My friend Lisa has launched a book called Bondi Style – a snapshot (or several) of life in Bondi, with a sartorial slant.
I was asked to launch the book the other night. Which was a little bit weird because I don’t fit the Bondi style, apart from the glasses I wear (big, black, bought for ten bucks in Hong Kong when I was filming there with MasterChef). I do kind of observe it from up close, however, like a daggy anthropologist. This is because I work and live in Bondi.
This is a new series I’m starting that will flag cool gadgets and tricks and things that make life simpler and less… stuff-y. Most of it will be free stuff. All of it will be elegantly simple.
Sunday Life readers might have seen my column a month or two ago about Instapaper (a nifty filing button for “cool/interesting must-reads you find on the web when you’re meant to be other stuff but that you know you’ll never find again if you don’t read now”. Basically, it enables you to read cool shit later.)
Chapter two in this thinking: Readability. It’s a new FREE! INSTALL IN-ONE-STEP button that you just add to your toolbar and it changes stuff you’re reading online into clear, simple, old-school text, getting rid of pop-up ads and annoying eyeball clutter. When you’re reading something online, just press the readability bookmarklet on your toolbar and it converts the text into a far happier format. A treat for sore eyes!
And so The Lovely Bones, the movie, kicks off next week.[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikUWKi0W5_g&feature=related[/youtube]
I’ve been hanging for this movie to come out. The book by Alice Sebold has huanted me for years. What has struck me most poignantly is the kooky 14-year-old thoughts Susie Salmon has (via her narration) about family, and boys and beauty. They reminded me of my own personal dialogue at my age now. Which made me realise I had the same dialogue when I was Susie’s age. I wondered about impermanence, I reflected in a melancholy way and would hover on sad, small thoughts for a while…and pull them apart delicately.
This week I sleep at the wrong end of my bed.
Lately I’ve been exploring whimsy (see my previous post). A little bit because I just like the word. It has a lovely onomatopoeic trill to it. It’s also a theme that’s been popping up a lot this past week, which is what themes do when I’m looking for a new topic for this column. When they erupt in clusters I’m compelled to write about them, somewhat whimsically. Or perhaps just superstitiously.
First, I met this guy down the street who’d stuck eight cameras together and had devised a button that could press them simultaneously. Just to see what happened. He was taking photos of twigs when I came across him.
Next I wandered into a bookshop and came across Isabella Rossellini’s new book Green Porno, in which she dresses up as a baby barnacle (totally deadpan) and ponders anchovy orgies via thought bubbles. Because she can, I guess. It’s compellingly bonkers.
And then I got a feed from 13-year-old fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson. I’ve followed Tavi for 18 months. Her “about me” blurb reads: “I take part in a rap group with a pirate, and we write about Japanese designers and furry vests”. Her posts see her variously dressed up in a piece of carpet netting with a blue fruit basket attached at the hip, and four clashing tartan pieces (one on each limb) worn with floral Doc Martens.
She’s now sartorial royalty. She’s been on the cover of fashion bible Pop and sat front row at New York Fashion Week last month. She posts: “For one week I was in a utopia full of people who can recognize that my jacket is Luella and appreciate that I stuck an upside-down doll in its chest pocket.” Off-the-dial whimsy in a four-foot-nothing package. I want to hug her!
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/2247337[/vimeo]
(The above is the cutest damn thing I’ve seen a 12-year-old do…mind is troubled to think where such whimsy comes from)
Anyway, so I’ve decided whimsy makes life better.
So I met His Holiness the Dalia Lama. Much to say (stay tuned…I’ll be filing my Sunday Life column on here shortly). But for now, the evidence: Anyone from Melbourne? Definitely try to get to his public lecture this Thursday. His message is very important right now as we find ourselves caught in a flurry … Read more
This week I cheerfully lower the tone of Christmas.
When, in a few weeks, I arrive into my hometown after a sweaty four-hour crawl up the highway, I’ll be pulling over in a truck stop, breathing deeply and repeating the following mantra: I aim only for cheer. I will then calmly continue on to Mum and Dad’s and enter the Wilson Christmas Fray. Breathing. Very. Deeply.
Christmas is hard. First, there’s the strobing, jingly, soul-deflating onslaught of crass consumerism from about August onwards. Which we then try to deflect by Focusing on What Really Matters – family, the joy of giving and so on. Which, in turn, serves only to create ridiculously high expectations that come crashing to earth in an argument over who left the skid marks in Dad’s gravel drive. All before Grandma’s first sherry’s poured.
I’m sure families aren’t designed for extended periods of intimacy. But every year, there we go again, piling on top of each other for 48 hours-plus and expecting born-of-a-virgin-like miracles.
…this year, it’s this clever little charity…streetsmart.org.
What do Stephen Fry and I have in common? I wish it was a lot more. For now it’s the fact we both support Streetsmartaustralia.org, a set-up that helps you help homeless people in your community…while eating out.
It works like this:
This is also how life works: when we actively support anyone doing good stuff, good stuff spreads. My approach has always been that the biggest difference is made from the small things we do as individuals.
This video says it all in pictures.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43L1IR5qHIU&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
These moments seem like flukes. But nothing is a coincidence, ever. If you’re meant to live, you will. Everything flows in that direction as if by magic. I’ve been saved from death a number of times, by millimetres. Most of us have. It’s just we don’t see the “hand of God” that swoops in to save us. Or we don’t reflect on it when the moment passes; we take it for granted that the bus changed lanes just at the right moment. Or whatever.
This week death is close to me. My beautiful Uncle Pete, who is also my godfather, has a brain tumor. He’s being operated on, on Friday and he has a 60 per cent chance of coming out of it unscathed. Then comes chemo.
This week I check in with my “inside people”
You can spend a lifetime reading books about how to get happy in 11 easy steps while not sweating small stuff. There are a lot out there, generally written by some of the most tortured souls around (in the same way neurotics often become psychiatrists and awkward nerds generally become models).
But I find the most powerful life-bettering lessons emerge from everyday people you meet in the street. Randoms, in the act of happiness.
On Monday I ran into Eugene, a surfer I’ve known from around my neighbourhood for a while, sitting in the sun having a coffee. I asked what he was doing because he wasn’t reading the paper or talking into a phone. He was just sitting. “Sez, I’m checking in with my inside people,” he said everyday-ishly, like he was posting a letter.
I found this new ad for a sustainable development company that invites us to rethink the way things are done. You can’t actually access the link via youtube, so click experiencere… The visual effect of the youtube interface splitting at the seams is clever, technologically. But so is the symbolism. It got me thinking. Very … Read more