Cotton on to some nifty tea towels at Country Road

I thought kitchen-accessory perfection had been well and truly attained when I bought two dozen gingham-checked restaurant-kitchen-quality tea towels from London and American Supply Stores ten years ago. They were absorbent, generously proportioned, didn't need ironing and made a nifty faux-kaffiyeh when I felt the urge to indulge in a spot of Palestinian-styled keening at my latest culinary disaster.

Of course, they got threadbare and worn over time, so two years ago I went back to that trusty little Elizabeth Street gem only to find the tea-towels on offer were NOTHING like the ones first bought all those years ago. They were a decent size and they were the same colourful check pattern, but a quick fondle confirmed what my eyes picked up almost instantly - despite their restaurant-y look, they were RUBBISH. They would shed lint faster than a mutt sheds hair in Summer, or Miranda Kerr her nursing bra at a David Jones catalogue shoot. 

I had to fight the urge to wrap one around my head, ululate at the top of my lungs and empty a Kalashnikov into the sky.

Surely it's not much to ask of a tea towel that it be big, largely crease-free, dry quickly after laundry, be colourful and above all SUPER ABSORBENT AND LEAVE NO TRACE OF LINT on your glassware, especially if - like me and Muddy K - you don't have a dishwasher (as ours is a mostly analogue house...)?

You'd think finding good tea towels would be easy given the proliferation of homewares stores catering to domestic goddesses, hostesses and hostesticles everywhere - but you would be wrong.

WRONG WRONG WRONG.

After spending an inordinate length of time and money on sub-standard swathes of honeycomb linen, crappy cotton and porous polyester from various reputable homewares suppliers, I succumbed (at my cousin Chunky Venetian's insistence) to the homewares section of Country Road. I say succumbed because I have little love for Country Road as a fashion label, having found its stock of mostly bland, inoffensive, dull, cookie-cutter suits and pants, shirts and t-shirts/tops exclusively created with the sartorially petrified mid-level executive PA in mind.

So I bought a bundle of five cotton towels from one of the CBD stores two months ago and gave them a go. Oh. My. God. They are truly beautiful. They are bright and cheery primary colours; they are thick and thirsty; they don't have to be ironed (but strangely enough it is a pleasure to iron them, slowly and lovingly, like a well-made man's tailored shirt); they leave not fleck or speck of lint, making your crystal sparkle; they need a tiny hit of Napisan to come up clean and spotless on the short cycle; they dry speedily in a warm spot and they stack beautifully in my kitchen drawers.

Can a person fall in love with a few rectangles of fabric designed solely for sucking up water? It would appear so, for I have fallen hard for my Country Road tea towels.

Some might say I need to get a life - I would say you need to get down to your local Country Road outlet and buy yourself a set of tea towels. You'll thank me.

Formal Friday - A manifesto for restoring decorum to the workplace

"I began the revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I do it with 10 or 15 and absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith and plan of action."  Fidel Castro

If you believe Wikipedia, Casual Friday, and its bastard child Dress-Down Friday or Casual Day, were born in the US in the 1940s and given new life doing the dot-com boom of the late Twentieth Century.

Corporations and government departments around the world adopted Casual Friday in the vain hope that it would somehow boost morale and productivity among their staff - as if coming into work wearing jeans, t-shirts and sneakers on a Friday could somehow mitigate the spirit-raping, faeces-eating, face-glassing, rectum-invading despair of the modern corporate workplace.

I personally believe that Casual Friday was the opening salvo in a vicious dirty war that has reached its peak in Flexi-Desking (and its illegitimate offspring the 'clean-desk policy').

Yeah, I see it now - let us wear our comfy tops and jeans, and then when we're all happy, pliant and relaxed in our expandable waistbands...BANG take our desks away!!!

The fact that Casual Friday became popular during one of the most insidious of all the Fin De Siecle bubbles means it is ripe and ready to be euthanized – sooner rather than later.

A mercy killing is on its way, and it's called Formal Friday.  Formal Friday is Casual Friday's Jack Kervokian. Structured, tailored clothing is its carbon monoxide thingamajig.

Let us restore dignity, style and discomfort to the workplace - we must never forget Friday is still a work day and that the weekend starts on Saturday.

As of NOW, the following apparel will be banned from the workplace (and not just on Friday):

•               Denim (in all its manifestations - jackets, trousers, jeans, shorts and skirts, black, blue, faded or stonewashed) – no denim imitations either. Frayed hems will be met with public flogging

•               T-shirts

•               Trousers worn without a belt

•               Hoodies and any other 'polar fleece' items - The word 'Kathmandu' on clothing will be grounds for punishment along the lines of having to unload the communal dishwasher FOREVER

•               Chinos or Cargo pants

•               Sneakers, runners, Ugg boots

•               Too-short skirts

The following (non gender-specific) items will be encouraged, if not mandatory:

•               Tailored suits

•               Slacks, shirts, belts

•               Pinky rings

•               Cravats, ties, bow ties and kipper ties

•               French cuffs with cufflinks

•               Tie bars and tie pins

•               Pocket kerchiefs

•               Socks with garters / Stockings with suspenders / girdles and corsets

•               Cocktail dresses, pencil skirts and high heels

•               Monocles, spats, patent leather shoes, hats and flowers in lapels

•               Canes, large umbrellas, pocket fob watches

•               Silk scarves, gloves

Let the battle for hearts, minds and wardrobes begin.

Red Karpitz - President and Founder of the Formal Friday Movement (FFM)
Dusty Venetian - Vice-President of the Formal Friday Movement (FFM), Media Relations Advisor (ie Chief Propagandist from the Ministry of Truth), Sartorial Svengali to young men everywhere.


PS - looks like someone beat us to it, Red. Check out this entry on Urban Dictionary - Formal Friday

An Emergency in Slow Motion - making psychobiography the new literary black

Those who know the life and art of photographer Diane Arbus will be more than familiar with the sadness, the all-pervasive melancholy and the strangely enjoyable feeling of having your internal organs shift every time you look at her work.

Two books of her photography, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972) and Diane Arbus: Magazine Work (1984), published by her estate (administered by her daughter Doon Arbus) provide a clear and concise introduction to her work. Diane Arbus : a biography (1984) by Patricia Bosworth is a fairly conventional but thorough and readable account of Arbus' life (and relationship with her immediate family), detailing the what, the when and the how but very, very short on the why of Arbus' work - or her appalling death.

For Diane Arbus committed suicide in 1971. She was found in the bath by her lover, artist Marvin Israel, with both her wrists cut, the post-mortem revealing the presence of two kinds of barbiturates in her system.

I confess I've been morbidly fascinated by Arbus' art, life and death since my early twenties. Her photographs of the mentally retarded, grotesque carnival acts, twins, triplets, transvestites, everyday New Yorkers and celebrities are arresting, moving but also very, very repellent. They're almost pure negative emotion and misery with not one tiny interest in capturing calm or prettiness. She is the anti-Avedon.

An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus (2011) by William Todd Schultz is an exquisitely written and (I don't want to say it, but I will) brave attempt to understand what motivated this desperately unhappy and very complicated artist.

Once more, an Arbus biographer is denied the assistance and involvement of her estate (which is what hampered the Bosworth bio), but Schultz is aided by the recollections of Arbus' psychotherapist, Helen Boigon, whom he met before she died in 2005, and of the book Revelations (2003), published by the Arbus estate, and which is richer in content and analysis than the previous published collections, including quotes and commentary from Arbus' photographic subjects, friends and lovers.

The author goes straight to her work and what it reveals. He analyses the responses of her subjects (who can just as easily be considered her victims), deconstructing her complex relationships with everyone who came into her orbit, always using psychological theory (Klein, Freud, Jung) to anchor and support his analysis. There is the inevitable comparison with that other suicidal artist, Sylvia Plath, but the connections and parallels make sense here.

But this is no hoary old artist-as-depressive chestnut. This is an analytically rigourous look at the nexus of creativity and mental illness. The final portrait of Arbus that emerges (neurotic, sexually troubled, promiscuous, manipulative, needy) is as interesting and as gruesomely compelling as her art.

Big shout out to my adopted Gen Y 'son', Red Karpitz for gifting me this extraordinary book as a belated Christmas present. Well chosen. I enjoyed every word of it. Love, Dusty.

Much of a mulchness - playing in the garden is the funnest thing of all.

Five years ago I said I would never make another New Year's resolution, commitment, promise or undertaking. This year, I said "Bollocks to that!" and made a whole lot of resolutions / commitments / promises / undertakings - one of which was "to play in my garden more". By 'playing', I mean weeding, pruning, watering (not just a once-a-week splash with a watering can, but an actual hose with a proper nozzle and everything, and now made easier with the lifting of restrictions in Melbourne), planting seasonal colour, chucking in some fertilizer and laying down mulch. Honestly, I was a very cursory gardener - half-hearted at best, neglectful at worst.

I am aided by the presence of a great Plants Plus nursery just a two minute drive away. I don't know about other Plants Plus nurseries, but the one on Rathmines Road, Hawthorn, near Auburn Road, is staffed by the friendliest and most knowledgable nursery folk I've ever met. And they carry stuff TO YOUR CAR! Noice. The short shorts on the hot young eye-candy horticulturalists also help.

I have a pretty decent Bunnings nearby and when you can find someone to help, they're usually pretty good. In fact, they're pretty awesome - but only if you can find someone.

So, in the last few weeks, I have had a go at playing in my garden.

Pre-new year, I'd given my garden the proverbial 'Brazillian' with my fancy pruning shears, cutting everything right back to bare branches (geraniums, roses, daisies and masses of unidentified ground-cover), and giving my pavers a good scrub. This meant I could look at it clearly and start planning my next phase of attack.

Last week I was ably aided by my older sister and keen gardener, Musty Venetian, who was visiting from interstate. She helped me weed, showed me how to dig in Dynamic Lifter and helped me choose and lay down some mulch. Musty also taught me not to be afraid of colour, so we chucked in some bold and bright petunias and impatiens in shady spots. Mint-basil was also planted, though I am still dubious about this one - is it mint? Or is it basil? If it is both, then it is neither, surely? And if a tree falls in the forest, would Gina Rinehart hear it? Or care? Apologies for my philosophical digression...

Many thanks and a big shout-out to Musty for her back-breaking efforts. Couldn't have done it without you, sis'.

Needless to say, the garden is looking better and healthier, but like a person just coming out of an illness with a clean bill of health, it will take some time before it is truly beautiful and rosy again. I can't wait.

There will be piccies, so stay tuned.

Recommendation for everybody - Songs for Nobodies

Please please please please please (no, this is not a James Brown homage) Melburnians, do yourselves a favour and go and see Songs for Nobodies at the Fairfax Studio, Arts Centre before it closes this weekend.

Written by playwright / Australian theatre-luvvy stalwart Joanna Murray-Smith and performed by Bernadette Robinson (Who? I know, I know, it's obscene I hadn't heard of her before), this tribute to Judy Garland, Patsy Cline, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday and Maria Callas is told (and sung - Oh my God, how it is sung) through the stories of five ordinary women whose lives briefly intersect with those of the twentieth century's most famous and talented divas. Ms Robinson performs all the parts. And when I say 'perform', I mean perform - she does NOT merely impersonate (think Little Voice), she inhabits.

I'm a Patsy Cline fan, so any rendition of "Crazy" is going to make me a wee bit weepy, but this one had me reaching for my handkerchief after only ten seconds. By the time Ms Robinson got to Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit", my sleeves were sodden beyond repair. I was a mess by the end of it. And if you have half a soul, you will be too.

Minor quibble - why the Arts Centre saw fit to warn patrons of the non-nicotine cigarette-smoking on stage (all three seconds of Ms Robinson's shallow, girly puffs) only proves we are turning into a nation of sooks and need to harden up.

Go and see it NOW.

(Now) Star Voyager - ACMI AKA Nerdfest 2012.

Anyone who has read my profile or who has caught a glimpse of my bookcase knows I have fairly dilettantish interests. In amongst the books on American mid-century furniture design or 1970s Europorn, there will the odd book on Soviet space exploration or doomed Antarctic expeditions led by clueless Englishmen with names like Hall and Oates. So it shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me and my better half, Muddy Karpitz, that last Sunday we checked out Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

As the tagline to the exhibition says, it's a "journey through the fact and fiction of space exploration from Fritz Lang to the moon landing, to Star Trek and Total Recall."

In short – this is a real nerd-fest of Asimovian proportions.

Highlights include an extraordinary piece of silent film from Denmark, Himmelskibet (A Trip to Mars) (1918), beautifully restored by the Danish Film Institute; archival footage from the Soviet Union in which we catch the briefest glimpse of Sergei Korolev, the elusive and enigmatic "Chief Designer" of their space program, whose identity the Soviet government kept secret until years after his death, and a copy of correspondence between rocket engineer Werner Von Braun (AKA NASA's favourite Nazi) and a young fan-boy from America's mid-west who would later emigrate to Australia and settle in Horsham!

As expected, iconic SF films like Stanley Kubrik's '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Solaris' (1972) get a look in, but for a really haunting cinematic experience, the experimental film "Star City" by British filmmakers Jane and Louise Wilson, a four-screen installation piece depicting the now empty and ghostly Russian cosmonaut training facility, is worth the price of admission alone.

The exhibition finishes this weekend, so use your Australia Day holiday to check it out. Kids holiday workshops like Kids in the Studio - Space Explorers: The Ultimate Space Adventure - finish on Friday 27 January 2012.