sometimes i show people the drawings i do

I still draw a reasonable amount, just sketchy quick messy stuff. sometimes i even let people see some of it.

photo's documenting: bike polo championships

Bike polo in melbourne is with no disrespect intended, a sport mainly participated in by Critical Mass attendees and folding bike enthusiasts. The rest of Australia seems to have a different (more agressive) take on it however, which made for an interesting weekend down at Flagstaff gardens. There were many many spills, elbows, mallets under wheels and kamikaze t-bone crashes. In between the heavy showers of rain on sunday, there were also a fair few spectators.

LIGHTNING BOLT!!!

NAH NAH NAH NAH- NAHNAHNAHNAH

lightning bolt WAS awesome, on friday night at least, too much waiting around on thursday, cause they blew up their subwoofers, and the mix never sounded right after that. Loudest accoustic drum kit in the world, no doubt, they need the huge speaker stacks just to get the bass louder then the drums. The venue they played on thursday was a brunswick warehouse called Irenes, they set up in the small straw bale recording area, which is the size of a small living room. It was a very hot day, and it got very hot. I saw a lot of sweat. I saw a drummer wearing an animal mask made from old rags drippig with sweat, i saw a crowd of people who were dead keen on this band, and i got blinded by idiot wannabee faster louder photographers camera flashes for the whole gig.

There was a strange mix of metalheads, hipsters, and music nerds on friday night. and they played in this huge gilded plaster theatre in thornbury, which had a weird italian wedding/50's dance hall vibe. No empty bike parking out the front, every pole and post had bikes locked to it for 100 metres up and down the road. I went to the toilet before they played, and when i got back an impenetrable circle had already formed around the setup on the floor. I hung out at the back taking to some people, before heading up to the back balcony where i managed to take this picture with full zoom. the crowd was a teeming mass of people clustered around the band, looking like ants swarming a donut, but the rest of the space was totally empty. the sight of two guys filling this huge space with a wave of sound was pretty special.

At neither of the gigs was my mind really blown, however, listening to the Earthly Delights album now, i get really really excited, which is strange as i never really expected this band to 'grow' on me more, but that seems to have been what happened

Serenissima

I read about the Miss Rockaway Armada in 2007 on the fecal-face website, a venture run in 2006 and 2007 where a group of people built large unpowered rafts from salvaged materials and floated on them down the Mississippi river in a kind of Huck Finn meets post-Katrina dumpster diving odyssey.
The street artist Swoon further developed the concept on a number of occasions leading to the 'Swimming Cities of Serenissima' project. A handmade fleet of rafts made from reclaimed materials travelled from Slovakia to (gatecrash) the Venice Biennial across the Adriatic sea. The voyage was documented by the photographer Tod Seelie
The aesthetics of the rafts are carefully curated, and while on examination the materials are clearly junk, as a whole entity they seems much more graceful and emotive of childhood dreams and adventure stories. In particular I am reminded of two entirely separate things from my childhood, the book Junk Castle by Robert Klein, telling the story of a group of neighbourhood kids who build a giant fort from rubbish and defend it from an irksome neighbour. And the painting 'the raft of the medusa' by french artist Theodore Gericault detailing a historic shipwreck off the coast of Africa in 1816, where 147 people were set adrift on a small raft, reduced to madness and cannibalism, only 15 survived. The painting was in a flimsy paged encyclopedia which much childhood procrastination resulted in me skim reading cover to cover.
Anyway, when the ships reached Venice, it is interesting to make the comparison between them, and the city, both rickety, dilapidated, battling the sea yet picturesque and soulful.

photo's documenting: pyschocross

matt in the yellow keiran hat organised one of melbourne's first cyclocross races for several years, albeit unsanctioned, unpermitted and uninsured. just like it should be. there was a mix of mtb trails and tarmac, with liberal dashes of mud, running up hills, beers, blood and cowbell.

old things i like the look of...

Persol sunnies

Bridgestone 350 GTO
Iain Oughtred's Eun na mara



I guess you can begin to see some trend emerging...

photo's documenting