Welcome to my blog. My cultural celebration and catharsis.
If the backyard of your house is on fire and your family or neighbours are in danger, you don’t back the car out of the drive each morning to head into parliament or the office to work on other things that are less important. You do everything you can to make sure your house, your street, your village is safe – first and foremost. When emergencies happen or disaster strikes, that’s when you see what your leaders are made of.
As the Waverley community in Sydney requests a more mature approach to the council’s zero-tolerance alcohol bans in its parks, a proposed trial is ruffling some obstinate feathers.
All year round, Sydney’s night time should be a space in which we discuss, listen, laugh, explore, share food, sharestories, have fun and come together after a busy day working. It also needs to be reinstated as a place to express ourselves, as it once did. A place to re-energise and reconnect with friends and peers. A place that allows us to explore our local fabric and be a place that can inspire again.
But at the heart of it, what we are witnessing here a worrying trend towards the privatisation and outsourcing of our community’s largest coming together, with local councils and government agencies shirking their responsibilities around that. It’s an approach that stifles and separates an evening we’d normally expect to be riddled with a naturally-flowing ambience, whilst seeking to ‘autopilot’ a community event that rather should be invested in and nurtured.
A thriving, expressive local personality is not just a wonderful thing for locals to bask in. It is also something that can be cultivated and bottled in order to pitch for new business, attract ambitious talent and bolster the local economy. Ironically, looking back again to just eighteen years ago – Sydney already had all of that, we were there.
To show emotion as a man, especially in public, is a sign of inner weakness in this country.
The cunning association of top players with casinos and online betting drives a normalisation of gambling amongst children. After all, these malleable youngsters are the industry’s future customers. Gambling promotion during the State of Origin is an investment.
Where Vivid is about pretty lights colouring up a cityscape, there is nothing superficial about Mofo. Where Vivid excites the eyes, Mofo hits you in the gut and the soul. If Vivid is for kids, then Mofo is certainly more grown up, more adult and self-assured.
Sydney is going through a bad patch. Yes, life can sometimes dish out lows on the other side of enraptured highs. But this time it feels deeper than that.
Where the grassroots creative community in this city fights to survive, the Casino has apparently only thrived.
We believe that a clinical implementation of these simple steps will help you to knock the life blood out of your city. In no time at all, you’ll begin to taste the vanilla again and to relax with a smooth regime of comfortable predictability. We recommend just working through them, one by one.
I was attracted to Paddington because of it reminded me of the beguiling jumble of unplanned streets in London. A city that had been my home for a decade. Only minutes to the city, minutes to the harbour and minutes to the beaches - it’s location is perfect. Most of all though, it is Paddington’s undeniable sensory charm that seduced me.
Fed up with their nighttime liberties being suffocated, and the increasing trend towards a ‘nanny state’ mindset, young Sydneysiders are finally crying out “enough!”
the more I involved myself in the Sydney morning, the more I began to realise that the sunlight, serotonin and morning sounds have dripped deep into the Sydney psyche.
“Everybody has the same energy potential.
The average person wastes his in a dozen little ways.
I bring mine to bear on one thing only: my paintings
and everything else is sacrificed to it - myself included.”
You don’t have to be a sociologist to see and feel that the lockout laws have smothered something once bristling in Sydney.
Information, and the devices we use to absorb it, inundate our lives like never before.
