A hard-copy loud paper reader emailed me yesterday asking, “Whatever happened to the Boring Issue?” (Embarrassingly, the call for submissions is still up on the website.) The actual explanation is pretty boring, but the query inspired me to look at some of the content I'd collected. In that dusty digital folder, appropriately titled Issue 13, I found an essay on Australian taverns by curator/critic Robert Cook and illustrated by photographer Tony Nathan. Both men continue to muse on the suburban condition, as seen in the 2005 show, Proof of Light at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. Robert is a curator at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and published an essay in the catalog Andrea Zittel:Critical Space. It is with real and honest pleasure that I present their work. Apparently, there is a future for this piece after all.
No Future: Piss-hole Boredom
by Robert Cook
photographs by Tony Nathan
Last NYE Siouxsie and I did something new. After living in the neighbourhood for over eight years we visited our local hotel. Not the hotel we had made our local—the charming (though Saturday-night-blokey) Paddington Ale House that’s a pleasant fifteen-minute stroll away. No, this time we actually visited the one closest to our place—the ugly-beyond-description Osborne Park Hotel that’s eight cranky minutes by foot. Frankly, we’d been too scared to pop in before. It’s the kind of hotel with the chalkboard out front advertising Skimpy Girls on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. It’s the kind of hotel filled with hard core alcoholics at about two in the afternoon, or so we presumed because we’ve seen them staggering around the car park often enough. The location sucks, dominated by a crappy sloping, but unskateable, car park, right on the intersection of a couple of busy main roads. There’s no shade either. In fact, there’s a complete absence of any softening features. It’s a piss hole, a barn to drink in—pure function, no style.
So on NYE I opened the door gingerly. Siouxsie stood a few paces back. A dozen fat men of various ages dressed in excruciatingly short shorts turned and stared at us. There was no going back. I tried to walk like a bloke, pushed my legs wider than normal, did something manly with my shoulders. We made it to the bar. But, fuck, I blew it by over-politely asking for a couple bottles of Asahi. Armed with our beer we walked past the expanse of deserted pool tables, past the girl setting up for karaoke as special NYE entertainment, and went out back. Out back was a patio arrangement with plastic seats and tables and some real ferns. There was a moulded plastic sunroof, exposed mission-brown jarrah beams. At 6pm it was still bloody hot, blue skies all around. The smell of petrol from cars chugging at the lights made the atmosphere feel more potentially volatile than it probably was. The proprietors had U2’s Rattle and Hum on auto-repeat. Vans drove up, builders got out. The place filled up, but even the weight of more bodies couldn’t disguise the shittiness of the surrounds.
We didn’t exactly have a blast, or even a relaxedly mellow time really, but we were proud that we’d visited: especially since it was so confronting. It wasn’t the class thing that grated mind. That’s cool. After all, we live in a neighbourhood of the pensioned and unemployed, the recently divorced, spaced teens enjoying their first share flat. It’s a sun-scorched, transitional suburb three miles from the centre of the city, a low rent suburb of past heartache and current growing pains. All of that is kinda why we like it; the exact opposite of bourgeois. No, what was confronting was its familiarity: it was so like those we frequented in our late teens and early twenties. Each suburb in Perth, in the entire state even, has a hotel like the Osborne Park Hotel and they weren’t so much threatening as soul destroying. They are dens of hopelessness, pits of banal, lacklustre misogyny. The odd family will creep in, the kids dressed in their pyjamas, the pathetic husband’s hair wetted down with water into a Richie Cunningham style part, the wives harried, despairing, utterly. The television is always on. A bit of pool is played, but not the sort of pool where a bit of sporting hustle is involved. It’s all shaky cue shots, missed holes, endless fucking around with the black before the game is over for lack of caring. And you notice all of this, because these joints are always made up of practically totally empty space. Everything is super visible. It takes an age to make it from the front door to the bar. You walk in and everyone sees you coming. It’s a throwback to the old Western saloons; every entrance is dramatic. Maybe it’s because it’s all downhill from there, best make something of it. I’d literally shake as a kid. Drinking problems start from that kind of threatening space. And this empty space is physically metaphorical of the only sorts of lives that could flourish in these hotels: empty, hollow, vacant lives.
Good hotels, older styled ones, bourgeois boutique pubs for Christ-sakes even, work differently. Ah, you slide into these from one of up to four discrete entrances. Once in, the dominant feeling is of being in a friendly uncle’s leathery lounge room. There’ll be about three meters distance max from the pub counter to the arm of the shelf where you can rest your arm and start drinking and lying to your friends. It’s all nicely cosy and close. Our local, the one 15 minutes away, is imbued with this graciousness. It is a nest, a series of nooks. Sure, it has a bit of Olde Worlde Twee, a bit of a theme park thing going. But we forgive it for that. It arches, not matter how self-consciously, back to gentleman’s clubs, and there’s a sense of social fluidity there with that. Life might go places. The mix of old timers is real and not forced. This old guy is there everyday we are. He sits at a small table and is comfortable, sinks, maybe, three pints. Not too few, not too many. Some geezer shoots the breeze with him. No big deal. No one is cross. No one feels watched except in a tantalisingly hopeful way. That’s good space for you. Pubs should be a blend of useful containment and openness. You gotta feel as if you belong, or could belong. Wasn’t that what Cheers was all about? You gotta feel happy there, but also like you are about to meet someone who will open you up to an entirely other world of social buoyancy, love and intellectual resplendence and financial independence.
The true Australian suburban shit-hole hotel is naturally a different matter entirely. They seem to go out of the way not to appear homely and to close possibilities down. They are positively uncanny (unhiemlich) in this regard. Yet, and here is their foul paradox, they are also an extension of our suburban childhood homes. They reek of some dumb arsehole dad’s big idea of a family entertainment site. They are exactly like those recreation attachments to the backs of homes, those hot, shadeless enclosures built on the cheap. Carrying this architectural load, suburban hotels feel horribly policed. Dad is always implicitly present. Plus, in their resemblance to those suburban outcrops that never quite feel really lived in, our hotels also feel only partially finished. They are provisional. They have a roof, a shitty carpet. They are dominated by the right angle. The brick work is the same as the houses around it. It’s all fashioned to make going out feel just like staying at home, but worse. When you stay home you know that nothing transforming will ever happen. When you go out you hope. These hotels are a tease and a refusal and the abjection of the home is doubled—its stupid limits are made horribly obvious. They are not about rubbing shoulders, meeting people, talking about ideas. They are about watching the fucking television and keeping your place and not dreaming and feeling so totally visible you cannot stand it. They enforce suburban norms in their dumbest manifestations. It is an affirmation of everything that is most dry and soulless. They make you feel that this is your lot and this is where you’ll stay. That is what we hated as teenagers. They were the limits of the suburban social world. This was basically it. This was our life.
That’s why these places are so boring. And I say boring quite precisely, because they cultivate a deadening of affect. They make no compensations to emotional, physical or cultural sensitivities or aspirations at all and, as such, mirror a hard-as-steel, phallic paternal system of meanness and limit enforcing. That sentiment in Alberto Moravia’s novel Boredom is true: seriously boring feelings occur when you have no motivated relation to objects. That was the deal at those places—there was no hope of feeling any connection to anything. Yet we still went there, treading social water, wanting, despairing. That is the true definition of boring, and why NYE was so weird for me and Siouxsie. It was frighteningly like we’d both never left, and that this was our lot, for now, for the future, until we died. Of boredom, painful boredom.
