End of Sophistication

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 24

End of Sophistication

EVERAL connoisseurs have pointed out that Wellington women may dress in a more sophisticated manner than south- | ern women, but to see real chic the thorough observer must go to Auckland. No thank you. Now I know the logical end point of sophistication, I am staying away from it. There it is, -|hanging over the attractively got up /women I like to see in the street, the spectre of the completely got up. It costs | £140 and runs on a three-volt battery. -It has 17 faces, eight shades of hair, two complexions-"peach" and "grizette’and several types of hair, ranging from silky nylon to a coarse kind made from , bootlaces. By pressing buttons the limbs ‘of this simple mechanical mannequin ;| can be made: to move in various ways | to show off its clothes. Sophisticated lady, gazing,emptily into the mirror, fixing your false eyelashes, shaping your ' standard Hollywood mouth, putting on | your complexion in layers, how do you know you won’t wake one morning and, instead of well-brushed, silky, nylon type hair, find on your pillow a pile of coarse bootlaces? ett nt, OO Ea ee uaa ee a, aa a ae Indigenous Atmosphere .. Under the avenue trees, it’s black night. Headlights of cars, one after the other, sweep the kerb on the outside of the hairpin bend, tyres swishing, nibbling at a skid. Half in the shadow of the trees at the edge of the corpse-blue -pool ‘of an arc light, stands a figure, nothing’ but overcoat, hat-brim and menace. It’s _ all slightly larger than life; the cars travel a little too fast, the tree limbs cast too fantastic a shadow, the pool of arc light is too hard and concentrated, the figure too still. Blame the director. | Most movie men tend to lay on their atmosphere with a bulldozer. . . . Walk--ing up Salamanca Road it was black dark. The cars swished round the hairpin bend from Kelburn Parade a little too fast, their sweeping headlights picking up the kerb, the tree limbs, and a | still. figure, ‘all overcoat, hat-brim and | menace, standing on the edge of the | ghastly pool cast by an arc light. What -was I doing there, an alien from the / south, where cars travel slowly round hairpin bends and movies stay inside the picture theatres? I stole past, looking vainly for a director with a bulldozer. } Lost | SO CEN EEE a The mouse must ‘have had a thick Friday night and wandered far from home. He was still lost about seven on ‘Saturday morning when’ I went down Bowen Street to buy a paper at the ‘Cenotaph corner,’ hopelessly lost, running about in distracted two-yard bursts where the Cenotaph and the pavement | | meet. As I came along he left the horizontal level, and started to scale the Cenotaph itself, a dark grey dot on a light grey mass. He didn’t have a show, and fell off pitifully three feet up. Unreliable creatures, humans. Find a mouse

in the flour-bin, and you kill him, feeling virtuous and satisfied; find one trying.to climb the Cenotaph and you are filled with pity, superiority, and impending St. Francis-hood. Fitting Chamber music is not everybody’s joy; contemporary chamber music seems particularly esoteric. Yet in Wellington there are active groups whose members both sponsor and attend concerts. The first recital sponsored by a new group interested in contemporary music attracted about three times as many people as the organisers expected. The audience was packed a little too closely to allow the elbow room enthusiastic applauding demands, but the players, who had put a

lot of time into rehearsing a difficult programme, received a more heartfelt tribute than the mere beating together of hands. On the last note of the final item, a Honegger violin sonata, a lady anticipated everyone’s enthusiasm by fainting clean away. Evening at the Art Galleries I took my dog for a walk along Petone Beach on a fine Sunday evening, looking for a couple of sheets of tin to roof the packing case he’s living in now. I found some tin at the mouth of the Hutt River, a mountain of it, enough to roof a dog kennel, line a graving dock, and make Model T bodies for half the population of Detroit. Amongst the tin there were strips of plaster board, gaskets, heaps of mould-covered vegetables, a fence post, a gas mask, crusts of bread, a fish’s head and spine; some rotting wetly, some in smoking, stinking little bonfires. It was 4 surrealist’s paradise. Never let it ‘be said now that surrealist pictures have no connection with anything to be seen on this earth. I saw all the surrealist pictures ever painted that evening in the Dump of Desolation Art Gallery. "Think of Paul Nash’s picture of the graveyard of wrecked’ German aircraft; think of Salvador Dali’s streamlined nightmares. ~Picasso’s violent, shocked disintegration. It was all there; a sheep’s face draped with a zip fastener, the gut‘ted, gaping frame of a woman's handbag, sheets of head sized, tin circlets hanging on projections like drunken haloes. I got my sheets of tin and walked back into the sunset,. rumbling one sheet‘to make stage thunder. It was a lovely evening; a romantic, Turner period sunset in front, thunder on the left, surrealist desolation behind, and dog all round in

mad circles.

G. leF.

Y.