The crack of evil

It's Halloween, that time of the year when the fissure between earth and hell opens for a moment and all the nasty things sneak out. That's why we need to spook them back where they belong by wearing ghoulish Philip Ruddock and Alexander Downer masks. The crack of evil is supposed to open for only a nanosecond on All Hallows Eve, according to Celtic legend - but why do I get the feeling it was prised open long ago - let's say around Halloween 2000 - and never entirely slammed shut again? I might paint my toenails black in protest today - to match the cloud of CO2 emmissions that is going to get me anyway. At left, a pictorial offering from my trip to Dracula's birthplace in Romania last year.

A whiter shade of female

The following is the text of my Deeply Superficial column in this month's (sydney) and (melbourne) magazines:
A few weeks ago, I was strap-hanging in a crowded New York subway car thinking about the colour of my skin. It was difficult not to in this situation – I was the only white person in the car. And I was very white, having come from Australia’s winter to the middle of a heatwave in Manhattan. Just to make me feel even more different, the occupants of the car were jiving to blues played by an old musician sitting on a crate. He’d play a few bars and then ask his audience to guess which singer performed the tune. “Who made it?” he’d call out. I jived along with the rest of them. And then he turned to me. “White lady,” he said. “This one’s for you. Don’t none of the rest of you tell her who it is.” He played a few bars. It was something very famous. Panicked, I said the first thing that came into my head. “Otis Redding?” Everyone looked at me in pity. “No!” yelled the musician. “Tina Turner before Ike hit her!” My fellow passengers dissolved into laughter. The song was Proud Mary. Now I felt really White.

But I digress… I’m thinking about white skin, as I always do this time of the year, when fake tans beckon. I’ve travelled a lot in the past year and most of my journeys have taken me to places where I’ve felt very blonde and very white – Rajisthan in India, Beijing in China, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Huvafen Fushi in the Maldives, Harlem in New York. Unfortunately for some travellers, skin colour has become such an issue these days that if you’ve got the wrong one you’re likely to have your fellow passengers gang up on you and throw you off the plane. So it’s rather instructive - and humbling – to move outside your comfort zone and become the “other,” the odd one out. I had a wonderful time in Harlem, where people seem more courteous, friendly and good-humoured than the rest of Manhattan, but on one occasion I walked into a Black Power shop, where a fab teeshirt of Angela Davis had caught my attention, and the sales assistant froze me out with her glare. (Too much bad history, I suppose.)

This summer, white New Yorkers seemed obsessed with becoming brown, taking to solariums to get a deep, nuggetty tan which would horrify most Australians. But we’re an odd planet – in Hong Kong, I was gobsmacked by the shelves of skin-whitening products in department stores and pharmacies. The obsession to be pale in Asian countries mirrors the obsession to be golden tan in the west.Over the past year, skin-whitening products such as SK-II Whitening and Clinique’s Derma White have become available in Australia. It’s not so much that we want to become whiter it’s just that we like what colour we have to be free of age spots and irregular pigmentation, to be radiant and luminous, to use the two favourite buzzwords of the industry.

“Whitening” is a bit of a misnomer. All skins produces melanin when exposed to UV rays. When there is too much melanin – caused by sun exposure or hormonal changes – the skin is unable to decompose it and so it remains in clusters or blotches on the surface. Whether you’re yellow, light brown, caramel or pink, there’s an argument that “whitening” products will work for you in evening out your skin tone and reducing visible sun damage.Right now, with the warm weather here, I’m trying Clarins Radiance Plus Self Tanning Body Lotion on my legs and SK-II Whitening Source on my face. It’s a bit schizophrenic, I know. I’m conditioned to think my face should be white but my body golden. I suspect it’s something to do with the idea that being tan makes you look slimmer.

Is that the sound of my proudly black soul sisters up in Harlem chuckling?

Revenge of the Wrinklies?

"For years, it has been the widespread practice throughout the beauty industry to promote the attainment of wrinkle-free, youthful skin by using wrinkle-free, youthful models. While the styling and the settings – children, puppies, windswept beaches - have suggested that the models are in that great, indeterminate 20-35 age group, in many cases they have been teenagers or very young women ... After all, we have been force-fed for years the idea that a woman’s skin is “perfect” when she’s 12 and it’s all downhill from there." Read the rest of my column on the trend to older models in this month's Australian Women's Weekly, out today.

Throw the Jew Down the Well

Okay, okay, calm down... it's only Borat's favourite Kazahk tune, which he managed to get a crowd at an American football game to sing along with him. Some people don't find Borat funny, including the entire population of Kazahkstan. Satire or bad taste? Or both? Make up your mind: the first four minutes of Cultural Leanings of America to Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has been (deliberately no doubt) leaked to You Tube and is doing the rounds of cyberspace. Check it out here via Huffpost. Will Bruno get his own movie too?

The white leg dilemma

My monthly column, Deeply Superficial, appears in the (melbourne) magazine today (inside The Age) and in the (sydney) magazine tomorrow (which is free with The Sydney Morning Herald.) (I wish they'd get rid of those trendy parentheses.) The subject this month is Asia's obsession with white skin and the West's obsession with suntans, now that it's time to get out the fake tan again. By the way, if you really must fake it (and, quite frankly, I don't see what is wrong with white legs) I've discovered a product that isn't half bad: Asyana Dark Bronze Tanning Lotion. It gives you a hell of a fright when you first pump it out of the bottle because it stains your hands poo-brown but, never fear, it washes off. Okay, that's enough superficiality for this week. On to more serious things...

Vogue Living goes wild

The latest very civilised edition of Vogue Living has a wild heart. Check out the gorgeous abstracts of Australian native flowers by Tony Amos. At left, one of the series, Flannel Nocturne.

Telecholia

I'm putting in ten-hour days on this novel, so I like nothing more than to go into a mindless coma in front of the tele after dinner (or, even, during dinner.) I'm not sure if digital TV is messing with my brainwaves or not, but ever since I suscribed to it I could swear there's less to watch, rather than more. How could this be? Last night was a case in point - after the mandatory hour and a half of wrist-slashing news (SBS, ABC, The 7:30 Report) and a few little chuckles over Curb Your Enthusiasm (funny enough, but I'm mourning the program it replaced, the divinely whimsical Arrested Development) I spent an hour flipping through channel after channel, passing over movies I'd seen before or never wish to see, repeats, repeats, repeats of comedies I watched as a child and from which I've moved on, Andrea Bocelli, Greta van Susteren, South Park episodes I've already seen twice, The Simpsons, people cooking things, Eastenders, people building things, Coronation Street, excreable promos for unfunny stand-up comedians, people blowing up things, Blow Out, America's Next Top Something... well, fellow Foxtel viewers, you get the picture. As I was flipping through the networks I realised I have never watched Channel Ten in my life. And now I shall never watch Channel Nine again, given what they have done to The Sopranos (midnight on Mondays from now on, I believe, if we're lucky, and my damn video doesn't work.) But tonight! The one little glimmer of genius in this swamp of blah makes its final appearance on the ABC (bless it) at 10:05 pm and even if I have to sit through the plodding Midsomer Murders to see it I will prevail. (Actually, it's so easy to sleep through MM that I shall set the alarm.) Sensitive Skin, starring Joanna Lumley and Denis Lawson as a 60-ish couple who are struggling to hold on to their youth, is positively brilliant, and has invented a new genre all of its own, melanchomedy. The bitterest sweet, it is not uproariously funny but it's wry and charming - and just when you're relaxing, in the ABC way, thinking how pleasant and doesn't Joanna Lumley look great for 61? the odd, devastating Pinteresque moment lobs in. It's the last episode but I guess we'll be able to get it on DVD very soon - which is what I shall be doing with series six of The Sopranos.

Oh craven new world that has such people in it

I woke up to a dismal day - grey skies, the news that legendary New York rock venue CBGB's has closed, and Janet Albrechtsen beaming from the front page of The Australian, dressed as Oscar Wilde, and triumphant now that she's pushed through her plan to force the ABC news to feature its fair share of kittens up trees just like the commercial networks.

Hail Uncle Monty

I'm having crumpets and butter and a small rhesus-negative Bloody Mary today to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of my favourite film - ever -Bruce Robinson's masterpiece Withnail & I.Unbelievably, there are some people who have never seen it. (James Wolcott, I'm talking about you.) For those of you who haven't, go buy the anniversary DVD now. "It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life, when one morning he awakes, and quite reasonably says to himself, I will never play the Dane."

Other voices, other reforms

I was honoured to be invited to judge nominees for the Magazine Feature Writing category of the Walkley Awards for 2006. It was an awesome task in the true sense of the word - 59 submissions of an exceptionally high standard, ranging in subject from elegant profiles of public identities to gut-wrenching pieces of investigative journalism. (Indeed, there were so many well-written profiles, one of the judges suggested this genre should have its own category.) Reading and assessing was a pretty tough ask but we (my fellow judges Toby Creswell and Louise Adler) came to a conclusion surprisingly quickly. Congratulations to Patrick Cook, Chloe Hooper and Amanda Hooton who are our chosen finalists in the category. Of course, there were at least another five stories I would have loved to have given a gong, but that's the cruel nature of writing awards. I toodled along to the Civic Hotel in central Sydney on Wednesday night for the ceremony to anounce nominees. In a particularly unfortunate stroke of irony, this was the same week that our beloved Communications Minister, behaving increasingly like Miss Piggy, drove the new media reforms through the Senate. Not a great week for journalism or freedom of speech, when you add Anna Politkovskaya's murder into the mix. Still, talking the Pollyanna line, I was heartened by the fact that there are so many talented voices being published. Let's just hope there will always be a significant medium for them to be heard. The winners of the Walkley Awards will be announced in a televised gala event on November 30 in Melbourne.

The Hillary versus Condi ho-down

Hot off the email this morning, check out this hilarious animation. Go girls!

Go with the Flo

Better hurry... it's the last day or two to catch Gillian Armstrong's wonderful, whimsical bio-documentary, Unfolding Florence, about Florence Broadhurst, the woman who reinvented herself more times than Madonna or Kylie Minogue and whose last incarnation was as a successful fabric designer, responsible for those fabulous, headache-inducing prints that now grace the walls of every fashionable pad and watering-hole in Sydney. Check with Palace Cinemas for final screening times.

The world's best hotel lobby?

It's no secret that the novel I'm currently writing is set in hotel lobbies in various countries and there's no doubt that The Peninsula in Hong Kong boasts one of the great lobbies of the world (if not the great lobby.) So it was with much delight I lunched today at the vertiginous 41 restaurant with Jean Forrest, the Hong Kong based General Manager of Marketing for the Peninsula group, and Frank Bowling, who is "Ambassador" for The Peninsula in Beverly Hills. I'd been to the Beijing Peninsula Palace last December and the Pen in Hong Kong this May, and I'm becoming a bit of a Peninsula groupie - purely for the purposes of collecting information for my book, of course. Since lunch, I've now added The Peninsula Beverly Hills to my must-visit list, as well as the new Tokyo one (but I'll have to wait until the end of 2007 when it opens.) The Divine Frank Bowling, who has been GM at two iconic hotels, the Bel Air in Beverly Hills and the Carlyle in New York, tells me that regular, valued guests at the Beverly Hills Pen (such as James Packer) have their own monogrammed pillowcases. And to make the journey in commercial first class so much more comfortable (when the Gulfstream's not available) the hotel will pack your very own picnic basket of goodies to take on board. The bliss of being super-rich! As the hotel is right next door to my film agent at CAA, you can guess where I'll be staying when I go to do my next big film deal. By the way, if you know of any fabulous hotel lobbies (five star or half-a-star, it doesn't matter) please post below. I'm always looking for a new lobby to swan around in.

The forty men rule

The stack of books beside my bed is getting out of control. I'm going to need an engineer soon to consult on how to keep them upright. I'm almost finished with Love for Sale: A World History of Prostitution by Nils Johan Ringdal, which is as entertaining as a 17th Century Venetian courtesan's repartee (who, incidentally, was required to be "neat and clean, delicate, well dressed, cunning at the card table and board games, and prolific in arithmetic.") Full of fascinating detail about whoredom, one of my favourite bits is the "forty men rule" devised by medieval theologians - any woman who had sex with over forty men was deemed a harlot whether she was paid for the sex or not. So - whew - there'll be a few women out there who are glad they stopped at thirty-nine. Also on the stack is Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe and Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, both waiting for a re-read. Under that, The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists they Inspired by Francine Prose and Maharanis: A Family Saga of Four Queens by Lucy Moore... hmmm I think there's a theme emerging.

Vale Anna Politkovskaya

When she was a guest at this year's Sydney Writer's Festival, Russian journalist and author Anna Politkovskaya enthralled everyone with her fierce intellect and astonishing courage. A strong critic of Vladimir Putin through her reportage for the independent paper Novaya Gazeta, she was the one journalist the Chechan rebels trusted to report on the Moscow theatre siege in 2002. In Sydney, she spoke about her role as liaison between the Russian government and the rebels - a task that was thrust upon her and one she undertook with great apprehension. She claimed she was poisoned on the plane on her way to cover the Beslan school siege in Chechnya in 2004. There was a strong sense of weary fatalism as she spoke, as if she knew the Russian secret police would get her one day, one way or the other. And now someone has. This morning it is reported that she was found murdered in her Moscow apartment building. The news is appalling but Politskovskaya's voice can't be killed off as easily as her body - she is the author of several books on modern Russia, including the recent Putin's Russia and A Dirty War: A Russian reporter in Chechnya. Register your protest by going to Amazon UK and reading the work of this exceptional woman.

Something from Chanel this way comes

Imagine my delight when a large shopping bag from Chanel arrived yesterday. Inside, something wrapped in white tissue. Was it a jacket? A dress? I carefully removed it and unfolded the layers. Exactly what I've always wanted - a Chanel bath pillow! Now, all I need is the bath. Oh well, it's way more chic than the two pink cupcakes, iced to resemble breasts, that a Sydney cosmetic surgeon once sent me to promote his range of services. Watch this space for more crazy PR gimmicks.

Jenny Kee chants her big life

It was wonderful to have the opportunity to take my Jenny Kee "opal oz" shirt and poncho out for a cocktail last night. Those girls are so outlandish they can only be aired every now and again. I first bought them in the early 1980s from the legendary Flamingo Park store in the Strand Arcade and have worn them on and off ever since. Famously, Karl Lagerfeld was so enamoured of the print that he used it for lining a collection of Chanel suits. Last night, the occasion was the launch, at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, of Jenny Kee's autobiography, A Big Life, splendidly published by Lantern. Soul sister Linda Jackson, who flew down from Cairns for the night, gave the official speech. A beauteous Jenny, wearing black and white (Yohji mixed with Flamingo Park she told me) with her trademark bright red lips, gave an elegant speech that had some in the crowd in tears. Then she blessed us with a Buddhist chant, singing the mantra she had woven into her latest piece, Transformer: Waratah Warrior Walking the Sacred Path, designed in collaboration with Masahiro Nakagawa and constructed from the old teeshirts of her late lover Danton Hughes. A few Flamingo Park pieces came out for the night, including scarves worn by Alexandra Joel and Dasha Ross. If you looked down rather than up, you would haave spotted Nell Schofield's amazing shoes, which looked like plaster casts stuck onto wooden blocks (very approppriate given that the Chinese terracotta warriors guarding the room were wearing almost the same footwear.) The gang was all there - Richard Neville, Martin Sharp, Brett Hilder, Sue Smithers, Kylie Kwong, Mary Shackman, Ita Buttrose, Robert Adamson, Mark Joffe and Lydia Livingston, Fran Moore, Deborah Leser. Those who were originals in the 70s and 80s looked on with amusement at the dashing young man, generation 2001, who was wearing full New Romantic drag. So much nostalgia in one night! It was bliss.

Oh Happy Day

Celebrate the 15th birthday of Martha Stewart Living today by baking some chocolate brownies. (From scratch, please, no packet jobs.) Here's the recipe from Martha's book Desserts (Clarkson Potter):
1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts (optional)
I cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter plus more for pan
8 ounces best quality unsweetened chocolate such as Callebaut
5 large eggs
3 1/2 cups sugar
2 teaspoon instant espresso
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract1 2/3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips.
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Spread the chopped walnuts on baking pan; toast until fragrant, 5-10 minutes. Transfer nuts to bowl to cool. Increase oven temperature to 400 degrees. Generously butter a 9-by-13 inch baking pan; set aside. Combine the chocolate and butter in a heat-proof bowl or on top of a double boiler. Set over a pan of simmering water until the chocolate mixture has melted. Remove from heat; set aside. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat the eggs, sugar, and espresso at high speed, 10 minutes. Reduce speed to low, and add the melted chocolate mixture and the vanilla; beat until combined. Slowly add the flour and salt; beat until just incorporated. Fold in the chocolate chips and toasted walnuts. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake until the edges are dry but the center is still soft, about 35 minutes. Remove pan from oven, and transfer to wire rack to cool. Cut into 3-inch squares, and store in an airtight container up to 2 days.

The Devil Wears Prada

The only thing I liked about the book was its title but the movie is a blast. Much of this credit goes to screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna whose script plays like a old screwball comedy from the 'thirties (and that, my friends, is my favourite genre, along with anything film noir starring Ida Lupino.) For those who are calling this film a satire on the behaviour of the fashion pack I should say this: it's a documentary. My only caveat about the script is that it falls for the same moralising tone as the book - assistant Andrea and her arty friends are somehow superior to steely editor Miranda Priestly because they are "nice." Frankly, I'd rather hang out with Meryl and Stanley any day.