Even Nine-year-olds lose memories...

Sad. They are demolishing the chairlift at the Ekka.
Took my godson Alex last year to the Exhibition.
And the best part was the chairlift at night.
He remembers it - my dad took us on the chairlift
when I was about Alex's age too.
The traffic moves slow and redevelopment moves fast
in this damn world that destroys heritage and
memories without thought for what people love.

Scriffles: The Kurilpa Bridge only looks good from this angle. :(

This Public Works Dept photo is the first time I've thought that the Kurilpa Bridge had style.
From any other angle this Tall Ships Marina of a Bridge looks like a pick up sticks nest.
I know, it's a design miracle. So what?
This crook of the Brisbane River will have FOUR bridges - when the Hale Street flyover is done.
Do the words visual pollution come to anyone else's mind?
They built it and then discovered it was pretty low.
It made me nervous from the very beginning and I'm no engineer.
The elegant William Jolly Bridge is now Brisbane's Opera House.
They put the Toaster in front of the Opera House and now the lovely curves
of the William Jolly Bridge are now sandwiched between a design "miracle" and a flyover.
I love bridges. LOVE them. But not this.
My favourite is the Story Bridge.
I cross this bridge at least eight times a week.

I love crossing this bridge - reminds me of the excitement of going to the airport.
It was the easiest way to the airport before the Gateway Bridge was built.
Now, it's the way to work and the gateway home every day.
It's a joy - except when there's an accident or someone decides to do something rash.

Scriffles: Clem7. The sign says pay if you want to get to the other side and save fuel.

So the wind blew the cover off a sign about Brisbane's Christmas present: a new road toll.
Here's a video:

It will cost $4.20 one way to pass through the Clem7 - passing under the city - instead of through the CBD.
http://www.flowtoll.com.au/tag-account.html
We aren't really too happy about it: http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26128167-952,00.html
But Mayor Campbell Newman says it will solve our traffic problems and so we elected him on that promise.
Let's see. Wolfdene Dam, Rochedale dump, Mary River Dam (http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/200911/s2740694.htm), Brisbane tunnel...But you will avoid up to 23 traffic lights and apparently save fuel on the new trip under the Brisbane River.

And we still have to look forward to the Go-Between Bridge: http://www.gobetweenbridge.com.au/
Roads. Tunnels. Bridges. "Connecting communities!" If you can afford to own a car in a few years time.

Scriffles: To Have Done With God by Frank Productions. Physical Theatre Company from Brisbane.

Dance choreographer and theatre director Jacqui Carroll let me film a rehearsal of Frank Productions' work-in-progress To Have Done With The Judgement of God. It's alternative theatre based on a form out of Japan called The Suzuki Method. Very dramatic. Jacqui and husband, actor/dancer John Nobbs, have been adapting the classics for many years and now have quite a repertoire for their ensemble. The creator of the method Tadashi Suzuki has invited Jacqui to create a piece for his annual festival held in his home town of Toga - quite an honour.
This is hard core training. I've attempted it once. It's designed to bond the body, spirit and voice. This is their first all-male piece.

 

To Have Done With The Judgement of God is a radio play by a French "madman, philosopher, playwright" named Antonin Artaud - John plays Artaud in this piece.

This Frenchman was way ahead of his time - he attacked America as a "baby factory war-mongering machine". The radio station which commissioned him to write it pulled it at the last minute and the censorship raised the hackles of other artists such as film director Jean Cocteau. God is found to be an organ pulled out a corpse on the autopsy table.

BTW: it was a hand-held shoot of a few hours.

Tim Finn opens Unnerved: The New Zealand Project at GoMA. He really rocked the house. Vid.

This is a 10-minute edit. Was going to work on it but too exhausted so it's a whole 5 minutes long with some art works from the Unnerved show thrown in. It's worth sticking around for the end when they really rock out. Sorry but Flip Cameras obviously aren't great with audio - and the acoustics in the gallery are not good. But how long has it been since you've heard Dirty Creature or I See Red?

 

 

 

Clouds and servers. Charles Leadbeater's talk in Brisbane. Quick rundown on cultural developments.

Charles Leadbeater talked about Cloud Culture at QUT by raising the question of who or what should control the clouds - of data that is.
If you leave it up to algorithms it's dicey.
 
Amazon's algorithms recently recommended he buy his own book, We-Think. Facebook's algorithm started a rumour that he and his wife were not on speaking terms because they hadn't written on each other's walls in so long - he assures everyone that they are on more than speaking terms still.
 
He started out telling a room full of academics that he wasn't really one of them - he's a journalist. He worked for the Financial Times. He worked in Weekend TV.
 

Charles Leadbeater (left) with Stuart Cunningham (Creative Industries & Innovation centre of excellence director).
 
But when he started out nobody was asking him what his business model was and no one in the "traditional media" game wondered what their end-users were doing with the content they produced. 
 
All that's changed in the past 10 years. He expects the rate of change to maintain its momentum for the next 10 years.
 
Basically, he thinks that the new business model may lie somewhere on a spectrum between aggregators and Apple - he actually thinks that a process is underway called Applizing.
 
He pointed to the fact that Google's new products - like Buzz - are failing while Apple's selling hundreds of thousands of iPads.
And he thinks Google's search function is second-rate - perhaps that's why Facebook has taken the search crown this year.
 
People tend to concentrate on the ferocious struggle between old and new media but it's the ferocious struggle between the new and newer and still newer media which will determine the landscape of the future.
 
So who does get to control the cloud?
He says it's obvious that governments would have a preference for doing deals with one or two players: Apple and Facebook? There's Apple again.
 
However, he says Facebook is "fatally compromised" because the more it goes commercial the less "social" it becomes - and there's a pesky issue of privacy.
While Apple is upfront about its dealings - it's commercial. It helps you to be cool. Thereby it serves you. (Them's aren't actually his words I'm just interpreting here)
 
And one of his big lines is that it's the renegades and the pirates - the guys who DON'T get government subsidies - who will be the game changers. 
But there's room for all - at the moment anyway.
 
For instance, the UK's pollies spend many hours doing interviews with netmums in this election campaign - which has only 600,000 members.

Clouds will come in many shapes and sizes and compositions - depending on how the governance issues pan out. 
 
The users and creators of clouds will come from a "pebble beach" landscape (METAPHOR) - with large organisations such as aggregators, public institutions, universities, libraries, galleries being the "boulders".  
They will replace the boulders of the industrial era - newspapers, TV etc.
 
And then there's the pebbles - amateur and professionals who blog, create, post, mash ... RT even.
 
Cloud capitalists and governments are possible enemies of cloud access and equity - governments because in an effort to control the cloud they will want to make deals with capitalists.
One interesting question came up in the Q&A: Google's attempt to access cheap hydro power for its server farms.
 
I asked Mr Leadbeater about this slight contradiction between consumption and supply - this carbon footprint problem of the technology revolution.
He admits that it's an issue which few are addressing.

Rock solid foundations start at the bottom - not at the top. What's your perspective? Illustrated poem about Brisbane.

With clouds above, 

the rain falls.

Above the clouds,

the sun rises.

People scurry past torn hoarding,

so not glimpsing earth, grass and sky.

Silent, padlocked, empty city block,

forgotten like the first colonial sentinels,

standing small by the expressway, 

dwarfed by the 21st century,

standing small on rock solid foundations that built this city.