1): SCIENCE CLUB MID TO LATE NINETEEN EIGHTIES
Once upon a time in the mid to late 1980s there was this gathering of
mainly
men called the Science Club. We used to meet in a building near the
corner
of Bourke and Russel streets. We gathered every Wednesday night to
get
smashed and talk about science. There were explorers, mechanics, artists,
lecturers, musos, travellers, friends of friends. Heaps of people.
Sometimes
women, but mostly men. Science and technology were the main themes,
although
we ended up talking about pretty much anything we wanted to after a
while.
One was expected to bring something... some object of strange technology,
some photos, a magazine article, maybe some poetry, or a film, an invention,
an art object - a theory.
When I first met these guys in 1982 I was a film student and was told
before
I went that I'd be expected to show my film (a rather over ambitious
and
underfunded film about The Revolution in Melbourne), and explain it
right
there and then. Having done so I then intermingled with the vibrant
intellectual party and was treated that very night to an introduction
to
(for me totally unheard of) chaos theory, entropy, and fractals. Ah,
the
Signs club. Signs society. It had many names. I've heard it is still
going
somewhere. It seemed it back then a natural extension of the vibe of
the
streets outside. They call it the entertainment precinct today.
CITY MEMORY 2): INNER CITY CONTAINMENT ZONE PRESENT DAY
That sense of *something happening* is still around that part of the
city,
but has changed somewhat - the area has been somehow cordoned off.
The
fences are 24 hour fast food joints with bright yellow and red plastic
self
illuminated logos, cinemas and games arcades. The area seems to have
almost
been set aside as a kind of inner city teen homeless drug and impulse
desire
ghetto. A tolerated zone of increasingly isolated desperate homeless
kids
and teens, and of course, those who exploit them. Like all cities,
Melbourne
has its containment policies for those who don't fit in. The bigger
an
area's role as ghetto is, the harder it is to find somewhere to sit
down,
take a pee, or do anything not tied to quick commerce and fast purchase.
They actually set it up that way. They plan that stuff. People sit
down and
work all that stuff out.
CITY MEMORY 3): SKETCHES OF STREET VIBE LAST WEEK
The videogames stores and in particular the more run down ones,
the ones
with hand drawn signs in the window advertising "VIRTUA COP 2 one dollar!"
.
Just off the main drag, away from the shiny 'official' 'family
entertainment' type arcades, the funky arcades have rows and rows of
only
the most popular games most profitable, and in some, rather licentious
sex
themed games, where getting the right pieces of a digital jigsaw rewards
the
player with a full screen soft porn image. You won't find that in Timezone.
The area has made the news lately as a bit of a heroin scene, and for
as
long as I've known it, has been a bit 'suss'. You occasionally see
people
running into or out of alleys just that bit too quickly, people in
various
states of demise and stupor, the neon flashing signs reflected in dimming
eyes. That edge, that
nervous ache to the street is getting stronger all the time.
There's one old busker guy who sits on the corner or Russel and Bourke
and
plays this inverted plastic paint bucket and a broken cymbal. Unlike
a lot
of the other buskers he's quite good. I'm amazed at just how little
it takes
to conjure up music from nothing, except perhaps when there is nothing
else
left. Nothing at all.
CITY MEMORY 4): VIDEO ON WHILE YOU EAT THIS
AFTERNOON
Russel street in winter. Rain. Look up to see the sheets pour across
skyscraper towers with satellite dishes on top. Notebook in pocket,
belly
full of Peking style beef on rice and Chinese tea, and Victoria bitter.
Lights really bright. Loud, really loud videogame sounds from row after
row
of arcades.
Rows and rows of Chinese restaurants - each one displaying red ducks
hanging
in the window - giant pieces of pork. A guy furiously smashing the
duck and
pork to feed the never ending demand for the stuff on rice, with noodles,
with vegetables. My favourite of these is "Nam Loong" who have
offered for
twenty years at least inexpensive eats for local Malaysian RMIT students.
"Pho Dung" - Vietnamese soup joint opposite the eternal Stalactites.
A chain
of about six soup joints now all across town. "I'll have Number 15
(sliced
chicken) please" I say and plant myself down under bright flouros.
My
reflection in the mirror tiles. The logo of the place is a smiling
bull and
a proud chicken, each on either side of a bowl. Bottomless Chinese
tea out
of a really hi-tech aluminium thermos bottle. Always warm inside the
place.
Makes my John Lennon glasses steam up every time. Each soup comes with
a
huge plate of beanshoots, Vietnamese mint, lemon and chilli. David
Copperfield magic show video on the twin TVs mounted on either side
of the
restaurant. Or Michael Jackson compilation video. I'd forgotten just
how
bizarre Jackson's persona has been for the last fifteen years. Damn
the soup
is good.
CITY MEMORY 5): VIDEOGAMES, PAWN AND PORN TOMMOROW
Television cannot match the speed and colour of the games over the road
though, set as they are in the reflected puddles of rain amidst the
neon
sorrow of Little Bourke street. So many games have us flying
through cities
- really shiny bright cities. Usually with day glo gun in hand players
swoop
down on faceless bad guys, the fact that the pre game sequence outlines
their status as drug runners or corperate crims seems to make little
difference to the glee with which they are mowed down. In a thousand
arcades
in a thousand cities, this brand of digital justice is played out over
and
over again, two bucks a game and don't slam the door on your way out.
Porno supermarket, with sex toy impulse purchase items in the window.
Pink
plastic impulse purchase items in the window. Bored girl behind the
counter.
Those swinging doors like in western movies hiding
row upon row of plastic lined mags, videos, toys, condoms, lotions,
objects.
Security cameras. Sometimes the porno joints are nestled behind
newsagencies, which have the logo of the "R" in a diamond out the front.
Window displays of army disposal stores with objects aimed at stirring
the
passion that burns inside the heart of being a nobody: Maglite torches.
Replica pistols. Bayonets. Ammunition tins, Gas masks. Camouflage.
Webbing.
Almost pornographic in their fetishisation. arranged in thematic sections;
sharp, deadly knives, slingshots and crossbows, patches and badges,
police
stuff - all semi legal, semi authentic.
There's the second hand shops along Russel between Bourke and Lonsdale
which
never fail to entertain.
The unlikely combos of objects in the windows - obsolete computers,
super 8
cameras, scratched watches.
The windows are like installations - strange museums without meaning
to be.
These joints have been there as long as I can remember, and once upon
a
time, Russel street was known for its many music shops. I bought my
first
acoustic guitar in 1975 when I was 12 years old from a store which
stood
exactly where the second glass door on the right of the shiny and massive
Greater Union cinema now is. I remember that guitar... "Alvarez". A
cheap
classical. Fifty dollars. These music places were kind of daggy, and
sold
instruments which you associated with high school music lessons - recorders,
trombones. There were harmonicas in racks: A, B, D, E, F, G. Plectrums
in
trays with compartments for different sizes, different thicknesses.
There
were bazoukis, zithers, music stands, violins. Tuning forks, and jaw
harps.
Kazoos. Sheet music. Not one shop like that but at one time, maybe
four or five.
CITY MEMORY 6): ANCIENT HARD DRIVES AND TRAM PANTOGRAPH SPARKS
I like it now that the old women's hospital has been demolished because
it
allows a view of the amazing reading room dome at the State Library
- this
beautiful dark hemisphere that covers the equivalent of an 18th Century
hard
drive: so many books and shelves upon which books sit - the latter
arranged
like orange sections fanning out from a central hub. Seen from above,
the
state library is a kind of pie chart. Its one of the few non religious
places one can find quiet in the city. Go there and see the cities
thinkers
peruse and the reverberating coughs echo around you. A fucking sacred
place.
Sacred.
The trams flash the pantograph-on-wire sparks across the street and
the
brightness of these electric fireworks illuminates all around if but
for a
millisecond. One frame if this were a film (the animator talking).
Lumbering structures these trams I think as I watch an articulated
'lite
rail' creak up Burke Street toward Parliament house. They've renovated
that
place lately and the cleaner it gets, the dirtier it feels. But the
city has
its own vibe, and the people who use it know that. The city is all
those
crazy moments, all those unexpected sudden and slow events which coalesce
in
the mind and the imagination. In my memory it will always be this
'entertainment' section which means the most to me. Not just Melbourne,
but
every damn city.
I'll always feel at home with this, my reflection scattered across the
sad
fragments of the countless storefronts of memory. I'll might
play against
the computer in the arcades but I always play against myself in the
cheap
Chinese restaurants as I try to write. To write *along* these streets
and
these pavements. To write *around* these tiny kitchenettes where the
ducks
heads are smashed with the cleaver, next to piles of sacks of rice
and
shrines to the Buddha under a chair.
You see its just too late.... The last tram's long gone and its way
too far
to walk home. I'm stuck here for a long while yet. Its raining.
Pen to rain
stained paper, I'd better get back to it...