Bad Hostess

Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labour on what does not satisfy? This is exactly the sort of thing that threatens Judah, and indeed all sinful persons, with trouble. The Bible (Isaiah 5:52) recommends frugality and hard work. So does its nearest rival for the attention of the world, The IKEA catalogue.
“We are all from SmÂland,” says the catalogue. This province of Sweden and home to IKEA is known for its “poor soil, thrifty attitude and hard working people.” Apparently, poor soil requires a thrifty kind of tilling. This is why IKEA furniture comes in flat-pack boxes. Sheesh. These Lutherans know how to work an agricultural metaphor as well as any prophet.

You might have read this sunny universalism. It just arrived at your house.
And everyone else’s, too. According to some estimates, the catalogue comes in behind the Harry Potter series and The Bible as the third most printed document in the world. In its 2009 catalogue, IKEA makes a bolder claim, “the catalogue has surpassed the Bible as the most published work”.
At 175 million annual copies worldwide, the document triples that of what IKEA humbly names its “counterpart”.
IKEA does, however, offer a qualification. “Since the catalogue is free of charge, the Bible continues to be the most purchased literary work.”

All those awaiting the Rapture might claim, of course, that nobody actually reads the Good Book of interiors. The wall of Billy Bookshelves behind you begs to differ. As does an act of mass hermeneutics this past weekend.
It seems that the Bible of Interior Spending has done what many consider to be the unthinkable. The catalogue changed its typeface.
Eschewing the Bauhaus chic of Futura for Microsoft designed screen font Verdana.
Long the chief servant of mass good taste, IKEA has been pilloried for its own bad design.

And it wasn’t just graphic designers who were aghast. Over the weekend, Twitter wouldn’t shut up “IKEA, Stop the Verdana madness” and “Words can’t describe my disgust” were among the tweets that drove the typeface to the No.1 trending topic. Heavens, it was as though IKEA had failed the same canonical litmus test of its “counterpart” the Good News Bible.
This is not the first time the masses have searched the Scriptures for inerrancy. IKEA (a carpenter, but not, it seems, just like Jesus (here and here) celebrated the devotion of its faithful in the 2009 catalogue. In 2006, the appearance of a dog with an abnormally large head was amplified online.

Terrified, perhaps, that they will not be able to cross the River Styx, the catalogue’s most ardent readers spot strange cats, esoteric books and Zen imagery.
That this may be the work of playful designers is not really relevant. The point is: in an age where interest in print dwindles than my patience for assembling Billy Bookshelf (seriously, the last one nearly ended my marriage) people actually read this thing. The major marketing tool of the corporation, the catalogue drives more than 300 million people to its stores annually. And there, they take the SmÂland communion.
More than 112 million IKEA meatballs are consumed.

The writer and pop patrician will be broadly remembered for his crime writing. It was his talent for gossip, however, that is the culture’s greatest loss.

Dunne, who succumbed yesterday to bladder cancer, acquired toney credentials long ago. Brother-in-law to Joan Didion, the former producer was once, along with first wife Ellen Griffin Dunne, host of Hollywoodís greatest soirees. The guest list at “Nick and Lenny’s” reads like a primer on haute American pop. Company included, but was by no means limited to, Humphrey Bogart, Dennis Hopper and Allen Ginsberg.

Happy, by his own admission, to drink and bask in the glory reflected from his nationís greatest artists, Dunne didnít go pro as a gossip until the ’80s. He would emerge as a cross between Louella Parsons and Upton Sinclair; his sort of gossip was, in the words of former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, “the defining voice of the magazine”.

This ingress was by no means easy. In 1982, Dunneís daughter Dominique, best remembered as an actress in the film Poltergeist, was killed by John Thomas Sweeney. Despite evidence of intent, Sweeney went on to serve fewer than four years for the crime. Dunneís first piece for Vanity Fair was an account of the trial.

The special correspondent wrote extensively on swanky or eminent deaths. His piece on Claus and Sunny von B¸low is remarkable for its very private utterances. Dunne, the nicest kind of starf-cker, actually knew all these people. He read like post-recovery Gonzo that vacationed in East Hampton.

The work on the Menendez brothers was compelling.  It was the OJ Simpson trial, however, that catapulted Dunne to genuine fame. These were the best top-to-toe accounts, save for those in the National Enquirer, of everything from the Bruno Magli shoes to the bloody glove. And, perhaps, just a little better for their more intimate revelations. The man who had once served Bogey a single malt was able to use his considerable Irish charm on far lesser celebs. Nicole Brown Simpson’s family talked to Dunne unreservedly.
No doubt, Dunne’s campaign for justice was sincere. As remarkable as his reportage was, it is not, in the end, his greatest achievement.

There has never been a greater gossip than Dunne.

The “greats” who emerged contemporaneous to the rise of the American film industry such as  Hedda Hopper or Parsons never gave us much more than spin. The new generation of “insiders” such as  Perez Hilton rarely give us much more than self-interest. Dunne, with his stories of brunch with Nora Ephron or shopping with Lee Radziwill, gave us something in between. He strove neither to escalate the importance of stars nor to deflate it.

Hilton, the mutant grandson of a gossip great such as Dunne, pushes his way into “society”. He manufactures stoushes with two-cent”celebrities” such as the bloke from the Black Eyed Peas; he grows the myth only of himself. Dunne’s dish, as personal as it was, allowed the American myth making to continue. The people with whom he dined were never “just like us”; thank goodness. They remained stars or bluebloods with only the best sort of flaws.

Hilton has no interest in preserving glamour; all he craves is a laminate.

Less than 24 hours and 400 kilometres from another death in Hyannis Port; the great gossip died. He will never write, enticingly, of Chappaquiddick again.

Although I am often mistaken for a much younger harlot, I am, in fact, forty years old. As you might suspect, this is an age that produces all sorts of paranoid questions. Viz. what happened to my magnificent career? Why did she hide the strap-on? How much am I spending on my hair?

While the answers to two of these questions elude me, a third is easily solved. I have calculated the lifetime cost of my coiffure and, frankly, the sum makes me want to stab a hairdresser named Davin (yes, Davin) directly in the neck with a pair of styling scissors.

Haircuts are expensive, trying and, for the most part, total shit.

You might THINK your hair looks fabulous. However, this is a delusion formed in equal parts by (a) the routine blandishments of Davin along the lines of ìYouíre really going to tear it up in the club on Friday, girl, whoopî; (b) the drugs he put in your awful salon coffee; and (c) the dissonance and guilt of giving $80 to a bungling fucker who has taken far, far too many hits of amyl to locate his own penis ñ let alone the source of your cowlick.

But, dear, seriously. Your haircut is probably crap. Take a candid photograph of yourself. No. Not one of those come-hither MySpace motion-blurs, where all I can see is your cleavage. A real mug shot that reveals your crowning glory is, in fact, a big stinking turd.

He charged you $80 for this.

The Missus and I agree that as we aged our haircuts became progressively crappier. Accordingly, we advanced to more expensive studios, where the smell of botanical products and the gratis glasses of flat Yellowglen promised sexy hair. We didnít get sexy hair. I asked a South Yarra pouffe for ìBlunt punk chic revival. You know, like Deborah Harry.î The prick ended up giving me Deborah Messing. This, of course, would have been fine if I were an immaculately dressed fag hag with an endless supply of meth and a stylist with blow-dryer on call.

I donít know what instructions the Missus offered. But they undoubtedly were not, ìHereís a picture of my Great Aunt Ida. If you could somehow make my head resemble hers ñ note the thinning hair and remnants of disastrous perm ñ Iíll probably give you a blow job.î

Anyhow. We donít bother any more. I buy her a bottle of Irish Cream and ask her to give me the sort of hair that belongs to someone sheíd like to fuck. Fuelled by sugar, lust and alcohol, she does. Now I finally look like Deborah Fucking Harry.

Find a girlfriend or stylist who can follow instructions as simple as these. If you crave colour, donít do it yourself, you ninny. Hurt bitches with nice highlights until they give up the name of their colourist.

As for the rest, use decent product.

If you colour your hair, for chrissake use a colour preserving conditioner and shampoo. Natralia make some decent stuff. And haircare haven Aveda is to be trusted with Color Conserve. Beach whores and water babies might also use the Sun Care Hair & Body cleanser.

If you have curls, tart them up. The Missus has some lovely curls, which have been amply slutted by a range released last month, Innova Curl. She also likes C-Curl from MOP. And, in fact, we both fancy the grassy smell and smoothness that MOP shampoos confer. Current favourite is the Basil Mint. We also dig NZ organic brand Trilogy and new sustainable Australian line GROWN.

Oh, goodness. I havenít even told you about stylist techniques and products. These may or may not involve horrid Irish liqueur. Until next time: give Davin the middle finger.

A crass T-shirt is no more offensive than a tot in head-to-toe Prada.

LATE last week in the digital barnyard, there was no sound louder than outraged clucking. A hip mother hen and former magazine editor had started some serious squawking.
As reported in The Age, blogger Mia Freedman instigated a campaign against the company Cotton On Kids. Alerted by a reader who’d visited one of the chain’s stores, Freedman found herself appalled by a particular product. She then did what all irate modern parents with a router must: she unleashed her wrath on the internet.

Freedman wrote that she was ”outraged, disgusted and distressed” at the appearance of a specific shirt. Her digital spittle ricocheted in no time flat. In the online campaign to undo Cotton On, an angry tangle of threads emerged. Thousands of other parents echoed Freedman’s outrage, disgust and distress and an impromptu boycott was threatened.

According to some reports, the company was assaulted with complaints. Livid mothers, concerned citizens and anyone looking for distraction on a Friday afternoon requested the item be removed from sale.

Whatever the volume of grievance, the group of companies complied. Whether it was fear of censure from a taste-maker such as Freedman or genuine moral shame, we can’t be sure. In any case, Cotton On Kids vowed to delete the item, extended an apology to ”those who have been affected” and said it would ”sincerely endeavour to not cross these lines again”. The fact of lines being crossed is purely a matter of taste. Opinion may have been divided, but the T-shirt made for babies with the slogan ”They Shake Me” is no longer available for sale. Not at Cotton On, at least. It may, however, be bought in various versions at boutiques in the real and virtual worlds.

Since the early part of the decade, similar wayward-wear for infants has been on sale. Once, it was only elite and ”edgy” stores that purveyed shirts for pre-literate tots. These items, retailing at upwards of $40, bore slogans as confronting as ”Mother Sucker” or ”F*** this Family, I’m Moving in with the Osbournes”. In the tradition of couture, the trend trickled down to the ocean of mass consumption.

Five years earlier, it was only the toddlers of the chic wearing T-shirts that bore punk labels such as ”Kid Vicious” or the hyper-ironic ”They Shake Me”. Now, those parents who fail to shop in the nation’s boutiques can afford to ”abuse” their offspring too. A fashion-forward woman such as Freedman must have been aware of this fad. I still dress like it’s 1992 and somehow the Bad Baby trend appeared on my own radar.

But it wasn’t until Freedman saw this outrage for sale at a shopping centre that she chose to mobilise her audience of comfortable parents.

Presumably, in the right hands, these shirts are nothing more than a comic gesture made by a generation of parents themselves raised on rebellion. In the care of less fashionable stylists, they are tantamount to ”child abuse”. Or, to use Freedman’s own ardent prose, the shirt is an attempt ”to turn children into the sickest kind of human billboards to advertise Ö smart arse and grossly insensitive slogans”.

This sort of rage, as sincere as it might be, rests on an assumption that there is a neutral way in which one can clothe one’s infant. There is no instant in the sartorial life of a middle-class child when he is not dressed by his parents as a ”human billboard”. While the vulgarism of ”They Shake Me” may offend some, still others, including myself, mine offence from the outsized and overpriced Bugaboos of St Kilda. There are those who find the common shopping centre fashions for babies unbearable. And there are curmudgeons, like me, who find the sight of a kid decked out head-to-bootie in Baby Prada smart arse and grossly insensitive. The brand of conceit that drives parents to advertise their wealth is another sick kind of advertisement.

Shaken baby syndrome is, of course, a heinous thing. Reference to this wrong might be considered crass. But it might also be read as comedy. The real work of comedy is to find a way to speak the unspeakable.

It seems, of late, we’d rather not hear this kind of utterance. In fact, we’d much rather swathe it in Baby Prada.

‘IRAN went to hell, media went to bed.” Last week, this sentence spoke to an acute cultural fear. Written on global whiteboard Twitter, it typified a particular rage and echoed a particular boast: old media is inert and useless; our own, new real-time media is where we’ll write and find the truth.

Citizens of the electronic world, it seemed, were ravenous for news on the Iranian election. Traditional media, they contended, were unable to offer satisfying fare. Rather than sit around waiting for a-la-carte news service, millions chose to serve and feed at the chaotic buffet of Twitter instead.

Following the disputed Iranian elections, the Twitter service was saturated with links to images and messages of happenings in Iran. Even for the cynical, it was difficult not to gape in awe at some of these “tweets” ó the name given to the short, and, in this case, very persuasive, bursts of text published on the medium. Posts ostensibly written by Iranian citizens not only managed a news speed “top down” outlets seemed unable to offer, in many cases, the tweets alerted the people of Iran to protest and protection. The locations of military action and Government crackdowns were written in under 140 characters. These updates were followed slavishly not only by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s soldiers. The West was also watching.

In the face of democracy’s defeat, at least new media scored an unambiguous victory. But Twitterers were hardly alone in the conviction that their medium had become an essential news, and survival, source. The significance of the tweet was elevated by an institution no less traditional than the US Government. The nation’s State Department officially requested a delay in Twitter’s maintenance tasks so that the tool remained available to opponents of Ahmadinejad.

This is not the first occasion in which affordable technology and so-called “social media” have been employed by protesters. In 2005, the Philippines Government restricted broadcast of a wiretapped recording in which president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo discussed election rigging. The conversation was fused with music and quickly spread as a mobile telephone ringtone. Arroyo’s prohibited conversation was heard throughout the nation. In 2007, ordinary Nigerians used SMS technology to observe and report on the election.

The same year, the term “blog” officially entered the popular lexicon thanks, in large part, to the extraordinary efforts of Burmese citizen journalists. When Burma’s press was forced to down tools, the Saffron Revolution was entirely written on mobile telephones and in internet cafes. The photography sharing site Flickr, normally home to the artsy offerings of teenaged Westerners, first hosted the now famous pictures of blood on a monastery floor. In the ’60s, protesters against the Vietnam War would chant, “the whole world is watching”. Then, the world was not watching with such constancy and ease as it is now.

Recent days have seen spirited discussion about the role of new media and citizen journalists in reshaping history. Buoyant terms like “Twitter revolution” and “collaborative dissidence” are coined by technology-minded thinkers. Many Western public intellectuals are preparing to deliver the eulogy for old media. But, news of the Iranian election did not so much unfold as explode on Twitter. What we saw, more than a careful chronicling of events, was the release of a compressed urgency.

Some news agencies, including BusinessWeek, suggest that there were fewer than 100 active twitterers during the disputed election. Among those sifting through critical tweets was The Atlantic’s political editor, Marc Ambinder. It is generally agreed that Ambinder’s conflation of old media savvy with new media smarts provided some of the best coverage of the bloody dispute. While he credits many Iranian tweets, he is reluctant to employ the term Twitter revolution. Twitter, he says, is noise. It is not signal intelligence.

It would be foolish to dismiss the online events of recent weeks. It would be equally unwise to celebrate, as so many seem willing to do, the demise of traditional media just yet. In the end, Twitter offered the world little more than a cluster of emotional, diffuse and unreliable detonations.

The genuine messages from Iran were quickly eclipsed by Westerners desperate to selfishly demonstrate their selflessness. This flashy display achieved a goal that eluded the Iranian Government. Twitter became useless as a news source. Iran was silenced by those “citizen journalists” on the other side of the world. In a matter of hours, one was unable to follow any meaningful narrative on Iran. All the talk turned to the failure of old media, thereby ensuring the failure of the new. As I write, “Iran” has all but disappeared as a tag in Twitter. Users offer emotional, diffuse and unreliable reports about Michael Jackson instead.