Enmore

It’s 8am, a crisp winter morning. 11C outside. I drag a battered flannelette shirt over my t-shirt — a shirt that’s now 12 years old, I remember. I bought it at Gowings when I first came to Sydney, and it’s still wearable, more or less. Where will I buy everyday clothes now that Gowings is gone?

The shirt smells of smoke. Why is that?

It’s not the acrid stench of cigarette smoke, but the dusty odour of burnt wood. Eucalyptus. A bushfire? Ah, no, I remember now. Sitting by the open fireplace at The Duke Hotel… red wine… the memories flood back as the coffee kicks in…

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Rebellious stencil art found yesterday afternoon in Pemell Lane, Enmore. “Don’t be a cog in the machine, be a spanner in the works.”

It’s done! ’Pong has completed his short film Anywhere Chairs, which he made as part of the Sydney Songlines project. You have to put up with my narration, I’m afraid.

(I wrote about this project when he started it and when I found myself discussing the motivations of a chair. I should have also written about how all-consuming it’s been for the last few weeks!)

Interesting Geekfacts: The whole film was shot on a Nokia N90, one of the first Nseries “multimedia” phones (2 megapixels from a Carl Zeiss pimple-lens). Post-production was in iMovie HD 6 and GarageBand 3. It was converted to Flash Video for the web using ffmpegx.

Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is my very great pleasure tonight to announce the recipient of the Inaugural Paul Neil Milne Johnstone Award for Language Mutilation.

This award is named in honour of the late Paul Johnstone of Redbridge in England, who was cited by author Douglas Adams as writing the worst poetry in the entire universe. This award isn’t about poetry, however. It’s about Language. Language — and especially the abuse of language — in all its glory.

Of the many things which make us human, Language is one of the most important. Language binds our society together. Language, some even say, is what allows us to think rational thoughts.

So when people use Language badly, when Language is abused in order to mislead, to corrupt, to baffle or to sell a product, we shouldn’t ignore it. We should stand it on a pedestal, call up the author, point to them and say in a loud voice, “This person is destroying the very meaning of humanity.”

With this in mind, I’ve chosen as the recipient of the Inaugural Paul Neil Milne Johnstone Award a representative of a profession — if I may call it that — which is renown the world over for misleading language, namely, a real estate agent.

Ladies and gentlemen, would you please put your hands together for Claudia Mendez (pictured right), of Laing+Simmons, Newtown.

Now as Claudia is making her way to the stage, I’d like to say a few words about my choice, and take a look at her work…

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Even if it’s your local pub, there’s a limit to the kind of photographs you can take in the urinal and still use the excuse that it’s for “Art”.

“Want to buy a sofa, going cheap?” Mike, the bloke sitting on the veranda, laughs — amused that the discarded furniture was torched. He’s annoyed they started the fire too close to the fence, though, scorching the paw paw plant that’s just starting to come into fruit.

Somehow the conversation turns to the weather-beaten old homeless guy who was camped out nearby most of this week, but who’s now been moved on. “Keith? Nah, he’s not into money,” Mike tells me. “He’s a millionaire though.” Come again?

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Here’s what dawn sounded like this morning (1.3MB MP3), or at least a minute and a half of it. There’s quite a few different kinds of birds. Unfortunately there’s a slight whine in the right channel — a bad microphone cable, that’ll have to be replaced! And the thumping sounds toward the end are one of the cats walking across the wooden deck, too close to the mic stands. But it’s a suitable test of my recording set-up, which hasn’t been used in ages.

And it’s on the side of a car in Sebastopol Street!

OK, the Liberals have a snowflake’s chance of winning our local seat of Marrickville in the forthcoming NSW state election, so they can let any muppet have a go. But if this is the best election flyer you can come up with, Ramzy Mansour, then who are you kidding?

Consider:

• If you can’t even organise someone who can cut paper in a straight line, what makes you think you can run the state of New South Wales?
• If you can’t raise the $3000 to professionally print the 45,000 leaflets necessary to hit your electorate, how little support do you actually have?
• If you can’t do the basic financial management to understand that for large print runs, offset printing is a lot cheaper than photocopying, why on earth would I trust you with a billion-dollar state budget?

1 out of 10, can do much, much better.

On Friday night I ran into three local restaurateurs chatting in the street — proprietors respectively of Sydney’s best Lebanese restaurant Fifi’s, Greek meze specialists Kafenes and The Razor’s Edge.

While I’ve eaten at Fifi’s several times and can vouch for their wonderfulness, which is why I stopped to chat too. I haven’t tried the others — but they both have excellent reputations.

The guy from The Razor’s Edge left to set up for dinner. And then the guy from Fifi’s mentioned that his kitchenhands were late and he had to go too. Maria from Kafene’s reaction: “Do you need a hand?”

Restaurants across the road from each other are meant to be arch enemies, aren’t they? Or are they? This cooperative approach to business was inspiring.

The unknown bird call which woke ’Pong and me the other day has been identified. This morning I spotted the beautiful pair of Grey Butcherbirds (Cracticus torquatus) on a tree next door.

Today’s morning chorus also included 30-odd long-billed corellas, a scattering of rainbow lorikeets, a low-flying pied currawong (I love the way they fly well under the main canopy, staying hidden) and assorted pigeons and miners.

By all rights, The Greens’ candidate for Marrickville in the forthcoming NSW state election should be a shoe-in. This is The Greens heartland, and Fiona Byrne is a local councillor and presumably knows her patch. Labor incumbent Carmel Tebbutt, the Princess of Marrickville (so-called because her husband Anthony Albanese, the Prince of Marrickville, is the Federal ALP member for the equivalent district, Grayndler) has to dissuade us from thoughts that the NSW ALP government is rotten to the core. And environmental issues are at the top of the agenda.

But it won’t happen. And here’s why…

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Another reason to love this village: just walking to the post office, I encounter five different species of birds! rainbow lorikeets (noisy and obvious, but still pretty), Australian magpies (confident and my favourite), Australian ravens (with their languid calls), noisy miners (yes, they’re noisy!) and pigeons.

OK, the skyrat pigeons can go. But the rest are just wonderful — even the aggressive miners. And add to that the family of pied currawongs that live nearby and several other species and you have a wonderful community in which to live.

When Clover Moore, Sydney’s time-share Lord Mayor and state MP, started talking about “a city of villages”, I thought she was giving it tug. (No anatomical pedantry, thanks.) But now it’s the city’s official slogan, and a few relaxed Sundays have persuaded me she’s got it right — at least for the inner and inner-west villages which have some historical reality.

This photo ain’t art. But last night’s view from the front bar of the Warren View Hotel really does say “This is my village”.

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