Bad Hostess

Have you ever thought about how foul these rental onesies would smell?

There is little doubt you have heard of that catalogue of mortal hope, the “bucket list”.  If you have not, you are very fortunate and I urge you read no further.  However, if you’re a stubborn masochist, here’s a crib: it’s a written tally of the things an individual longs to do before he carks it.

Considered in itself, the bucket list is not an especially foul practice.  Considered within the culture that informs it, it has become the dull work of braggarts.  And, of terrible publishers; at last count, there were 1001 books itemising the 1001 Things To Do Before You Die.

Advice on how to risk one’s life before it ends is everywhere: the average day can suffer decrees to jump out of a plane, join a cult or run naked screaming “pants on fire Supreme Leader!” through the middle of Pyongyang.

For the sake of all that is decent, SHUT UP.  My goals for the remainder of my life are modest and I’d like to keep them that way, thanks.  If I can manage to return my tax return on time and have a thorough dental check-up in the same financial year, I’m ecstatic.

Recently, I poked myself in the face with a gardening implement and stumbled to the rooms of my general practitioner.  Shickered on pain-killers to the point that even a seven-year-old copy of OK magazine seemed a great literary undertaking, I flicked through a deck of cards designed to appeal to the drug-affected and time-poor. These were a mere 52 Things To Do Before You Die.

The first card suggested I “swim with a dolphin”.  Now, this thought might have been briefly entertaining if (a) I hadn’t seen and read this proposal in a thousand cheap pieces of media and (b) we could suppose that anyone had bothered to consult the dolphin population about this inconvenience.  Does anyone stop to think about the thousands of poor sea mammals who spend their lives catering to the greedy whim of unfeeling publishers who have pushed an entire generation headlong into their flippers?

The second card suggested that I “dance like no one is watching”.  This oft-heard Hallmark nonsense never fails to piss me off and make me wonder about the tortured ghost who demonstrated an utter lack of foresight when he wrote these awkward words. Further, my poor skills as a dancer should not be further compromised.  What if someone was watching? A dolphin, for example.  Like they haven’t suffered enough.

Number three? Have Your Portrait Painted.  WHY? Photography is an art and documentary form honed these past two centuries PLUS it costs virtually nothing.   No. I will NOT support a form of expression that has, artistically and technically, long since outlived its usefulness. More to the point, why on EARTH would I BOTHER sitting still for six hours when I have an annual dental appointment to attend?  Frankly, I’d rather have root canal than the attentions of the sort of artist my budget might allow.

Actually, I quite liked Number Four which was “Participate in a Police Line Up”.  I called my local constabulary to make an appointment and they said, albeit politely, “What do you think this is, lady, CSI?”.  There’s no great call for fidgety and unusually fair middle-aged women in forensic photography.  Apparently.

I don’t want to climb a mountain.  I do not wish to write poetry; I spent my late teens doing just that and I’m surprised I wasn’t put in prison for violating the copyright of Sylvia Plath and the health of my classmates.  And skinny dipping at midnight?  That’s just ASKING for a painful mosquito bite in an inappropriate crevice.

Besides which.  I have a tax return to complete.  And a wisdom tooth to conquer.  And figs to harvest and lemon meringue pie to master.  I wish these active-dying people and the publishers that feed their imaginations would shut up.  I have 1001 unglamorous  things to do before I die.

This was written for the lovely folk of The Big Issue.

May Contain Traces of Poison Feminism

If Genesis teaches us anything, it’s that even the righteous need hobbies. Just as Abraham counted travel and circumcision among his favourite pastimes, the prophets of feminism also enjoy active leisure.  We find this has come in two primary forms viz. (a) Getting Really Angry When Some People Call Themselves Feminist and (b) Getting Really Angry When Some People Don’t Call Themselves Feminist.

Everybody needs to blow off some steam, most especially those of us who have a covenant with g-d. And, let me tell you, these judgement-games can be enormous fun. You haven’t lived until you’ve publicly rebuked one of those crazy chicks who bangs on about “the over-sexualisation of girls”.

I often wonder what, exactly, “sexualisation” is as an identifiable process and, more to the point, how one might measure its over-supply.  Recently, I hired an instrument to test my gas heating ducts for harmful emissions and I thought briefly of Melinda Tankard Reist.

Of course, today’s younger keepers-of-the-faith are much nicer than I and have largely abandoned the sporting feminist tradition of keepings-off.  These days, feminism is inclusive and even, and especially, seems to welcome fashion magazine editors. Call me old-fashioned, but I see fashion magazine editors about as useful to the goals of feminism as a penis-flavoured candy bar. Which is to say, not particularly inimical but strongly inappropriate nonetheless. Fashion magazines are no more a viable locus for social change than candy bars are a suitable medium for the taste of penis. One cannot, quite simply, have one’s cock and eat it too. But, again, this is a story for another time and place.

The story for today is Australian and concerns the question of feminist umbrage reserved for those women who elect to call themselves “not feminists”.

One such Not Feminist is unremarkable broadcaster, “Jackie O”.  In a recent cover-story for a national newspaper supplement, Ms O was asked, “do you consider yourself a feminist?”.  It appears that she does not and it appears that she chose not to elaborate on her rejection of the Faith beyond, “But … you know.”  This was enough to (a) ignite the blogosphere and (b) disappoint the author of the article, who helpfully pointed out “but you’re a woman”.

I shan’t go into too many details about O’s career vis-à-vis this denial of feminism as it’s too jizzing boring. Let it suffice to say that the woman, in the great tradition of FM Radio, is paid to giggle and to serve as a Civilizing Influence for a fuming pot-of-vomit. Think of her as Robin Quivers but much, much, much less interesting.

Personally, I was relieved that O publicly declined her membership to my club. If you ask me, it’s too crammed with fashion magazine editors to make room for another unhelpful tit.  I mean. Shit. If we keep letting these people in, all we’ll ever talk about is How Photoshop is Killing Women or Getting Katniss’ Hot Apocalyptic Look. And, yes, there’s room for everyone in an inclusive movement blah blah blah. But, when the actual fart will we start talking about something other than accessories?

Actually, these are the sorts of sentiments that might have been unlooked had O answered, “Yes. I’m a feminist”. At worst, she would have been derided by ladies like me. At best, she would have been schooled in Remedial Feminism by well-meaning bloggers for the next five years.  Jackie O Vs Feminism, I suggest, can only be a zero-sum game.

But, as the author of the O puff-piece reveals, I am out-of-step with modern algorithms. Today, apparently, we are all feminist whether we like it or not.

The English writer Caitlin Moran is gifted of great wit and nowhere is this more apparent than in her oft-quoted Test for Feminism. “Put your hands in your pants. (a) Do you have a vagina? And (b) Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said yes to both, then congratulations, you’re a (c) feminist.”

This is, of course, quite hilarious.  But, axiomatic charm notwithstanding, it’s also quite wrong.  Moran, funny, as shit as she is, is begging the question.

Not being a feminist is not unavoidably the same as disapproving of feminism’s gains. One can endorse activism without being its agent; and the term feminist does imply activism or, at the every least, the inclination to action.  It’s just nosy work, I think, going about demanding that people identify as part as of a social movement.  It is the right of all female, First Nation, same-sex attracted or atheist or religious or whatever persons to NOT be Abrahamically righteous.

In its current compulsive inclusiveness, feminism(s) reminds me a little of the LDS. Making Jackie O be a feminist is a bit like a Baptism for the Dead, intellectually speaking.

One is not ethically obliged to utter the name of the Saviour in life and we are ethically obliged not to utter Her name on behalf of the intellectually deceased.  Getting all Mormon on Jackie O will serve no one very well; least of all the name of feminism.

Many years ago I enjoyed a brief but fantastically odd period of internet sex with a tech-support Team Leader from Syracuse, NY.  This imaginary sex was good.  So good, in fact, that I began to plan a trip to the USA.  Why not?  I could explore unlawful frontiers in pleasure and stock up on quality linens.  Sheet-sets are so reasonably priced in America.

Of course, it did occur to me that crossing an ocean to be tied up by someone with the screen-name Hugh_G_Rection might be risky.  So, I asked around for advice.  “Are you insane?” was one rhetorical reply.  “Have you lost your dog?”.  The consensus was that I should absolutely not serve the unwholesome needs of an IT Team Leader in upstate New York.  This was due less to a fear that I would be killed, julienned and served as a goulash for Satan and much more to our national kneejerk loathing for the USA.

Why, as one colleague put it, would you bother to travel so far with sex with middle-management?  Especially when there are many needy, under-achieving perverts with handcuffs so close to home?  This was not an issue of morality. Nor had it a thing to do with my recreational Health and Safety.  This was a matter of fair trade in which my vagina, rather like Vegemite, had consented to multinational takeover and would never taste the same again.

Needless to say, there is a good deal of plain sense to be seen in trade protection.  Both my genitals and I prefer to buy Australian wherever we can. However, the import of goods should be viewed as quite separate from the export of lust and I fail to see why one should forgo American sex as well as American Vegemite.   I.e. to mistake cruel economic imperialism for pleasure makes about as much sense as confusing breakfast with sex.   This is to say, it makes absolutely no sense at all and, unless you really want to get crumbs in your crack, you should be especially careful to divide one from the other.

It’s been some time since the USA was our major economic partner.  Nonetheless, our great and confusing dislike for the nation has grown even as our two-way trading dwindles. Many public thinkers are more fearful of “Americanisation” than they are of climate change or bird flu and offer long, tedious pieces to the newspaper pleading for the rebirth of Australian culture.

The rebirth of, what, precisely?  Bush Ballads and dreary landscape paintings and a “She’ll Be Right” demeanour that punishes excellence and pats passable achievement on the back? The thing is, Australian culture has been shit for more than two centuries.  Long before we began to worry about our rank as a 51^st-state, it was shit.  After the release of Any Questions for Ben? it was still absolute shit. I thank goodness every day for American culture; a behemoth which continues to give us great cinema, written inspiration and dazzling standards in bed-sheets.

Certainly, Australia is a just and reasonable place to live.  Certainly, I want to experience American health-care about as much as I want to sit through Any Questions for Ben?. Certainly, our nation has produced exceptional mutants who have risen above our fight to the middle.

We can rock and we can play sport with the best and every now and then, we produce a thinker or scientist with something to offer.  Of course, these people always go and live somewhere else.  Usually North America.  But, bugger them, eh?  With their fancy educations and expensive ideas. She’ll be right.  Let’s throw another awful bush ballad on the barbie and talk about the “Americanisation” of the culture and coast along on the mineral boom as though we ever actually did anything to earn our gloriously lazy lives.

Writers rage about it.  People on television rant about it.  Everyday people fume about America displacing our national character, too; as though we had a national character worth preserving.     In defining our national character, we increasingly reach for the things that we are not. The list of things that are unmistakably Australian is brief, unimpressive and probably includes melanoma.  The list of things that are “un-Australian” is relentless and absurd. It’s much easier for us to identify those things that are foreign than anything that might legitimately belong to us.

A country so preoccupied with the business of saying what it is not is bound to resent a country that appears to know what it is.  And so, of course, we dislike and admire the States in equal measure. Even as we talk about America’s failings, we’ve become a cultural parasite on this big, juicy host.

We define ourselves in opposition to America but suck on the teat of its confident culture until we are bloated with self-hatred.  And bloated with actual fat, too.  We can bang on about “fat ugly Americans” all we like. But in 2008, global diabetes research found that we had won the international race to obesity boasting the highest per capita population of fatties anywhere on the planet.

Even as we state our revulsion for the USA, we mimic its worst habits.  And appear to pick up none of its good.  We reject the value of distinctly American qualities like sentiment or eloquence or civic-mindedness; it’s “un-Australian” to demonstrate emotion, to speak passionately and publicly or to become involved in community matters.  But, it’s tolerably Australian to sit in front of the telly eating simple carbohydrates and failing to move for weeks at a time.

I never did make it to Syracuse.  This is for several reasons, not the most of which was a poor exchange rate and not the least of which was that Hugh_G_Rection, as it turned out,  weighed 300 pounds and was, in fact, the sort who confused sex with breakfast.  I mean.  A little frivolous edge-play is one thing.  Functioning as a buffet for steak-and-eggs is something altogether different.

My near miss as an all-you-can-eat attraction notwithstanding, there remains much that I admire in the USA.  Perhaps if we can all learn to openly love the good in this other nation, we might be better equipped to actually like ourselves.

 This was written for my Sadeian Overlords at FHM Magazine. I wrote it naked and slathered in oils because I am oppressed.

In 2010, a theater writer set out to Scotland’s famous Edinburgh Fringe.   When it came to the traditions of burlesque, critic Sally Scott would find no fun.  Except, perhaps, that in the creation of similes.  “Somewhere between a crack addict and a blown-up sex doll” was Scott’s published impression of the gaze of a burlesque performer.

An occasional theater writer myself, I recognize this sketch. Personally I’d often place the burlesque dancer’s expression somewhere between Cthulhu and Rachel Zoe.  Rachel Zoe right after a particularly wet air-kiss from Tom Ford. However, ours is not to quibble with facial degrees of numb-but-sensual conceit.  Rather, it is to learn about the criticism of burlesque in Scotland and beyond.

In a compendium review, Scott awarded the several “ironic” strippers she had seen no more than three stars apiece; in Edinburgh, a charge of mediocrity is more damaging than slaughter.  So, the day the reviews appeared, performers donned their nylons early and marched, or minced, to occupy the offices of The Scotsman.

Tempest Rose, a professed “showgirl sensation”, led the complaint against the reviewer.  She and her fellows, it seems, were worked-up by Scott’s failure to appreciate everything the burlesque revival had done for women.

Rose was acting, she said in a statement, on behalf of “a community” angered by the assertion that her burlesque was about nothing more than tassels and tar-tars. Burlesque, said Rose, “promotes the idea that a woman can be intelligent and powerful as well as expressing and enjoying their sensuality”.

“Women can have brains and beauty,” said Rose.

This is the sort of pish one might excuse from a pageant contestant.  Perhaps if a woman other than Miss Norway believes that this is a point worth making publicly, then she has no real place making art.

But, this is the point that drives a good deal of burlesque: women can be intelligent and sexy and in charge of removing their very own clothing.  Zzzz.

Certainly, the view that a bright woman need not forfeit her libido is one with which I have no quarrel.  But, there is a good deal of burlesque that is performed by women who show much sexual hunger but nothing that makes them seem especially bright.

It is, of course, no crime to be dim. If it were, then our prisons would be full of the off-cuts from Reality TV.  It is not a crime but it is a sin to press a terribly useful thing like feminism into the service of under-done theater.

If I’ve seen one lass in an animal-print tutu drop her boop-a-doop and give us the late-breaking news that women are capable of thought and tassels, I’ve seen a hundred.  Or, at least a dozen since the New Burlesque hit town a little more than ten years ago.

Across this past decade, burlesque has developed a few different subspecies and functions.  First, it was an “empowerment” exercise that, regrettably, took root in licensed premises.   One can spot these performers by checking the ladies for (a) feather headdress and (b) frequent use of the phrase “brains and beauty.”

Then, it became a project of those who have read books.  One can spot these performers by checking the ladies for (a) tattoos and (b) frequent use of the phrase “performativity.”

So, burlesque has been largely practiced and informed by Personal Development or Gender Studies hobbyists.  Which helps us understand both why it’s so bad and so absolutely, cultishly sure of itself.

As burlesque shows no sign of setting down its brains-and-beauty, the time has certainly come for critique. It’s time to alert the community of corsets that their burlesque can no longer rely on a feminist fan dance to save it from review.  Perhaps we could invite the critics of Scotland over to take the ladies’ boop-a-doop away.

Or, perhaps we could make our own efforts as connoisseurs.   A good start, is in seeing something good; something that does not crave approbation for its “beauty and brains” but seeks, instead, to jolt.

The tradition of burlesque can offer us something wonderful.  The idea of identity as a costume that is worn, not a biology that is fixed, can be so boldly illustrated in the sideshow arts. But, most of the time, it is not.  The most sincere artistic wish of many local practitioners is not to detonate gender or beauty or the fabric of identity.  Instead, it is to purchase cute, shiny outfits and take them off in a Brooklyn speakeasy. To an uncritical audience that lacks a Sally Scott.

This piece is adapted from a thingie I wrote for The Age newspaper

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.