Brisbane Blog

These are some of my favourites from the recent photos from Brisbane posted on the DeviantART site.

brisbane river by night by ~robbiemoffatt on deviantART

I like this one because it’s from a different angle to most of the “Riverside Expressway at Night” shots.

Boy, it’s hot today. by =champir on deviantART

Cute!

Little One by ~Rizubesu on deviantART

Even cuter!

Garbage Prison by ~CarosKnight on deviantART

A little different. What really happens in a city.

VooDoo Lulu Promo 28 by =DJColdfire on deviantART

I normally get bored by photos of models, but these clothes are awesome.

UPDATE:

The second comment on this post was made anonymously, asking “Who cares?” . It was posted by someone posting from a News Limited network.

Also, Luke Royes, the apparent City News reporter whose tweets I have linked to in the post below, has now made his Twitter account private. He may not be aware that Twitter Search will continue to display the tweets he made before he locked the account down.

Since Twitter Search only lasts for a couple of weeks, click here to see a screenshot I just took of the Twitter search screen, showing the tweets that Luke Royes posted that I quote further down in the article.

Next!

END UPDATE

Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and managing director of News Corporation, is angry at companies who make it easy to find his content on the Internet. Last year, in a speech at the World Media Conference, he called them “content kleptomaniacs”:

The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.

However, it seems when it comes to his papers, taking the content of Twitter users and publishing it without saying who its from is perfectly OK. Yesterday, February 11 2009, Twitter user Erik Veland posted a message about a post from Twitter user Sarah Fallon (who uses the nickname @beautiful_alone). Erik Veland’s post said:

There’s been a rash of uncredited tweets in the news lately. Here’s @beautiful_alone‘s from last week in City News http://yfrog.com/4emxqcj

This is a screenshot taken by Erik Veland of what the City News published:

Click here to see the original message posted by Fallon on Thursday February 4th. As you can see, the City News didn’t bother to credit Fallon by name, calling her a “Twitter fanatic”, which she objects to:

Thanks City News for printing my tweet without crediting me: http://yfrog.com/4emxqcj (via @erikveland). Hmpf. ‘twitter fanatic’ my arse.

The Brisbane City News is part of Quest Community Newspapers, which is owned by News Limited, News Corporation’s Australian arm.

Naturally, when the City News was alerted to this failure to attribute the author of the tweet they republished, they immediately apologised and offered to make restitution to Fallon. Oh wait, sorry, this isn’t Bizzaro World. In fact, both responses to Fallon were a joke. First of all Twitter user Luke Royes, who appears to be a reporter for the City News (a story under his byline appeared in yesterday’s City News here) replied to both Erik Veland and Sarah Fallon:

@ErikVeland @beautiful_alone Thanks for reading @BrisCityNews tell all your friends to pick up a copy each Thursday!

(Mr Royes got the name of his own newspapers’s Twitter account wrong, it’s actually @CityNewsBrisbane).

It’s unclear if this later tweet posted by Mr Royes is a threat relating to Ms Fallon’s complaints about the Brisbane City News’ failure to attribute the source of their story:

Not sure if there has been a previously proven case, but defamation on Twitter is possible. Clearly some forget that.

Ms Fallon also received an email in reply to a complaint she sent to the City News:

Clearly News Limited policy does not currently state that the authors of material quoted in full in their newspapers should be credited or paid.

Sure, it’s a storm in a teacup. There are a hundred stories more important than this one. But just remember that the next time you hear Mr Murdoch complaining about content being stolen, that he’s perched at the top of an organisation who doesn’t respect the work of others.

The beginning of the Lunar New Year is on us again. It’s celebrated in many East Asian cultures including Chinese, Korean, Tibetan and Vietnamese, and Brisbane’s celebrations will be centred in the Chinatown Mall in Fortitude Valley.



At 6.30pm there will be Lion Dancing by the Khuan Yee Lion Dance Association.

At 7.15pm a Cantonese opera will be performed by the Multi Arts Association



Yabin Huang (shown above) will play the erhu at 8.15pm

At 9pm soprano Hong Yan will perform Chinese folk songs and there will also be provincial dancing: This video of Chinese provincial dancing was taken by YouTube user missmardi81 at the Lunar New Year festival in Brisbane 3 years ago:

At 9.30pm traditional cries of Gong Hei Fat Choi will be heard. This means “Congratulations and be Prosperous!”, and is also highly effective for defeating the final boss in the legendary role-playing game College Saga.

For a slideshow of photos from the 2007 Lunar New Year celebrations in Fortitude Valley, click “play” on the player below, or click here to visit the set on flickr:

Celebrations continue throughout the weekend on Lunar New Years’ Eve on Saturday, and Lunar New Year’s Day on Sunday. Restaurants in the Sunnybank area, where many people of East Asian descent live, are also expected to be busy.

There’s an exhibition of war paintings and photos on right now at the QUT Art Museum at Queensland University of Technology’s Gardens Point campus in the city – click here for a Google Map.



“Portrait, Dr Jeff Brock, AME Surgeon, Kandahar” (lower panel).

The Framing Conflict exhibition is presented by the Australian War Memorial and is the work of Lyndell Brown and Charles Green who travelled in the Persian Gulf, South-West Asia and Afghanistan as the Memorial’s official war artists.

This video shows Brown and Green being interviewed about the work that led to this exhibition:

“Afghan National Army Perimeter Post with Chair, Tarin Kowt Base, Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan”

The Framing Conflict exhibition is on until Sunday February 28th 2010

Another exhibition is opening at the QUT Art Museum on Tuesday, February 9th 2010 and runs till Sunday March 7th – the KP11 Producing Communities show. This shows off work from 11 organisations that have been working with the cast-offs and people on the edge of society to help them grab hold of some power by using art. There’s an essay about the exhibition by the curators, Malcolm Bywaters and Dr David Sudmalis, if you click here.


The art works involved are from:

The Tutti Ensemble, seen here performing “How Beautiful are the feet” and the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s “Messiah”, with the Norwood Symphony Orchestra

For more work from the Tutti ensemble, click here to visit their YouTube channel.

Dadaawa‘s work “Diatribe” tries to explain what it’s like to live in a house that isn’t really a home:



ICE‘s “Urban Jungle” shows young people in Western Sydney getting a new view of the world through parkour/freerunning:

Somebody’s Daughter Theatre is displaying art by women who’ve been in prison.

Beyond Empathy is showing an exhibition connected with its Postcodes from the Edge project:

Contact Inc has videos of their Common Ground project:

Feral Arts will show off some of the stories from their PlaceStories project.

Shopfront Contemporary Arts Centre have displays based on their (lost toy story) festival held in Hurstville, Sydney in 2008:

Shopfront’s Soundcloud page is here.

The (lost toy story) Flickr account is here.

Click here for Shopfront Arts’ YouTube channel


The Footscray Community Arts Centre will show photos from it’s Crowd Theory projects:

Barkly Regional Arts are going to set up a listening post where you can hear the recordings they do of music from the Northern Territory through their Winanjjikari Music Centre. You can click on the player below to listen to a podcast they did in October last year, and you can click here to see their podcast page and subscribe to it in iTunes.

Arts Access Victoria are displaying videos of their Warm Hearted Bastards project:

The QUT Art Museum is free to enter, and it’s closed on Mondays and public holidays. From Tuesday to Friday it opens from 10am to 5pm, except on Wednesday nights when it’s open late till 8pm. On Saturday and Sunday it’s open from 12 midday to 4pm.

The best way to get to the QUT Art Museum by public transport is to catch a clockwise free City Loop bus from George St near the Treasury Casino, Adelaide St near King George Square or Adelaide St near Anzac Square. This Google Map shows those three bus stops. You need to get off the bus once it turns into George St from Alice St – click here to see the QUT Art Museum and the George St/Alice St bus stop on a Google Map. You cna also catch a CityCat to the QUT Gardens Point ferry terminal and walk to the Art Museum – that terminal is also shown on the second of those two Google Maps. You can click here to use Translink’s journey planner to find bus or ferry timetables.

The Clem7 Tunnel, running from Bowen Hills under the Brisbane River to Woolloongabba, is opening to cars soon, and before that happens there’s an open day on Sunday February 28th where you can walk, run or ride a bus through the tunnel to have a look at it.

It’s free to visit the tunnel, but people are being asked to book free tickets to manage visitor numbers and avoid queues. Click here to visit the site where you can book your free tickets.

If you’re the sort of person who thinks running is something to be done for pleasure, instead of, say, escaping from a sabre-toothed tiger, there’s a “fun” run which costs $30 to register. This will start at 6am. On a Sunday. When normal people are in bed. But if you like that sort of thing, click here to find out more.

For the rest of us, the open day runs from 9.30am till 3pm. You can enter at the Bowen Hills end of the tunnel – there are three different entrances. Click here to see a Google Map showing the entrances.

At the open day, you’ll be able to walk to the lowest point of the tunnel, 60 metres under the Brisbane River. From there you can walk back to Bowen Hills, catch a shuttle bus back to Bowen Hills, or walk to Woolloongabba and catch a bus back to Bowen Hills from there. At Bowen Hills there will also be a display of vintage, hot and luxury cars, face painting, music, and displays about the tunnel and food and drink for sale. There will also be giveaways, apparently.

Be warned that bags (and quite possibly clothing) will be searched before you’re allowed in.

Free shuttle buses will run from the Cultural Centre bus station and the King George Square bus station to the Bowen Hills entrances – click here to use Translink’s journey planner to find out which buses or trains to catch to get to those stations.

These photos of Taylor Swift in concert last week on February 4th 2010 at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre were taken by Flickr user BonjourHepburn.

For a slideshow of all of BonjourHepburn’s photos of the Taylor Swift concert, click the play button on this player:

If you can’t see the player, click here to see all of BonjourHepburn’s photos from the concert.

These two YouTube videos are from Taylor Swift‘s concert last week, on Thursday February 4th at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre. The first video is “You Belong With Me“, shot by TheCoolestDorkEverrr, and the second one is “Should’ve Said No“, shot by 29Fliss.

Artist Sam Blanch, whose Bridges to Elsewhere exhibition I wrote about last year, has another show on right now at the Tidy art space at 27 Logan Rd, Woolloongabba – click here for a Google Map.

The new show is called “cross a fake“. Blanch  says:

This work comes out of 18 months of art therapy
sessions with Cathy Condon a Coolum artist/art therapist.  The sessions
delved deeply into the layers of my consciousness and produced a year’s
worth of experimental works one of which was in this cross style. 
After sifting through the mammoth amounts of information that came
through my sessions, crosses came up time and again.  

Crosses
have a symbolism that predates the familiar Christian crucifix and it
is these kinds of crosses that I am interested in.  For me the cross is
an important symbol of the centring of the universe, the ability of
humanity to fix things in place using mind and hands, to find meaning
in the patterns of nature (like the southern cross) and the potency of
the spirit world (the power of the use of symbols).  The process of
producing each cross is a synthesis of these above traits, with each
brush stroke and block of colour a meditation on these themes.

The exhibition runs from now until February 19th 2010. The Tidy is open 9-3 Monday to Saturday, and the best way to get to there by public transport is to catch a bus to the Woolloongabba bus station and walk from there – it’s only a few minutes walk away. See the Google Map to see where the bus station and the art space are, and if you need to find out public transport times, you can use the Translink journey planner.

I just found out through Facebook about a site that’s been going for a while, dedicated to finding music videos of Brisbane Bands. It’s called, simply enough, BrisbaneMusicVideos.com

One of the songs the site has found is the classic punk anthem Pig City by The Parameters, written back in the bad old days of the early 80s where being even a little bit weird was enough to get the police beating you up, or planting drugs on you:

If you’d like to follow the creator of Brisbane Music Videos on Twitter, his name there is @POTRM.

If this isn’t your thing, there’s plenty of other styles of music, from The Go-Betweens and The Saints to Custard and Kate-Miller Heidke. And if you can’t see a song you think should be on the site, just request it.

If you’re a Twitter user in Brisbane, you might have heard of the monthly #btub meetups. #btub stands for Brisbane Twitter Underground Brigade, although it’s not very underground any more.

If you’d like to meet some new people in Brisbane you should come along. The #btub meetup kicks off at 6pm and usually goes through till 2 or 3 on Saturday morning, and it’s at the Greystone Bar, 166 Grey St South Brisbane. It’s just across Grey St from the Southbank 5 Cinemas – click here for a Google Map.

Here’s a slideshow of pictures from the last btub meetup night in early December 2009. If you can’t see the slideshow, click here to see the photos:

I won’t be there till maybe 1 am this time, because I’ll be at work then I’m going to see The Lovebuckles play at 11pm at the Music Kafe, but if you want to know more about the event, feel free to send a reply to either of my Twitter accounts, @brisbaneblog or @djackmanson, or of course you can leave a comment here. You can also follow the Greystone Bar twitter account, and the btub twitter account if you like.

BTUB regulars The Lovebuckles will play at the Music Kafe in West End at 11pm – some people will be walking up from Greystone Bar to West End.


The best way to get to Greystone Bar by public transport is to either catch a bus to the Southbank bus station, or a train to Southbank train station, both right near Grey St. If you catch a train make sure you don’t get off at South Brisbane, which is one stop north of Southbank. Greystone Bar, the train station and bus station are all shown on this Google Map if you click here. If you need to know bus or train times, you can use Translink’s public transport journey planner.