A hundred dates in less than a year. Will they heal her broken heart or make it worse? Brilliant, hilarious and excruciating confessions from bestselling writer and journalist Helen Razer.
A cheeky introduction to Marxism and socialism for everyone fed up with their capitalist woes. Millennials have it bad. They face the problems of underemployment, unaffordable housing, and economists who write crap columns telling them it’s their fault for taking an Uber to brunch. Today the future’s so dark we need night vision goggles, not a few liberal guys shining a torch on a sandwich. Maybe today we could use the light of Karl Marx. Marx may not have had much to say about brunch in the twenty-first century, but he sure had some powerful thoughts about where the system of capitalism would land us. Over time, it would produce a series of crises, he said, before pushing the wealth so decisively up that the top-heavy system would come crashing down with a push. Pushy old communist Helen Razer offers an introduction to the thought of Marx for Millennials and anyone else tired of wage stagnation, growing global poverty, and economists writing desperate columns saying everything would work better if only we stopped eating avocado toast.
It's sad and boring to be sick in the head, and until Prozac Nation was published, it wasn't even faintly hip. Depression, anxiety disorder, dysthymia or whatever one chooses to call whatever the amorphous thing, or things, that so many of us seem to wrestle with, is unglamorous crap. In 1998, Helen Razer, JJJ icon and self-confessed fruit-bat, was forced to reassess her high-profile life when she found herself temporarily blind and suffering incapacitating dizzy spells, hyper-vigilance, headaches and a whole gamut of other symptoms associated with being hurled about in the anxiety and depression spin cycle. At her lowest Helen wrestled with suicide, but with the help of psychoanalysis and judicious drug therapy, she dragged herself into recovery. In her usual irreverent urbane style Helen chronicles her own painful but ultimately transformative experience and draws on that to discuss everything from finding a good shrink to dealing with suicidal thoughts, from tips on what to do when you hate yourself to how to cope with a panic attack. At a time when youth depression and suicide is on the national agenda, Gas Smells Awful speaks bravely, honestly and optimistically to anyone trying to find a way through the torment of depression.
Alain de Botton meets Russell Brand in this glorious rant about everything that drives you mad about the modern world. How did everything get so dumb? How did we become hostages to idiocy? What must we do to be freed from a captor whose ransom note simply reads, 'D'oh'? The deteriorating quality of our public debate and the dwindling of common sense in media, politics and culture can drive you to despair and rage. It certainly drove writers Helen Razer and Bernard Keane to a desperate act: befriending each other for long enough to write a book. Join forces with these uneasy allies to fight against a world that has lost its reason. Explore what's behind the remorseless spread of idiocy, and why there's just so much damn Stupid around you. Stupid isn't just ignorance; it's not just laziness. Worse than the absence of thought, Stupid is a virus that drains our productivity and leaves us sick and diminished. And Stupid has a long, complex and terrible past, one we need to understand in order to defeat it. A Short History of Stupid traces the origins of this maddening ill, examining the different ways in which we've been afflicted over the last three thousand years. It damns those who have spread Stupid and celebrates the brave few who resisted. It shows how Stupid tightens the grubby grip of the foolish around our throats. Hilarious, smart, unpleasant, infuriating and rude, A Short History of Stupid is at once a provocation and a comfort. It will spark debate, soothe the terminally frustrated and outrage the righteously Stupid. It is a book whose Stupid time has come.
While I am tempted to hold The First Stone entirely responsible for rewriting feminism to the point where it became about as unifying and useful to the girl-in-the-street as a wonder bra, I'm not quite that small-minded and brittle. There are lots of other folks to blame as well. Somebody said once, and doubtless after watching 'Australia's Funniest Home Videos', that happiness is slavery. I can't for the life of me remember if this was The Nine Inch Nails or some nihilistic bod like Albert Camus. This is a heavy problem I have, confusing my latex-encased rock and roll demons with French modernist free thinkers. This is not, by any means, due to a pluralistic and eager embrace of all media. I simply never pay enough attention. Perhaps it was Nietzsche. Or maybe Ray Martin. I don't know. Helen's Never Fail Ten-Point Checklist for Outrunning Extreme Sexual DisappointmenT 1. If he has 'Satan Is My Black Lord and Master' tattooed on his scrotum, it's a fair bet that you will be sacrificed before your third climax. 2. If you're a female with a taste for a same-sex encounter, check her cd collection first. If you find Tracy Chapman, Judy Small or Joan Baez, please do not expect anything more spectacular than incense and a shy squeeze of the bosom. 3. Always try for a Away Match, and do try to remember the whereabouts of the front door. In larger cities, deadlocks are common, so take his trousers/her handbag with you as you flee. 4. If you're a male with a taste for a same-sex encounter, check his wallet for gym membership. If he has received an elephant stamp for hours spent on the stairmaster, please do not expect anything more spectacular than a compare and contrast of your sphincter muscles and a rippling strip show performesd to early Bronski Beat as he looks consistently in the mirror. 5. Girls with lots of candles in their bedrooms, sarongs thrown over milkcrates and a picture of Virginia Woolf in profile generally have eating disorders. While this may not always mean that they can't root for shit, they may only have limited energy and they will certainly have bad breath. Further, you will find it almost impossible to come between their cries of 'I'm so fat and ugly!' 6. With few exceptions, boys who play guitar are a sexual joke. Bass players are worse. Drummers are appalling. A keyboard player has no penis and the sound guy is a virtual cro-magnon. If you do a roadie than I have no sympathy, and shouldn't have been so naive. 7. men who say 'Relax, baby' should be killed at birth. 8. Ditto for 'You Rock My World'. 9. Anyone who needs a bach flower remedy, an aspro or a bucket bong before a shag is a fool and a bad horizontal mosher. 10. Check for hidden cameras. Helen Razer and Mikey Robins are still slaying the ratings in their guise as the TripleJ Breakfast Show, with over 2 million listeners as last count. If anything, Helen has increased her profile since the release of the bestselling Three Beers and a Chinese Meal (thanks, guys - 20,000 copies and please keep stocking it; they get new listeners all the time), writing a number of full-page feature articles for the Sydney Morning Herald, and a regular column for Cleo, as well as being categorised as IN by the arbiter of all things tasteful, Mode magazine. She has also appeared in a number of high profile televised debates. IN PURSUIT OF HYGIENE is a collection of writing showing Helen at her most hilarious and incisive. No one else can write with the same sense of scorn and vitriol - no prisoners are taken and all sacred cows are skewered through the heart. (Read the attached section entitled 'Women and Men I Really Don't Like Much' to get an idea of how good Helen is at stomping on people's toes. With chapter titles including 'The Truth That Hell, Very Often, Is Other People', 'Bad Shagging', 'The Anger That Preceeds Thorough Listlessness', 'Torpor and Tantrums', 'Ten Good Reason to Turn Thirty', 'Things That Really Get Up Me' and 'Women and Men I Really
Everything's Fucked. Anyone alive today can tell you that. But not as sublimely, sumptuosly or seductively as Triple J's gorgeous postmodern Goddess of Nihilism, the disenchanted, permanently adolescent and just plain cross HELEN RAZER. And why is everything fucked? Because of Deepak Chopra, that's why. He and the rest of the execrable New Age movement have just gone too far. Incense, chakras, yurts, rattan shopping bags, angel therapists, John Gray, Louise Hay ... none of them are a path to lasting peace. All that namby-pamby self-discovery and New Age Orthodoxy be buggered. Have you ever considered the possibility that the multibillion dollar self-help industry is actually a plot hatched somewhere in a dank, humourless corner of the Pentagon, designed entirely to keep you dirt poor, overburdened with doubt and stupid enough to actually enjoy programs such as 'Hey! Hey! It's Saturday?'? Well, darn it, it's occurred to me! And that is why, in a perverse spirit of generousity, I have decided to rake the detritus from the crazy paving we recognise as human endevour and forge a trajectory toward the One Truth: everything's fucked. Petulance and hate are the only antidote in this postmodern world. All things are shithouse, and thankfully we have the curvaceously cranky Helen Razer to provide us with a starter kit of fucked things to think about to ease our way forward to embittered recovery. Hate can be deeply rewarding. Especially when directed at gaudy prepubescent female frock-shop attendants. Or crypto-fascist computer store Billy Gates wannabes. All you need is Helen's Never Fail Five Point Plan for Twarting Shitheads: Hate. Read. Flounce. Recount your hates. And never trust a hippie. If you've been overcome by the cloying synthetic honey-love of the New Age and hate doesn't come as naturally to you as it once did, Helen is on had with a few suggestions for recognising dissonance, vacuity and scum. Like Demi Moore. Alcoholic soft drinks. Gourmet pizza. And of course 'Hey! Hey! It's Saturday.' Once you've got the hang of karmically imbalanced hate, it's time to acquire Protracted Adolescence Disorder. This dysfunction publicly evinced by such luminaries as Bill Gates, Jerry Seinfeld and Courtney Love, is virulent and may be financially perilous. Malapert owners of factory-fresh newborns may naively expect to extricate themselves from toxic parental bondage in, perhaps, twenty years. PAD ensures beyond doubt that in the year 2029 you'll have a wingeing, procrastinating, shop-soiled thirty-two year old still begging you for money and leaving their (Mambo) clothes on the bathroom floor. To be the perfect postmodern princess, you must of course abandon gender to the revolution. And if you churlishly refuse to follow any of Helen's other extravagantly researched paradigms for self-awareness and change, well, you must, you simply cannot afford not to, crossdress. For those few of you needing them, tips on exacting extreme gender travesty are forthcoming. For gentlemen: Cry. Experience PMT. Depilate. Meddle. Envelop. For ladies: Fiddle. Nudity. Let fluffy off the chain. Drink beer. Gamble. Ladies, you must learn to fiddle. Do not fiddle with the frustrated, poignant desire of a convent girl who knows what she's doing is wrong in the eyes of the Lord. As much as it may be an exhibitionist pleasure to masturbate in the presence of an important deity, stop it at once. Be more nonchalant. Remember that an ill-gotten climax is not your objective. Perform irresolute origami with your nether folds. Disrobe not with the urgency of a motley Kings Cross fan dancer but the the comic integrity of an ample, gangling male sports-ground streaker. Fart not with the repressed denial and pain of a Tory politician who is paddled by a buxom madam in cloying weekly privacy. Fart with the loud avuncular dignity of an adipose publican. Drink beer not with the tentative chagrin of a shandy-sipping befrocked matron. Imbibe it instead with the gusto
A collection of prose and poetry with the central theme of humour. The co-authors are two radio personalities from the youth station Triple J in Sydney who have put together a conglomeration of anecdotes and fantasy about life today. The text is conversational in style and covers all issues most popular with the listening audience of the station - sex, sexual fantasies, politics, pop music, growing up, nostalgia, eating. Some photographs are included, as are cynical and cult comments.
A cheeky introduction to Marxism and socialism for everyone fed up with their capitalist woes. Millennials have it bad. They face the problems of underemployment, unaffordable housing, and economists who write crap columns telling them it’s their fault for taking an Uber to brunch. Today the future’s so dark we need night vision goggles, not a few liberal guys shining a torch on a sandwich. Maybe today we could use the light of Karl Marx. Marx may not have had much to say about brunch in the twenty-first century, but he sure had some powerful thoughts about where the system of capitalism would land us. Over time, it would produce a series of crises, he said, before pushing the wealth so decisively up that the top-heavy system would come crashing down with a push. Pushy old communist Helen Razer offers an introduction to the thought of Marx for Millennials and anyone else tired of wage stagnation, growing global poverty, and economists writing desperate columns saying everything would work better if only we stopped eating avocado toast.
Alain de Botton meets Russell Brand in this glorious rant about everything that drives you mad about the modern world. How did everything get so dumb? How did we become hostages to idiocy? What must we do to be freed from a captor whose ransom note simply reads, 'D'oh'? The deteriorating quality of our public debate and the dwindling of common sense in media, politics and culture can drive you to despair and rage. It certainly drove writers Helen Razer and Bernard Keane to a desperate act: befriending each other for long enough to write a book. Join forces with these uneasy allies to fight against a world that has lost its reason. Explore what's behind the remorseless spread of idiocy, and why there's just so much damn Stupid around you. Stupid isn't just ignorance; it's not just laziness. Worse than the absence of thought, Stupid is a virus that drains our productivity and leaves us sick and diminished. And Stupid has a long, complex and terrible past, one we need to understand in order to defeat it. A Short History of Stupid traces the origins of this maddening ill, examining the different ways in which we've been afflicted over the last three thousand years. It damns those who have spread Stupid and celebrates the brave few who resisted. It shows how Stupid tightens the grubby grip of the foolish around our throats. Hilarious, smart, unpleasant, infuriating and rude, A Short History of Stupid is at once a provocation and a comfort. It will spark debate, soothe the terminally frustrated and outrage the righteously Stupid. It is a book whose Stupid time has come.
This highly illustrated book is written for the new standards for Level 3 Hairdressing. It covers the mandatory units and twelve optional units giving you plenty of choice as you develop your salon and technical skills. Two special features - Creating the Look and Providing Aftercare - have been created to help you move into your professional role.
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