Sarah Wilson

sunday life: in which I try out “whimsy” for size

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This week I sleep at the wrong end of my bed.

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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.

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This is Tavi
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this is her style, pic courtesy of her site (she's narky about due attribution!)

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.

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and so it was that i giggled with the Dalai Lama

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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

sunday life: in which I plan to cope with my mad family at Christmas

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i cheerfully watch this film every christmas, deliriously full of turkey.

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.

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if i recommend getting involved in one thing…

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…this year, it’s this clever little charity…streetsmart.org.

donate $2 with streetsmart
donate $2 with streetsmart

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:

  1. check out streetsmartaustralia.org to see restaurants taking part. Here’s a map with clicky bits…here! Hundreds are. Most of the big ones on my hit-list are. In Sydney: Longrain, Bills, etc In Melbourne: Cutler and Co….
  2. when the bill comes you’ll be invited to kick in an extra $2
  3. your two bucks will then be ferried off to a homeless project nearby. For details, see this
  4. you will feel better about yourself and the collective. This is how life works.

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.

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good reminder #1: you only get one shot

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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.

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sunday life: in which i check in with my inside people…and Eugene Tan

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This week I check in with my “inside people”

a happy shot by Uge
a happy shot by Uge

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.

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do not adjust your screen!

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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

why I like men

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I’m meant to be writing my Sunday Life column, due in two hours. But there’s a great survey published on The Punch today – blokes’ take on female body image. And it’s given me an inspired jolt.

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On Thursday I drank wine and ate sushi with The  Punch editor Penbo (he gave me the gig writing an indulgent column in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph a year or so ago when he was editor) and he we were talking about the survey. He was getting responses on his blackberry from male readers as we ate. He made the startlingly obvious point that everything we (women) think we know about what men think about us is wrong. We kind of know this. But it’s another one of those things about men we just refuse to accept.

I like this observation from the survey, because it opened my eyes:

Interestingly, men think women are more turned on by a good physique than they are.

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sunday life: in which I plunge into mess

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This week I plunge into mess

So tell me what you make of this pop-cultural collision? Californian fashion label Ed Hardy has launched a range of hand sanitisers. The tattoo-motifed label is best known for dressing trash-tastic celebs like Tara Reid and Tommy Lee in expensive, tough-nut versions of your aunt’s experiments with a BeDazzler gun in the early 80s. So this foray into handbag-sized disinfectant is a bit off-kilter, don’t you think? A bit like Mack trucks doing a diffusion line of tampons.

Anyway, hand sanitiser happens to nick an old wound of mine. I despair when I see more evidence of our desperate attempts to control life – be it the germs, dirt, traffic or noise.

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