Welcome to my blog. Before I start, please forgive me my trespasses, there'll be quite a few. And today, a rainy wet Sydney Sunday, I want to pontificate on self righteousness in the Inner west.
For thats where I was, at Marrickville Markets this morning.
Until recently, Marrickville was not trendy. Indeed it was the preserve of the greeks and south vietnamese, and there was little to admire architecturally or culturally. The shops were pretty mundane, no restaurants to speak of apart from Bay Tin, and what architecture there was to admire had simply been missed by the concreters. Then the massage parlours, english immigrant renters from the Eastern suburbs and students from UniSyd Arts Med Law, on secondment from the North Shore, invaded Newtown. Newtown is now odious, and a walk along King Street encourages you to slap people. Decent people spilled over into Marrickville. Decent? I mean warm, honest, unpretentious, funny, self deprecating, failing, succeeding… all the things that our gorgeous Sydney encourages. They bought rundowns in Marrickville, loved their elderly Greek neighbours and sent their kids to Ferncourt.
But Newtown has become overcrowded, as it began to believe its own hype and the sycophants loved the hype too. So thats who you'll want to slap on the King St stroll…
So now they have spilled over and they go to the Market. With their dogs. Who needs to take their dog(s) to the Market? Why? Whats with the gluten free? The dairy free? The sugar free? The wheat free? Is this the only way these half wits can feel special? How come we are so many of us now reactive to food? What's with the organic thats not organic, the homemade bread for $8 A LOAF that tastes like… bread… and has pointy ends so you waste a third of it, because you can't toast the ends! - and it's so tough cuts your mucous membranes. Whats so ethically strong about taking cash and payings no tax and so doesn't support the schools, roads, hospitals, and needy?
Whats with the coffee porn? Why do I pay the same for a fucking tea bag as I do an artfully crafted fucking coffee? What's with the parading up and down the market lanes, first one way then the other, again and again, Black + White poodles at hand, laughing with the boyfriend/handbag, looking askance to see if an Agent has spotted you? What is it with overt, advertised lesbians, so righteous, so predictable, so lacking in culpability and guilt for all the world's ills… That's shame, isn't it. another blog.
But why do these market goers revere any cultural product from a third world country, where people fuck, birth, live, struggle and die on the street, where democracy is strangled by corruption and tribal hatreds, where children are sold, women are (mis)treated like shit and men worked to death; why are those cultures revered by these halfwits when our own, a culture that truly does care for us all through universal taxation to which THESE STALL HOLDERS AND THEIR PATRONS DONT CONTRIBUTE…
Its because they don't think. They follow. Its because they are fools. Lucky fools.
