12/19/2008

The John Curtin Hotel, Carlton: "A Calm, Neighbourhood Clientele"


Gentrification seems to be becoming a central obsession of this blog, but is it any wonder? It is unfolding in Melbourne like never before. With the population expanding like a bullfrog's croaker there is increasingly less space for the proles in hip and cool inner-city dwellings. So it is with The John Curtin.

Named after the Labor prime minister, the Curtin was once a drinking den for trade unionist and true believers of the labour movement. Situated in the working-class heartlands of Carlton this was where blue collar blokes could drink in a pub named after one the heroes of the movement they created (that the hero in question died of alcoholism is a moot point, almost as incongruous as the Harold Holt Swim Centre).

Now though Carlton is a prestige suburb, and there's no time for the heroes of yesterday. The Visit Victoria website boasts (alongside a picture of a martini I might add) that the Curtin, "once a drinking spot for union workers, now entertains a calm, neighbourhood clientele. Its warm, cosy setting invites quiet front bar drinks." Note the 'calm' and 'quiet'. Not like those oikish union thugs eh? A rowdy & noisy bunch THEY are. This might be because you don't win and protect workplace rights by being quiet. Curtin himself could not have become Australia's greatest prime minister, inspiring a country on the brink of aggressive invasion by remaining quiet. But hey, what does any of this matter to a creative industry professional on the hunt for background chill-out grooves and a dry martini?

Thankfully, while the Curtin is being colonised the nearby Comrades Bar hold true to the cause. As long as the ETU retains ownership there ought to be no room for techno-bourgeois posturing there, and the day the ETU sells it to a consortium of advertising yuppies looking for an investment enterprise... well then we're all fucked.

10/04/2008

7/28/2008

Spending Time in Australia

"Well, my feeling about this country (Britain) — that we have nothing left but consumerism — does, as far as I know, translate to other consumerist societies like America and Japan. My impression is that Australians, however, have got other things to do with their spare time. They’re not besotted with shopping, because the country’s so large and there are so many opportunities for recreation — that’s probably another delusion of mine, I’ve no idea."

- JG Ballard in interview on Ballardian

Well, even sages have to be wrong some of the time.

Ballard seems here to have fallen for the English disease of transposing onto Australia his ideal of what it ought to be. Generations of Englishmen have fallen for the same trick, building up Australia as a wonder-land of plenty, the anti-England. Of course it's not all false, as those who experienced the grim pessimism of post-war Britain and then moved here would no doubt attest. But certainly there is a compulsion to dream everything one wishes for in existence in that Great Southern Land, and it is one that proves easier if you stay in Britain. Ballard's Australia seems to be a huge expanse of driving terrain, free of the British social hierarchies he so rightly loathes and ripe for the exploration of inner space. The reality proves somewhat duller.

Presumably Ballard does not watch Kath and Kim but it offers a clear picture of Australian suburban reality/banality. The suburban consumerism & anti-cultural, alienated thinking explored in Ballard's novel Kingdom Come is here too, made even more intense than in Britain since in Australia everything is fucking miles away! Australia's space does not facilitate liberation, quite the opposite. Those McMansions parked on large, cheap tracts of land hundreds of kilometres from the city are intensely claustrophobic. The nearest library, cafe, pub or shop requires a seemingly endless voyage through bland medium density habitations.

All of this is done by car of course, which might impress Ballard I suppose. Yet while there are plenty of roads in Melbourne, they aren't the neon highways of Crash, and of Heathrow airport (stretches of the new Eastlink freeway excepted). The roads here are decorated by factory outlets, discount kitchen warehouses and hardware superstores. And all roads lead to a mall, even those from the CBD:



That is not to single Australia out for special punishment, but the idea that it is exempt from the dumbed-down second rate consumerism in Europe, Japan and North America is patently false. What does place Australia apart however, is that the space here means people are less 'hemmed in' and so maniacal bourgeois terror cells are probably less likely to appear, but I'm not sure Ballard would think that a good thing. Then again there's always hope that this was the beginning of something bigger...


7/06/2008

Clifton Hill: Accusations in the Concrete


Perhaps the thing confusing me the most about this cemented accusation near my house is whether Lily is being accused, or whether Lily is accusing the forces of gentrification. If it's directed at me I'm not sure how to take it. On the one hand I'm no yuppie wanker, on the other I'm not a blue collar worker hailing from the area either. Just because I work for a trade union doesn't mean I don't drink cafe lattes (I'm afraid I do).

I read an interview with Michel Gondry recently which touched on this conundrum. Gondry, lamenting the gentrification of his New York neighbourhood, was horrified by the interviewer's suggestion that he was part of the process. Of course he didn't like to think of himself that way, but if having a commercially successful art house movie director in the area doesn't count towards gentrification I don't know what does. Even if Gondry himself is no wanker, wankers are sure to follow.

This is also the case in my home town of Manchester where the Hacienda yuppie flat complex is a natural, if perverse & unintended, consequence of the nightclub. How to infuse an area with something fresh and useful without attracting vacuous parasites? That is the question.


7/02/2008

Reach For Your Pipe and Dressing Gown....


Alas, I have neglected blogging duties in the past months due the hard work of my new job as a trade union official. Slog on behalf of the working man is immeasurably more rewarding than corporate wage slavery, but it certainly saps one's energy and creative juices. Such is my fatigue I have begun longing for the days of the Dalston dole office. In spite of the loss of dignity encountered there I at least had the freedom to flaneur the streets of London, if not to escape chronic debt and general impoverishment.

I have resolved to make more time for urban exploration and regain my blogging vigour. In the mean time I shall absorb some of the lessons offered here at The Measures Taken.


3/10/2008

Sam Newman's House, St Kilda: The Dialectics of Materlialism


As he stood beneath the fractured, glacial stare of Pamela Anderson, her linear geometry echoed a television howl. Vomit, violence, tabloid architecture. Was this, he wondered, the denouement of the French Revolution?

2/28/2008

Psychogeography and its Discontents

I recently discussed with Simon from Ballardian, the limits of the term psychogeography. Is it possible to even use the term anymore? Certainly there is little amongst the current crop of psychogeographic literature that correlates to what the Situationists meant by the word, which might better have been named psychogeometry.

The so-called ressurector of the practice, Iain Sinclair (who doesn’t really claim to be a true practitioner anyway) is more concerned with the arcane titbits of Hackney’s hidden cervices than anything else, while Will Self (who, judging by his book’s title, does claim to be a practitioner) and his pontifications on landcape architecture and sojourns to Barcelona, published in the Independent on Sunday and British Airways Magazine, are not psychogeography in either sprit or content. Anarchists like Stuart Home have dragged into the movement occultist elements that Debord would not recognize, while JG Ballard has been reluctantly dragged in himself by various lazy journalists.

The question I faced in founding a Melbourne Psychogeographic Society was, with so many disparate elements, does it make any sense to use the term anymore? After all, the word was never even meant to mean anything anyway, Debord ascribing its coinage to “an illiterate”. I chose the thesaurus-tastic term ‘cognitive topography’ for this blog, but for all of my concerns of its tainted or contradictory associations, the word psychogeography remains a usefully recognisable term in a way that 'cognitive topography' and other neologisms are not.

I was relieved then to find the question solved, insightfully as ever, by Iain Sinclair in a recently published interview:

‘I’ve been doing what everybody else has been doing for years, but now there’s a convenient label, a franchise, "psychogeography". It goes back to De Quincey, theRomantics, you wander this landscape without necessarily having preconceived notions, follow your impulses and drift into the street. Sometimes this is looked on as a derangement of the senses, a hallucinogenic high, a drug vision transposed onto the town. Sometimes it becomes Situationism or Psychogeography or this Baudelairean dandy looking at reflection in windows. Sometimes it’s Walter Benjamin. It is still the same human impulse to get out, to align yourself with what is out there and to treat the city as a kind of book or library, an open gallery, exploded museum. All of these things are true and it means covering the city from night to day and it means noticing the meat markets and slaughterhouses, the pubs, going underground to sewers and cellars and up into church towers. The theory and description is redundant as far as I’m concerned, you can apply whatever franchising slogans to the same impulse in whatever historical period’.

2/11/2008

The Reich Stuff: Melbourne's Porno Lanes

One of the more curious aspects of Melbourne’s structure is the proliferation of ‘adult’ shops along Swanston Street and its lanes. Of course it is to be expected that Melbourne, like any major city, will have a sex quarter, but that it occurs along the main drag is quite strange, rather like displacing Soho’s vice dens onto The Strand.

All of which makes me wonder if, in the past, someone high up in the city’s planning department was an avid follower of Wilhelm Reich. Surely if Reich was correct, and Orgone energy is the key to health and happiness, and the best means of accumulating Orgone is through sexual orgasm, then wouldn’t it make sense to line the main arteries of a metropolis with erotic boutiques? Perhaps those men in stained raincoats are flushing the city with streams of pure Orgone. They are not sordid, they are our saviours! Certainly I have always felt that Reich’s ‘Orgone Accumulators’ look like booths to house peep show voyeurs (in this light Einstein’s dalliance with them seems even more bizarre).


While on this theme can any readers enlighten me as to what happens in a Ram Lounge? This feature seems to provoke sufficient pride in those erotica venues that possess one to plaster it all over their promotional signs. A natural timidity, a disapproving girlfriend and a suspicion that I may be of the incorrect sexual persuasion have prevented me investigating first hand, but revelations from those with stronger stomachs are welcome. It would put to an end my mulling over some very bizarre scenarios…

1/31/2008

Against Hayek: The Harold Holt Swim Centre



There is something delightfully incongruous about the Harold Holt swim centre. It is not simply the naming of a swimming centre after a drowned Prime Minister (though this never fails to raise a grim smile whenever I mention it to anyone), but rather that one of Melbourne’s premier examples of Brutalism should be named after a conservative leader. Not only this but that it should be situated in one of the most conservative areas in Australia, home to two Liberal Prime Ministers (and probably three if Peter Costello was not “all tip and no iceberg”) is rather amusing.

As an unrepentant left-wing modernist, I have always had quite a penchant for the Brutalist. There is something about that clash of the clinical beautiful modernist geometry and the material harshness of concrete that appeals. With their communitarian ideals and bludgeoning aesthetics, Brutalist structures have always appeared to me as great socialist fists, pummeling an outmoded conservative topography. Of course not many people these days would view this imagery in such a positive light as I do
, and so it is the concrete fists themselves that have come to be outmoded (the family idiot for one hates them almost as much as I despise him). More reason then to cheer that the wonderful Harold Hold Swim Centre has survived. It has not clung on as a heritage fetishists' relic like the Brutalist Clyde Cameron College in Wodonga, which was built as a training school for trade unionists (huzzah!), but is now preserved with a token heritage listing as a private hospital (boo!). The Swim Centre endures as as a vital and vigorous institution. It's aesthetics may not be overly popular, (even its website doesn't have a picture of it) but still it remains undefeated.
Perhaps the distaste at its forms stem from the widespread distate at the ideals behind the Brutalist movement. Keynsianism and government investment in public works have no place in the Late Capitalist epoch, and so neither does an architecture representing such heathen ways. Yet in this particular structure we can see that there is no reason for this, that those fists are not outmoded at all but more necessary than ever.

Rather than existing as a mere curiosity, a museum piece for architecture students, the Swim Centre continues to function in providing a valuable community service. For only a small fee the public can paddle with their children, take a sauna and a hydrotherapy session, or swim in an Olympic sized pool. It is an embodiment of the state-sponsered, community-driven projects that neo-liberal zealots have spent the past twenty-five years warning us against. Here we have a brilliant and (literally) refreshing embodiment of the contrary argument, a celebration of public over private, of state investment over commercial re-development. One only has to go to a nearby gym to see how snobbish, vapid, exclusive and hideous a privatised version of this place would be.

The Harold Holt Swim Centre ought to act as a rallying call to stop felating the market and for the state to take the initiative of looking after the people. It stands as a small but supreme realisation of a noble municipal dream and a feeling of political satisfaction cheers me every time I swim there. It is tainted only by looking at my fellow swimmers and knowing that some of them voted for Howard….

1/16/2008

Travels in the Interzone

A new job (assessing the licence for Crown Casino of all things!) and an imminent visa application have been sapping my brainpower of late. But to temporarily satisfy any readers (should there be such things), here is a superb structure from Melbourne's Ballardian outskirts.


1/08/2008

M-C-M: Branding the City

On the corner of Russell Street and Little Collins street is a nondescript piece of luxury neo-modernism, containing yuppie apartments and a handful of high-class boutiques. This is nothing special of course, not in the teeming hub of economic rationalism that is the hypermodern metropolis. But what (literally) marks this structure apart, is that it sports a large barcode on its facade. It unashamedly embraces its architectural status as a mere commodity; not a benevolent server of a social function, not a monument of collective significance, nor a model of aesthetic wonder, merely means of accumulating capital. And why not? The (mis)guiding ethos of the age is Adam Smith's assertion that it is not the benevolence of the butcher that motivates him to provide us with meat, but his selfishness, and while this is the case why not be honest about it?


The building stands as the ultimate example of consumerist architecture in the city, not simply because it lays bare what other projects cloak in corporate speak, but because its chosen symbol, the barcode, is itself the ultimate avatar of free market capitalism.

As Michel Pastoureau illustrates in his brief but excellent book, "The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes & Striped Fabric", stripes in medieval times were viewed with extreme suspicion. The stripe, with its dynamic bichromism and implication of movement, was an aberration within feudalism both aesthetically and philosophically. The heraldic eye was trained to read images in terms of monochromatic layers (reflecting the feudal structure), to which the stripe was an aggressive assault. But this was not the only reason that the stripe was such an abomination. The medieval man was not a historical agent in the sense that we would understand, that is he did not conceive of himself as being a player in an ever-changing historical narrative. Rather he existed within a stable world, overseen by God and king, that always had been and always would be. The brash linearity of the stripe proved a disturbing and incongruous presence, and as such it was attached to those disturbing elements in the medieval world; Prostitutes, criminals, heretics, fools and the Devil himself all were branded with the stripe.


This stigma began to fade only with the rise of modernity. As the industrial revolution powered forward, taking with it an ascending bourgeoisie, so the stationary concept of history gave way to Utopian ideas of progress. A locomotive of Comtean dialectics steamed over the feudal model and into the future; suddenly the linearity of the stripe was in vogue.






The barcode thus serves as a branding of the historical narrative of laissez faire capitalism. And as Melbourne, like other Western cities, follows the Parisian model of purging the city of all undesirable (i.e. non bourgeois) elements, the barcoded building brazenly reaffirms that the city was/is the key unit in this march of consumerist triumph. It is where capitalism was born, and now that the industrial dirty work that was once done here can be passed on to lesser nations, it is where the oligarchs of late capitalism come to play. An arena of 21st century opulence.

This is underscored by the fact that the barcode on the building is not small, manageable and accessible, like that of a chocolate bar or soft drink, a product graspable by the plebs. It is large, imposing and overbearing. The masses cannot afford the product it represents, and it lets them know it. The barcode says to those who do not live in luxury apartments, "the city is the domain of capitalist power, it does not belong to you, it is ours." It stamps its ideological dialectic on the the urban sphere.

Of course, if a barcode is scratched or marked, it is rendered useless, no longer able to transmit the value of the item it appears on... see below.

Culture and Thuggery in Melbourne: Postscript

Regarding Melbourne's graffiti, I have just stumbled across this line in William Gibson's Neuromancer:

"He knew this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime and crime not quite art."


There is a paradoxical attitude towards graffiti in Melbourne, with the embracing of it as a tourist attraction and simultaneous zero-tolerance enforcement of draconian anti-graffiti laws. Or perhaps it is not a paradox. Iain Sinclair (reputedly Gibson's favourite writer) notes in Lights Out For the Territory how he prefers the civil disobedience of a crudely inscribed tag on a tube seat to the more elaborate gallery-sanctioned 'graffiti art'. I am inclined to agree with him. Is deeming graffiti to be 'art' a means of empowering it, as implied, or a means of co-opting it into the bourgeois culture narrative, and of thus castrating its disruptive power?


Certainly Banksy is unlikely to create anything as 'confronting' as the youth who scrawled "YOU'RE A CUNT" on an empty Evening Standard headline board I once saw in Hackney. Brutal scribblings. And so the more Melbourne's glossy tourist brochures feature edgy snaps of stenciled laneways, the more wedding couples pose in front of urban etchings, the less power graffiti has as the language of the powerless and the more it becomes the language of officialdom; a codified norm requiring permits, printed on coffee mugs, hanging in exhibitions opened by politicians.


Support for a small-scale quasi-official graffiti scene does not contradict anti-graffiti heavy-handedness, but rather is the perfect compliment to it. "Why can't they just do it on a community wall or something?" cry liberal bourgeois anti-graffitist when accused of being reactionary. By not rejecting the whole form, but rather adopting a tolerably minor portion as legitimate, conservative forces (often self-identifying as liberal) are able to identify all other graffiti that does not conform to such constricting definitions as illegitimate and worthy of harsh suppression. In this way they are able to remain back-slappingly open-minded ('but we do like graffiti when it's art' i.e. when it conforms to our comfortable restrictions) whilst eliminating all illegitimate, non-bourgeois friendly markings. The aim is to strip graffiti of the status Gibson describes, a disturbing, ill-defined anomaly in traditional notions of what is crime and what is art, and rigidly dissect it into the moral (art) and the immoral (crime). There is but one response:


"YOU'RE A CUNT"

1/07/2008

Australia on Collins: In Praise of Direct Action

One of the more curious cultural differences to strike me on arrival in Australia was the 'two-flush' toilet system. I had never experienced severe water shortages before and was surprised and amused at the division of the flusher into small and large flush options. Initially it seemed to make sense, but there was something rather out of joint about the whole thing. The unspoken categorisations of the system (small flush for urine, large for faeces) leave a set of taxonomical conundrums (what to do with vomit, and other forms of organic detritus?) and autocratically dictate a forced toilet etiquette that may often not be logical. Small amounts of faecal matter, requiring only the small flush, will be given the large regardless, because to abandon the division of fluids would be obscene.




A solution might include an appeal not to flush the large option unless absolutely necessary (as is attempted in the sign above) but in order to be truly effective, and to override the auto-categorisation of the flusher, it would require a discussion of, or at the least a clear allusion to, shit, and so it is unlikely in a conservative country of Anglo-Saxon anal dismissive character.


Another solution is the reintroduction of a monistic flusher, only with half the amount of water. Anything requiring more flushing could be given a second dose, and anything hanging around longer than that would necessitate brush intervention whatever the system. Not only this, but it would help to roll back a fairly puritanical piece of bodily repression and a further atomisation in an already obsessively sub-divided social structure. This is the preferable option but it could prove difficult to execute, after all once a taxonomic structure has been introduced it is often hard to dismantle it.


Joyous news then, that the Second Option (note capitals) that has been directly imposed on the toilets in the Australia on Collins mall on Collins street, which can be viewed below.




It is an excellent nugget of socio-ecological liberation. I call for the universalisation of the Second Option and more direct toilet action!

1/03/2008

Flinders Street Station: The Death of Cerberus

I have been on something of a flaneuring hiatus over the holiday due to parental visitations and spending time in Sydney (boo! Judas! etc etc), more of which in due course. But I am back now, and one of the first things to strike me on my return to Melbourne was the removal of the previously mentioned Cerberian dog heads at Flinders Street station, due to vandalism. Perhaps their menace pushed someone over the edge?





An interesting addition in the same space is that of a collection of severed heads. It is not clear if the same perpetrator was responsible for the removal of the official art, and the installing of the unofficial, but it's certainly a triumph of romantic independence over patronage. Another interesting comparison between the two is that where the threat of the dogs was overt and menacing, the malignancy of the new installation is rather more oblique. A stencilled message simply reads: 'It's lucky for the world I'm willing to stop at one murder. Together we could rape the universe'



It is the second part of the statement that contains the threat. I assume that it's an eco-anarchistic "political" statement, but there's always the vague possibility that it's an invitation...