THE STARS

Pino's Boxes, The Dare, Flippy's Slab

The Paris End’s Gift Guide: may we suggest a five star hat or a soft cotton city pigeon tee? Order ASAP to get it in time for the hols.

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★★★★★ Pino’s Fruit and Vegetable Boxes

Prahran Market is not really a produce market. It is a luxury food boutique designed for window shopping (window eating?). It is where you stroll past trays of duck tortellini, tender balls of buffalo mozzarella, techni-coloured heirloom tomatoes, oozing figs, various prosciuttos and parmesans dangling from deli hooks—and imagine serving it all up on a long, elegantly set table in a jasmine-fringed courtyard. Your friends arrive in flowing linens. They praise your produce, your Epicurean vibe, your witty repartee. But this is where the fantasy ends. In reality, you leave the Prahran Market and head to the nearby Aldi, where you buy the frozen Urban Eats Greek Spinach and Cheese Spanakopita ($8.99, five stars). The spana begins to thaw on the tram back north across the river and you consider eating it from the packet. This is why your editors were a little suspicious when we got a tip off about Pino’s Fruit and Vegetable Boxes. The legacy green grocer is among the more elite at the Southside market (which is really saying something) so we assumed that their boxes would be unattainable. Wrong! For $30, you can get a generous selection of delicious fruit and veg delivered to your door: enough to feed approximately two healthy appetites for a week. For $50, there’s a “Family Box,” good for four. The produce is seasonal and varied; you get your potatoes, leafy greens, and apples. But then, there will also be a pineapple, some Lebanese zucchinis, a fist-sized heirloom tomato. Pino’s delivers basically everywhere in this sprawling city, from Frankston to Werribee, Box Hill to Brooklyn. Those who get the boxes soon become ardent devotees. (We were recently told about a Whatsapp group called “Pino’s Sluts” wherein the girlies discuss their hauls along with seasonally appropriate recipes.) We feel a little traitorous, having been Ceres box people previously. Pino’s may not be organic (read: the lettuce is not filled with slugs). But given that we’re all 75% microplastics these days anyway, this box is just plainly superior… and cheaper.

★★★★ The Dare

Do you like girls? Do you like the girls that do drugs? Girls with cigarettes in the back of the club? Girls that hate cops and buy guns? Tall girls? Small girls? Girls with dicks? Call girls? What about all those girls who got degrees? Or the girls on killin’ sprees? If you answered yes or uttered a “YEOWWWWW” sound in response to any of these questions, you are probably a huge fan of American musician The Dare. If these questions read like a list of unintelligible rubbish, maybe you should stop for a moment, consider your cultural obsolescence, and listen to The Dare’s hit song, “Girls.” In our opinion, it is one of the greatest tracks of last summer and has a bright future ahead for many summers to come. In the opinion of our more musically knowledgeable friends and lovers—people with sophisticated, esoteric tastes and vinyl collections etc.—“Girls” is a derivative rip-off. The Dare is capitalising shamelessly on the indie sleaze revival, they say, and his tracks are a synthy husk of the mid-2000s, his aesthetic entirely indebted to stripey tees and LCD Sound System… blah blah blah. Play “Girls” again! That’s what’s up! Aside from being a banger machine, The Dare—born Harrison Patrick Smith—is also extremely sexy, if you happen to like a guy who looks like a toothpick dressed in a black suit, white shirt, black skinny tie and black sunglasses. TPE secured tickets to The Dare’s sold-out show at Max Watts last night, and and we wrote this star from deep inside the disco-balled-up basement venue off Swanston St. There were an inordinate number of Zoomers dressed as The Dare in attendance, many of whom bizarrely had digital cameras clicking and flashing away. The opening DJ’s most popular song primarily consisted of the phrase “CEO” repeated over and over again. The crowd went wild. Over at the merch desk, The Dare’s minions were offering free posters printed with the phrase “what’s wrong with melbourne?” It was hard to know where to begin. Before we could formulate an answer, he appeared on stage, writhing convincingly in front of a wall of speakers punctuated by bright, white flashing lights. If you missed out on The Dare experience, he’s also playing this weekend at Meredith (sold out) and running his club night, Freakquencies, tonight at Miscellania. The Misc event is also all sold out, but… we’re considering lurking at the downstairs KFC for recon, ready to throw ourselves at Harrison in the event he slips downstairs for a nugget or frozen Pepsi. What would we even say to him? We are just humble bloggers. And, in the words of the man himself: what’s a blogger to a rocker, what’s a rocker to The Dare?!