ragingyoghurt

Category Archives: werk

my sister, who keeps me in constant supply of cool comics, recently sent me a “drawn and quarterly showcase” in the mail. you see the drawing above? it is by a french-canadian girl, geneviève elverum/castrée. her pages in the book made me want to fall over and curl up into a ball. in a good way. there are pages completely covered in intricate ferns. and there is an elephant. and sadness and wistfulness.

sigh.

i used to draw. i even used to want to draw a comic, but i think that time has passed. a combination of extreme laziness and the thought hanging over my head that i couldn’t do it: self-defeating blah.

these days i lie on the floor with scraps of paper, blunt pencils and the kid, and i draw dogs and cats and lions and cows. tigers, ducks, monkeys, frogs, elephants. i tried to draw a rabbit the other morning, but it turned out to be a totoro.

gripped by a short and uncharacteristic burst of motivation over xmas, i drew this:

because who doesn’t like that light and fruity taste of baby yoghurt? i find myself licking the spoon, just short of nicking mouthfuls myself, when i dish out the kid’s breakfast in the morning. you can buy it on a bib for that grubby baby in your life… or maybe even for yourself! we all spill brown and red down our fronts from time to time, no?

posted by ragingyoghurt on 10 January 2006 at 10:12 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, kid, nellie, werk

my desk is littered, happily, with little dishes and tea cups. three dishes and two cups now unburdened of their treats — surely they haven’t been there that many days — and the currently active set bearing tea, and a lamington and a truffle.

the lamington is not just notable for the fact that it was marked down for quick sale at woolworths yesterday; the boy came at me, brandishing the package. six for a dollar, and three whole days before they expired. they are frosted in raspberry butter cream, which seems like a bit of a luxury, no? for a dollar?

the truffle is notable for the fact that it is perhaps the best damn truffle i have ever eaten. it tastes of dark and bitter, and chocolate and cream, and it melts away on your tongue, leaving behind a rabid desire for more! more! you can avail yourself of one such truffle (or an entire bag) at la renaissance patisserie down at the rocks.

the tea is tetleys, and is best forgotten.

these little plates of sugary snacks fuel me. i am drawing again, only small drawings for small sums of money in the small amount of time i have, but it feels good to do, and i shall try to do more.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 11 September 2005 at 5:49 pm

permalink | filed under around town, boy, cake, chocolate, snacks, werk

fueled by two slices of pumpkin sourdough toast and a cup of milky tea, i am in the throes of… throwing out magazines. again. long-time readers may recall an episode — more of a mini series really — almost a year ago, when gripped by the fervour of impending baby, i shifted a pile of old magazines as tall as myself (ok, so that’s not so tall) out of my wardrobe and into the recycling bin. at the time, i was like, what am i doing?? there’s history here!!” but of course, aside from the odd early twinge of loss of my complete collection of “juice” magazines, i haven’t longed for a single issue.

today i find myself much less traumatised as i attack a stack of “details” from the mid-to-late nineties. this was my favourite magazine from the era, and thus survived the previous cull. as i flip through them before casting them on the recycling bin pile, i am taken aback by how much i absorbed at the time. no, not just the chris heath celebrity stories or the articles addressing issues pertinent to brash young men (despite so not being a brash young man); looking at the pages now, it appears that every single design element (especially picture boxes with rounded corners sitting on coloured slabs) and typographic trick (testosteronic sans serif type forced into a slant, maybe even set on an angle!) in “details” filtered through my impressionable young brain and ended up on the pages of the magazines i was designing at the time.

i remember a reader’s letter from 1995 or 1996, saying that i should stop copying “spin” magazine, but clearly they were mistaken. i should have stopped aping “details”. in my defense, i would like to think that i inherited the practice from my predecessor… but now that both my collections of “details” and “juice” are n’more, who can really tell? well, ben. ben could probably tell.

anyway. there is no point to this story. i just wanted to remind myself that i threw out all my “details” magazines today. and found appreciative new homes for half my “new yorkers”. it’s all a lead-up to when i tell you that i’m gonna be offline for a little while: first to go overseas, and then to move house.

be seein’ ya.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 28 June 2005 at 10:14 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, snacks, werk

so i looked over at the still-unwrapped chocolate bar on my bookshelf, and along the spine of it, next to “extra creamy milk chocolate” in gold print, were the instructions “open here”.

ok, mr chocolate bar.

my bookshelf is now much closer to my desk — which explains why i managed to read the tiny type on the side of a chocolate bar despite near-legal blindness — since i moved it over from the opposite side of of the room, to make space for the crib and change table for the new person who will soon be upon us, holy fucken crap.

aside from moving furniture around, the mammoth magazine cull continues… the last couple of days i finally made it to my pile of “juice” magazines. if you read the previous post about cutting down the swathe of “spin”s and detected a faint poignancy about the exercise, this new challenge has been a few notches more melancholy. because these, i actually worked on.

i have issue one, and two, and three (you get the idea), from when i had to buy them at the newsagent… through to a couple from around issue ten when i did a spell of work experience there in third year uni, and then a bunch more, and then every issue from march 1995 when i was deputy art director for a couple of years, and then the year’s worth from november 1997 (issue 57) when i became art director, to october 1998, when i went postal and had to leave the company, and then a random few from after. yeah, i have a lot of issues.

now there’s a pile, facedown, at the top of the stairs, awaiting transfer to the recycling bin downstairs. it feels like i’m throwing out a chunk of australian publishing history, and every time i walk past i wonder if i’ve been too brutal. of course, i did keep all mine, and took clippings of choice layouts from the rest, where “choice” includes both the aesthetically pleasing and the “what the?” ludicrousness of that heady mid-nineties period of cutting edge magazine design. but aside from a very select few from the very early days (issue three, with evan dando in love beads and nothing else on the cover; issue eight: nirvana; issue 18: eddie vedder “on kurt’s death”), there they are, facedown, top of stairs.

sigh. there’s a feeling not so far back in my head that if my entire stash had not been so dotted with cockroach shit (just the outside covers, but still a misadventure in storage if there ever was one), i would have blogged instead about the extremely delicious watermelon i procured this week from the supermarket at a bargain 95c/kg.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 October 2004 at 12:53 pm

permalink | filed under bookshelf, snacks, werk

what better way to start the week than plunder the magazine cupboard for another stack of old magazines to cast upon the steadily growing pile by the door. after a lengthy bout of procrastination, the cull finally began in earnest mid-last week.

started off with the “wallpaper”s and “the face”s, which were easier than i expected. and then a stack of those trendy, purposeless magazines out of LA or new york — easy. then the “esquire”s, which were a bit harder because there are actual articles in there that i found myself re-reading, including a trio of david sedaris stories, and a 1999 interview with osama bin ladin, and a bunch of randomness by ted from “queer eye”, like the one where he gets a fragrance made up especially for him, called “ted” . still, nothing i couldn’t add to the pile by the door.

this morning though, i have unearthed a couple boxes of ten year old “spin”s. the stacks of pulpy paper covered in grainy grungy photographs of kurt, the stories about river phoenix dying on the sidewalk, the introduction of alanis, the reviews of “pulp fiction” and “bakesale”. so now i’ve got “bakesale” on the CD player as i speedread courtney love’s lollapalooza diary and bloody hell it’s like a trip down memory lane.

a few days ago the boy was mocking “all those memories” but he has little idea of what’s tied up in these boxes of “spin”s. it’s all about the waking up in the middle of the night to pearl jam songs on the radio, the university work experience at a pop (culture) magazine, the design school major projects about rock music and junk food, the graduating and getting a job at the pop (culture) magazine, the shameless ripping off of other magazines for design tips… the design award, the gradual boredom and disillusionment with working on a magazine, the exiting the industry, the occasional yearning to be moving those slabs of words and pretty pictures around a page again…

posted by ragingyoghurt on 27 September 2004 at 10:55 am

permalink | filed under bookshelf, boy, soundtrack, werk

i’m doing too much. i’m not doing enough. either way it seems to have resulted in this field of blog lying fallow.

aside from the nonstop happy rollercoaster of my sister being in town, i’m also working to a handful of print deadlines. this basically means that any given day involves moving between a pastry and a computer, maybe even three or four times a day. sometimes a great distance across inner-city suburbs is walked to get to a pastry, other times i only have to stumble downstairs to the kitchen. on these occasions, i hope the foetus is absorbing any extraneous kilojoules.

this morning, what awaits in brown paper bags strewn across the kitchen counter are: a blueberry brioche, a custard brioche, the biggest custard-filled, caramel-topped profiterole in the world (which the boy bought because of its resemblance to the enormous, pulsating, million calorie, poison-creme-filled dessert offered to homer in food critic mode), and a loaf of sourdough spelt fruit bread…

do your teeth hurt? a pot of strong black bush tea will help.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 13 August 2004 at 8:04 am

permalink | filed under around town, boy, cake, kid, nellie, snacks, werk

the next best thing to being unemployed is being a freelancer at the end of a bunch of projects, where you can take half a day off and sit in the bastion of tranquility in the middle of the city — the tea centre [specialists in tea of fine quality] — sipping iced tea and nibbling on one of those dipped-in-chocolate, shortbread-and-jam sandwich biscuits, in the company of …mmm… jake gyllenhaal. alas, it is only 2D jake on the cover of glossy airfreight GQ, so it turns out that the biscuit is much more enticing company.

when you buy loose leaf tea at the tea centre, the always smiley girls behind the counter measure it out of very large tins off the wall-to-wall shelving. if you are unsure, or confused, they are happy to shake the tin before lifting the lid just in front of your nose. inhale. if it is the stockholm blend, which is black tea with orange peel, vanilla pieces, apricot flavour, safflowers, calendula blossoms and rose petals, you will be overcome by the need to buy a packet. the shop girl will scoop the desired quantity into a blue or red cellophane-covered foil bag, sealed with one of those bendy wire thingys so that you can open it easily for another smell on the bus home.

i don’t normally like fruity or flowery teas (and tisanes? pah!) but the vanilla (i guess) makes this smell like magic cake. magic! cake!

posted by ragingyoghurt on 8 June 2004 at 4:14 pm

permalink | filed under around town, drink, snacks, werk

it’s just that, the more hours i spend in front of mr computer doing actual werk, the less hours extra i want to spend sitting here writing. in addition, the volume of werk has an adverse effect on the type of adventures available to me.

want stories about me chasing up quotes from printers? it can cost between $300 to put a logo on 500 envelopes, and $1200. when you do show up at the $300 printer’s premises after not hearing back from them regarding your questions about supplying artwork or payment, you will discover that their system can only accept eps files (but will be updated really soon to take pdfs too!), and their press can’t print anything closer than 10mm from the edge. your client will not be too upset by this development, but he will ask that you make msword templates of envelope and letterhead so he can print them out as required. ugh, msword.

wurd.

fortunately there will still be days (a day) when you can disentangle from the mouse cable, and find yourself in granville sitting in a lebanese chicken shop by the train station, across the table from lena, overseeing a plate of half a grilled chicken, a dish of garlic puree, a dish of pickles, a shallow bowl of tabouli, a basket of flatbread and a little mound of chicken-salted chips, and everything will be eaten. after, she will take you on a tour of the main drag, including a stop at silly willy’s, a $2 shop where you can get a pack of twelve multicoloured dishwashing sponges for… $2. and abla’s, for a sitdown, a plate of sweet cheese and a cup of tea.

i believe i came away all culturally ignorant at abla’s, walking along the counter of treats, pointing at each tray and asking the busy yet patient lady on the other side, “what’s that?… and um… what’s that?”. still, it yielded me a plastic platter (wih cut glass aspirations) of an assortment of pistachio pastries and a large custard-in-honeyed-filo contraption. it was meant to last for days, or, at least two days, but the boy ate his share before nightfall and the custard thing became school lunch the next day. a granville excursion is on the cards; the counter across the room had the rum babas and the chocolate cream cakes.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 31 May 2004 at 8:19 am

permalink | filed under around town, cake, grumble, lunch, werk

i ate this recently: a beautiful pink heart-shaped lamington, twice the price of normal brown block-shaped lamingtons because it was made for mother’s day. surely this is the best mother’s day product ever. beats the ugg boots, the cosmetic gift sets, the DVDs of “something’s gotta give”, the discounted kitchen appliances…

actually i came thisclose to getting the braun blender with the glass jug and five speeds including one labelled with “icon of bowl of soup”, which would be perfect for the impending broccoli soup experiment. but instead came away with special mother’s day priced “lost in translation” DVD. woo!

trivial, soup-related distractions aside, i think i’m finally getting back into the merry swing of werk, four, maybe five months after returning from overseas. the last few weeks have been spent tweaking logos: working out kerning in extremely small increments, debating whether a milky chocolate brown is better than a rich coffee brown, nudging a graphic representation of a fig around a box trying to make it look less turd-like and more fig-like (unrelated to previously mentioned brown issue), wondering if 5pt type is too small…

oh it’s been fun! and now the anticipation of getting it all back from the printers. crisp letterheads and lush, environmentally unfriendly, matt-celloglazed business cards. so i was quite horrified when amongst the penis enlargements (so many penis enlargements!) and cheap software i was offered in my inbox, there was this handy service. shudder, and sigh.

posted by ragingyoghurt on 12 May 2004 at 5:00 pm

permalink | filed under cake, shoping, werk

sometimes i just fall off the blogging train, and even though it’s just a week, it feels like much longer. it’s not that there’s been no good eating… there was, for example, the first spag bol i ever made which began with a large onion sauteed in a mound of sambal terasi. not so authentic, but damn it was flavoursome, and there was enough to last an extra four (pregressively smaller) meals. the best part was i didn’t even have to touch the meat. just sliced the top of the pack open with a knife and prodded (with said knife) the block of mince into the pot.

and then last night there was the roast pumpkin, fetta and sage pizza that showed up at the door just in time to distract us from the nightly news footage of those photographs of the beaming brown-haired american girl soldier pointing at iraqi prisoners’ genitals. home delivery rocks.

it’s not that no adventures have been had. last week i got to go to kinko’s three times! once, a print job that should have taken ten minutes evolved into an hour-long saga with a hapless employee who was really the wavery-voiced teenage boy who works at all the fast food restaurants on “the simpsons”.

and the last couple of days i’ve spent scanning a stack of faint yet grubby colour pencil drawings for a book(let) of work by newly-arrived-in-australia teenagers. the fun, she does not end.

and just for the record, well, there’s this:

posted by ragingyoghurt on 7 May 2004 at 10:01 am

permalink | filed under dinner, kid, werk

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