ARE YOU ON TV YET?

"It is unlikely that many of us will be famous, or even remembered. But not less important than the brilliant few that lead a nation or a literature to fresh achievements, are the unknown many whose patient efforts keep the world from running backward; who guard and maintain the ancient values, even if they do not conquer new; whose inconspicuous triumph it is to pass on what they inherited from their fathers, unimpaired and undiminished, to their sons. Enough, for almost all of us, if we can hand on the torch, and not let it down; content to win the affection, if it may be, of a few who know us and to be forgotten when they in their turn have vanished. The destiny of mankind is not governed wholly by its 'stars.'"

- F.L. Lucas

If we believed them, those words would reroute a misguided generation. To our detriment, we have limited our definition of modern-day "success" to how many people know our name, recognise us on the street and follow us on Twitter. We are a love-hungry populace, seeking constant validation from our peers. We just want to know we're ok, and bizarrely, we've learned to think that 15 minutes' reality tv exposure will confirm the fact. One of my favourite songwriters, Sara Bareilles, tweeted something recently that really struck me. She simply said to her 2 million + followers:

"You are enough. You are amazing. I promise."

Those words sang to the ache inside a ripped-off cohort of bright young things. To those who have grown up under the lie that to be known and remembered is to be valuable. Prominence is a poor substitute for assurance. And the former will never guarantee the latter. If you don't already live out of the assumption that you are inherently "enough", then no amount of flattery, empty praises, promotions, followers or love letters will fill that gaping chasm where your worth should be. You've got to figure out what it is that has contributed to your missing link.

Lucas' words would seem to imply that every life is valuable and worth living. That the mothers are as important as the actresses. That it is the former's efforts that "keep the world from running backward". In a world where we have glorified fame as the ultimate cosmic seal of approval, we have diminished and undermined the purpose of most of the world's inhabitants. That is, to learn what a good life looks like. And to live it. To raise a new generation with integrity. To love justice. To guard and develop your own scope of influence, whatever its scale. Some people will never believe that they could be happy with an "ordinary" life.

I would counter that there is no such thing.

TUESDAY WITH PETER

Less than ideal circumstances have seen me spending a fair bit of time at an old folks' home lately. On a recent particularly full-on visit, I wandered into the communal lounge area for distraction via a change in scenery, where a number of elderly dears were dotted around the room either chatting amongst themselves or staring vacantly into the distance - sanity levels dependent. The dulcet tones of 1950s ballads lent an eerie melancholy to the scene; the jubilant rhythms misplaced in so lifeless an atmosphere.

As I sat back into an obliging floral armchair as aged as its most frequent inhabitants, my gaze fell to a man on my right. He had the aura of someone still with his wits about him, and was intently poring over a book on the history of freemasonry. Yearning to engage with this fascinating specimen, I found myself waltzing over. "May I enquire about the book you're reading?" I started mischievously, flopping into a neighbouring seat. "Hello, darling!" he replied, promptly landing it on my lap. Thus began an hour of one of the most fascinating conversations of my life. Peter had been a musician. A fact confirmed when he would later serenade me, loudly, and in German, to the indifference of a less than captive senile audience. "Ich liebe dich, my dear.." he bellowed operatically, simultaneously backing his earlier claim to German fluency. His voice still rang as clear as crystal through the foggy tunnel of age. I could tell he had been quite the talent. "When I was 19, I was left a small fortune," he explained. "I never had to work! So I built a boat and sailed around Europe for most of my twenties, crossing from one concert, one music festival to the next."

He had no family now, he said, and only one friend. One friend whose nine-year-old daughter he walked into a bank with just weeks ago and signed over his entire inheritance to. "It's important to set up future generations, to give them a chance to succeed." he said by way of explanation. We talked of life, of education, of love, of regret. "What do you think people live to regret?" I mused to him, half rhetorically. His face turned sober. "I was so selfish. I regret being selfish. You know, I never married. I had mistresses, sure, all very intelligent, passionate, fiery women. But I lived for myself." as I was taking in the gravity of this disclosure, he affixed me with his penetrating stare. "Look at you. You're young and beautiful, and you've got that against you. Men are going to come in and out of your life... in and out. And they're going to hold you up." Seemingly a fragment, I waited for the rest of his discourse. It never came. We sat in comfortable silence.

We talked on; of land, of ownership, the importance of education, of travel. By the end of it, he'd convinced me to call to fruition my buried dream of learning German myself. I'd always wanted to, if only to one day pronounce my surname in a way that didn't cause my Deutsch-dwelling friends to fall about themselves in laughter. "Never stop learning. Never stop reading." he stressed to me. The nurse came round to administer his medicine, at which point he grinned and barked "you'd better set an extra place for dinner!" cocking his head in my direction. "No, Peter!" the nurse countered jokingly, "you'll have to take this young lady to a nice restaurant." "You know, I don't think I even know anywhere good around here..." he replied apologetically, as if the proposition held actual merit. He turned to me, "In my younger years I would've made an adventure of going off to find one, but these days I just don't have the energy!" It was roughly around this time I decided I loved him.

"Well," I said brightly, as our conversation eventually reached a natural end. "This has been a wonderful afternoon." "You've read a good book!" Peter said, pointing to the still-open volume of his I'd absconded. "I think I've read two." I said softly, smiling into that gracious man's watery blue eyes. With that, I gave him a shy kiss on the cheek and scampered off. Back to real life.

I'll always remember that afternoon with Peter. He reminded me of the importance of people; end of story. I learned that dreams and cities and possessions make for a skeleton of a life when you've no one to share them with.

And of 'story' in general?

His sentiments provided the impetus I needed to remember to live a good one.

ME, MY BAGEL, A STREET CORNER

As friends worldwide can attest, my propensity for getting myself irrevocably lost borders on a party trick. However, this was surely ne’er more obvious than when I recently spent a month in New York City. To view me in my natural habitat for the lion’s share of those four weeks, one needed only to meander to the corner of 54th and 7th where I could invariably be found juggling Google Maps in one hand, a bagel dripping with cream cheese in the other; face affixed with a permanently bewildered gaze. I should also point out that any time between 2 and 4pm, my ‘smart’phone’s battery - daily tested to its limits by excessive route planning - would die, leaving me clutching a decidedly archaic PAPER map instead. In retrospect, to make my non-native status less obvious, I could’ve just scrawled ‘TOURIST’ across my forehead in neon yellow. “JAIMEE!” my male comrades would berate me at frequent intervals, “Do you even know how to read a map??” “Vaguely!” I would cry in self defense, after my fourth ‘infallible’ walking route would lead us to anywhere except our planned destination. “iPhone; you have failed me.” I would mutter at my shoes, as The Men would take over, having greater success finding our elusive SoHo eatery utilising only their innate GPS systems and the sun than me and my myriad technology put together. The only redemptive factor here is that I discovered with certainty how effective ye olde ‘little girl lost’ adage truly is in practise. I swear I fell prey to more pick up lines over four weeks’ map-toting than I ever did in the preceding four years in my hometown. Surely that’s saying something. Something like ‘beware: carrying excess copies of The Pocket Guide To Greater Manhattan will render you fair romantic game to smug locals’.

Towards the middle of the trip, I realised that restricting my daily wanderings to specific suburbs meant I could feign navigatory confidence with ease. Indeed, I must’ve done a convincing job, because by the end 'twas I being approached by rookie foreigners displaying signs of that same bagel/Google/bewildered situation I’d been victim to only weeks before. “Mi scusi! Mi scusi! How please to get to Bleecker Street??” a wry smile flickering across my face, I’d reply “Two blocks down, to the left. I can highly recommend BookMarc.” "Grazie mille! We knew you are a New Yorker!"

I didn't correct them.

Amateurs. Don’t they even know how to read a map?

(*Bagel not pictured.)

ON LOOP: CROSSES

OBAMARAMA LIVETH

So, here's the thing. I have a borderline obsession with Michelle Obama. It's an awkward quirk to confess, even to oneself, but it's really not until Google finishes your sentence "Mi -" on your way to researching Michigan's education policies, with "Michelle Obama wardrobe" that you realise that you're well and truly in bona fide fan territory. I'm not entirely sure how it happened, but I can vaguely pin it to when I started getting really transfixed by the White House's Flickr stream. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what did it. It's like the voyeuristic plague infiltrating the minds of the general public via the rise and rise of social media finally crescendoed with the Presidential administration deciding the best way to maintain the present incumbents' public image was to give us snapshots of what the Obamas are up to. ALL. THE. TIME. Obama hangs out with the Dalai Lama. Obama slurping a frosty on vacation in Hawaii. (Everyone say 'Photo op'!) Obama and family watch the World Cup from the Oval Office. (As you do. What else is the Oval Office for?) Obama plays peek-a-boo with some super cute toddlers. Obama has a meeting with the mayor of Toledo at Rudy's Hotdogs. Oh, and what's that? Mrs Obama waits to be introduced to a foreign secretary of state, sporting yet another colourful specimen from her impressively extensive cardigan collection. See? You just cannot look away.

Cue new daily illness: Distraction By Obamas. (Handily abbreviates to DBO.) That photostream; it will get you. You don't want to spend too long contemplating how many minutes of my life have been lost needlessly stalking perusing the every move of the US President and his sartorially gifted spouse lately. It would be embarrassing. I do this thing now where I suddenly feel worried if I've been away from the internet for too long in case Michelle Obama's gone and worn an outfit I've not known about. It's like I have to fulfill my daily quota of Michelle Obama images or I'm at great risk of voluntary implosion. ("Single White Female." - Wait, who said that?!) Now obviously, she and I have taste that is worlds apart. I wouldn't wear anything she does. She would not wear anything I do. However, obvious gaps in age and style do not negate the fact that this is someone who clearly knows what they're doing in the getting dressed department. The woman has a singular sense of personal style not boasted by a First Lady since Jackie Kennedy. An avid supporter of up and coming American designers, she wears everything from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's line The Row to chains like J Crew with such panache you'd be forgiven for thinking her sole job was to look good. Really, really good. She's also credited with wearing a Jason Wu gown better than anyone else ever, and just casually has a degree from Harvard Law School on the side. In other words, she's sort of a walking recipe for self-loathing.

I'm going to throw the link out there so the rest of you can join me in corporately wasting our time trying to vicariously climb into the lives and, where its female counterpart is concerned, wardrobes of the most powerful couple in the civilised world. Just don't blame me if Google starts to smugly draw attention to your interesting, er, browsing habits when the real world comes knocking. DBO victims, unite. Surely there must be more than one of me. Surely.

As you were.

Barack Obama; infant whisperer

Michelle Obama/UK PM's wife Samantha Cameron, BFFs

Proof that powerful men need wives to de-lintify their jackets, too

www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/

IF NEWS DIES, WE KILLED IT

Today, I did something seemingly crazy for someone my age. (Or so I’m told.) I became a digital subscriber to the New York Times. You heard. I actually got out my plastic, punched numbers into the relevant little boxes, and signed on to fork out NZD$17 per month for unlimited access to the Grey Lady. Sick of constantly reaching my monthly ‘20 free articles’ quota, I vowed to scale the online paywall, spurred by the thought of the plethora of articles from that great bastion of world journalism since 1851 awaiting me on the other side.

“Why, Jaimee? Why would you do that? Why would you PAY for what the internet lets you have for free? Why wouldn’t you just avail yourself of the smorgasbord of free-ness that is The Huffington Post or The Guardian instead?? They reference NYT articles half the time anyway!”

You raise an excellent point, oh spoilt brat of the digital era Cynical-Twenty-Something. But you see, we’ve been duped. This whole pattern of online media consumption is utterly unsustainable. Raised in the felicitous yet highly temporal era of Free Internet, the world is now cottoning on to the idea that newspapers, magazines, books, and generally anything else worth its weight in printy goodness is dying a slow but inevitable death. We have no idea how to pay for credible journalism anymore, if print is dead and online is free. Advertising sales on news sites have bandaged the wound to an extent for the past 15 years, but there’s still blood spurting out everywhere you look. I lament the day the headlines bloggers announce: “New York Times files for bankruptcy after the digital onslaught cuts all remaining revenue streams.” And I’ll be damned if I’m going to passively continue to contribute to the death of paid-for, reputable media. I don’t want bloggers telling me their skewed opinion on world events; I want accountability, dammit, and if there’s no editor, no fact-checker, and no research, just hot air blowing all over the place and us all capitalising on a free balloon ride, we’ve none to blame but ourselves if ‘truth’ soon becomes an even more relative concept than it currently is. It’s hard enough in this age to filter reporting on world events past the bias of its source and try to make rational sense of things, let alone a future without the comfort of the knowledge that at least the writers are, um, educated. And the reality is, as fun as the prospect is of a world allowing anyone with an internet connection and a penchant for HTML to masquerade as a ‘journalist’; the fact remains that when it all hits the fan in Libya, someone’s still gotta pay to go over there and report from the ground. And you don’t catch most bloggers doing that. Hard facts require investment. Up until now, this investment has been made by media companies. Media companies that send trained people in to cover major events, who are then paid to filter these events via their own informed biases to make sense of them for the rest of us. The rest of us who have historically then paid them $3 for their trouble. I’m not naïve to the fact that media editors and writers all have strong biases in the current model. I’m not saying the NYT is infallible either. I am saying, however, that we’re throwing not just the baby but the entire kindergarten out with the bath water if we think that every time we avoid paying for our news we aren’t bringing the world closer to anarchy.

I decided today to put my money where my mouth is. You pay for what you care about. Be that music (bless your soul, those still saving the industry one CD at a time), parent-less nine year olds in feudal Rwanda who haven’t eaten a nourishing meal since February, and who spend hours a day toiling for 40 cents with which to feed their five younger siblings, (World Vision, you are phenomenal) or newspapers, because you acknowledge that access to responsible news about the release of Apple's next product issues like those is more important than ever – you invest.
And so, I did.

And, just quietly? As a newly-minted subscriber, I can attest that by the bye the NYT’s style pages are also excellent.

And that’s for free.

SHEEP OR WOLF?

ON LOOP: ANGUS&JULIA

KILL YOUR DARLINGS

Disclaimer: this is by no means a fashion rant. But Coco Chanel, that walking lesson in elegant restraint, said something I’ve instinctively stuck to my whole life: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off”. Social constructs dictate that this possibly shouldn’t extend to foundational items like, um, pants - but regarding accessorising, it is a very useful little mantra to stick to, to ensure you’re not in danger of going overboard. (And something my inherently beige, minimalistic style witnesses greatly to.)

However, recently I had the searing revelation that this quote could be applied to more than just one’s tendency to overdo it on the bracelets. It is also particularly helpful in the context of writing. I.e., in my case: “Before you hit publish, revisit each sentence and remove one adverb.” Because I’ve realised… I have something bordering on a frightening attachment to the abundant overuse of adverbs. See what I mean? I could’ve written just then: ‘I seriously overuse adverbs.’ But I couldn’t hold myself back. Each word becomes one of my children, and I want to include ALL of them, hence the idea of removing one mid-edit brings on a sensation akin to something dying inside. No, no, unstoppable in my mission to use as much of my native vernacular as humanly possible, instead I have to find the most circuitous way of saying something really simple. Piling adjectives and adverbs up like a magpie stacking tinfoil because he likes how ‘shiny’ it is, all of my original meaning is lost or at least shrouded in a collective haze of floral ‘describing words’, not nearly as valuable as I think they are. IT’S A PROBLEM.

Luckily, an occupational hazard involves my workplace boasting more award-winning journos than a David Bain trial, so I’m never far short of people to explain to me - oft’ with far more diplomacy than I deserve - of my grave need to cull. One such colleague voted a Stephen King book the most useful thing she’d read in regards to the learning of the actual craft. Titled (creatively) On Writing, inside King asserts the need for every writer to learn to ‘kill your darlings’. Borrowing from this quote by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch - “Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it – whole-heartedly – and delete it before sending your manuscripts to press. Murder your darlings.” King uses the phrase to illustrate the constant need to 86 your favourite bits. You know the ones – that big word you used to make it inescapably obvious how smart you are, but which you’ve gone and used painfully out of context, provoking laughter instead. The sappy deluge of pointless phrases, because you simply couldn’t resist the way the acrophony of ‘vestibular vestige’ rolled off the keyboard. That sentence you thought was genius but which confuses your readers instead. For the sake of your progress, sayeth King, you have to learn impartiality, and wake up to the cloud of self-indulgence that probably surrounds your ‘best work’.

Anyone familiar with the creative process is no stranger to the pain attached to self-editing. Learning to cut, cull, shape, delete, replace and otherwise mangle your own work in an unbiased manner is nigh impossible. Stephen King’s remedy? Write the novel. Put the manuscript in a drawer. For six months. Re-read. Second draft. Most creative types know that distance from your work for a time is the only surefire way to get perspective. Write/make/draw/create/design something. Sleep on it. Revisit it again. Kill your darlings. Hopefully, by the next day, you’ll be ready to, and your work will be better for it.

I will start now, in fact. I shan't press publish yet. I’ll save this. And after returning to remove another 27 superfluous bastardizations of my prose, may later deem it worthy to be inflicted on the blogosphere. Lesson learned, Coco. Lesson learned. And here’s to you, Stephen King.

You killjoy.

WRITING ON THE WALL

I captured this little piece of brilliance from an obliging Melbourne wall during last week's trans-Tasman trek. It manages to sum up in just two fragments what I spent a very long time trying to express in a recent post.

Melbourne's inhabitants clearly pride themselves on their widespread penchant for writing exactly what they think on the nearest available public surface. It's now become a hallmark of the entire city; the graffiti, art and various scrawlings found everywhere you look. And I love it - the fact that it's been embraced as part of the fabric of its culture, rather than hidden and continually removed. What is often elsewhere classified as vandalism is here allowed room to flourish, lending to some very inspiring moments when you least expect them.

One thing's for sure - I verily hope no one paints over the back of that door... because reading that statement gave me food for thought for an entire week.

THE CHANCE OF CHANCE

"I cry for Hawking and his computer brain. Bring together 10,000 of the world's most sophisticated computers and see if there will be love, hate, joy, awe, compassion and, above all, hope."

- Letter to the Editor, TIME magazine

June 20, 2011

(For more angles to this topic, refer to this article on Professor John Lennox, an Oxford scholar and apologist who has publicly debated Hawking, Hitchens and their other New Atheist contemporaries on matters of spirituality.)

WINTOUR OF OUR CONTENT

If you weren't already convinced that Anna Wintour is in arguably the most powerful role in the fashion industry for good reason - then this selection of her spreads for New York Magazine from back in the early 80s could just catalyse a change of opinion. The woman is, for all her well-documented and infamous faults - a creative genius, way ahead of the industry bell curve.

And now we've proof she always has been.

MOUNTAIN TOPS - WORTH VALLEYS?

"The soul that is always light hearted and cheerful misses the deepest things of life. Certainly that life has its reward but the depths of its satisfaction is very shallow. Its heart is dwarfed and its nature which has the potential of experiencing the highest heights and the deepest depths remains undeveloped. And the wick of its life burns quickly to the bottom without ever knowing the richness of profound joy."

Adding further weight to The Case For Friends Overseas Who Still Change Your Life From Afar, a favourite of mine messaged me that quote from oceans away at midnight last night. It was timely. (Which is apt, being that Aforementioned Friend has had perhaps more influence on my development as a person than nearly any other, er, ever.)

Digression. Basically, that quote got me thinking. Because those sentiments remain as relevant to the wider human struggle now as they were when originally spouted by L.B. Cowman in 1925. They reminded me of a mind game I played once last year. I vividly remember posing myself, for kicks, (a frequent, vaguely quirky pastime of mine) the following hypothetical question:

"Given the choice, would you rather live a life in the middle-ground; of 'safe'/'predictable'/'stable' + 'happy', where nothing hugely good nor hugely bad happens to you... or the alternative, a life of extreme highs and extreme lows, where you can only hope the former eventually makes the latter worth it?"

It's a question you wouldn't generally bother asking, because at the end of the day it's not like most of the above is anywhere within the scope of our control anyway. As much as the extreme-o planners amongst us (bless their cotton socks) find incredible comfort in forecasting, preempting and safety netting every aspect of their lives in an attempt to avoid the ultimately unforeseeable... that's just it. It's ultimately unforeseeable. ('Unforeseeable', by the by, is one of those words that looks more and more wrong the more you type it. I'm not going to use it again, we need a break.) 
MY POINT SLASH QUESTION is - were they right when they told us such platitudes as "it's better to have loved and lost, than to never have loved at all"? Does the good really negate the bad? Or would a 'safe' life, cushioned from those pesky incidents that implode the worlds of the best of us - with less downs but also less ups - be our choice, had we the power to choose it?

For the record - I decided I preferred a life of extremes. Of incredible joy, and conversely incredible sorrow, to that of living in the equivalent of the twilight of existence; never quite night nor day, just a bizarrely numb sort of half-life between the two.

Why did I settle on this bordering-sadistic option?

I suppose because I agree with L.B. Cowman - that "the wick of life (*when lived in the twilight zone) burns quickly to the bottom, without ever knowing the richness of profound joy."

I'm glad I asked it of me, as it gave me some comfort to realise that how life is naturally dealt to us anyway (ie, without our consent) is exactly how I'd swing it, even if I had a vote.

Without the downs, would we know the ups were up?

IMAGINE

DYING INSIDE?

It borders cliché, and is potentially also a vast understatement – but I’ve been learning of late that it’s so important to do what you love. Obvious, yes. Prioritised? No. I’m finding that oft’ the most seemingly simple things in life are the easiest to overlook. It’s not until you make an incidental change or addition that suddenly really impacts you that the penny drops, and you realise you've gone and accidentally changed your own life.

When I say 'doing what you love' I'm not necessarily speaking of 'doing' in just a career context, either. Recently I’ve found that a few relatively minute changes in my daily routine have had a massive impact on my general outlook on the world. Some of them have been small: the discovery of the perfect decaffeinated vanilla chai tea that I now drink every night religiously - it makes everything seem right with the universe. Some of them have seemed bigger: forcing myself to write. (Blog posts. Regularly. Ish.) But all of them have added greatly to my general happiness. Why is that? Well, because little things make you happy – ask any impulse shopper. Whether we mean to or not, we create the atmospheres of our worlds out of little, everyday things - events, interactions with others, quirky obsessions, interests, a new song on repeat, more caffeine. The 'everyday', and how we shape it, is of paramount importance. And the reality is that in the midst of the chaos, when the 'busy' card is too often played, the things we truly love doing are the first things to be squeezed out of the picture. In a classic case of the urgent versus the important - the urgent wins. And so life becomes a dizzying haze of urgent stuff, and less crafted intentionally to include the things that make us 'come alive'.

One of my favourite quotes talks about this. I will paste this quote at the end, in aid of being helpful. My challenge to me, to us, to everyone... and especially to those to whom life has lost its spark, is - what do you love? What makes you feel most yourself? Why are you not doing these things more? How could you find time to prioritise them? Slash, is it time for you to in fact discover what these things are? Ask yourself the seemingly obvious. You'll be better for it. And if you happen to find me in a park one day with Pride & Prejudice in one hand, a journal in the other, and a chai tea perched precariously in the midst of them when I should be doing laundry - you'll know why.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs – ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

HILARITY

"This week, the sixty-two million subjects of the United Kingdom will mark the marriage of His Royal Highness Prince William Arthur Philip Louis of Wales, their future king, to Catherine Elizabeth Middleton, the captain of her high-school field-hockey team."

- Lauren Collins, The New Yorker

May 2, 2011

DEAR ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY: you are rad

For a more complete exposition of why Archbishop Rowan is climbing the stakes as the coolest man alive, read the full story here. This is a rare 'random act of kindness' at its best, people. Someone who is no doubt 'busy' and would have had myriad valid reasons to not bother responding to a rudimentary letter from a six year old, broke rank and did. If only there were more christians like him in schools and institutions everywhere, religious workers would not have such a bad rap. He makes for a very good case for cloning.

I remember getting stupidly excited when I was seven and my brother and I wrote letters to The Wiggles and they responded (generously including an abundance of free merch, WINNING). Therefore, I can't even imagine how you'd feel at that age (slash, any age) upon receiving a response from the Archbishop of Canterbury on the kind behalf of the creator of the universe. (In saying that, I'm aware that some of you probably would've preferred the musical memorabilia. The mugs in particular were quite useful...) Personally, my disposition lends itself towards a love for engaging with mysteries, which consequently would have rendered me far more excited over a letter like Lulu's than one from four questionably attired dancing men, I think.

*Disclaimer: Before you are overcome with jealousy over The Wiggles Incident, let me be upfront in disclosing from the get-go that their willingness to reply was potentially founded on the basis of our insider connections. On account of, our auntie worked for their tv production company in Australia at the time. (It's not what you know...)

**Trivia: if you've never heard of Archbishop Rowan before, he was the guy in the bizarro hat responsible for marrying Prince William and Kate Middleton.

HYSTERIC

This was the cover of the magazine I work for circa the wedding of Prince Charles and the then Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. Ahh, nostalgia. Wedding mania has reached fever pitch amongst my colleagues today in the lead up to Prince William and commoner(!) 'Catherine' (no, you can't be casual 'Kate' anymore, apparently...) Middleton's pending nuptials this weekend. I'm going to go with, half the population of our floor are currently adorning themselves with positively Brit-esque handmade fascinators fashioned from ribbon and the occasional streamer. Which has consequently rendered any attempts at serious discussion highly distracting. There have been whispers afoot of celebratory parties this eve involving Union Jack bunting, an abundance of themed cupcakes and in one bordering-disturbing case cut out dolls of 'Kate and Wills' atop a custom-made cake. You've gotta admire our patriotism as fellow citizens of the Commonwealth. (I think).

Seriously though people... hats off.

*Or more correctly, on, if my surroundings are anything to go by.

RITUAL

This is an image from last weekend's annual Holy Fire Ceremony in Jerusalem. I found it in this phenomenal collection of pictures documenting the various traditions and rituals surrounding Easter celebrations worldwide. Utterly poignant, utterly beautiful. It got me thinking around the concept of 'ritual'. What is it within us humans that finds strange comfort in the ritualisation of annual events? I know this has been customary for centuries past, but it got me wondering (and subsequently Wikipedia'ing like a crazy person) about how these traditions came about, and why they've been carried on - particularly those pertaining to annual religious celebrations.

Because they're beautiful, and meaningful (they mean something), and in an increasingly postmodernised, minimalised, secularised society, I guess the archaically traditional side of me secretly relishes the idea of hundreds of thousands of people each year, carrying out detailed, symbolic, age-old rituals around events that signify something important to them.

After seeing those pictures, and in light of researching the various rich histories behind those cultures' traditions, I can't say with much feeling that it's something us westerners are super good at.

I hope we don't lose our rituals. I hope we don't become too cool for them. I hope I get creative about the rituals I plan to adopt and carry on, and reinvent them for future generations.

Somebody ask me about that next Easter, will you?

MANHATTAN DREAMING

This is Diane Keaton & Woody Allen in Manhattan, circa Annie Hall.

I suppose you could say this is my dream.

QUICKFIRE QUESTIONS: Juliette Hogan

Recently I got to speed-interview NZ fashion designer Juliette Hogan for 'one of my day jobs'(!); sometime writer for ONCE'IT.

Editorial Assistant by day; online copywriter/painfully pedantic editor by night. It's rough out here on the coalface. (I joke...!)

(You can read the original ONCE'IT article here.)

I found Juliette's answers really inspiring - and particularly concurred with her choice of French design talent Phoebe Philo as an industry stand-out. I remember being mildly devastated when I heard that Philo had resigned from Chloé in the early 'noughties, so was only too pleased to hear she had recently (ish) taken the reins at Céline. But I digress.

The point of the exercise is - it's always interesting gaining an insight into the minds of these insanely creative types and a glimpse at what fuels their inspiration. I'm off to check out Juliette's blog recommendations now in fact... happy reading.

QUESTIONS FOR JULIETTE:

1.In an industry saturated with creativity, which designers (either here or overseas) stand out to you as truly unique?

Phoebe Philo, Hannah McGibbon, Marc Jacobs, Rebecca Taylor.


2.Over the years, who has informed your own design aesthetic?

Loads of people, my family, my friends, my tutors, my peers. Everyone has an impact in some way or another.


3.If the Juliette Hogan label were a song, which song would best describe it?

At the moment? The song would be James Blake - The Wilhelm Scream or My Cloud by Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx

4.What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning and keep designing collection after collection?

Making yet another pretty dress....taking another step towards my end goal.


5. Along your travels, what has been the most impressive retail fit out or window display you’ve encountered?

My favorite store in the world is Liberty's in London. Love, love, love that place.


6. Complete this sentence: “I would be incredibly excited to find a photo of _____________ wearing a Juliette Hogan piece.”

“I would be incredibly excited to find a photo of Clemence Posey wearing a Juliette Hogan piece.”


7.Blog or website that most inspires you:

Liebemarlene Vintage, What Katie Ate, Saipua.

For a looksie at Juliette's latest creations, visit: www.juliettehogan.com.