Author Archive
Saturday, July 7th, 2007
Brit Blog: Cardiff
Me outside a Cardiff church (photo: Simon Sellars).
I’ve always been fascinated by Wales. It’s something to do with my interest in ‘edge culture’, with distorted cultural mirrors sharding mainline nationalism into fragments. I used to hear English people put down the Welsh, mocking their accents and their tradition, and it fascinated me. Not the racism, […]
5 Comments » - Posted in Urban Decay, Brit Blog, Architecture, Travel, Blog by Simon Sellars
Monday, June 18th, 2007
Brit Blog: Norwich
A view of the ziggurat student quarters at Norwich’s University of East Anglia. This is Brutalism at its finest. (Photo: Simon Sellars 2007).
I woke on the train to Norwich.
I don’t know much at all about Norwich, except a bit about their football team. In John King’s book The Football Factory, the narrator, Tom, recalls how […]
2 Comments » - Posted in J.G. Ballard, Celebrities, England, Brit Blog, Travel, Blog by Simon Sellars
Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
Brit Blog: On the Way
‘Hey now, baby, I’m beginning to see the light…’ The author, waiting to go through customs, ponders the notion of ‘flightless travel’ (photo: Simon Sellars 2007).
At one stage I used to listen to people whingeing about long plane flights and think they were dullards with no imagination, that I was above them (literally) because I […]
2 Comments » - Posted in England, jetlag, Brit Blog, Cosmology, Travel, Film, Blog by Simon Sellars
Sunday, April 1st, 2007
Tropfest: The Future of Australian Filmmaking is…Shit?
Best Film Award, Tropfest 07: ‘An Imaginary Life’ (Steve Baker).
On April 7 Channel Nine, accompanied by the still-infuriating-after-all-these-years Richard Wilkins, screened the films from the finals of the Sony Tropfest 2007 short-film festival, which was held on February 18. Tropfest purports to showcase the work of ‘Australia’s emerging filmmakers’ and there’s a big focus on […]
6 Comments » - Posted in Reviews, Film by Simon Sellars
Monday, February 19th, 2007
Philip Brophy’s Northern Void
Flyer for Northern Void.
Last night I attended the second (and last, for now) screening of Philip Brophy’s 50-minute film Northern Void, billed as a “live cinema performance” accompanied by the real-time sonics of Ph2 (Brophy and Philip Samartzis). Northern Void is set along Plenty Rd, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston — specifically a […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Urban Decay, Suburbia, Dystopia, Reviews, Melbourne, Film, Sound by Simon Sellars
Friday, January 19th, 2007
Melbourne Welcomes You
Station Pier (photo: Simon Sellars). There used to be a sign here saying ‘Melbourne Welcomes You’, the first thing we saw when we got off the boat, I imagine.
I was asked to contribute some thoughts about my family’s immigration story to the second book in Jim Hammerton’s ‘Ten-Pound Poms’ series. Ours is a strange tale, […]
3 Comments » - Posted in Melbourne, Travel, Blog by Simon Sellars
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
Micronations Competition: An Update
Sorry for the delay: I’ll be announcing the winner of our Micronations competition very soon…as soon as I get over this terrible flu.
More soon.
No Comments » - Posted in Micronations, Travel, Blog by Simon Sellars
Saturday, September 2nd, 2006
John Foxx: Seductive Whirlpools, Part 2
Interview by Simon Sellars
John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice.
This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful — weave […]
10 Comments » - Posted in Sound, Interviews by Simon Sellars
Monday, August 21st, 2006
Happy Family
Screengrab from the old Sleepy Brain site
All the interviews, features and reviews written by past contributors to Sleepy Brain (from the old magazine-style format) have been lovingly dismantled from the old HTML and reassembled brick-by-brick in the new PHP. Follow the links to the right and above for immediate access.
3 Comments » - Posted in Blog by Simon Sellars
Monday, June 26th, 2006
Tassie Bridge Story
Looking at some old photos I took of the Westgate Bridge got me thinking about another significant elevated arterial link in Australia, Hobart’s Tasman Bridge, hit by the Lake Illawarra, an iron ore tanker, in 1975. As a young lad the dramatic newspapers pictures were emblazoned on my nascent cultural awareness: two cars hanging precariously […]
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