Fitzroyalty

Hyperlocal news about Melbourne's first suburb: Fitzroy 3065

junkie logic

I have admired the writing of Theodore Dalrymple for several years. He writes with great clarity and conviction about social issues, including parenthood, social responsibility, crime and ethics. He cannot be simply defined as progressive or conservative; his views avoid convenient categorisation and focus on the crucial aspect of an issue. He can be controversial; his logic is something I find instructive in evaluating and elucidating my own views on social issues. In summing up his worldview, he states:

Tolerance is the greatest moral virtue and broadmindedness the greatest intellectual one.

follow the white rabbit, NEO

I?ve recently read about the newly defined demographic of the NEO (new economic order). I?m probably one of them. It?s a demographic based on economic power, and it crosses race, class and gender. NEOs are likely to be tertiary educated, well travelled, comfortable with selective conspicuous consumption and motivated by innovation and ideas. They are also early adopters and regular users of the internet and information technologies. The concept is explained in a website and in this book.…

men, employment and education

A January 23, 2007 report by the Australian Productivity Commission – Men Not at Work: An Analysis of Men Outside the Labour Force – interested me a great deal. Before saying why, be warned that this piece features another of my rants and will no doubt be offensive to some.

I read about the study in a January 24 article in the Age newspaper. It acknowledges that there is a relationship between men who are unemployed and men who are single, and suggests that there is no simple causal factor linking the two.…

Lou Reed: Berlin in Sydney

visual art travel sydney music media film concerts arts

Photo by Edwina Pickles at the Sydney Morning Herald

I’m writing this several days after seeing Lou Reed perform his Berlin album in sequence with a theatre style stage set with video projections at the final night of three nights only at the magnificent State Theatre as part of the Sydney Festival. I went to Sydney over the weekend to see the show, went home again, then went to Sydney again for work on Thursday.…

St Jerome’s

music melbourne drink

Down Caledonian Lane is a bar/cafe that makes the cheapest top quality coffee in the Melbourne CBD, and has the perfect vibe for lazing away a couple of hours. St Jerome’s is also the coordinator of the Laneway music festival, which I attended this year (the Sydney show), and which included The Gossip, who I really enjoyed.

music melbourne drink

The inside of St Jerome’s, pictured above, is cosy and warm, while the courtyard out the back is open and cooler, albeit with some of the sometimes challenging smell of Melbourne laneways.…

intellectual property and indigenous art

I’ve been following the media’s reporting of the proliferation of graffiti paintings of Wandjina, a character in Aboriginal Australian mythology, in inner-city Perth by an unknown artist. The phenomenon has been thoughfully blogged about by Rosemary Lynch, and is also covered by the ABC blog Articulate. The photo below, by Technobohemian, is of one of the many images in the Flickr Wandjina pool.

visual art perth media intellectual property

art deco at Bondi beach

visual art travel sydney

My favourite style in art and design is deco. When I was in Sydney recently I walked around Bondi looking at the art deco buildings in the streets immediately behind the beach.…

Emma Magenta

visual art fitzroy books

In 2003 I was new to Melbourne and was keen to see and experience everything I could. I have recently been revisiting the pictures I took then and have found some that now have new meaning to me. These pictures are one example – they are of cute drawings on post-it notes stuck on the wall of a Johnston St boutique, which I was visiting with a friend. Now, I know that they are by published author Emma Magenta.…

goddess

visual art travel sydney galleries and museums

On Sunday I went to the Art Gallery of NSW to see the Goddess – Divine Energy exhibition. I was in Sydney to see Lou Reed perform his Berlin album at the Sydney Festival, and I’ll write about that soon. I thought it was a wonderful exhibition, and loved the colour of the paintings and drawings. The statues were the most remarkable pieces however, and reading the stories of the various goddesses and gods in the Hindu mythology is fascinating.…