Finally experienced the piercing joy of eating ice-cream in the freezing cold, I always used to wonder why people would do that. But tonight I walked into this swanky ice-cream bar where the guy had just taken all the plastic rims off the deep buckets, presumably to wash them, and he was puzzling over putting them back each in its right place. I said, “Do you just take them off sometimes and put them back all different, then, just to confuse people?” And he gave me his slow, shy smile. “…No,” he said, somewhat reluctantly. “No,” I said, fondly, “because that would be silly.” Only I think I said “weird” or “freaky” because I always think “komisch” is going to mean “comical” then I remember it doesn’t. He didn’t take it amiss, thank god. There is not enough room in a passing pleasantry to say, I didn’t mean that as a passive-aggressive attack, it just came out wrong because my German is faulty. He had a service-smile and then a shyer, boyhood smile which he gave out only sparingly, from under the shelf of his brows. That was the one I remembered and will carry, which slightly alters everything. We’re in this world together! Each of us, gazing out, going: Wow, far out. We exchanged a look which acknowledged this. So then he gave me my ice-cream cone wrapped in a serviette and I ate it walking home in the cold, cold wind.
Tag: shopping
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bella Africa
Beautiful African woman, standing with her back to the street in a luscious canary-yellow dress. She is facing the vast windows of a display of swank cars, why? The windows rise away into the night above her head like an airport. Ah, I see. Beautiful African man, whom I didn’t see until he moved, in the dark, standing with his back to the car he has chosen for dreams, she has her phone up, he is posing. They are built like gods and light the night. I walk past with my head down, my hands full of posies of stolen plants roots and all gleaned from the gardens outside the shopping centre which I plan to propagate rather than just steal, beautiful in my way.
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a bowl of apples
Cafe I used to work in, in Berlin, had sometimes a dozen Apple computers (mine included) lined apple to apple, cheek to cheek across the counters. People forget ‘branded’ is what they used to do to the rumps of cattle. To show they are *owned by somebody*. We think it means, “Now I Own This.”
‘Maverick’, incidentally, comes from the name of the one guy who refused to burn brands into his cattle. So when a steer turned up who had no sign of ownership, they knew: one’s a maverick. But for all those who so proudly claim the term: still means you are somebody’s property. It’s just that the chains are invisible.
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I’m not sure you’re taking this entirely seriously
Went to the outdoor store to try on their $1000 goose-down & coyote fur jackets. “Made in Canada,” the sales guy explained as I was falling about laughing at the price: “Canadian wages.” “Ah,” I said. “Everyone wants Fair Trade but no one wants to pay any more for it.” He leveled his trigger finger at me: You Are Exactly Right.
Who has the money for this kind of malarky? They had a hat, with furry earpieces, a snip at 300 Euros. That’s, oh, around 375 Australian pesos. They had parkas in a seductive scarlet which have big hoods rimmed in fur. Magic. You put the hood up and you can’t see two feet in front of your face. The salesman folded the fur back for me: “Now can you see out?” “The street, yes. Stars, no.” He let his head fall to one side. “I’m not sure you’re taking this entirely seriously.”
Finally I bought a more ordinary hat, very warm, so warm it made me want to strip off a couple of layers. Leaving the shop I saw the original salesman, who had been called away to another section, leaning on a display cabinet of vicious-looking knives. He looked so bored. I tapped on the window from the snowy footpath to make him look up. In pantomime I showed him the successful and awesome furry-hat purchase, drew it out of my satchel and put it on to demonstrate how it makes me look like a Russian farmer maiden. His face split in an enormous grin. Thumbs up, he said. Thumbs up, I said. Thumbs up, said his colleague over his shoulder. Warm in the brain. It only now occurs to me the word ‘demon’ is embedded (devilishly) in the word ‘demonstrate.’ So all those door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen in the 50s were maybe like the anecdote, I mean the antidote, to God’s helpers who spread out on the ground and say, You take the poor suburbs, I’ll take the rich.
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built from junk
I wonder if the reason we are all so fascinated by vampires is that we are vampires, slowly draining the blood from our land. By our habits we suck the life out of the soil, the seas, and each other, turning workers into slaves in distant countries, buying surface sprays that promise to transform our homes into havens of immaculate lifelessness. Is that why we want to see this as desirable and glamorous? Is that why we long to confess?
It seems to me equally understandable that we are experiencing gluttony (obesity) as a leading cause of death, and sex as ‘an addiction’. These are the functions of survival: we need to eat, and we need to reproduce. At present our survival is threatened.* So naturally we can’t stop eating – or dieting, in some cases. We can’t stop thinking about sex – including all the primping, dyeing, shopping for killer shoes, posing, and choosing facebook profile pics.
I realise ‘we’ is a convenience, a generalisation so broad as to have very little meaning. But I mean it. We are in trouble.
On the high street I have been noticing a giant poster advertising skinny jeans. The models stand in a pouting row, bare-breasted, coyly protecting their chests with splayed and manicured hands. These are porn poses – the kinds of postures that ten years ago I would have never have seen, unless I had sought them out in specialist magazines. Now they are normalised on the high street, a flagrant yet oddly unsexy display.
Selected through a punitive auditioning process, photographed at the pinnacle of youth and freshness, these beautiful girls are highly socially desirable. To get here they have passed through the eye of the needle: dieted, dyed, denied themselves. The four of them embody what every eight-year-old girl dreams of. Yet on closer examination they seem weirdly unhealthy. That glowing skin tone has been artificially applied. Round the midriff they are pudgy with incipient rolls of fat. These beauties are not built as their mothers were out of fruit and fibre, vegetables and meat. In fact they are the first generation raised on hormones and additives, preservatives and complex fats. They are built from junk.As Michael Pollan points out, processed foods that do not break down on the shelf are not in fact foods at all. And if microbes won’t eat them: neither should you. Drifting down the alleys of supermarket aisles in a torpid trance of sugar overdose, slow-moving with fats, we are all busy building ourselves out of junk. If fashion models show signs of deterioration at their physical peak – what does that say about the rest of us?
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*To those still clinging to the driftwood of climate change denial: your arguments are built from junk. If science is mistaken. If our actions, unprecedented and massive in scale, cause only some tiny fraction of the natural cycle of climate change. Therefore it’s overwhelmingly urgent we make every effort in that tiny percentile we influence. Use your logic: it’s imperative. All hands on deck at this point. You’ll be welcomed.
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sex as a spectator sport
There are two sex shops nearby amid the shoes, discounted make up, flimsy summer dresses and cheap suits. Assuming they don’t sell sex itself any more than garage sales sell garages, I am guessing they sell implements. Outfits. Toys. Exciters & enhancers.
I’ve never been much interested in football. If someone turns up at my door with a ball, saying, Come down the park & let’s play – I’ll be there. But why watch other people doing it? Pornography seems to me strange like this. Sex is not a spectator sport. It happens between, and within. And the sex shops with their bristling array make me feel sad for their clients. If you need the Red Bull, the special lighting, the tools and the costume drama – if you are not overwhelmed by the breathing closeness of the one you want, standing before you in their naked body that has carried them here over worlds you will never know – it seems you are missing the point somehow. The reality. The experience.
How is it not unbearably moving, exciting, to take hold of someone you long for? Years ago in a trash magazine I read a confessional interview with an American rock teenager. His band is not up to much. But he fell in love with a famous girl, and had married her, and was boasting. He told how their first encounter took place in a famous hotel – o! the fame! the fame! the glory! – and in that hotel the bedroom had a long mirror behind the big bed. He said, I was pinching myself, I was saying, man, you’re balling Actress X! And you’re watching it in real time!!
