It’s 3:28pm on Monday afternoon, and I’m
waiting for Francis out the front of my building. With me are my laptop, my
camera, and a copy of Grayson Perry’s Playing
to the Gallery.
Other tenants of the building keep walking
by and giving me odd looks; it’s cold, and I’m sitting on top of the structure
that houses the bins for buildings inside. Also, none of these people know who
I am, other than maybe a manifestation of the one of the people they’ve heard
in apartment three.
I am completely aware of how insane all looks,
but I don’t care. Between 3:20 and 4:20pm, Francis is going to bring me the clothes airer I’ve been waiting for since last Thursday. I never put so much
mental energy into a clothes airer before now; come 4:20pm I never want to
think about it ever again.
These are our boxes. There are many like them, but these ones are ours.
Today, I felt the cold indifference of waiting for an Amazon delivery to arrive. To begin with there were these two boxes, which strangely arrived at exactly the same time. Then there was silence; just the boxes and I.
So I decided to do the logical thing available to me at the time, and take many photos of said boxes utilising different lighting options and focal points.
As you leave Finsbury Park station to head to our apartment, you pass a store dedicated to selling merchandise for Arsenal Football Club. I found this novel when I first saw it, joking that this resolves the eternal expat dilemma of working out which club I'm supposed to support. The penny didn't quite drop though that this would also mean that I would be living at Arsenal Ground Zero, and that I can hear the reactions to bad umpire calls from our living room.
Since a trip to Europe last Christmas, I've banging on to any one who'll listen about the cortado. A simple enough concept - an espresso shot with the same amount of warm milk - but somehow this just isn't a thing in Australia. That said, given that the rest of the world has only recently discovered that the flat white exists, I'll just chalk this one up to regional differences.
While running errands across town, I was reunited with the cortado courtesy of a small coffee shop embedded directly into the entrance of Gold Hawk Road Station. It was a joyous experience, even if I've chosen to memorialise this with a rather bad photograph.
Despite all the changes going on at present, mostly I've just been getting on with things since arriving in London. I buy groceries, cook meals, even the odd bit of dry cleaning. But every now and then I'm caught off guard by something distinct to our new home, something that you just wouldn't come across back in Sydney.
Like this can, for example. This is a can for Tate Modern's house lager, featuring an illustration by Peter Saville, who amongst other things designed most of the record covers for Factory Records. No matter how many times I think about this, I still smile every time.
This is the Ikea at Tottenham. We walked here from Finsbury Park. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I took this photo as we made our approach, mostly out of relief.
This is the back of a pavilion set up for designjunction, part of the London Design Festival. Inside the pavilion were all manner of expensive treasures to enthral people and make their lives better. I took plenty of pictures of such things, but many of these were reference shots for the purposes of looking something up later.
There was something about the lines in this shot that interested me; everything's just a little out of whack, and the vectors in the two foreground structures don't lead you anywhere interesting. It's all kind of a mess, but then you see the polite little signs reminding you were the fire exits are.
What I like most about scenes like this is you're not supposed to look at it, let alone think about it too deeply. No one wants to consider the idea that a fire may break out inside, but if it did, and you were looking at the right part of the walls, well, you'd know what to do.
Drifting on the Thames out the front of Tate Modern is a giant cube adorned with (what looks like) illustrations. Atop the cube is a lone figure, still and unmoving as the cube's barge moves slowly with the tide. It's beautiful, and I have no idea why it's there.
In the two days I've spent in Finsbury Park, this sign has loomed above ominously as I head into the Tube. At first I thought the sign was a relic of long-passed neon glory days, but standing beneath it is a living, breathing bowling alley - Rowans Tenpin Bowl.
Being
from Australia, I know that hurling stones at other countries' tabloid
newspapers is not exactly a fair sport. However there's something
distinctly English about seeing the headlines of every newspaper dominated by the divorce of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
I've
spent most of my first 24 hours in the UK staring at my laptop and
getting my head around things. All the while this photo, with its
unfortunately placed crease, stared back at me. For what it's worth,
also today Tony Blair decided he should be involved in less scrupulous
business interests, and the Labor Party decided its members should
adhere to stronger social media standards so that they can stop being so
damned mean.
For
those playing at home, the bakery that supplied the chocolate croissant
does a pretty solid flat white. The croissant itself was also pretty
tasty, and I can see many more of these in my future. Good news for
blood sugar levels.
Some verygood friends of mine are posting a photo a day on Tumblr in order to document their journeys living overseas. Always being one to jump on a bandwagon, I thought I would also give this a shot. Historically, declaring to do something for a sustained period of time has mixed results for me. What makes me think this might work this time is a genuine desire to take better pictures. Another has generously helped in this cause by providing me some sweet prime lenses to play around with. The image above was taken with one of said lenses, immediately reminding me that there's a reason people use these primarily for portraiture. This is the view out of window where my partner and I are currently residing. I'm still getting my head around living somewhere with less trees and much more brickwork, but there is a quite sizeable park nearby - so that equation can be balanced after I recalibrate from being jetlagged and work out what day it is.
Some 18 months ago I said I would record a bunch of tracks within a month and release them immediately after that - I even published one of these tracks as a proof of concept, like this would somehow inspire me to actually do the thing I said I would do. Somehow, perhaps predictably, this didn't happen as expected. However, after finishing the recordings I'd started last February, the resulting pieces of music were put on to Bandcamp under the banner of Topical. At this point, the music longer reflected any sort of commentary about anything happening at the time the project started, rather than a self-deprecating jab at the speed with which I finish things. But it's done now, and you can listen to it above because the internet is good like that. And now that I've written a post that honours the completion something I've previous said I'd do, maybe I can properly move on to something else.
Last year I took part in Weeklybeats, a year-long challenge to produce a new piece of music every week for all of 2014. While the results varied wildly, I was proud that I was able to get a new track online each week (with one exception, which I conveniently don't count, due to technical difficulties). Since the end of 2014 I've found myself distracted with a whole new set of crazy schemes, but I found I've missed the routine of trying to quickly produce a track to Weeklybeats' local Monday morning deadline. I've thought about continuing the tradition off my own steam, but I just haven't been able to make it stick. And to be honest, the drive just hasn't been there. Something to do with the combination of said deadline, and an inbuilt competitive streak.
Whilst listening to All Songs Considered a few weeks back I heard about the RPM Challenge, which seeks to have people write and record an album's worth of material (10 tracks or 35 minutes) during the month of February. Being one to overcommit myself, I thought to give it a shot, but I've decided to make the process slightly easier on myself. I'm simply going to write a bunch of tunes, commit them to my hard drive, and then release them come March.
Opening this Thursday at Gaffa in the Sydney CBD is Recently Historic: Australian Electronic Arts in Western Sydney #2, featuring recent work by myself and a whole bunch of people I used to go to university with. While a description like that may read like a reclaiming of one's glory days, the broader context ties into research by the show's curator, Monica Brooks, into the Bachelor of Electronic Arts at the University of Western Sydney. Now for what it's worth, I studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts, but that's a whole other story.
The New Year is usually a good time to give yourself a series of lofty goals that aren't well-enough defined. In 2015 I've decided to give myself several of these, figuring that surely at least one of them will stick. One of these goals involves being all milennial and starting to use the blog again. After a couple of years of not updating, coupled with the death of RSS services (or at least Google Reader, I'm sure there are others that people still like), I'm sure there are fewer than ever people to shout into void at, but let's give this a shot.
Other goals are more pragmatic (and apparently really obvious), like "reading more". I could just write this as "use the internet less so you can read more", but I don't think that really addresses the issue. I already know I'm easily distracted; I feel that my aim overall is to better channel these distractions.
Set times. You should have a few set times during every
day when you’ll read for at least 5-10 minutes. These are times that
you will read no matter what — triggers that happen each day...
I am terrible at
sticking to a routine, and I can usually dismiss advice like this out of
hand, but there's something about reading this list at this moment in
space and time that is completely resonant for me. So let's see if I can
be a little more structured about things, and maybe in 2015 I can get a
few more things done. Either that, or I'll see you in another two
years.
Lots of things are said about the fact that Australia is damned lucky when it comes to the wealth of produce available to us, and that this combined with an astounding diversity of cultures living here leads to a vast array of taste sensations. There are also a lot of food courts in Australia that promise said delacacies, and then put peas in a burrito.
Thing is, I don't know if it's OK to put beans in a burrito, or if it's OK if this burrito is the size of your head. What I do know is that XQuisito at the University of Sydney's Camerdown campus thinks it's OK, as long as they put some red stuff on top of the burrito along with some partially melted cheese. Don't get me wrong, this thing was perfectly edible, but it was edible in the same way that combining lettuce, cheese, sour cream, guacamole and some sort of warm chicken goo in a wrap is fundamentally edible, it just didn't feel particularly authentic.
And that's the kicker, isn't it? Authenticity. Serving mexican speedily has always been somewhat in fashion in Australia (especially when combined as an outlet for stuffing things into potatoes), but it's recently hit some sort of new plain of franchised consciousness, with at least two competeing chains doing the rounds in Sydney. This is on top of numerous actual restaurants serving burritos around the inner-west, all purporting to different degrees of authenticity, or at least authentic tex-mex. That's a whole other deal.
I don't care about any of this. I just want someone's grandmother to make me a burrito, the way their grandmother used to make it for them. Maybe this doesn't even exist, so I'll just take whatever, and be immensely grateful for the experience. Either way, I bet it won't involve an ice-cream-scoop-worth of sour cream. Everything else, is a bonus.
The Fall of Turkish Pop Group (2004, 2005) The Song Remains The Same (2005) Real Ultimate Power (2006) Mario's Unfinished Symphonies (2006) "An Unexpected Gift" (2008) It's All Been Done Before / The Day The Music Died (2008)
