Live Triumphantly

Feel like living triumphantly? You may want to consider moving to the new 'Trio' apartments in the City Quarter. According to the website: "Trio is boldly individual, yet part of something greater". Would that be the 5,000 or so other apartments already crammed into the old Children's Hospital site in Camperdown?

So what does the luxurious, yet sterile Trio "complex" have to offer its inhabitants? Again, according to the website: "Trio's closest pool will be glorious. At 50m in length with an infinity edge down one side over which water gently tumbles it will be the perfect relaxation spot." I wonder if they're talking about the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre in Ultimo?

On a related note, has anyone ever read the JG Ballard book 'Highrise'? For some reason, the Trio building enlivens this book in my mind.

What I would really like to know is what kind of human being is attracted to spend money on a marketing campaign that asks you to 'live triumphantly'. Comments most welcome... 

The Burlesque Hour@Spiegeltent

It was with excitement and anticipation that we queued up for The Burlesque Hour at the Spiegeltent in the Opera House forecourt on Saturday evening. We rushed in and secured our seats near the stage (thankfully, not too near the stage as it turned out). Things started off bemusingly with Maude Davey stepping onto the stage in a long, black gown bearing a bowl of strawberries. She walked deliberately and seductively through the audience offering strawberries to audience members before introducing the show. The next performance, by Yumi Umiumare dressed as a school girl, was a frenzied explosion of underwear and energy. Next entered my favourite performer of the evening, Azaria Universe wearing a white body stocking and balancing on a Swiss ball. 

Moira Finucane's performances were highly strung, sexual, menacing and ironic all at the same time and she has a penchant for using liquid in her performances, red sauce and milk in vast quantities. Although by the time she performed her dance of the many balloons I had warmed to her naughty, horror movie monster stage presence. 

However, my favourite performances were both by the marvellous Azaria Universe. Her trapese work, executed while wearing tight elastics on her arms, legs and trunk (which made her look like a very feminine Michelin Man) was compelling. And her naked-except-for-300-strings-of-pearls rendition of Total Eclipse of the Heart was hysterical AND moving.

Check it out for yourself. The Spiegeltent season is sold out, but the Burlesque Hour will be returning to the Opera House Studio Theatre in January 2009: 

http://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/theburlesquehour09.aspx

And yes, there is nudity.

Sculpture By The Sea

I invited MDM and MBH to Sculpture By The Sea this weekend. For some reason I misremembered that the exhibition ran from Bondi to Coogee. Finally, I'd have an excuse to catch the 370 bus! I happily endured the 60 odd minutes wending our way through Newtown, Alexandria, Rosebury and Kensington enroute to Coogee. I was a little surprised to note that there were no sculptures immediately in view. Must be just around the northern headland, I thought to myself. It turns out I miscalculated the start (or end) of the exhibition by five beaches (Coogee, Gordon's Bay, Clovelly, Bronte, Tamarama). Still, I haven't ventured to the beach for ages and it was all very Morrissey walking through Waverley Cemetery on a sunny afternoon. MDM was quite a slow walker, and one who required many rest stops, so we didn't see a sculpture until we had been walking for about an hour or more.

We rested briefly at Tamarama before forging into the throng of sculpture spotters. It was very difficult to take a photograph of a sculpture sans little kids crawling over it, but my impatient muttering was rewarded with a few human-less shots. Overall, the standard was good, but I was more interested in re-hydration than art by the time we reached Bondi. Art works that feature animals are always of interest of me, so I enjoyed the dogs roaming the hillside at Tamarama.

Perhaps another visit is in order during the week, in the hope that the crowds will be thinner. 

Post-Bourgeois

Yep, that's me. Well, that's me according to Lisa Pryor of the SMH. She used her fancy words to paint a picture of someone quite like me anyway.

Here are some of the tell-tale signs:

1. Your career does not yield a particularly high income but required years of tertiary study (legal aid lawyer, academic, journalist).

Yep.

2. Your holidays feature expensive air fares and cheap accommodation. You think spending $80 flying to the Gold Coast then $1200 staying at Palazzo Versace would be a gauche waste. Spending $1200 flying to Cambodia then $80 on guest house accommodation for the entire trip makes complete sense.

Hey, show me a cheap flight to Cambodia and I'll take it!

3. You have taken the bourgeois anxiety about discussing money to an extreme. Not only do you think it is naff to talk about money, you think it is naff to care about it at all. Even though your love of beachside living and late-night tapas is totally dependent on it. You would be mortified if anyone thought you recycled Christmas wrapping to save money but if they think you recycle it for environmental reasons, that's fine.

It IS naff to care about money!

4. Your tertiary education makes you sceptical about the way the mass media distil complex academic terms into buzzwords and simplify class dynamics into matters of lifestyle, yet you feel drawn to read such tosh when your own milieu is the topic of discussion.

The fact that I'm blogging about the topic is enough evidence really.

But for me, I'd take the idea (or is it ideals) of post-bourgeoisism further. Not only do I not care about money, after completing 2 burn-out inducing degrees I don't care about knowledge either. These days I'm quite happy to sit back and let my friends and colleagues espouse their sound, evidence-based points of view without feeling the need to hold my own position or appear clever. I suppose its a mild form of benign anti-intellectualism, except that I don't feel any hostility towards intellectuals or intellectual pursuits. In fact, all my friends are terribly clever and it causes me no consternation at all. Nor am I coming from the perspective of a religious fundamentalist or authoritarian dictator. I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather bake cupcakes than watch the news.

The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill

I've always resisted saying that I like Banksy. It just seems like such a wank. I mean if Angelina Jolie has done it, it's definitely not cool anymore. But my hat well and truly comes off to his new project, an installation work which critiques our exploitation of animals, called The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill. Banksy explores the inherit hypocracy of the human relationship with animals using animatronics in a faux pet store scene. There are animatronic fish fingers swimming in a fish bowl, chicken nuggets pecking at a container of tomato sauce, hot dogs in terrariums, a rabbit applying cosmetics at a mirror, a chimp listening to head phones while watching television and a miserable, old, featherless Tweety-bird in a cage.

Check out The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill online and today's SMH article on Banksy's New York show.

Oh, to be in New York this October!

The World's Smallest Sheep

MBH and I spent a mad, mad Saturday looking at houses to buy in the inner west. We saw about 13 or 14 houses in a little under 4 hours, and I can confirm that I was driving in a blind rage by the 3rd or 4th last ones. There were lots'n'lots of nice ones we can't afford in places like Glebe, Annandale and Newtown. You know the houses I'm talking about. I felt like I had to wear a tie to impress them (no prizes for correctly guessing the Simpsons reference, just my eternal respect).

By lunchtime MBH and I were back in home territory checking out some terraces on Darling Street. We were meandering back towards the car when my exhausted gaze fell upon an odd looking creature crawling on the footpath. I stooped, and using one of the glossy real estate brochures as a platform lifted it up to have a closer look. At first it looked exactly like a slater than had been (perhaps inadvertantly) spray-painted white. MBH agreed and I got ready to remonstrate righteously along the lines of "I ask you, what kind of person spray paints a slater!" when I realised that the spray paint was in fact a fluffy or woolly looking substance. As carefully as I could manage after a long, hot day of house-hunting I placed the little fella on the palm of my hand and looked even closer. It looked like the world's smallest sheep!

I showed it to some people smoking on their front porch pretty much right where we were standing. The woman said something inane like "That's not natural!" to which I felt like replying "Actually it is natural, which is what makes it's unusual appearance so interesting" but decided that I wanted a coffee and muffin more than I wanted to create an awkward moment with a stranger, so I moved on.

After some online research we discovered that our pasty little friend is a mealy bug. According to the internet they are a pest, but in my opinion they are ridiculous cute! If only someone would cultivate mealy bugs and sell them as pets ...

Accidental Graffiti Find in St Peters

Ages ago I bought a small series of prints from a vendor at the Glebe Fair. Each one is a simple b&w illustration of a tree and on each tree is a single red leaf. I thought it would be fitting to frame the prints in a thin red lacquered frame to complement the dash of colour in each picture. And I assumed that most framing shops would carry this stock. Not so. Anyway, I searched further afield and spoke to a friendly and helpful man called Paul at Modern Framing in St Peters who found some Marks & Company Red Lacquer No. 107 kicking around in the back room. Yay!

I followed Paul's directions and parked around the back of the shop on May Lane, St Peters. As I stepped out of the car I realised I had inadvertently stepped into graffiti art heaven. The artworks adorning the laneway represented a number of styles, including (my favourite) stencil work and a huge array of very colourful traditional pieces. None of that crappy tagging stuff.

The pictures that follow were taken hurriedly with my camera phone. I hope to return soon and take some better shots.

Henry Beston Quote

I just received this fantastic quote from one of my animal rights buddies and thought I should share it as widely as possible:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

If you are interested in finding out more about Henry Beston, I have included a link to his Wiki entry: Henry Beston

Unashamed Fan of the twothousand Website

Just like the title says, I am an unashamed fan of the twothousand website. Twothousand is the online, much cooler version of Timeout magazine. If you're not too cool to admit that you like to keep an eye out for what's cool, then I recommend this site to you. Twothousand describes itself as "a weekly snapshot of Sydney's subculture" and seems to be staffed by a team of cool hunting geniuses (with the exception of the recommendation of Cantina Mexicana as a good place to eat in the Centrepoint food court).

I receive each new issue by email, which includes a 'Cool/Fool' list along the lines of 'What's Hot/What's Not'. On the online version, each page is headed with a seemingly unending supply of funky, clever photographs. I recommend a visit to twothousand for this reason alone, but there are lots of features to hold the reader's interest like the collection of 'mix tapes'. 

Thanks to twothousand I've discovered such little gems as Art Meets Matter, Jan Von Holleben (although neither are strictly part of Sydney subculture) and the Sparkle Cupcakery.

Twothousand has a sister publication, based on Melbourne subculture, threethousand. I haven't really checked it out yet, but I will before my next trip to Melbourne.

Goth Nostalgia

I made my bi-monthly (every two months, rather than twice a month) visit to the Phyzogs Hair Salon today and was unexpectedly sent on a goth nostalgia trip, which provided a nice distraction from the dreadful regrowth i'd been disporting for the last 2 or 3 weeks.

One of the new apprentices, Tracey, is clearly a goth, albiet a mini-goth, or toned-down-at-work goth. I could tell by the heavy silver pendants she wore around her neck, as well as the straight black bob, matching straight black fringe and general goth-like demeanor. As you may have guessed, I am a recovering goth and am therefore never far from plunging back into blissful gothdom at the slightest provocation. Although I don't appear in the least gothic these days, at least not to the untrained eye anyway, there are certain signals that we must emit which betray us to our brethren and sistren. Let's call it Goth-waves. 

Tracey and I immediately fell into conversation about the recent Under the Blue Moon Festival (which I forgot to attend). She asked if I liked goth music and I lamely replied along the lines of "er ... yes, but it's all at least 15 years old like The Sisters of Mercy, Ministry and Skinny Puppy" hoping she wouldn't ask me to recall any of my favourite songs. 

Apparently, a band called Covenant headlined the festival and everyone "went off" when they played their big song "Call The Ships To Port". I asked if they were like Sisters of Mercy and she told me they represent a new genre called 'dark wave'. I have listened to a bit of Covenant since our conversation and they don't seem to be a million miles away from Sisters of Mercy musically, which is both amusing and rather a relief. More importantly, there was a goth fashion show at Carriageworks. That would have been fantastic! I am an unashamed fan of the downright beauty of goth costume wear. 

Our conversation ranged quite widely as I lay at the basin reminiscing about the early to mid 90's. Tracey agonised about whether emo would be the death of goth and I opined that goth has been through at least 4 waves to my knowledge and that it will continue to be reinvented as long as teenagers keep discovering Joy Division and black eyeliner. Tracey seemed unconvinced and suspicious of my assertion that gothism has existed in a prior incarnation. So I didn't bother to talk about the 10 or so years I spent dyeing my hair blue-black or "the good old days" of Soho in the Cross and the time I was just so friggen gothed up that my friend and I were ushered past the waiting queue of wannabes as if we were goth royalty. 

Hmmm ... maybe I'm ready for a personal goth revival. Dare I?

Whatever You Do .... Don't See The House Bunny

Man! What was I thinking? The House Bunny is the perfect example of a film where every single funny scene is used in the preview. Every single one. It wasn't just shallow. It wasn't just boring, badly acted and scripted. The joke that was funny was used over and over until it became rather depressing. HB exuded a form of profound stupidity, so much so that I feel as though I left the cinema with a trail of vapidity in my wake.

On the upside, I genuinely believe that Anna Faris is a talented actress and probably deserves a shot at a role in a better class of film than HB and the deeply dreadful Scary Movie series.

Half a chewed Bunny Ear

Introducing Tinkerbell

As an integral part of the launch of the Tinky brand worldwide, Tinky must reach you through the medium of blog.

Here is a picture, you lucky, lucky bastards.

Coming Up With A Cool Blog Name

Let's get all the self-conscious stuff out of the way right now. As soon as I hit 'Create Blog' after choosing 'For The Love of a Small Dog' as my blog title, I came up with a much better one! *sigh*

Be it known that my next blog title will be called 'Be It Known'.