Summer salt

And this time next week
When planes find their feet
We'll dive and somersault
In the brine, the summer salt
Tasting sun on our skins
Sweet split watermelon grins
Sand, sea, sky - each a line
Fish in paper, lemon, wine
New tanlines will cross backs
Roadtrip mixtapes in stacks
And the flip flop beat songs
Of what you call flip flops
...and I call thongs.

Life in the bike lane

The Bicycle Film Festival comes to Sydney November 17-21. Check out the program here, kicking off with an opening night party at the Beresford next Wednesday. For the cinematically inclined, films will screen at the Newtown Dendy on Friday-Saturday November 19-20. There’s also a street fair just off of Bourke Street on the Saturday afternoon, and it all winds up beach-side with a ride to Bondi and a wrap party at the Beach Road.

Ugh, it’s like everything I’m missing from Sydney bundled up into a tasty couple of days. And I mean it – you need to soak this one up for me, I’m so sad I won’t be there. Not least for RIDE: Life in the Bike Lane, which is the official exhibition of the festival. The organisers rounded up a talented bunch of artists and designers and let them loose on some life-sized wooden bicycles. The 17 creative types - including the likes of Andrew Quilty and Beci Orpin - will each customise a bike in their own style, and if you head over to the website they have some fun interviews with the artists including memories of their first bikes! Lots of BMX memories but I think this response from photographer James Alcock is my favourite:

Do you have any childhood memories of riding? Now that you’re older, do you still ride?

I've always had pushies since the time I could walk. It's one of the few constants in my life and my dad was always good at repairing them. My grandfather actually had a pushie shop. I remember really clearly my dad letting me go at the top of a hill in Coogee near my house. I was just off my training wheels but didnt quite have a grasp on the back peddle brake thing.
I flew straight across a busy street at the bottom of the hill just missing cars both ways and ended up going over the handlebars when I hit the oncoming gutter. There was plenty of skin off and my nuts were blue and purple for a week! My brother raced BMX at a national level all through the 80s. I am on my pushie every day and I love riding in summer (sans shirt/backpack) super blazed with Roots Manuva (or Skiphop) bumpin throuh my earbuds.

Don't dilly dally! RSVP for the exhibition opening on Thursday November 18 here on Facebook.

"If Paris is France.. Coney Island is the world"

The full quote, pilfered from a faded mural on Coney Island's beachside boardwalk, is:

"If Paris is France, Coney Island, between June and September, is the world."

So said George Tilyou in 1886. Tilyou was a founding father of Coney Island's amusement district, setting up Steeplechase Park as a family attraction full of mechanical rides and sideshow excitements. This was the area's heyday, the turn of the century through to the 1920s, when the area became known as the "nickel empire" and seethed with Sunday crowds of hard-working immigrants on their one day off. It cost a nickel to get there on the subway, a nickel for a dog from Nathan's, a nickel for the rides.

Before Tilyou brought his vision to life the area was originally a resort for the upper class, then a new race track and boxing arenas brought in a broader crowd, and "associated gambling dens, dance halls, and brothels brought a hint of the illicit". All this history hangs heavy in the air at Coney Island; it's not hard to imagine those long-gone days.

Look familiar? Coney Island has a Luna Park too, used as a garish literary motif in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 follow-up, Closing Time. Turns out Heller grew up in Coney Island and his writing often returned to its landmarks of his childhood.

The telling part of Tilyou's analogy is its timeframe. When I visited the iconic south Brooklyn beach, it was very much an October Monday. The sun still shone and the Wonder Wheel still dissected the skyline, but the atmosphere was overwhelmingly one of melancholy, an abandoned funfair. The decrepit boardwalk creaks with every step, and wayward planks will trip you if you don't watch your feet as you stroll. Looking inland the skyline is composed of gritty brick housing projects behind the abandoned old rides. A string of retirement homes inhale the sea air off the promenade, so you're as likely to pass a wheelchair as a bicycle. Those enjoying Monday's noonday sun were generally of the older persuasion; let down your guard and you'll cop an eyeful of vast expanses of dimpled, undulating white flesh, or, if you're slightly luckier, a leathered mob of weathered regular sunbathers.

I passed many older couples out walking. One woman slowed as she approached me; I steeled for small talk and squinted in the glare, trying to catch her eye beneath a faded visor. But before she reached me she stopped short, spread her feet for steadiness, and leaned over from the hips as if peering through the boardwalk cracks for some lost treasure below. Then she held the bridge of her nose lightly and blew snot onto the ground.

An estimated million people per day visited Coney Island in the 1920s, but the area was ravaged by the Depression and spiralled into decline in the 40s when Luna Park caught fire and was closed. Since then Coney Island has struggled, castigated as an eyesore and constantly threatened with destruction by development proposals. But there have always been those who fought for the area's heritage, and in recent years projects like the Mermaid Parade and the opening of Lola Star's Dreamland Roller Rink in the magnificent old Childs building (now, sadly, shut down again, though you can watch a great video about it here) have rallied a dedicated community hoping for a Coney Island renaissance.

It's a historic little pocket of the world that steals people's hearts. To pinch another quote from that mural:

"All Coney Islanders have sand in their shoes. Once it gets in, it never gets out.

Coney Island may be down at heel but that's not to say it doesn't posess charm and beauty. The beach is no Coogee or Bondi, but you can still imagine it a crowded patchwork of beach towels and umbrellas on searing summer days; a many-sunburned-limbed creature imbibing beer and hotdogs and ice-cream from the parade of storefronts on the boardwalk. Sideshow games like the massive "SHOOT THE FREAK" sign kinda sum up the atmosphere - a jarring jaunt back to a bygone era, before political correctness and hyper-litigiousness. A time of hand-painted signs and coconut-scented suntan oil and strings of coloured light globes. Here's hoping Coney Island gets a second heyday soon.

Mermaid avenue

When researching Coney Island before my visit, there was one vague image that bubbled up from the vault of memory. I recalled a music video Supergrass did a few years ago, around the time of their Road To Rouen album, which featured archival and current footage of women dressed as mermaids and doing beautiful underwater dances.

Now, Coney Island does have an annual Mermaid Parade. Held at the height of summer, a sea of floats, vintage vehicles and costumed acolytes parade from Surf Avenue onto the Boardwalk. Each year there's a celebrity Queen Mermaid and King Neptune - this year Lou Reed was King Neptune!

But this is the video I was thinking of, for the song "Low C", and it's actually from a place in Florida called Weeki Wachee Springs. It's about all you can ask for from a music vid - almost more of a mini documentary, and it's a gorgeous complement to the song:



Amazing, right? Apparently Weeki Wachee spring is so deep no one's ever found the bottom. In the late 1940s an ex-Navy bloke called Newt Perry decided to set up a roadside attraction there off Highway 19, building an underwater theatre into the limestone and recruiting pretty girls to be mermaids, smiling and performing aquatic ballets, breathing oxygen sucked from hidden air hoses.

In those days, cars were few. When the girls heard a car coming, they ran to the road in their bathing suits to beckon drivers into the parking lot, just like sirens of ancient lore lured sailors to their sides. Then they jumped into the spring to perform.

Excuse me, I just need to check out flights to Florida....

Supergrass are one of those bands that never seemed to really get their due. They made some of the most memorable pop tunes of the nineties and naughties - grab a copy of their tenth birthday retrospective, Supergrass Is 10, and you'll be suprised just how many of their songs you know and love. Sure, they kicked off their career with two of the most quintessential songs of the Britpop explosion - "Caught By The Fuzz" and "Alright". But they went on to scale pop highs across a range of genres - glam, funk, fuzzy punk, blue-eyed soul, and more than a few nods to T-Rex and Slade. All illuminated by a sheer enthusiasm that's especially evident in the crowd-singalong joie de vivre of "Pumping on Your Stereo":

Life is a cigarette / You smoke til the end

The split-personality swoon and stomp of "Moving" is probably my favourite, though there's a magnetic melancholy about their 2005 Beatlesesque reinvention on Road To Rouen. There's a world-weariness permeating that album that probably isn't unconnected to the band's personal issues at the time. They released one more album, broke with their label EMI and were supposedly working on a seventh record called Release The Drones when they announced they were calling it a day in April this year. RIP, Supergrass. I'll never forget seeing them play Brisbane's Arena in 2004, one of the best gigs I've ever seen, complete with an encore cover of Neil Young's "The Loner".

Coasting

All families have their own shorthand of shared memories, private terminologies and in-jokes. In my family one of those tiny sayings that signifies something much bigger is "you're standing by the water's edge...".

It refers to a Family Circus cartoon that must have run some time in the early 90s - my attempts to find it online have thus far proved futile. In the cartoon, the mother says the words "you're standing by the water's edge..." and each of the kids visualises the scene based on what they've seen of the world. The littlest kid imagines a puddle, the next one a pond, then a river, and finally the eldest kid imagines an ocean.

The cartoon was duly clipped from the newspaper, yellowed and curled under a fridge magnet, and was even trotted out in photocopied form for boarding school care packages from Mum. But most of all the words became a mantra of reassurance from Mum whenever we were on the brink of some kind of change in life, and feeling a bit scared about what the future held. A reminder that whatever insecurities you feel, there's a whole world of opportunity there for you to conquer. From a school swimming carnival, to boarding school homesickness, to starting uni and then moving to Sydney... each time the scope was grander, the water's edge stretched further. Now I don't even need Mum to say the words; they just pop into my head.


Standing at the water's edge can be nerve-wracking, but with these times of change there also comes a dropping-away of commitments and a sense of freedom that I can only imagine becomes increasingly rarer into adulthood. In fact I'd say the past few months, waiting to get to this point, have been more difficult than the actual leap into the unknown. To switch metaphors, until the water's edge was in sight, it has sometimes felt like pedalling painfully uphill.

Having finally finished the climb, the downhill leg is exhilarating. Suddenly things are moving of their own accord, as time marches on toward a no-longer distant date of departure. Goodbyes are suddenly for real, packing is becoming a priority... There's no need to pedal now - I'm coasting. All that's left is to kick up my heels, feel the wind in my hair and enjoy the ride.

Manly pursuits

It was a golden late afternoon at Manly wharf on Saturday...
...Not quite warm enough for a dip though...

There are buildings with some beautiful old facades down near the beach...
Spotted: this ripper old dragster on the promenade...
... St George players warming up before taking on the Manly Sea Eagles...

Brookvale Oval, home to the Sea Eagles, is my favourite NRL ground. Aside from how fun it is to get there, passing all the most famous views of Sydney Harbour on a chugging ferry, it's also a really small ground and one of the few that still has a grass hill rather than wall to wall grandstands. Consider: a sell-out crowd, like Saturday night's top-of-the-table clash between the Eagles and the St George Dragons, comprised about 16,000 people.

We got to the ground so early we scored front row seats in the bleachers. It gave us a fantastic view of the game, and put us right in the middle of the game's atmosphere - both on the field and in terms of bogan crowd behaviour. A contingent of Dragons fans were encamped behind us on the hill, singing "When The Saints Come Marching In" and heckling the diehard Manly fans. Both the Dragons and Manly fans were up in arms about the quality of the refereeing - both adamant that the umpire was biased against their team. "He's been doing it all day, ref!" was the cry that rang out over and over. Despite the enthusiasm for these fat guys next to us (they were particularly impressed with the Manly cheerleaders, the "sea birds"), the most intense fan was a tubby old lady with owl-like round glasses, who seemed hell bent on provoking a physical altercation with someone, anyone....

At the end of the game, they sounded a siren to let the crowd know they could run onto the field. Suddenly kids appeared from every angle, leaping over the fences, playfighting and attempting to steal the various padded promotional signs. I looked away for a minute and my dad had calmly wandered down into the fray, and told me later on the bus home that he couldn't wait to tell the folks back in the George that he'd stood on Brookvale!

New eyes

Feel like I have new eyes. Everything just looks so good today - colours are vivid, the light is sharp and clear.... Kicked myself that I didn't take the camera down to Gordon's Bay for our weekly snorkel slash hangover cure.

These photos aren't from today. Today the water was aquamarine green and crystal clear, with sailboats racing out past the bay and dogs chasing tennis balls everywhere. No sign of the groper today but we did see some cool fish that were incredibly long and thin, like animated sticks. There's a photo I really want to capture, of my red toenails (and plugger tan) against the blue sky and green water as I'm floating on my back... But I'm too scared of getting the camera wet!


Stroke of genius - dragged a mattress out into our courtyard for an outdoor afternoon nap. The sun is softer here, filtering dappled through buttery yellow-green new leaves and a gentle breeze. My hair is curled with sea salt and I'm listening to Elbow, El Perro Del Mar and Miles Davis and reading lengthy Vanity Fair articles online.... conserving energy for Mardi Gras tonight!

Salt of the earth

A temporary reprieve from the rain this afternoon brought nothing so vivid as the call of the ocean. Riding home in the afternoon sun, I was barely even into Randwick when I swore I could taste salt in the air.

The ladies' pool had just been pressure cleaned, and every shell and darting shoal came in crystal clear to the agog goggled eye. The swell was like nothing I'd seen before at Coogee, waves crashing into the pool and frothing every second lap end.

McIvers Baths is apparently the only women-only ocean pool left in Australia. While trying to find out how long the pool is, I stumbled on all these other colourful historical tidbits about the pool. Failed discrimination suits by guys who felt slighted by the no-dudes policy. Allegations of lewd, lascivious depravity; accusations of a "lesbian lair".

True, there generally is a fair splash on skin on show. It's weird to feel like a prude when stripped down to a one-piece, but then most places I'm used to swimming aren't studded with boobs, bobbing and floating here and there like fleshy Christmas ornaments. From seasoned pancakes to wayward wall-eyed nipples, the shamelessly bared baps of every age, shape and size may leave you wondering where to look... but that can actually make it somewhat easier to put your head down and smash out some laps.

People ask what the secret is to swimming laps. There isn't one. You swim to the end - then you swim back again. You get to the end however you can - counting strokes, counting breaths, mentally muttering gangster rap. Most the time it's just a struggle. Saltwater in your nose, burning the back of your throat. Forcing out three strokes before gulping air, kicking out cramps in crooked toes. But now and then you hit that state where you're physically on autopilot, and the arrow-straight back and forth becomes strangely meditative.

It's amazing the things that pop into your head, when all is submerged silence and your arms and legs have found their rhythm. Forgotten song lyrics, long-lost snatches of swim coach suggestions for stroke correction. Childhood memories.

Growing up in a bush town, the ocean was an exotic thing to be feared. On rare visits to the coast I remember squealing while the water licked at my ankles, my dad trying to teach me to catch waves, and watching amazed as the tide rushed out around my feet. But swimming itself always came easy.

Australian childhood is built on being in and around the water - from sprinklers to paddling pools, brown dams and rivers to bright blue chlorine. We grow up slathered in 15+, via bomb dives and kickboards and swim clubs and 50 cents' worth of mixed lollies from the canteen after an hour's squad training. I feel like some huge portion of my latter primary school days was spent swimming up and down the St George council pool.

I wonder how elite swimmers cope... watching that black line unspool for hours, kilometres, every day for years on end - they must see it even when they're not submerged.

At any rate, today's swim was a special one. Maybe it was all the lesbian nipple and armpit hair on show, but I started feeling a bit Helen Reddy. Propelling myself through the water I felt strong, and somehow womanly. Every 150 metres or so, I'd stop to clear the salt and fog from my goggles, and it was literally a revelation.

Like that bush kid slowly warming to the waves for the first time, I think a big part of the spirituality many people draw from the ocean is tied to fear. Well, maybe fear's not the word. But the undeniable sense of your insignificance it gives you - no matter how important you think you are, the sea could crush you in an instant... or just dump you and make you feel silly. Sometimes you need that.