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taking it to the street 2

2007-11-23T10:07:11Z

I've always wondered if Paris, a city that claims a special affinity with philosophy, is best experienced from above, from the eagle-eye perspective that Nietzsche associated with the loftiest profession.

Cinema has taken a different view of Paris, preferring the view from 'below' especially since Caude Lelouche's 'underground' short film, C'etait un Rendezvous has made it to DVD release (and therefore officialdom):

Since its release to DVD there has been a spate of speculation about the actual terrain covered by Lelouch's car as it whizzes through the early morning Paris streets.

One website, Physics on Film takes the speculation even further as it pores over the details of the trip, trying to figure out exactly how fast the car was traveling (the findings have generated reams of web commentary most of it suggesting that the students who wrote the site over-estimated the car's speed).

But wait, there is more! A wonderful mashup that links the car's journey to a googlemap as the movie plays - so you can track the entire journey on the map as it happens. At last the eagle-eye perspective I was after. Thanks to my mate Ben Goldmsith for the tip on this site.

the last (single screen) picture show?

2007-11-23T06:44:00Z

Its finally official. After a couple of premature announcements, the Astor Theatre, Melbourne's last single screen venue is going to be sold. According to the current owner/operators it is just a bricks and mortar sale and the repertory program will continue to operate 'for the next few years'.

The Astor has had many 'lives'. It belongs to a period of suburban cinema expansion in Melbourne- even its 1936 opening night was remarkable in that just across Dandenong Road another rival cinema, the Windsor, also launched on the same night.

The Windsor has been dark for many years, but the Astor remained viable when other suburban cinemas closed around it, by progamming prestige, big-night out films. Then, when even this strategy no longer worked, it re-emerged as a specialist screening venue for Greek migrant cinemagoers. More recently its been a repertory cinema.

My favourite Astor memory (and I'm sure its not a unique one) is of sitting in dress circle more or less alone watching a re-run of Bladerunner only to have the be-jeezus scared out of me as the Astor cat, Marzipan, leapt into my lap at an opportune moment. I lost the remains of my choctop over that one.

the Ithaca connection

2007-11-07T00:02:51Z

On the Greek island of Ithaca there is an obelisk built by the Melbourne cinema proprietor, Stathis Raftopoulos (aka Stan Raft). In this clip, taken on his beloved Ithaca, Raftopoulos talks about his role in establishing one of Australia's most significant migrant cinema circuits, based in Melbourne.

The global circulation of non-Hollywood cinema is a topic I'm especially interested in. At the same time that waves of post-war Greek migrants arrived on Australia's shores, the Greek cinema also experienced its golden years. In Melbourne alone there were more than 35 venues screening Greek films from 1945-1975. Actually they screened a lot more than Greek films, catering for Greek preferences for Bollywood, Turkish, Hollywood and Asian cinema. But there are also notable differences from Greek cinemagoing in the way the screenings occured in Australia. For example Italian films, which were also pretty popular in Greece, didn't show at these Australian venues since there was a separate Italian cinema circuit specifically for Italian migrants and the commercial rivalry between the two circuits didn't permit any cross-over. Except perhaps where the statuary is concerned...

Image: Advertsing slide used in Greek cinema screenings in Melbourne

taking it to the street 1

2007-10-30T23:25:39Z

Despite the popularity of air travel there's not too many people who could claim that the birds-eye view of the world available on google maps corresponds to their everyday experience of place.

Now there is an alternative view of Shanghai available (as an English demo) with panoramic (read: neck-craning) options:

Google have also dipped a toe into producing audiovisual support for their maps - prosaically called StreetView - which has, until recently, been resolutely 'driven' by the idea that streets are for cars (and not the specific viewing practices of pedestrians or cyclists). I wonder how different a bicycle-level view of the city might look in google. Now Google have also introduced panoramic views:

StreetView and City8 add another layer to how we experience particular places which are ‘accessible’ in a new way. We can now see select locations through the eyes of a google camera operator/driver - in addition to the view of say a novelist (like Iain Sinclair’s take on London's motorways for example) or of a filmmaker (like Wenders on Lisbon). Despite the anonymity of the google drivers, and the higher-than-your-average person position of their cameras, I’m not convinced StreetView is any less idiosyncratic or embodied than some of these previous meditations on place – a point made clear to me when the googlevan detours to MacDonald’s for a pit-stop.

In fact if it were a tad faster this idea of single shot capture of the city might rival the infamy of a Parisian predecessor: Claude Lelouch who, in the mid-1970s, mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the front bumper of his Mercedes and drove through the centre of Paris. The resulting movie has only relatively recently been released to DVD.

Alternatively, here is the more mundane car that google will use to capture Australian cities over the next few months (you can just make out the camera mounted on the roof):

venices

2007-10-25T09:32:54Z

Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. But then again, neither is Kansas...

~ Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places, 1996: 19

Aveiro is a medium sized town in Portugal that is sometimes known as 'the Venice of Portugal' because it has a series of small canals running through it. The canals are very lovely (you can take a tourist boat on them) but despite the obvious watery parallel I'm pretty sure they are no Venice! In truth I can only guess at this because I have never actually been to the paradigmatic Venice. But as it turns out I have been to many other Venices.

I had no idea that I was already an avid collector of Venices having traveled to Bangkok (The Venice of the East); Dubai (The Venice of the Middle-East); Annecy (The Venice of Savoie); Bruges, Stockholm and Amsterdam (all known as The Venice of the North), the more literally named Venice Beach and more locally Woy Woy: known affectionately as The Venice of Australia only because it is prone to flooding and which inspired a 1934 film by Claude Flemming actually called “Woy Woy: the Venice of Australia”.

And apparently there are still many, many more Venices that await me. Japan, which I've yet to visit has a multitude of Venices: Hiroshima, Yanagawa, Otaru, Kagoshima, Kurashiki, Osaka, Sakai and Matsue all claim the sobriquet, The Venice of Japan. There is another Venice of the North: Saint Petersburg. And Venices of the East: Udaipur, Basra, Barishal, Alappuzha, Suzhou, Palembang, Vilkovo, which all goes to show how ‘the East’ is a less precise term than ‘the North’. Zhouzhuang claims to be the 'Venice of the Orient'. I could only find one Venice of the West: Nantes.

Scandalously, as far as I can tell, there are NO Venices of the South.

The list goes on and on, with increasingly finite divisions and subdivisions and at risk of adding one more frivolous list to the already swollen annals of city listings I've itemized some of these other Venices at the end of this post - but I welcome more!

The plethora of Venices got me thinking about another project I'm working on. Along with my colleague known on the web as Whitebait (we're keeping with the seafood theme), I'm undertaking a major publication on urban rivalry. One of the premises of our study is that city identities are formed in a relational network of cities which overvalues distinction or difference: what Rob Shields calls a 'differential social spatialisation' in which places are principally understood as 'places for this' and places for that'. What is nice about the Venices is that although they demonstrate this point - showing how particular cities seek to differentiate themselves from their local context - they do this by appealing to an over-riding sense of their similarity (with Venice). Of course the point is that Averio's desire to be like Venice is way more likely to demonstrate that town's similarity to Nantes, Osaka or even Woy Woy, as one more in a line of would-be Venices.

Venices

Fort Lauderdale - Venice of America; Cranford - The Venice of New Jersey; Trenton - The Venice of America; Wickford, Rhode Island - The Venice of New England; San Antonio -The Venice of the U.S.; Sunny Isles - The Venice of America; Birmingham - The Venice of the Midlands; Bourton-on-the-Water - The Venice of the Cotswolds; Tongli Village - The Venice of China; Mopti - The Venice of Mali and Africa; Dohomey - Venice of Africa; Ganvie - The Venice of Africa; Massaua - The Venice of Africa; Hoi An - The Venice of Vietnam; Recife - The Venice of Brazil; Giethoorn - The Venice of the Netherlands; Zhujiajiao - The Venice of Shanghai; Nan Madol - The Venice of the Pacific; Hamiltron - The Venice of New Zealand every 3 years (a personal favourite); Lagoon City - Venice of Canada; Cambridge - Venice of Canada; Mykonos - Venice of Greece; Chania - The Venice of Greece; Seville - The Venice of Spain; Wroclaw - The Venice of Poland; Gyor - Venice of Hungary; Korcula - The Venice of Croatia; Dubrovnik - The Venice of Croatia; Rovinj - The Venice of Croatia; Banjarmasin – The Venice of Indonesia; Belen – the Venice of South America; Tigre - the Venice of South America; Bogota - The Venice of South America; Madang - the Venice of the South Pacific; Bamberg has an area entitled ‘little Venice’, which consists of a few houses perilously close to the river. The country name Venezuela itself means 'little Venice'. And in 1912 Gérone was celebrated in a self-titled film as ‘la Venise espagnole’.

have GPS...lose the plot

2007-10-26T02:12:56Z

So now parents can now purchase children's clothing specifically designed to track tykes at all times (and there's even a nifty historical view, 'where past days/weeks or even months movements can be viewed'). If your child strays beyond particular boundaries the device will text your mobile.

I can see the updated versions of Little Red Riding Hood being scribed as I write...'My, grandma what big eyes you have'. 'All the better to track you with my darling...'

Knowing how quickly children grow out of their clothing, and how infrequently they actually keep their jackets on, I can't see that this could be an effective containment strategy anyway (especially at £250 plus £10 per month monitoring). If parents really wanted to get serious about this they would just embed GPS devices under their children's skin at birth and be done with it. Alternatively you could just tell them creepy stories like Little Red Riding Hood to keep them in line.

Valerie Paradiz writes in Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales about the way in which the Grimm Bros. collected their stories not, as most folk believe, from researching the traditional storytelling of German peasants but from contributions made by educated friends and family in Kassel, Westphalia (and most of them women). 'Little Red Riding Hood,' which apparently had an obscure alternate version that provided much stronger roles for the women, was sourced from family friends, the upper-class Hassenpflug twins and was intended as a story about the repressive social climate of the time, which didn't allow women, even those of means, much control over their lives.

But at least they didn't have GPS readers sewn into their corsets!

finding America

2007-10-25T23:34:48Z

I know geography gets a pretty raw deal in the American education system but judging by this performance you'd have to say so does logic, clear thinking, English grammar and expression and a whole bunch of other things. BTW the America in the map to the right is in Holland.

out of the puddle...

2007-10-10T09:56:53Z

One thing to miss about Australia is the muddy cafe latte colour of water (what water I hear you say!).

The water around Lisbon is very expressive - dark and brooding, clear and bright, transparent and guileless - but almost never that unmistakable impenetrable latte of the Yarra (and these fond words come from someone who almost never drinks coffee..).