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July 25, 2004
I was depressed yesterday. I was tired as it had been a hard week. It was raining and cold. Suzanne was holidaying on the Sunshine Coast enjoying the sunshine. Winter had pressed in around me. A lonely weekend in mid-winter
I was listening to Robert Johnson. This phrase from Hellbound on my Trail kept replaying itself in my mind.
"I got to keep movin'
I got to keep movin'
blues fallin' down like hail
blues fallin' down like hail
Umm mmm mmm mmm
blues fallin' down like hail
blues fallin' down like hail
And the days keeps on worryin' me
there's a hellhound on my trail
hellhound on my trail
hellhound on my trail"
Robert Johnson
Then I played the Rolling Stone's Exile on Main Street, that excellent album, with its mixture of rock & roll, blues, soul, and country and its American references to drugs morgues, courthouses, bordellos, deserted highways, soul survivors and defeated people still searching for the American dream. The casualities and nerve-torrn nights are everywhere in this dark dense album.
I was too depressed to even drive to Kino's to get some films on DVD. There was no winter sunshine today.
So I walked the city streets of the inner city with the two poodles. We were exploring Adelaide's built environment looking at all the new apartments going up around me. The state is reputed to have a good 20th century architectural story to tell. It is a strong and regionally distinctive story told by its surviving 19th-century bluestone, limestone and sandstone villas, banks, churches, schools and public buildings. A heritage story.
Today? Do the new apartments at Halifax Street add to that heritage? They depressed me even further. Small enclosed boxes within rectangular complexes running along both sides of a street. Row after row of depressing visual forms across several street blocks. Many of these were cheap and nasty without balconies. It was hardly a gathering place There was little by way of a “village center” that would function very much like a town square, with exterior and interior spaces for social activities and meetings.
I saw nothing approaching this kind of work.
This is MIT village by Frank Gehry:
I kept on thinking to myself why cannot that be done in Adelaide. Why recycled straight modernist lines and flat surfaces?
This is not momumental architecture. It is modest and local:
It is innovative form without being excessive. Adelaide could have done something like this:
It had two city blocks (an old contaminated Council depot) given over to urban living to play with remake Adelaide. The dream of building an "ecological city" in the heart of Adelaide faded. What we got instead was pedestrian urban design.
I came back home, played some more Robert Johnson, then more of the Rolling Stone's Exile on Main Street. I wanted to hear a world weary, bar room band playing in some honky tonk jive expressing their bleaklived experience of the pain and joy of the underside of urban life. You see that underside in the broken glass on the ground, the empty shops, the urban nosie and the shadow figures in the enveloping gloom as you walk the streets.
The music is what gives expression to the despair of being hemmed in and torn. It is expressed in Exile on Main Street where everyone is heading for an overload whilst being stranded on a dirty road. This music takes us by beyond the bleak drugged nihilism of Sticky Fingers to facing the depths of despair w e find ourselves in.
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retail therapy kicks some major depression butt.
So does changing the colour of your hair. No, really.