The Null Device

Pitchfork has a new interview with Jens Lekman, in which he talks about listening to the Sly Hats, plans to move to Melbourne (where he has more friends than in Gothenburg), the Arthur Russell covers EP he has put together, and incurring the wrath of the South Swedish Elvis Society:

There's one song with Frida [Hyvönen] that is a song that we wrote together in Finnish that I think is coming out sometime. I played it for a lot of people. It almost made it onto the album, actually. I think it would have actually fit pretty good on the album. But we just took the four phrases that we knew in Finnish-- she knew two phrases, I knew two phrases-- and we just wrote them down and realized, "Oh, this would actually make a really great song." And it starts off, like, I sing, "I love you," and she sings, "I'm sorry, I don't understand." And I repeat, "I love you," and she says, "I'm sorry, I don't understand." And then the chorus goes, "Wonderful, cutie-pie, wonderful." And that's the whole song, but it's a really beautiful song. Yeah, you will love it. I think you will really like it.

So I was thinking of just trying to settle down. I think I need a new home and a new place and to see how that place and home and how the people who live there will influence my music. I guess that will be Melbourne, if I don't find something else before that. It's going to be interesting.

No, I don't have a girlfriend. No, I don't. I haven't had a relationship in years, actually. But yeah, I'm still looking. It's kind of nice to be looking for a home at the same time. And I really think I need to find a home. I don't know if that includes a girlfriend or not, but first I need to find a home, definitely. Because I felt pretty homeless in the last couple of years, and I never felt at home here in Kortedala. So it's time to find someplace where I feel like it's home.

(via Bowlie) ¶ indiepop interview jens lekman melbourne pitchfork [no comments]

There is more support for an underground railway line in Melbourne, with public transport operators Metlink and Connex throwing their weight behind such a proposal. (Though, in the latter case, I wonder whether this isn't merely to serve as a distraction from the appalling state of the system as managed by them:)

The call comes after a drop in the number of cars travelling to the CBD. City of Melbourne figures show public transport is the preferred means of travel, accounting for 67 per cent of all journeys in 2006, compared with 36 per cent in 1999.

Professor Currie said he was amazed the Government was still examining new road tunnels to the city. "Public transport dominates access to the city and the biggest single problem we've got is that there's not enough capacity on our railways," he said.

Though I'm wondering if they didn't miss a trick by not having it go east from Melbourne University, under Fitzroy and Collingwood, interchanging with the Epping and Hurstbridge lines at Victoria Park, and emerging on the median of the Eastern Freeway, where it becomes the long-promised Doncaster line (immediately taking more cars off the road):

¶ melbourne public transport [2 comments]

It seems to be the season for blue-sky speculation about new railway lines in Melbourne again; The Age has published vague details of a leaked state government report listing possible new and reopened railway lines:

Under the blueprint, tracks might connect Chadstone shopping centre to the Dandenong and Glen Waverley lines and trains could run to Rowville and Monash University.

Options also include a north-south rail tunnel from Melbourne University to Windsor and the Melbourne Airport rail link.

There's more in it, though; the authors speculate on the possibility of reopening lines including the Outer Circle line (from Fairfield to Oakleigh via Kew, Camberwell and Malvern East; this could perhaps end up being the Chadstone rail link mentioned), a railway line going to Monash University in Clayton, and reopening the truncated ends of existing lines, such as Lilydale to Healesville and Frankston to Mornington.

Mind you, the report doesn't discuss funding, and appears to be nothing more than a catalogue of rights-of-way along which it would be possible, should a need arise, to lay tracks and run rail services. Whether we'll ever see trains running cheerfully through the ruins of the VicRoads headquarters in Kew, or, for that matter, to Doncaster or Monash University, is an entirely different question.

¶ australia melbourne public transport [1 comment]

The NSW president of the Australian Hotels Association has some choice words to say about the differences between Melbourne and Sydney:

"Melbourne is Melbourne. Sydney has a different outlook," said Mr Thorpe, a fierce critic of the City of Sydney's plans to make it easier for hole-in-the-wall bars to gain permission for extended trading. "We aren't barbarians, but we don't want to sit in a hole and drink chardonnay and read a book."

"People can sit down, talk about history, chew the fat and gaze into each others eyes and all this sort of baloney but it's pie in the sky stuff," he said. "That's not what Sydney wants."

Sydneysiders - fit, outdoorsy types who enjoy the fresh air - are more likely to want alfresco drinking, dining and dancing, he says.

"There's a lot more entertainment than sitting there chatting. I think our culture is a little different than Melbourne because they haven't got this magnificent harbour and the Opera House. No wonder they want to sit in a hole in the wall," he said.

(via mysterbey) ¶ australia culture melbourne philistines sydney [no comments]

There's a rather good article in The Age on up-and-coming Melbourne indie-pop artist Pikelet:

She's from Melbourne, she's 24, she sometimes works in a bar. Her name is Evelyn Morris and she calls herself Pikelet, and although she hits the drums for two experimental hardcore bands, her debut solo record is the stuff of charmingly arcane and cryptically beautiful pop.

She sings her own harmonies; she loops and layers her songs into stunningly melodic vignettes; she writes songs about eating bugs in her sleep.

"When I was little, my older brother would tell me stories that would scare me," she says, pauses, laughs a little. "He was like, 'Over a person's life they swallow thousands of spiders' and I was like, 'What!' just freaking out.

(via m+n) ¶ australian indiepop melbourne music pikelet [no comments]

The Age has an article about how, thanks to some two decades of thoughtful urban planning, Melbourne has advanced ahead of Sydney in terms of creative culture:

Melburnians had gained more public open space and access to waterfront lost for decades and, since 1991, thousands had been to encouraged to live in the "central activities district", creating demand for bars, restaurants and footpath cafes. Melbourne's laneways had been protected through height regulations and, between 1983 and 2004, active arcade frontage had increased from 300 metres to 3 kilometres, Adams said. And only bluestone paving is now allowed in the city.

The City of Melbourne had also invested in public art to improve the public domain, determined by an independent artists' panel.

The Sydney envy at hearing of Melbourne's leadership in city planning, architecture and art spilled into newsprint. Sydney University adjunct associate professor of architecture Elizabeth Farrelly lamented Sydney's developers had erased a plethora of laneways and back streets with skyscrapers, while much of Sydney's character had been "Botoxed away".

Farrelly declared that the biggest difference between the two cities is Sydney's "sheer cultural timidity - from fashion to cafes and from public art to architecture - compared with Melbourne's cultural courage".

Of course, affluenza is hitting Melbourne as well; property prices are skyrocketing, and the young creative people who filled up the inner cities are being displaced further and further out, making room for moneyed yuppies with a taste for boutique lifestyles. Perhaps one of these days we will find that Springvale or Sunshine has become Melbourne's Neukölln, sufficiently populated with thrifty creatives and bohemians to have a vibrant local culture but insufficiently "funkified" (in the words of estate agents) to have attracted the yuppies?

(via givemethegun) ¶ architecture arts culture gentrification melbourne sydney urban planning [no comments]

A blog calling itself Psychotic Leisure Music has posted MP3 copies of the ultra-rare Japanese CD release of the Dogs In Space soundtrack. The Japanese version is equivalent to the "PG-rated" vinyl release, in that the songs aren't overdubbed with snippets of film dialogue.

(via Rocknerd) ¶ dogs in space melbourne mp3s music post-punk [3 comments]

Mess+Noise has an article about eclectically experimental Melbourne art-pop group Aleks and the Ramps:

Aleks And The Ramps' first full-length, Pisces Vs. Aquarius, does have its share of eccentric moments. "No Se Si Es Amor" is a cover of Roxette's 1990 chart hit "It Must Have Been Love", sung in Spanish and backed by primitive electronic blips and beeps and Aleks' banjo. Other song titles include "Aminals" and "Diary Of A Lizard Man". But there are also threads of a much darker lyrical obsession woven throughout. Often, they appear as dialogues, either between two people or a conflicted memory, which travel along the entanglements of violence and sexual politics in neatly rhyming couplets.

In the story told by one track, "Brain", two cripples hobble aboard a bus and share a flashback to a car accident. The lyrics are written as two individual memories which spool together into a kind of disjointed conversation. "If you were in pain, I couldn't tell," laments Aleks in deadpan character. "I was dealing with a punctured lung." The voice which replies is so playful and effortlessly gorgeous that it's difficult not to become entranced by the contrast. "Your gasping reminded me of the first time we made love," sings Janita, member of The Ramps and Aleks's real-life lover.

According to the article, though, not all is well in the Melbourne live music scene, with commercial pressures pushing out the sort of experimental leftfield music in favour of a more commercially viable aggressive normality:

Since then, the band has recorded an album, performed a live-to-air on Melbourne radio station PBS and accrued a reasonable amount of interest. But when Aleks tried to book a venue for the launch of "They're Recording Everything We Say", the first single from Pisces Vs. Aquarius, he found it a difficult task. Many of the smaller inner-city venues he had frequented had closed -- including Good Morning Captain, where the first incarnation of the band had played its first and only gig -- and those that were left were either too small to fit five animated musicians, or wanted to play hard-ball on the door figures.

No doubt it is difficult for larger, well-maintained rooms like the East Brunswick to risk booking young or experimental bands in a headline slot, while venues in their shadow - bleeding door numbers - have become more fastidious about ensuring each night's profitability. The result can be a closed door for bands that are untested or outside the current status quo. Whether due to fatigue or necessity, the problem is reflected in the habits of venues' music directors.

Aleks: "A lot of bookers don't actually watch the bands. It's really weird that the type of people who are put in these positions are the type of people that don't bother watching music. I think they just sit in their office in this weird little bubble browsing MySpace, judging who are the best and biggest bands based on how many friends they've got."

¶ aggressive normality aleks and the ramps commercialism culture indie melbourne m+n music [no comments]

Mess+Noise has a short piece on local band Ninetynine, which mentions their future plans and their surprising popularity in Finland:

Having been back in Melbourne for three months now, waiting for the album to be reissued, Ninetynine have been rehearsing, writing new material (some of which will be heard on their upcoming dates) and commissioning a series of low-budget videos for album tracks with the simple proviso that the band don't have to appear in them.

(via m+n) ¶ finland melbourne m+n music ninetynine [1 comment]

I just watched Sticky Carpet, a recent (2006) documentary on the Melbourne music scene. It was quite interesting, interviewing musicians and scene figures about various aspects of it, such as the interplay between the mainstream and the alternative (most of them were very anti-mainstream), art and commercialism (the consensus was that when money becomes a consideration, the range of allowable creative decisions narrows severely), Melbourne's profusion of band venues and community radio stations, and even the theory that Melbourne's preeminence in the Australian music scene has to do with the cold winter days encouraging musicians to go indoors and rehearse.

Sticky Carpet's main flaw was its fairly heavy rockist bias, though, which it didn't seem to question. The majority of the music presented in it was either primal 3-chord blues-rock or heavier versions of such (metal, hardcore, punk). The concession to non-rock music consisted of extreme experimental music (a metalworker who makes his own instruments, a bloke playing a theremin and breaking sheets of glass over his head, atonal "sound art" with laser displays). In short, trading one form of machismo (that of primal rock) for another (that of strenuous experimentalism). This ignored a lot of other (usually less testosterone-charged) genres of music just as prevalent in Melbourne: virtually the entire spectrum of indie-pop was omitted (this was a world where the Lucksmiths, Chapter Music, Library Records and such never existed, it seems), or indeed the Country'n'Preston scene, or local hip-hop or electronica, and so on. (This was, in a sense, the opposite of a documentary on the Melbourne indie scene aired the Swedish TV programme Musikbyrån last year, which focussed on Architecture In Helsinki, New Buffalo, The Avalanches and Cut Copy, and didn't show anyone wielding a guitar; if one were to view both side by side, there would be little evidence of them referring to the same city.)

I was surprised to find that the frontman of Eddy Current Suppression Ring wasn't wearing a blue singlet or sporting a rat's tail mullet. I sort of placed them as part of a Bodgie revival.

Another interesting thing that was said in the documentary: Tony Biggs (who presents the talk-radio segment on 3RRR) made the claim that the fact that 99% of commercial music consists of love songs might contribute to depression and mental illness, as such songs instill unreasonably optimistic expectations in listeners.

¶ art culture dvd film indie melbourne music rockism [6 comments]

Sticky Carpet, a recent documentary on Melbourne's independent music scene, is coming out on DVD on 8 March 2007, and will feature over an hour of bonus material, including live footage and film clips:

This raw and vital film collects interviews from musicians currently leading the charge in Melbourne's underground. Not restricted to any one genre the film brings together everyone from sound explorers Robin Fox and Rod Cooper to and Melbourne scene stalwarts like Ross Knight (Cosmic Psychos), Bruce Milne (founder of Au-Go-Go Records, In-Fidelity Records) and Roland S. Howard (Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party).

Bands included on the documentary: The Stabs, HTRK, My Disco, Colditz Glider, The Birthday Party, Baseball, Group Seizure, True Radical Miracle, Cockfight Shootout, Nation Blue, The Sinking Citizenship, Agents of Abhorrence, Civil Dissent, ABC Weapons, Pisschrist, The Dacios, The Sailors, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Depression, Trash 'n' Chaos, Batrider, Ninetynine, The Stabs, The Assassination Collective, Digger and the Pussycats, The Losers, Bored!

(via M+N) ¶ culture documentary dvd indie melbourne music [1 comment]

The river has a right side and a wrong side... Apparently Apple's flagship store in Melbourne is going to be in South Yarra, in the Paris (Hilton) end of Melbourne. More precisely, the glass cube will be part of a shopping complex on the former Fun Factory site at the corner of Chapel Street and Toorak Road, where the Beautiful People play.

I wonder whether Apple will attempt to fit in with local community values by selling MacBooks encrusted with Swarovski crystals.

(via M+N) ¶ apple bling melbourne [no comments]

Some commuters in Melbourne, frustrated with Connex' mismanagement of the railway network and the resulting decline in service quality and reliability, have called a one-day fare strike on the first of March. Commuters are being urged not to buy or validate tickets on this day.

¶ activism melbourne public transport [2 comments]

Secret plans by the Victorian government to build a 15-kilometre underground railway line under Melbourne. The line would link North Melbourne and Caulfield, and take two of the sets of lines that currently go through the loop. It looks like the loop would be left servicing the Burnley and Clifton Hill lines, and possibly the Sandringham line, and Richmond and South Yarra stations would become a lot less busy, losing a few now redundant platforms.

Internal emails show the option favoured by the Department of Infrastructure was for a 15-kilometre underground rail line linking North Melbourne and Caulfield stations, which would include new subway stations at Royal Parade (intersection of Royal Parade and Flemington Road, servicing the University Of Melbourne), Melbourne Central (upgrade of existing station), Flinders Street (underground extension to the train station), and Domain (intersection of Domain and St Kilda roads).

If this scheme goes ahead, though, it looks quite plausible to extend it to the Doncaster line. Given that it goes from North Melbourne station to the corner of Royal Parade and Flemington Road and then down Swanston Street, it would execute a pretty tight S-shaped turn under North Melbourne, and be heading east at Royal Parade. Thence, it would be fairly simple to have a branch line going straight east, under Carlton (possibly with a station on Lygon Street), Fitzroy (with a possible station near Brunswick or Smith Street) and Collingwood, before emerging right in the middle of the freeway. Whether any government would stump up the money (especially when car-dependent swinging electorates want more freeways and cheaper petrol) is another question.

Meanwhile, British transport consultant Sir Rod Eddington, who has been contracted to do a study on Melbourne's transport needs, has said that Melbourne's transport system is still "a work in progress". Then again, couldn't the same thing be said about London's (at least by Ken Livingstone)?

¶ melbourne public transport train underground [4 comments]

During my visit to Melbourne, I videotaped a few gigs. Now (time and computer facilities permitting), I'm going through the tapes and will be putting a few choice fragments on YouTube (with permission of the performers, of course).

The first fragment: Light Music Club, "Music for the Tiny Hours", live at Spoon, Brunswick:

Apologies for the shaky camerawork/less than ideal video quality.

¶ indiepop melbourne video youtube [no comments]

I am writing this entry in Melbourne, having returned for a visit, my first in one and a half years.

A few days ago, I caught a flight from London. This time, I eschewed the usual Qantas/British Airways and flew with Emirates, going via Dubai and (briefly) Singapore. I'll probably fly with them again; the experience was, for the most part, very good. The food and service were of quite high standards, but most impressive was the ICE entertainment system on the London-Dubai leg of the flight. It had over 500 channels, including on-demand movies (all of them pausable/rewindable; something which makes a big difference when the staff come around to serve drinks), a pretty large library of music, and a selection of video games, some of which are playable against other passengers. (The trivia game is particularly suited to this, even if the questions are a bit US-centric.) The selection of music is worthy of note; the channels included the usual pop, alternative, classical, jazz and chill-out, along with an extensive selection of world music (J-Pop and K-Pop, European chart hits, classical and contemporary Arabic music and Bollywood-style music), a selection of "classic albums", and a repository of every UK number one hit since the 1950s. As well as this, there were two video channels displaying the view from two external cameras at the front of the plane, one looking forward and the other looking down. This was quite interesting (especially when landing), even though the cameras didn't perform very well after dark.

The entire system seemed to be implemented on the same operating system as the entertainment systems used on Qantas and BA flights; for example, the real-time flight map seemed to be identical, except for the languages being English and Arabic, and Emirates having the somewhat annoying habit of interspersing promotional slides between map slides. This system appears to consist, from what I can determine, of a central computer connected to one or another type of video source (a rack of old-fashioned videotape players on older aircraft or a hard-disk-based system on newer ones) and a few hundred terminals consisting of NTSC monitors and controls. Unfortunately, the ICE entertainment system has not been rolled out across all aircraft, and so 2/3 of the trip (i.e., everything from Dubai onward) only had the old system, consisting of several non-interactive video and audio channels.

I managed to see a few films on the flight: I caught Thank You For Smoking (a cynical US indie film about a tobacco lobbyist; somewhat similar in tone to Wag The Dog), and The Illusionist (a thriller about an illusionist involved with the rather nasty Austro-Hungarian Crown Prince's fiancee; it was a nice mood piece, though the details of his art were treated as an opaque plot device and not elaborated upon). Towards the end of the journey, I also saw and episide of Derren Brown's show and most of Disney/Pixar animation Finding Nemo, confirming that Andrew Bolt was on crack when he wrote about it being leftist propaganda.

The only downside to the flight was the fact that, from Dubai onward, I was seated next to a large woman who was in the habit of surreptitiously lifting the armrests and spilling over into her neighbours' seats. Such, I suppose, are the travails of not being fabulously wealthy and able to afford to fly business class.

As for Melbourne, it seems to be still here, largely unchanged. For one, I am relieved to see that the Giuliani-style sanitisation of the CBD seems to be largely a myth, at least judging by the abundance of stencil art in various laneways. Either that or they dropped the policy after the Commonwealth Games were out of the way.

¶ melbourne personal travel [9 comments]

Last Friday was the 30th anniversary of Melbourne community radio station RRR's first broadcast. In those 30 years, it has escaped death several times, locked horns with critics and censors, and (along with other community station PBS) nurtured Melbourne's unique music scene. (If you're wondering what Melbourne would have been like without community radio, look at Sydney in the decade or so after 2JJ was ripped out of its community and made into a deracinated national "yoof" broadcaster, cutting off the city's live music scene from its fan base.) The Age has an article about the history of RRR:

The station's evolution into an example beloved of politicians boasting about Melbourne as Australia's cultural capital is ironic, given that for many years it had to fight for survival in an environment unsympathetic to its more outre tendencies.

In an attempt to reduce "accidental" broadcast of unsound material, white nail polish was used to paint over questionable tracks in the station record library, but use of the word "f--k" proved difficult to eradicate when popular culture had embraced it.

Some details are lost to history - such as whether the station went off air for a few hours each afternoon in its early days to let the ancient transmitter cool down or to let the RMIT electrical engineering students have a go. One thing that won't be forgotten is the massive public support that enabled Triple R to narrowly escape one of several death sentences when in 1981 the board voted to close it down, before agreeing to give staff and volunteers five weeks to raise $50,000.

There is now a book on the history of RRR, titled Radio City, by Mark Phillips. It is available from the station.

¶ culture melbourne rrr [no comments]

I heard this morning on 3RRR (to which I listen via web streaming) that the Westgarth Cinema, the lush art-deco cinema in Northcote, has now passed into the hands of the Palace cinema group (who also run a similarly opulent arthouse cinema in St Kilda), who have refurbished and reopened it.

This sounds like good news. I remember when the Westgarth was the Valhalla (or "the Val" in the local parlance). It played a lot of quirky arthouse and cult movies, and the stairwell was adorned by a model Viking longboat. Then the landlords who owned the site decided that they wanted a piece of the action, forced the tenants out and took over, replacing most of the quirky content with insipid American family movies and disnannies (where, presumably, the money was; after all, freaks and geeks will only bring in so much). They kept a few things (the occasional scifi/horror marathon and the Blues Brothers events), though this was more of an exception than a rule.

Anyway, it's good to hear that it's now run by someone with a good reputation for putting on interesting films. Let's hope that it lives up to its promise.

¶ melbourne [no comments]

The house in Richmond in which cult Australian post-punk film Dogs In Space was filmed is up for auction this weekend. I wonder how much it will fetch, and whether its fame will put the final price up.

(via reddragdiva) ¶ dogs in space history melbourne [2 comments]

The Age has a profile of Boing Boing and Cory Doctorow, who, incidentally, is speaking in Melbourne on Tuesday:

It was Boing Boing that first noticed that "black people loot, white people find" groceries in the now-infamous captions of news photographs taken after hurricane Katrina.

"The greatest threat to an artist is obscurity, not piracy," says Doctorow, who has released three other novels on the internet. "All the people out there who didn't buy my books mainly did so because they hadn't heard of me, not because they could get it for free.

¶ copyfight cory doctorow interview melbourne [2 comments]

Apparently they're upgrading the Melbourne-Sydney XPT passenger rail service. I hadn't heard much about it for a while; I heard a rumour that it was to be scrapped because everybody was choosing, instead, to fly for half the price and 1/5 or so of the time. The last time I caught it (in December 2003), I recall that there were quite a few empty seats, and most of the patrons were elderly people, rural commuters and one rather drunk bikie.

The Victorian and NSW governments are investing A$35M into the XPT, which apparently buys a new lick of paint, new furnishing for all carriages, and better refreshment and toilet facilities. (And, given that there's nothing in the news report about it shaving a minute off the 11 or so hours that a one-way journey takes, that's probably a good thing.) I suspect that the upgrade won't include power points in seats/tables (as, say, Virgin Trains in the UK have), as pensioners and bikies in rural Australia generally don't carry laptops.

Anyway, it's good to hear that the XPT is not only still kicking around but actively being invested in. When the oil crunch comes and the cheap flights dry up, it'll undoubtedly come in handy.

¶ australia melbourne railway sydney travel xpt [no comments]

In response to the Melbourne City Council's vandalism policy (interpret that how you will), a coalition of troublemakers has convened the Melbourne Graffiti Games:

In response to this, and the Victorian Governments decision to waste $1 million dollars of tax-payers money in setting up an anti-graffiti taskforce, GGOC have announced the commencement of the 2006 Graffiti Games. During the Graffiti Games, which begin next week and end in April 2006, the entire Central Business District has been declared a maximum tolerance zone open to street art of all forms.Unlike the elitist Commonwealth Games the Graffiti Games will be open to anyone with a spray-can and a good or bad idea. The entire population of Victoria, as well as interstate and international visitors, are encouraged to compete. Although all who take part, and the public at large, will be winners in this tournament the Graffiti Games Organising Committee will also be awarding Gold, Silver and Bronze medals to the most popular entrants in various categories.

These will include -

1. Most Elaborate Stencil Piece
2. Funniest Slogan
3. Largest Graffiti Piece
4. Most Daring Placement
5. Best Caricature of the Mayor or other City Of Melbourne Councillor
6. Most Seditious Piece

(via "mike p") ¶ graffiti melbourne street art [no comments]

In today's Grauniad, Banksy writes about the war on street art in Melbourne:

"The Melbourne scene is incredibly diverse," says Alison Young, head of the department of criminology at Melbourne University. "The range of artists includes people in their 40s, in their teens and a relatively large number of women." Young was commissioned by the city council to draw up a draft graffiti strategy last March in which she recommended tolerance zones be set up where street art and graffiti be allowed a small space within the city, where writers and artists would be at a lower risk of being arrested. "This was rejected by the city council, despite it generating lots of public support and despite evidence being presented that zero tolerance, for lots of reasons, wouldn't work."

Instead, the council doubled its anti-graffiti budget. "The clean-up is an imposition of a supposedly mainstream, or dominant, cultural view," says Young, "in denial of the diversity of cultural styles that actually exist within a city space."

The street art destroyed in Melbourne will survive on graffiti's new best friend - the internet. The web has done wonders for graffiti; it perfectly reflects its transient nature, and graffiti is ludicrously overrepresented on its pages. The ability to photograph a street piece that may last for only a few days and bounce it round the world to an audience of millions has dramatically improved its currency. On the other hand, the internet is turning graffiti into an increasingly virtual pastime. It is now possible to achieve notoriety by painting elaborate pieces in secluded locations, without the associated risk of arrest that is usually attached. By posting photographs online you can become a significant graffiti writer from a town where none of your work is actually visible.

And as Melbourne has been Giulianified into inoffensive blandness and approved commercial messages, due largely to the Commonwealth Marketing Exercise, er, Games, London (with a far bigger commercial extravaganza coming to its artist-infested East End in 2012) is likely to be next:

The precedent set by Melbourne does not bode well for London in the build-up to the 2012 Olympics. The games will be set in east London, where Hackney is one of the few remaining parts of the city where affordable studio space for artists still exists. After the warehouses have been flattened by compulsory purchase orders, the pots of grey paint will be opened and an area rich in street culture and frontier spirit will disappear. Factory doors whose flaked layers of Hammerite reveal history like the rings in a tree stump will be thrown on the fire. Disused cranes perched on top of foundries like skeletal crows will be torn down. Everything will be replaced by a cardboard-partitioned village perched on a pile of cheap laminate flooring. And if you think the graffiti will be removed so it can be replaced by vistas of clean urban space, think again. Every meaningful spot will be clogged with giant billboards by the likes of McDonald's encouraging you to get fit by staying at home and watching the games on TV.

¶ banksy melbourne street art [1 comment]

The makers of the "Tube" map viewer for Palm handhelds* have released an updated map of Melbourne, partly in time for that big sporting event they've got there:

Melbourne, home to the 2006 Commonwealth Games, is a city of world-class events, including: a non-stop program of film and food festivals, renowned dining, major art exhibitions and musical extravaganzas.

Those wanting street maps of Melbourne on their handheld can make do with a JPEG viewer and scans of the 1966 Melway, which should be mostly accurate for the inner suburbs, give or take a few drive-in theatres and the odd freeway.

* that's "the map viewer named Tube", not "the program for viewing London Underground maps"

¶ maps melbourne melway public transport [no comments]

Melbourne/Brisbane twee-krautpop outfit Minimum Chips have released a video to their song Goodbye, from their most recent album, Kitchen Tea Thankyou. Filmed in oversaturated Super 8, it involves the band members packing into an old turquoise Toyota and going for a picnic in the park, and goes quite well with their music. There's a streaming Flash version on YouTube here, and Spiked Candy has put up a downloadable version here.

Apparently Minimum Chips are going on indefinite hiatus, as frontwoman Nicole is having a baby; which could mean no more Minimum Chips, or just a longer than usual wait for the next EP. However, they're not leaving fans empty-handed; they have posted (128kbps) MP3s of their entire back-catalogue, including their recent album Kitchen Tea Thankyou, on their discography page.

(via spikedcandy, andy_yayus) ¶ indie melbourne minimum chips video [1 comment]

The Victorian state government is set to announce plans to expand Melbourne's struggling public transport service, including extending the Epping line to Ongar South Morang and extending suburban bus services to run in the evenings and on Sundays. A more cynical soul than Your Humble Narrator would speculate that there's an election coming up, and that, after having served their electoral purpose, much of the plans are going to disappear to the same graveyard of abandoned public transport policies as the Doncaster railway line, the Monash University/Rowville rail link, and real crackpot pie-in-the-sky ideas such as the underground line linking St Kilda to Brunswick St. or wherever that was.

What's that? There is an election coming up? You don't say...

If, by some miracle, it does actually happen. it'll be a decent start, though no substitute for sustained investment in public transport. Bringing Melbourne's system (outside of the very centre) up to scratch would require Ken Livingstone-esque levels of spending.

¶ melbourne politics public transport urban planning [2 comments]

The Melbourne City Council is planning to discourage the use of cars in the CBD. It's not quite a London-style congestion charge, but will involve lowering speed limits, reclaiming street space for pedestrians and cyclists, giving cheaper public transport fares to residents who give up parking permits and, umm, resisting moves to ease the flow of traffic into the city centre. It also will only cover the 2 square kilometres that comprise the central business district, and depends on the state government increasing public transport funding, which it has shown no signs of doing.

So, if this plan goes ahead, two things could happen:

1. People abandon driving into the city centre in favour of public transport; as pressure on the city's trams and City Loop increase, the government increases funding and expands the system to cope
2. People abandon driving into the city centre. Overcrowded trams and trains struggle to cope. Public transport operators rip out seats, creating a standing-only transport system to accommodate the crowds. The government hems and haws over the question of increasing funding, eventually doing little or nothing. After mass public dissatisfaction, the city council reverses the plan, removes bike/bus lanes, restores parking spaces and the car resumes its place as Melbourne's rightful king, and motorists can once more sit down in their oversized Toorak tractors as they nip down to David Jones.

¶ melbourne public transport urban planning [2 comments]

A burglar was caught in the suburbs of Melbourne after it turned out that the house he had just fled from belonged to a well-known cartoonist. Bill "Weg" Green had seen the burglar and was able to draw an accurate, if perhaps unflattering, caricature of him which proved to the police that they had the right man:

"After we had a look at this gentleman in the back of the divvy van, we just couldn't believe how much of a likeness it was to the picture that Weg had drawn," Senior Constable Roche said. "If anyone ever says 'can I draw the offender', I'll be handing them a pencil pretty quickly."

Mr Green said he did not expect police to catch the thief so quickly but that his ability to remember faces in detail helped. "I have an affinity for faces and I can remember faces even hours after," he said.

¶ crime irony melbourne weg [no comments]

The Melbourne City Council has declared war on the city's status as a stencil-art capital with their new zero-tolerance graffiti plan. Under the plan, building owners will be legally obliged to either remove graffiti (which includes aerosol art or stencil art) or put in applications for each individual piece to remain. And so, the city becomes a little more like Singapore or Giuliani's New York.

(via flickrgroups:melbournegraffiti) ¶ graffiti melbourne street art [1 comment]

More wacky goings on on Melbourne's trains, as an unidentified woman broke into train public-address systems, and proceeded to describe her sexual fantasies about the drivers in explicit detail; this happened during peak hour, with hundreds of commuters hearing it, though no witnesses seem to have seen her. Police are at a loss to how she did it, though it is believed she actually got into a vacant train cabin. (I wonder whether this sort of thing is now covered under anti-terrorism legislation.)

(via bOING bOING) ¶ hacks melbourne pranks sex [no comments]