Department stores: are their days numbered?

I'm not really much of a shopper, especially when it comes to clothes. I really dislike the experience of browsing for and trying on clothing. I don't mind browsing for books of course, but when it comes to clothing I like to get in and out as quickly and painlessly as possible. I'm also not one for haggling at markets - I enjoy the colour and activity of a foreign market environment, but when it comes to actually buying something I feel much more comfortable with a fixed price, thank you, and I prefer to try my clothes on in the air conditioned privacy of a change room with a good mirror.

These are some of the reasons that I like the department store and its everything-under-one-roof concept. When I say department store, I mean the old fashioned, service focussed, mass emporium of awe inspiring variety and choice - not the trumped up discount chain stores that pass as "department stores" today. I mean the kind of place with a food hall in the basement (or on the top floor, as they often seem to be in continental Europe) and reassuringly knowledgable sales staff who know their products and don't think twice about whipping out a tape measure to take your inner thigh measurements to get you the right suit pants. Sadly, it seems that this fabulous creation - the department store - is dying out, a victim not only of changing retail tastes and a failure to keep pace with those changing tastes, but also of the increasingly low margins provided by a shop that sells "everything" and requires a lot of expensive floor space to do so. Even in Japan, department stores are losing favour (except for their food halls, thankfully - I must say, I do love a good department store food hall - I think that will be the subject of a future post).

I like department stores. I study them. Wherever I travel, I visit the top department stores of the city and the mid-range ones (seldom the discount ones, as I have found they are all alike) and make copious mental notes about their interior design, product range and sales formats. I read extensively in the business media about their flailing fortunes around the world and in once reliable markets such as Japan, western Europe and the US. It seems to me that the department stores that are surviving are those, such as the two remaining chains in Australia (David Jones and Myer) which enjoy a duopoly market, or those in Hong Kong (Lane Crawford, Hong Kong Seibu, Hong Kong Sogo) which have (a) reinvented themselves primarily as purveyors of high-end fashion and luxury homewares and cosmetics, and (b) adopted very trendy, modern and quite chic interior designs that challenge the stodgy outdated notions of what a large format store looks like. I think Lane Crawford's IFC Mall and Pacific Place stores are simply the most beautiful stores that I have ever been in (mind you, in Hong Kong the standards for high end retail spaces are set very high and modern, gallery/nightclub-like spaces are de rigeur, unlike here in Australia where retail formats seem to me to be very outdated and boring). I'd also cite Harvey Nichols in Hong Kong and Bloomingdale's in San Francisco as excellent examples of modern, forward-looking and exciting interiors for department store concepts.

It has to be said though that these examples are the exceptions. I admit that I was pretty unimpressed with the famous Printemps and Galeries Lafayette stores in Paris (though I do like the Galeries Lafayette store in Berlin, housed in a stunning Jean Nouvel building and feauturing a marevelous conical inverted dome flooding the store with natural light - I especially love its intimate food hall). These Paris grands margasins are large but tired and boring in their design. Who would want to go to them, outside of sales periods, when there are so many more interesting boutiques all over Paris, many of them providing a far more pleasing and better designed shopping environment?

It's the same in Germany. I love the food hall at KaDeWe - I love its three champagne bars, the fact that any food from any corner of the globe is available there any time of the day, I love everything about it. But the rest of the store is pretty bland in terms of design and product - the problem with peddling luxury these days is that luxury is available everywhere, so it is no longer the sole domain of high end department stores. KaDeWe apparently still turns a profit, but is up for sale anyway as its owner plans to focus on the larger, but often troubled mid-range Karstadt chain. I think KaDaWe will survive, unlike other famous German department stores which are closing.

Department stores in Japan are having a tougher time. The expansion of Japanese deparment stores into Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia was ultimately unsuccessful and led to the withdrawal of all Japanese-owned department stores from those markets (I think there may still be a few of them in the US, Paris and London, and that they are also trying to get into China - like every other retailer is trying to do). At home, it seems the department store concept which has dominated Japanese retailing for hundreds of years is declining in popularity with ever decreasing retail market shares and subsequent ever decreasing profit margins for their huge premises.

In Singapore, which seems to be constantly building new shopping malls, the latest shopping malls have pointedly decided to ditch department stores - once considered vital "anchor" tenants for any shopping centre but now despised by landlords for the lower rents they pay per square metre and the realisation that they no longer attract the shoppers. Basically, department stores usually pay a lower per square metre rent, in recognition of their "anchor" role and necessary for their financial success because they require such large floor spaces; recently developers have discovered they can get more per square metre if they forget about the department stores. This effectively blocks department stores out of the malls, and since most department stores sold their own city centre properties decades ago and moved into malls, this creates a serious problem for the department stores - they face being locked out of the market. They can't afford to pay the higher rents for their large format premises, and they can't afford to buy new stand alone downtown properties - and even if they could, they may not attract the customers. From the original 1960s idea that a mall needed a department store to anchor it, we seem to be coming to a situation where the department stores need the malls to provide them with customers.

So what does all this mean for department stores? The evidence seems to suggest that the chain department stores will need to go down market to survive, and that there will be even further culling. We will get to a point where the high-end malls push the department stores out, and the low-end malls will only want discount department stores. I hope though that there will always be a space for a few "flagship" department stores at the top of the retail chain and giving an important sense of place to the downtowns of our major cities: every metropolis should have its KaDeWe. But maybe it will have only one of them. And maybe that will make them more special, desitnations in their own right, as they once were. For that to happen though, I think they need to raise their game and adopt the superior standards of interior design and sales formats evident in stores like Lane Crawford. We'll just have to wait and see I suppose.

Quality control for tea rooms

If you've read any of my previous post about tea you'll know about my dismay at the variable standards of afternoon tea services in Australia's top-end hotels. It seems to me that there is a need for some good, honest quality control of afternoon tea in Australia.

In Britain, the UK Tea Guild maintains strict criteria for memebership and publishes a guide book of its members. Membership of the Guild is a status symbol for high-end establishments in particular - it's like a five star hotel rating - and the membership guide published by the Guild provides a vital quality assurance service to afternoon tea patrons.

I wonder if the Guild could be convinced to open an Australian branch?

An afternoon in the City

Winter is a great time in Melbourne's city, because it makes all of those cozy laneways the city is famous for even cosier and because the cold weather opens up a range of great food options. Plus, a coffee is much more enjoyable when it's grey and chilly.

Today was my first day off work since the uni semester started this week - the final semester of my masters degree. I had very good intentions and a list of things to do: get up early, clean my flat including the neglected bathroom and kitchen, then make a detailed grocery list, catch the train into Queen Vic Markets to buy lots of fresh food, then come home and get fully up to date with all my study for the week. Well, it did not work out that way.

Last night, I got home quite late from work, then ended up going out and staying out much later than I had intended to (winter is also a good time to go out at nighttime in Melbourne). This meant this morning I not only overslept, but really did not feel like house cleaning or grocery shopping when I did get myself together. Instead, I had a very lazy morning reading a book (Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which I am enjoying very much - I did not get around to reading anything study related despite my good intentions), and when I did leave the flat at about middayI caught the tram from Bridge Road into the city where I collected my Melbourne International Film Festival pass (the festival starts this week; I'm going to see 10 films and quite looking forward to it, although I'm not sure how I'll juggle it all around work and study). I the ambled up Swanston Street to Reader's Feast bookstore, where I had a "loyalty" gift voucher that I redeemed for a book on good coffee places in Melbourne and a book about Veuve Clicquot, the founder of the champagne house.

I enjoyed the lively atmosphere of Swanston Street - the street is alive with international students and the hundreds of cheap "hole in the wall" eateries catering to them, along with buskers, tourists, all those pesky charity people smiling at you and asking "do you have a moment for the environment?" and that sort of thing. As I was enjoying this ambiance I remembered something I'd read recently which concerned me very much indeed: Melbourne City Council, with its new Mayor keen to make his mark, is "reviewing" arrangements for street performers and vendors in Melbourne, with the proposition being that some sort of bureaucratic panel might "audition" potential buskers before they are permitted to busk; the review also looks at chestnut roasters and newsstands (I'm not sure if it applies to the Big Issue sellers, of which there seem to be quite a high concentration in the City, some of whom are a bit Bolshy). Ominously, the purpose of this review is to ensure street buskers and traders "meet the future needs of the city" - I hate that coded bureaucratic language; presumably what they are saying is do the buskers fit with the sophisticated marketing image we are peddling?

I am totally against any plan to "audition" buskers and I am wary of this veiled attempt to sterilise the vibrancy and colour of the city. For many years Melbourne had a reputation for being staid and prim, and these sorts of proposals hark back to those days. It seems to me that if a busker is no good, he'll soon find out because no one will give him any money and he'll either improve or move along. It's a pretty direct form of feedback. So I don't want some panel of experts deciding which busker fits the Melbourne "brand" or some rubbish; busking is the most immediate form of performance art, and it is self-regulating if you ask me, in the way I just mentioned. So I think the council ought to dump that idea toot sweet.

Back to my afternoon. I walked from Reader's Feast over to the GPO, which is not a post office but an upmarket shopping arcade, and had a very nice coffee at Octane espresso. I then ambled down Elizabeth Street to Mag Nation, which is a two storey store full of magazines. It is also full of mostly young people lulling about drinking coffee, using the free Wi Fi and flipping through all of the magazines. I'm not sure how they make a living but I presume some people must buy the magazines now and then. I had been to this store before but I had never been there when the mysterious third floor was open; today it was and I ventured up there to find a book shop focussed on design books. I browsed through a good many of these interesting but expensive books.

By now it was about 3.30, and I felt a little hungry, so I wandered over to my favourite city laneway, Centre Place, which is a tiny little alleyway crammed full of tiny little cafes and with a constant bustling passing parade. It also has some really great, colourful graffiti artworks. It's quite a special place really. I bagged a tiny table at Aix creperie and enjoyed another fine coffee and a ham, cheese and tomato crepe - just what I needed after all that book browsing.

Ni får inte använda toalett

I have always been amused by signs that seem to state the bleeding obvious, although I suppose it's really more disturbing than amusing that there are so many stupid people around that such signs are needed.

Today I saw this sign that amused me in a mock up bathroom at Ikea in Richmond (I was there to buy a dish drying rack). Now, this bathroom is in a bedroom "set" and has no private door to it - it's on view to the whole store practically; now, it is pretty obviously just a demonstration and not intended to be used.

Obviously, though, Ikea feel the need to point this out to those desperate shoppers with bursting bladders trying to find their way to the exit.

A Day in Pompeii

The Melbourne Museum is currently showing a fantastic exhibition called A Day in Pompeii. Like many people, I am fascinated by this lost city, its apparently pleasure-driven (at least for the elites) lifestyle, and its amazing preservation and archaeology. So I went along to see the exhibition today around 1pm and found the crowds were quite tolerable.

It's a huge exhibit with a large number of Pompeii artefact on display, and much detailed information about life in Pompeii, its architecture, social life, and of course its destruction, "rediscovery" and archaeology. It's very detailed, and includes a 3D animated film of the city's destruction which sounds ghoulish but is actually quite fascinating. There are the inevitable body casts, which are of course very emotional - even though these poor people died in 79 AD, their images at the moment of their deaths (mostly from asphyxiation, rather than burning) are so hauntingly preserved. I would have liked to have seen some more about the lives of the slaves, but overall it is a very comprehensive exhibition.

I learned some interesting things, such as the fact that graffiti was popular in Pompeii - people would write all sorts of saying, witticisms, poetry or political slogans on their houses. The only one I recall was this one: Sex, wine and baths ruin our bodies. But what is life without sex, wine and baths?

I also learned that most of the 20,000 citizens survived by fleeing after the initial eruption. I had always thought that they all died.

I highly recommend this exhibition and may even try to see it myself a second time before it closes in October.

Polanski at the Astor

Last night I caught the 78 tram from Church Street about a block away from my flat in Highett Street, down Chapel Street to the beautiful old Astor Theatre in Windsor. This is truly one of the most special and rare old cinema buildings in Australia. It is a perfectly preserved Art Deco treasure that somehow survived the 1970s and '80s wrecking balls that fell other grand old cinema buildings, and somehow its glorious auditorium survived the indignity of being subdivided into a mini-multiplex of two or three cinemas. It remains a single screen cinema and walking into its lobby is like stepping back in time.

But the Astor is no relic, it is a popular arthouse cinema showing revivals of classic and interesting recent films. Last night was a double feature of Roman Polanski's first English language films, Repulsion starring Catherine Denevue and Cul-de-Sac starring Donald Pleasence and Catherine Denevue's ill-fated younger sister (I forget her name, but she died a year or so after the film was made; she was one of several female stars that Polanski apparently clashed with during the making of a movie, with the most infamous of course being Faye Dunaway in Chinatown; perhaps the tension worked though, because Catherine Denevue's sister in Cul-de-Sac and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown both deliver very effective performances). I'd never seen either of these films and enjoyed them both. Cul-de-Sac is a bit bizarre and darkly funny. Repulsion is basically a case study of a mental breakdown, and found Denevue's performance to be very good.

When I was leaving I was surprised to see a cat in the foyer. Someone told me later the cat lives in the theatre.

Some recent Berlin buildings I do like

It occurs to me that my last post was a bit negative, so I thought in the interests of balance and since I actually am a very big fan of Berlin that I'd attach some pictures (all of them obtained from the internet) of some of the many recent buildings in Berlin that I actually do like, such as the Kudamm Eck, Galeries Lafayette, the Nordic Embassy, the Hauptbahnhof, Peek and Cloppenberg, as well as the courtyard of the Sony Center (despite my overall ambivalence about Potsdamer Platz), and the restored Hackescher Hof and Reichstag buildings. So I don't think it's ALL bad!

Erasing modern architectural memory in reconstructing Berlin

This past weekend I attended a free public lecture by an eminent architecture professor at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, which is holding an interesting series of Berlin-inspired talks, performances and exhibitions. I have to say I thought the lecture itself, not to mention the poor quality illustative photographs, was pretty lacklustre, but the issues raised about the dubious value of reconstructing destroyed buildings in reunified Germany, typified by the meticuluous reconstruction of cathedrals in Dresden and Berlin and highlighted by the plan to reconstruct a long-destroyed palace on the site of the former socialist parliament house, are very interesting, so I wanted to document some of my own uneducated thoughts on the matter.

First, some context. There are two very good articles that summarise the crux of these issues. This 2009 article by Nate Berg deals with the bizarre plan to reconstruct a destroyed former royal palace in the centre of Berlin on the site of the recently dismantled former parliament building of the socialist German Democratic Republik (the former parliament building is the first picture above, the model of the reconstructed schloss is the second picture). There seems to be no clear purpose that the reconstructed palace would serve other than symbolically erasing the recent past. This 2006 article by Andreas Tzortzis outlines the building controls that effectively stifled innovation in architecture during Berlin's important post-reunification development. I think these two articles, read together, summarise my main concerns about Berlin's recent development and its futile attempt to erase its own recent past, especially the socialist past, and to recapture some bygone ideal of urban form by slavishly mimicing and recreating buildings from earlier periods - at the expense of its future.

The story for me starts after the war and before reunification in the divided city (a period canvassed only in the abstract at the lecture I attended). I know everyone's interested in the public buildings but I like to start with the housing. West and East Berlin developed the generally colourless housing styles necessitated by the urgent demand for acommodation in the ruined metropolis, and this is evident in the ugly identikit high rises on the eastern side and the less ugly but still rather bland identikit neubau medium density style which I happen to think is rather successful as an urban planning device when they are generally low rise and clustered around frequent, active squares, as they tend to be in Berlin.

It was in the public realm, however, rather than the mass produced housing that we saw the spatial manifestations of the opposing political ideologies of East and West (just as we saw spatial expression of the Nazi political ideology in architecture such as the Olympic stadium). East Berlin's conscious construction of a modern, socialist metropolis was an homage to Moscow in every respect, especially the stark, imposing expanses of the flattened Alexanderplatz, formerly a vibrant commercial and entertainment district (and, like Potsdamer Platz, a constant changeling; it was undergoing substantial reconstruction to assume the latest of its many forms when I was there in 2006), dominated by the striking Fernsehturm which for so long provided many East Germans with their only glimpes into West Berlin, and monumental Stalinalle (now Karl Marx Allee), looking as though it has been transported directly from Moscow with its huge apartment "palaces". Nothing, however, expressed the aspirations of the German Democratic Republic more than the Palast der Republik. Built on the prominent central, riverbank site of the destroyed former royal palace, the Stadtschloss, which had been damaged during the war and then demolished by the East Germans in 1950 (remember, the area known as Museum Island where the schloss stood was, and still is, full of large, neo-classicial buildings at varying states of disrepair). This sleek, gold-sheathed building that housed not only the parlimentary chambers but also the best restaurants, bars and discotheques of the socialist state, not to mention its only bowling alley, was a true palace of the people, designed to invoke pride.

The political undertones of urban design in West Berlin were no less overt, with the conscious reconstruction of Kurfürstendamm and Tauentzienstraße as temples of consumption and capitalism, anchored by the once ultra-modern and distinctly American-styled Europa-Center and the resilient high-end department store KaDaWe ("Department Store of the West").

Reunification. A new city with two of everything. The hated wall and the dead zones on either side of it where so many attempted defectors had died was torn down and not missed, although two small sections were retained, one which today is part of an interesting and important if somewhat harrowing museum on the wall's history and the other which is sort of an outdoor art gallery. Curiously, and somewhat distastefully in my opinion, the famous "checkpoint charlie" border crossing which was removed with the border later returned, as a replica, as some sort of amusement for tourists. This foreshadows Berlin's strange relationship with its own recent urban past

It seems to me that in Berlin's first blush of reconstruction activity after reunification, the emphasis was determinedly on establishing some sort of capitalist "catch up", with the harbinger being the perhaps hurried reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz, once a busy transport interchange and vibrant hub of retail, hotels, cafes and nighlife, and reconstructed today again as transport hub but perhaps in a more sterilised, less chaotic, less exciting crush than it once was. My feelings about Potsdamer Platz remain ambivalent; tourists certainly like it, but to me it's disjointed from the rest of Berlin's urban character (admittedly, many would argue that Berlin's urban character is disjointed!). When I first saw the "new" Potsdamer Platz in 2002 it left me utterly cold: a collection of gleaming commercial temples, dominated by three high rise towers, only one of which (the Sony Center tower, now the DB tower) displays any beauty, and the worst of which is a pure pastiche of mid-20th century American urban architecture; impressive yet inward looking "campus-style", poorly connected sites, and an overall sense of space that was inconsisent with the "platz focussed" urban sensibility of the rest of Berlin - indeed, the entire project seemed to turn its back on the actual platz itself. When I saw it again in 2006 I felt that it seemed to work better but it still seems like an anomoly to me - the huge indoor shopping mall, the inconspicous nature of the housing, the overbearing sense that this is first and foremost a commercial space remain problematic for me.

The "reconstruction" of the commercial buildings around the Pariser Platz (the third photo attached to this post), on the former East Berlin side of the city adjacent to the Brandenburger Tor, is also problematic. Here, commercial interests, mostly banking and insurance but also some foreign embassies I think, reclaimed dormant property rights and constructed facsimiles of pre-war office buildings. It was as if everything that had happened during and after the war had never happened, and it certainly seemed as if building styles, techiques and materials had not changed. This "mimicry" style of building also characterises the reconstructed Leipziger Platz, Friedrichstraße and Mitte.

To me, Pariser Platz is a failure because it feels like a theme park: Disneyland's Main Street USA probably has more authenticity (I say probably as I have never been to Disneyland). The beauty of the Brandenburger Tor and the potential for a significant public space in this important position between the Tiergarten and the elegant boulevard of Unter den Linden was lost by the denial of time and an obsessive compulsion to "recreate" the "right" era. It will now never be anything more than a facsimile, an artefact of some German desire to recreate an idealised urban past and thus deny the possibility of a new or different present or future.

Slavish reproduction of architecture from bygone eras does not preserve heritage, it denigrates it. Pariser Platz is not a triumph of planning and restoration, it is a temple to mediocrtity, lack of imagination and lack of faith.

I think Pariser Platz summarises both sides of the problem in the reconstruction of Berlin: on the one hand, there is the dominance of private property interests in the shaping of the built environment and the public realm (Sony and Daimler-Chrysler that bought land on the cheap in Potsdamder Platz, and the banks and embassies that reclaimed land in Pariser Platz); on the other hand, you have this strange retreat into a very bland, safe style of urban planning which forces all new buildings to mimic the styles of older buildings. Oh, of course there are exceptions, with many examples of great contemporary architecture: I recommend Michael Imhof's book Berlin New Architecture for a good round-up of some of the better examples. Overall, though, much of what has been built recently is intolerably ordinary.

The tragedy of all this is that just around the corner from Pariser Platz, on the other side of the Brandenburg Gate, we see how things might have been. The Reichstag building with its much celebrated new glass dome remains an exciting and above all relevant building, respectful of and referncing its past but not mimicing or seeking to recreate it. Surrounded by the gleaming new buildings of the Parliamentary Quarter including the imposing Chancellory, the Reichstag beautifully projects a confident, optimistic and forward-looking image for a newly unified, powerful and proud nation, an image that respects the past but is not mired in it. These buildings show us what might have been of the new Berlin.

Sadly, the confidence and the power of this statement dissipated, probably commesurate with Germany's declining economy I suppose, and what we have seen since then in the reconstruction of Berlin is not only an attempt to eradicate and deny the built environment legacies of the modern era, especially those relating to the failed socialist state, but also a retreat from the exciting, contemporary architecture associated with capitalist cities and a subsequent emerging dominance of "safe", boring, pastiche architecture, patherically aping far superior earlier styles.

The reconstructed Reichstag offered a promise for a new Berlin that was not realised. Instead, much of the "new" Berlin is a pale imitation of an older Berlin. This is a pity indeed. I may not like what Potsdamer Platz became, or what Alexanderplatz is becoming, but at least they are changing, developing, growing with the city and the times. They are not being denied life, nor a future, because they are not condemned to become replica theme parks.

Afternoon tea review: Hotel Windsor, Melbourne

This is my most serious afternoon tea review to date. It concerns a Melbourne institution: afternoon tea at the Windsor Hotel, the last true remaining "grand" historical hotel in Australia (and in dire need of a serious cash injection and facelift - everything about this graceful old lady is faded, even if the bones are very good; the chair fabrics in the dining room in particular are quite grotty and ought to be replaced without haste). Today I took my first afternoon tea at the Windsor and admittedly my expectations were high, given its reputation. Those expectations were, while not quite shattered, certainly they were repudiated by the reality. My assessment: this is a hotel that is resting on the laurels of its reputation and history. On the Scott Scale, it earns only 4 out of 10, and that would have been even lower had it not been for the very high quality of the three tier stand presentation and in particular the pastries, which were easily the superior of any hotel pastries I have come across in Australia. Also, the staff were very polite and friendly.

So, if I liked the pastries so much and the food was so nicely presented (which it was, credit where it's due; also, I liked the white linen table cloths and napkins) and the service was fine, then just what, I hear you ask, was the problem?

First, there is the faded grandeur of the room, which badly needs tarting up, and those grotty chairs. Secondly, the sandwiches were very dull. Note the delicious looking sandwiches in interesting bread rolls in this photograph from their website and which I had been looking forward to were substituted, today at least, with some very bland, predictable (egg, salmon, cucmber) fingers on soft white Tip Top style bread possibly bought from the local no name supermarket. Thirdly, the scones were overly sweetened. Okay, sweet scones may be to some tastes. They are not to mine.

Fourthly, and this is by far the most serious problem in my opinion, is the rather shocking fact that the "tea" aspect of afternoon tea at the Windsor seems an afterthought. There is no selection of leaf teas. You do not even get your own tea pot. No, instead the staff walk around carrying huge pots of stewed tea ("Windsor Blend", apparently, and it is the same strong flavoured tea they serve with breakfast - I asked) and they pour it out to you one cup at a time. The tea tastes like the tea you would get on an airplane and is served in the same manner. When it is not being poured, the pots sit stewing on various hot plates at "stations" around the room, rather like filter coffee at large American diners. This utter disdain for the tea itself is unacceptable, particularly in an establishment claiming to do it better than most.

There is also the matter of the price. At $45 on weekdays, increasing to a totally unjustifiable $65 on weekends for what sounds like a rather over the top "indulgent buffet", this is one of the most expensive afternoon teas I've had in Australia or Asia. Yes, it includes one glass of house sparkling wine, but it is simply not worth the price given the overall quality of the experience, and certainly not given the poor attention to detail regarding the choice, quality and serving of tea.

The Windsor does not live up to its reputation. That said, my searingly honest and learned account of afternoon tea at the Windsor published in this obscure and little read blog will doubtlessly make not a shred of difference to the cash cow the Windsor has in its afternoon tea. On a weekday afternoon it was full, especially with women taking photographs of themselves and their food. Bookings are essential and I am sure that the hotel will continue to do very well for themselves out of this nice little earner they have got going. That is, until I do get around to opening my tea salon/champagne bar, and educating the masses about how good afternoon tea really can be!

Afternoon tea review: Langham Melbourne

Had afternoon tea at the Aria Lounge of Melbourne Langham yesterday afternoon. It's quite a nice venue, fairly cosy which is good for winter afternoons. We had the "traditional" afternoon tea (as opposed to the "chocolate" afternoon tea, which sounded rather too much, or the special children's tea, which was a school holiday special and which, according to the staff, had proven extremely popular). The traditional afternoon tea is served on a pleasing three tier platter. The food itself was not exactly exciting: the sandwiches were totally what one would expect (cucumber, egg, salmon) and there was nothing innovative or surprising about them, which was a little disappointing, and they were all served on bland, soft white bread, whereas I think some bread variety is a good thing to have on the plate. The scones were adequate; the clotted cream was very good. The pastries were pleasant without being overly exciting. There was a good choice of teas (including my preferred orange pekoe). It was very reasonably priced at $29 per person, and the staff were quite friendly although it was very difficult to attract their attention in order to procure a second pot of tea when one wanted it.

I must admit that in winter I would like to see a bit more variety offered - cucumber sandwiches are fine and well in summer, but it would be nice to see some little hot treats on a cold winter's day. If I ever do open that tea salon/champagne bar that I often dream of doing, I would have a seasonal menu and I think I'd also have an option for a purely savoury tea - sandwiches, scones, maybe some little baby quiche or something, and a little fruit is really all I need most of the time; often I leave the lovely pastries on the plate as they seem too rich and sweet.

But again I digress. Overall, this is a good, traditional, reasonably-priced afternoon tea experience in a pleasant lounge. It's nothing overly exciting. I'd say it's a very good introduction to the afternoon tea experience for a novice. On the Scott Scale, I give it a 5 out of 10.

Air NZ naked flight safety video

I've flown with Air New Zealand several times. I think they're a great airline with friendly staff, clean and comfortable planes and quite tolerable food. Despite the general antagonism that many Australians, including me to some extent, feel towards them for their role in the destruction of our former and best domestic airline Ansett (as a recap, Air New Zealand bought Ansett, then effectively raped and stripped it bare, and then shamefully cut it loose and hung it out to dry), I can accept that times have moved on and I still prefer to fly Air New Zealand when crossing the Tasman (note: only New Zealanders refer to the Tasman Sea, cringingly albeit affectionately, as "the ditch", or as they say it "the detch", just as they are the only nationality I have ever heard refer to the continent of Australia, rather than a person from Australia, as "Aussie" - but all joshing aside, I love New Zealand and New Zealanders).

Recently, the airline has been remaking its image in some sort of nude form, with a TV commercial featuring naked staff and a naked CEO. Today, they've garnered some "good news item" headlines for their new air safety video, which features naked cabin crew members in body paint uniforms. It's guaranteed to get even the most jaded frequent flyer to glance sideways from their magazine during the safety demonstration (not that you see anything even remotely jiggling).

It looks like the participating crew members all enjoyed themselves. I wonder how they auditioned? And more pertinently, after watching it, I do wonder if the safety video is subtitled into English?

Post Script: Wake in Fright

Further to my review below, I did a little online research and found this really interesting comment from barrie-2 on the discussion boards at IMDB that I thought I would share (note that the comments refer to remarks made by Jack Thompson, who appears in Wake in Fright and was speaking at a Sydney screening of the film a couple of weeks ago)

Jack Thompson said the response at the time was very negative. They didn't believe this showed a true Australia. We were far more refined - much more like the British or the Americans - and they didn't like the idea of this story going overseas. Very interestingly, a young Peter Weir sat in with the crew during the filming for a sort of early work experience. The influence on his work is enormous. I would have said it was his film if I hadn't known who directed it. The sense of dread, mencace, and ruin with no escape is exactly like The Cars That Ate Paris or Hanging Rock.

Now that it has been pointed out, Wake in Fright certainly does remind me somewhat of The Cars that Ate Paris, another film which deserves a revival, as well as the slew of other 1970s films that examined various dark sides to the Australian rural and outback ideal.

My online trawling also uncovered the fact that actor Gary Bond died in 1995 at the not very ripe old age of 55. It's not really very relevant in the scheme of things, but he did look very good in Wake in Fright, including in the brief (but apparently, for 1970s Australian cinema, mandatory) nude scene, which evidently was re-shot for American audiences with him wearing underwear (!)

I'm sure everyone will be pleased to know that the full frontal version is used in the restored print - a nice, lasting physical tribute to the late actor.

Film review: Wake in Fright

This afternoon I saw the restored print of Wake in Fright, one of the most critically-acclaimed films of the Australian "new wave" of the 1970s and one of the most criminally ignored by Australian audiences.

The behind-the-scenes story of how this classic film was effectively lost sometime in the 1970s and only recently re-discovered in a US film vault marked for destruction is almost as compelling as the film itself. It is a film I had read about in Australian film history books but, for obvious reasons, had never had a chance to see - until now. All I can say is thank goodness for the National Film and Sound Archive and their fine work in preserving (and, in this case, restoring) our cinematic heritage.

The 1971 film was based on a 1961 novel by then 32 year-old Kenneth Cook, and the NFSA describes the book as follows:

As a young ABC radio journalist Cook had done stints covering Australia’s big rural districts and ended up living in places like Rockhampton in Queensland and Broken Hill in New South Wales. In those days, the late 50s and early 60s, before mobiles, the Internet, good roads, and efficient rail and plane networks, Australia’s big outback towns were so isolated that they seemed a long way from anywhere. From what Cook witnessed, a culture of drinking, game shooting, and gambling and more boozing prevailed...

He never apologised, at least in public, for the sense of horror and revulsion John Grant feels at the hands of the outback locals and their aggressive friendliness.

I have not yet read the book, although I have tried to get my hands on a copy for many years. I hope that a reprint will be issued to accompany the film.

Now to the film. Gary Bond plays John Grant, a somewhat supercilious teacher serving out his time as a "bonded slave" of the education department as a teacher in an isolated outback school. We meet him on the last day of school on his way back to Sydney for a beach and city holiday and a reunion with his girlfriend, although the educated young teacher who speaks with a highly cultivated accent and dresses in crisp white shirts with tie and jacket in the outback heat yearns for something far more sophisticated than even Sydney, hoping some day to "get to England". On his way to Sydney he stops overnight in a mining town, "the Yabba" (patently Broken Hill), and suffice to say he never makes it to Sydney. What follows - his long, lost weekend of debauchery - is actually a very complex story, but the dumbed down version of it is that he is seduced/entrapped into the heavy drinking, gambling and shooting that comprises the exaggerated machismo of the outback world. In a sense, he devolves into something base and uncivilised. Drawn into the world at first by a malevolently friendly copper played with utter brilliance by Chips Rafferty in his final film role, and then later by a possible kindred spirit as another lapsed professional, the alcoholic 'Doc' played by Donald Pleasance, Grant will lose all of his money and his dignity and certainly his intellectual delusions of cultivated civilisation. For me, this is the central, and most terrifying, message of the film: Doc speaks drunkenly at one point of the fallacies of civilisation (not the words he uses, but I can't remember them exactly!), and it is in the other-worldly environment of the hot, isolated and brutal outback that the facades of civilisation are stripped away so vividly. People revert to and embrace their base instincts and desires. Grant's "descent" (it is often characterised by critics as a journey to destruction, but I'm not so sure it's not really a journey to self-discovery and manhood - again, a more disturbing position; that is, that who he becomes is not only who he is meant to be but who he wants to really be - note that he returns to his teaching post at the end of the weekend and tells his landlord that he had "the best" holiday) into booze, gambling and hunting is shown to be an experience that he at first just accepts, but then eagerly embraces. He embraces his devolution into baseless, raw, aggressive masculinity, eventually shooting and eating his own food as he wanders the outback after abandoning his books, perhaps forever.

This film is often said to be chauvinistic. I disagree. While there is only one major female character, she is shown (and said) to have succumbed to her base animal instincts just as, although differently from, the men. In a male dominated world, she is a fairly liberated, sexually aggressive sort of creature. She, like the men, has reverted unashamedly into something rather uncivilised and, thus, something rather threatening to those retaining the delusions of civilisation. In a way, she is shown to be more powerful than, and to exercise much power over, the men.

Cinematically, this is an impressive film. The other-worldly outback settings of red dust and dirt are both exotic and unnerving, really the perfect setting for this "Australian Gothic" horror. One of the most notable, and disturbing, sequences of the film is its prolonged kangaroo hunt that is graphic, winsome and also rather vile. The homoerotic undertones to the peculiarly Australian (and masculine) dogma of "mateship" are subtle and pervasive, and the implied homosexual encounter between Grant and Doc (for some reason hardly ever commented on in, so far as I can see, in discussions of the film, but in my opinion rather integral) was also shot very cleverly.

Needless to say, I found this a very good film and it is highly recommended, with an easy 5 out of 5 on the Scott Scale.