LUCY

Rip It Up, Issue 176, 1 March 1992, Page 38

LUCY

Last year I made a big discovery. Some things actually look better on tight budget. My hair, for one. When I was a full-time wage-slave I'd go to this high fashion male hairdresser. "We" were supposed to be growing my hair, but every six weeks I'd go to get the split ends trimmed ("You don't want to look like a surfie chick do you?") and consequently my hair didn't move past my shoulders for two years. Meanwhile, at S9O a pop me and other working girls who like to feel pampered by a man, any man, even if we have to pay for it, were financing his twice-yearly jaunts to visit lovers in New York, his six pairs of motorcycle boots, his 18-karat gold knuckle dusters, his S2OO T-shirts. Now that I'm poor and can't afford to go to him anymore my hair is growing wiki, which may not be his idea of glamour, but real men seem to like it. Put it this way, as a "ped" I no longer have to wait for the "Cross" sign when the trucks go by. My wardrobe habits have changed for the better too. Less is more. Now that I can't afford them, I realise how awful new clothes can be, designed either for 14-year-dds or Margaret Thatcher. Unwearable outfits in ugly fabrics retailing for hundreds of dollars! Who, other than TVNZ

newsreaders, can afford these things and why, when buttons fall off and they lose their shape after two wearings and require constant dry cleaning, which adds S2O to the price tag every time you wear them. I like clothes I can roll around in, wipe my fingers on, blow my nose in, clothes that absorb life's sticky moments. I pass rich women in the supermarket and recoil at the sound of their expensive suits and dresses, a sort of crackling sound from excess drycleaning fluid. Why do so many women wearing really expensive clothes look so awful? Why is that a certain famous waitress at a chi-chi Auckland eaterie who habitually serves women dripping bugle beads and sequins, effortlessly outclasses them in her old white man's shirt and plain black skirt? Because you don't wear expensive clothes, they wear you. Mercifully, people like me don't come into too much contact with Gold Card women. Expensive clothes can't survive uncontrolled environments, thus such women go from the restaurant or hairdresser or supermarket aisle to their cars. Driving everywhere, they hardly get any exercise so they have to enroll in a gym. Fools. They could save their money, their ass and the environment if they gave up driving for walking. Restuarants are another thing you don't miss when you're poor. Like the new breed of "stylee" espresso bars filled with men in

pony tails wearing non-prescription spectacles to give them the intellectual look necessary to sip cappuchino in a place called "Kerouac's" alongside girls who stagger in under designer knapsacks filled with makeup, staffed by gyrating jackanapes who size you up before serving you, all this in a bogus Euro-New York setting which makes people feel they could be in France or Italy, except expresso bars in those places are patronised by all kinds of people—bums, butchers businessmen — not just the fashion / media mafia. Give me a little oki greasy spoon with wood pannelled walls and peeling orange carpet, Cona coffee and spaghetti toasted sandwiches any day. There are lots of 'em still languishing in dusty shopping arcades, but I'm not going to tell you where. Another thing that looks better when you're not working is movies because you can go to the daytime sessions at Pacer Kerridge for $4.75 five days a week (and evenings on Tuesday) instead of the usual extortionist price. Even if the movie's a let-down you can savour the pleasure of sitting in a near-deserted cinema in the middle of the day, plunged in darkness and faux-luxury while the rest of the population slave over the assembly line. Thank you Pacer Kerridge. Being too poor to buy new books is another blessing in disguise. I used to read magazines hyping the

latest baby Norman Mailer who'd gotten a $300,000 advance on the strength of his/her penetrating analysis of post-apocalypse culture and sold the film rights and been bussed by Andy Warhol and profiledin Vanity Fair and asked to model clothes for Gap until I woke up and thought, hang on, when is this person doing any writing? Sure enough, their follow up books invariably sucked and on second thoughts their first ones were pretty lame too (with the exception of Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho). So now, instead of shelling out 20 bucks for a new paperback I get three books for 75 cents from the Salvation Army shop— Peyton Place; Ed Saunders' The Family, The Wind In The Willows — which I'm sure to be rereading in 10 years' time, unlike Slaves of New York, Less Than Zero, Bright Lights Big City, Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Velocity and all the other over-hyped novels by hip young gunslingers foisted on us in the 80s. To escape the plague of fashionable authors, visit second-hand book shops, like the Hard To Find in Onehunga Mall, the Green Door in Symonds Street, David Thomas in Lome Street, and there's a new one opened in St Kevin's Arcade in K Road tho' it's a bit more classical in taste. But why am I telling you this? I don't want my stomping grounds swamped. On second thoughts, stick to Whitcoulls. LUCYLYNCH

NZ FOLK SONG SOURCE Singer-songwriter Mike Harding has compiled a complete directory called When The Pakeha Sings Home—A Source Guide To The Folk and Popular Songs of New Zealand. Published in association with Godwit Press at the end of this month, the book comprises a commentary on the development of New Zealand song, a discography, a bibliography and a vast list of recorded and published songs with sections on Folk Ballad & Song, Colonial Songsters, Parlour Song, National and Patriotic Song, Songs of the Wars, Modem Popular Song and Songs of the Hills. Harding says criteria for inclusion in the book was simple: "This publication lists all those recorded and I or published songs I have been able to find, in English, that can be identified perhaps by no more than a single local placename or Maori word, as songs from New Zealand. This

inevitably excludes Maori songs and also the many songs written by New Zealand songwriters that don't attempt to express something of New Zealand." Mike Harding will be making promotional appearances at several north island venues performing examples from the books listings, see Calendar gig guide for dates.