H&M, Hypocrisy and La Moss

We live in an intellectually-challenged age of doublethink and political scapegoats, of public shamings and media trials, and now we have our latest martyr - Kate Moss.















In my reasoned and scholarly analysis of Kate's downfall, I will try to put aside the rather childish and embarassing fact that I was transfixed when, as a 16 year old, I first saw her in the pages of The Face (she was 16 too). I'll also add the disclaimer that, while I have nothing but disdain for celebrities who are famous for nothing, I make an exception for Kate because she is to my generation what the heart-stoppingly, iconically beautiful Jean Shrimpton was to the sixties. Add to this the earthy, shabby, potty-mouthed, eminently fallible (but never fragile) South London everygirl image, and there is something irresistible about her - to me anyway. So what if she's more likely to be caught peeling herself off the floor of some upmarket nightclub than leaving yoga or the therapist's? Back in my youthful day, so was I (though perhaps the nightclub was not what you’d call ‘upmarket’)!. And, morons, she's a model, not a role-model. She is part of the cut-throat, decadent and openly misogynistic fashion industry. An industry whose bosses, it has long been alleged, actively encourage their emaciated charges to hoover up the class As, and then discard them like so much trash. Who the hell are we kidding? Anyway, I’d like to think I would defend anyone who was the victim of hypocrisy, whoever they were. And I am lost for words at the laughable corporate hypocrisy of the labels scurrying to drop her from their ad campaigns. I mean, take a look at her contemporaries.

What made Paris Hilton famous? It wasn’t her brains. It wasn’t her acting or singing ability. It wasn’t even her looks, God help her. No… over and above her inheritance and her penchant for micro-minis - cut appealingly to show off her latest Brazilian - it was her starring role, at 19, in the home video made by her ghastly and exploitative ex-boyfriend Rick Solomon, imaginatively titled ‘One Night In Paris’. That’s right – Paris’s star hit the ascendant because of a porno.

Having been afforded the opportunity to view this cinema classic (courtesy of a DVD doing the rounds of my office*), I can tell you that she comes across as a wretched, dim-witted victim of that slimeball boyfriend; mewing at him not to point the camera at her; caught in the infra-red beam like a rabbit about to be shot; dull-eyes staring blankly as she sets to work on him; plucked bits and lipglossed mouth stuck for an inordinately, painfully long time on the end of his gruesome member. It is truly an ordeal – and I was only able to watch a fraction of it, shot as it is with the pornographer’s eye for plot twists and turns.

To cap it all off, the film is dedicated ‘To 9/11 – we will never forget’. A priceless touch! Perhaps it’s the patriotism that lets Paris and little Ricky off the hook. Perhaps it’s even un-American to criticise such an enviable debut.

This film made Paris the It Girl sensation she is today – admired by young fillies across the world. It literally, single-handedly made her. By contrast, some pictures of Kate Moss (doing what half of Hollywood does) have brought the poor girl’s career to a halt? How does that work? Since when has being completely humiliated and subjugated by some festering bloke, as Paris avowedly was in this film, been glamourous? And anyway, how much would you like to stake on Paris, or any young starlet for that matter, being a powder-free zone? Not much, I imagine…

If any impressionable young girls really think they’d like to be Paris Hilton, I’d encourage them to take a look at this poor snivelling dullard as she is figuratively and factually shafted by her stinking ex-boyfriend, and tell me they’d rather do that than a few lines of charlie with Kate. Personally, neither option remotely appeals to me, but at the risk of opprobrium from my less enlightened readers, I think what Paris did is far more disturbing and self-demeaning – and far from hurting her career, it has sent it into orbit… This is the bit I really don’t understand. Er… you go girl.

But back to Kate’s plight. Ultimately, who is the most deserving of a corporate rooting in this sorry tale? Surely the enlightened approach - with all forms of addiction - is to provide some kind of rehabilitation. Surely the owners of H&M (Hennes & Mauritz) and Rimmel Cosmetics would cut a much more compassionate dash with their young market if they offered Kate rehab rather than dismissal. Do we really want to discard and disown people who have habits? If so, there’d be a hell of a lot of people discarded, from the uppermost eschelons down. And more than a few of them would be these ruthless, hypocritical bosses of modelling agencies, of fashion houses, of record labels… I’d wager there’d even be a few politicians in there. But of course, they're not in a position to be sacked by anybody. No, not even the politicians. Kate's decline also highlights the fragility of even a so-called 'rich and powerful' woman's position in this barren post-feminist world.

Anyway, I've decided to boycott the label that has provided me with approximately a third of the clothes in my current wardrobe - that very handy little Scandinavian manufacturer of cheap, shitty clothes, Hennes, whose clothes Kate must have been paid a pretty penny to pretend she wore. I know sanctioning Hennes was probably something I ought to have considered when I realised the implications of their exotic 'Made In... (child labour-friendly) Cambodia, Romania, Thailand, Turkey, Russia' tags... but it wasn't, and I didn't, so I guess the persecution of an affluent, wayward supermodel will have to do as a peg on which to hang my principles. That, and the fact that I now live a good 12,000 kilometres from the nearest H&M high street.

As for Chanel, they're terribly badly made you know, darling; Burberry is the chavs' own choice, and Rimmel makeup, with its line in magenta glitter gloss, could only look good on a face as flawless as Kate's - though I'm sure she'd never touch the muck on her off days.






















*In case my boss is reading this – said horrendous DVD was viewed off the premises, and I will not disclose the name of the lender!

Commissioned Post #2

Having just written a come back epic which I implore you to read, I have now been tagged - presumably because I had failed to write anything of note in just on 3 weeks. Anyway, I've capitulated and scribbled out some answers, but only because I'm feeling generous and prolific. Speaking of prolific, I will only be passing this tag on to my colleague Dean, to give him something to get his teeth into, and my gorgeous cousin, in an effort to get him to write something, ANYTHING. I know them both in the flesh (well, the clothed flesh) so I don't feel like I'm pestering them with some dastardly chain letter style bollocks. And if they feel that way they can just tell me what to do with my tag...

Here are my answers to the following questions:

Seven things I plan to do before I die:
1./ Enter the political sphere and change the system from within maan.
2./ Write a treatise on the impact of modern consumer culture on international conflict.
3./ Explore the futility of work and become hideously successful for doing bugger all in the process. Like most other hideously successful people of our times.
4./ Visit Latin America.
5./ Read Crime and Punishment. I'm sure it will be good for me.
6./ Having learnt something from Crime and Punishment, go back to England and teach a certain person a lesson in physical pain.
7./ Shag Stephen Harmison.

Seven things I can do:
1./ Sing like bloody Julie Andrews.
2./ Nerd it up like no other - give me an interest and I will explore it to the max.
3./ Talk til your ears and my tonsils bleed - in that order.
4./ Drive like Nelson Piquet (is that how you spell it? when I was young I thought it was 'PK')
5./ Spell.
6./ Brood.
You said seven? Er...
7./ OK - cook, write, dance, paint, think, assemble bookshelves, strip floors (of carpet and the like), midwife for a cat, live on my own in a town I hate (not London, dear rellies, don't fret - Canberra. oh yes. That's a blog unto itself).

Seven things I cannot do:
1./ Sing like Dusty Springfield.
Seven.... I cannot think of seven.

Seven things that attract me to another person:
Nothing. I'm too bitter to think that initial charm, wit and humour are anything more than a chimera which before long gives way to mentalism, alcoholism and other unsavoury isms.
I can tell you what I find unattractive though - fascism, SUV/4WD driving, cruelty to animals, hypocrisy, Jude Law and blandness.
And these days (well, this month) I don't find anybody attractive unless they play first class international cricket for England.

Seven things I say most often:
Recently these have become a little crude. And I have to remember my audience. I remember watching television with my old dear not so long ago, and that horrible little flea of a man, our Prime Minister, appeared to whitter on about some tax cut he was going to give the rich. I said 'Christ that man is a cocksucker!' - thereby insulting every tenet of good behaviour and bad language my mother had ever bothered to set herself. So I've got to be careful. Not least because these days you can be deported from our good country for saying anything vaguely controversial.

Seven celebrity crushes:
I'll play this one fairly straight.
1./ Simon Jones (England fast bowler - see pic in blog below)
2./ Did I mention Stephen Harmison? (England fast bowler - see pic in blog below). Poor guy will be taking out an injunction order soon...
3./ Just watched an episode of Spooks and have a freshly minted crush on this beautiful boy - Rupert Penry-Jones (though he looks a bit foppish and crap in this photo):
He was the love interest in Charlotte Gray, whom she foolishly throws over for an intellectual. Never go the intellectual, girls! Take the blond fluff when it is offered up!




4./ Bryan Ferry







5. The young David Hemmings (RIP)






6. Dicko (it's an Aussie thing - and I like him for the same reason I like Jack Black)





7. Thierry Henry (it's a Brit thing)







And please just one more, because I don't want to come across as a sport groupie (something I've never been before), and because I'd pick him over them all:

Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode.








Hmmm... disturbed by the lack of Aussies (and predominance of foppish Brits). In an effort to prove I am not an anglophile, I'm going to make it my mission to get out there tomorrow and see if I can spot an 'adonOZ' (sorry) on AFL Grand Final Day. Er, after all, I love a drunken, pudgy, pie-eating, bogan ocker footy fan as much as the next sheila. Honest.

Two reasons for neglecting my blog...

I've got a new computer. I've had it loaded up with a software package that allows me to tape my entire record collection (and I mean the vinyl) onto my computer's hard drive. It's (literally) hours, days, weeks, years of fun. I might never leave the house again.

I have been floored by the emotion of the cricket. I've tried to put words to this wordless moment of triumph, but I simply can't. If I do finally manage to, it will be hopelessly, pointlessly out of date. On that score, I note bitterly that The Age has a female 'Chief Cricket Writer'. I have been vigilantly critical of her cricketing knowledge, assuming her to be some poor cadet hack who got stuck on the sports pages. I WANT HER JOB. I guess it would be a useful exercise to write something about it myself, to prove my knowledge of the nerdy intricacies (I mean, would this cricket journo sheila know a flipper if it came around the wicket at her and pitched outside leg stump, to be caught at extra cover!?), but I can't. It means too much to me. Stay tuned though....

Until then, I've had a bash at something that really doesn't mean all that much to me... a spot of restaurant criticism. Something my dad was apparently a bit of a dab hand at, back in the 60s. It's all one huge tweak! (Which I imagine to be a wank, but with tweezers - a nice double barrel insult I've thrown about a bit lately).

Restaurant Roulette

Last night I hooked up with a friend I'd not seen for a good 9 years. He was a literature/philosophy student when I knew him. He graduated and went, as most of us humanities ponderers do at some point, into the closely related field of hospitality. I’m sure there's a steady stream of waiting staff the world over who've poured over Foucault, Derrida and Kant only to find ample opportunity to flex that useful knowledge in their jobs. A degree in philosophy also works well as an apprenticeship for a career in that other related industry - retail. It’s an obvious career progression.

Anyway, he probably would've been a waiter forever, except that with his nous and tenacity, not to mention a good line in bullshit, he must have made 'the right friends' and has now reinvented himself as a 'Wine Consultant' (I very nearly typed 'Wind' there - and what an apt little slip it would have been, as you’ll soon see), and is set to start a food and wine column for some rag of repute in Melbourne - knowing as he does, 'the right people'.

When we hooked up last night he took me to a splendidly tasteful little establishment where we had an assortment of rather costly tapas, and the star of the evening was a bottle of wine which exceeded my yearly projected budget for the stuff. During the course of the evening I learnt a little bit about wine appreciation - about notes, about acidity, about fruity wines (they are cheap unless there is a depth and balance to the other elements apparently), about the scent of the earth which yielded the crop. I was told that the wine we were having was a 'deeply unfashionable, much maligned yet eminently drinkable' Riesling, and I was counselled against drinking more wine after dessert, lest the acid notes dominate by comparison, thereby corrupting the memory of that first, cleansing sip, which I was told would be akin to biting into a Granny Smith apple. My companion did do an exceedingly good line in bullshit (indeed, I expect no less from any self-respecting fellow Arts graduate) and while I felt for much of the night as if I was at an audition reading for the film ‘Sideways’, he (and perhaps the wine itself) managed to convince me that it is possible to keep a straight face when musing that there is un soupçon of asparagus about a glass of white. Well, as long as they pay you well to say so.

The evening made me realise what a miserable little cheapskate I am when it comes to eating out, with little sense of occasion and even less of those other vital ‘eating’ senses like smell, touch and taste…although perhaps it is fair to say I have a finely honed bullshit detector. And a keen sense of my own financial reality. If I were to write a review of the last place I ate at, it would go something like this:

The Shanghai Dumpling House* is tucked away in a less traversed part of Chinatown. It retains the 70s period charm of oak-panel veneer and a carpet not unlike that of a nightclub that has seen years of beer spillages, bodily emissions and gum-trammellings. A few years back it was on the brink of closure after it was visited by some officials from the Department of Health, who declared it unfit to continue trading. The reports mentioned rats, cockroaches and dishes that were less than clean. I was horrified – not about the rodents, but about the prospect of losing this gem of a place, where you can fill up on unprocessed, delicious food for less than 10 Aussie bucks. This was an establishment I’d frequented a few times with nary more than the odd stomach pain, and I’ve yet to come across a friend who has had a bad experience after eating there. Perhaps we all have iron guts, but I think it’s more a case of enjoying the odd spot of restaurant roulette. If you’re prepared to risk a bout of mild food poisoning, you get for your trouble a cheap, no-fuss, nutritious meal - the way it might be served in China itself. Luckily, the SDH remained open to the public, with little discernable change to its practices….

At the SDH, patrons help themselves to scratched plastic mugs, still dripping wet from whatever large vat of other dirty dishes they might have been lifted from. You pluck them apart from the stack of other cups they’re suctioned to and line up, Salvation Army style, at a huge steel (you hope it’s steel anyway – that would reduce the likelihood that what comes out of it is tarnished by rust) urn and flick a little lever, cask wine style, to release a very murky looking liquor which you can only hope and surmise is ‘tea’. You then collect an assortment of plastic crockery and utensils (chopsticks if you’re feeling lucky) and head back to the table to order. The menus are soup-stained, dog-eared and present challenging descriptions of ‘chillie prorn noodle’ and ‘peanut satan stick’. The ‘Chinese menu’ is always much longer than the ‘English menu’, perhaps because the more sinister dishes involving the off-the-beaten-track parts of some poor animal cannot be adequately described to the anglophone punters. At least, not without further trouble from the Health Department or the RSPCA.

You will likely be served by a very young girl with no understanding of anything you are trying to say, or an older woman who knows all too well what you are trying to say but is being as wilfully unpleasant as she can possibly be. Whoever your host is for the evening, she or he will invariably move any old globs of soy sauce around the table with a bacteria-ridden, grey dishcloth before dealing out your orders and leaving you to get on with it.

Choose carefully though, and you are rewarded with succulent dumplings, handmade noodles with shiitake mushrooms, emerald green vegetables, all in the tastiest of sauces. It helps to be a vegetarian, like me – how badly can a carrot poison you? SDH has a lightning turnover, and everything comes out of the kitchen at a 100 degrees, so as long as you knock it back before it goes lukewarm, there’s no way those little suckers are going to have a chance to work their voodoo on your guts. Five stars.


*Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

Commissioned Post

I have finally been tagged by a blogger I don't know - which I guess is actually all of you except cousin ptolemy and countess rowena. Mind you, I had to invite myself to be tagged! Anyway, I don't as a rule like the writing-on-demand caper that is tagging. I prefer to write at leisure about whatever takes my fancy (even if nobody bothers to drink in the genius) but it so happens that my virtual friend GW has raised a subject close to my heart - that of the written and printed word.
So here goes:

BOOKS

1. Number of books I have owned: Far, far too many to count. The number is bolstered by a) the collection of charity shop paperbacks I've acquired for around 30c a go b) the many books I have borrowed and would gladly return if I could remember who had originally lent them to me c) the number pilfered from my parents.

2. Last book I bought: Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau.

3. Last book I completed: Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. I have crossed my fingers behind my back at this point for telling a porky. I did, last week, read one of those McPotter books because I was curious - but I don't think it counts, or I'd be counting my grocery receipt.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me: I'm going to sound very predictable to those that know me... a)1984 by George Orwell - still the most prescient book ever written b) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger c) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte - it shits on Pride and Prejudice d) The Millstone by Margaret Drabble - I read this book over and over when I was a teenager, which I don't often do with books e) Watership Down by Richard Adams - read it when I was about 9, and haven't read it since, but I'm sure I'd love it just as much now. And I have to add this book because it's just fab - Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse. And The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks. Also all of Douglas Adams's output. I was never into sci-fi AT ALL but he managed to combine it with pop culture and make me laff. So five stars Douglas, if you're out there in the ether...

5. Which five bloggers are you gonna tag?
I don't know if I know five... so Ro, you have a go, and cuz, you can too. Others who are welcome to have a bash are Dirk, Yorkshire Soul and Russell Allen...and Ian - but Ian never listens to instructions so I'm sure my invitation is wasted!

Against All Odds - a lament for fat, bald, old rockers

Like many others, I watched Live 8 in July this year, 20 years after I first stayed up in my oversized fluoro nightdress to watch every move made by Sting, U2 and the delectable Duran Duran as an impressionable pre-teen. While watching I realised that there was something seriously lacking… and it wasn’t Pete Doherty’s memorable ‘performance’, which did at least appear to owe something to the rock lizard preening of his 85 forebear Adam Ant. Predictably, Bob and Midge managed to wheel out a few of their compadres from the class of 85 (and many of those were middle-aged even then), but I don’t think we can even blame them for the absence of the true bombast we saw in 85.

Who can forget the sight of the Freddy Mercury practically felating the shared microphone and busting a few minor arteries as he went for the big guns at the climax of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Who can forget Mick and Tina (clad in a leather dress) doing the Ragamuffin over in Philadelphia – get a room, you old tarts! I certainly couldn’t get all that raunch and extroversion out of my scandalised 11 year old head.









This year we had the temperate, sober, some might say soporific Coldplay, the worthy, modest REM, the bored looking (but very welcome) Richard Ashcroft. It was all a bit sedate really, wasn’t it? All these guys have been to the indie and post-indie school of rock understatement. There’s none of the gleefully daggy, figurative and sometimes literal bald showmanship of, say Phil Collins or Howard Jones. And even though I was moved to tears by the wonderful, re-formed Pink Floyd – they did seem like relics from the Rock Museum. The days of balls-out hoary old rock, of playing the piano with your arse, and of making grandiose (and yes, ultimately empty) gestures to the fans are gone. Quite gone.

It made me think of something rather silly I’d started to write a while back. I was thinking about the lack of variety, of historical anchorage, in modern mainstream pop. And I wondered if I could make a case for the return of….

THE ROCK DINOSAUR.

It’s a spurious and spectacularly ill-conceived premise, but hear me out, dear reader.

I never thought I’d lament the passing of the rock dinosaur. In the 1980s we saw a glut of middle-aged males flooding the teenage pop charts. Most were cashed up former members of the mega bands of the previous two decades, from both sides of the Altlantic, whose bloated egos were lured out of tax exile with the promise of solo success. The carcasses of the Eagles and Genesis proved particularly fertile, spawning two 80s solo monsters apiece. Don Henley and Glen Frey and their British counterparts Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel produced some of the more memorable pompous epics of the decade. Those of us raised on defiantly underground, scowling, posturing acts like Sonic Youth or the Dead Kennedys might shudder at the thought, but we all know the lyrics to ‘Boys of Summer’ and ‘Against all Odds’ – not least because farty-voiced Pop Idol winners and opportunistic dance producers have bludgeoned us with pale copies in the last few years. And while you might shudder in the admission, ex-indie kids, you will be hard pressed to deny that those original tracks make you want to punch the air – or at least, punch something…where the recent covers leave you completely indifferent.

Throughout the 80s, 1970s juggernauts like Steve Miller Band, Boston, Toto and Chicago (it appeared if you could name your band after an American city you were almost guaranteed soft rock gold) were still issuing overproduced LPs with terrible cover art, noisily grinding into the dotage of their careers. Their solo escapees also basked in this baroque twilight of hairy-chested, old-time rock n roll – Robert Plant, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Peter Cetera of Chicago, Lionel Ritchie of the Commodores - all these thinning, pock marked men of middle age had mammoth hits in the 80s. Some became even more famous in their solo iterations. More surprising still, some middle-aged men – Huey Lewis, to name one – had their first success in that decade, without an earlier, sexier incarnation to smooth their way... unlike respected 70s legend Bruce Springsteen, who was forging ahead with ever more commercial, off-road-vehicle-advert friendly output. Here in Australia, Jimmy Barnes had freed himself of the rest of Cold Chisel and was running amok in the charts in his solo incarnation as the 'Working Class man'.

And who could forget the supergroup? When it wasn’t David Bowie and Mick Jagger getting into their pastel golfing best to dance like Dad at your Aunty Pat’s wedding for ‘Dancing in the Street’ it was a band of rock legends (only three out of five of whom are still alive), the Travelling Willburys, croaking out million selling records and scaring the kids with their ugly mugs on MTV.

And it wasn’t just the out of shape geezers who were making comebacks with Grammy nominated 17th albums and armies of session musos plucked from around the globe. The 80s saw a revival of the careers of several great sixties divas. Aretha, Dusty and, spectacularly, Tina Turner were big all over again – and it wasn’t just their hair. The enormous, middle-aged Aretha Franklin was imploring her mystery man with all the subtlety of a drag queen to ‘drop the pedal and go’. There were dykes about in those days too – Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls. And there were women who really looked like they might be – Annie Lennox, Joan Armatrading, Tracey Chapman. And what about Cher? And Heart? Quite a rag-tag collection of shapes, sizes, colours, ages and preferences. And all big, big hit makers.

The point I’m making is that there was once far more variety for the pop-loving, impressionable pre-teen Countdown (or Top of the Pops) viewer, who at least in my case was to morph into the self-conscious Cure or Smiths or Pixies fan a few years later. But before this happened – before I was old enough to blanche at the mere mention of Billy Joel – variety was an important part of my musical youth. It is now almost impossible to imagine a man who looks like Paul Simon making an impact as a solo star in the sleek, choreographed pop world that we know today.

No short baldies in pop. Is that a problem? I hear you ask. Well, yes….it is.

Like Mike and the Mechanics or, understandably, loathe them, they hail from a time when popular music – admittedly overproduced, often cringeworthy and preachy – was more important than the image of popular music. These were days when a hook was still more important than a headline, a riff more important than a tan. These were days when you might not know what a band (let alone a dance act) looked like at all before you bought their CD. I’m not saying they were pretty times. Politically they were pretty barren times. But the thing about them was, even if we graduated to po-faced independent cool and forever disowned the past, those of us who grew up listening to the pop charts were exposed to a healthy, varied diet of novelty pop, last ditch dinosaur rock, the fading embers of wonderful things like punk, the new wave and synth pop and, admittedly, some horrible American-imported MOR balladeering thrown into the mix. The good, the bad and the ugly. It refined our taste reflexes! These days, if you’re 11 and you listen to popular radio, even if you wanted to hear something by a man over 40 – still less a woman of that age – you simply wouldn’t know where to start.