What the cat dragged in

Schadenfreude in Melbourne

Spotted last Sunday at Smith Street Safeway: over-exposed and perennial boomer-boosting writer/critic Peter Craven, pushing a mop in the aisle. Well he wasn’t literally pushing a mop, but he was wearing an employee uniform and carrying a disconsolate expression on his face that suggested a mop wielding-like inertia. Perhaps he was performing a price-check on Helen Garner Credibility Crackers, with a best-before date of 11/11/1975 and now Reduced To Sell.

It’s good to see that the calculated starvation of the arts and academia, a uniform blight on the lives of Xer writers and thinkers for the last two decades, has finally caught up with at least one high-profile boomer. But don’t worry, Peter – I’m still way ahead of you in the shitty job stakes.

Also had to chuckle at photos in today’s AFR magazine of the interior of boomer architect Karl Fender’s “stunning” (his word) high-rise apartment. It features faux-retro bar stools that were runners-up in the Fountain Lakes Academy of Interior Décor end-of-year prize night. In 2004. And an opaque bluey-green tinted glass-topped coffee table that appears to have come straight from the Freedom Furniture catalogue of the same year. But in fairness to Fender, time has mellowed the opaque bluey-green tinted-glass range. In 2007 such furniture speaks with all the charm and quiet authority of a dentist’s waiting room, rather than a humbler original connotation of a 20-something’s proud splurging of their first post-uni pay-cheque.