Headless Hollow posts, categorised for your convenience and enjoyment. On this page you’ll find posts vaguely related to Opinions.
Nothing’s changed I suspect
A friend and I were discussing the rings that creatives have to jump through when quoting to corporate clients, when he came up with this analogy I just had to repeat here:
I’m visualising Pope Julius II saying to Michelangelo:
“We want you to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for us, but we want a fixed-price quote showing your estimate of the level of complexity, scope of work and an allowance for us screwing with your design at any time. Oh, and by the way, if your price doesn’t match our idea of what it’s worth we’ll refuse to pay at all and if you make any trouble we’ll denounce you to the Inquisition and have you burnt at the stake as a heretic. Now go and get your paints, wonderboy.”
Get yer hair cut!
For the last few years I’ve been regularly getting my hair cut at a tiny barber shop on King Street in Newtown. There’s a lot of things I like about this little place. There are only three chairs, and just enough room to squeeze behind them, and you don’t come here for anything fancy in the haircutting department. Still, it’s best to come on a weekday as there’s usually a queue milling about on the pavement on the weekends.
I get an ‘extra zero’, which is about as short as you can get without having your head shaved with a razor. (Why extra zero? Wasn’t just zero enough?) I like the fact that I’ve been going for about three years, and none of the guys there have asked me my name, or told me theirs. They’ll always ask “how are you?” when you come in, and give you a friendly goodbye when you leave, when I always say “thanks guys, see you next time”. If you feel like having a chat that’s fine, you can talk about the weather or what you did on the weekend or how busy work is at the moment; but if you feel like sitting there and not saying a word that’s just fine too.
Not only do I get my extra zero cut, but they always use a cut-throat razor to go around the ears and the back of the neck afterwards, and sometimes I even get a bit of a head rub. But it’s always a fast, professional, no-nonsense operation, and my hair is cut and I’m out the door, feeling freshly shorn again, in no time flat.
They’ve never tried to get to know me, or give me a little credit card to join their ‘barber club’ so I can get a dollar off after ten cuts, or sent me an email newsletter, or had a ten percent off day. I just go there, get my haircut properly, and pay them $10. I will therefore continue to go there, get my haircut, and pay them $10 (hell, they can even put it up to $12 eventually, though just giving them a ten buck bill is easier), every few weeks until the proverbial cows come home. Probably literally as I will have moved to the country by then.
Personally I think modern marketing gurus could learn a thing or two from this little barber shop.
Massive Hypocrisy 101
I just had to share this quote from today’s Sydney Morning Herald from the Cathoic Archbishop and all-round orthodox conservative busybody George Pell, ‘prominent religious sceptic of climate change’, also recently quoted as saying “Jesus had nothing to say on global warming”.
“My task as a Christian leader is to engage with reality, to contribute to debate on important issues, to open people’s minds, and to point out when the emperor is wearing few or no clothes.
“Radical environmentalists are more than up to the task of moralising their own agenda and imposing it on people through fear. They don’t need church leaders to help them with this, although it is a very effective way of further muting Christian witness. Church leaders in particular should be allergic to nonsense.”
Engage with reality. Open people’s minds. Allergic to nonsense. Yep. Uh-huh. Riiiight.
It’s a hard life
My girl and I visited the Hyde Park Barracks the other day and took in some excellent exhibitions about the harsh life of convicts aboard prison hulks and the early female immigrants to Australia.
I feel a small personal attachment to the restored Barracks building as I was one of the 250 or so volunteers back in 1980/81 that spent time sifting through the dust and dirt that had been vacuumed up from between the floorboards. I vaguely remember that a friend discovered an old matchbox, but I don’t think I found anything. I did get a chance to scramble up into the pidgeon-infested clocktower though.
Today, the barracks houses exhibitions about the building and its many uses over the years, and early Sydmey in general, and its spacious courtyard is also the venue for various Sydney Festival events—bands, temporary clubs, etc. There’s also a great little restaurant where we had lunch in the sun, eating salad and vegetable tempura and listening to the crows in the nearby trees.
As I looked over the scattered ephemera of people’s lives dredged up from the sea where rotting prison hulks lie, or picked out from rat’s nests between the floorboards, I couldn’t help but reflect on what a lucky bastard I am. A couple of centuries ago I probably would have experienced the days of my (short) life in one of two ways—unremitting tedium or relentless drudgery. Considering the history of at least one side of my family, probably the latter (there’s at least one horse thief and axe murderer in there). Throughout the small span of years that human beings have occupied this planet, most people have had a pretty rough time of it. They certainly have had very little choice, counting themselves extremely lucky indeed to simply be able to earn enough to put food in their mouth, or have a place to sleep at night.
Whether a domestic servant, a convict working off his fourteen years for stealing a hat, a clerk hunched over paperwork in a stuffy office, an immigrant coming to a new country in search of a life—millions have lived a life where only rarely one could snatch just a few moments of happiness here and there.
After viewing the exhibitions I sat outside in the sun, was served a high quality meal, and sipped a cold beer in a chilled glass. I live in my own home that I can’t be thrown out of (as long as I keep paying the mortgage of course) with the woman I love, and get to do something everyday that is creative and remarkably easy in contrast with most jobs throughout history. I am, and so is just about everybody I know, obscenely privileged in contrast with all of those souls that came before.
It really puts things into perspective.
Image: Jacks (detail) Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, c1880
Beep beep
Whose bloody stupid idea was it to make cars go beep beep when they’re automatically locked? When you work in a street which is near a shopping centre and people are parking in it all day, this seemingly innocuous sound begins to take on the quality of Chinese water torture. Also, people leave their cars at 3am sometimes, outside houses with sleeping people in them. Didn’t this cross the tiny minds of the perpetrators of this astounding design flaw? Nope, they were too busy devising yet another way for their inventions to disturb the peace. “Engine noise? Check. Fumes? Check. Destroy ozone layer? Check. Annoying little beep beep sound when you lock it? Check! Righto, now for some more refinements to my other masterpiece, the leaf blower …”
Oh, why stop now:
Other Things That Shit Me As I Work From Home
- old men walking by hawking up huge gobs and spitting on the pavement
- council workers parking their trucks just outside and leaving the engine on while they eat lunch
- the same people who feel the need to always shout at each other from one end of the street to the other instead of getting a bit closer to one another
- groups of old women walking by all talking at the same time at about 2000 decibels
- the fact that someone, somewhere in the street is always operating a large power tool, if not a jackhammer
- the house three doors down that has been renovated and painted and now looks like something out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, ruining the character of the row of houses (I mean - blue walls with grey tiles? Argh!)
- people who leave shopping trolleys from the shopping centre (around the corner) in our residential street - not to mention in great numbers in the park nearby
- the screaming kids next door (of course)
- the damn barking dog a few doors down (of course)
- people who tie their dog up outside the shopping centre, resulting in said dog barking non-stop for an hour
- anyone who goes to the shopping centre and parks in this street instead of the huge shopping centre carpark (see shopping trolleys, above)
- people who eat their crap McDonalds food (from the shopping centre) and then leave all the wrappers in the grassy area at the end of the street
- going to the shopping centre and seeing hugely overweight parents feeding their hugely overweight children McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken at bizarre hours like 9am and 4.30pm
- I’m sure there are more
