Rise again, Tote Hotel

Photo by Pierre Baroni

At the Tote. Shot by Pierre Baroni

Save the Tote protest 17/1/10 by Pierre Baroni

Save the Tote

Letter to Tony Robinson, Victorian State Minister for Liquor *sigh* licensing

Dear Minister,

I urge you to reconsider the very unfair closing of the Tote Hotel in Collingwood. This venue is a real grassroots venue that has been a really strong contributor to the music business. Melbourne is famous for its live scene and its terrific bands, many of which have become internationally successful and brought considerable income back to Australia.

The Australian music business is a major employer and Melbourne is the music capital of Australia. Yet we would be nowhere if the up and coming bands have nowhere to play, to cut their teeth and learn to entertain. The Tote is one of the most important venues in this regard. It has never been a violent kind of venue, more a friendly and down home rock'n'roll pub well sited in an area surrounded by shops and inner city social activities.

We can't allow this important aspect of Melbourne's character, this vital venue - and potentially others like it - to be closed due to a narrow-minded view of licensing laws. It is very important that youth be given a creative voice and young bands have places like the Tote to play in.

Please save the Tote.

Kind regards,

Jen Jewel Brown
journalist and author of Skyhooks Million Dollar Riff
ex-A&R Manager, Mushroom Records and Publishing

A silver guide to unconsciousness

The trick to unconsciousness is knowing when you've achieved it. It's like balancing on a tightrope - one minute you're awake and the next you're not. Everyone wants to know what happens on the highwire. But what happens on the highwire often stays on the highwire. The tricky thing - to maintain enough wakefuless to experience falling out of wakefulness. Your feet doing their best to swallow the rope dividing light and dark like two carpet snakes, your body perfectly balanced, half and half weighted, moving back and forth, back and forth, almost rocking like to keep your weight distributed above your left foot then your right, coming and going, going and coming and coming and coming ... but the next thing you're swimming up from the weightless dark of unconscious samsara towards moksha, towards the light and it's another day

The Cat Piano

More poetry in the poetry incinerator right now. I just noticed a rat run under it, or perhaps a ferret. Flaming Hoop will be poeting again soon. I think I will just go investigate what that flash of fur was.

Guitar by Gabby

ARTFUL DODGERS STUDIOS PRESENT OUT OF MY HEAD

Please come! All welcome and it's free
Out of My Head
an exhibition at Signal
Signal @ Northbank - behind Flinders St Station, towards Sandridge Bridge, Northbank, Melbourne
OPENING: Friday 30 October 4pm
EXHIBITION: Wednesday to Saturday until 14 November 2-6 pm

Mental sparks fly as the Artful Dodgers Studios, Melbourne’s award-winning urban studios for young “at risk” artists, create installations for their new Out of My Head exhibition at Signal.

“The collaborative process is very exciting”, said Clare, 21, one of the participants. “Everyone put forward their own ideas to come up with the one theme, Out of My Head.” Together 10 resident artists on staff and around 40 young participants under 28 have been involved on some level in the development of work for the exhibition, which will also feature individual pieces and projections.

The critical battle of the growing individual to manage issues like mental illness, societal prejudices, family hardships and the misuse of drugs and alcohol inspires the work. The centerpiece installation is an outsize ganglia/neuron station representing the thunderstorms and lightning-struck inspirations of the brain. The second group-devised installation features footwear: shoes, boots and sneakers layered with the vivid and maddening detritus of life. The venue will be filled with sounds created in the Artful Dodgers music studios under the Living Music program.

Artful Dodgers Studios has mentored young artists (15 to 28) from marginalised backgrounds through the respected Gateway program of Jesuit Social Services at 1 Langridge Street, near the corner of Smith Street, Collingwood, since 1995. Professional staff include visual artists Alison Burton, Zoe Horsfall and Forest Keegel, musicians Abby Dobson (Leonardo’s Bride), Charles Jenkins (Icecream Hands), John Favaro (The Badloves), Natalie Allison (Vanessa Amarosi) and Andrew McSweeney (Kutcha Edwards) as well as dramaturge and Arts & Culture Coordinator Rebecca Lister and multi-media honchos Justin Schmidt and Tim Osborn.

Out Of My Head will be one of the first exhibitions in the City of Melbourne’s new Signal creative arts studio for young people near Sandridge Bridge, Northbank, behind Flinders Street Station. Wheelchair access is available from Banana Alley,

Website: artfuldodgers.tv

Signal

A tiny tree down the wormhole of a book stack in the window of the Book Affair in Elgin Street. I did some publicity for the shop's marvellous Fringe Festival exhibition The Liminal.

The LiMINAL
Universes in transition
MELBOURNE FRINGE ART EXHIBITION in Book Affair windows (3 new locations)
161 Elgin St, CARLTON * 287 Smith St, FITZROY * 149 Sydney Rd, BRUNSWICK
Thursday 24 Sept. - Sunday 11 Oct., 10am to 8pm (& 24/7 from the street)
Opening Parade: 200 Elgin St - Wednesday 23 September 6pm for 6.30pm
ALL FREE

A record, three-day heat wave peaked on January 30 last summer in Melbourne, when the mercury hit 45. Suddenly Book Affair, that rambling and greatly loved second hand bookshop at 200 Elgin St, near the corner of Lygon, seemed to spontaneously combust.

Sparked in an air conditioner, flames soon billowed high above Carlton and the roof of the iconic 25-year-old business was gone. This led to flooding and a mammoth relocation of over 100,000 books. Finally, after hard work, understanding bridging support from staff and vital help and solace from the local community, a three-headed phoenix of three marvelous, specialist second hand Book Affair shops has arisen.

To celebrate this, the Book Affair – perhaps the only bookshop in Melbourne with a permanent Arts Projects Coordinator (Susan Bamford Caleo) and several practicing artists-cum-booksellers on staff - presents The Liminal, a delightful Melbourne Fringe Festival exhibition. Works are sculpted primarily from recycled book paper and bindings, but also incorporating other things such as barbed wire, silk, hemp, ash, cotton, wool, string and wood. It is the second time the Book Affair have appeared in the Fringe Festival; their exhibition last year 'Bookish' was very well received (“delightfully playful yet very thoughtful” - Buzzcuts; “drenched in the same sort of charm that one finds in any great bookshop” - Beat).

Led by owner Kaya Prpic, the staff of Book Affair is working with a group of consulting artists (including Shirley Cass, Katherine Connolly, Eliza Donald, Ute Leiner and Waltraud Reiner) on the exhibition, to be displayed in the windows of the three new shops. Sculptured forms and costumes will capture moments of transformation and disorientation, reflecting their experience over the last six months.

The Liminal (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is inherently unstable, alive with possibility. The myth of Daphne, who morphed from a nymph into a tree and the infinite possibilities of the liminal space that readers enter when they open a book, are some of the early ideas inspiring artworks that incorporate an element that can be worn.

This is a community project for Book Affair staff and friends and is important for morale as well as a marking a tremendous new chapter in the Book Affair story. Hence, a mad and joyous parade of staff and friends will proceed on Wednesday 23rd September at 6.30pm from the old shop (200 Elgin Street) to the seductively new wood-fragranced and sculpture-draped Book Affair HQ at 161 Elgin, to launch the exhibition and celebrate the three new shops. There will be fun, colour and an opportunity to shake off the last of the ash.

The new Book Affair second hand shops are at 161 Elgin St, Carlton (academic), 287 Smith St, Fitzroy (sci-fi, occult, graphic novels) and149 Sydney Rd, Brunswick (military, sport, transport).

For interviews with key personnel and further information, contact:
Publicist: Jen Jewel Brown email jenjewelbrown@fastmail.fm
The Book Affair: Susan Bamford Caleo, Kaya Prpic or Catherine O’Dwyer
Phone 9347 3542 email sbamcal@hotmail.com

your immediate cormorants

I wish I could remember
you sleeping
seems to me you were always
awake when I stumbled
to consciousness
awake and writing
I felt for the phone, dailled two, room service

golden
your long curved back
absorbed you reached behind
and clamped my left breast
the other hand
inscribed wet notes on the lions
Sicilian outrageous
grand mechanisisisms
melodious
infamy
my right breast
triggered the secret door behind
the innocent, panelling in my library

your immediate cormorants
oh, my mercy
transcendental work
is going on

Cat People (1982)

Cat People (1982)

when twilight crawls down the lawns of the old
New Orleans zoo
shadows lean like collapsing bars
at dawn she
wakes naked and bloody-faced alone
to the crisp lip-curling spank of cat
pungent cement
her own basso profundo moan

my panthera pardis …

go then through the empty streets as the black city mumbles
the Desire Project where ambulances won’t go
with its broken flat windows leaking Cajun smells
past boughs skeined with Spanish moss
in the drowned French quarter
the graveyard sinking
in Mississippi mud

now this old swamp pops and creaks
around her entering
above, the moon is beaten gold
a crocodile god’s eye

pole the boat past the cayman’s swirl
to the shack trapped in the bayou
black she waits
frightened panting
enter slow
don’t forget
to chain her down

starter

rubber tarmac fight
blue smoke stink
hairpin
a bunch of yaaaaaarhs
gaaaaaaaaarns getfuckeds
stiff arms waving
from the blur
with the glint of beer colour
glass cracking toast
cracksmashtinkle
yaaaaaaaarh
aaaaaaaaaarh she skids a thud
yella glass sprays
into the bush gasping
eastern greys pogo out
of scribbly gums
shade thin as sticks

amber ooze
cracking tree
phalanger turns
head tucked
black noon
cicadas with your
cluster eyes
drummer
green stick pin singin
wild chorus in the canopy
of flowering mountain ash

glass spawn
glints from rock
it split its head
open the thick
jagged lip
sizzles with light