suit, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Melbourne is the first Australian city I’ve visited where I really thought I could live.

Lest that come off snobby, let me explain. Well, yes, I’m a snob but really? Sydney? Canberra? Sydney is too big and freeway-strewn and aggro, and Canberra is just kind of weird with all it’s government buildings and legal prostitution. I’m on the verge of graduating and considering my future career options, as is my lovely and Australian Janelle, and as much as I love Vancouver, I’ve been here a while. A change of scenery, well, it’s an option. However, I’m really not a person motivated solely by career. First and foremost, I want to live in a place I want to live. Melbourne seems like a place I could want to live.

As a city on the other side of the world where everybody has odd accents and roughly 90% of the architecture dates to the Victorian period, it’s different enough from Vancouver (or my last city, Toronto) that I feel like I would be getting a new experience. But it’s also not unfamiliar. It’s bustling and vibrant, with yuppies, hipsters, immigrants and middle-class families rubbing shoulders. The combination of broad streets and countless twisting laneways — an artifact of the 19th century gold rush and subsequent real estate bubble that made Melbourne the richest city in the world and second-biggest in the Empire — makes it walkable, colourful and gives rise to a truly impressive tram network. Tasty, cheap ethnic food abounds, even if the Vietnamese restaurants all call phở “noodle soup” and bánh mì “Vietnamese rolls”. It has a really strong art scene (and street art scene) and a lively pub culture, complete with dozens of trivia nights around the city (go Team “Throw Another Ken on the Barbie”! We would have totally kicked ass if it weren’t for the $12 jugs of beer!). The people seem to all be either friendly or entertainingly pretentious. In a way, it combines a lot of my favourite aspects of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, with a dash of junior-league London for good measure.

And it seem like a place where I could get a job. Maybe.

Anyway, after a couple of overnight flights broken up by a 17-hour layover in a Taiwanese airport, I’m back in Van now, and you know what that means! Pictures!

• hipstamatic Melbourne
• Melbourne street art
• Gold Coast
• Madrid
• Paris

spring dusk, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

The view from my apartment. I actually live in a fairly nice neighbourhood, but it’s a nice neighbourhood that from certain angles (including my front window) looks charmingly dingy. As the weather gets warmer, and the immediate pressure of thesis and paper deadlines has temporarily waned a little, I’ve been doing a lot of walking around the side streets and alleyways of the east side. I like walking. You can see and hear and smell things you’d miss otherwise. Plus, it lets me catch up on my podcasts.

I’ve been an East Vancouverite for almost two years now, though I haven’t explored this side of the city nearly as much as I’d like. Vancouver is not remotely an old city, but wandering through the relatively older neighbourhoods around me is an interesting study. If you look close, you can see the marks left by successive ethnic and demographic waves — an old porno theater just out of sight of some new condo developments, a hidden decades-old sign for Japanese lessons on a clothing boutique, or the Jimi Hendrix shrine between Chinatown and the Skytrain station. It’s also given the neighbourhoods really distinct characters. As a Main Streeter, I’m only a ten-minute walk from Cambie and a ten-minute walk from Fraser, but there’s no mistaking the condos and slick Hong Kong cafes of one for the subdivided Edwardian three-storeys and cramped Vietnamese phở shops of the other.

Olympic Town, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

I’ve managed to stay pretty disengaged from the olympics — I have a thesis to write, dammit! Plus, the olympics combine sport and crowds — two things I’m hardly a huge fan of. But hey, if people want to have their olympics, I’m cool with that. Sure, it’s expensive, but it’s resulted in some much-needed infrastructure, like building the new Canada Line, which finally makes it easier to take transit downtown than to walk (at least when the olympics aren’t on).

It *has* resulted in other changes to the city that I’m less happy about — like turning Granville over to the bridge-and-tunnel skanks and assholes — but I’m at least glad I live in a city that is dynamic, and that *is* changing. Vancouver still feels to me like a project that’s not quite done yet. It hasn’t become what it’s going to be. I don’t know, ultimately, what the impact of the olympics will be on the city, but it feels like part of that process.

phantasy of phinishng a phd, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

So for those keeping track at home, I took leave of my position at Worio last month to go back to work on my PhD full-time. I’d been either a non-student or part-time for the last two years, which seemed kind of incredible to me. How the hell did a six-month leave turn into two years? I guess by extending it and then getting sponsored to be a research intern, is how, but that answer seems too literal and lacking the existential resonance I was hoping for. So I’ll just say that the PhD is simultaneously the best and worst thing I’ve ever done. I’m glad to be back and gladder that the end is finally in sight.

But for now, I’m fully immersed in the full-time grad student lifestyle again. It all came back easily, as I immediately had to dive into submitting a paper to a fairly high-profile conference. Which means the past month has been the tick-tock of an approaching paper deadline with far more to be done than time to do it. Days with the sickening feeling of knowing you’re procrastinating and feeling powerless to stop it. Other days enjoyably lost in elaborate code, listening to Four Tet and Aphex Twin. The sudden happy click when a once-obscure paper starts to give up its secrets and make sense, or the rush of getting a really clever idea for solving a problem. And then biking home from the lab, exhausted, in the early morning hours, and passing through Kitsilano, which is still and quiet and smells like flowers and marijuana and the ocean.

All that, and I kind of think the paper I submitted was not-so-good. The code stayed buggy, the experiments unconvincing and the writing something less than a model of clarity. Oh, well, the “good” news is, there’s always another conference deadline coming up soon!

Until I’m finally done, and then there isn’t.

Richard’s on Richards, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

I’m currently on Salt Spring Island attempting to eat my body weight in goat cheese, but I wanted to acknowledge the passing of Vancouver’s answer to CBGB, Richard’s on Richards, which is gone as of today.

Ever since I moved to Vancouver, I heard rumours Richard’s was about to fall victim to the insatiable condo market, so it’s a bit ironic that as the market drops, Richard’s is being demolished to make way for development presumably nobody especially wants. But such is life. As a little mini-memorial, here are some of my favourite photos from my years of Richard’s concert-going. (You should probably also check out Allan Macinnis’s much more articulate thoughts on the matter.)

Bloody Vivaldi, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Janelle + Eric + photo booth + the random album game = the best new album you’ve never heard.

Sunset Rubdown at Richard’s, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Spencer Krug and company playing to a sold out show at Richard’s on Richards.

The opener was a band called Witchies, whom I’ve never heard of, but they were fantastic.

the unmoving dance of shame, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Dan Deacon took over Richard’s on Richards last night and put on what may well be the show of the year (well, for me — I don’t go to all that many shows). Vancouver hipsters are legendarily reluctant to shake it at on the floor, but they were no match for Deacon’s infectiously dorky showmanship, which Wikipedia describes as "part stand-up act and part dance party". It didn’t hurt that he was backed by a 13-piece ensemble, including THREE drummers. (And to think, I was once impressed by Caribou’s two drummers.)

Junior Boys at the Biltmore, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Saw Junior Boys at the Biltmore last night. Maybe it’s just that I haven’t been to a show in a while, but I had a great time. They sounded much more polished than the last time I saw them, and while I haven’t hear the new album yet, all the songs they played off it sound terrific. And the Junior Boys brand of whispery, synth-powered indie-electronica is well-suited to the cramped and sweaty subterranean confines of the Biltmore Cabaret, where the entire audience is within about three meters of the performers.

The only real downside of the show is that their audience seems to have gone from introverted electonica nerds to include a lot more annoying cool-dudes and their trendy drunk girlfriends. Such is the price of success.

SF cable car, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

(More photos on Flickr.)

Janelle’s flight back to Australia departed from San Francisco in the early morning hours of Wednesday, so I went down there with her for a few days beforehand.

Aside from a single day in 2001, and an airport transfer or two since then, I’d never been to SF, so it was pretty cool to see it. I think I had an image in my head from other west coast cities I’ve been to (Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, San Diego) but it’s actually very different. Older and more expensive, and less naturey — the downtown is definitely more Manhattan than West End.

We stayed in the downtown Hotel Des Arts, an “art hotel” like the Carlton Arms in New York, meaning that the rooms are small and basic, but painted with murals my local artists. Ours was done by Jeffrey Fish, and was really cool, with whimsical skulls (yes) everywhere.

We were only there a few days, and neither of us gets all excited about spending all day seeing the standard tourist sights, so aside from a trip to the SF Museum of Modern Art and the obligatory cable car rides, we mostly just wandered (always my preferred tourist activity in a new city). Highlights and random thoughts:

• After a couple of expensive, mediocre meals, we basically gave up on restaurant dining in San Francisco. I simply couldn’t get past the feeling that unless you’re into fine dining (which we aren’t), you can get food in Vancouver just as good for a whole lot less, once you figure in the abysmal exchange rate. After coming to that conclusion, we mostly ate Subway and burritos.
• SF burritos are yummy. Are they really all that? I’m not sure, since I didn’t get around to trying enough different places, but they are pretty good.
• Being at the intersection of the Financial District and Chinatown makes for interesting bar hopping, as we decided to do one night. We started in upscale wine bars and rooftop patios and ended up in a dive bar with old Chinese dudes and trannies, arguing incoherently, and having walked a total of about four blocks.
• I am too old to drink a lot. Never again.
• Seriously, the cable cars are not to be missed. Not only are the views spectacular, but in this age of litigation and safety regulations, it’s great to be in a rickety open car open to the elements, with standees hanging off the sides and hopping on and off in the middle of traffic. Just don’t try to catch it at Powell station — it had dozens of people waiting a good hour to get on, while the other stations were almost empty. In fact, we took the California Street line and had the car to ourselves for most of it.
• Seeing Milk and then going to The Castro was an experience. The place might have been gritty in the 1970s, but today, the place smells of money. Sweet, gay money.
• The SF MoMA is cool, but what I really dug was the nearby Cartoon Art Museum, which had Coraline and Watchmen exhibits, and a huge room full of Gene Colon originals.
• Probably my favourite neighbourhood was Valencia Avenue, which was like a cooler, slightly more upscale version of my beloved Main Street, with taquerías and bars instead of noodle houses and coffee shops. We spent an entertaining afternoon wandering the vintage shops, hipster art galleries and zine stores.