Bert Flugelman's Pyramid Tower a.k.a. The Silver Shish Kebab
  (from 'Sydney' magazine)

Yes, that’s right - that’s Bert Flugelman’s silver sculpture in a more yellowy-green light than usual, in this glamorous photograph from the monthly glossy supplement to Sydney’s daily morning newspaper.

In the 1990’s the sculpture was, without consultation, removed from Martin Place ( by then re-named, without consultation, ‘Martin Plaza’) and placed (or 'dumped') in a city council depot yard in Ultimo, just around the corner from where I lived. It lay there, on its side, for years, until its reinstatement, without consultation, in a small space in the city near the revamped York Street.

Here are my old poems that mention these events and others about My City Of Sydney (and Tommy Leonetti's too) from a decade ago and then later, around 2000.

In Surry Hills

faintly scribbled in sky-blue pencil
  on the front wall of my house
 in Surry Hills in 1971 -
“is this the hostel where the lazy & fun-loving
                                    start up the mountain”
I don’t think anyone entering the house
   had heard of F. O’Hara,
their T-Rex records under their arms,
               sauntering
      out to the kitchen to lean against
 the fur-lined door I’d made
    to honour  Meret Oppenheim
& for a sensual lean
                         as well

At the Ian Burn show
 MCA 1997

at the Ian Burn show
  there’s a badly recorded
b&w video of Ian Burn
      & colleagues       performing
anti-authoritarian art spiels -
drumkit, keyboards, guitar, voice -
   it’s the ‘Art & Language’ days,
the mid-seventies -         recorded,
   most likely,    on a Sony portapak
        (I set one up -     a tripod
     in the lounge room
       of our communal house
 & let it run     full twenty-minute
       brackets   to film   quotidian comings
   & goings).
ah -       here’s Terry Smith
   with plenty of hair - a stringy beard
&, possibly, an Afro -   singing along
            in the refrain -
“...ee...gal - it - tar - i - an...ism...!”
       gustily.
I’m chuckling now -      this is
   amazingly cheering -       I feel
      it’s my culture - or was - &, easily,
  could become
                   karaoke !
as it contains,       for me,
    equivalent nostalgia.
ingenuous, idealistic
                         and schismatic !
 direct-action practising populist artists
    (anti-institutional-intellectual-academy)
vs
 theoretical conceptual post-object artists
    (yet not always nor certainly pro-academic)
it was my schism too,      our exegesis,
      “artists think” ?      well, maybe -
they did,           for a decade
all under the same
                         tin roof


In Ultimo in ‘98

I maximize my traipsing
              round the district -

at the end of Bay Street
  Bert Flugelman’s silver shish-kebab
                 lies abandoned
in the Sydney City Council yard
   behind the garbage trucks garage
      (“Living City”
           say the
               t-shirts)

---

Another think coming

on time,
speeding into the cold shade
in the mica-blue daihatsu,
hailstone dings patched 
with felt-tipped pens
and nail polish,
towards York Street,
the only street
left standing 
after two centuries
of demolition –   
its sandstone Victoriana
like a row 
of determined invalids
suddenly brought into daylight,
stunned in a gone world.

cement-dusted street corners
draped with orange vinyl netting -
framing the unannounced return
of Bert Flugelman’s
silver shish-kebab. 

an un-hoped-for cityscape -
two clocks
on the same building
displaying different times

having,         so far, 
dodged all civics conferences -
now, punctually, I attend
stressed-finished
seminar rooms -
a beautifully literal
painted-on patinae
of grime and cracks.

buoyed by 
off-to-the-second-
day-of-a-conference-
eagerness,
this flâneur 
drives everywhere,
imaginary ram-raider
skittling that bricoleur
clutching a fascinating
collection of spoils
in a palm organiser.


attention,      attention ,
    may I have your 
              attention

sorry                no -
I’m reviewing a few
windows of opportunity
from my workstation desktop,
on the actual desk –
the pale golden colour 
of white ginseng
steaming in a china cup
perched on a silvery 
compact-disc coaster,
screwed-up pages, red ball-point,
small black radio emitting news -
political party supporters’ dreams 
weakened by boom time fluctuations
like comets in a spin 


were ‘we’ 
not to apply
serious scholarship
to metro profit margins’
most pressing questions -
‘we’ might find ‘we’
 have
another think coming.

money now 
determines class,
focus, promise, function 
& an era
of boredom
tolerated by 
the middle classes 
ends

mistaking the ruins
for decoration
the dig reveals
bits of polyvinyl chloride,
ribbons of audio tape,
the usual aluminia –
the site becomes a museum,
the souvenir shop’s
elegant glass counters
house miniature replications
of christianity’s clean spires
carefully erected by
gigantic Russian helicopters
in time for the international
sports event
some time back
in the year 2000

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