Movies

The only charming structure I was able to find in Huskisson. And on the subject of movies, go see Slumdog Millionaire, even though you may have become sick of people telling you that.

Tomason

Tomason are vestigial architectural features: the term is Japanese, derived from the surname of an American baseball player who was hired by a Japanese team but sat out the season due to injury. Dan Hill’s City of Sound, quoting Greg Allen: “Tomason are the useless, abandoned leftovers. Stairs to nowhere are a favourite. Bricked up windows are a close second.”

The building was demolished last year, but it still has a driveway.

Only one more Olympics post

I should have looked up the Water Cube before writing Friday’s post: with its blend of macro and micro, it’s even more like something from Aldiss’ Zodiacal Planets stories. Even the geometrical form the outer shell is patterned on, the Weaire-Phelan structure, sounds like one of Aldiss’ plausibly odd-sounding names.

Nevertheless, even though the architecture is beautiful, it’s basically a swimming pool. Other people get pissed off at the Olympics because of Tibet or because they don’t like sports. I get the shits with it because for my whole adult life, public debate has been dominated by a constant, nihilistic moan about how large-scale public endeavours are all old-fashioned and wasteful and socialist and blah blah blah, except for when there’s a big Little Athletics carnival on (or a war) and then look what we’re capable of.

The only time in recent memory when anyone bothered spending large amounts of public money on infrastructure in Sydney was for the guess what. That was also when the ugly grey granite footpaths started, I seem to recall.

Modern Times

As part of their upcoming exhibition Modern Times – the untold story of Modernism in Australia, the Powerhouse Museum have created a public Flickr group and invited the public to post their own photos and images.

Which is pretty untold.

The Crest

On Saturday I needed to take the car to Granville for a replacement radio. I walked up to Parramatta to get some coffee and it turned into a bit of an architectural photo-shoot, which I continued on the drive home.

The Crest, on Blaxcell Street in Granville, was my favourite building in the whole world when I was a kid, and it’s still pretty high on the list. Local legend had it that Paul Hogan used to go to the movies there when he was a kid.

The big sign with the letters in roundels used to spell out HOYTS. I have no idea if ’roundel’ is the right word for them. Sometime in the 90s it was changed to BINGO. The current occupants have added a sixth roundel to allow them to spell BLOUZA, which is the name of a village in Lebanon. I don’t know if this violates whatever heritage order the building is under, but I didn’t actually notice the change until I was looking at the photos when I got home and noticed that BLOUZA has one more letter than BINGO.

I’ve only just noticed that the new blog layout cuts off Flickr’s ‘Medium’ photo size.

CBF

Teenage boys on the bus this morning:

– The first half is it’s like gold. It would be a good CD to listen to on like, um, a tape or something, you know with two sides, so you could just -

– Listen to the first half and then -

– And then, coz the second side, you know, CBF.

I was puzzled by the last phrase, but impressed that he could think of any form of media with two sides. Then, a few blocks later, discussing a show:

– Tickets are like a hundred bucks so I’m not going. I mean at that price I CBF.

That’s when I worked it out. This is an impressive development in laconic contempt: he not only couldn’t be fucked, but he couldn’t be fucked actually saying ‘couldn’t be fucked’.

So that it’s not all apathy and me whinging about it, here’s an optimistic story from earlier in the week about Kensington Street, next door to the old Kent Street brewery in Chippendale: the developer wants to make the derelict terraces and warehouses available for free to artists while they are demolishing the offices on the other side of the street.

I lived in Kensington Street from 1994 to 2001, in the terrace above, which hasn’t been re-let since I moved out. It had very high levels of lead in the paint and dust, which is why we moved. The whole street belonged to Carlton United Breweries at the time, and although they were good landlords, they really CBF doing anything with the properties beyond routine maintenance. So once a building got major problems, like lead, or the single-story terrace up the street which had begun shearing in half whenever a truck went past, it was locked up and abandoned.

Although this policy of neglect was what had allowed me to move there in the first place, I thought it was a shame that the street was falling apart. I guess the extremely low rents were a sort of arts patronage: my wife’s film business depended on it and there were a few other artists living there. I am very happy that someone actually could be fucked to do something creative and interesting with it.

The terraces are heritage listed; the developer is planning to turn the street into a bar-and-restaurant precinct. I have a reflexive response which tells me that this will be ghastly but I know that it comes from the same place that makes people say they couldn’t be fucked. So I’m ignoring it.

KoyaanisqUTSi

Some weeks there are just too many things to blog. Building T, the part of UTS across the road from Building 10, where I work, is being demolished, and we have webcams trained on it. You will have to hum the Philip Glass tunes yourself.

Balloon

I was going to review Aalst today but it’s hard enough being cheerful with this nerve inflammation in my neck; I don’t think I can also contemplate a harrowing play about infanticide. So I’ll just say that it’s excellent, and then let you see what Berlin looks like from a toy balloon’s point of view.

(via jtemperance, more info at The Balloon Project)

Aestheticising catastrophe

BLDGBLOG interviews science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, I’ve been saying this for a number of years: that now we’re all living in a science fiction novel together, a book that we co-write. A lot of what we’re experiencing now is unsurprising because we’ve been prepped for it by science fiction. But I don’t think surrealism is the right way to put it. Surrealism is so often a matter of dreamscapes, of things becoming more than real – and, as a result, more sublime. You think, maybe, of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, and the way that he sees these giant catastrophes as a release from our current social set-up: catastrophe and disaster are aestheticized and looked at as a miraculous salvation from our present reality. But it wouldn’t really be like that.

Last night in Dublin

My last full day in Dublin: the Guinness storehouse tour in the morning, which was like Willy Wonka’s Porter Factory. I quite like how they manage to have a rather anemic safe-consumption-of-alcohol exhibit, juxtaposed with an entire floor of the old-fashioned “Guinness Is Good For You” advertising.

Lunch at Phoenix Park. I now know what the mysterious act of indecency committed by HCE in Finnegans Wake was: presumably he’d got sick of looking for a toilet, and, finding that the tearooms were closed, went behind a tree.

In the afternoon, I went to the Book of Kells at Trinity College. It’s beautiful, but the Long Room upstairs is better, and the smell of old manuscripts is intoxicating.

For dinner, I met up with yatima’s old friend D – having been introduced via email a month or so earlier – and went for sushi (featuring the admirable concept of all you can eat in 55m; does anywhere in Sydney do this?) and a sample tray of beers at the Porterhouse.