a steal at $145k, which would be right at home in a brutalist-styled modern home.
But it’s her earlier works, where she mines the interiors of her life as a woman finding meaning and validation as a wife, mother and homemaker that I feel she’s strongest not only visually, but intellectually as well. To paint as she did at a time when society held very different expectations of women, both as individuals and as artists, was a potent radical act. By elevating the domestic sphere and asserting the significance of women's lived experiences, she transformed the personal into the political and this is what cements her legacy among New Zealand's great artists.
In her later works, however, that woman seems to have disappeared, or rather, she is at home and doing stuff that people in their 90s typically do,
Instead, you get the painterly equivalent of someone posting photos and videos to social media, layering protest and outrage over images as literal text. Not being disrespectful, but just imagine if someone gave Jacqueline a phone and several social-media accounts?
Pretty pictures, sure. Provocative? Not really. Will I bring out my black Amex? Yup, but only to purchase her early works.
Sundays
Chicken, chicken (skin) and more chicken.
We had nothing planned for Saturday night dinner, so Papa's Chicken it was — the leftovers of which got paired with ramen the next day. There are a million chicken places out there, some genuinely great (like Papa's), some disappointingly meh (Popeyes, I'm looking at you). Papa's main strength is consistency. I'm partial to their plain, unseasoned, crispy variant, which you can doctor to your own taste — Kikkoman and crispy chilli oil, in my case.
Then the chicken skin arrived. Two kilos of it. I hadn't even realised I'd ordered it, and it came from this online store — the only place I've found that sells it here.
As someone who has become annoyingly snobbish about meat sourcing, I had questions. Is the chicken free-range? What exactly is the quality control on how the skins are processed? Without clear answers, I just ran them under cold water over and over until my hands started to go numb. They're going to be cooked anyway, right?
The best method I've come across is to lay the skins flat on a baking sheet and roast them in batches. I've seen people on social media dump everything into a pot of water and wait for the liquid to evaporate, letting the skins render and fry in their own fat — but I think this is misleading. Unless you're using a brand-new, genuinely non-stick pan, the skins inevitably stick during the boiling phase and tear when you try to work them off with a spatula. (I used a non-stick pan. They still stuck.) That said, I do see the merit of a quick parboil beforehand to take the edge off that intense, barnyard chickeny smell.
Yes, keto people will tell you chicken skin is practically a health food. And while rendered chicken crackling is genuinely delicious, let's not kid ourselves — it's still mostly fat. We treat it as a treat.
And because the crackling had left us with a nice pool of rendered chicken fat, and we had some large chicken legs sitting in the freezer, it seemed only logical to make chicken inasal for dinner. Sort of. I didn't actually have cane vinegar, calamansi, or lemongrass — so it was inasal in spirit and appearance, if not entirely in flavour. It's been a while, honestly, and I can't even recall with any certainty how it's supposed to taste.
One last thing: there's a US lobby group that flatly declares that chicken is not a healthy food choice. Take that with an enormous grain of salt — it's an American organisation, after all, and they have their own agenda to push. As they always do.
Questions that (sometimes) keep me up at night
Yes L; there are some questions that keep me up night.
Where and how can I get that miracle drug that will add another 30 years to our cat’s life?
When really, will I start getting actual wrinkles??
How do I deal with pubic hair turning white?? Does it matter?
Is there an endgame to Philippine politics?
Where and how do you begin therapy and recovery for artistic atrophy?? For what ends??
Should I just start writing??
How can I admit that I really don’t like salmon that much?
How do you know that you have enough clothes??
Is sex work really that bad???
Can one start all over again with art?
Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now
Copy pasted as is:
Spanning decades of artistic exchange since China’s Reform and Opening Up in 1978, Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now offers a captivating look at how a new generation of Chinese artists have responded to the seismic shifts in society – transitioning from rural to urban, traditional to modern, and industrial to global powerhouse.
The exhibition features a powerful selection of works from international heavyweights including Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Xu Zhen and Yang Fudong, alongside stunning pieces by cutting-edge artists making their New Zealand debut, including Lu Yang, Pu Yingwei and 2024 Sigg Prize Winner Wang Tuo.
Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now presents fresh takes on traditional Chinese crafts, imposing robotic sculptures and meditative digital landscapes. This exhibition reveals the complexity, innovation and bold vision of Chinese art today, inviting you to discover a dynamic and ever-evolving cultural landscape.
The exhibition is proudly supported by the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation and New Zealand Government’s Events Boost Fund.
city on the cusp of winter
Auckland’s weather has been described as having a warm, oceanic climate with distinct sub-tropical influences, which means warm, humid summers and mild, wet winters. Saturday was dipping just above 10 degrees, but after walking about 2 km from Symonds all the way to the viaduct with precise, well-timed stops at a specialist optometrist store, a newly opened Asian bakery and a small snobbish boutique stocking Celine & Loewe, it was hot.
We have small coffees at a Starbucks and loiter at Britomart a bit at the large public square called Te Komitititanga. This is the tourist part of the city which funnels an endless stream of people taking the ferries back and forth to Waiheke, Davenport, Pine Harbour & Great Barrier Island. This is literally the only part of the city where there is a crowd.
Then it was some more walking for a yum cha lunch at Grand Harbour at the corner of Customs Street West and, Pakenham Street East, where we had barely taken off our coats when the roast pork cart came around (two please!).
There’s no time to feel guilty over a hundred dollars worth of dimsum; you just walk it off again until you come to the Britomart weekend market and see the stalls selling donuts. mochi-cheesecake hybrids and vegan pastries.
But then we didn’t really get dessert so….
Accept things for once
An aggressive Thai massage. A dubious can of cheap sardines. An elaborate meal of slow-cooker beef cooked in Rendang spices, then served with Japanese ramen and kelp broth. Four eggs for himself (The protein! As if 350 grams of beef wasn’t enough). Half a bag of spinach wilted in hot oil.
Bent over the toilet without his glasses, he had the horrifying thought that he’d literally vomited up his own guts. Then he saw it was only the spinach — undigested, black, and slick as kelp out of water. The nausea came in waves, and each one had a lesson, had a question.
Lesson: Don’t be afraid to hunch over the bowl as they do in movies- it is, after all, a $3,700 toilet bowl- so that you can contain all the gory spatter.
Question: How much beef did he really eat?? Every vomit seemed enough to fill a small bowl. That would be $14.99 please.
And he was cold, deathly cold and sleepy. But also vastly relieved. Because for once, there was absolutely nothing he could do, like for real. And nothing else mattered. His body was either healing or dying and he couldn’t tell the difference. Nor cared. For once in a very long time, he surrendered to just accepting it, to being at peace with it. It helped that every cell in his body, every thought, was in accord towards that objective.
So he just slept with the electric blanket on at 3, with the cat nestled near his legs.
Friday
When you don't bother reading instructions
The shelving in the bathroom looks great (the colour is called ‘Gentle Oak’), but be careful not to shake it or put something heavy on top of it. It’s rickety like a bamboo scaffolding on a 20-storey building in Hong Kong. The flat pack came with a cryptic set of assembly instructions, which he didn’t really follow. How hard was it to put together a shelf? It’s not, but patience and mindfulness are not things he’d like to expend energy on when building a shelf, which is an object he considers minor, inconsequential and for this particular one, something just for optics. Six new Country Road towels, three for each level. A pale green glass vase on top that could hold long, slender calla lilies. An imitation white coral shell.
He hates remote controls, especially for TVs, which he believes have evolved into something more complicated than the Presidential Emergency Satchel. His default behaviour when using one? Punching every single button until the screen makes sense, or show him what he wants to see.
He was mid-way through shaving his head when the shaver just died, and he thought, it can’t be- he just charged it two days ago. But S was suspicious. This same shaver was a replacement for one that just lasted 5 months. Both were the same model. Both started sputtering, then completely died even after having been charged. They returned the 1st one to the store as it was still within the warranty period, and got the same model; surely the defect was just a one-off, a fluke. But here we are again, and he was looking at his head, one half clean-shaven, the other half with that tell-tale sheen of gray regrowth which he hates.
Have you cleaned it?
There’s this little hatch on it, but it’s empty.
Yeah, but where do you think all the hair goes?
He NEVER really knew nor cared. So it was a bit of a shock, and a fascination when they opened the shaver head and saw five months’ worth of hair compressed in the rotors and the cap. It was so full, the mechanism was actually, literally choking.
How Was Your Friday? It was the usual
He gets anxious when he forgets to bring his AirPods. He can’t pretend to be deep into Olivia Dean or Travis Scott or the old Weeknd or whatever he had on his music-streaming account, and now he has to pretend that without the music, he was deep in thought about something else. Surely, if you had no phone to look at or ear-thingies to listen to, what could you be doing looking at shit or thinking about shit? You were virtually exposed. Some loser could try to get your attention, to engage with you and then what? There were more and more people lately at the bus stop, phone-less, ear-thingyless, mouth slightly open, and eyes darting every which way like some animal that had been up all night. Were they hungry? Were they tired and needed to rest? He didn't really care. All he needed was to pretend to be deep into something while he watched them furtively.
He could do anything he wanted. The tools of knowledge and creation stretched from creating a totally new face for someone, teaching an AI assistant to comb through gigabytes of archival data in less than 2 minutes, to rendering a brochure in 3D just because he could. Was it necessary? Not really, and in the end, he did an actual mock-up for the 3-fold cover just to see what it was like in real life.
He wants to smell like he lived in a world on fire because it is.
One of these days out of sheer childhood nostalgia, he’s going to sit down to a bowl of his childhood Fruit Loops and watch YouTube clips of Superfriends. He will remember the days when innocence meant trusting anything that felt and tasted good; sugary cereal, the tang of orange juice, rice slathered with pork fat and seasoned with fish sauce.
Did you know? A McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese (US) contains approximately 740–770 calories, 48–51g protein, 42–45g fat, and 40–43g carbs. This high-protein, high-fat burger also provides roughly 20g of saturated fat, 165mg cholesterol, and 1,360mg sodium.
