'You don't get more Aussie than Colin Hay'

Yep. That's right. This is what's happening within the walls of Fairfax Digital's little attic - the Stayz office. Listening to the best of the worst radio has to offer. (FM, that is) Good ol' aussie battler, Col, eh?

I keep thinking 'wallpaperwallpaperwallpaperwallpaper'. It's something that I've been thinking a lot lately. Lifted from Smart Cunt Fry's podcast about Oscar Wilde.

“Why, Mr. Wilde, do you think America is such a violent country?”

“I can tell you why,” he said. “It’s susceptible readily of an explanation. America is such a violent country because your wallpaper is so ugly.”

Now that seems, you might snort with laughter at first and say, “Well, how amusing.” Part you you may say, “Well this is just a typical peacocking primped camp remark from a shallow and trivial man who thinks it’s amusing to say things like that.”

But actually, to understand what the Aesthetic Movement is all about, one has to take that quite seriously. Instead of judging things as being good or bad, things are judged by whether they are beautiful or ugly. And we may say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but actually it’s a lot easier to judge when things are beautiful than it is when things are bad or good. We spend our time puzzling dreadfully over whether we can interpret something as being wicked or whether it’s virtuous. However, beauty, beauty, beauty acts on us in a very real way, and what Wilde was partly saying was, if we look out of the window into our world, we see things that are universally and entirely beautiful from nature. Whether they be palm trees swaying in an island, whether they be the arctic wastes, whether they be deserts, tundra steps. It doesn’t matter where you look in the world, we see nothing but beauty. Unconditional, remarkable beauty.

Except where man has intervened.

And what Wilde is saying is, imagine belonging to a species where all you believe that all you can do to the world is to uglify it. To make it worse. To despoil it. Which is what we do. We know that now in real and profound and terrible ways that Wilde couldn’t have known about because the science hadn’t yet discovered quite how harmful we are as a species to our planet. But he could see that we were harmful to our planet in terms of its aesthetics. That we were making the earth uglier. Uglier with bad architecture, uglier with badly designed factories, uglier with badly stamped out tin trays and cheap ornaments, ugly with appalling wallpaper. And if you’re someone who grows up in such an environment, who is surrounded by badly made ugly things, then you think ugly thoughts of yourself and world. You think ugly thoughts of your whole species. There is nothing for you to do but to, to, to crap in your own nest. It’s what we do when we don’t believe in ourselves. And so although it seems a cheap response to a question about violence, the aesthetic point if view is actually I think a very valuable one, a very profound one, a very extraordinary one. And it makes people think beyond the knee-jerk reflexes of conventional morality, of revealed texts, whether they be the Bible, the Koran or the Communist Manifesto. It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to think harder than that, Wilde was arguing.

Where did this man come from? Seriously. I wish I could sing for him, or paint him or shout his name from a rooftop. In fact, the next rooftop I find myself on, I will do just that. And it will echo across the universe. Where do sound waves end? Do they? If I told you I love you, those three words would go on and on and on and on and ... you get the point. Ok, engineer friend, do NOT prove me wrong with your 'facts'. I like to imagine possibilities. I don't really care to know the exact point where whispered words become but a memory. That's sad. If no one's around to remember them, does it flick them out of existence? Which reminds me of another thing that rattles around in my head all the time (along with wallpaper). Naive. I really have a problem with that word. Why is it a dirty word? Why do so many ponces bandy it about like a sword dipped in the blood of all the gormless dead. (I mean people who were gormless before they died, of course. You can't be a gormless corpse ... or can you?) Maybe, when I shout Oscar's name, I will add a mantra about the loveliness of WONDER.