chrisgregory.com

Cook the food in butter, then add some cream.

Saturday night we had a few of the people we’d become acquainted with through teh fatty interwebs, which to me is centered around Bri’s RSS feed called Notes From the Fatosphere. One of the guests said nice things about us here.

Somebody said that, on the way to our house, she realised this was the first time she’d been ever gone to a social event without feeling self-conscious about her weight. Which is kind of cool, but kind of sad as well.

Perhaps next time there’ll be some other guys involved…someone who’d be impressed by all my cool stuff. Or some kids, I guess.

I turned forty years old on the Equinox. I share a birthday with JS Bach and Russ Meyer, so from the sublime to the – well, I guess it depends on your opinion of Bach. I don’t make a thing of birthdays, usually, but I enjoy the type of cooking involved in social events and Kate sold me on a theme for the party.

I have very fond memories of the family get-togethers of my childhood, in rural South Australia through the late seventies and early eighties. If I ever ran a restaurant I would want it to mimic the experience, somehow. There would be a gas griller and a keg of beer, and a tape player with a pile of tapes, all containing the music of Slim Dusty. Trestle tables would be set up and the surfaces lined with butcher’s paper. On one table would be salads, which would all have meat in them, and on the other would be a variety of multi-coloured home-made desserts, usually containing jelly and marshmallows.

To me, that’s probably as good as it gets. While I don’t doubt that finer fare exists, I have yet to enjoy the same level of pleasure in a commercial setting. I doubt that it’s possible without some pre-existing personal relationship between the people who prepare the food and the people who consume it. Social food has meaning beyond and sometimes unrelated to satisfying base nutritional requirements.

Kate sent out invites using modern methods, through email, Facebook and a few phone calls. To suit the ‘theme’, Kate asked people to bring a dessert or a salad, of the kind that was popular in the seventies.

This made me feel a little sad. Somewhere between my childhood and now, food changed. Partly it’s changed circumstances: I sort of made the shift from rural working-class life and culture to a kind of middle-class urbanity. My tastes have changed. To some of my friends, the idea of social food is fairly alien. Middle-class preferences are for reproductions of other people’s cuisines, the particulars of which depend almost wholly on current fashion. The food Kate was describing seemed shameful to some of them, like a trap set to trigger deeply-felt status anxieties. One refused and said they would bring a ‘good’ salad.

The idea of having a theme for a social function seemed alien but unavoidable. Few of the people that I know have a strong sense of identity attached to the foods they consume, not in the way that the people around me when I was growing up did. For better and for worse; I remember various foodstuffs I’d now consider staples being referred to as ‘wog food’ or worse. But at the same time, nobody talked about authenticity, or making other people’s food. The food they made belonged to them, and by sharing it they were sharing themselves.

Browsing through old cookbooks, there was a fairly abrupt transition in the seventies, from cookbooks that focussed on entertaining guests or cooking for pleasure, to books that promoted simple cooking or healthy cooking above all else. The involved desserts and carefully crafted appetisers, meant to be made at home before transporting to social events, became unfashionable and were mostly replaced by commercial substitutes, in much the same way that commercial interests like shopping malls supplanted town squares in the eighties.

An unhealthy paranoia about food hygiene and home preparation standards, often the result of overzealous regulation and commercial lobbying, combined with puritanical notions about health and persecutory fantasies about pleasurable eating, invoking a litany of negative consequences resulting from even the briefest transgression, have made sharing food outside of the immediate family unit a morally and ethically loaded act. The solution, often enough, is to avoid the situation entirely. Eating a meal before the social event or, as host, providing solely commercially-prepared food, are increasingly common occurrences. There is little value given to preparing food for others as an act of friendship, or respect, or love.

Conversely, there seems to be no shame in providing for guests in the most perfunctory fashion. If effort is involved, it is aimed solely at boosting the host’s social status; evidence of the host’s good taste and ability to conform to current fashions through seemingly authentic reproductions of whichever dishes are currently favoured by the established culinary authorities. Any concession to the needs or preferences of the guest are negotiated as a series passive-aggressive refusals, often involving squeamishness masquerading as morality or some self-diagnosed physical intolerance (statistically, these are significantly more likely to be imagined than real).

Puritanism, perhaps an expression of the cultural implications of the fifty-fold increase in the incidence of obsessive compulsive disorders over the last thirty years, has severely curtailed the imaginative and aesthetically grandiose elements once common in social foods. The ideologies of healthy eating have become so constrictive and constipated as to disallow any expression of unrestrained joy through food and drink, even for a special occasion, when the rules of everyday nutritional balance should be relaxed or, ideally, abandoned completely.

The event went well. People ate, on the whole, much more than they should on any average day. There was a trestle table for the desserts, not as many as I remembered from my childhood, and not as skilfully prepared (the knowledge of such things, and the skills required, having atrophied), but still, I was moved that there were people who would care enough about me to do such things.

We were driving back from the Lort Smith animal hospital this morning, along Mt Alexander Road, when we saw a sign that made us pull over:

WOW Bacon only $9.00 for 2.6kg

We went in. It was an almost expired food sort of place, with loads of cool stuff. I picked up some honey mustard cranberry condiment for 80 cents, some lime flavoured soft drink called Frenzy (which I think is funny, because it’s the name of Alfred Hitchcock’s only experiment in gore, which snobby film critics like to forget ever happened) and, best of all, a couple of large camemberts for two bucks each. Oh, and some bacon, of course, which was good quality stuff from Castlemaine, in separate sealed packs inside a cardboard box, which’ll go straight in the freezer. I make bacon myself, but that’s for eating. This bacon will be for cooking, for making baked beans and such.

Then, as we were leaving, I saw the bin. It was a freegan’s wet dream:

Yes, it was entirely filled with bacon.

Over the past couple of years I’ve found myself having heated discussions with people online about food and the politics of food, and invariably the biggest douchebags quote Michael Pollan, usually as their sole point of reference.

I’ve been writing about the politics of food since before Michael Pollan started, so I’ve paid attention to his increasingly quackish claims, and even read one of his stupid fucking books (In Defense of Food; I couldn’t stomach another). I’m not a fan, to be frank. But criticism of Michael Pollan leads to invariably aggressive attacks from his fans/followers, with an intensity that is nothing short of religious fervour.

Which makes me wonder: what is it that makes Michael Pollan’s most ardent fans such total douchebags?

I’ve thought about it, and I have a couple of ideas. The first reason, I suspect, is that most Michael Pollan fans have almost no pre-existing knowledge of the subjects that he makes pronouncements about. I suspect that few of them have any scientific training, or first-hand familiarity with food production methods. Many of them have probably never seen a feed animal up close, let alone slaughtered one. Mostly, their knowledge of nutrition will have come from two main sources: advertising and, since his audience is predominantly middle-class, the lifestyle sections of newspapers, neither of which provide a terribly useful or reliable framework for understanding a very complex subject.

Without any sort of structured understanding of the issues, one relies on feelings or hunches about things; prejudice, in other words. And that’s where Michael Pollan is a viking. There is nothing in his work that challenges any of the prejudices or values that you could expect your average white, middle-class urban dweller to already be convinced are self-evident truths.

Very few of his claims stand up to any sort of rigorous inspection, claims that we are all getting sicker, that the great unwashed masses make poor food choices, and so on. But to a person who instinctively believes these things to be true, to whom these claims ‘feel’ right, having them reinforced by reading them in print bolsters what is, essentially, bigotry.

My partner writes about issues of faith from a sympathetic but outside perspective. While now a firm atheist, she was brought up in missionary communities, wrote a book about English missionaries in the Gobi, and has a pretty firm understanding of the mentality of evangelicals.

Many evangelicals feel confused that non-believers are not convinced by quotations from the Bible. They find it very hard to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn’t accept that the Bible is the final arbiter of all things, the written word of God. Pollanites are hardly different. There’s the same failure to accept that, perhaps, there’s a whole world of different, often conflicting, research and conclusions and opinions. But, since the word of Pollan is the only authority they are at all familiar with, most discussions end up as little more than a series of increasingly louder repetitions of the same paraphrased arguments. In other words, it’s like trying to make sense to an angry parrot.

But perhaps the worst bit of intellectual charlatanry is the way that Pollan denies authority. Now, as someone with a background in the hard sciences, I understand that you should never accept an argument from authority. But dismissing authority is a different matter altogether. He writes:

So on whose authority do I purport to speak? I speak mainly on the authority of tradition and common sense. Most of what we need to know about how to eat we already know, or once did until we allowed the nutrition experts and the advertisers to shake our confidence in common sense, tradition, the testimony of our senses, and the wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers.

The authority of tradition and common sense or, in other words, mindless conformity and prejudice. He both dismisses all others as false prophets and sets up the readers themselves as ‘authorities’ with no need for further qualifications: they already know everything there is to know, and all else is lies and trickery. This, I think, is the real reason why Pollanites are douchebags.

Final Fantasy XIII, Disc 1:

Final Fantasy XIII, Disc 2:

From an early age, it was clear that Luffy enjoyed music. He seemed to prefer simple, dynamic sounds, particularly Krautrock bands like Cluster and Harmonia. He would sit in front of the speaker and tilt his head, a little like the dog from the HMV logo. In the car he seemed to react most positively to upbeat, syncopated dance music like the Jackson Five or the Pointer Sisters. My understanding is that dogs cannot differentiate between different pitches as well as we can, only differentiating between high, middle and low pitches within a single octave. He has never seemed to enjoy rock and roll at all, which I presume sounds like a wash of noise.

Our new dog, Toki, seems to have no interest in music at all, and doesn’t react to it. But he does seem to have a taste for literature. He is roughly four and a half months of age at the time of writing this, and his puppy teeth are still coming through. Like most teething puppies, he chews on things to alleviate the discomfort. And we found that he had started picking books off the shelves of the various bookcases in the house, to chew on.

I didn’t think much of it until I noticed that he had pulled down a copy of Aristotle’s writings on literature that I had forgotten I owned, which got me thinking. I collected up all the books with chew marks on them and piled them on top of one of the bookshelves in the hallway. When a new book takes his fancy I add that to the pile.

I was talking to Gerald Murnane on the telephone. Gerald is residing in the country for awhile. I told him about the new puppy, and how he had a taste for literature. Gerald asked me if Toki had tried any of his own books, and I told him no, that for now Gerald’s books were a little beyond him.

But funnily enough, a few days later Toki found a photo of Gerald’s country house that he had given us, and chewed the corner. I haven’t talked to Gerald since he picked up his award at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, but I want to know if he visited the Murray Bridge bunyip on the way either there or back, as I suggested.

I suspect that Gerald will be pleased to know that Toki has given his country place his blessing.

Toki’s Recommended Reading List

1. Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl
2. Norman Spinrad, Bug Jack Barron
3. Michel Tournier, Gilles & Jeanne
4. Len Deighton, Horse Under Water
5. Mark Leyner, Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog
6. Aristotle/Horace/Longinus, Classical Literary Criticism
7. Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner

Toki just made his debut on Matrixsynth right here.

I stopped writing professionally a few years ago. I had suffered a bad back injury which required a lot of pain management, and I decided to stop writing entirely until I was in better shape. At the time, I didn’t think the recovery process would be so drawn-out and difficult. I’d planned to start writing again once I’d made a full recovery. But that could be years away.

My friend Tony Moore suggested I should do a little writing for the ABC, for an opinions section on the ABC website called Unleashed, with the subtitle: ‘…presents diverse and robust opinion about politics, society, belief and behaviour.’ Tony had written for them a few times and recommended it, saying it was ‘a good little earner’. It seemed like a good idea to get in touch with them, so I sent them an email with my details and general interests. I waited a month and heard nothing back.

I have no strong opinions about the ABC one way or the other, I guess. As far as I can tell, the ABC exists primarily so that emigrants from England can keep watching their favourite TV shows. I’ve had various friends work for the ABC, and thinking about it now I realise that every single one of them left after a bad experience with either the Stalin-esque bureaucracy or as the result of some blatant act of nepotism (usually involving George Negus). Forewarned and forearmed, I was, and yet…

There was a bit of mainstream press at the time, about a video game called Fallout 3 that was going to be bowdlerised by the Australian censors for local release. Being a fan of the earlier games, I wanted to write something in support of an unexpurgated Fallout 3, which reminded me that I’d never heard back from Unleashed. Rather than email them again, I called Tony and asked him, if he wanted, to write a quick letter of recommendation to whomever he’d been dealing with at Unleashed.

I’ve known Tony for many years, but the basis of our relationship was originally professional. Along the way he published my partner’s book, Women of the Gobi, and I’d written for various projects he’d been involved with. And I guess there were other projects he didn’t think I was suited to and never even mentioned to me. I have no influence to peddle whatsoever; Tony gained no advantage by recommending me, beyond continuing to get the occasional meal, but he did.

Twenty minutes after Tony had sent off an email I heard from Unleashed. Seriously, it was probably less than twenty minutes.

That’s how I started writing opinion pieces. And as we all know, what the world needs is more opinions. I have never had any interest in reading the opinions pages of the newspaper, or reading newspapers. I’ve written for newspapers but I can’t read them. There’s something about general interest publications that makes me want to smoke crack; everything gets so dumbed-down. If I read anything it’s geared toward an audience with a specific interest, and I’ve written for specialist publications, and it’s a totally different experience. I’d explain the difference as having some basic respect for the readership. But general interest stuff reads like it’s aimed at ten-year-olds. If I ever felt like I fit the target audience for these things I’d be grossly insulted.

So writing opinion pieces for the ABC was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I guess I’d always thought that people had opinions about things based on their experiences, or training, or independent research, or something resembling logical analysis involving a survey of the peer-reviewed literature. But now I would assert that most people hold opinions based solely on the popular consensus of their self-identified social group and for no other reason.

Mostly, the consensus view of each group has some element of self-interest, which is thinly disguised as a virtue or presented as the only possible correct moral or ethical stance. That’s how people learn which opinions they should have about whatever it is: they pick the person or group they feel most self-similar to or aspire to be like and make sure they say the same things. They learn what that would be by reading opinions.

The beliefs of the dominant group are made articles of faith through constant repetition. So while Unleashed claimed to be ‘robust and diverse’ it was just the same stuff, over and over, in a cookie-cutter format. The same photograph of the same factory pumping out dark smoke (if that’s the only factory that’s causing all the pollution then why not close it down?) would be used three times a week, cropped slightly differently each time. But mostly it was mindless drivel about the social mores of op shopping or how people who go to shopping malls are disgusting and need to learn self control or how things were so much better in the old days or how we need to change our behaviours and conform to the ritualised abstinence program of some proto-fascist creep with an eating disorder or else the world is going to end or about all sorts of other kinds of conspicuous abstinence rituals designed to assuage middle-class guilt and to sustain that pleasant feeling of self-righteous indignity at the conspicuous failure of people who self-identity with non-dominant social groups, usually poorer people, to conform to these standards. Future historians are going to use Unleashed as source material to show how we were more screwed-down than the Victorians.

Look, I really wouldn’t care how much toothless pap they published, but for the name of it – Unleashed – and the claim that it was ‘robust and diverse’. Why do they use words like ‘Unleashed’ when it’s so fucking patently not? Why not call it ‘Pablum’? Why fucking pretend? It’s like labelling the smallest condoms as ‘Jumbo-size’, I guess. Marketing. I was just disappointed that the thing was so fucking lame, and I can use that word because I’m a cripple myself.

Still, it was two hundred bucks a pop for seven hundred words. That’s not great pay – it’s well below the award rate – but I’m on a disability pension. I’d usually write much more than that each time, maybe twice as much, always for the same flat rate, if I hoped to do a particular subject any justice. While it’s physically painful for me to sit and write for any period of time, I didn’t take the job lightly. The pain that attended writing even a short article would be considerable (and I reported my earnings to Centrelink, so it was hardly profitable), but at least I was writing something again, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity just to keep in practice.

The staff at Unleashed seemed to change fairly often, without any rhyme or reason. I just pitched an idea when I had one, and I think that each time they ran with it. The only limit was my physical endurance, really. But it’s in my nature to question authority. I won’t claim that it’s a virtue. And I began to feel the need to write about Unleashed itself. I wanted to bring out into the open the kinds of boundaries that exist in this sort of simulation of a public space.

I think that Unleashed represents what a bureaucrat would like the entire Internet to work. The bureaucrat’s Internet fantasy would claim to be the same as it always was, but everything would get filtered through a single little office, like something in the movie Brazil, filled with clogged pipes that lead nowhere and forms that need to be filled out in triplicate before anybody gets to look at even a single pre-approved webpage. I always smile when I see the web link on the Unleashed homepage that says: ‘Suggest a contributor’. I kind of imagine a dot-matrix printer with a busted ribbon in some bricked-off office, long forgotten, tapping out reader’s suggested contributors on a great, endless spool of perforated paper that nobody remembers ever existed.

I can’t say that I suffered a great deal of censorship…by which I mean that almost every topic I proposed was accepted and went up almost exactly as I wrote it. The only taboo was the topic of Unleashed itself, about which nothing critical could be said whatsoever. I doubt that anyone involved with Unleashed at the ABC felt like it was anything more than a stepping stone to something better, so any criticism would reflect badly on their brief tenure, I guess. The first rule of Fight Club was the first rule of Unleashed. Of course it rankled, but that wasn’t my downfall.

I’d only look at Unleashed very occasionally. It was kinda depressing. There only seemed to be about five people who even read the thing; it was the same small group of commenters almost every time. Most of the regulars seemed quite happy to chat amongst themselves about their own private business, like a group of teenagers who’d found an abandoned parking lot where they could hang out without getting hassled. They were all pleasant enough. Lots of people hang out in crappy places, simply because they’re convenient. The rest were, well, either passing trolls or kooks. By kooks I mean obsessive compulsive types with axes to grind, who’d attach the same comments about their little hobby-horse subjects to every article, whatever the topic and however tenuous the connection. I gave up commenting on anything myself, or replying to comments on my own pieces. I had started to notice that my own comments weren’t getting through moderation anyway, which annoyed me. Many of the comments I replied to were blatant trolls, the actions of anonymous vandals engaged in the virtual equivalent of pissing in the corner of a public building. Yet if I told the troll to get off my lawn, so to speak, in a colourful fashion, I’d as often as not get moderated myself.

That was just frustrating. But any time I made an effort to engage with an opinion, to examine the rhetoric being used, I would be moderated, unfailingly. I can only guess that the experience was shared by anyone else who tried to engage with the material that was being presented. Whoever was moderating the website (I was later told it was some third-party who worked from home) successfully filtered out any comments that weren’t by trolls or consisted of anything more substantial than non-sequiteurs and cross-traffic. If the quality of the article was assessed in any way, it was by the numerical count of unmoderated comments. But that’s a stupid game to play. Isn’t it?

Ramadan 2009 came around in October. There were billboards around where I live, saying (I translate) “Happy Ramadan” (basically). I live in a largely Muslim community, which has many advantages for me and no shortcomings whatsoever (I cure and smoke my own bacon at home, so that’s not an issue). Unleashed ran an article for Ramadan with the title: ‘Does God really care what we eat?’

That pissed me off.

The article was written by a first-timer called Jack Ellis. The title wasn’t really a question, more like a taunt from a little bully who thought the rest of the gang were right behind him to back him up. The piece was notably sub-par, even by Unleashed’s sometimes poor standards. It read like the work of a reasonably bright Year 11 kid for a school magazine, or perhaps a homework assignment on a topic that the writer had little interest in. There was some vaguely insulting anecdotes about mocking a Muslim taxi driver, but no engagement with the topic and no conclusions. There were a couple of bogus Bible references (he was looking for the bits about Peter’s vision in Acts 10) but no research or analysis, just the suggestion that non-Anglos really ought to spend more of their time worrying about the environment.

The guy’s biography said little more than that he’d studied music at the Sydney Conservatorium and in the Hague. So he hasn’t done much but his parents have money. There was something about the photograph that stuck with me. The tone of the piece reminded me of the articles that Peaches Geldof wrote for Nylon, or the Max Gogarty travel piece for The Guardian. It wasn’t just that they were over-privileged little wankers. It was that they knew they didn’t really have to try.

I was particularly ashamed that a musician, and one who would seem to have enjoyed so many professional advantages, could be so dismissive of other people’s struggle to find meaning. There’s no more meaningless activity than creating music, which is part of its purity. There was something so limited and self-focussed about Jack Ellis’s writing, the symptoms of a poverty of both imagination and spirit.

Jack Ellis had a website. It said that he’d been performing solo gigs in Sydney since he came back from Europe, and had ‘attracted a loyal following’. Who says something like that about themselves? I looked at the photo some more, those dead eyes, and then it clicked. This was Bob Ellis’s sprog.

How I feel about Bob Ellis isn’t really relevant here, but I’d like to tell you anyway. I’ve met Bob some dozen or so times. Let’s just say that I am way under his radar. If I was with a woman he’d hit on them, else-wise I wouldn’t even register as the furthest blip on his radar. The same friend would introduce us time and time again, having forgotten the previous times we’d been through this particular routine, and nothing. A blank look. No interest in having any conversation with a younger white male of no conspicuous use-value. I decided some time ago that the next time we went through this particular routine I’d just tell Bob Ellis to fuck off.

I don’t understand the complete divide between what Bob Ellis says in public forums like Unleashed and how he acts in person. I understand the behaviour – Bob Ellis is the most profoundly Ubu-esque character I have ever met. I would suggest that he exhibits, in person and in print, the characteristics of a narcissistic personality disorder, which is a genuinely evil and ugly thing, or a really, really small penis. What I don’t understand is why people seem so willing to go along with it all. But I guess it goes back to the problem with the whole public opinion industry – that political views are just as commodified as soap and washing detergent. Nobody seems to care how broad and crude his sloganeering actually is, or the hypocrisy of his position, they just happen to be in the market for what he’s selling.

Anyone I ever met who knows Bob Ellis has some horrible sordid story, involving him fucking somebody or trying to fuck somebody, or threatening violence on them, or actually performing violence. And they always laugh after they’ve told the story, like they were describing the actions of a cartoon character, some farcical Caliban in a Farrelly Brothers movie. And when he writes about equality and justice, I don’t think he really understands what these things represent. I think they’re just arbitrary, meaningless symbols that he waves around like so many bingo tickets. If you read Bob’s reply to Louis Nowra he genuinely doesn’t seem to understand what Nowra is criticising him for. He’s more concerned that Nowra described his costume wrong.

So it all came into focus. I sent an email to my regular handler at Unleashed, who said he hadn’t been assigned Jack Ellis and hadn’t been aware of the circumstances of his hiring. I did what I thought was the right thing: I posted a comment under Jack Ellis’s article, asking him what he thought about Max Gogarty’s similar efforts for the Guardian.

The Max Gogarty thing pretty much resolved itself. The readers smelled something fishy, did the research, worked out that Max Gogarty was the son of a Guardian travel writer and cried foul. This is one of the great things about the Internet. It’s very hard to keep secrets in any but the most restrictive forums, because they tend to self-police. But in this case, the ABC was too profoundly constipated to let anything slip out.

The comment never appeared. It was moderated, as was any attempt to clarify the relationship between Bob Ellis and Jack Ellis. I tried a few more times, then tried again using a few different posting names, then got some friends to try. Nothing. In the end I sent my handler an email, complaining that this was inappropriate censorship. Concealing a familial relationship goes beyond a conflict of interest and becomes actual criminal activity. Which in many ways was worse than anything Bob Ellis had done in the first place.

My handler got back to me, and told me that the third-party homebody who did the actual censorship had considered the post ‘off-topic’. Which would have been an argument to remove the significant majority of all the comments, all the time. And that, seemingly, was that. I’ve enough experience with publishing to know there’s always some bullshit clause somewhere that, in the end, lets them do exactly what they wanted all along. I could have left the matter there, but I felt dirty. I couldn’t write about ethical issues knowing that this sort of stuff was going on. I’d be a hypocrite, which was an act I’d need to get paid a lot more for to intentionally commit.

So I started asking around. I found out that Bob Ellis had contacted Unleashed and asked if Jack could write for them. No clicking the ’suggest a contributor’ link for little Jack. Internally, there was some unease about the whole situation, and they knew that it looked bad. Jack had written several things which they’d rejected, but he was persistent. The people I talked to said that they didn’t feel Bob had pressured them, but I guess it wasn’t necessary: Bob had got what he wanted. Any further effort was unnecessary. Look, if my Dad had called them up, would that have got me the gig? Well, my dad’s dead, so maybe, if he was a zombie, but you know what I mean. Sure, I got a referral myself, but that was from a colleague. Jack Ellis had no experience and wasn’t writing about his chosen profession. The only thing he had to recommend him was his relationship to Bob Ellis, and that was being hushed up. And how could Unleashed reconcile the claim of being robust and diverse when the Ellis family was so significantly over-represented?

My handler gave me a phone number to call to make an official complaint to the ABC. I called the number and got put through to an electrician working somewhere in the building. I’m guessing my phone records can be used to prove I made the call. I couldn’t get through to anyone and gave up (which didn’t actually take long).

The only other thing I could do was to go public. I thought that I’d go to the more left-leaning media, since these were the people I mostly knew, and this was kind of their mess anyway. I guess I’d describe myself as an angry moderate, or as the kind of socialist who hates hippies. So first I talked to some people at Crikey!, then mentioned it to the Monthly, and even talked to someone at Media Watch. It was like that scene in Lethal Weapon 2, when Mel Gibson can’t nab the bad guy because he’s got diplomatic immunity. They each laughed when I told them the story, which they seemed to enjoy hearing, and would probably repeat around some dinner table somewhere, that weekend. ‘Bob’s our friend’, someone from Crikey! told me, ‘But I will ask him about it.’

In some profound sense, this was what being Bob Ellis actually meant. I was reminded of an episode of the Simpsons, when Krusty the Clown realised that it wasn’t comedy that was ‘in his blood’, it was selling out. In some odd way, the complicity of it all, the failure to hold Bob Ellis accountable for any ethical or moral transgression, made me think of the Portrait of Dorian Gray. But was Bob Ellis the man, or was he the portrait?

So I gave up again. I had a life (sort of). I had written another piece for Unleashed, which tried to deal with the sort of ritualised abstinence stuff that dominated the website. My handler told me it sounded too aggressive, but after I insisted that he run it as it was, he removed every direct reference to Unleashed and then put it in the queue.

I guess I’d been a bit difficult. But that wasn’t anything new. I’m always difficult. And this was Unleashed, wasn’t it, prompting the image of unrestrained canine teeth snapping away, tearing into the soft underbelly of…I don’t know, stuff? It’s like when Jack Marx got hired to write a blog for Fairfax. They hired him to be controversial, and then they sacked him for it. What’s wrong with these people? Why does Jack Marx end up having to look for a new job? Shouldn’t they have sacked the idiot who hired Jack Marx to be controversial, when they never really wanted it in the first place?

Beforehand, being put in the queue had meant waiting a day or two, or maybe a week with an apology because something momentous had happened. But a couple of weeks went by, then a couple more, and I was still in the queue. My handler told me he was only working for Unleashed part-time now, and he had no real control, but each time he assured me the piece would appear in only a few more days. After six weeks I sent in an invoice, saying that I no longer cared whether they ran the piece or not. It appeared later that afternoon. Nobody got upset by what I’d written, but I may have aimed a little high.

I wrote one more piece for Unleashed, the morning after Kyle Sandilands got in trouble for making a concentration camp dieting joke about Magda Szubanski. This kind of fat hating is a bit of a pet subject, and there’d been some equally hateful anti-fat talk by people like Susie O’Brien in the media in the previous two weeks, but Sandilands got in trouble and Susie O’Brien got to go on the breakfast shows. So I wrote something quickly and sent it off without pitching it first, because it was so timely. That’s when I really learned that I was on the out.

My handler told me that they wouldn’t be able to run the piece because of a new rule that contributors could only submit fortnightly. Since the previous piece ran ten days before, they couldn’t use it. I said that, well, the last thing went in the queue seven weeks before. And I never heard of anything like that before. Imagine I had written the greatest story ever. Nobody would sit on it because of some bureaucratic quota; they’d judge it on its merits. This was crazy. I asked: how many pieces came out of the Ellis household in the past fortnight? I noticed they’d added a whole new layer of legal boilerplate to the comments section of the site. Because nothing says Unleashed like legal boilerplate.

In the end, the handler said they’d run it when Sandilands came back to work a couple of weeks later. I told him it was a mistake, and I was right. Sandilands went on an extended tolerance holiday, and by the time he returned the piece would be dead in the water. I emailed him the day I’d been told the piece would run, but I got an automated out-of-office reply, saying he’d gone on leave. If I needed to contact someone, I should email Catherine Taylor.

This was her response:

Hi Chris,

Much of the problem when you filed was that your previous piece ran on September 1 and we only rarely run the same writer more frequently than monthly.

We were debating a piece on Sandilands for this week – under the impression that he would be back on air or formally sacked – however neither of these things are happening at the moment so unfortunately we will not be able to use the piece.

If suitable for you I would prefer to receive pitches for stories in advance of you going to the work of writing them – this is the way I work with other writers – so that I can ensure the subject has not already been commissioned and fits with the particular writer’s output of stories.

I am also a little confused by the strong criticism of Unleashed you’ve been submitting to the threaded message board.

If you’d like, I’m very happy to talk with you about any concerns you have regarding the ABC’s editorial policies or talk further about the best way to submit stories.

Hope this helps.

So it was my fault, somehow. I had failed to follow protocol. Not that they had commissioned anyone else to cover the same subject. I’d written a timely piece, I hadn’t stepped on any toes, but they wouldn’t run it because of a quota system I’d never been told existed and which had never previously been applied. So what was this about a monthly quota? When did that happen? Just in the last fortnight? Surely I’d seen other articles by other writers appear more frequently than that. Or was this pure bureaucrat speak, the indirectest way of telling me I was being squeezed out, like so much bolus from the ABC’s twitching anus? And while she knew about my efforts to disclose a freaking conflict of interest, she hadn’t once tried to contact me about it? Yet she made it sound like I needed to be scolded.

I gave her my phone number, and after an email discussion of her responsibility in this matter she agreed to pay a hundred buck kill fee for the article. I made it clear that the kill fee was to restore my confidence in her ability to recognise that it was the right thing to do, not just something she was being forced to do to fulfil a legal obligation. I had to repeat the request several times when she genuinely didn’t seem to understand the difference. She wouldn’t discuss my other complaints in writing, I guess understandably. She insisted that the monthly quota was a long-running policy. All I really wanted to get from her was how much Bob Ellis was paid by Unleashed. I doubt he’d be working for less than the award rate, as I had been. And if he was getting a higher rate of pay, how about his son?

This was two months ago. She never called. Bob Ellis continues to write a new piece every fortnight, as he always has done, as does Helen Razer, who is also, I guess, considered ABC royalty, and lives by different rules than the rest of us. Jack Ellis has since published a second piece. I expect we’ll be hearing more from him.

Myself, I guess I’m out of the opinion business. I can’t say I mind too much.

I’ve been very lazy this Christmas. Today I’m going to brine the turkey, and tomorrow I will cook it. But I haven’t made anything else. Compare this to last year, when I cured and smoked ten kilograms of pigs’ leg as well as smoked a turkey.

I fully intended to make another (smaller) ham this year, but before I realised it was December 18, and it takes at least seven days to properly cure a ham in brine. So that’s just poor time management (awareness?). Sadly, I lacked the willpower to forgo a ham entirely, and bought a tiny little on-the-bone number for about $25, just to tide us over until after Christmas, when I’ll go shopping for post-Christmas ham bargains. Woohoo!

I had other big plans. I was going to make panettone this year. But again, it’s way too late.

I only started eating panettone a couple of years ago. We’ve always bought them fairly randomly, usually whatever looked good at Piedemonte’s, generally with fruit or chocolate fillings, or even, one year, a solid chocolate coating. One year Dora the cat went crazy for panettone we’d brought home, but ever since she’s refused to touch them. So I don’t know what was in that panettone that the rest lack.

This year I went with a plain Perugina Pandoro (like a panettone without the fruit, so kind of like a brioche), which my friend Placido at the Preston Market recommended. I think that without the other flavourings you get to appreciate the texture and taste of the cake better. I guess the acid test for me is that Luffy still likes it, and he’s usually unreceptive to plain baked goods. But then he tends to like anything Italian, from parmesan reggiano to cannoli.

After Christmas is when you get the deals, of course, and even stale panettone makes a good bread-and-butter pudding. Or toasted with coffee for breakfast, maybe with berries and marscapone cheese. There’s just something magical about eating cake for breakfast, and while I’d be happy to eat panettone year-round, I guess it makes Christmas a little more fun.