The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  At first I thought he had simply had too many 50-cent long-necks, but the more he explained the more he made sense. When the tiger tries to bite the hedgehog, it gets stuck in the tiger’s mouth, and the spikes get stuck in the tiger’s nose. As he explained this, he chewed on a stinky yellow strip of fish jerky—a delicacy that was stuck in the mouth of everyone at the bar: eight years of famine drives people to do some pretty horrifying stuff.

  Being stuck in the tiger’s mouth, though, is where North Korea wants to be. This means that even though the hedgehog is very small, he can control the direction the tiger heads in. “Hedgehogs are small but prickly,” concluded the man with a smug grin that made me think for a moment he was a French diplomat, even though he was short and Asian.

  Having discovered the essence of North Korea’s foreign policy (deep background research in North Korea is amazingly cheap—the whole conversation only cost me $3.50—even including the jerky, which had me “researching” Pyongyang’s plumbing systems for the rest of the night), it got me thinking. If America is the tiger and North Korea is a hedgehog, where does Australia fit in?

  A few days later, I was hanging out with a former Chinese military spy in Tiananmen Square (it’s a long story—but it ended with us being detained by police, of course). He started telling me about how he perceives China’s role in the world. “It’s like the tiger and the snake,” he said. Apparently, China is the snake—you can beat it with a stick, you can chop off its tail and it won’t die. And yet it can kill with just one bite which the tiger won’t even have seen coming.

  All this talk got me feeling sorry for tigers—after all, our success in the world is directly tied to the United States. Like it or not, Australia’s future does not bode well if our friend the tiger is limping around with a hedgehog in its mouth.

  So what exactly is Australia in this overly extended metaphor? I’d like to think Australia is a kookaburra, sitting high up on a distant tree, laughing at the rest of the animals. Others would prefer us to be a koala, sitting in the tree, stoned, not paying much attention to the world around us. But the truth is slightly less fun. If China is a snake, North Korea is a hedgehog and the United States is a tiger, then Australia is the hookworm of the world. It has penetrated the skin of the tiger and is making a decent living in its lower intestine. But it depends on the tiger’s survival to ensure its own survival.

  Which is probably why I favour eating fish jerky, and using diplomatic words with the hedgehogs. It beats having our host run around with spikes up its nose.

  STEVE VIZARD

  The Library hotel, Thailand, and other hip hotels

  “Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle”, Norman Mailer provocatively proclaimed in his 1957 essay “The White Negro”, between stabbing his second wife and collecting a Pulitzer Prize. If Mailer had been poolside last week at Thailand’s hippest hotel, the Library, I’m fairly confident he would have stabbed my 13-year-old son Jim. And he wouldn’t have been alone.

  The Library is a phalanx of cubes clustered around a glass library in the form of another cube overlooking the best bit of Koh Samui’s perfect beach. It doesn’t need a copy of Mailer’s book on its shelves to exude hip. A triumph of right angles. Interiors by Euclid. Lines so sharp you can disembowel yourself leaning against a doorframe. Monochrome décor. Black benches. White, enamel-painted floorboards. Black stools. White matte walls. Staying at the Library is like vacationing on a chessboard. If Boris Spassky and Annie Lennox had a love child and it was a building, this is what it would look like—a minimalist structure so architecturally pure that even checking in creates clutter.

  At least that’s what happens when we check in. You can almost see the only other visible guests—the Argentine supermodel couple and a cigar-chewing Italian Marlon Brando circa Godfather— start packing and changing flights. The Library isn’t expecting our family. Or any family. And it certainly isn’t expecting 13-year-old Jim. Within minutes Jim is dismembering hipness: Jim emptying contents of bar fridge; Jim locating iMac in library; Jim downloading dance tracks at blaringly loud levels; Jim ringing room service; Jim befriending eleven local Thai boys and instigating international soccer match using as goalpost a chaise-longue-bearing, cigar-gnawing Mafia guy; Jim feeding entire soccer team and their distant relatives on room service; Jim purchasing incendiary device in the form of skyrocket from Thai pedlar on beach; series of explosions outside Argentine supermodel bedroom; Jim unavailable for comment.

  Jim is wild but this joint is wilder.

  Our bedroom is a giant white box as vast as Mailer’s ego. On one side, raised on a rostrum, is a double bed. At the other end is a bath. It might be a bath. It’s hard to distinguish its white silhouette against the white walls in a white room, which strangely evoke the sense of skiing and après skiing simultaneously. The Library lives and breathes the hip dictum, form over function. No cupboards. No wardrobes. No racks. Only white surfaces. I spend twenty minutes feeling the walls looking for concealed storage cavities. The cleaners who valiantly attempt to make sense of my daily pigsty are equally hamstrung by lack of storage. Their solution is to repack my clothes into my suitcase each day. For an establishment that markets itself as “a leader in Thai hospitality”, there is nothing less hospitable than finding one’s suitcases packed every day. The hotel is screaming, Get the hell out of here. Take your battered suitcase with your soiled underwear and your fake Polo shirt and the preposterous crumpled reefer jacket you brought to the tropics on the off chance of a formal dinner and your hyperactive son and his pirated DVDs and get the hell out of our brochure.

  Outside, in the Library’s obsessively manicured gardens, Queen’s Bishop Two to King’s Pawn Three, the dominating landscaping feature is a vast square red mosaic pool. Bright red. Every time I wade in I feel like I’m bleeding from the ankles. When Jim and his eleven mates relocate their soccer match to the pool, the overall scene resembles the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan. On the pool’s edge, a lank-haired photographer and his lank-haired offsider man an expensive-looking Minolta on a tripod. Twice I walk or swim in their general direction, and twice the photographic duo abandons their post as if a solar eclipse has consumed the light. It isn’t just that I am getting in the road of their shoot; reality is getting in the road. I watch them. Extreme close-up of foot of chair. Extreme close-up of prawn on plate. Extreme close-up of fork prong. An extreme close-up of lard-assed, middle-aged Australian cavorting in red water, in a manner reminiscent of dying mammal on the upper deck of a Japanese whaler, is never on the cards. Neither is any image capturing any human being.

  The Library, like all hip hotels, lives in extreme close-up. It is a Wallpaper shoot. It is a freeze frame. It is best viewed through a macro lens, the better to magnify particulars, to distort reality, to render everyday life as a pastiche, too close, too far away, too hard, too soft, never just right.

  In downtown Munich, Bavaria, the City Hilton is the black hole of hipness.

  “Have you got one of our Hilton family cards so you can stay anywhere in our portfolio of over three thousand branded hotels in the global marketplace?” recites the well-groomed Hilton beauty in the grey Hilton uniform presiding over the grey counter. I can’t place her accent. She could be from anywhere. So could the Munich City Hilton.

  “The card guarantees you’ll feel at home no matter where your travels take you.”

  There it is. She said it. “Feel at home.” Hilton hotels, chain hotels, comfort hotels, airport hotels, family hotels, the lot of them, all of them aim to minimise disruption and replicate your known universe. Conformity is king. It’s in their strategic plans. Millions of bulk-buy chocolates on millions of synthetic pillows across every continent are daily reminders that hidden teams are working round the clock to make you feel like you are somewhere else. The same somewhere else. Not here. Your place, not ours. Home.

  Hip hotels are home wreckers. Hip hotels despise your known universe, maximise disruption, transpor
t you nowhere. Nowhere else matters. Nowhere else exists. “They’ve got three thousand hotels; Hell, we’ve got one. They’ve got five million rooms; Hell, we’ve got twelve. And we’re thinking of getting rid of them.” I suspect the hippest hotel in the world has no rooms. Merely a lobby and chandeliers and a bevy of Calvin Klein bellhops in black T-shirts wearing Blutooth earpieces, talking to no one and carting luggage nowhere. Check in to our dream on our terms. Here is the key card to our existentialist abode; welcome to the narcissism of our “enormous present”, take it or leave it.

  “Uniquely memorable experience” is the defining characteristic of the hip hotel, conclude the hip hotel guides. Perhaps. But not entirely. Holidaying in a caravan at Rosebud with my Uncle Frank and Aunt Carol and two incontinent cocker spaniels is a uniquely memorable experience. Twelve years in a gulag is a uniquely memorable experience. Unique and memorable might be necessary conditions but there’s more.

  Hip hotels tease: they draw you in and spit you out. They flaunt themselves like upmarket Russian hookers, splendid in their designer labels and scarlet lipsticks, half-buttoned skirts, glimpses of thighs, mirror black shoes, all come-on and procuration, yet ultimately unprocurable. There are names for women like these hotels. And for a moment, a split second, you consider that this might be, could in the right circumstances be the perfect place, that the rest of life should resemble this space. In truth, you know this is a one-night stand with calculated lunacy. Angelina Jolie with rooms.

  Take the Portobello Hotel in London’s Notting Hill: another sort of hip again, as different as David Bowie’s irises, yet still mes-merically hip. The Portobello. Velvet, bric-a-brac, chandeliers, clusters of worn couches, shabby chic hip, an antique bulk lot from the Sunday market, both cool and chaotic simultaneously. Two former inner-city terrace houses are somehow connected by mazes of servant staircases. The Portobello has the sense of an Escher print. Staircases that seemingly take you from your bedroom lead you back again. Hogswood on Amex.

  On the other side of Piccadilly, the “surreal Cocteau-like atmosphere” of the Sanderson delivers another strain of hip courtesy of Philippe Starck. The foyer houses a giant pair of Dali lips as a couch. That’s it. Pretty much just a pair of lips in a tundra of a vestibule. Arriving at the Sanderson is like checking in to Mick Jagger’s head. A maze of floor to ceiling translucent sheer curtains hang on a network of rails creating the impression of a tram terminus on the roof. I arranged to meet my business associate Shaun in the curtained spaces. I knew he was in there somewhere. I could see shapes and shadows. I could hear his asthmatic wheeze. Someone was moving. My search through the curtains, chasing ghosts and the slap of leather footsteps, turned out to be less of a meeting and more of a psychological thriller.

  The Library. The Sanderson. The Portobello. The Bulgari. The Mondrian. There are no common master plans here, only individual tales of eccentricity and obsession.

  Hipness is a thief, appropriating stuff from everywhere, prowling back lane dumpsters and suburban housing estates and op shops for the next big thing. Everything’s up for recycling. Anything. Take my grandma. Grandma’s three-bedroom brick-veneer house, the one she’s lived in for the past forty years, is a hip hotel in waiting. Complimentary mug of Milo and a homemade orange cake on arrival. The talking budgies and the cuttlefish bells. The ’50s floral retro couches and a set of ceramic ducks taking off from the wallpapered lounge room. A level of service that borders on obsessive albeit a tad slow. Fluffy purple acrylic toilet seat covers. Shabby chic so chic it’s all shabby. I can see the brochure. Extreme close-up of a knitted toilet roll cover. Extreme close-up of a homemade pasty. Name? I’m thinking something like “The Frame”. Or “Mothballs”. Or “Terminus”.

  In this Galapagos of narcissism, the designer is king. Ludwig of Bavaria would have made a fantastic hip hotel owner. Walt Disney, too, had the perfect temperament, with particular reference to creating a talking mouse/steamboat captain and cryogenically freezing his own head. All four of Walt’s twisted kingdoms proclaim the magnetism of designer insanity.

  And Mailer. Mailer’s work mythologised everything around him, just as Mailer’s life mythologised Mailer. Mailer spent a life romanticising. It was all about him, as over-inflated and caricatured and attention-grabbing as an inflatable jumping castle. Less hotel, more hip. More him. That’s the point of hip hotels. Audience, statement, me.

  Madison Avenue was always going to pounce on the hip hotel. Just as it pounced on hip. Charlie Parker was dead but his soul was ripe for the picking, The Bird’s plaintive wailings made cool for the masses, commercialised from a downtown jazz club to a billion home stereos. Hip is the mass marketer’s R&D department.

  The cool madness of the hip hotel was perfect for the mass marketers. They knew they could spin a story about place and belonging. In an age of confusion we thirst for meaning. In an age where we stumble through virtual worlds and sprawling shopping malls, we crave identity. The hip hotel stands for something, says something, proclaims its identity for all to see. It’s implicit in the Library marketing material and I’m a sucker for it. Our world is a world of red pools and shimmering drapes. For a day or a week, you can share in our precocious dream, walk in our absurdity. Be mad. Be eccentric. Be noticed. Be different. Be something. Be hip.

  Check out the bar fridges, a cacophony of weird merchandising. Chocolate frogs and boxes of herbs. Swimming goggles and multivitamin tablets and toolkits. At the Como in Melbourne, yellow rubber ducks. At the Mondrian in Los Angeles, pencils, pencils everywhere—on pillows, on the bar fridge, by the bed and in bathrooms.

  “Shoppers get the chance for total immersion”, declares the definitive German guidebook to designer hotels. Fashion brands and fashion designers are now claiming the domain of the hip hotel and I’m scared. What common skill base connects a belt and a bedroom? Mont Blanc make great pens, but I have no desire to be immersed in a restaurant created by a design team whose principal preoccupation hitherto has been whether a tiny white knob at the end of a writing instrument should swivel clockwise or anticlockwise. Total immersion is worthy, provided one is immersed in the right thing.

  The Continentale in Florence is so perfectly immersed in itself it demands ransacking. Michele Bonan’s version of heaven, its “femme pastel pop art interiors” are asking for a full frontal assault by skyrockets and a teenage soccer team. Here at full rack rate is the solipsism of designers playing at being designers, a seductive hybrid of accommodation and display case that simulates sleeping in the front window of Harvey Nichols. Here the pink velvet knob is turned to eleven. The Continentale is fashion week with mattresses and key cards and the only item missing from the bedroom is a cash register.

  The Continentale “world of Ferragamo” needs to meet my world of Jim and five kids and birthday parties and chocolate cakes and a rampaging terrier and then let’s see how spotlessly their white translucent sheers hang. I want Jim to bust up the place. I want to hurl my sweaty no-brand singlet over the Murano chandelier. I want to sprawl over the Minotti chaise longue quaffing meat pies, spilling sauce on the zebrano timber, my sweaty feet all over the Colefax and Fowler wallpaper, watching football at full blare, annoying neighbours. I want to wallow. Walk in my shoes for a day and let’s see you survive the mortar attacks of my world: of discarded ring pulls, tossed peanut packets and spilt salt that spreads like dandruff over the charcoal pile and grey-inked fingerprints of yesterday’s newspapers all over your white hand-stitched leather and crinkled shopping bags and blunt plastic razors and wet towels and five-day-old socks. Let’s see how you deal with the flotsam of my life.

  By the time I arrive in Mailer’s metropolis, forty years and twenty blocks away, New York’s original hip hotel, Morgans, is history. She is a 50-year-old supermodel intent on walking the red carpet and all I can see are crow’s-feet and sunspots and I don’t want to know. The once hip basement bar is now a basement with a bar in it, and no offer of free pencils or rubber ducks can wallpaper over the cracks or s
ummon up the glory days. In a city of twenty million, in this city of twenty million, birthplace of Warhol and Blue Note, you don’t expect everyone at this hotel to be hip. Just someone. And at Morgans’ prices, one of them is supposed to be me. The time had come and gone for Morgans.

  Ammianus Marcellinus, a fourth-century Bill Bryson, chronicled the decaying days of the Roman empire with the all-seeing eye of an early Michelin inspector:

  Those few mansions, which were once celebrated for the serious cultivation of liberal studies, now are filled with ridiculous amusements of torpid indolence, reechoing with the sound of singing, and the tinkle of flutes and lyres. You find a singer instead of a philosopher; a teacher of silly arts is summoned in place of an orator, the libraries are shut up like tombs, organs played by waterpower are built, and lyres so big that they look like wagons! and flutes, and huge machines suitable for the theater.

  Marcellinus arrived at his accommodation on the Palatino too late, nearly four centuries too late, to witness real Roman hip, proving that hip and square are flip sides of the same denarius, separated by the razor thin enemy of all that is cool—time. Hip is not merely how one looks at the uber objet, but when. If the hippest guesthouse in Heidelberg, Zum Güldenen Schaf, had decorated its walls with truckloads of gilt buddhas and Che Gueverra portraits a century prematurely in 1891, local pedagogue Gottlob Frege might well have observed of it, hip at evening and square by morning.