Triumph Over Time?

Posted on May 31, 2006

Still on celebrity rant: My eye was caught by an ad for ‘The New Triumph Over Time by Dior’ (sounds like a Cher song) and the tagline ‘More beautiful today than you were at 20′. It shows an image of a beautiful 20-something girl and it was vaguely churning in my brain that she couldn’t be too far past the mark anyway.

Then I realised the woman looked a little familar and picked the magazine up to read that this was in fact Sharon Stone! I just laughed! I covered the name and asked Sig. Other how old he thought this woman was and he put her at 26. I told him who it was and he didn’t believe me.

Now, Sharon Stone was born in 1958 so she’s not even within hollering distance of 26, yet there she is, not line, not a wrinkle - she’s perfect. Do they really expect us to believe skin cream can take a couple of decades off your face?

What makes me cross is the hypocrisy of the ad which croons ‘your age, the most beautiful age’ when they clearly do NOT think 48 is a beautiful age.

What saddens me is that Sharon Stone, although a willing partner, must cringe every time she sees this image of her flawless self, preserved like a ripe peach and then looks in the mirror to see a middle-aged prune.

At least the rest of us can actually grow old gracefully - or even disgracefully - without having to justify it to anyone. It is a perfectly natural process after all.

Clinking Bling

Posted on May 30, 2006

I hate to add to the general chatter about celebrities but the urge is upon me. What is the big woop? That really sums it up for me.

The whole supposed adulation of celebrities is clearly artifical and self-perpetuating - why are we buying into it?

The latest example of gratuitous self-promotion is Channel 7’s glitzy ‘reality’ (hello?) show ‘It Takes Two’ where a supposed non-singing (Channel 7) celebrity performs a duet with a singing celebrity - not that I’d heard of either actually.

You can only wonder at the politics behind it all. I imagine all every wanna-be and every nearly-there at Channel 7 with their hand in the air (jabbing it up and down making those little noises in the throat that tells the teacher you know the answer - definitely) ‘Pick meeeee!’ they murmur through their lip gloss.

And no wonder, these shows can turn a weather man into a game show host or a game show glamour girl into a talk show host overnight. What I just can’t work out is why we care. 

Ups & Downs

Posted on May 29, 2006

Talk about the best of times and the worst of times - what a week for Australian climber/mountaineer, Lincoln Hall. First he manages to summit Mt Everest (I’ve always wondered about the significance of a mountain called Ever Rest) allowing him to tick another lifelong dream off his To Do list. Next thing he’s collapsed with altitude sickness and left for dead up the mountain. But as the news of his death and the circumstances is emerging back home, it is overtaken by the news that he has been found alive by an American climber (after a night on the mountain!) and is being brought down. What an amazing story.

I met Lincoln Hall some years ago - probably even 15 years - when he was the paid speaker at corporate event of which I was the organiser. He arrived an hour or so before the event and was none too organised - unusual for a climber. A really lovely man but a bit frazzled. He was in a fix as he hadn’t been able to print out his speech but he had it on an Apple diskette - could I sort the problem out? I rang the local Apple dealer and they agreed to print it for him - must have been the days before email. I gave Mr Hall the address and suggested he grab a cab and dash around there. The look he gave me! He seemed overwhelmed by the task at hand. You’d have thought I’d asked him to, well, climb Everest. A great lesson in the sheer diversity of human comfort zones.

My business partner at the time was a climber who went away every year to tackle either Everest or some other equally punishing peak. So, we had lots of climbers, some missing toes and fingers from frostbite, hanging about the office. I don’t think it’s a generalisation to say that they are men of much action and few words. They’re quiet men of great resolve and focus - with a selfish streak -who push themselves to achieve for the sole purpose of that achievement. You’ve got to admire them. Hell! You wouldn’t climb Everest to impress anyone else but yourself!

Bookies Meet

Posted on May 26, 2006

We had our third book club meet at The Inch cafe last night and the numbers, which swelled to 22 people last time, had ebbed (thank God) to six - very civilised.

Janette brought ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’ by Jean Dominique Bauby to discuss - amazing how it just keeps popping up, a true ‘word-of-mouth’ success. She also highly recommended ‘The Kite Runner’ by Khaled Hosseini, set in Afghanistan, which I’ve heard many good things about and have now borrowed to read.

By contrast Lucille had been reading ‘In Mortal Danger’ a true story about a girl who starts her adult life at 14 when she becomes a sort of au pair to a family and sex toy for the husband who is a high profile legal eagle. Sounded fascinating but disturbingly explicit and was compared to ‘Running with Scissors’. The thing that disturbed Lucille the most was that her mother had read it before her!

Jane recommended two books one by Wallace Stegner called ‘Angle of Repose’ - which is apparently an engineering term - she described it as a heavy duty read but well worth the effort. She also spoke very highly of ‘An Equal Music’ by Vikram Seth which is a novel about music. Janette is a cellist and she said the orchestra had all read it and loved it - pretty amazing feat for a non-musician writer to accomplish.

I took an old favourite, Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ ,and a good thing I did because only one other person had read it - and several had never heard of it - what is the world coming to!

But probably the highlight of the evening was the dessert which was three large plates each with about six tiny desserts, let’s see - that’s 18 desserts to be shared by six people. The most delicious one was a hazelnut meringue (just took me about 8 attempts to spell that!) with a little fresh cream on top..mmm

Brilliant Idea

Posted on May 25, 2006

I’m big on brilliant ideas and have been put in my place many a time by my significant other who says ‘Just tell me the idea - I’ll decide if it’s brilliant.’ He simply doesn’t understand the hype starts with the flagging of the idea as ‘brilliant’.

Anyway, my latest brilliant idea stemmed from thinking about the relationship between writers and cafes. (If you really want to get romantic, picture Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre writing in cosy Left Bank cafes - Paris in winter.)

I thought that in order to support the arts and promote their local authors, cafes could ‘Adopt an Author’.

So, no money needs to change hands - although if the cafe wanted to supply endless free short-blacks authors might work a little more speedily. But the author would undertake to haunt the cafe on a regular basis, providing an elusive presence and adding a certain sense of nuance. (Whatever the hell that means) Obviously if the author became horrendously famous this couldn’t help but bode well for the general vibe of the cafe. Admirers would be drawn to the cafe as they are to the bars propped up Hemingway in Spain.

The cafe would have a sign displayed saying they were part of the ‘Adopt an Author’ programme, and who their author was. They would display (favourable) reviews (ritual burnings of unfavourable) and perhaps even sell signed copies of their works. Possibly a special private launch for patrons when new work was published.

I think it’s a symbiotic relationship made in heaven - but maybe I just believe my own hype!

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