Barbie #34 Wong Kar-Wai In the Mood for Lacoste, kari chicken don, downsize survivor, the Sopranos, the secret life of a pass-activist, CD playlist, Richard Ford, early typography, Pixel porn, Jesus of the ballpark, Sartre's bath, robo-roach, cats and dogs lost, Mario Bava retrospective, a problem with metaphysics, rumba football and more ... The Clash forgotten, Proust unread, pushy media, Tokyo cityscape, Peach Milk Tea, Afro-Australian guitars, the future of English, The Sopranos, Ghost World (the movie) and maybe more ... |
22 July, 2002 Spare the RodThe supermarket heareabouts has been playing Rod Stewart tracks in its musak mix — only late at night, mind. If, like me, you grew up around British immigrant kids, you’ll know how I feel about this. If any of them were Scottish, double your score. My teenage years fell somewhere between “Maggie May” and whatever came after “Sailing”; I was the unwilling participant in many Rod Stewart singalongs. (Though to be fair, the more you drank, the better it sounded.) His genius was to mix a maudlin and Presbyterian sentimentality into a British R’n’B sound and serve the dish with lad-ish panache. I like the word ‘lad’. Throw away the labels that changed from time to time — mod, skinhead, casual, whatever — and stick with ‘lads’; it was the essence of British youth culture’s ‘revolt into style’, and with its chick equivalent, probably still is. 17 July, 2002 Rubber soleWhen I was a kid, everyone wore rubber thongs. They came in one basic model with five colour choices: black, blue, green, red and yellow (thong designers beat Apple by 30 years on that one). Thongs were one of only three footwear choices for most kids at that time. The other two were leather school shoes (black or brown) and canvas gym boots (black or blue). I don’t know if life was better, but buying shoes for kids was a lot more straightforward for the adults in charge. I have two pairs: one to wear around the house — because I prefer not to wear shoes inside — and one to wear if I have to duck out into the garden. I bought one pair in Thailand a couple of years ago for a few baht, and the other at an Asian grocer here in Melbourne for a couple of dollars. Rubber thongs, and their kin, plastic sandals and bathroom slides, are ubiquitous in the non-Western world. They’re cheap — little more than the equivalent of a dollar a pair in most currencies — waterproof and easy to clean. You can slide into and out of them with barely a break in stride as you leave or enter a house. Lined up outside a mosque or temple, they are a little picture of communal solidarity. No doubt there are people in the world who never own any other type of footwear in their lives. That’s both a good thing — a parable of living simply, with few demands — and a bad thing: a pair of Manolo Blahniks would keep a village somewhere in footwear for a generation. For years in this country, no one wore thongs much in public at all. They were completely uncool and pretty much totally un-noticed, even by those who did wear them. Then a couple of years ago, nineteen- and twenty-something girls started slouching around in supermarket-variety two-dollar pairs. Before long the stylists noticed, and brand-name fashion-label thongs were on sale. Many pairs cost much more than a couple of dollars. That’s fashion; that’s capitalism. The most recent version I’ve noticed comes from Mooks. They look like standard rubber thongs in styling and construction, but are printed with a variety of groovy Mooks-ish designs. They also come packaged as part of a large rectangle of thong rubber with a handle at the top — you press the thongs out of the rubber rectangle the way you used to press out clothes for a paper doll. That’s pretty cool, for sure. I don’t know how much they cost; I hope it’s not too many times the standard two dollars or so you’d pay for the ordinary type at K-Mart. I’m no puritan about fashion, and part of me (not just my feet) would love to see a hip version lined up in the shoe rack beside the old blue rubber pair. 13 July, 2002 Ghost worldIt’s a sunny mid-winter afternoon and you are up a ladder, pruning a grapevine. You are standing on the second step from the top — above the ladder’s advertised tolerance. You are bending over a pergola, cutting and pulling pieces of entangled vine away. You stop, raise your head, start to stand up and back ... but there is nothing behind you, only the top step of the ladder to trip over and a three-metre fall onto the lawn, which has been reduced to a thin scurf of grass on clay hardened by the winter drought. Luckily, your body knows this, even if your consciousness does not, and you stop. You don’t fall. At the zoo you hold your baby daughter on the ledge of the viewing window of a mandrill cage and let her lean forward onto the inclined glass. You know the glass is there — it was all the other times you’ve been — but you don’t really check. What if, this time, it wasn’t, or you had remembered incorrectly, and it never really had been there? Your daughter would fall several metres onto the rammed earth floor of the enclosure, surely cracking her skull. Perhaps you would have caught the edge of her clothing, her arm or leg, as she fell, and held her dangling there, shocked and terrified, but unhurt. Who knows? The ghost of what wasn’t haunts you, a physical presence in your body: the biochemical byproduct of the shock or just the result of a too-vivid imagination, too much thinking ... It’s like the synopsis for a tragic, depressing novel of alienation: the man who broke his neck on a sunny afternoon, the man who dropped his daughter into the monkey cage at the zoo. The non-reality feels stronger, more real than what you perceive as “real”, as if your normal life is the accident that didn’t happen. You are tired; your daughter has a cold and you haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a week; go to bed. 11 July, 2002 “In 1911 ... the emperor abdicated ... and power flowed to the Shanghai triads.” What form does power take when it flows? Is it a liquid? An electromagnetic wave (in which case, it doesn’t flow...)? If “flow” is only a metaphor, is it the right metaphor? Or does power change in some other fashion, like a quantum state? 10 July, 2002 Letter to the editorsMagazine editors — and sub-editors and journalists — exist to fill in the blank space between ads for stuff people don’t need so shareholders can get more money. Discuss. 6 July, 2002 Tangerine dreamSoccer inspires more great writing ... David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football kicks around a whole lot of ideas about Dutch art, ’67’s Provos, Vermeer, architecture, Dutch social history, dike building, Johann Cruyff, Rinus Michels, Ajax, the (failed) Dutch assaults on the 1974 and 1978 world cups ... culture and sport in one slim volume. And the chapters are numbered non-sequentially in honour of the Dutch player numbering system. Made 2002’s World Cup contenders look like a lot of bland football accountants. The moral? It’s all about space ... and the bottom line ain’t the scoreline ... 5 July, 2002 Sydney“Sydney’s getting pretty vulgar, isn’t it?” asked Ben, who lives there. I couldn’t say — I was only in town for a week, for the first time in five years. What can I report? Well ...
1 July, 2002 World Cup — finalStill would have liked to see Brazil get past Argentina ... |