By David Cox

City Memory 1 - Science Club, Mid to Late Eighties

Once upon a time, in the mid to late 1980s there was this gathering of mainly men called the Science Club. We used to meet in a building near the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets. We gathered every Wednesday night to get smashed and talk about science. There were explorers, mechanics, artists, lecturers, musos, travellers, and friends of friends. Heaps of people. Sometimes women, but mostly men. Science and technology were the main themes, although we ended up talking about pretty much anything we wanted to after a while. One was expected to bring something... some object of strange technology, some photos, a magazine article, maybe some poetry, or a film, an invention, an art object - a theory.

When I first met these guys in 1982 I was a film student and was told before I went that I'd be expected to show my film (a rather over-ambitious and under-funded film about The Revolution in Melbourne), and explain it right there and then. Having done so I then intermingled with the vibrant intellectual party and was treated that very night to an introduction to (for me, the totally unheard of) chaos theory, entropy, and fractals. Ah, the Signs club. Signs society. It had many names. I've heard it is still going somewhere. It seemed it back then a natural extension of the vibe of the streets outside. They call it the entertainment precinct today.

City Memory 2 - Inner City Containment Zone, Present Day

That sense of *something happening* is still around that part of the city, but has changed somewhat - the area has been somehow cordoned off. The fences are 24 hour fast food joints with bright yellow and red plastic self illuminated logos, cinemas and games arcades. The area seems to have almost been set aside as a kind of inner city teen homeless drug and impulse desire ghetto. A tolerated zone of increasingly isolated desperate homeless kids and teens, and of course, those who exploit them. Like all cities, Melbourne has its containment policies for those who don't fit in. The bigger an area's role as ghetto is, the harder it is to find somewhere to sit down, take a pee, or do anything not tied to quick commerce and fast purchase. They actually set it up that way. They plan that stuff. People sit down and work all that stuff out.

City Memory 3 - Sketches of Street Vibe, Last Week

The videogames stores, and in particular, the more run down ones; the ones with hand-drawn signs in the window advertising "VIRTUA COP 2 one dollar!". Just off the main drag, away from the shiny 'official' 'family entertainment' type arcades, the funky arcades have rows and rows of only the most popular, profitable games. In some rather licentious sex-themed games, getting the right pieces of a digital jigsaw rewards the player with a full-screen soft-porn image.

You won't find that in Timezone.

The area has made the news lately as a bit of a heroin scene, and for as long as I've known it, has been a bit 'sus'. You occasionally see people running into or out of alleys just that bit too quickly, people in various states of demise and stupor, the neon flashing signs reflected in dimming eyes. That edge, that nervous ache to the street is getting stronger all the time.

There's one old busker guy who sits on the corner or Russell and Bourke and plays this inverted plastic paint bucket and a broken cymbal. Unlike a lot of the other buskers he's quite good. I'm amazed at just how little it takes to conjure up music from nothing, except perhaps when there is nothing else left. Nothing at all.

City Memory 4 - Video On While You Eat, Thisafternoon

Russell Street in winter. Rain. Look up to see the sheets pour across skyscraper towers with satellite dishes on top. Notebook in pocket, belly full of Peking-style beef on rice and Chinese tea, and Victoria Bitter. Lights really bright. Loud, really loud videogame sounds from row after row of arcades.

Rows and rows of Chinese restaurants - each one displaying red ducks hanging in the window - giant pieces of pork. A guy furiously smashing the duck and pork to feed the never-ending demand for the stuff on rice, with noodles, with vegetables. My favourite of these is "Nam Loong" who have, for twenty years, offered the least inexpensive eats for local Malaysian RMIT students.

"Pho Dung" - Vietnamese soup joint opposite the eternal Stalactites. A chain of about six soup joints now all across town. "I'll have Number 15 (sliced chicken) please" I say and plant myself down under bright flouros. My reflection in the mirror tiles. The logo of the place is a smiling bull and a proud chicken, each on either side of a bowl. Bottomless Chinese tea out of a really hi-tech aluminium thermos bottle. Always warm inside the place. Makes my John Lennon glasses steam up every time. Each soup comes with a huge plate of beanshoots, Vietnamese mint, lemon and chilli. David Copperfield magic show video on the twin TVs mounted on either side of the restaurant. Or Michael Jackson compilation video. I'd forgotten just how bizarre Jackson's persona has been for the last fifteen years. Damn the soup is good.

City Memory 5 - Videogames, Pawn and Porn, Tomorrow

Television cannot match the speed and colour of the games over the road though, set as they are in the reflected puddles of rain amidst the neon sorrow of Little Bourke Street. So many games have us flying through cities - really shiny bright cities. Usually with day-glo gun in hand, players swoop down on faceless bad guys. The pre-game sequence outlines their status as drug-runners or corporate crims, but makes little difference to the glee with which they are mowed down. In a thousand arcades in a thousand cities, this brand of digital justice is played out over and over again. Two bucks a game and don't slam the door on your way out.

Porno supermarket, with pink plastic sex toy impulse purchase items in the window. Bored girl behind the counter. Those swinging doors like in western movies hiding row upon row of plastic-covered mags, videos, toys, condoms, lotions, objects. Security cameras. Sometimes the porno joints are nestled behind newsagencies, which have the logo of the "R" in a diamond out the front.

Window displays of army disposal stores with objects aimed at stirring the passion that burns inside the heart of being a nobody: Maglite torches. Replica pistols. Bayonets. Ammunition tins. Gas masks. Camouflage. Webbing. Almost pornographic in their fetishisation. Arranged in thematic sections; sharp, deadly knives, slingshots and crossbows, patches and badges, police stuff - all semi legal, semi authentic.

The second-hand shops along Russell, between Bourke and Lonsdale, never fail to entertain. The unlikely combos of objects in the windows - obsolete computers, super 8 cameras, scratched watches. The windows are like installations - strange museums, without meaning to be. These joints have been there as long as I can remember, and once upon a time, Russel Street was known for its many music shops. I bought my first acoustic guitar in 1975 when I was 12 years old from a store which stood exactly where the second glass door on the right of the shiny and massive Greater Union cinema now is. I remember that guitar... "Alvarez". A cheap classical. Fifty dollars. These music places were kind of daggy, and sold instruments which you associated with high school music lessons - recorders, trombones. There were harmonicas in racks: A, B, D, E, F, G. Plectrums in trays with compartments for different sizes, different thicknesses. There were bazoukis, zithers, music stands, violins, tuning forks and jaw harps. Kazoos. Sheet music. Not one shop like that now, but at one time, maybe four or five.

City Memory 6 - Ancient Hard Drives and Tram Pantograph Sparks

I like it now that the old Women's Hospital has been demolished, because it allows a view of the amazing reading room dome at the State Library - this beautiful dark hemisphere that covers the equivalent of an 18th Century hard drive: so many books, and shelves upon which books sit - the latter arranged like orange sections fanning out from a central hub. Seen from above, the State Library is a kind of pie-chart. It's one of the few non-religious places one can find quiet in the city. Go there and see the city's thinkers peruse, and the reverberating coughs echo around you. A fucking sacred place. Sacred.

The trams flash. The pantograph-on-wire sparks across the street and the brightness of these electric fireworks illuminates all around, if but for a millisecond. One frame, if this were a film (the animator talking). Lumbering structures these trams, I think as I watch an articulated 'light rail' creak up Bourke Street toward Parliament House. They've renovated that place lately and the cleaner it gets, the dirtier it feels. But the city has its own vibe, and the people who use it know that. The city is all those crazy moments; all those unexpected sudden and slow events which coalesce in the mind and the imagination. In my memory it will always be this 'entertainment' section which means the most to me. Not just Melbourne, but every damn city.

I'll always feel at home with this, my reflection scattered across the sad fragments of the countless storefronts of memory. I'll play against the computer in the arcades but I always play against myself in the cheap Chinese restaurants as I try to write. To write *along* these streets and these pavements. To write *around* these tiny kitchenettes where the ducks heads are smashed with the cleaver, next to piles of sacks of rice and shrines to the Buddha under a chair.

You see, it's just too late.... The last tram's long gone and it's way too far to walk home. I'm stuck here for a long while yet. It's raining. Pen to rain-stained paper, I'd better get back to it...

David Cox <paradox@toysatellite.org> is a film-maker and writer based in Melbourne, Australia.

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