Thursday, December 13, 2007

Where the fugg is this?


I stole this pic from a friend of mine's photo folder on Facebook. It's the kind of thing that makes me wanna get printing and then go exploring the city with a drill and a ladder...

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Good Rid-Dance



On election night a few of us got together and sorted a generator, projector and screen, tv top box, decks and a soundsystem. There was talk of doing a Reclaim The Streets party when the result came through but the safety logistics of that proved to be too overwhelming. (Both from the side of drunk party people on the street at night and from the cops.)
So from that the Good-Rid Dance was born. All up it cost about a hundred bucks. Most of that was phone calls and photocopying some flyers. I did have an element of fear that was way out of proportion to what was actually going to happen (it's amazing what a lack of sleep will do to your brain).
From 7pm we kicked the music off and ended up with about 500 people gathering in the square and witnessing the end of the Howard era/error together in the heart of our neighbourhood. People got dressed up and danced, drank talked and caught up with mates as they hatched plans for the evening. There were many parties on, not least of them Chanel Number 5, the 5th in the series of the legendary 'Channel' parties, which began in the abandoned ABC studios at Gore Hill over a year ago.
Chanel descended into a 'three hour brawl' (thanks again to the Telegraph for such a bullshit quote) and my evening ended with washing my friends eyes out because they got sprayed with pepperspray by the cops. La bullshite. Oh, my evening didn't really end by the way, I took refuge in a friends warehouse and partied until 8am, repression be damned. For once we actually had a good reason to have a big fucking party. Good Riddance!

Monday, December 10, 2007

APEC anticlimax... Fun,No Fun?



So my plan for APEC was pretty simple. All I wanted to do was go with the Wheelie Bin Soundsystem and play some music to keep people's spirits up in what was a very overpoliced and tense situation as people went into the city to protest against Howard and all the tired bullshit as usual we all have gotten used to in the last few years. Long sentence hey?
But the whole circus did feel that...Long and drawn out, like a three hour movie that should have ended an hour ago. The whole lead up to it, complete with media hysteria (along with panic-filled articles about the anarchist riot manual (ha ha ho ho - The Daily Telegraph is always good for it), and the endless hints to everyone in Sydney to quietly Shut Up Shop and Leave The City... I ummmed and ahhhed for weeks. I was going to stay on a retreat up north and drop out of the whole tense mess that Newtown had become. There were worried faces and cops everywhere, like how I imagine the coming oil shortage to be. Anyway...
SO Predictable. Sure Bush was going to be in town but personally I was more interested in the possibility of people getting some energy focused on the 'leaders' of Papua New Guinea and Indonesia ; ie- our close neighbours, to see if anyone was going to try and call them on their shit. There's a lot of dirty business happening up north.
I wasn't going to do anything but play music, partially because id rather do that than play 'David Vs Goliath' and get arrested for no good reason, and also because protest as usual is so boring. Chanting to deserted streets is not going to bring about the fall of Western Civilisation. Sorry.
So Ive had the wheelie going for hours and Im sick of dragging the thing around. I leave it with a mate and duck into the cafe in Hyde Park for a piss. When I emerge there's a whole posse of bike-cops zipping up to me to search the Wheelie for 'projectiles'. This included going through my CD folder and looking at every cable and flyer the Wheelie had collected. This was the 3rd time I had been searched that day. The third time.
I told them I didn't want to carry around projectiles. I wanted to play music. I was there to keep it fun and a bit fluffy, not to cart rocks around. They searched everything I had. The best moment was when they went through my bag of t shirts i hadn't gotten around to selling. I had blue and white 'APEC 07 : Armed Police on Every Corner' tees with 'No Police State' on the back which the assembled media scrum and protester posse really liked. I was able to hold one up for the crowd and cameras. I can be such a fucking show off sometimes...
I got rid of them within minutes after the cops left, which was good because I had to stash all the electro gear somewhere. I realised Id had almost enough of the CBD for a while and I dumped wheelie with a van and got the fugg outta there as the police were lining up around Hyde Park and not letting anyone out.
We stopped for a group happysnap and loaded into the car, went home and drank some cold beer before a posse of unwashed dole scroungers who I love very much descended on my backyard and trashed it. Trashed it in a very friendly way as we talked and laughed. Maybe there's a good memory from APEC after all.