Walking to work this morning, I crossed a side street and out of nowhere came an ambulance which almost knocked me down. Instead of feeling the adrenalin surge through my veins, urging me to flee this life-threatening situation, I stood in the middle of the road thinking, 'Ah yes, that would have been a good definition of irony if that ambulance had killed me, as ambulances are meant to save lives not take them.'
When I was about 11, my parents explained to me what irony is using that very same definition. It's probably not the most acute one out there, but I still think of it whenever I need to quickly assess if a scenario is truly ironic or just something Alanis Morisette might have come up with when she was 19.
I can still picture the post-dinner, living room scene where the concept was illuminated for me - I had probably interrupted Mum when she was trying to read, and she would have been umming and ahhing and trying to throw the question to my Dad, hollering over her shoulder, "Geoff! Lorelei wants to know what irony is! You tell her!" And he would have been washing up, and they would have shouted back and forth between kitchen and living room for a while before collating their ideas and finally arriving at 'being run over by an ambulance'. And I'm very grateful, because I feel like if I hadn't grasped the idea then, I would have really struggled throughout the rest of the nineties when the fervent appreciation I had of Winona Ryder's work hinged crucially on my understanding of how cool and ironic she was. (Now, I would suggest that in order to appreciate her more recent films you need an entirely different sense of irony than that which was required at the Beetlejuice/Heathers/Reality Bites level, but try explaining that kind of subtlety to a kid. It's not that she's been run over by an ambulance exactly, but there's at least been a moped involved. I still love her very much though.)
I can't help but speculate that if Mum and Dad had checked Wikipedia before answering my innocent query (so the internet wasn't invented yet, but stay with me) they'd have had trouble trying to explain THIS humdinger of a definition of 'irony' to me:
If someone were to go on a trip and decide not to take a plane because they are worried about crashing, and take a bus instead, it would be ironic if a plane hit the bus they took, thereby realizing their fears of crashing with a plane, despite measures taken at the outset of the journey to avoid such a fate.
I hate to state the obvious, but it seems to me that the only known truth in this world is that Wikipedia entries never glimmer with the clarity of professionally-edited text.
But power to the people all the same. It's still always the first place I look.
Monday, 14 July 2008
Friday, 11 July 2008
Frances, Saffron and Rosemary
In May 2002, three young women - Frances, Saffron and Rosemary (not their real names) - met together on a Hove Street deck to discuss writing and the ideas of Anais Nin. Their conversation was published in Issue Three of Semper Floreat. Now, almost a year and a half later, they regroup to discuss where they are feministically, and define their understanding of what an Independent Woman is.
This is the introduction I wrote to go with the transcript of a conversation I had with two friends in Brisbane in 2003, which was never published as we intended it to be. I publish it now as a tribute to both the young ladies involved. We're all now 28 and living in different cities, and I think it's pretty amazing to read what you were thinking about and talking about five years ago (this recognition keeps me going in my often tediously time-consuming diary obsession). I'm still thinking and talking about the same things, delivering the same bromides that seemed so much fresher then, and gripping (but perhaps less tightly now) onto similar ideas and hopes.
I realise it might not make much sense to the general reader, but I wanted to put it up as an homage to what we were trying to do back then. In the transcript below, we are 23, journalistic, and still obsessed with Anais Nin.
I should declare from the outset that I predictably chose the Salinger-inspired name 'Frances' as my pseudonym. My two insightful friends shall remain anonymous unless they choose to reveal themselves in the comments section.
24th October 2003
SAFFRON: So, just to recap, in our last discussion I think you, Frances, were 22, and I was 21, and you and I were writers, and Rosemary was a musician. We all lived with our partners, and Rosemary was engaged. At present, none of us is living with anyone anymore.
FRANCES: So Saffron, do you identify as being an Independent Woman, in the way we mean it?
SAFFRON: Trying, absolutely. Getting there. I mean, the whole 'JB Hi-Fi' fiasco today ...
FRANCES: What happened today, Saffron, explain it.
SAFFRON: Well, it was my first Independent Woman purchase, along with a curtain rod and a phone cord; various things. A power pack. Buying shit that you actually need for yourself, not bumming off people like Jack anymore, entering a good phase. I decided to buy these things for myself. Frances said the argument I had with the sales clerk was even more independent.
FRANCES: I admired your nobility and graciousness in the shop. I would have become really belligerent and accepted that I couldn't get a new one, but you stuck to your guns.
SAFFRON: Well, I'm poor at the moment, and it's my birthday and I was determined to get one, because I'd bought two already and I'd done my research, that's the whole thing, before I bought those things ...
FRANCES: She's a journalist!
SAFFRON: Well, yeah, and I'm right. The customer's always right.
FRANCES: You've often exhibited Independent Woman characteristics, Rosemary. Do you feel more independent as the days go by? You've always seemed independent.
ROSEMARY: I'm kind of independent. I'm seeing someone who's independent, it's the death of the old Rosemary.
SAFFRON: Can you, though, live in the same town as somebody and be independent? That, I think, is the new question.
FRANCES: It is! It actually is! Because we've all tried that. Well, maybe we realised we didn't want that, and that's due to a hole in ourselves.
ROSEMARY: Depends who's in control in relationships.
FRANCES: I'm realising how much I become the person I'm living with, how much they affect me, whether I'm in a relationship or not. Because I project myself onto them, they have the power and control because I let them. I don't plan to do that anymore, but ... well ... I don't plan to do that anymore ... but, well ... it's hard because you love someone and you want them to protect you, almost ...
SAFFRON: But I think you can be an Independent Woman if you have someone who's an independent man, and I think that's the whole crux of it, and that's what Anais was getting at with the New Man and the New Woman, which was the foundation of our last discussion, and that's really the only way to achieve it, and you have to take into consideration that maybe the guys we were with weren't feeling like independent men, and we weren't feeling like independent women, and therefore the new plan, the new phase, couldn't really work, because nobody was independent at that point. It does take time.
FRANCES: So you're suggesting that everyone just needs to be happy with themselves. Do you agree? Yes, with a raise of the eyebrows, she agrees.
SAFFRON: But what now?
FRANCES: Do your own work, start your own stuff ... well, continue starting your own stuff, cause we've all been doing heaps of shit, but somehow, in my case anyway, I feel like I've been drowning in all the other stuff, I dunno, love and etc, I'd like to try it on my own, like I'm actually happy, for once, happy to be on my own. I feel actually on my own for the first time in three years or something.
SAFFRON: I just wanna say that I think another thing is when you don't separate your work from your life anymore, and when it's all-encompassing, and work is not a chore, and basically when you're doing what you really want to do, then it becomes easier because there's not that distinction of okay, I'm focusing on love, or okay, I'm focusing on work - it's everything, and therefore all you're really doing is focusing on yourself, and that's the best thing that I think you can do and ...
FRANCES: ... and the food arrives. Yum, the eggplant gnocchi and the ...
ROSEMARY: (muffled) salad.
SAFFRON: If you're focusing on what you really want to do yourself then the other stuff just does work out, because you're not putting your life into sections any more, and it's just your life. And that's really cool.
FRANCES: Exactly what it should be.
That's where it ended, as obviously lunch was more important. The two things I realise from reading back on this are:
1) I'm not sure if I got my speeches, my lines, from just being brutally honest with myself, or if they were memorised from some Salinger story like most of the things I said during 1994-2005, but either way I want to go and give myself a big hug because those words of vulnerability break my heart, as does my mis-use of the word 'belligerent'.
2) I get the sense that we will probably still be talking about these same things when we're fifty and sixty.
I hope we won't be, as it just seems so exhausting. Although I have to say that if a big plate of eggplant gnocchi times itself like this each time the topic comes up, it mightn't be so terrible to discuss it till we're dead after all, I guess.
This is the introduction I wrote to go with the transcript of a conversation I had with two friends in Brisbane in 2003, which was never published as we intended it to be. I publish it now as a tribute to both the young ladies involved. We're all now 28 and living in different cities, and I think it's pretty amazing to read what you were thinking about and talking about five years ago (this recognition keeps me going in my often tediously time-consuming diary obsession). I'm still thinking and talking about the same things, delivering the same bromides that seemed so much fresher then, and gripping (but perhaps less tightly now) onto similar ideas and hopes.
I realise it might not make much sense to the general reader, but I wanted to put it up as an homage to what we were trying to do back then. In the transcript below, we are 23, journalistic, and still obsessed with Anais Nin.
I should declare from the outset that I predictably chose the Salinger-inspired name 'Frances' as my pseudonym. My two insightful friends shall remain anonymous unless they choose to reveal themselves in the comments section.
24th October 2003
SAFFRON: So, just to recap, in our last discussion I think you, Frances, were 22, and I was 21, and you and I were writers, and Rosemary was a musician. We all lived with our partners, and Rosemary was engaged. At present, none of us is living with anyone anymore.
FRANCES: So Saffron, do you identify as being an Independent Woman, in the way we mean it?
SAFFRON: Trying, absolutely. Getting there. I mean, the whole 'JB Hi-Fi' fiasco today ...
FRANCES: What happened today, Saffron, explain it.
SAFFRON: Well, it was my first Independent Woman purchase, along with a curtain rod and a phone cord; various things. A power pack. Buying shit that you actually need for yourself, not bumming off people like Jack anymore, entering a good phase. I decided to buy these things for myself. Frances said the argument I had with the sales clerk was even more independent.
FRANCES: I admired your nobility and graciousness in the shop. I would have become really belligerent and accepted that I couldn't get a new one, but you stuck to your guns.
SAFFRON: Well, I'm poor at the moment, and it's my birthday and I was determined to get one, because I'd bought two already and I'd done my research, that's the whole thing, before I bought those things ...
FRANCES: She's a journalist!
SAFFRON: Well, yeah, and I'm right. The customer's always right.
FRANCES: You've often exhibited Independent Woman characteristics, Rosemary. Do you feel more independent as the days go by? You've always seemed independent.
ROSEMARY: I'm kind of independent. I'm seeing someone who's independent, it's the death of the old Rosemary.
SAFFRON: Can you, though, live in the same town as somebody and be independent? That, I think, is the new question.
FRANCES: It is! It actually is! Because we've all tried that. Well, maybe we realised we didn't want that, and that's due to a hole in ourselves.
ROSEMARY: Depends who's in control in relationships.
FRANCES: I'm realising how much I become the person I'm living with, how much they affect me, whether I'm in a relationship or not. Because I project myself onto them, they have the power and control because I let them. I don't plan to do that anymore, but ... well ... I don't plan to do that anymore ... but, well ... it's hard because you love someone and you want them to protect you, almost ...
SAFFRON: But I think you can be an Independent Woman if you have someone who's an independent man, and I think that's the whole crux of it, and that's what Anais was getting at with the New Man and the New Woman, which was the foundation of our last discussion, and that's really the only way to achieve it, and you have to take into consideration that maybe the guys we were with weren't feeling like independent men, and we weren't feeling like independent women, and therefore the new plan, the new phase, couldn't really work, because nobody was independent at that point. It does take time.
FRANCES: So you're suggesting that everyone just needs to be happy with themselves. Do you agree? Yes, with a raise of the eyebrows, she agrees.
SAFFRON: But what now?
FRANCES: Do your own work, start your own stuff ... well, continue starting your own stuff, cause we've all been doing heaps of shit, but somehow, in my case anyway, I feel like I've been drowning in all the other stuff, I dunno, love and etc, I'd like to try it on my own, like I'm actually happy, for once, happy to be on my own. I feel actually on my own for the first time in three years or something.
SAFFRON: I just wanna say that I think another thing is when you don't separate your work from your life anymore, and when it's all-encompassing, and work is not a chore, and basically when you're doing what you really want to do, then it becomes easier because there's not that distinction of okay, I'm focusing on love, or okay, I'm focusing on work - it's everything, and therefore all you're really doing is focusing on yourself, and that's the best thing that I think you can do and ...
FRANCES: ... and the food arrives. Yum, the eggplant gnocchi and the ...
ROSEMARY: (muffled) salad.
SAFFRON: If you're focusing on what you really want to do yourself then the other stuff just does work out, because you're not putting your life into sections any more, and it's just your life. And that's really cool.
FRANCES: Exactly what it should be.
That's where it ended, as obviously lunch was more important. The two things I realise from reading back on this are:
1) I'm not sure if I got my speeches, my lines, from just being brutally honest with myself, or if they were memorised from some Salinger story like most of the things I said during 1994-2005, but either way I want to go and give myself a big hug because those words of vulnerability break my heart, as does my mis-use of the word 'belligerent'.
2) I get the sense that we will probably still be talking about these same things when we're fifty and sixty.
I hope we won't be, as it just seems so exhausting. Although I have to say that if a big plate of eggplant gnocchi times itself like this each time the topic comes up, it mightn't be so terrible to discuss it till we're dead after all, I guess.
Friday, 4 July 2008
Friday
My clothes-hanging apparatus has just fallen down. This is a common theme in my life which I have learnt to laugh at ever since being almost killed in 2002, when I was literally pinned down by dresses, unable to move, in the bedroom of the second-floor apartment I lived in with my boyfriend, Jack. Luckily, he was home at the time to rescue me, weeping and terrified by the downright force of my own wardrobe.
The perpetrator that time was just an old French dressing screen, three-panelled with hinges, gutted of its actual screens so that only the wooden frame remained. I dragged it home from the famed 'Junkie Eviction Sale' on Gladstone Road the year before. The Junkie Eviction Sale - so named because someone (was it Hannah? Beck? Blake? Or Jack?) came breathlessly running in one day to announce to everyone that 'the woman who owns that weird op-shop on Gladstone Rd is being evicted because she hasn't paid her rent because she's a junkie, and so everything in the shop is 50 cents!'
Much of my wardrobe up until the time I left for New York last year dated from this period. The amount of pure second-hand gold we all got at that sale, watched over by beady-eyed detective-looking dudes who couldn't give a shit about mink and gloves and beads and records and only cared about the value of the real estate, has never been matched for sheer volume by any op-shop outing before or since.
Literally everything was for sale in this place, shop fittings and all. I wandered downstairs to investigate what was beneath the shop, and it was there I found the French screen along with an old wooden easel. I dragged them both all the way back to Ruth St where they got dumped beneath my house and sat there purposelessly for half a year. When I moved to Brighton Rd the following year, I announced to Jack, "This will be perfect to hang my clothes on!" And sweet as he was, Jack helped me assemble and hang, and acted as if my idea was as brilliant as I proclaimed it to be, even though he is an engineer by profession and would have known from the beginning that the structure was unsafe for the volume I intended to burden it with.
I piled it so full of dresses and coats and scarves and hats that I had a special technique whenever I needed to pluck an item off - the whole thing needed to be handled correctly and gingerly, and then re-balanced in a very specific way so everything would stay standing. If someone wanted to borrow a dress, I allowed it, but only if I was present to supervise the delicate operation of browsing. The problem escalated because Jack and I loved to op-shop, and every Saturday we'd buy the newspaper, get out our yellow highlighters, and mark all the garage sales in Brisbane. We'd be out for three hours, and when we returned I piled more and more onto the French screen. It was bursting. The impression you got when you entered the bedroom was that it was a big walk-in wardrobe, with a bed in it.
I always seem to be present in the room when my life falls apart, and it occurs to me that this is because I need to be taught a lesson first-hand. When the French screen finally fell, ravaged by the weight it was carrying, I saw it all happening before my very eyes. The gentle swaying and unbalancing, and then the topple. I ran forward to catch it, confident I could save everything, but I had underestimated how heavy it would be. Even with prior training in boxercise, which builds upper-body strength, I was overwhelmed, and crashed to the floor, choking on the many kilograms of fabric which still unfortunately seemed to retain that overpowering op-shop mothball scent. I remember seeing a whole bunch of those headlines - which are usually reserved for the deaths of anorexic models - flash into my head: Killed for fashion! Dying for style! I lay there in shock, the first of many subsequent lucky escapes to come.
Now, back to the present, where just an hour ago I walked into my room carrying a nice pot of tea. I closed the door behind me, some might say a little too forcefully but my hands were full so I couldn't manage to do it softly. Instead, I did an elegant little backwards kick with my foot, perfected over many years - but this time it proved to be a sinister death knell.
I saw it all happen. First, the sound of the door shutting; then suddenly, an almighty crash. The nail that was holding the piece of washing line which was acting as one arm of my clothes-hanging structure, was ripped straight out of the wall. The legitimate clothes-hanging part, which is one of those stand-alone, knock-up things you can buy for about $30 at K-Mart, was attached to the clothes-line part by my pathetic anti-Girl Guide rope-tying ability, so it co-dependently crashed down with it. If I wasn't better-trained to deal with this kind of emergency, I would have been quite hysterical, but I just calmly piled all the dresses on my bed, the precious new New York ones on top; the coats and scarves (I don't even know why I am harbouring coats and scarves in the current climate I'm living in) next to them. The clothes remain piled up on my bed, and I will probably sleep in there with them tonight, which is romantic and quite fitting really. I have somehow acquired far too many clothes again. But the fact is that something deep inside me needs to be surrounded by dresses and fabrics, and I can't really help it.
The other thing I thought of when this happened (besides the realisation that I still haven't learnt my lesson from all this) was a thing I read last week in the Good Weekend magazine that columnist Maggie Alderson said. She revealed that she is frightened of the ephemeral reality of vintage clothes - that one day, they're going to run out, and soon. If you're interested in what I think (and of course you are) this is utter rubbish. Not only is the innate nature of vintage clothing that it can never run out (vintage clothing being by definition the clothing that is second-hand, of a previous fashion and thereby limitless as clothes just continue to be made) but attitudes like this turn the whole scenario into a snobby and ridiculous undertaking, where vintage means a $200 floral fifties dress which is the example that Alderson mentions. I love buying proper quality pieces and a dress I bought in Berlin is certainly of this ilk, but the majority of this kind of talk comes from the arrogance of under-rating the imagination and flair and fun of actual op-shopping as hunting, where you can take second-hand clothes of any era and make them amazing if you are clever. Poverty enhances fashion style wonderfully in this sense, and frankly, if we hadn't been so poor over the years most of us wouldn't be anywhere near as stylish as we appear to be to the average observer. It makes me think of a book title I've always adored - Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means. I love it, and with that, I'll finish.
POST SCRIPT: I had wanted to include a photo of the disaster zone earlier, but I had to quickly run out. Here it is now though, so you can see my favourite thing - the neatly positioned 7" record sleeve of Kate Bush's 1985 single Running Up That Hill in the top lefthand corner, where Kate appears to be aiming directly at my ill-fated wardrobe structure.
Here it is in close up. I prefer to imagine today's disaster was all her doing, like in Ancient Greece where they understood tragedies as being due to the gods' anger, which meant no-one had to face up to bad planning. I guess she was just jealous of my large selection of leotards.
The perpetrator that time was just an old French dressing screen, three-panelled with hinges, gutted of its actual screens so that only the wooden frame remained. I dragged it home from the famed 'Junkie Eviction Sale' on Gladstone Road the year before. The Junkie Eviction Sale - so named because someone (was it Hannah? Beck? Blake? Or Jack?) came breathlessly running in one day to announce to everyone that 'the woman who owns that weird op-shop on Gladstone Rd is being evicted because she hasn't paid her rent because she's a junkie, and so everything in the shop is 50 cents!'
Much of my wardrobe up until the time I left for New York last year dated from this period. The amount of pure second-hand gold we all got at that sale, watched over by beady-eyed detective-looking dudes who couldn't give a shit about mink and gloves and beads and records and only cared about the value of the real estate, has never been matched for sheer volume by any op-shop outing before or since.
Literally everything was for sale in this place, shop fittings and all. I wandered downstairs to investigate what was beneath the shop, and it was there I found the French screen along with an old wooden easel. I dragged them both all the way back to Ruth St where they got dumped beneath my house and sat there purposelessly for half a year. When I moved to Brighton Rd the following year, I announced to Jack, "This will be perfect to hang my clothes on!" And sweet as he was, Jack helped me assemble and hang, and acted as if my idea was as brilliant as I proclaimed it to be, even though he is an engineer by profession and would have known from the beginning that the structure was unsafe for the volume I intended to burden it with.
I piled it so full of dresses and coats and scarves and hats that I had a special technique whenever I needed to pluck an item off - the whole thing needed to be handled correctly and gingerly, and then re-balanced in a very specific way so everything would stay standing. If someone wanted to borrow a dress, I allowed it, but only if I was present to supervise the delicate operation of browsing. The problem escalated because Jack and I loved to op-shop, and every Saturday we'd buy the newspaper, get out our yellow highlighters, and mark all the garage sales in Brisbane. We'd be out for three hours, and when we returned I piled more and more onto the French screen. It was bursting. The impression you got when you entered the bedroom was that it was a big walk-in wardrobe, with a bed in it.
I always seem to be present in the room when my life falls apart, and it occurs to me that this is because I need to be taught a lesson first-hand. When the French screen finally fell, ravaged by the weight it was carrying, I saw it all happening before my very eyes. The gentle swaying and unbalancing, and then the topple. I ran forward to catch it, confident I could save everything, but I had underestimated how heavy it would be. Even with prior training in boxercise, which builds upper-body strength, I was overwhelmed, and crashed to the floor, choking on the many kilograms of fabric which still unfortunately seemed to retain that overpowering op-shop mothball scent. I remember seeing a whole bunch of those headlines - which are usually reserved for the deaths of anorexic models - flash into my head: Killed for fashion! Dying for style! I lay there in shock, the first of many subsequent lucky escapes to come.
Now, back to the present, where just an hour ago I walked into my room carrying a nice pot of tea. I closed the door behind me, some might say a little too forcefully but my hands were full so I couldn't manage to do it softly. Instead, I did an elegant little backwards kick with my foot, perfected over many years - but this time it proved to be a sinister death knell.
I saw it all happen. First, the sound of the door shutting; then suddenly, an almighty crash. The nail that was holding the piece of washing line which was acting as one arm of my clothes-hanging structure, was ripped straight out of the wall. The legitimate clothes-hanging part, which is one of those stand-alone, knock-up things you can buy for about $30 at K-Mart, was attached to the clothes-line part by my pathetic anti-Girl Guide rope-tying ability, so it co-dependently crashed down with it. If I wasn't better-trained to deal with this kind of emergency, I would have been quite hysterical, but I just calmly piled all the dresses on my bed, the precious new New York ones on top; the coats and scarves (I don't even know why I am harbouring coats and scarves in the current climate I'm living in) next to them. The clothes remain piled up on my bed, and I will probably sleep in there with them tonight, which is romantic and quite fitting really. I have somehow acquired far too many clothes again. But the fact is that something deep inside me needs to be surrounded by dresses and fabrics, and I can't really help it.
The other thing I thought of when this happened (besides the realisation that I still haven't learnt my lesson from all this) was a thing I read last week in the Good Weekend magazine that columnist Maggie Alderson said. She revealed that she is frightened of the ephemeral reality of vintage clothes - that one day, they're going to run out, and soon. If you're interested in what I think (and of course you are) this is utter rubbish. Not only is the innate nature of vintage clothing that it can never run out (vintage clothing being by definition the clothing that is second-hand, of a previous fashion and thereby limitless as clothes just continue to be made) but attitudes like this turn the whole scenario into a snobby and ridiculous undertaking, where vintage means a $200 floral fifties dress which is the example that Alderson mentions. I love buying proper quality pieces and a dress I bought in Berlin is certainly of this ilk, but the majority of this kind of talk comes from the arrogance of under-rating the imagination and flair and fun of actual op-shopping as hunting, where you can take second-hand clothes of any era and make them amazing if you are clever. Poverty enhances fashion style wonderfully in this sense, and frankly, if we hadn't been so poor over the years most of us wouldn't be anywhere near as stylish as we appear to be to the average observer. It makes me think of a book title I've always adored - Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means. I love it, and with that, I'll finish.
POST SCRIPT: I had wanted to include a photo of the disaster zone earlier, but I had to quickly run out. Here it is now though, so you can see my favourite thing - the neatly positioned 7" record sleeve of Kate Bush's 1985 single Running Up That Hill in the top lefthand corner, where Kate appears to be aiming directly at my ill-fated wardrobe structure.
Here it is in close up. I prefer to imagine today's disaster was all her doing, like in Ancient Greece where they understood tragedies as being due to the gods' anger, which meant no-one had to face up to bad planning. I guess she was just jealous of my large selection of leotards.
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