The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  Hip is as time-sensitive as a soufflé. Too early, it’s a treacly novelty. Too late, it’s as indigestible as Cliff Richard unplugged.

  I invariably arrive too early. Or too late. The enemy of the hip hotel is me. People just like me. And Jim. When suits with briefcases and kids with iPods check in, hipness checks out. Herein lies the Library’s trick, the hip marketer’s triumphant sleight of hand, the fundamental audacity of the hip hotel: the hip hotel welcomes the customer to the dream never disclosing that the dreamer has left the building. It leaves the customer alone to fill the gaps, to connect the dots, to create the backstory. To insert life. For one night only, for the price of a bed, the unwitting latecomer customer plays at being the designer; the audience plays at being the hipster never suspecting he’s paying top dollar for a stale vision of paradise and his own handiwork.

  And that’s the paradox of hipness. Hip has rooms to fill, but despises a full house. Hip stands apart but chases its own tail. Today’s shocking pink interiors at Philip Treacy’s laughingly hip hotel the g in Galway are tomorrow’s suburban housing estate, back whence they came, ashes to ashes.

  Mailer knew the transience of hip. Even as he uttered it, Mailer was checking out and moving on, fuelled by his own unspoken revelation that the ultimate destination is never the hip of this moment, but the electric anticipation of the next.

  GERMAINE GREER

  Who cares if she can’t sing and can’t dance? Posh Spice is the Damien Hirst of dress-wearing

  I have said very mean things about Victoria Beckham in my time, such as that she could neither dance nor sing and should give up her disastrous efforts at a solo career while she and David had some money left. I take none of them back. What I have lately come to realise is that what Victoria understands is clothes. She knows what to wear and she knows how to wear it. The revelation came in the form of an unforgettable pink dress.

  The Moon dress by Roland Mouret that Victoria wore when she attended the press conference that welcomed her husband to LA Galaxy last summer is a work of genius. Mouret’s designs usually begin with draping a model in fabric, in this case, 96% cotton and 4% elastane. By making two double-sided folds from nipple to neckline he constructed a bodice with oblique side-seams joining extended cap-sleeves that stand proud of the shoulders, each stiffened by another small origami fold. The front panel is divided by an inch-wide half-belt that holds one edge of a folded tab into which two more folds are set. The straight skirt ends at mid-knee. Some sources claim that the back zipper extends from nape to hem, which would mean that you can walk into the dress like a cupboard, but this impression appears mistaken. Victoria’s dress that day had a kickpleat at the back.

  As Victoria would tell you herself, it is the extra half-inch that counts, but nearly all the women who have worn the real dress have given in to the temptation to wear it a size too small. Not Victoria. As she prowled along the hot green turf of the playing field, the perfect background colour for the cold pink of the dress, the half-belt sat flat on her natural waist and the skirt moved easily. Off the peg, the Moon dress would set you back about £1,000. By teaming it with a matching pink ostrich-skin Birkin bag by Hermès and hoisting herself five inches higher on stupendous Balenciaga heels, with no added tat, no bling, no gloves, no hat, Victoria did that clever, innovative dress proud.

  On GMTV last Thursday, Kate Garraway wore a knock-off of the Mouret Moon dress. Several such knock-offs are doing the rounds; this one was near-enough a replica and all wrong. Next to the red sofa, the pink turned puce. The dress was so much too small that small puffs of flesh extruded at each armhole. The cap sleeves were too meagre to begin with and, because the dress was too tight, they sat too close into the neck, thereby overemphasising the bust, and that was before Garraway decided to clutter the neckline with a bulky necklace. The side-view was a disaster, every bulge mercilessly outlined. Real elegance requires not only a great dress, but a discriminating and disciplined wearer. Suddenly I was reckoning Victoria Beckham among the all-time greats, alongside Wallis Simpson and Coco Chanel. She could make Anna Wintour look dowdy.

  It must have been Victoria Beckham who sold the idea of managing Mouret to Simon Fuller, who parlayed the Spice Girls to their success, and has continued to manage her and David Beckham ever since. When Mouret showed his first collection at London Fashion Week in 1998, he was the property of Sharai and Andre Meyers, who had 100% of the label. In 2005, he was named red carpet designer of the year at the British Fashion Awards. His Galaxy dress, with its square neckline and draped shoulders, was the must-have of 2005; Scarlett Johansson, Beyonce, Nicole Kidman, Rachel Weisz and Keira Knightley were all photographed wearing it more and less well. In October 2005, Mouret dissociated himself from the Meyerses, leaving them holding the name Roland Mouret Designs and nothing else, and gave himself extended sick leave. His next dress, the Titanium, was so eagerly awaited that to get one you had to put your name down, wait for months, and save up £950.

  When the Mouret label was relaunched in 2007 as 19RM, in homage to Fuller’s 19 Entertainment, Mrs Beckham bought all 21 items in the collection, for a mere £30,000 or so, the price of three of her Hermès Birkin handbags. She had probably already decided to wear the Moon dress for her appearance at LA Galaxy four months before it would be available in any department store. Because it would be seen in sunlight and therefore in its true hue, she chose orchid pink, an unusual colour for her. Ordinary mortals could buy the dress in black, white or navy; only Bergdorf Goodman in New York would ever carry the pink. In darker colours, the architecture of the dress is difficult to appreciate; in pink, every fold counted.

  Victoria Beckham may have seemed the least talented of the Spice Girls but her real talent lay elsewhere. She is an artist in the same genre as Damien Hirst: marketing. In an era of bare bellies, painted legs, visible underwear, junk jewellery and grisly computer generated prints, she is a lone champion of elegance for working girls. In an endorsement for the paperback edition of her book, That Extra Half an Inch, Mouret credits her with making “high fashion relevant for everyone”. So why does she always pout? Why doesn’t she ever smile? I reckon it’s because she knows that when she smiles, she looks like a chipmunk. Anyway, grinning isn’t glamorous.

  PETER LALOR

  Fashion pinkoes are the fifth columnists of masculinity

  A male colleague asked if I thought his shirt was a disgrace. I had no qualms telling him it was. I said the shirt in question was worse than a disgrace, it was a crime. Genocide, no less.

  I followed up with a long dissertation on why a man in Barbie doll pink was an affront to both nature and nurture, a gesture of surrender that will one day see us sitting down to urinate and ringing each other to see what we’ll be wearing out on Friday night.

  There may have been some mention that the great gods of masculinity did not fight the long war for this. Would Johnny Cash be considered one of the greatest entertainers if he had wandered squinting into the Nashville footlights, curled his lip and announced: “I’m the man in pink”?

  Would masters of the ancient Asiatic assassin cults aspire to homicidal greatness if they were to bow before their master and be presented with a lovely pink belt?

  Would the Rolling Stones have pulled off all that satanic majesty make-over that so successfully wedged the Beatles had they sung “Paint it Pink”?

  “Hell man,” I cried:

  Your shirt might get you accepted at a seven-year-old’s fairy party but it ain’t gonna cut it at the inner circle of my darkness. You have insulted our noble DNA, torn up the colour code chart of honour that sets us apart from the hordes who believe things get better when you talk about them.

  And, don’t call me unreconstructed. I have renovated. I have no problem with men who lie with other men, men who choose to watch a hanky-soaking drama instead of sport, men who have no difficulty remembering their wives’ birthdays or their children’s names. But a man who wears pink is beyond the pale.

  Apparently I ha
d missed the point. The chap in question meekly informed me he was not asking my opinion about the colour of his shirt, but the collar of his shirt.

  The chap’s collar was torn and he was uncertain whether this was acceptable.

  I wiped the spit from my chin and his face and put a masculine arm around his brotherly shoulder. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I have a needle and thread in my man bag and we’ll have you looking tickety boo in a minute or two.”

  I’m starting to realise the battle against pink is lost, but before I let go I want to relate the experience of another colleague who was playing pool against a rough-looking chap in a pub.

  The straight-talking builder-type grabbed my significantly less masculine mate’s pink shirt in his callused fingers and asked “did it get mixed up with the red socks mate?”

  I blame television. And Kerry Packer. There was a time when everything beamed into our lounge rooms came in shades ranging from black to white.

  The apartheid broadcasting era ended sometime around the time of Lillee and Thommo and before you could say “Graham Kennedy has a rather effeminate approach to colour coding” Packer’s band of privatised cricketers were putting their creams in the wash with every sock colour you can imagine. The poor old Windies suffered the humiliation of being forced to wear pink during the early stages of the competition.

  When I was at uni the smart kids used to talk about form influencing content or some such. I often wondered, as I served these scholars their cheese toast and cleaned their tables, what they were talking about. Now I think I get it.

  Form influencing content is, like, when the television itself changes what’s on the television. So when colour telly came in, cricketers started wearing coloured clothes.

  Which got me thinking about the rash of programs on television concentrating on generous arses. For a while everything on the bloody box had to do with overweight and sweaty people wearing lycra. You saw fat people running, fat people in the gym, fat people on bikes and fat people abseiling. There were lots of shots of fat people in slow motion. Fat looks good in slow motion. There’s more drama. It goes up, slowly. Then—wait for it—it goes down. Slowly.

  I had wondered what was going on and realised it was the wide screen TV. I wonder if it is a case of the (fried) chicken or the (fried) egg. What came first? Did television manufacturers build the wide screen because we’re all getting fatter or did we get fatter because of wide screen?

  Another blokey colleague has just arrived at my desk asking if his arse looks big in the new suit he’s bought.

  JOHN LETHLEAN

  Silence of the lamb

  “We’re getting a lamb?” asked big ears with touching excitement. “Yes,” I replied, “but I don’t think it’ll look much like what you’ve got in mind.”

  Took it pretty well, I thought, given the explanation that this lamb—this whole lamb—was coming to dinner as guest of honour. I had a full head of steam about this animal and it was riding roughshod over a 10-year-old’s sensibilities.

  It’s easy to get carried away with the whole romantic pure-produce/first principles idea. And in the abstract, a whole milk-fed lamb is a notion to nourish all manner of needs if your idea of great food is gnarly bits of meat, cooked simply with oodles of flavour; low on glamour, high on satisfaction. The whole Slow Food/do it yourself/massage it with love thing.

  But concept and reality can take divergent courses.

  The background? I was on the phone to smallgoods entrepreneur Andrew Vourvahakis, a man all pigs fear this time of year, discussing the specifications for the yuletide leg of porcine bliss—the ham order is an important conversation—when he said something about milk-fed lambs from Flinders Island.

  Supplying a few restaurants, he said. Good product.

  It must have been cold; the weather has a profound influence on what I’m thinking about eating. While the season was undoubtedly heading towards fish and salads, I started thinking about warming winter braises and red meat.

  “Whole milk-fed lambs, eh Andrew?”

  It was meant to be a thought bubble; what would I, a bloke who can barely joint a chicken, do with a whole mammal? However, I must have articulated some kind of moaning desire, or maybe it was a dodgy phone line, because the next week in a bright-red Andrew’s Choice box arrived a lamb. Pretty much the whole beast.

  I was excited. In the cryovac bag, in two separate pieces, were the rump/legs and the balance of the torso, dressed (I think that’s the correct expression for a carcass that’s ready to “break down”).

  I cleaned out a shelf of the beer fridge, pushed lamby in tight and … Cripes! What next?

  Excitement turned to trepidation. Was I really going to take my first butchery practical on this valuable carcass? Would I follow pictures in books, which belongs in the same category as making sense of architect’s drawings?

  I turned up the boost on the fridge and waited for fate to intervene, which he/she did about three days later when I asked a chef I was chatting to—Dwayne Bourke, from The Argo, a man good at all this primal stuff—what I should do with my lamb.

  “Depends on what you want to cook, I suppose,” came his answer. It couldn’t be argued. But it didn’t get me any closer to doing something useful with my little sheep.

  Then, like the voice of salvation itself, I heard the words: “Why don’t you bring it over and I’ll bone it out for you and re-cryovac it in a few different bags?”

  Hallelujah.

  By the time I got to Bourke’s kitchen towing the long-wheelbase Esky a few days later, I knew I wanted to make a wet roast—abbacchio alla romana—for a boys’ weekend (nice change from the barbecue)—and maybe keep at least one leg for roasting, but the rest …

  “Good meat,” he said as he flicked his special knife around bones in a manner that suggested experience. It was pale and sweet-smelling. In the time it took for me to drink a coffee, we had the meat from two shoulders/forelegs/necks expertly removed from the bones in two separate pieces, two once conjoined legs ready for roasting and two loins with belly flaps for filling and rolling and roasting. And a lot of bones for the old dog (yes, I know you don’t give uncooked bones to a dog, but believe me, it won’t be a brittle shoulder that takes a 15-year-old arthritic lab from this earth).

  In the end, one of the legs had to be seconded to the abbacchio to get the quantity up for eight would-be surfers; it’s one of those chuck-it-all in a pan kind of dishes—lamb, wine, stock, herbs, aro-matics, tomatoes—that you finish with breadcrumbs and Parmigiano. I chucked in some anchovy, too: not in the recipe, but what the hell. Very straightforward, and if I do say so myself, bloody great. We had it with polenta and artichokes out of my garden; my best impersonation yet of the mature, 30-something Jamie Oliver (allowing for the rather obvious age difference).

  With a lot of vino and the latest RocKwiz trivia book, a great night of male bonding was had. And, having watched my chef, I feel ready to tackle the task personally next time a might-have-been-a-sheep comes a-knocking.

  Santa, I need a boning knife for Christmas. And no, son, we are not getting a lamb for the backyard. The only small ruminant I want to see round here is silent. Very.

  JOHN LETHLEAN

  Telly tubbies

  It was a day like any other really. With one serious exception.

  Instead of getting up, doing all the usual stuff and skulking off to the workstation, I got up early, went straight to the couch and watched television, all day.

  I was crook; I’d loved to have blamed the flu vaccination but in fact I was poorly before the nice nurse did her jabbing. Next day, I switched on and rostered myself off. Nobody was home to feel sorry for me, but that didn’t seem a reason not to wallow in self-pity on their behalf. And what’s the point of paying for subscription television if you don’t exploit it?

  So, instead of hitting the keyboard, I slipped into a sleeping bag, grabbed a pillow and hit the three-seater. And watched the food channel. All day.

  At 6a
m, on comes Michael Chiarello’s Napa. Never heard of it. Or him. I’m drinking orange juice and Chinese tea; he’s stuffing a leg of pork with onions and spices. He’s slick, confident, gregarious. He’s American, for goodness sake. He looks like a Gap model and I even like the food he’s doing. I hate him.

  Next is Georges Laurier, from Quebec, in Cook Like a Chef. It’s another glam cooking demo with more raw meat, a bit much at this hour really. He exhibits all the traits of his predecessor, except he’s wearing chef’s whites, not Gap.

  “Reez-oh-toe, what a nice dish,” says Georges as he demonstrates the 1235th risotto technique ever done on telly. No wonder I can’t make risotto.

  Top Chef accompanies sunrise. It’s a reality elimination game for aspiring chefs, nine hyped-up Americans whose first challenge is to cook a dish based on ingredients bought for $20 at a petrol station. Intense. But strangely compelling. The product placement is shameless.

  Cooking in Paradise: Gioconda Scott speaks Spanish better than she cooks for a camera, but nothing surpasses her Oxbridge vowels. Coxon’s Royal Feast: everything you didn’t need to know about the cooking of a royal family in South Africa. Yawn. Party Starters. American tripe.

  Time for some toast and coffee.

  Masterchef Goes Large. I’ve heard about it: the British elimination show with expat Aussie John Torode. It’s punchy, fun, but not as over the top as the Americans. Thank God.

  Heat in the Kitchen is something I’d been meaning to watch again anyway: Sydney chefs and Sydney restaurant critics fight it out in the great battle for Good Food Guide hats. I can relate.

  Time for a spot of convalescent lunch—pasta and parmesan— as Market Kitchen mixes cooking and produce stories with food writer Matthew Fort and Tom Parker Bowles (yes, her son) looking about as jolly hockey sticks as you’d imagine.