Rambling on about hats

Look at photos from the early twentieth century, and everyone - men, women and children - is wearing a hat. Everyone.

Even up until the fifties, when I was a child, most people wore hats. We wore caps to school, caps that had a little brim out the front made of hard card which was good for flicking someone else with.

And then suddenly this all stopped. It was as if overnight a switch had been reset and hats became invisible. You have to wonder what happened to them all.

We've never quite gone back to the total hat scene, although hats of various sorts are much more visible now than they were a decade ago. A few weeks ago, for a few days in a row, there was a man in a suit, on the bus, wearing a hat that looked like the one on the right - it's the sort of hat very few people wear these days.

Which reminds me that a couple of decades ago some brave soul started up a hat shop here in Dunedin, at a time when hats were practically invisible. A friend of mine bought one that was even more stylish than the one pictured, and wore it briefly - until he realised that just no one was wearing anything like that. And the shop closed within months of opening, as I recall, which was hardly surprising.

Women's hats, of the kind that used to be worn by every woman (with exceedingly extravagant versions available to those in 'society'), appear at weddings, but not much anywhere else. (My wife wore one to my son's wedding.) We seem to have moved on from the age when the hat was a symbol (more than something to protect your head) and when people spent a good deal of time on windy days holding onto their hats - or chasing them along the street. And we've certainly moved on from the time when it was normal to wear a hat,whatever the weather, and whatever the occasion.

In the hotel room we stayed at in Heidelberg four years ago, the only other item in the room was a hatstand - which seemed a bit optimistic.

However, having said that hats are well nigh invisible, that's not quite the truth. Hats of the more formal kind, with a brim all round seem to have gone into hiding, but hats in general (covering a wide range of styles) still appear - if you keep your eyes open.

Men and boys wear the baseball type cap (thankfully the right way round for the most part) and these are particularly useful for wearing as a kind of shade to keep the sun out of your eyes. Consequently I wear one through the summer when I'm walking to work, and even well into the winter - both to keep my head warm and also to act as a shade against the very low winter sun. I even wore a cloth (or flat) cap for a time - someone had given it to me and it just suited the purpose.

And talking of winter, that's when a vast array of hats appear: beanies that fit all around the bonce, (by beanie I mean the NZ version, not the one in the picture) and the occasional balaclava, and those peculiar knitted things full of colour that hang around down the ears and would loop around under the chin if it was stylish to do them up (I've just discovered they're called a 'chullo'). Knitted hats, in fact, are very common in the winter, and certainly in our climate they're great for keeping the heat in (although I've read somewhere recently that we don't actually lose a large percentage of our heat from our heads after all - wish scientists would get their facts right and stick with them).

Wikipedia, of course, has articles on the hat - this one has a great list of them with photos attached - it surprising just what a wide variety there are around the world. You can even buy Wikipedia trucker hats with various sayings on them...rather like the slogans on t-shirts.

Well, there you go. How to ramble about the hat when I could possibly, and probably should be, doing something else. What the heck, I'm nearly retired!

Monsoon Wedding

I mentioned this movie quite some time ago, but didn't say very much about it. There was a DVD of it in the library the other day when I was there, so I picked it up to have another look at it.
A good deal of it came back to me, but I'd virtually forgotten the strange, beanpole of a man who's the 'event organiser' (played by Vijay Raaz). His story is treated in the way Shakespeare used to treat his humorous, down-to-earth comics: as counterpoints to the main play. Here, in a setting that's nearly all middle-class and full of extravagance, we have a man who's also well-off, but who's impoverished in something that matters: his heart. His mother has been nagging him for years to find a wife and give her grandchildren, but whether because he hasn't bothered or just hasn't found the right person, we don't know. Anyway, within ten minutes of the movie's beginning, he's fallen head over heels in love with the servant of the house. And she with him - although she manages to hide it rather more successfully. The man is fairly ugly, to put it mildly, and isn't the sweetest of personalities, but in the end he gets his girl, and you feel as good for him as you do for any of the other characters. Better, perhaps. It takes some work holding himself together, but he manages.
The film, on the whole, is a cheerful piece, with few dark corners. However, there is an underlying sub-plot about a family 'friend' who has been helping fund the family in past crises, but also secretly molested the niece (whose own father is dead - she lives with the family). When I first saw the movie, this aspect came as a surprise (as is probably intended), but this time round the warning signs are obvious throughout the film.
The story is full of all sorts of other complications, some of them trivial, some of them important to the people concerned; and there are several relationships running at various levels throughout the movie. It's a little hard to keep up with all the characters, but perhaps that doesn't really matter: this is a film about community, both within and without the extended family, and it's a film about the joy of being alive, and the enjoyment of all that weddings mean, and how they bind people together in amazing ways.

On another tack altogether, I'm listening to Philip Glass' Violin Concerto - yup, I did say Philip Glass. This is another Glass altogether to the man who wrote that interminable opera I mentioned a while ago. Here is a wonderful soaring piece of music with a constantly throbbing accompaniment that varies as instrument after instrument picks it up, or moves it suddenly along at twice the speed. It's coupled with John Adams' Violin Concerto, which, apart from its Chaconne movement, is taking quite a bit of getting used to.