Sparkling wit

I’ve just been watching a video of Miranda Kerr that’s on her website. It’s a couple of years old, from 2006, and it’s her ‘video diary’ from the first Victoria’s Secret runway show she ever did. Anyway, she comes across as a little awkward and vapid, which disappoints me given that she’s going out with Orlando Bloom and I’ve always imagined him to be fairly intelligent. Surprise surprise, men don’t care if you’re smart.

At one point in the video, Miranda holds up a pair of white, sparkly wedge sandals and explains that they’ve been “embezzled with Swarovski crystals”.

On the blink

Paralympian Kurt Fearnley is on Enough Rope tonight, and when Andrew Denton asked him what it felt like when his sternum was broken after being hit by a car, he said, “It hurt to blink”.

Willett ever stop? Yo, I don’t know

God, what a truly awful post heading. Anyway, onwards.

I was sent a copy of Jincy Willett’s newest novel The Writing Class a few months ago and even though it had a blurb from David Sedaris on the cover I still didn’t start reading it. I’m not exactly sure why; partly because I was in the middle of a stint of reading intensely middlebrow non-fiction, partly because I was really busy with work, and largely because I was a bit put off by the concept, which Willett’s Wikipedia entry describes thus:

Her third book, The Writing Class, a Novel was published in 2008 by St. Martin’s Press and is a witty mystery.

Ho, ho, ho. Anyway, the last thing I felt like reading was “a witty mystery”, but the Sedaris endorsement was effusive enough to make me buy a copy of Jenny and the Jaws of Life, her book of short stories. I meandered through those, at once knowing that this book was one of the best things I’d ever read, and, more depressingly, that I’d never, ever be able to write something that good myself.

Now, of course, having finally got through the short stories and subsequently powered through the novel in a day, I’ve decided that Jincy Willett is my favourite writer, possibly of all time, and I want to buy everyone I know copies of her stuff so they can all appreciate how great she is.

In conclusion, YOU MUST BUY JINCY WILLETT’S BOOKS, ALL OF YOU!!!! DON’T DELAY!!!

PS Cos I’m on holiday I also read The Post-Birthday World. It’s a page-turner, but it felt a little hastily put together and as I’ve noticed in the past, Lionel Shriver has a habit of ramming home every single metaphor and then, in case you missed the flashing sign saying ‘HERE IS A RATHER CLEVER METAPHOR’ the first time, she actually takes the trouble to explain what she’s been doing, which can get a bit annoying and frankly, feels a little patronising. I don’t actually know anything about Lionel Shriver (except that she’s a woman with a man’s name) so I don’t know what market she’s meant to be writing for. Is she a Paulina Simmons/Jodi Picoult kind of writer? I’m worried she might be. I should probably know this kind of thing.

Oh, thank God

Browsing the The Cadbury’s Australia website after I’d looked up Clinkers to find out what exactly I’d been eating for the last two days, I found they have a handy list of all their products which are certified Halal or have been mentioned in the Mizrachi Kosher Food Bulletin:

Bulk Eggs
Bulk Solid Egg Cylinder
Bunny
Choc Basket & Eggs
Chocolate Mini Egg
Dream – Dream Almonds, Dream with Cookies, Dream Breakaway, Rabbit
Easter Egg Cylinder
Egg Crate, Pack, Foiled, Mary, Solid
Happy Easter Casket, Cylinder
Happy Rabbits
Harlequin Casket
Heart Casket
Heart of Eggs
Humpty Dumpty
Marching Bunnies
Milk Chocolate Eggs
Milk Eggs
Mini Egg Gift Pack
Ponyshoe
Rabbit – Bag, Carnival, Cheeky, Easter, Elegant, Junior Elegant, Giant Sitting, Dream Rabbit
Red Tulip Egg Milk
Royal Bunnies
Santa Block (Cadbury Dairy Milk)
Twin Bunny
Twin Heart Casket

Haha.

Dude, lose the ‘tasche

That’s such a crap heading, but whatever. Anyway, is Natascha McElhone actually a genius? Is she actually the finest actress of her generation and possesses a skill so subtle, with performances so delicately rendered, that I’m just too thick to perceive her brilliance (actually quite possible)? Or is my impression of her as possibly the WORST ACTRESS ON OUR SCREENS accurate? Seriously, WTF is going on with this woman and why has she been given a job on Californication?

Every single scene she appears in on this otherwise fairly entertaining program, she ruins. She has zero charisma, her delivery is consistently clunky and wrongfooted, and she sounds like her voice is being transmitted through a river of porridge. Every line she gives voice to just falls to the floor in a heap. I just can’t work it out. With the cheekbones and the low, posh-sounding tones, she’s like a reject from a Meryl Streep Impersonators’ competition, the main thing that led to her failure in said contest being the fact that she has absolutely no discernible acting talent whatsoever.

However, Natascha’s agonisingly bad performance is MORE than made up for by the fact that there’s a French bulldog on the show. ‘Nuff said.

Ian McKellen is King Shit

Poor Ian McKellen. As usual, I’m a few weeks late, but those New Yorkers have a habit of piling up (much like grimy silverware does) and I’m only just getting through the last couple. Anyway, in the August 27 issue there’s a profile piece on Sir Ian McKellen and his current stage role as King Lear, and he comes off seeming like a typically self-loathing, preening, insecure actorish personality.

Even looking at the photo which accompanies the story, I find it hard to believe that someone who conveys such a sense of gravitas on screen/stage can actually be so… immature, but that’s the unavoidable impression the piece has made on me. The description of his public coming out, for example, makes it sound like he only did it because he was feeling attention-starved at the time. He talks about how how he used to really hate himself for being gay, and how those feelings have lingered, which is as big a clue as I any, I suppose, that he’s not entirely self-actualised. He just sounds like a big show-off.

He also says his performances used to be inauthentic, but these days he can truly be, instead of merely delivering, ‘the message’ of his roles, because he’s developed self-confidence. And reading that, it’s hard not to think he only developed said confidence after he got a lot of money and a lot of recognition for playing Gandalf. Ha. All his years of treading the boards in *serious drama* as a *real thespian*, and McKellen finally feels better about himself because he played a wizard in a movie trilogy.

But anyway, all that’s by the by, and it’s only supposition, because who knows what agenda the journalist ended up wanting to push once he’d met McKellen. Or whatever. The par I’m really interested in is this, in which a director who worked with McKellen on a play about Nazi Germany describes the actor’s commitment to technical verisimilitude:

McKellen’s character was forced by S.S. guards to beat his boyfriend to death and have sex with a dead girl in order to “prove” that he wasn’t homosexual. “He did something that was phenomenal,” Sherman said of McKellen’s interpretation. “He was sitting there, and then he defecated. It was very subtle — but you saw in his body the spasm, which is what a person does in a period of such shock. It was one of the most stunning things I’ve ever seen.” Sherman continued, “After a month, he didn’t do it any longer, because he was onto something else in the scene that he thought made it even more honest.”

He WHAAAAAAAAT??

Sorry, what? I just cannot wrap my brain around this one. I mean, I’ve heard of method acting, but surely this is taking things too far? Anyway, it’s obvious that the fact that he did it at all is fairly bizarre, but I also kind of feel like it’s more embarrassing that he stopped doing it halfway through (although I have to say it’s very nice of the diplomatic Sherman to claim that this was only because McKellen latched onto something more effective). If he was going to start pooing his pants during his performance, he owed it to himself to keep on doing that to the bitter end, because it just seems slightly pathetic to change tack halfway through the show’s run (run, pfffrrrt).

It reminds me of a particularly cringe-making episode of Freaks and Geeks where Sam wears his new Parisian nightsuit to school, and he starts out strutting through the corridors thinking he’s Mr Cool, but his pleased expression slowly evaporates as he realises that in fact people aren’t giving him looks of admiration, but are packing up laughing at his ridiculous new clothes.

You can just imagine the scene… Ian’s been tossing up whether or not to poo himself since rehearsals first started, but he’s so far been unable to reach a decision. Then, once the performance proper gets underway, and already running high on adrenaline and first-night nerves, he decides to just go for it and lets loose with a big one, leaving everyone else onstage reeling and disgusted, but ensuring his place as the focus of everyone’s attention.

He gets such a reaction that he carries on doing it for a few weeks, but each time he does he feels slightly more ashamed, and the looks on the other actors’ faces show that they’re getting increasingly annoyed with this particular form of childish grandstanding. Plus, the clean-up afterwards is pretty gross and not much fun, and he also realises that he can probably just pretend to poo his pants, rather than actually doing it (it’s called ‘acting’). Eventually he confines his on-stage bowel action to just a tiny, silent fart, before abandoning the theme altogether and pretending he’d never pooed his pants in the first place.

Two other quotes from the story:

“He loves the smell of napalm in the morning,” the director Sir Richard Eyre said.

“Ian loves the smell of the greasepaint,” Nunn said.

Haha, yeah, seriously, we got it, Ian loves smells.

What a couple of scrubbers

Melissa Penfold’s at it again, doling out her particular brand of condescending, faintly passive-aggressive advice to the masses. In this case, to the great unwashed — she and Jenny Tabakoff have combined forces to put together a pretty comprehensive piece on house-cleaning.

The story is so awful I’d really like to just paste in the full text and conclude with a long, drawn-out scream, but I’ll push through and write a proper analysis.

First of all, it’s titled ‘How to pass the white-glove test’, which immediately rings alarm bells for me, because, sorry, but I really don’t give a rat’s whether or not I pass that particular exam. Frankly, the ‘white-glove’ test became obsolete when women en masse entered the workforce. I’m at work for nine or 10 hours a day, and outside of that time I have better things to do than worry about whether Mary Poppins would approve of my skirting boards.

But let’s read on…

The basic thesis of the story is that our cleaning standards have slipped — they actually use the word ‘backsliders’ at one point — and they need to be brought back up to scratch. The way to do this is to be meticulously organised (sure, sounds reasonable up to a point), diligent (hmm, you’re starting to lose me) and to spend a minimum of 20 minutes every day doing the cleaning (WHAAAAAAAAT?).

Now, I don’t suggest anyone live in filth. And anyone who knows me, in fact, knows that I tend more towards the germaphobic end of the hygiene scale. I carry a bottle of antibacterial gel in my bag at all times. My house is very tidy, my bed is made with sheets changed weekly, my bathroom is nice and clean. I’m not a grot, basically. But even though my house is probably tidier than a lot of people’s, there is absolutely no WAY I’d ever spend an (broken or unbroken) 20 minutes EVERY day on housework. Maybe every two or three days, with another half an hour to an hour on the weekend.

But that kind of cleanliness is just not good enough, as far as Mel and Jenny are concerned. Oh, no. They want us, among other things, to clean the tiles in our showers and scrub the handbasins every day. Every day? Yes, EVERY DAY, YOU LAZY SWINE. They also mention quite high up in the story (and, just quietly, given her previous form, I have a strong suspicion that this advice comes from Lady Muck Melissa) that the silver should be rubbed down with a cloth once a week. Yes, because that’s my main problem as far as housework goes, Mel. I and a lot of other people really find that the grimy silverware just piles up like nobody’s business.

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH! Anyway. Oh, they also advise not to ‘dress like a drudge’ for the cleaning. All right, I’ll wear my nice clothes and get black Silvo smuts all over them, plus some bleach marks. Cheers. Actually, I don’t even know why they need to tell us this, since I always wear a ballgown to polish my extensive collection of heirloom silverware.

What else?

You need to sweep the floors every day. Give all your loos a brush every day. There’s an exhaustive, and exhausting, list of just what tasks need to be done and how often. As I’ve mentioned, my main problem isn’t that it’s too hard, but that most of it is simply unnecessary. No, the rubbish doesn’t need to be taken out every day. If the bag isn’t full, that’s a flagrant waste of plastic and I’m not going to do it. Similarly nothing is going to happen, pestilence will not descend upon my home, if I don’t run my already-clean glassware through the dishwasher on a weekly basis ‘to keep it sparkling’, you wasteful, disgusting Earth-rapists! Don’t you know there’s a water crisis on?

Bahaha, but at the end they do tell us not to go too overboard with the ironing, which is refreshing, and they even give a list of things that really don’t need pressing. So, you sillies, stop worrying about ironing your socks and underpants, and just relax! Oh for Christ’s sake, has anyone, or rather any person with a job, ironed a pair of socks (or jocks) since, say, 1962? I thought not.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH! (Long, drawn-out scream.)

(insert name-related pun here)

Hardly worth mentioning, really, but George Hotz, the New Jersey 17 year old who unlocked the iPhone, has traded the unlocked phone with the owner of a mobile-phone modification company, for: three 8GB iPhones and a Nissan 350Z. Yes, the old 350Z. Yes, that’s the car I talked about before.

All I hope is he doesn’t go over the speed limit in that thing, or no woman will ever want to sleep with him.

But then, maybe women aren’t at the forefront of George Hotz’s mind.

I’m reading Beyonce like she’s entrails

July 24 (Southern Hemisphere): On his way into an interview at a Perth radio station, John Howard trips over as he’s handing his mobile phone to one of his advisors. Afterwards, he makes a rambling attempt to make light of the embarrassing stack, saying, “I’m more durable than that, you know. I know some people, somewhere else, who sort of wish that were not so – but there you go.” Coming as it does two days before his 68th birthday, the fall, which can instantly be viewed on Youtube, highlights just how old Howard is getting, and he seems frail and doddering.

July 24 (Northern Hemisphere): Onstage during a concert in Orlando, Florida, Beyonce Knowles takes an embarrassing headlong tumble down a flight of 12 stairs. Ever the professional, she gets straight back up onto her feet and continues singing, not missing a beat. The first thing she says to the audience, though, is, “Please don’t put this on Youtube”. Naturally her plea falls on deaf ears and by the next morning every office worker with an internet connection has watched her humiliating trip-up several times over. Coming as it does just when every new single Rihanna releases seems to be made of solid gold, Beyonce’s fall highlights how old and comparatively out of touch she’s getting, and she starts to seem more human, but a little pathetic.

August 18: Kevin Rudd is forced to admit he and one of his colleagues went to a New york strip club four years earlier, and that he made the decision to go to ‘Scores’ nightclub because he’d “had too much to drink”, after the story is leaked to the media by an unknown source. When the story first breaks, the socially conservative and at times vocally Christian Rudd appears to have struck his first serious hurdle, his reputation apparently set to be left in tatters. As it turns out, though, his frank admissions of guilt, plus the ultimately tame nature of his ‘crime’, leave him even further ahead in the polls than he was before the so-called scandal, with many Australians of both sexes feeling that all he’s done is shown himself to be a regular guy. Cynics suggest Rudd may have planted the story deliberately, pointing to polls that followed the Clinton impeachment which showed the former US president’s popularity levels increased after his sexual misconduct was brought to light.

August 22: Beyonce is forced to deny that she accidentally flashed her breasts at the crowd of her Toronto concert one week earlier, after footage of the incident is leaked to the media by the audience member who shot it. When the story first breaks, it seems the lyrically conservative and at times vocally Christian Beyonce has struck her second on-stage hurdle, with the boob-flashing set to leave her so-far scandal-free reputation in tatters. As it turns out, her publicists tackle the issue by denying there was any actual flashing of boob at all, saying, “She’s wearing a flesh-tone bra! Do you really think Beyonce would go onstage like that?”. Cynics suggest Beyonce’s publicity team may have planted the story deliberately in a bid to generate headlines and sex up the singer’s image to compete with her arch-rival, Rihanna.

CONCLUSION: Beyonce is possessed by the Australian federal political system, all her onstage actions the mere performance of a puppet whose strings are being pulled by an invisible hand. Close monitoring of the remaining performances of her ‘B’Day’ tour must be undertaken if we are to gain any serious insight into the current Australian political landscape and, hopefully, to know the outcome of this year’s federal election.

Cop that, Thorpe!

Ooh, there’s been a potentially exciting development in the current debate about Sydney’s crummy liquor licensing regulations. Unlike in Melbourne, here it currently costs tens of thousands of dollars to procure a licence that permits the sale of alcohol without it having to be accompanied by food. Meaning that where Melbourne has lots of wonderful little hole-in-the-wall bars, because anyone with a few old couches and maybe some design sense can set up a super-cool bar for not very much money, here you have to have stacks of cash to be able to buy a license, so only rich people can do it, and they need to recoup the expense by developing venues with profit margins big enough to justify how much the license cost. Which is why we have such an oversupply of horrible, overrenovated, cavernous c*nt traps in Sydney.

Anyway all this has long been well known, but lately the debate has opened up again, because Clover Moore released a proposal last week that Sydney change its licensing laws in a bid to try to follow Melbourne’s lead and, eventually, develop a new drinking culture here.

Naturally, John Thorpe, president of the Australian Hotels Association, is having none of it and immediately started ranting about how Sydneysiders don’t need little bars because we have the beautiful harbour, and that Melbournites only want cosy drinking spots because they haven’t got anything else. The favourite quote all fortnight has been Thorpe’s, “We don’t want to sit in a hole and drink chardonnay and read a book”.

“That’s not what Sydney wants,” he continued, with the implication being that what Sydney does want, is huge, impersonal venues designed to cater to thousands.

Aside from the fact that there are obviously quite a few Sydneysiders who would really like to be able to sit down and read a book over a nice glass of wine, and the fact that Thorpe seems to be living in a Croc Dundee-era timewarp, his position has been further undermined today by the news that Justin Hemmes’ latest development, the mega-establishment ‘Ivy’, is being stymied by the police because they fear it will bring an ungovernable amount of alcohol-related problems which will overtax the CBD’s already stretched police resources.

That the police force opposes the development of yet another gigantic drinking complex in Sydney because they can reasonably expect it to lead to alcohol-related problems makes it clear that regardless of whatever Thorpe, right or wrong, may believe Sydney “wants”, what Sydney actually needs is small, manageable venues like the many cosy little bars Melbourne has to offer.

I’ll be interested to see how the AHA responds to this, if they respond at all. Kneecapping NSW’s finest, maybe.