September Update Pt. 1 - a Chilli Festival comes to town

(N.B.: I started writing this post with the intention of making it quite short, simply a few unconnected things that have happened lately and are coming up soon. But typically I went off on one and now I can't bring myself to abridge it. It starts off with a list of what's supposed to be in one single post, but I decided to leave the list in and just do several posts instead so I can add pictures, links etc. and make it a little more digestible.)

More general updates and tidbits to end the surprisingly sunny and optimistic month of September 2009, including:

- Dave visits a Chilli Festival, wins a game of chicken against his own digestive system

- UK Customs deny alternative jazz-rock

- Dave fails to self-promote again, promotes other people instead

- HydraHead re-release Oxbow's long out-of-print debut album 'Fuckfest', average level of awesomeness increases all-round.

- Winter festival season gets exciting

- Dave becomes a film snob, enjoys it, and assumes you want to know about what CDs he's bought recently.

- Scott Kelly (Neurosis) plays his new band and invites you to argue about the first four Metallica records.

Now I'd like to revert back to the more comfortable First Person and continue, hopefully with a few more readers in tow thanks to the Tucker Max-style self-reference that seems to impress today's more discerning blog-followers (but probably not). Firstly, what can I say about the Fiery Foods Festival that came to town last weekend? Fucking phenomenal. I didn't even know it was happening until the day before, and then I got drunk and forgot about it before bed. I was woken up by a text message: "Chilli festival. Where's my sock?" Holy shit! No hangover could dash my hopes today.

It was merciless from the very first stall. These people simply do not fuck about. If you're the kind of person that buys that "Cool Salsa" shit with your Doritos, stop reading right now. I've since discovered that there's two kinds of stall on the chilli festival circuit. There's the rustic, culinary, homespun sort of stall - the people that make chutneys and sauces from ingredients they've grown in an allotment, package them up in quaint little jars and supply to those upmarket grocers that no one can really justify shopping in unless they live in Seer Green. These stalls were my favourites. Everything on them tasted wonderful and was made with real care by people with a proper talent for spices.

The other stalls are the ones that care not for your personal safety. They don't do pansy shit like "presentation" or "taste", they just line up their garish and frightening arsenal of sauces into a spectrum of spiciness that goes from Pretty Damn Spicy to Immediate Stomach Ulcer, and wait for victims. Wearing matching shirts and standing with their arms crossed, they scout for greenhorns to deceive with massive understatements like "That one? Yeah mate, it's got a bit of a kick to it." Then they refuse to hide their own smugness as people stumble away, spluttering and crying and sincerely wishing they were dead.

I'm being dramatic, of course, because this was definitely one of the best days of the year. All the saucemakers put out broken crackers and rice cakes and little sample dishes for us to try. I came away with a jar of half-relish, half-paste called "HHH" (standing for Hell Hot Habanero). It was from one of the 'culinary' stands, Mr. Vikki, who was definitely my favourite. Four of his sauces had been selected for stocking by Fortnum & Mason, and deservedly so. Please check this guy out if you are so inclined - I reccommend HHH, the King Naga (his hottest), and the Hot Coriander Sauce.

I was marvelling at Mr. Vikki's stand when Dan made me aware that he was suffering quite acutely. He'd already fucked himself up a bit ("Blair's Ultra Death") within five minutes of us being there (as had I with the "Dragon's Blood"), and it looked like he'd done it again. The cause of his discomfort was a little jar of something called "Pure Pain Paste". I had some of it, and it fucked me up a bit too. Then I noticed the carved wooden skull with horns sitting ominously on the table like something out of 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'. It was drawing attention towards two savage-looking sauces. "Be Damned" was a really fucking hot one and actually quite tasty (as was the sweet but violent "Trinidad Scorpion"), but my mistake was to take a reccommendation by a couple of massive muscly dudes that looked like they could shit broken glass every morning without wincing. "Try the '10 Minute Burn'" they said. I can tell you that ten minutes is selling it somewhat short.

The next day we came back with Duncan and several pints of milk. We were told that fatty things like milk, ice cream and cheese were best for soothing the burn, and to avoid water. Duncan is a Mekon so he had to make do with beer, but we slammed our milk bottles down on the counter of Scorchio (UK-import home of the infamous Dave's Insanity Sauces) and informed them that today we'd come prepared. We tried a few more things and pretended to be seasoned chilli-maestros, which was fun, but quite honestly I didn't have the same gung-ho spirit as the day before. The other guys did though, and we were all in varying degrees of pain before long. I learnt that the "10 Minute Burn" had been removed from the display because two people had passed out that morning, which I relayed to the Scorchio folks. They asked me whose sauce it was and I described the stand. "Oh yes, that must be Gerald." they said. Suddenly the idea of a Travelling Chilli Carnival Community became too awesome to bear.

We got talking to a couple of other reckless folks and I suggested they try Gerald's "The Beast" sauce. They approached us again a few minutes later, laughing and in serious discomfort, proclaiming Gerald to be "some kind of dark underground chilli sadist."

Tasting some of these chilli sauces is a bizarre experience. A paste called "Fist of Fire" increased my heart rate and turned me bright red immediately. The "Mongoose" sauce sent me stumbling around light-headedly, like a 12-year old glue sniffer. Sharing voluntary intense pain is a weirdly gratifying experience, so make sure you go to the next Chilli Festival and fuck yourself up.

(to be continued...)

From The Vaults #1

As some of you may know, my job is to scan books. I scan them to .tif format files, photoshop the scratches out and send them on their merry way to a publishing house of some kind. At the moment I'm building a book from scratch - it's about Irish Feminism in the early to mid 19th Century. But I digress, my point is that occasionally I'll come across something in these old books that really needs saving for one reason or another. Some snippets are hilarious, some offensive, some just plain brilliant. Here are a few of these dusty old gems:

The first is from a book called 'Cosmic Consciousness' by a Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke M.D., "formerly medical superintendent of the asylum for the insane, London, Canada". It was first published in 1901, and it's basically a very long 'study' into the concept of cosmic enlightenment. Burke reckons himself 'enlightened' (forgive me if I use in inordinate number of inverted commas here, it's just that most of this is complete bullshit), and considers examples of other notable enlightened people of history: Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Dante Aligheri, Francis Bacon, William Blake, Honoré de Balzac, Walt Whitman* and more. (His list of almost-but-not-quite-enlightened people is interesting: Moses, Socrates, Blaise Pascal, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Henry David Thoreau). At some point in the book, he starts to analyse the correlation between 'age at enlightenment' and 'age at death', providing us with a helpful table of reference. This is the first bit that made me laugh.

Look at the table. It's chronological, but the mid-to-late 19th Century (Bucke's own era) is vastly over-represented. His own initials are bang in the middle of the list (#33) , surrounded by the initials of other people that he was, coincidentally enough, pretty well acquainted with. Now, call me a cynical old bastard, but it does look an awful lot like Dr. Bucke simply had Delusions of Grandeur on an overwhelming scale, not only ranking himself alongside Socrates and Moses on the spiritual enlightenment scale but roping another bunch of self-regarding Victorian cock-ends into his drawing room to sit around in a circle and profoundly discuss how they're all, like, totally super-enlightened right now.

If that wasn't ridiculous enough, check this out. I think he's arguing here that enlightenment to 'cosmic consciousness' is a kind of evolutionary process, if not necessarily in strictly Darwinian terms, and in some cases can lead to insanity rather than anything positive. Not too controversial in itself, but during this section he drops a truly priceless bit of classic racism, with some very very specious reasoning thrown in for good measure. It's a fucking marvel.

There’s so much wrong with this logic that I can’t even be fucked to start. What I will say though is that, in 1901, widespread psychological evaluation was probably not one of the most pressing concerns of the black community. And while we’re on the subject, I doubt that Victorian-era Canada** could offer much in terms of a representative sample anyway.

Maybe I’m wrong, I dunno. He does have a Wikipedia page after all.

This one’s from a batch of books we got about the 18^th Century Scottish social economist Adam Smith. You may have noticed him on the back of a Scottish twenty quid note. One whole volume was dedicating to the context of his theories – extracts from contemporary journals and such. I found some great stuff in there, including this Georgian-era depiction of a city of vices. It’s called ‘Gin Lane’.

It’s nice to see that gin’s not changed in 300 years, eh?

And now for the piece de resistance. Quoted heavily in this volume are the works of Daniel Defoe, notable of course for writing ‘Robinson Crusoe’, and a fella called Arthur Young. Both men traveled Britain extensively and wrote in great detail about their journeys and the subcultures and specifics that could be found across the land. This is an extract from Arthur Young’s ‘Southern Tour’, published in 1768, in which he ‘reviews’ the inns and taverns he stayed at during the trip.

See that? The Antelope – a nice place to be… 241 years ago.

Just a quickie to finish with, and I promise this is awesome. It’s from a batch of books sent to us by the Naval and Military Press detailing the first-hand accounts of Australian WWI soldiers, mostly Light Horse regiments. These guys saw some very nasty fighting, particularly against the Turks at Gallipoli, and later on the Western Front alongside mostly Canadian and American troops, pushing the German army back across North-Eastern France and Belgium in 1918.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the Real-Life Rambo: Sergeant Stanley Robert MacDougall, 47^th Battalion, A.I.F.:

Fuck yeah.

* It was only when searching for the link to Walt Whitman's Wikipedia entry that I saw how awesome he looks. He looks like Dickens, Father Christmas and Socrates all rolled into one awesomely bearded human-shaped unstoppable ball of awesome (see right):

** The first time I went to write "Canada", it came out as "Conan". Psychological analysis on a postcard please