Bad Hostess

Miranda July is the hottest name in independent cinema right now. I know this because a cineaste of my slight acquaintance, whose day-job it is to decorate cupcakes with “satirical” trim, recently told me. “Miranda July is the hottest name in independent cinema right now,” she said as she nibbled a pastry shaped to resemble a rat.

If you have not yet viewed Ms July’s oeuvre, it would be reckless to amend this mistake. Even if her work is both “hot” and “independent”, it is also entirely slap-able and seems chiefly concerned with poor jokes about poop and bad sex. The 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know marked July’s first award at Cannes, her directorial debut and the appreciation of anyone who has ever eaten and enjoyed a “satirical” cupcake. It’s awful and cutesy and deniably meaningless.

July is to cinema as the contemporary cupcake is to carbohydrate. This is to say, she is fantastically decorative and easy to consume but ultimately delivers naught but empty calories in a gaudy blast of sugar. In her non-narrative narratives about mildly depressed shoe salesmen and people who babysit slightly injured cats, she hints at depths that do not exist. This, of course, is not a transgression we could attribute to the cupcake. But July’s perplexing popularity, just like the cupcake’s, is founded on the overuse of whimsy.

Whimsy. Like iPads and overly bookish spectacles and bacteria, it is everywhere.

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment in which whimsy escaped from the birthday parties of six-year-old girls and into the business of serious art. We might suppose that this was in the same moment grown and intelligent women stole cupcakes from their daughters. I personally place the shift at about ten years ago when I noticed a large dog sitting by Sydney Harbour.

There are many things to loathe about Jeff Koons. Much of his work is a triumph of money and plastic. Even when he does not work in plastic, he seems, somehow, to be hygienically safeguarded against any infection by meaning. This, to me, is his gravest offence and the primary impact of his stupid sculpture Puppy.

Puppy, who has since scampered to the Guggenheim, is an enormous West Highland White Terrier made of steel and topiary. I have no quarrel with this feisty little breed and find the Westie’s likeness entirely acceptable on headbands or at the birthday parties of six-year-old girls. He has no place, however, rolling over for bloated art.

Thanks to the ruse of whimsy, Koons and his terrier are permitted to feast on the bones of meaning. The appearance of childlike spontaneity excuses a lack of thought and gives rise to a thousand other dogs. The films of Wes Anderson, by way of example, are rabid with whimsy and seem to hint at deep emotional difficulties when, in fact, all they do to chew on the gristle of magical realism and upchuck it at the doorway of art.

In recent comedic seasons, the gifted humorist Daniel Kitson has elected to replace actual jokes with the sort of quirky reminiscence that would make John Irving call for restraint. Once, he spoke with incandescent wit about all he saw wrong in the world. Now, he sits next to bits of obsolete technology in a cardigan and talks about “ordinary lives”.

The popular actress and singer Zooey Deschanel had an elective surgery which saw her brain and taste replaced with a clockwork mouse. Michael Cera, insufferable star of the insufferably whimsical Juno, works to a similar mechanic and if I see one more knitted effing toy at a gallery, I may take a needle and hurt the next “craft practitioner” foolish enough to offer me a cupcake.

As for burlesque. Well. If I had my way, “whimsical” disrobing would by now be a summary offence.

There is, of course, that kind of “whimsy” that has changed the world of art. If Marcel Duchamp had never whimsically thought to sign a urinal and call it art or if Lewis Carroll had never dug a rabbit hole, we might very well be still looking at ordinary landscapes and reading narratives that only take place in the real.

But, these works, fanciful as though their origins might have been, do not simply suggest meaning; they actually produce it. And they do so not, as the contemporary burlesque dancer does, by offering us a whimsical tease to confuse our view but in allowing us the space for interrogation with their bare ambition.

Now so very often in the cupcake half-bakery of art, whimsy dresses the naked truth. Often in a cardigan.

This was written for and first appeared in The Age newspaper.

Dear Chaps,

It’s been a while since we’ve spoken.  Come to that, it’s been a while since your trowel last tilled my lady-garden. But, discussion of my area, or “Ground Zero” as it is known to my therapist, is for another, more private time.  For the moment, we’re going to talk about you.

More honestly, we’re going to talk about me; or, we’re going to talk about my gender as it relates to yours.  No. Don’t worry.  There will be no whiny “You Go Girl” drivel about A Woman’s Right to Shoes.  I hate that shit.

In fact, there’s a lot of stuff about perky women that makes me long to grow a penis.  I don’t like their fascination with handbags and cupcakes.  I don’t like the way they keep scrapbooks. I don’t like it when they say “women are really good at multitasking” and demonstrate this through buying kitten-heels, scrapbooking and ramming cupcakes in their pie-holes all at once. I mean, if you’re so good at multitasking, stop buying things, shut the hell up and become an urban planner.  Don’t waste your neurological gifts whining “blah blah blah women are so much smarter than men” but doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to bear this out in civic life. Our foremothers did not throw themselves in front of horses so you could buy the Gossip Girl boxed-set, you self-centred, over-spending bint.  Shut up and measure housing density and re-route the traffic; I’ve had it with your moaning.

But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

There is a critical thing you should know about women which is rarely discussed. To wit: they have an aching need to be told that they’re hideous. I know this seems odd. Given the dollars and energy women expend in bra and diet technology and the horseshit they produce like “All women want to be thought of as beautiful”, you might reasonably think that all women want to be thought of as beautiful.  Not so.  From about the age of fourteen, nearly all women will do whatever they can to get you to call them ugly or, even better, fat.

This strange feminie urge is universal and generally proceeds something like,

Helen: “What do you think of this new chemise?”

Man: “I want to fly my love-plane into Ground Zero this very minute! You look really hot and curvy! ”

Helen: “Are you calling me fat?”

Or,

Man: “Wow.  Your arse looks great in those jeans.”

Helen: “Are you calling me fat?”

Or,

Man: “I believe public response to the proposed Carbon Tax has been negative and extreme.”

Helen: “Yes. Excise could be an effective way of cutting emissions and showing leadership in the region.”

Man: “Moderate reform for middle-income earners is good, too.”

Helen: “Are you calling me fat?”

Are you calling me fat? I have absolutely no advice in addressing this question; particularly given that I have asked it myself many times.  You could, of course, try saying, “no, no, no my darling.  You are so svelte of silhouette and lissom of limb as to make Katy Perry appear portly.  If we painted you Mission Brown, you could be mistaken for a paling. Darling, you could use dental floss to wipe your tiny butt.” Yes, you could.

Or, you could help put an end to all of this coddling and call our bluff.  I mean, if somebody wants to engage in self-destructive behaviour, there’s not a thing you can do about it.  It’s certainly not your job to make people feel crappy about themselves, but nor is it your job to fix their crazy shit.

There is a lesson I learnt when I was a resident of Kings Cross, Sydney.  Every day on Ward Avenue, a bloke called Spoons asked me for money for “food”.  I gave it to him, chiefly because his name was so inspired. But, when I’d got to around the thousand dollar mark, I’d had jack of it.   One day, Spoons offered the usual, “Can I have some money for food, sister?” and it struck me that I could say, “You can have some money. But only if you promise to spend it on heroin.” He never asked again and I was free to use my spare change to buy cupcakes and scrapbooking materials.

My point is, the drama of nearly being called fat is a kind of illicit drug to women. Actually daring your boyfriend to call you less-than-Angelina has all the thrill of smack. So, cut off the supply NOW. If, when asked, more men said, “Yes. I am calling you fat”, then perhaps more women would acknowledge how pig-bonkingly stupid the question is, stop asking it and get on with something important. Like urban planning.

It may help you to know that many women have violent conflict with their looks.  And they are not at all content to keep this war civil; they’re looking to fight on other fronts. From the interior, soldiers of self-loathing march toward you, the unwilling ally, with the battle-cry ““Are you calling me fat?”.   There’s no winning, so don’t fight. Gentlemen, lay down your arms and practice nonviolent resistance. It worked for Gandhi who, when asked, always told his wife Kasturba that she looked just like a non-holy heifer.

Chicks. When it comes to their bodies, they’re certifiable.

Having said this, I don’t have much truck with this “Battle of the Sexes” crap; it’s a boring stoush that belongs on breakfast radio.  Instead of focusing on our differences, we should be focusing on (a) urban planning and (b) interesting things to do with our genitals.

Are you calling me fat?

Regards,

Helen

This was written for the dapper chaps at FHM Magazine

At the end of each year that is uttered in English, there are words so shop-worn and meaningless we hope never to hear them again. It might be nice, by way of example, if “wow factor” was made a muzzling offence by January 1. “Baby bump”, similarly, should be a criminal phrase. Made-up noises like “agreeance” and “solutionise” must certainly be met with a gag or, at least, a pocket dictionary; but there were few terms so smother-ably empty in 2011 as “body image”.

Earlier this week the great performer Meryl Streep was inadvertently responsible for a fresh wave of references to “body image”. When the 62-year-old actress posed on the cover of American Vogue, there was a volley of “You Go Girls” in the blogosphere followed shortly, as is often the case, by passionate discussion on “body image”.

Streep’s radiant turn as a model has been described radiantly. She is a “positive role model” and a “real woman” who is “finally showcasing real women“.

Streep, almost needless to impart, is an extraordinary artist whose 40-year oeuvre has earned her a gallery of statuettes and a cathedral of respect. The “real women” whom she depicts on screen are entirely believable. The “real woman” she is purported to represent on the cover of this luxury magazine is a cheap fiction.

Many real and intelligent women, however, are impatient to buy this story of the “real woman” as fact. They read it every time a woman who falls outside the margins of a catwalk beauty is represented to a large audience as beautiful.

That this “real” Streep is impossibly beautiful seems not to matter to advocates of “real” beauty at all. I mean, look at her. She is gifted of such remarkable DNA as to make the rest of us look like amoebae by contrast. The actress may be a sexagenarian but looks, for all the world, like a hot 40-year-old who has just been attended by the personal consideration of Ralph Lauren.

Nonetheless, the feminine hunger for the “real” devours Streep as sustenance for the surreal, and terribly confusing, idea of a “real” body intended for public consumption.

More had been made of the need for the real in the weeks preceding Streep’s lovely shots. A piece by writer Catherine Deveny was widely circulated for its remembrance of the real. Posing in a swimsuit, Deveny wrote of the need to celebrate all kinds of female bodies; with particular reference to the celebration of her own. Next, a TED talk by blogger Brittany Gibbons appeared to great acclaim. Again, Gibbons celebrated as she recounted the time she stripped to her swimsuit on live television in New York City’s Times Square. Both women declared the need to show “real” bodies for the sake of young women and girls.

It is generally agreed by feminist thinkers that young women and girls need to make out the real from, as Deveny puts it, the “cookie cutter”. In fact, it seems quite generally agreed that we should all consume more wholesome and real pictures of women.

For me, though, there’s a logical flaw in the argument to compel mass culture to show us more pictures of women; real or artificially baked. Haven’t we seen enough pictures of women, already?

I am untroubled that visual culture reproduces pictures of women who don’t look like especially like me. I have never suspected that the reproduction of pictures of women that do look like me would make anything even remotely better. I have always supposed that the problem with pictures of women was not their lack of authenticity; mass culture eats the possibility of the real for breakfast every morning. I have always supposed that the problem with pictures of women is that there were just so many of them about.

Celebrating my body, particularly in public, is the sort of leisure-activism in which I have no interest. Just as “baby bump” is a very silly way of saying pregnant stomach celebration strikes me as a poor synonym for seeking approbation. I’m not saying for a minute I don’t adore it when someone comments favourably on my appearance. It just feels wrong, even for a “real” woman, to consent to a gaze. Even it is for the sake of the children.

It doesn’t matter what shape the image of woman takes in mass culture; slight, stout or “real” it remains a route to the manufacture of approval. If we are genuinely troubled by this mechanism that manages approval of women’s bodies, perhaps we should just stop watching and participating.

Taking off your clothes for TV in Times Square or being 62 on the cover of Vogue is not especially meaningful. In this way, it is much like a “wow factor”.

This was written for the folks at ABC Online.

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.