Heval comes to Chippendale

Heval is playing at the Seymour Centre this Thursday, blending traditional and contemporary Kurdish, Indian and western sounds. I don't know if I can make it, but I always love it when I can.

That's our friend Colin Berryman on the sitar.

"Heval" is Kurdish for "friends", by the way.

Castle Hell

Friends, on Easter Saturday I made the mistake of trying to buy a few items quickly at Castle Towers in Castle Hill.

It's the anti-Chippendale! An entire city founded on the car. Queues to park. Queues to exit. So much to buy and nothing worth buying. Noise, noise, noise, but no sounds that can actually be identified — just a deafening drone. A mad frenzy of shopping trolleys full of hundreds of dollars of cheap, tasteless, chocolate eggs. A monument to quantity over quality.

They are going to have a heart attack in Castle Hill when petrol becomes prohibitively expensive. I mean, this is the suburb that doesn't even have footpaths for nine streets out of ten.

I read somewhere that the inner suburbs make you mad (nowhere to relax) and the outer suburbs make you fat (nowhere to walk). I reckon Castle Hill would do both. What a nightmare!

Yet more about the CUB site

The City of Sydney's statement wasn't in their media room, it was on their main website.

Quick message analysis:

• It's not just the planning controls, it's the property downturn


• It's not just the City of Sydney, it's the state government too


• It's not over yet

More about the CUB site

It seems I was wrong when I said Australand had already bought the CUB site.

According to an Australand statement, they had an option on the site, and expenses incurred so far total $4 million after tax. They claimed this amount is too small to be material.

Meanwhile, there's no statement on the matter from the City of Sydney.

CUB site

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Australand has pulled out of redeveloping the CUB site, which covers about a quarter of the suburb of Chippendale. Australand is citing the City of Sydney's planning requirements (open space etc) as a barrier to profitability. You've got to wonder if it's a bluff though, considering they've already bought the site.

More about that stabbing in Chippendale

The Sydney Morning Herald has published a first-person account of that stabbing in Chippendale. It's frightening reading, but at least the author says:

"Of the 2357 recorded assaults using a knife, sword, scissors or screwdriver in NSW last year, most occurred in Campbelltown (63). Other suburbs high on the list were Mount Druitt (52), Liverpool (41), Sydney (36), Gosford (36), Cabramatta (35) and Surry Hills (33). Chippendale, despite misconceptions, had only four incidences."

So there are scarier places to live...

Alcohol and pedestrian accidents

There's nothing better than stumbling home to Chippendale after a few too many in the city, Glebe or Newtown. Certainly beats getting a $60 taxi home to the suburbs, or — worse — trying to drive. But according to this study by St Vincents Hospital, booze is one of the reasons so many pedestrians get hit by cars. Ouch!

Sydney Improvised Music Association

The new home of the Sydney Improvised Music Association is The Sound Lounge, which I'd never heard of. Apparently it's in the Seymour Theatre Centre, which is impossible to miss. If jazz or improvisation are your bag, check it out.

Stabbing in Chippendale

Yikes! According to The Glebe Courier, a man was grabbed from behind and stabbed on the corner of Wiley and Dangar Streets. Look after yourself.

City Road terraces

You know those iconic multistorey terraces on City Road between Myrtle St and Cleveland St? Well they've got a history, and I was lucky enough to have lunch with the guy who knows it.
 
Apparently, there once was a family with 11 children. When the parents divorced, one of them remarried into a family with 6, creating a household with 17 children. So they bought a few huge adjacent terraces on City Road and demolished some of the dividing walls. Would've been a magnificent adventure for the littlies — a memory for life.
 
Some of the family has moved on so they rebricked the walls. But some of the children with their children still live there.  A happy story.

Breakfast Bytes — the weblog

Here I go, breaking that old self-imposed, don't talk about work rule again. Well, hey! Just to be sure, listen to this: what I say here is not necessarily the opinion of Hill & Knowlton. I'm just a guy. With an interesting job. And a blog. And the two are not the same.

That out the way, let me talk about work ;-). Only for a second though, cause I wanted to say this:

If marketing and public relations are your thing, check out the new Breakfast Bytes weblog. You've attended the seminars! You've seen the TV coverage! Now it's time to debate our industry's key issues on the internet.

Thai Tha Hai

Breezy atmosphere. Tasty food. Nice people. Good value. Check out Thai Tha Hai, on Cleveland St opposite the Beaumont St pedestrian crossing. My tip: try the scallops, not the eggplant.