Coils Ain’t Coils Part 2 – It’s “Me Monster” time…

Howdy Folks!

Ta da! I DID it! I finally got my special Curly Girl haircut at Neel Loves Curls, and I can confirm it was worth the wait. Check the photo below if you don’t believe me.

 

What can I say? This guy is seriously passionate about curly hair and the Curly Girl (CG) method and will talk your leg off about his conversion to the “CG Religion”. Because I’d already started ‘practising’ as a CG and have a good regimen for my hair, I think I might have stolen his thunder. Sorry, Neel, you’re preaching to the choir. Really, I’m a convert.

He has a copy of Lorraine Massey’s Curly Girl handbook which he made me look at while I waited my turn. Having looked at it in depth now, I might remove it from my Amazon wish-list and try and score a library copy instead. I think I know all this stuff already from countless CG internet sites. Still, it’s good to say “I’ve looked at it”.

Neel’s salon is suitably theatrically decorated - clearly to match his own fabulous personality, but also pretty basic and a comfy in its setup. It’s essentially a space above a shop (Quick Brown Fox on Brunswick Street). It consists of two chairs, and one basin so there’s a wait if there’s someone at the sink. Don’t expect super-trendy, high-tech fancy-shmancy salon trimmings. He DID say he and his business partner Christine are considering a bigger salon space with an extra chair for a colouring specialist. I welcome this, as the place where I get my colour done is rough with the towelling off, acts offended that I bring along my own sulphate/paraben/silicone-free products whilst NOT offering a chemical-free alternative AND they think it’s weird that I don’t let them dry it off with a hairdryer or straighten it any more. If Neel gets a CG-friendly colourist, then the experience will be complete!

Neel looked at the photos of inverted bobs I took in and seized on one in particular that he and his partner Christine both loved. That’s what he gave me and I am very happy with it. Seriously, the guy can cut hair. Dry cutting is so much gentler and quicker than a wet cut. Neel sculpted my hair like a gardener doing exotic topiary on a garden hedge, and removed the boxyness/pyramid shape instantly. I think it will grow out beautifully as a result, and maintain its shape for a few months at least (I hope).

He then washed my hair at the basin. He asked if I wanted a co-wash or a low-poo shampoo wash. I opted for a co-wash, just to see how he did it. Basically he ‘washed’ my hair with conditioner instead of shampoo then conditioned it as normal. There was a lot of squishing and squelching and light-handed rinsing. He patted my hair dry with an old tea-towel then put me back in the chair to start the styling process. This was the most useful part of the experience and I learned a lot about styling in just 20 minutes with Neel.

Neel mixed/'cocktailed' a 20-cent coin-sized blob of Miessence gel with a generous  squirt of Jessicurl hair oil and really worked it into the wet hair, coating each hair strand by strand, then finger-curled it into spirals all really tightly from the scalp/crown. I sometimes do this at home, but it takes me ages. Neel did it in half the time. He then got about 10 Deva Clips and lifted the finger-curled swatches of hair and clipped them so that they sat off the scalp to dry. This adds volume, and given I am starting to thin out from hair loss, I can do with some volume, so I may grab some Deva clips when Muddy and I are next in the US and try this out myself.

I then sat under one of those wall-mounted hooded electric dryers for 10 minutes – Neel calls it the Darth Vader. Once done, Neel removed the clips then made me turn my head upside down so he could finish off the drying with a diffuser on a hand-held dryer. He used hot heat but minimal movement and no hand-touching of the curls. Two scrunches later, and we were finished. He even put a sticker badge with his logo on it on my cardie – cute.

All in all, a great experience. In the three days since I had my haircut, I’ve managed to mimic the same post-salon effect by conditioner-washing with stuff from the health food store and using a general dollop of hair “crack” – the  delightful ‘Knot Today’ leave-in conditioner by Kinky Curly, after which I dry my hair with an old t-shirt and a microfibre hood. The last step is to use massive amounts of gel and pomade and work it through to create lovely curls. And then…

Sit. Wait. Keep warm. Don’t touch your hair at all. Curls will follow.

Check out the pic again if you don’t believe me.

Mad Max 4 - Fury Road - a furious ride!

Howdy Folks, it’s exhortation time! I am exhorting you to drop everything and go see Mad Max 4: Fury Road.

Now that I've come down from the aural/visual/sensual high that is this extraordinary film, I urge every single one of you to head to the nearest big screen cinema and strap yourselves in for the cinematic ride of 2015. Fuck yeah!

Take your loved ones, your parents, your (older) children, your grandparents, your friends, and while you’re at it, your pets. Let George Miller take you through a crash-course in Directing Action Films 101.

It features real humans performing real stunts – and I mean seriously death-defying stuff. It uses minimal CGI. It features Charlize Theron rocking a gorgeously butch haircut, looking like the sun-kissed Amazon of the Veldt she is. It features the melancholically pretty and thankfully near-mute Tom Hardy as the eponymous Max. Megan Gale makes an appearance in the nuddy.

Strange as it sounds, there are quite a few nods to iconic silent films. Yes, you read correctly - silent films. In amongst the noise, the crunch and the crash, amidst the thrash of drums and electric guitars, there's some real visual poetry here.

Without giving too much away, the early scenes inside the Citadel look a lot like Fritz Lang’s classic Metropolis, and the henchmen perched atop the long swaying poles evoke the Keystone Kops or Buster Keaton-style antics from that same era. Muddy reckons they reminded him of Balinese fisherman hanging off fishing poles! In a pre-audio world, silent films told stories through physical action, body language and facial expression alone. No words required.

So much has been said about its feminist slant – brutal patriarchy overthrown by a ballsy chick, a pregnant supermodel-cum-Boudicca, a bunch of grannies on motorbikes and a couple of tag-along blokes lending their muscles on the journey – that I don’t need to add any more. If you’d like to read a good deconstruction of the film, then check out Anthony Lane’s review in the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/high-gear-current-cinema-anthony-lane

For me, the image of a girl madly clutching a handbag containing precious seedlings thirsting for soil and water is one of the film’s more poignant images. The film is full of these arresting moments that take you by surprise and make you think, but never slow the film down.

This is a stand-alone epic. No need to have seen the originals.

Check it out on the big screen while you can.

Coils ain’t coils. Going curly just got complicated…

Time to get confessional, peeps. And personal. Deeply personal.

Towards the end of last year I started noticing some serious moulting. Hair clumped around the shower drain, stray strands in food and a few more than usual wound around the teeth of my ‘afro’ comb. Not surprising, given hair loss is a product of hormonal change due to impending menopause (me) and stress (also me). We grow old, we grow anxious, and things drop off and fall apart. It’s life.

Still, there’s something confronting about losing your hair. I’m hardly going bald (not yet anyway) but running my fingers through my freshly blow-waved hair before a big event last year sent a chill up my spine. My hair never felt so thin, wispy and insubstantial. There’s a strange, primitive sense of diminution, a loss of vitality that goes hand in hand with losing your hair.

So I decided I would no longer blow-wave my hair, or lighten portions of it in an effort to ‘work’ with the grey (bleach can’t be good right?). No longer would I try for the sleek silver-fox look. I decided once and for all I would revert to my dark, adolescent curly locks.

Sounds like it should be easy. Wash, condition, chuck in some expensive salon-brand curling product and voila – instant rockin’ locks. Alas no, it wasn’t quite so easy.

Years of repeated bleaching, blow-drying and an irregular curl pattern (my hair is a mix of spirals, waves and coils) meant my hair needed serious attention – especially since the only hairdresser I trusted to cut my hair had gone back to the UK. Dry and damaged, plus no real haircut in months meant my hair was growing into a weird, fuzzy shape. I would go into work looking like a badly-cropped poodle then twist my hair into a messy pony tail at my desk. Depressing and despairing…

Enter the internet, the greatest tool bestowed upon the curious autodidact with too much free time.

I Googled ‘looking after damaged curly hair’ and discovered a curly-hair movement/ revolution/ renaissance/ reformation has been taking place right under my nose.

After years of being told to straighten their hair because it’s more WASP/ acceptable in the workplace/ professional/ sophisticated/ sexy etc. a whole bunch of angry ‘curlies’ have jettisoned their straightening irons and rediscovered their natural waves, kinks, coils, curls, spirals and twisty bits. They have binned the sulphate-containing shampoos and chemical conditioners, and embraced the natural (vegan!) stuff to manage their natural hair. I have lost count of the number of dedicated curly-hair websites.

I confess I found myself getting swept along by their fervour.

So based on an astonishing number of positive reviews on Amazon and the number of times it popped up on various websites, I started using the Kinky-Curly range of sulphate-free shampoo and conditioner (their leave-in conditioner ‘Knot Today’ is the crack-cocaine of curly hair) thoughtfully delivered by my ‘Amazon mule’ Red Karpitz. I noticed an immediate difference in my hair’s texture after only a few days.

The fervour took hold. Over the last few weeks I

binned my straightening irons.
stopped drying my hair with a hair dryer.
bought a microfiber ‘snood’ to towel-dry my hair.
started sleeping on a satin pillow-case.
joined three curly-hair forums and a curly girls Facebook group.
started using pomade as part of my styling regimen.
made an appointment to visit Neel Loves Curls – a dedicated curly hair cutter – in late May (birthday treat).
self-diagnosed my hair ‘type’ (not a joke). I believe I am a 3c/4a, low density, high porosity ‘coily’.

I am a woman obsessed.

I am also losing less hair.

What???!!! Not another rev-head exhibition, Dusty!

Oh yes, peeps, you read right: another exhibition to excite the rev-heads, petrol-heads, design buffs and motoring boffins. And it's only a two hour drive North of Melbourne in sunny Shepparton.

Muddy and I have just returned from a weekend away in fruit-canning country, where we enjoyed two remarkable exhibitions dedicated to car design and manufacture. Yep, TWO exhibitions.

The Shepparton Art Museum is hosting Dream Machines, a terrific collection of more than a hundred hand-drawn illustrations of cars - both concept and production vehicles from the 1940s to the 1970s - from America's iconic carmakers. The materials are pretty prosaic - pencils (graphite and colour), magic markers and ink pens and occasional watercolour brushwork - but the sketches are gorgeous and near-photographic in their precision. This is before CAD, people, when artists and designers drew this cool shit by hand.

A tasty accompaniment to this, is the amazing selection of fully-restored cars on show (4-5 actual real-life manufactured and fully restored cars featured among some the sketches in Dream Machines) at the Shepparton Motor Museum, just 10 minutes out of town on the main highway.

A $17 adult ticket buys you entry to both exhibitions - and you don't need to visit them on the same day.

Dusty says check them out.

(A pleasant surprise was discovering the work of a local artist, Jane Spencer, on display in the wing next to the Shepparton Art Museum. This talented local has some terrific landscapes and still-lives on show).

NGV exhibition in top gear!

Howdy culture vultures! It’s getting to that time of year – shorter days, cooler nights, brief sunny bursts punctuated by rainy afternoons. This means indoor pursuits like degustation dinners, museum visits, footy matches on Foxtel in pubs, open-fire trivia nights and art gallery crawls are just around the corner.

To kick-start (or indeed rev-up) your winter entertainment regimen, I highly recommend you get down to the National Gallery of Victoria (Ian Potter at Federation Square) and check out the exhibition Shifting Gear: Design, Innovation and the Australian Car which “presents some of our most iconic vehicles as objects of art and design”.

As the online catalogue says:

“Shifting Gear: Design, Innovation and the Australian Car, traces the development of the family car from its earliest form, as a steam-powered ‘horseless carriage’, through to its present-day role as a major design object and highly refined and efficient means of transport.”

Petrol heads, cultural historians, design buffs, boffins and engineering geeks will all find something to like here. It takes no more than an hour to enjoy the exhibits, and soak up some gorgeously restored works of engineering art.

Runs until 12 July 2015.