The top triangle
Last night I went to a movie and when the ads were showing at the start, the logo for the ad management company came on as it always does - a neon sign in a lawn at night that says "Hopscotch" in a boxy cursive script. I heard a guy behind me say to the guy he was with, "I know the guy who made that."
"What, made the sign?"
"The whole thing, he designed the whole Hopscotch thing for them."
This struck me as the kind of conversation you have in Sydney all the time. Everyone knows everyone who makes things that the rest of the country sees. Almost every day on TV I see something shot in my neighborhood - well, exactly every day because I watch Sunrise in the morning over breakfast and it's shot in Martin Place which is exactly a 45 minute walk from my house and I used to walk right past there every morning to go to work. Once on the ABC there was a documentary on people who are addicted to Ice (crystal meth), and the whole thing was shot in exactly my neighborhood, my main street, my grocery store.
The Hopscotch remark got me thinking about this. Living this close to the centre of the biggest city in the country, it's like living in the top tip of a pyramid. You live close to where everything gets made for the whole rest of the country, but you never see the rest of the country because your attention is directed toward the pinnacle. As far as my experience of my own life and culture is concerned, the whole of Australia could be this little town of folks from here to the Opera House, boundaried at the train tracks on one side and South Dowling Street on the other, with about 10,000 people in it. Everyone who makes anything lives here - TV, film, books, movies (well, movies if you extend past South Dowling to include Moore Park - where they shot the Matrix movies and Happy Feet), ads, magazines, all the money in the country, airlines, consumer goods (Johnson & Johnson but not Kimberly Clark, maybe we'll have to include out to Luna Park on the other side of the bridge). And of course web sites!
On occasions when I've gone to rock concerts with my friend the rock journalist, even when there was room to stand in the very front row and he went up there, I liked to hang back a bit because to me, an important part of the experience is not just watching the band but also seeing the people, getting a sense of the crowd and feeling like part of them. Maybe living where I do is like standing in the front row. You don't get any sense of the crowd behind you - it might be a little club of 20 other people, it might be a huge stadium of 300,000.
That's what I was thinking at the movie theatre last night.
"What, made the sign?"
"The whole thing, he designed the whole Hopscotch thing for them."
This struck me as the kind of conversation you have in Sydney all the time. Everyone knows everyone who makes things that the rest of the country sees. Almost every day on TV I see something shot in my neighborhood - well, exactly every day because I watch Sunrise in the morning over breakfast and it's shot in Martin Place which is exactly a 45 minute walk from my house and I used to walk right past there every morning to go to work. Once on the ABC there was a documentary on people who are addicted to Ice (crystal meth), and the whole thing was shot in exactly my neighborhood, my main street, my grocery store.
The Hopscotch remark got me thinking about this. Living this close to the centre of the biggest city in the country, it's like living in the top tip of a pyramid. You live close to where everything gets made for the whole rest of the country, but you never see the rest of the country because your attention is directed toward the pinnacle. As far as my experience of my own life and culture is concerned, the whole of Australia could be this little town of folks from here to the Opera House, boundaried at the train tracks on one side and South Dowling Street on the other, with about 10,000 people in it. Everyone who makes anything lives here - TV, film, books, movies (well, movies if you extend past South Dowling to include Moore Park - where they shot the Matrix movies and Happy Feet), ads, magazines, all the money in the country, airlines, consumer goods (Johnson & Johnson but not Kimberly Clark, maybe we'll have to include out to Luna Park on the other side of the bridge). And of course web sites!
On occasions when I've gone to rock concerts with my friend the rock journalist, even when there was room to stand in the very front row and he went up there, I liked to hang back a bit because to me, an important part of the experience is not just watching the band but also seeing the people, getting a sense of the crowd and feeling like part of them. Maybe living where I do is like standing in the front row. You don't get any sense of the crowd behind you - it might be a little club of 20 other people, it might be a huge stadium of 300,000.
That's what I was thinking at the movie theatre last night.
posted by Ellen at 11:16 am
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