"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".

Walkley photo finalists announced

This year's photographic finalists in the Walkley Awards were announced overnight and I was really excited to see who made the cut. It used to be my job to sort through all the photographic entries as they came in, and then to write the gallery notes for the exhibition of finalist images (100-120 photos), and it's one of the things I've missed the most since leaving. Within the office we staff would always make our own predictions about which images would be winners, but it was more fascinating to sit in on the judging sessions and listen to photo editors deliberate over the value of one set of images over another. They take into account a lot of criteria - the context, the constraints the photographer was under, how memorable the image was, whether it shows courage and innovation; the composition, lighting and impact of individual images, and the coherence and tight editing of series of images.

I really believe Australia is one of the world's best countries for photojournalism, particularly on a per capita basis! And it's great to see some new names among the 2010 Nikon-Walkley finalists, at a time when both staff roles and freelance opportunities for press photographers are being slashed. You can see the full list of finalists here; the winners will be announced at the Walkley Awards on December 9.

The Nikon-Walkley prize winners for portrait and regional photography have already been announced - check out a gallery here. I love Cameron Laird's winning portrait of Bob Katter; the composition is fun, and it completely captures the defiant, laughing insolence of him as a bloke and a politician. Another political image that seems destined to be a classic is Glen McCurtayne's commended news photo, a tight close-up of Kevin Rudd's face on the day he last spoke as prime minister, a single tear poised below his right eye.

In the sport category finalists (always a very tight race) I was particularly struck by two series. Craig Golding's commended black-and-white collection of shots of aged athletes at the Masters Games, and Adam Pretty's colour-saturated, dramatically composed images from the Singapore Youth Olympics. Pretty is Asia-based for Getty Images and to my eye his sport photography stands out because he has this way of taking fiercely human moments and instead potraying them with a clinical calm, an almost achitectural beauty; as though his shots are premeditated works of art rather than captured of-the-moment.

The photographic essay category is prized among the togs and this years' entries are strong. Phil Hillyard (who's had a stranglehold on the sport category for a few years) captures small, humanising details in his black-and-white series on new PM Julia Gillard: playing with her high-heeled shoe under the table at a meeting, checking her hair in the mirror before giving a speech. Jack Picone documents the tension and outright violence of the "Battle for Bangkok". And Jason South presents a harrowing photographic investigation of Yayasan Galuh Centre in Bekasi outside Jakarta, where the mentally ill are housed but not medically treated, many of them nude and chained to poles. I remember seeing these shots in the Sydney Morning Herald and thinking we'd be seeing them again come Walkley-time. South, Hillyard and Simon O'Dwyer will duke it out for the press photographer of the year title.

Catch the Nikon-Walkley Press Photo exhibition on tour around Australia:

• Sydney: Australian Centre for Photography - 15-30 October 2010
• Melbourne: The Age - 20th October-December 2010
• Brisbane Powerhouse - 31 January-28 February 2011
• Newcastle Regional Library - March-April 2011
• Adelaide Fringe Festival - November-December 2011

More details here.

Hot DOG

First thing you see when you alight from the subway at Coney Island - the end of the line, the very bottom of Brooklyn - is a huge greasy food chain called Nathan's. (not pictured - this burger boy is cuter than the actual yellow and green facade). Nathan's apparently invented the hotdog, and this place is the site of an annual 4th of July hotdog eating contest. Naturally, I had to try it. I got a cheese dog and, in case that wasn't bad enough for me, some chilli cheese fries.

Isn't this the most awesomely repulsive thing you've ever seen? The cheese is luke-warm liquid, pumped out of a plastic dispenser. The chili looks radioactive. By the time I got my haul down to the boardwalk so I could sit and eat, the fries had all but disintegrated under this mushy mash. It bore not even a passing resemblance to any actual food group and yet the only way it could have been more delicious is if I were in Kings Cross at about 4am. Oh and PS, I'm pretty sure I could have had bacon added to both the fries and the dog, had I so desired.

The life aquatic

On a whim, decided on a Monday jaunt to Coney Island. The New York Aquarium has been there on the boardwalk since the 1950s but it's all pretty modern, with outdoor enclosures for seals, penguins, otters and walrus as well as all the usual fish, sharks, rays, etc.

There's something otherworldly about aquariums. All these winding dark passages, glowing eerily with blue light from the tanks - these walls of thick glass like windows onto another planet. Jellyfish that seem to glow fluorescently in the dark, anemones like alien life forms.

While the past few days' explorations have been soundtracked by folk music, there's something about aquariums - the artificial light, the jarring strangeness - that calls for electronic music, and the Chemical Brothers' Further worked a treat. "Another World", indeed. One of my favourite memories of San Francisco was these parties they'd have once a month at the natural history museum (which included a planetarium and aquarium), when they'd keep it open late at night, serve cocktails and have DJs. It was nuts.


Here in New York though it was very much a Monday afternoon, and I felt like Gulliver among the swarms of kids on school excursions. I think my favourite part was the walrus feature. They have such funny faces, like whiskery fat old men, and seem to leer at you cheesily. Plus they're absolutely enormous, and yet they flip and slide through the water effortlessly. This one was quite the showman, speeding toward us from the far side of the tank and then somersaulting right down the glass, so the kids could stare into his eyes, squealing all the while...

Mystery rambler

Right next door to the Brooklyn Museum is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Odd as it seems to have to pay to get in (hey, capitalism!), it's well worth a visit. The gardens are huge and varied, including fountains and lily pools...

... a conservatory that houses palms, aquatic plants, and a BONSAI MUSEUM where some of the teeny trees are nearly a century old...

... plus Japanese style gardens, a herb garden, a veggie patch for local kids to get their hands dirty, a grove of magnolias, and much more. When you first enter from the Eastern Parkway you're met by the Osborne Garden - a beautiful Italian-style lawn edged with wisteria-draped pergolas - which today was being gussied up for a Sunday evening wedding.

The park has a bit of an interesting history which you can read about here, the space was an ash-dump in the 1800s. Things are happening in the gardens all year round, like the "Ghouls and Gourds" festival planned for Halloween in a few weeks. My all-time favourite flowers are peonies, so fingers crossed I'll still be here in May when the collection of tree-peonies donated from Japan are in full bloom.

Another part that must be amazing in full bloom is the Cherry Walk, with stretching rows of different varieties of cherry trees which apparently put on the best cherry blossom display outside of Japan. Next to that, at least the massive collection of roses were out in all their glory.

Then there's this strange sight - a public artwork by Patrick Dougherty. Called "Natural History", it will stand in the gardens for 12 months until August 2011. Dougherty constructed these odd little huts - they're big enough to stand inside and peer out of - from reclaimed non-native tree branches, with the help of volunteers.

It's apparently all about sustainability and nature and the feelings he felt when he spent time in the gardens. But you know what they remind me of? Those crazy woolly monsters in Where The Wild Things Are. I like the quote from Dougherty where he said he wanted the finished work to resemble "lairs; a place for feral children and wayward adults."

Bish plz

Wandered around Brooklyn Museum in a weird mood today - kept seeing works of art and imagining them with stoopid internet-meme style captions.

Heheh. Heh. Heh. Heheheheh. Surely if a Disney villain and a Rastafarian stoner somehow had a bastard lovechild, it would look like this.

"I love your skirt, where did you get it?"
"It's my mum's old skirt from the eighties."
"Ooh, vintage. So adorable!"
...
(aside) "That is the ugliest effing skirt I have ever seen."

And does anyone else think this looks like George W Bush?