Has anyone else been wasting their life looking at Google’s street view photographs of Australia? I only found out about it by accident last weekend (I’ve been waiting for London to come online, not realising they’ve been working on Australia all this time) and have spent hours since then poring over the maps.
It seems to be a universal quirk that everyone first goes to look at somewhere they already know quite well, to compare the images with the reality of their memories. I looked up the suburb of Adelaide I grew up in, to find that Google captured the area in the midst of that great Australian tradition, Hard Rubbish Day.
My grandma’s old house, in a tiny town off the highway in an obscure backwater of New South Wales, is now visible to the world online. On the other hand, my girlfriend looked up her mother’s house in Caulfield only to find her section of street replaced by a black screen and the ominous legend “This image is not available.” She called home that night.
I don’t think it was the block on which that unfortunate man conked out after a night on the turps, after attending his best friend’s funeral (as the whole world now knows). That image, now removed, seems to be the only Australian one so far to have joined the likes of the fence climber and the burning house amongst the American street views.
Incidentally, the block on which that house burned down has also been blacked out, even though the hoses and smoke can still be clearly seen from further down the street; and of course, the images Google removed can still be seen on dozens of web sites around the world. The images persist after reality, even Google’s version of it, has moved on.
In my childhood neighbourhood, every day is bin day. Tied to its maps and aerial photographs, Street View gives an illusion of a perpetual present moment, when in fact it depicts a past world growing less true to the world by the second. A woman in Sydney observed, “Both my parents were pictured outside their house, but my dad passed away a month ago.”
Google would like to show the world in Street View, but remain invisible itself. The camera car is never seen, but on the dirt roads in remote parts of Australia, it reveals its presence as a cloud of dust stretching out along the road. (By this stage, the name “Street View” is becoming less and less appropriate.) The presence of the camera and the people who control it is also reflected in the choices the drivers have made.
For me, their most peculiar decision was to drive in and around the town of Wittenoom. If you clicked that last link for the map you’ll have seen that the sponsored link at the bottom of the page, instead of the usual advertisements for tourism services in the area, is a government warning headed “Do not travel to Wittenoom.”
Officially, Wittenoom no longer exists: the state government degazetted it as a town last year. All public services, including electricity, have been withdrawn. Only eight people still live in what remains of the town. Of its 20,000 former residents, over a thousand have died from exposure to the blue asbestos that was the town’s sole reason to exist. The government strongly advises against tourists from visiting: “Travelling to Wittenoom is not worth risking your life. The existence of tiny asbestos fibres on the ground and in the air which are a product of past asbestos mining present a deadly risk.”
I’d like to know what made the Google people decide to make a detour through Wittenoom. Were they following instructions or defying them? Acting out of ignorance or out of curiosity? Perhaps it was a desire to witness and preserve, in some way, what was left of the town before it was completely erased from the face of the earth, regardless of the potential risk to their health. I hope they drove around with the vents and windows shut.
What is there to see in Wittenoom? Empty blocks and crumbling streets, a few scattered houses, some still occupied. A mysterious truck with “Sound Production” painted on the sides is parked outside one home. The townsfolk apparently still offer accomodation for backpackers, at six bucks a night. One of the residents still holding out against the government’s plans to relocate her has set up a website, but it hasn’t been updated for several months. Not surprising I suppose, being without access to the internet, phones, or mains power.
Filed under: Writing by Ben.H
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Streetview Adelaide: The Museum Of Dirt
Tuesday 7 October 2008
I haven’t been doing any work, I’ve just been playing with Google’s street view of Australia. I’ve been mostly looking at Adelaide, my old home town.
Thanks Google, for picking Hard Rubbish Day to send your little car around the neighbourhood I grew up in. You make it look like I spent my childhood in a tip.
Note also in the above photos two other Adelaide icons, the brush fence and the stobie pole. I’ve tweaked the photos a little bit because Google went through town on a bright sunny day, and the intermittent tree cover made a lot of the pictures overexposed.
Filed under: Travel by Ben.H
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Bus Simulator 2.0
Sunday 5 October 2008
This weekend I’ve been distracted by (a) a head cold, and (b) Street View on Google Maps. The Sooper Seekrit Kar has been tootling around London for months now, but there still aren’t any British photos available on Google’s site yet. I’ve been counting on this to save me from having to take lots of boring photos of where I live, work etc to email the folks Back Home.
I thought I’d have to content myself with vicarious trips around New York City in the meantime, but I’ve just found out accidentally that Street View is now available for Australia. Not just inner cities – the whole bloody lot. Well, the bits I can be bothered looking at.
After checking up on the houses I used to live in around Melbourne, I headed out through the suburbs to see how far the Street View photographs extended. They extend all the way up the highway, 750km to Adelaide. Even though technically, out in the Mallee, there are no streets and there’s not much of a view.
If you ever wanted to check out the main drag of Lameroo without actually going there, now’s your chance. My childhood homes on the outskirts of Adelaide seem to be in there too, so I should have more to report soon.
Filed under: Travel by Ben.H
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Stockhausen for Everybody!
Thursday 2 October 2008
The Stockhausen Proms I enthused over in August can now be yours – both concerts in their entirety (from the BBC radio broadcast) are online thanks to inconstant sol (via The Rambler).
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Why I’m not a musician
Tuesday 30 September 2008
Having mentioned Paris Transatlantic the other day, I started looking through some older editions and found an interview with Phill Niblock. Niblock was the inspiration for my piece now showing at the Redrawing exhibition in Hobart (plug!).
Something Niblock said reminded me why I’ve never sought music-related employment as a day job to fund my musical activities: I worry about what might happen to me if I’m placed in regular contact with musicians. Here’s Niblock discussing the role of the performer in playing his music (remember that his music sounds kind of something like this):
There were two especially bad performances in my memory. One was in The Hague, actually. We were doing a concert and one guitar player had come to the rehearsal; and the other guy couldn’t come for a rehearsal at all – he’d never heard the piece nor had the CD or anything. So he came and got up on the stage and immediately started improvising over the drone. And the other guy was playing perfectly. I almost got up and said to him: please lay out. But I didn’t. And a similar thing happened very recently in the States. I had even sent the CDs to this woman who I knew, and who knew the music, and the same thing happened; I came very late, there was no chance to make a rehearsal or a soundcheck, and she just used it as an opportunity to make a really long improvisation for herself with a drone background. I was sort of shocked. I didn’t say anything to her because we were actually staying with her, so that made it difficult.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Monday 29 September 2008
Helmut Lachenmann, “Guero” (1970). Mario Formenti, piano.
(4’57”, 5.89 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Unlucky Thirteen
Monday 29 September 2008
This’ll learn me for talking too much about death. The Brockley Dormobiles are still growing in numbers, and yesterday afternoon I awoke to find my house had been visited by this dilapidated Kombi Van of Doom.
Needless to say, I went back to bed and waited until the hand-sprayed harbinger had clattered away.
Filed under: The Bunker by Ben.H
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Rueful Autopsy
Sunday 28 September 2008
“He reserves his respect mostly for the dead.” Why am I interested in so few composers under the age of 50? Is it simply because I’m getting old and stopped taking an interest in anything new? Or is it that I was never that interested in what’s comtemporary, and my interest is in a particular historical period, of which I happened to catch the tail end?
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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This is starting to get depressing.
Friday 26 September 2008
It’s one thing when you realise that most of the generation of great composers born in the 1920s have now died – Xenakis, Ligeti, Berio, Stockhausen, Kagel, etc – but now The Rambler is reporting that Horaţiu Rădulescu (b. 1942) has died. No other reports yet, and Wikipedia is dithering on whether or not to put it on their ‘live’ page.
ANABlog has recently been posting a bunch of mp3s, with notes, of Rădulescu’s music – simultaneously sensual and austere, using a rich and distinctive palette of microtones, embracing the complete “acoustic spectrum”. If the ANABlog links are down, there are more compositions easily found on the Avant Garde Project site (large FLAC files and sleeve notes here, mp3 versions backed up here).
Also, Paris Transatlantic interviewed Rădulescu last year. It begins promisingly:
He can’t stand Shostakovitch (“de la merde!”), dismisses Schnittke (“tuttifrutti!”), cordially dislikes Boulez (but admits that “he opened up a new sound world for all of us and his management skills come out well in front of the orchestra”), listens to Algerian rai, and Nashville blues while he accelerates in the BMW, and unwinds to Monteverdi and Josquin des Prez when he de-accellerates at home.His own music is unclassifiable. Though frequently called spectral, it has diverged totally from the French academic spectralism which is so hot in institutional circles in Paris these days. Colleagues of his who have become well-known such as Dusapin (the tritones of whose cello concerto “set my teeth on edge”) annoy him through their business skills, and he refers to the music spectrale crowd in Paris with scorn (“they’re the mafiosi”). He reserves his respect mostly for the dead: Wagner, Bruckner (“not Mahler, his music is empty!”), Josquin des Pres, and Xenakis, whom he venerates, adores.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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A Southeastern Trains Employee Offers Travel Advice To A Lost Tourist, Which May Have More General Applications In Life.
Monday 22 September 2008
“It doesn’t matter where you are now, that’s not important. Where do you have to get to?”
Filed under: Stupidity, Travel by Ben.H
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Mauricio Kagel
Sunday 21 September 2008
I performed Kagel’s General Bass (for “unspecified bass instrument”—I used an accordion), a little piece of typical, mysterious wit consisting of sparse, disconnected phrases that hint at some absent, traditionally tonal grandeur. Kagel a) was mildly disappointed at the fact that my piano accordion was not a bandoneon, but took it in stride, and b) was very particular about staging—seated, not standing; very still, as if one player within a giant ensemble; and making sure to underemphasize any espressivo possibility in the fragments. It was a bit of master-class in how to play off of performance expectations, and in how magically you can up the stakes of humor the less you give away the joke.Kagel could be intellectually unforgiving, but even his criticism was cloaked in the graceful good manners of an old-school radical; if he thought I was young and stupid (which he probably did) he never let on, instead giving the generous illusion that the time he spent with me was time well spent.
Mauricio Kagel RIP. A composer I’m still learning how to listen to; although this might be because I keep confusing him with György Kurtág.
Filed under: Music by Ben.H
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The mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham reads inter-office emails.
Thursday 18 September 2008
Filed under: Stupidity by Ben.H
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Please Mister Please
Thursday 18 September 2008
Lejaren Hiller, “An Avalanche” for pitchman, prima donna, player piano, percussionist and pre-recorded playback (1968). Royal MacDonald, pitchman; Norma Marder, prima donna; Robert Rosen, percussionist; George Ritscher, audio technician.
I. Getting Ready For It
II. The Avalanche
III. Cleaning Up The Mess
II. The Avalanche
III. Cleaning Up The Mess
(9’04”, 8.88 MB, mp3)
Filed under: Please Mister Please by Ben.H
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Big news this week, take my word for it.
Tuesday 16 September 2008
1. My String Quartet No.2 (Canon in Beta) continues its conquering of the southern hemisphere when the Redrawing show tours to Tasmania. It opens this Friday, 19 September, at CAST (Contemporary Art Space Hobart), 27 Tasma Street, North Hobart, and runs to 12 October.
More information about Redrawing can be found here. CAST’s website is… currently under redevelopment.
2. My “World Class Anxiety” post from earlier this year has now been published in a revised, improved form in the latest issue of Meanjin – volume 67, number 3.
The new, redesigned Meanjin is over 200 pages of fiction, essays, and poetry – including several contributions from fellow Sarsaparilla writers. Meanjin’s website is… currently under redevelopment.
Filed under: Self-promotion by Ben.H
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Postcards from Berlin (G – VG+)
Monday 15 September 2008
