Bad Hostess

Helen's first iris.

There Are Two Kinds of People in This World.

What? What?! This statement is only a preamble to nonsense.  Whenever anybody upchucks such tripe, I stop listening and think about my tuberoses. Dividing the difficulty of seven billion people into two is obviously silly; however, dividing tuberoses is not silly and should be done annually to promote better flowering.

If there really are Two Kinds of People in This World these, these are possibly (a) people who believe that There Are Two Kinds of People in This World and (b) sensible people who don’t. Apart from this, it’s fairly pointless to go about popping humanity into colossal one-size-fits-half categories.  The crushing insensitivity of such dualism aside, the practise is bent.  People are terribly confusing and any hope we have to understand them exceeds this either/or solution and will always be upturned by lunchtime.

Clearly, there are more than Two Kinds of People in This World.  However, on occasion, I do understand the temptation to bisect.  This has a little to do with my tuberoses. And my grevilleas.  And my growing fascination for mulch.  Let me explain.

My mother has long held that There Are Two Kinds of People in This World.  There are those, like herself, who have “interests”. And then, there are those, like myself and my father, who have “obsessions”.  Given the current state of my garden, which is exemplary, and my growing debt to the garden super-store down the road, I fear she may have a point.

Although I can cultivate native lilies, I cannot cultivate moderation. When I took the decision some months ago to tart up the garden, I also took myself into territory that could reasonably be called obsessive.  This is evidenced by the dirt beneath my fingernails, the fact that Sharon at the mail-order nursery now recognises my number and greeted me yesterday with “don’t you think you’ve got enough clivia?” and the tough love speech I delivered yesterday to my hoya.   “I don’t CARE if you prefer tropical conditions,” I said to the waxy little leaves, “YOU WILL LEARN TO CLIMB BITCH.”

A kind person would call the hours I spend in the garden a proof of passion. Well, it’s not a passion. It’s more like a dermatitis that burns and grows the more it’s scratched.

It has always been so. For some of us, a hobby is a lovely way to pass the time. For others, it quickly curdles in the sun of our curiosity until it becomes a disease.

I have seen this problem take hold before. When I was fourteen, I was not content to enjoy Scrabble. Instead, I became a monster. Having memorised every two and three letter word in English and American standard dictionaries, I went to tournaments and dreamed of forming words like “quixotic” on a Triple Word square. Less of a hobby and more of a lexical heroin, Scrabble dominated my days and gave me little in return; save for the knowledge that an “eft” is a juvenile newt and is worth six points.   I gave up cold when I found myself dreaming of the eft and the ai (a sloth with three toes and two points) and am no longer a tile-carrying Scrabbler.

And now, I am a gardener.

To be gifted of such focus, in this case on ficus, is a burden. On the upside, I never have cause to buy cut flowers or salad greens. On the downside, I smell of manure (mostly sheep; sometimes chook) and cannot maintain adult conversation that does not have soil condition as its focus.

There Are Two Kinds of People in This World.  There are those with hobbies and there are those who bury themselves in sheep poo.

Written for the goodly folk of the Big Issue.

There is little that is scornful left unsaid about a recent travelogue. Following the Fairfax publication of, Bali? Why Bother, opprobrium shot through the internet like goreng through a naive traveller and there now remains nothing to upchuck.

But, the internet has no gag reflex and bile continues to flow. While one or two sprays are palatable, such as this from comic Corinne Grant, most are a self-righteous retch. Amber Jamieson, writing in Crikey, said she was “nauseated” by “probably the worst travel article I’ve ever read”.

The worst travel article. Ever. While it is true that the piece might be benignly described as rotten, it is also true that a good deal of travel writing published in Australia is equally naff.

The author of the work has been charged not only with poor writing but with the grave crime of racism. Certainly, her renderings of Balinese businesspeople seem to take their ideological cue more from Carry On Up The Khyber than the better traditions of narrative travel. But, a quick tour of many Australian travel pages reveals a similar nastiness; it’s just staying at a nicer resort.

Racism and colonial conceit are stocks-in-trade for even the “better” Sunday supplements. Our travel magazines are full with pompous twaddle. In general, none of these publications would dare say that Ubud is a pit of Dengue-luxe dressed with Infinity pools and the stench of third-world debt. Instead, they talk in very warm terms about Frette linens, free breakfasts and the “dear” “little” natives who prepare both.

There are so very many who write with balmy condescension of “humble”, “smiling” and “simple” brown people. In fact, if I had a dollar for every instant of Eat Pray Love intolerance, I’d be able to take a vacation in a villa with a plunge pool. Instead, I earned a little less.

A few years back, I was moonlighting as a copy-editor for a travel magazine. Frankly, this is one of the most trying gigs a principled writer can suffer. I was horrified by the contra-dealing of the industry and the volume of words spent in describing “journeys” of “self-discovery” on bicycles in provincial Europe. Chiefly, though, I was appalled by the racism.

I can’t imagine that the editor of the National Front quarterly newsletter saw less racial antagonism than me. Of course, the gracious, middle-aged white folk who produce Australia’s worst travel writing were not making a case for ethnic purity. What they did do, though, was manufacture Mandingos and Suzie Wongs at a steady rate.

There were two books I found colossally useful as a travel copy-editor. The first, of course, was Strunk and White. The second was Orientalism by the late Edward Said. Said traces the history of a Western myopia that sees the “East” as a big, formless lump of fuzzy otherness. But, even Said was not enough to improve one particular travelogue. “His dark face was old and mystical,” the writer began. By the time she’d used the word “humble” three times and spoken of the “dear” “chief’s” “fascination” with her, I quit.

Malarial fever-dreams of third-world otherness are written by white people every day in the national and international press. We hail the work of Elisabeth Gilbert; we continue to view the South Pacific through the filter of Gauguin; we cannot help but use the word “humble” when what we actually mean is dark-skinned and poor.

Travel writing helps us believe that a fetish for otherness is wholesome. We gladly accept positive caricature in the travel section but today, it seems, we cannot abide its close and grumpy cousin.

There is no doubt that Bali? Why Bother was tosh. Its figures all emerged as caricature. But, really, the piece achieves what many, many travel editors encourage; albeit with a softer focus. To wit, it gives us an archetype rather than an actual travel story. The “passionate” Italians or the “colourful” residents of Brooklyn or the “spiritual” Yemeni are, really, no better or more real than Carolyn Webb’s aggressive touts.

I encourage no-one to excuse this work. I would, however, suggest packing a more critical lens when reading of cut-price luxe in developing nations. If we don’t change our focus, we’ll continue to get the travel snapshots we deserve.

This was written for ABC Online.

It is largely known that children are mean, unprincipled little shits who would happily trade Granny for a Lego Star Wars Turbo Tank. They’re awful. Lord of the Flies is less speculative fiction and more challenging documentary; a recreation seen any day on any national playground as children feed each other on sand, humiliation and bits of human poo.

Just try to discipline them, though. It’s never their fault. Someone else is always to blame. Even if you’ve just seen them send Gran to the courier.

Children have the morals and shame of a mattress and are as unlikely to accept guilt for their manifest poo-crimes as, say, a Shop Steward is to admit he and his friends used a Union credit card at a massage parlour on the NSW Central Coast.

Happily, children tend to grow out of it. Or, at least, they used to grow out of it. I like to think I did.

When I was three or four, I was a delusional racist. Oh. Don’t judge me; we’re all sociopaths in kindergarten.

Every time I broke something or cursed or wet the bed, I ascribed blame to an imaginary devil.  I called her “Black Helen” and she quickly became answerable to all my misdeeds; to wit taking a dump in the bath or drawing tits in texta on Aunty Jenny’s night-dress. Gradually, Black Helen became the wellspring of every rotten ill. She was soon responsible for extreme weather events, measles and double dissolution. Who did it? Black Helen did it.

Eventually, my parents stopped laughing and took me to the shrink.

Thanks to psychiatric intervention, I entered grade school with a sense of liability.   Like many of my peers, I’d learned by then to cop it sweet and accept the terms and limits of responsibility.  I was now a citizen and I knew Black Helen was a fiction who couldn’t change the weather; that I must own up if I’d sat on the class Guinea Pig. RIP little Daryl.

This is the basic stuff of our social contract. As we grow, we learn to claim responsibility in matters of dead pets and beyond. We learn, where necessary, to accept guilt and only to consign blame when we are absolutely certain of its shape. Did Helen sit on the Guinea Pig? Yes, Miss Bloom, she did. By the time we are ten, in general, we learn the justice sufficient for survival.

Things, though, in recent years have begun to spill back beyond the sandpit.  Easy blame is at an all-time high and there are Black Helens appearing at all corners. I didn’t do it. And neither did my friends. It was that imaginary thing over there.

When the terrible news broke this year of the tragedy in Norway, Murdoch’s UK paper The Sun rolled off the presses with the headline “Al Qaeda Massacre”. In the same moment, the Washington Post wrote of the “specific jihadist connection” murderer Breivik had with Pakistan. Except, of course, there was no such link and in minutes that might have been otherwise spent reporting, press appointed a new bogeyman. With Islamic fundamentalism down for the count, they chose video games as the culprit.

This wasn’t just the mad work of a few crazy Christians eager to distance themselves from a Christian murderer by means of World of Warcraft. Dozens of respectable commentators wrote that it was the Wrath of the Lich King that had pulled the trigger on 77 young Norwegians and sales of the game were withdrawn throughout Scandinavia. Cries were heard here.

Then, In August, it was London’s turn.

On the front page of the Evening Standard, video games were to blame in the wake of city-wide riots. “Now they’re playing Grand Theft Auto and want to live it for themselves,” said a representative of the Metropolitan Police. As half the world’s policy makers got down to the important work of banning fiction, the other half stared banging on about how kids with no fathers were spending too much time at the mall.

Now, I don’t have any answers for the hate that tore through the High Streets or the terror that belted Norway into an icy age of dread. But, I’m pretty sure that cries of Make Love, Not Warcraft have as much use in restoring social order as the instructions of care for a Guinea Pig.

Once, we had the skill of looking at a problem and considering its texture and our possible part in its creation. Now we prefer our answers delivered in large, hot helpings in thirty minutes or less.  A riot steeped in ancient resentments becomes a Grand Theft London headline. Video games, lazy parents and shiny things in shops are to blame for something that looked very much, for a minute, like the end of the world.

We charge Twitter with mutinies, toddler beauty pageants with child abuse and beautiful fashion models with everything from anorexia to riots. There’s a lot of shit in the world. Rather than pick it up and examine it, we just gather it up and throw it at each other.

These days, successful people thrive in an atmosphere of buck-passing. In the very best professions, one cannot excel without hurling turds around the sandbox like a toddler. At the Stock Exchange, the Press and in Parliament, we find all the dangerous people together.  Here, they speculate on fantasy futures and pass dumb-ass laws about video games and parenting and porn.  But what else are we going to do with the people who never climbed out of the playground? Thank god it’s only our money, trust and civil liberties they’ve got a hold on. Imagine what would happen if they actually walked among us.

If you have anti-social personality disorder, it’s best to trade in derivatives or policy or current affairs TV. If you’re more-or-less sane, you work and you possibly raise a child from unprincipled shit into human.   You sign the social contract. You accept your responsibility and you assign blame for your misfortune only to those who have truly earned it.

Vale, dear little Darryl.

This was a piece written for the FHM lads

If you are unfamiliar with the glorious city of Melbourne, Australia here are some facts that may advance your visit. First, our Australian Rules football is the planet’s most lickable sporting code. Second, our weather is erratic. Third, if you would like to dress in shiny clothing that repels both fluids and good-taste, you should probably shop in Chapel Street.

For some time, the raiment of this avenue has recalled little so much as, say, the bedazzled groupies of Billy Idol. Fusing the sartorial traditions of prostitution and 80s pop, this precinct has reinforced a trend called “Playful Couture”. As I tend to avoid tinsel and prefer to take my tequila from a glass over décolleté, I know little of this fashion. Apparently, though, a store known as GASP is a model of the genre.

Yesterday GASP was known only to that select group of Australian women who’d mastered the skill of vomiting cocktails into a knock-off Fendi. Today, it is known to the world. Thanks to a much-publicised exchange between shopper Keara O’Neil and GASP Area Manager Matthew Chidgey, the retailer has attracted a global attention.

The letter has now been reproduced more copiously than Nicole Richie’s haircut and you may have seen it flapping in the culture’s stale air. If you haven’t, here’s a synopsis: Chidgey is confused about the usage of “who” and “whom”. Almost as shocking as his inability to separate subject from object is his failure to distinguish Kim Kardashian from the “A-List”. Then, there followed misogyny of a strain so pure that Norman Mailer rolled approvingly in the grave. But not before he cried for Strunk & White.

You just have to read it. It’s a hoot as are the other GASP missives surfacing locally.

For mine, the great disgrace here is to our national standards of literacy. For international tabloids, though, the real victims are fashion and women’s self-esteem.

Today, the great echo chamber of the internet booms with why, why, WHY? Why does misogyny appear in the changerooms of the world? Why will these recalcitrant men not apologise? Why can’t we put Chris the Qualified Stylist and his clairvoyance to better use? Perhaps he could solve murders?

Personally, I’m disinclined to ask why and more inclined to dismiss Chris and his Sixth Sense with “why not?”. As a 61 kilogram (133lb)  woman who has, on occasion, entered a shop, I find the exchange entirely unsurprising.

Chris, Matt and the team of cruel designers who furnish the racks of GASP are no more unique than are their flammable slips. Of course, it is not very nice to learn that a woman was maligned for her size. But it’s not very startling, either. A clothing store that sells ruched tube tops to over-funded, under-nourished teenage girls will always be unkind just as our local Murdoch newspaper, the Herald Sun, will always be full of bollocks.

Matt’s approach to ladies is vile, of course. But, really, it just makes explicit what was heretofore implicit in ladies’ clothing retail. Without groundless snobbery and thinspirational stylists like Chris, there wouldn’t be stores that sell whorish Fashion Forward polyester. Conceit, in its varying degrees, is the chain store’s stock-in-trade. If one is seeking “self-esteem”, one should probably read a book. One should only expect to find its nemesis in a shop.

At the time of writing, GASP is unrepentant and operating on the (not very Fashion Forward) proposal that There is No Such Thing as Bad Publicity. It’s milking the sad little story. On its website, the company has announced that no orders will be dispatched for 48 hours. This is due to a “surge of interest” and has nothing whatsoever to do with the impending weekend.

Perhaps GASP might like to take things a little further. Perhaps they’d like to engage Glenn Beck as a spokesmodel to really uphold the brand’s stance on social inclusion.

Actually, this isn’t a bad idea. It is certainly true that Chidgey and his clairvoyant stylist Chris have an MO that is not unlike that of the Murdoch empire. To wit, they take bright ugly trash to an uncritical audience and repackage it as “elite”.

This is a piece de moi initially published by the ABC

There is a high incidence of penis in my browser window. Arithmetic was never really my strong suit, but I’d estimate their median appearance at roughly three per day.  The mathematically gifted will have measured this consumption at over two-hundred penis units per-quarter. However, I’d ask you to reserve your judgement and consider that (1) I have been in a lesbian relationship for over 12 years and a girl can dream (2) you’ve probably seen just as much wood. Oh, yes you have.

It’s true. It must be. As I mentioned, I’m not terribly good at numbers. However, when we consider the annual Australian spend for smut has long since surpassed $2 Billion; that a new pornographic video is produced every ten minutes and that “nudie” ranks reliably in Google’s top local search queries, we can only conclude that the average man has seen five trillion wangs by the age of twenty-six.

In a digital world chock-a-block with cock, the sight of a man at half-mast in his boxers is not especially shocking. Except, of course, if the mongrel was set loose by a Congressional Representative.

Just a month or two ago, Anthony was busy doing decent works in the Capitol. He was an advocate for affordable health care, tobacco industry reform and he sponsored a bill to increase the availability of US visas to foreign fashion models. (No. I didn’t make that up.) He was broadly known among political junkies for known for his humorous use of Twitter. And then, he was known by everyone.

In the blink of a cursor, the crotch of the aptly named Weiner was everywhere. The representative said that his Twitter account had been hacked but, he did not deny being the owner of the penis. “I don’t know what photographs are out there in the world of me,” he told CNN, coyly allowing that he was, in fact, the probable owner of the item.  Well, who wouldn’t? As a regular consumer of internet penis, I can confirm that Wiener’s world is big.  Not quite the size of a baby’s arm but certainly bigger than any piece of statement jewellery ever worn by Lara Bingle.

In the days following the flash, Weiner claimed credit for the tackle.  He also conceded that he hadn’t meant to Tweet it but, in fact, send it privately to Ginger Lee, the lovely young star of Auto Bang Sluts Vol 2. (No. I didn’t make that up, either.)

Needless to say, things didn’t go well for Anthony after that.

Of course, if Weiner had been a Member for the Australian Labor Party instead of a US Democrat, he might well have received a front-bench promotion. As it was, though, he was forced to resign from politics leaving only a graphic depiction of Big Government as his legacy.

Several months later, US pundits are still examining this matter; they’re still asking: what does it mean? And what is the future of privacy???

Personally, I think both of these questions are easily met. (1) It means that he put a picture of his dick up on the internet. (2) The future of privacy is non-existent.

Any sod with half a brain and a Facebook account knows privacy is dead.  If we leave recklessness, rage or penis online, our traces are indelible. You know this, your boss knows this and the Democrat with the colossal winkie knew it, too. In a digital world already drained of discretion, the question should not be “Where has my privacy gone?” but “Why don’t I care about my privacy?”.

A few commentators stepped in to explain Weiner’s risk-taking. Predictably, there were a few moralisers who called him a “sex-a-holic”; a man with a disease contracted from too much porn. This is nonsense. While I have not viewed Auto Bang Sluts Vol 2, I have seen a good deal of adult entertainment and I can’t say it’s made me impatient to show my gonads.

There were better theories, too. Weiner wanted out of politics. Weiner was mocked for his name at school and wanted to show the playground bullies how much he’d grown. Weiner had a really awesome dick and liked to get it out.

Actually, these theories are all quite sound and might explain why this particular man flashed his goods. What they do not explain, though, are the growing indiscretions of half the planet.  And I’m not just talking about penis-based indiscretion, either.

In fact, as a happy consumer of approximately two-hundred penises per-quarter, I don’t think a schlong is the worst of what people divulge online. There are far more unpleasant disclosures I see on Facebook and Twitter every day.

I am on the sofa. I have a headache. I am on the train to work and the woman standing next to me just farted. What? I don’t care. Shove the minutiae of your day and shove the self-importance that led you to think I’d give a tinker’s cuss about them.

Even as volleys are lobbed at Google, Facebook and Microsoft for violations of our privacy, a torrent of personal details are voluntarily spewed all over an unwilling audience. There are those prepared to tell the world what they had for dinner but indignant when they find Apple has tracked their online movement. I mean. What did you expect from a corporation that has more cash on hand than the US Treasury? And, what did you imagine when you began to chronicle every dreary detail of your day in the cube? Apple can resist a look at your personal preferences no more than a I can resist a peek at a politician’s cock. If you don’t want to be seen, don’t show yourself.

In 500 billion minutes each month, we kill time privacy on Facebook and other social media. Perhaps we should spend these minutes more wisely. Perhaps we should shut up until we can offer something useful or entertaining,

Like a picture of jam-packed boxer shorts, perhaps.

 This was a piece written for the FHM lads