Is garb turning into garbage?

The glitter has gone from glittering opening nights. In a world obsessed by fashion, people are wearing tat.

There are the gossip pages, endlessly preoccupied by photographs of stars and starlets in designer dresses of the moment arbitrarily accorded marks out-of-ten. In newspapers and magazines, these fashionista displays are given masses of space, as if they are really important. Photos are lined up, set out in extraordinarily clumsy page layouts, some pictures too absurdly small to see, but all of them dominated by marks out of ten for fashion sense.

The media seems to simply snatch them off the wire and then make their earth-shattering and often-mean-spirited editorial judgements. If you saw what some of those journalists were wearing, you'd wonder where the gall, the aesthetic audacity to play god with other people's taste or whim. Perhaps this trait is what is killing the spirit of fashion.

In real life, dressing up for special occasions has gone out the window. What do all these designers create fancy attires for if not for people to wear to fancy nights out? Go to a fancy night out and, what? People are just wearing any old thing. At the opening night of the Adelaide Festival of Arts' headline show, I saw men in shorts and a woman wearing sneakers. Sneakers? Opening night? So much for the glittering formality of the special occasion. So much for a reason to get the glad rags out.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think putting on one's best duds is the making of a special occasion. A room full of people looking their best is not only the sign of a civilised society but it is also a mark of respect for an event. Opening nights used to be the big events; they used to be black tie and formal frock.

It was the black ties which went first. Dinner suits are expensive and men often rented them. The formal tuxedo slipped to dark suit and bow tie. Then dark suit and tie. Then cream jacket, then any jacket, then no tie. Now shorts and open-necked shirt.

Meanwhile, it seems that there are just a few matrons who bother to doll up for opening nights. They look fabulous. But, how ironic is it that they stand out from the crowd. They are fastidiously coiffed, perfumed, and attired, down to their to-die-for shoes. Perhaps, if I was a numbers person, I'd estimate them as making up about five per cent of a foyer crowd. They not only are distinguished by their elegant outfits but also, sad to say, by their age. The sense of occasion seems to be turning into a generational thing. So there's a rub. Beautiful young women certainly wear pretty frocks and smart outfits around the town. But, often, when they go out at night, they wear so little that it is really hard to call it fashion. Skimpy doesn't begin to cover it. It is barely more than primal pheromone for, whether they know it or not, there is a reproductive undercurrent to their baring of the flesh. For the young, dressing up has turned into undress.

Even events like charity dinners and gala nights no longer carry that old glamour cachet. So many people want to short-cut formality that it makes the well-dressed feel self-conscious. The slobs are winning. Nothing is special for them.

This makes one wonder about the massive fashion industry with all those design schools spawning bright new talent. Fashion seems to have turned into an industry of photographs. We look at pictures of it on models and in those endless magazine spreads of never-heard-of-'em starlets posing on red carpets so they can be humiliated with a 2/10 rating for how they look. Perhaps women are so wary of being judged for their formal attire that they have shied right out of the market? Or perhaps people's priorities have changed.

Maybe life is all about speed and comfort these days. Just look at how airports have changed. We used to dress in our best to catch a plane. It was really special. Now, it's worse than a bus depot with all the zigzag queuing, the delays, the scrutinies, and the general intimidatory presence of security. On the planes, the attendants' smiles are rote and their ministrations brisk. They are tired and overworked before one even sets foot in their domain. The meanness of seating for the flying hordes does not encourage dressing up. It requires defensive dressing. Comfort first.

And thus do the denominators go down. Some people's idea of comfort is singlet and thongs. And, heaven help us, they are permitted to travel like that. Dress codes are done with. Wear what you like, from full burqa to next-to-nothing.

But not quite everywhere, thank heavens.

I note that Costo has put up a sign saying it won't admit people who are not wearing footwear. "You have no idea how many people come in here with bare feet," said the door attendant when I commented on the new sign. I was incredulous. I am incredulous. We're not talking poor people; Costco is not cheap. We are talking slobs.

The slobs are taking over. They'll be turning up barefooted to opening nights next.

VIT - and proud of it

Very Important Tweeps have trounced the grand old status of the Very Important Person.

Now, suddenly, smart social media marketers have clued up to the fact that the Twitterati are the communicators of the moment. We are not simply as good as our follower figures in spreading the world, but have limitless exponential potential according to the powers of the ReTweet.

It was the marketing person for the Cavalia horse spectacular, which is some offshoot of the Cirque du Soleil mob, who first called me a VIT. She was inviting me, in that capacity, to a free night of the horse experience.

The idea was to bring the VITs together and have them ecstatically Tweeting en masse.

That is a great idea.

As cruel irony would have it, when this invitation arrived, I was suffering the rare indignation of being muted on Twitter. Poor me.

I was overseas in the ricefields of Bali. The invitation leaked slowly down a third world internet connection which optimistically called itself 'wireless".

We VITs have a frustrating time when we're denied instant communications. We're VITs because we're communication addicts. I've been at it since before day one, so I can remember back to the early days of dialup. I never want to go back.

More prestigious by far than being a VIP is being a VIT.

But out there amid farmer women hand-threshing the rice crops in the field, one feels churlish about complaining that your spam is at a trickle, your email is queued and that your Telco has extortionate roaming fees which forces one to keep the phone off. I did the enlightened thing. I let go of the First World.

So I did not even try to RSVP to this wonderful invitation.

But I certainly thought about it.

Way to go, I thought.

Zeitgeist, I thought.

Once, as a newspaper theatre critic, I represented the immense power of mainstream print. Those were the days when people were eager for newspapers to come out with the precious first reviews of new shows. Now those are the olden days. Print media is shrinking. At the same time, the public is wary of paying for online subscriptions. And no one wants to wait for anything.

Social media has stepped up and usurped the old publicity machinations. Instant gratification meets the global parish pump.

And, I'd better Tweet this before it goes out of date.

How Seven sins

Like so many people, I'd really been looking forward to the Olympics.
Only once in every four years do I find myself glue with abid fascination to marathon cycle races, gymnastics, judo, swimming and equestrian events. That once is always an addictive joy. I defer other activities for Olympics-watching.

But here we are in Australia witgh Channel 7 providing coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. And it is just dire. It is the most lacklustre and crass coverage I have experienced.
The disappointment is immense.

Where are Roy and H.G.?
They were always the element which gave us a truly Aussie sense of involvement.
We were, I think, the only country in the world to be taking the mickey out of the Olympics and ourselves - with those well-informed and intelligent comics. We went without sleep in previous Olympics just to tune in to Roy and H.G.

This Olympics they are absent.

Channel 7 has made an executive decision - and has said that it has provided an alternative Olympics diversion, a morning panel show.
My god. How moronic do they think we are?
That lowbrow lineup of tedious egos is sheer insult.

The disappointments go on.

I needn't go in to the chopping and changing of the event coverage which leaves one never quite knowing outcomes unless we learn, retrospectively, that we won something.

Then there are the ads. They broke into the Opening Ceremony to place ads! How rude.

As for their talking heads, the Opening Ceremony commentators....oh deary me.

Shame, Seven. Shame.

Gold at the Olympics you are NOT.

Oh, God - thou ever was a forsaker.

On some days, one can barely bear to read the news.
Today is one such.
The utter, morally-bankrupt act of harnessing mentally-retarded people with bombs, sending them off to a pet market and then detonating them by remote control to kill and multilate countless humans and animals is simply beyond one's comprehension.

If war is repugnant, such acts of war are somewhere so far down the levels of intellectual squalor as to make one wish for the very thing one opposes - retribution. One wishes to put out the lights of those who seek to do such harm - to ensure that they stop doing it.

And they will argue that they have a God who directs their sub-bestial behaviour.
Ah, yes, in God's name.
If it is not one God, it is another.
And one knows it is all just so hopeless.

Forward this mail, now!

Who is the tediously irritating idiot who spends their time copying and pasting Internet funnies to dispatch as forwards - ever with a message on the bottom instructing the recipient to forward the mail?

* Send this to the men you know, to warn them about arguments they can avoid if they remember the terminology.
* Send this to all the women you know to give them a good laugh, cause they know it's true.

Now that you've smiled at least once, it's your turn to send this to someone you want to bring a smile to (maybe even a chuckle)...in other words, send it to everyone. We all need to smile every once in a while.


I betcha' you can't resist passing this one on!

*** A SMILE - worth passing along!!!! ***

And then, of course, there are those which come with threats of dire ill fortune if one does not onsend. These are of the ugly spirit of the evil chain letter - nothing less than sheer cruelty to the naive and gullible.
What torment the email must provide for such people - who live in mortal fear if they don't spam their friends and contacts with the latest piece of so-called humour or tear-jerking schmaltz.

I recall sadly the sight of a colleague who recieved a chain mail letter at work some many years ago. I had no idea of what a poor, superstitious, naive woman she was until I saw her run to the photocopier to run off 20 copies of the chain letter, envelope them up and pass them out to everyone else. Poor thing. Instead of being sorry for her, we were amused and mocked her by putting all the chain letters back into her pigeon hole. She then had 20 chain letters, each of which told her to send out 20 chain letters - and we was back at the photocpier in tears.
We realised we had not been funny.

There are people out there who are terrified of threatened bad luck. It eats away and them and dominates their world - until they bring it on.
These poor things need protected.
The rest of us need to be left a-bloody-lone.

And this applies to all funnies.
I love to received an email funny.
If I think it merits it, I may onsend it to a friend or two.
However, this is something I will decide.

I don't need these pesky halfwits telling me what to forward.
It turns me right off forwardikng and, sad to say, it makes me wonder about the friend who forwarded the mail in the first place.

Has the ease of the Internet's communications hset free a plague of ditzes?
Er, yes.

The senders of this nonsense are a plague upon bandwidth.
They are a plague upon intelligence and commonsense.

The ugly world of website comment

How come, as one who adores reading diary blogs, I cannot bring myself to do anything quite so straightforward?
I suppose this is a "comment" blog. I only blog when something gets up my nose.
Six months later, I am still wishing that it was smoke getting up my nose.
How tragic.
Oh, why can't being a non-smoker be easier?

For the last few months, I've been sidetracked into blogging for my newspaper's website.
It is a pretty unrewarding business.
There is a very different demographic going to those commercial sites - and it contains some rather ugly individuals who take the invitation to "comment" on stories as an opportunity to leap, in ill-educated English, into vicious personal attacks.
They misread the copy, misinterpret or perhaps don't read at all, since a few of them simply seem to want to talk about my photograph.
Most common comments are in the vein of "get off your high horse lady - X is a lot better than you are - go back to writing cookery books".

I am sure these people would not speak to one in the flesh in this manner.
It seems that the anonymity of the Internet is an enabler for sour, angry, frustrated and, dare I say it, pretty stupid people to hit rock bottom and be their true selves.
Cowardly, crude and venomous.

So, it is generally an unpleasant experience to log in to moderate the comments on the newspaper blog.

But, my compensation lies in the fact that these uglies are not as anonymous as they may think. Their email addresses may be private from the website readership but they are not concealed from the website administrators. So, guess what? I know who they are!

Oh, my, and wouldn't their employers be appalled at the sort of grotesque things their staff members are sending out online during the course of their working hours?

Aren't they lucky that I am not as vindictive and cruel as they are?

Downer with schools

"Why this interest in history? Why this wish to reawaken the past?"

This question was asked on Fox News this morning. Now, of all people, I of course know that journalists fare well to ask the seemingly stupid question. It forces subjects to explain and articulate and it avoids presumptions.

But this question is revelatory.
It explains something of the contemporary attitude towards history - of closing doors on it and moving relentlessly, mindlessly forward. History is barely taught in schools these days. Somewhere along the line it was decided the history was hard, it was dry, and students could be alienated if they had to remember dates.

It was one of the victims of the dumbing down of education.

There was a spelling test recently which was spectacularly failed by Australian teachers. Why? Because they don't read.

That is ironic in this time when text has been given vigorous rebirth on this medium.

One may blame the spoon-feeding of television for the declines in basic education.

But the real culprit is, of all things, education and gender equality.
Teaching no longer the only career for many intelligent women. They can do whatever they want - and they do. Given the choices, however, the brilliant women who once dominated school education now take careers in the subjects they once taught. They are historians rather than history teachers, mathematicians rather than maths teachers...

Cultural progress has resulted in cultural decline.

Media screws the message

One thing I find deeply irritating in my beloved America is the media's preoccupation with health scares. The old control-by-fear policy seems aggressively ubiquitous in this country. There are fresh scares every day - and endless marketing of drugs to either deal with or add to the scares.

Today a research finding on antidepressants and pregnancy has hit the media - with absurd results.

From the Los Angeles Times we get reportage headlined "Study shows antidepressants increase birth defects" with a story whipping up worry about pregnancy and depression treatment.
From the Associated Press comes a report headlined "Antidepressants pose low birth defect risk".

As one who reads two papers in the mornings, I reeled when I found these conflicting treatments of the same report. The AP report was carried in the Boston Globe, the other in the Nashua Telegaph. AP's was a much shorter report and it avoided the hysteria-raising of the Californian counterpart. How could this be?

Editorial sensationalist policy versus dispassionate reportage?
You can bet your bottom dollar on it.

The Paris Hilton phenomenon

The world has ground to a halt in the USA. I have surfed and surfed the TV news channels and there is only one subject being reported - being reported with obsessive minutiae, repetitive minutiae - and, of course, it is Paris Hilton, the tarty hotel heiress who is famous for being famous.
At first, I was amused and horrified. It seemed that the celebrity gossip which has been passing for news in this country had soared out of control.
But, pausing to scrutinise some of the coverage, it became apparent that, while it is, indeed, celebrity gossip reportage, there is something else at play here - something very interesting.

It is an exercise in national schadenfreud.
It is the display of country renewing its commitment to principles.

America has been inflicted with a daily diet of Paris's vapid and vulgar activities.
She has been a grotesque media creation, a cartoon of the American fascination with celebrity, riding high on endless concocted photo opportunities, not to mention the most artificially contrived un-reality TV show of them all.
But now she has tripped in demonstrating contempt for the DUI laws, in believing that as the celebrated Paris Hilton she is somehow above the laws, and the country has turned on her in a spirit of unified loathing.

Even Martha Stewart did not cop this sort of national vilification when she was jailed for insider trading. For all her faults, Martha has talent and has contributed to the world, albeit her contributions are stencilled cards and DIY Christmas decorations.
Paris Hilton is just the cheapest rich girl in the world. Even stencilling a card would be beyond her. But her country now is forcing her to contribute something towards its social mores. She is to be an example of comeuppance.
To that end, there were five helicopters and hundreds of media surrounding her house when she had her brief liberation from jail yesterday. The media halted all other news coverage to mull over the justice and ethics of her case. From channel to channel, there were debates, discussions and analyses - from Fox's savage talking heads to Larry King, from The View to Jay Leno.
And no one had a good word to say about her.
All of which has given her a new crown to wear.
Paris Hilton has taken over from O.J. Simpson has the most hated celebrity in the USA.

Screaming audience aversion

When did women start screaming to indicate their enthusiasm?
Once upon a time there was a thing called "applause" - a clapping of the hands to convey delight or appreciation. Sometimes it came with added whistles.
Then the "whoop" arrived and audiences added whooping vocal sounds to applause.
Now they just scream.
If they are applauding with their hands, it is inaudible beneath the shrill of shrieks and screams.
It is a most terrible sound. It is a descent into inanity.
Is it clear how much I hate this development in the world of entertainment?
Or, how mystified I am about it?

The strident insistence of extended audience screaming has caused me simply to turn off television programs I otherwise may have watched, even enjoyed. Conan O'Brien, the offbeat late night presenter, actively encourages this animalistic nonsense from his audience, cueing the women to keep on and on with the screams as he basks in it its approbation.
On the NBC morning show, there are screamers waiting in the streets. The moment they see a camera light go on, they start with the screaming.
This mindless din accompanies more and more American television. Well, it accompanies anything that includes a live audience. God forbid they start injecting the canned screams to the recorded shows. Daresay it may come.
This phenomenon has acquired nauseating ubiquity. We have produced a whole generation of people who can only express themselves with primal high Cs.
And no one seems to complain, to ask them to try the old hand-clapping routine...

Am I the only person who is despairing of this?
It makes me want to scream!

Spats and simpers: celebrities are news

Ann Curry's simpering interview with Angelina Jolie has been aired over and over - as if it has some major news significance. Oh, lordy, where will I have to see it next? Curry whispers at her subject with coy adulation, leaning forward in her chair, nodding like a bobble-head and daring to inject her own opinions and moist-eyed life stories into her interview - as if she and Jolie are just such special peers. I think I will dub it the American "simperview" since the talent-challenged Curry is not the only interviewer who uses this cringe-inducing technique. It seems intended to inject some emotional gravitas into what is basically pretty airhead material. Let's face it, Angelina Jolie is doing interviews to promote a new movie. The whole vast "scoop" interview is just a plug. This is not to say that Jolie is not one of the more interesting actresses around. She has always been "different" and she has a powerful and admirable political conscience which, one hopes, is of some influence to the masses in this gob-smacking culture of celebrity. But, bottom line, when she goes out there doing a dollar-driven movie promo, the media dissolves into a pathetic goo of star-worship.

How very differently does the media treat Jolie, the political animal, from the way it treats Rosie O'Donnell, the political animal!

The big bad right wing men in suits can't spew enough bile about Rosie. Rosie, a self-described "fat lesbian", is a popular hate target for expressing views not dissimilar to those of the beautiful Angelina Jolie. Rosie is intelligent and highly articulate, but Rosie is portrayed as a wicked loudmouthed left-wing extremist. The big bad right wing men in suits devour her with relish as an outlet for their deep anger at the very existence of a thinking left. She's an easy target, a soft target - and there's nothing they like better.

After yesterday's The View, they are having a field day - since Rosie was in very heated dispute with the very pretty and pregnant poster girl of the right, Elisabeth Hasslebeck. Hasselbeck is The View's balance of opinion - since most prominent and politically aware females in showbiz are, in fact, of Democrat sympathy. Hasselback is the NeoCon plant. She is a creationist.

While Rosie rose through the ranks of showbiz with brains, wit, originality and talent as a comedian, Hasselbeck's vast achievement was being a pretty thing on Survivor: The Australian Outback. I watched that show and I can barely remember her, but apparently American viewers so adored the cute shoe designer that, while she did not win Survivor, she won the bigger prize of national celebrity. She's a pretty little blonde, after all. The stereotypical American mould.

Watching the political spat on The View, I saw Hasselbeck on the attack and Rosie on the defensive. Hasselbeck struck out stridently, a ferocious viper already enraged by Joy Behar's praise for Al Gore and criticisms of the Bush regime. "Poor little" nothing! As she, indeed, said. Hasselbeck is a confident, self-righteous Republican and, doubtless, she is subject to constant briefing and revving up by the party cronies who would see her as a media prize. If you watch footage of that now historic spat, you will see Hasselbeck doing most of the talking and shouting - not Rosie. In sad fact, the two of them drowned out the real speaker, comedian Joy Behar, who had outlined a carefully-considered list of the political crimes of George W. Bush and his administration.

Rosie was naughty because she had a personal agenda with Elizabeth and, in giving vent to it, she enabled Elizabeth's shrieking outburst - all of which effectively took the audience's eye off the significant political ball that Behar had put into play. And it gave the men in suits yet another opening for yet another onslaught against Rosie.

Rosie will be gone from The View in three weeks - rather controversially insofar as all the denials in the world will never convince us that her departure was not pressured by the men in suits.
Meanwhile, pretty little Mrs Hasselbeck will stay on, radiantly pregnant with the next generation of Christian Republican creationists.
And, here's the bet, it won't be long before Fox is making a lucrative offer to draw her into their fold of "fair and balanced" rabid righties.

Oh, Molly.

The geographical distance could not be greater but nor could the spiritual proximity.
Molly Ivins was one of my own kind - one of the very best. She may have been writing in Texas, but we were reading her in South Australia. Avidly. With absolute joy that she was allowed to have a voice in the American media landscape. The balanced voice, the funny one - satirist and wise woman. She wielded wit and irony as weapons of mass communication.
That breast cancer has taken her is an outrage and an injustice.