Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere opens an embassy in Melbourne

 

Opening this week as part of the Next Wave festival in Melbourne, is “the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” Asian embassy. This exhibition is the ‘embassy’ of an imaginary pan-Asian nation named after the euphemistic term the Japanese used for their short-lived Asian empire.

The project is the brainchild of three Perth artists – Abdul Abdullah, Nathan Beard and Casery Ayres. All three grew up in Oz, the child of Caucasian fathers and Asian mothers (Thai, Chinese and Malay variously) and their work aims to explore the relationship between Australia and contemporary Asia – although how they plan to do that is unclear. I have not had a chance to see the exhibit and all I can find online is photos of them swanning around Bangkok in parodical Siamese headwear and riding on elephants.

One of the members though (Abdul Abdullah) is also a well-respected painter.

I’d be interested to hear reports from the show!

Meanwhile in the gay world…

I have noticed an interesting phenomenon lately. The blog is getting gayer. Of course, gay life has always been one element of the site, simply because it is one of my interests. But there seems to be an inverse relationship developing between the “outness” of my everyday life and the material I post here . Now that I am a happily-married middle-management type who spends all day being respectable, the blog has become one of the few outlets left for my gayness

And anyway, the gay posts on this blog are by far the most popular. Surprisingly, given the wide range of topics I have always covered (or tried to), gay-themed posts make up all spots on the top five most visited articles on the blog.

The post I did on  Leslie Kee’s “sex books” on Japanese stars has been by far the most visited on the site, with a throwaway piece I did years ago on “hot Arab actors” still racking up impressive hits. The rest of the top five is rounded out by “Other Stuff I’ll Miss This Summer” (largely due, I suspect, to its inclusion of a gay Arab party in Sydney), a follow-up piece on Leslie Kee with the admittedly calculated title “More hot Japanese super-sex” , “The Boys of Arisa” about the Israeli art-fag party and “transexual celebrity beaten almost to death”.

All this and more is easily accessible anyway through hitting the gay tag, in the tag menu at the top right.

But on to the latest additions: another couple of fantastic videos for the “John” and “Trough” parties in Melbourne:

This follows on from the newest addition to Australia’s party calendar,  a party called “DILF” organised by the same people behind the “John” night with the same  tongue-firmly-in-cheek sensibility. The party seems to be a response to the rising age of dance party attendees in Oz. It is quite noticeable how at many of these events the bulk of the bodies on the dancefloor are in their 30s, with probably more in their 40s than their 20s. Why is this? Has there been a generational shift? Are younger gay men no longer enamoured with dance parties (which seems sad) … or ar they simply too expensive?

Regardless, “DILF” is still determined to have a good time. As the event’s flyer says:

“This Easter we’re taking back what’s ours. The lights of suburbia will be conspicuously dim as daddies of all stripes convene in a darkened room. Who knew sublimating your dark, Freudian desires was such a party?…It’s going to be like Weimar-era Berlin but with absolutely no Liza Minnelli and nobody needs to be coy about wanting to suck a dick“

Over in Bangkok meanwhile, and happening tonight, revellers will ring in the Thai New Year (Happy Songkran!) with the G-Circuit party complete with gogo boys with Supersoakers for the “traditional” splashing. Man of the moment, Masaki Koh will be among them.

An after-party event is being held at the Eden-ic “Library” resort in Koh Samui where Daisuke and I spent a few blissful days last year.

  

Sigh. I can only wish I was there.

2011 Trends: Australian music keeps getting better

Kimbra, Washington, Gotye all showed Australia was continuing its slow but steady climb  towards a more imaginative pop music sphere, away from the dreaded pub rock. Next step though – originality (note the Studio Ghibli/ generic American hipster rip-offs below).

But before being gay gets too whitebread…

…here come the organisers of Melbourne’s “John” and “trough” parties, with something other than white picket fences and matching twinsets on their mind: artfag performance porn!

  

Congratulations Melbourne!

For the first time since I was in high school, Melbourne has been crowned the world’s “most liveable” city by a respected poll in the Economist magazine. The city was named best place in the world to live based on composite statistics measuring crime, wealth, health, education, the environment, transport and culture. In doing so it overtook long-time rival for the post, Vancouver, (which won for almost a decade straight).

Hong Kong came in at 31

Blond ambition

Andrej Pejic has had a pretty remarkable 19 years, born in Bosnia to a Croatian father and Serbian mother, and arriving in Australia as a child refugee. The family lived in working class Broadmeadows until Andrej was discovered and burst on to the scene as a top couture model. Oh, and also, he looks like this … and he is a man.

Despite all this drama, and rather inspirationally, Andrej refuses to make a huge deal out of any of it. His family have always been supportive, he says, and  he claims to have never experienced bullying at his local working class primary school or later at Melbourne’s University High School. He told one reporter:

“I know people find that really surprising. I like to hang around different people and not marginalise myself. They (some people) do . . . ask questions which may be rude, but I never sensed a lot of hostility or violence. I think it (society) is not as closed-minded as some people think.”

What a great message. Andrej also resisted the urge to work the poorhouse-to-the-penthouse angle. In the same interview he says “I thought modelling might be better than working at KFC”. But he continues:

“It is not like I was in this huge poverty and then suddenly it was a rags-to-riches kind of story,” the 19-year-old said.

“It is a different world, but you go to New York, you go to London and you see places like Broadmeadows.

“It’s a working-class suburb, but there’s no shame in that and it is definitely home.”

He seems like a cool guy. I especially liked his deadpan line “It is a new day for androgynous models. I don’t get out of bed for less than 50 dollars a day” ( a quip on Linda Evangelista’s “Supermodels don’t get out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day” line).

Austral-asia

Earlier this month something occurred which has never happened before, the signal of an immense shift: for the first time in Australian history, Britain was deposed as the number one source of migrants to the country – by China. Its actually surprising that it has taken so long. The majority of  immigrants have come from Asia for some time now, but no single Asian country has had the numbers to overtake the UK until now.

There are other signs of Australia’s Asianization too (a process which this blog, obviously, heartily approves of).

A love hotel has opened in Sydney, the city’s first.

And in Melbourne, a new public art project titled “Neon Lane” has been unveiled in the city’s Chinatown. Sixty neon signs have been installed in a dingy alleyway in a bid to replicate (as the press release says) : “ the energy of Mong Kok, the flashing lights of Ginza and the energy of Nanjing Road with the playfulness of Melbourne’s laneway culture.” That might be a touch ambitious.

The signs “ reinterpret traditional symbols of prosperity and peace such as Laughing Buddha and Maneki Neko, beckoning cat of good fortune. Ancient Chinese proverbs will hang alongside delightfully random slogans like ‘Let’s dance’, expressed in five different languages –  Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Thai. “

The designers say “Our inspirations included Chinese poetry and Japanese kawaii kitsch, and it was incredible working to replicate the excitement of Asia’s most vibrant cities in Melbourne”

It all sounds a bit you know, try-hardy and inauthentic, but it is still a cool addition to the city. It is the alley next to the (super Chinese-y) 206 Shopping centre on Little Bourke Street.

More Kimbra

This blog has been playing Kimbra’s stuff since last year and waiting for her debut album, but I didn’t even know about this track until an American friend posted it on her Facebook. The singer is from Melbourne – apparently. I had never heard of him but he seems to be quite famous in Australia now, and quite good:

Melbourne…gay…over?

In the last few weeks, Melbourne’s biggest and third-biggest gay clubs have both closed after running for twenty five years. ‘The Market’ closed its doors with a much-publicized ending bash that everyone knew was coming, but the Xchange was a bigger surprise, with the announcement sudden and rather shocking. The closure of the two venues sees the death of Commercial Road as Melbourne’s “gay” strip. From this point in there is no turning back – Melbourne no longer as a ‘gay village’. When I started to go out, all gay life in Melbourne revolved around the area, there were three major clubs, two smaller bars, a gay bookshop, a gay cafe, a gay medical clinic, a rainbow-painted sex shop and two saunas. Now it is only the sex businesses that remain.

What happened?

Partly, a newer gay neighborhood grew up around Smith Street in Collingwood, one that mixed in with other subcultures in the area. The gay bookshop, Hares and Hyenas, moved here and the area has even seen a new gay bar open (Sircuit). The Commercial Road-South Yarra scene grew increasingly dated with its image of shiny hair-perfect-teeth-and-tight-tops in an era when irony was in. The “cool gays” who would once have moved to South Yarra apartments mostly live in Collingwood these days.

Partly, it was a failure of the gay bar business model. Both the Xchange and the Market charged a significant cover price, while the last bars standing – Sircuit and the Peel – are free.

But more than anything, Commercial Road was the victim of trends reshaping gay communities around the world; greater acceptance and the ability to hook up online mean that gay spaces – in the physical sense – are no longer as necessary as they once were. The new generation of ‘digital natives’ – anecdotally – se no need to go to “gay clubs”. They hang out wherever the party is and then organise their dating lives through gaydar or grindr.

Isn’t this acceptance – to go anywhere and not be ghettoized -what we always wanted? Why then does it seem so sad to see the era of the “gay community” go?  I can remember nights at the Market when I felt something euphoric, and meaningful. I felt like I was part of something beautiful and bigger than myself. Will that spirit, too, be lost?

Thankfully gay clubs have not entirely died though, and there are still the “john” parties for example with their super-cool flyers and grungier, more modern feeling. Indeed its in-your-face super-homo visual aesthetic may just be the perfect solution to our increasingly dissolved presence, and part of their appeal.

‘John’ goes red alert

Goodbye!

The other night I walked down Smith Street, possibly for the last time. The late afternoon sky was a weird moody yellow, as if the sun were shining through the most fragile, feathery veil of storm clouds.  Everything was golden, but gloomy, and a light rain was falling. In this end-of-the-world light a lone locust, the first storm trooper of the apocalpyse, an advance guard for the trillion of its kind massing on the city’s outskirts, hopped into the cafe where I was sipping my latte. It was an omen, but of what? The impotence of man in the face of nature? Or simply, the beginning of the end?  ”Well, ” I said to the barman, as I drained my coffee,  ”first there was (what felt like) forty days and forty nights of rain,  now the locusts – I guess I”ll be seeing you in Hell”.

But its not hell, I’m going. Although it will be hot.

It is hello Bangkok and goodbye Melbourne, goodbye Kyneton; goodbye the murderous magpies and jogging by the river, and end to four days of frenzied cleaning and battling with plump shiny spiders in my windowsills. An end to walking down the street through fluttering, skittering clouds of locusts, and long, lazy days at an empty school.

Goodbye to the kids I see around town on their bikes, the delicious pizzas at Pizza Verde where I dined with my mum, friend and (bizarrely) Australian television personality Tonia Toddman, on Friday.

Goodbye to Fitzroy, with its refugees in tower blocks and cafes and scrawled posters everywhere.  I did my last lap today of VideoBusters (how I love you!), the African internet cafe, Sonido ( I went, and had a guanabana vitamina).

Goodbye to my hopes of dining at Izakaya Den, the “buzz” restaurant for Japanese food in Melbourne for the last few years,  which was closed on my last Sunday night when I tried to go.

Goodbye to an old way of life that I will remember in years to come through this blog.

I’m ready. Bring it on.

Goodbye Melbourne!

Another Melbourne chance missed…

I was walking down Gertrude St for probably my last time today, when I passed a really cute little cafe. It was closed. Still, I was inspired to google it, thinking it might come in handy as a venue for a super-last-minute get-together, only to find that it closes at 4pm daily which rules me out.

I also discovered that “Sonnida” is run by a Colombian couple and specialises in arepas, continuing Australia’s recent vogueish infatuation with Latin cooking.

Here are some pictures I stole off other people’s blogs.

Apparently it does a great breakfast. Cool website here.

Other stuff I’m gonna miss this Summer

In addition to all the music on over the Summer, and the promised Biblical swarms of locusts, there are a few things on in Melbourne over the next few months I wouldn’t have minded catching. Oh well. Who said you could have it all?

Among the things I’ll miss:

The city’s “Midsumma” gay festival featuring an outdoor leather bar (sponsored by Mercedes Benz!) and an exhibition in the basement of a sex club of all the wonderful artwork the “John/Trough” crowd have used to promote their parties (plus another party – this one an angel-themed foam party – high above the city on the rooftop of Curtin House!):

This Arab/gay party (true, its in Sydney, but I could have gone!)

The opening of new bar “Shebeen”, named after the basic canteen-style boozers in South Africa’s townships. The new bar will specialise in African and other Third world beers, with profits going directly back to aid projects in the developing world. Set to open late December on Bourke St.

Little Green Riding Hood

It began in Afrikkkka…

Over the weekend I ended up with a surprise free day, so made my way to the Immigration museum for its current exhibition: “West Africa, rhythm and spirit”. It was a small exhibition, but still an interesting one for anyone interested in African decorative arts (as of course I always have been). And of course, the stylishly renovated interior of the old Customs Building makes it one of Melbourne’s most beautiful buildings any way.

Although I had expected more of an “Africans in Australia” angle (it is the Immigration Museum after all) there was nothing on this, (I guess West Africans would be a pretty small community). Instead it was a straight anthropological exhibit of masks, jewellery and ornaments from the peoples of Ghana and Nigeria, apparently on loan from a (pretty impressive) private collection in New Zealand.

The entrance hall is lined with moodily lit wooden ‘twin’ totems from the Yoruba people, who have the world’s highest birthrate for twins. Odd, that something like that would be so ethnically specific. The plaques explained that the Yoruba had traditionally considered twin births to be supernatural events, with twins attributed otherwordly powers. It was a bit of a PC whitewash though. They didn’t mention that as a result they were often left in the forest to die, which is what I have read elsewhere, any way.

Downstairs there was another small, unrelated exhibition on Timorese ancestor worship with some carved totems like this one.

Melbourne, prepare to be amazed

Unexpectedly, my favorite movie of the last year (which I saw at the International Film Festival) is getting a local cinematic release. “Enter the Void” coming soon to the Nova. Don’t miss it!

This looks fun: discobeans

Japanese home-style cooking, “a performance space” and “REAL underground Japanese fashion”. In Northcote. More info here