Categories: Wunderkammer

25 Jul 2010, Comments (12)

Tinytown

Author: Helen

It’s Sunday! Let’s NOT write about the election! What about something less depressing and more relaxing?

One of my favourite things to do is to visit my brother in Tinytown, where he bought a Country Seat a while back. Not a bush block, a house in a quiet part of the town (if you don’t count an occasional milk tanker roaring past in the night.) He sold his house in Footscray and visits his place in Tinytown every weekend to dig the garden – a variety of potatoes, garlic, and every other kind of veg – chop wood, explore the surroundings on a little Postie bike, and drink red wine by the wood stove with his GF and any visitors and dogs who might be there.

Brother’s veg garden is not like my veg garden. Bro’s garden is some serious shit.

My brother's vegie garden in Tinytown, featuring a honking great trench. For potatoes? Or murdered neighbours?

My brother's vegie garden in Tinytown, featuring a honking great trench. For potatoes? Or murdered neighbours?

Victorians will easily be able to work out Tinytown’s real identity, but I’m keen not to raise the profile on Google in case it becomes the next Fitzroy. There have been upmarket cafe sightings.

One of the many things I love about Tinytown is the murals. They’re everywhere – on the supermarket, the servo, the side of every shop. When the people there get up in the morning and there’s not much to do, they paint a mural.
(more…)

10 Jul 2010, Comments (0)

Earworm of the Week: Everlasting

Author: Helen

Everlasting is the second solo CD from Rebecca Barnard, formerly of Rebecca’s Empire and Yarraville local treasure.

My first impression: quiet and restrained, occupying a very adult space between pop and cool jazz. The dove-grey cover art maybe sets up that expectation. Yes, it’ll seem soft and unassuming at first listen, but it’s a mighty album.


Everlasting is like a gemstone which might look soft and grey on the ground, but on closer inspection it’s covered all over with tiny multicoloured facets, and once you see one you discover more and more of these facets and refracted colours, all different.

Barnard, who is a foodie and radio/TV cooking personality in her other life, has another description for it.

“It’s a bit like one of those Chinese stocks that’s been simmering away for years and years,” she says of her new-found musical potency.
“The longer you let it go, the stronger it gets until it’s got all these elements that you’ve been striving for.”

I’ve been tasting this stock for a week and I keep finding more unexpected flavours. The pop sensibility of Rebecca’s Empire is still there in more uptempo songs like Give Way and Fall and Walk. The signature buzzy lead guitar still pops out on occasion (she plays all guitars on this disc) joined by clarinet, cello and other textures.

Everlasting was recorded in a few weeks in New York. Barnard deliberately took herself out of her everyday world to travel to a distant place, but to record with Barney McAll, who she had known since childhood. Other musicians are Dan Reiser (drums), Jonaton Maron (bass), Rufus Cappadocia (cello), Matt Darriau (Clarinet).

Take some time, got to move from there
All that’s left is what you bear
(Give Way)

This isn’t a CD for rushing around with a child clinging to your leg, or on the car stereo in noisy traffic. It’s a melodic meditation, with Rebecca’s sweet and husky voice telling you stories in between bursts of her signature sweet harmonies. The ingredients in the stock are the shifts and shocks of adult life, and the flavours are subtle sweet-sour-salty tastes and spices blended by a masterchef. I first listened to the title track, Everlasting, in the kitchen with distractions all around me, and it sounded unexciting, almost filler. Then I listened to it properly and now it makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Barnard invites the listener into something deeply precious and personal, hugely generous, a gift.

Everlasting is available here or here.

26 Aug 2009, Comments (7)

Hey, Chris, about that Miocene cat…

Author: Helen

I felt it was missing something.

Miocene fossil of cat footprint with LOLcat caption O HAI\

There, fixed.

14 Aug 2009, Comments (6)

Lovelace and Babbage

Author: Helen



A big hat tip, or a doff rather, with a big Victorian-era hat – something tall and full of mercury— to Nabs, who has sent me a link to the most wonderful thing on the entire Internets.

No, not the guy who can catch a laptop in his buttocks, although that is definitely up there. I mean the Lovelace and Babbage graphic novel / blog.

Lovelace and Babbage is a steampunk cartoon blog started by the wonderful Sydney Padua, who describes herself as “an animator, story artist, and tiresome bore [yeah, right] working mostly in visual effects in London.” She’s a friend of Suw Charman, the originator of Ada Lovelace Day, which led to “Wouldn’t it be hee-larious if there was a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime? Thanks, I’ll be here all week!”

Start here, with Lovelace: The Origin.

Follow the links at the top bloggy-style, and enjoy.

Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua

15 Jul 2009, Comments (2)

Death of a Piano

Author: Helen

Via a comment by Nabs at Still Life with Cat.

Hauschka – Morgenrot from Jeff Desom on Vimeo.

Morgenrot is an animation made from old photos of New York from the Library of Congress. That haunting music is from Hauschka (Volker Bertlemann), a modern composer from Dusseldorf.

More about it here.

13 May 2009, Comments (24)

At Home on the Cast Iron Balcony

Author: Helen

Spine of an old hardback copy of Ogden Nash\'s \"Good Intentions\" He who must not be named came home from school complaining that poetry was stupid.

He mentioned that he’d had a poem set in class by someone called “Ogden Nash” and that was the quintessence of stupid.

Reader, I did what anyone would have done in my place (i.e. obsessive Ogden Nash reader when young.) I ran to the bookcase and searched until I’d found the aged brown copy of Good Intentions, rescued from the last big cull of family books, bought by my mum, who died in the Summer of Love, 1968. I wanted to show HWMNBN that Ogden Nash wrote wacky and offbeat poetry which ought to be right up his alley.

My parents were of a generation that wrote their names and dates of purchase on book flyleaves, so I looked inside the dessicated brown cover and I found this. See over the fold: My mum must have bought this from a second hand bookshop.
(more…)

5 Dec 2008, Comments (22)

Friday Chocolate drops

Author: Helen

This was the most terrible, horrible, really bad day. (Warning: Swear alert.)

I jumped off the train in the city and rode up the escalator… with… my shoulders strangely light. Uh oh. My backpack with my wallet in it, with my car keys in it, my cheque book in it, my life in it.

That morning I get a call at work from girlchild who’s been rung by someone called Emily with a mobile number. Apparently she has my backpack. But I call and call all day and every time it goes to voice mail. Why? Why would she do that? Anyway, my workmates gave me lunch and hugs and a travelcard. I love them.

And as usual, Connex excelled themselves in not giving a fuck. Note to the Attorney-General if you’re reading this, as I know you do of a Friday evening: If any disaffected youngsters are thinking of going the abandoned backpack-bomb route, I can tell you Connex don’t give a royal shit about ownerless backpacks reaching Flinders street. Just saying.

I still don’t know what’s going to happen. All I want is to crawl under the doona and cry, but girlchild’s friends are all coming to have a birthday sleepover and I have to make with the fucking Mrs-coping-Mum.

I definitely am going to need some chocolate tonight (and girlchild has a Brunetti’s cheesecake.)


3 Dec 2008, Comments (1)

Collapse

Author: Helen

Image from http://redcabbagecollective.blogspot.com/

I only heard the term “site-specific” for the first time last week, and I saw it again today, like a make of car you’ve just come to notice.

I love decaying, secret urban and industrial sites. Love. them. When Barista put up a post on the Japanese ghost island Gunkanjima, I was happily googling it for days on end. Same with the motorcycle rider of Chernobyl and the wonderful secret tunnels under the city of London. I’m too chicken to go where the Cave Clan used to go in Melbourne, but if they ever decided to do guided tours, well.

We saw Collapse last weekend – a site-specific installation/play, which uses the heavily patina’d wharf area between the boat clubs and the shipbuilding factories at Williamstown.

In November 2008, Melbourne based company Red Cabbage will be installing a large-scale site-specific performance which will transform a secret historical location in Williamstown.
The Melbourne premiere of Collapse is a tale of human survival within a society in crisis. Audiences will embark on a journey by boat to discover a post-apocalyptic community seeking grace in the midst of adversity.

We had to assemble at Spotswood Scienceworks jetty (Scienceworks is another collection of cool old industrial archaeology, and that whole precinct is a great hangout for the industrial landscape lover, although it’s not what it used to be.) A boat took us to the wharf where the Red Cabbage collective used the old buildings (the same ones used for the Tall Ships project, I think) where I got to enjoy some vintage decay plus interesting weirdness. We weren’t really expecting a plot and suspected it might be quite installation-y, so we weren’t disappointed.

They also take you into the old morgue, which is a bluestone building smaller than the average school portable, with hefty shelves all around the perimeter. Not many ghostly vibrations there, though, with so many people crowding in.

We finished up at the Pirate’s Tavern, which is the hidden hideout of the game fishing club. It’s got a great scruffy personality. They hire the place out for parties– it’s worth a look, the fact that it’s all so hidden is the best part of the fun.

28 Nov 2008, Comments (4)

And the golden Emma…

Author: Helen

…for foiling diabolical masterminds, of course, goes to Tigtog.



It’s a bit embarassing because I always fix these things myself, but I simply could_not_find where the diabolical masterminds spotty socially-challenged wankers had placed the links that were causing the Balcony to look like a very low-class establishment when searched for in Google. Many thanks to Tigtog.

3 Aug 2008, Comments (7)

Go, Granny, go!

Author: Helen

When I am old I shall wear purple play God Save the Queen (the Sex Pistols version) at the Sydney Biennale.



H/T to Malcolm. (No, not that Malcolm.)

  • Twitter- CastIronBalcony