Riff Overlooking Circular Quay.

When I was a teenager my friends and I would catch the train into the city from the tracts of middle class suburbs from which we were born. Nights were the thing. Thinking was, perhaps we'd sneak underage into some venue where we could watch a band (always for music, never for drinking), but mostly just occupying the big empty spaces that emerged once the workers left. Sydney was always weird like that. Not much nightlife in the city centre except the occasional pub or maybe the couple of jazz dives that existed back then (Soup Plus was another favourite place in which we could get both music and beer (!!) if we were well behaved). The city of Sydney was like an empty house with the parents away. We didn't quite fit. The city was designed so that we didn't fit and so occupying it offered us a sense of obstinant power on which we thrived.

We'd skate where we shouldn't and when we'd had enough and felt enough of a sense of ownerhip we'd hit up McDonalds on George st - one of the few places at that time that was open 24 hours, grab a thickshake and a some fries in one of those rockable large paper bags and stroll into some 5 star foyer. We'd occupy the big round of soft furnishings and opulent coffee tables that inevitably inhabited those weirdly illdefined spaces between private and public and rejoice in the fact that very few of the concierge staff would have the chutzpah to challenge us. This might be their building but it was our city. Looking back it was a knowing deconstruction of high/low culture divide, a complication of class distinctions and exlusions, and a challenge to the corporate/wealth culture that we instinctively understood as bullshit. It was a classic GenX bourgouise kid move - but we were self aware enough to understand and incorporate those contradictions - Frankenstein's little monsters.

Today I'm a middle aged white man - although still not the one this city was designed for. I've lost all the chutzpah we had as a group of teenagers and as I occupy the big empty post-covid spaces of circular quay I'm struck by another kind of obstinance. Its the new AMP building that first attracts my attention - a 'shock of the new' insult levelled against Customs House - the last of the modern barely hanging onto its place to stand. The AMP building stands on one of the most beautiful deep water harbours upon which a city could be built and thrusts into the air like some giant dildo built to tear the sky asunder - violent angles shifting almost at random in order to perhaps cause the most damage it can to the sky into which it thrusts. I'm sure the architect had something in mind about shifting relations to the exterior as one ascended the interior building - avoiding a single plane of relation etc etc. I'm sure its wonderful form the inside looking out. Today all I see, form my vantage, is a big corporate 'fuck you' (I'll admit that I've softened on this building with its award winning resuse of the old building - perhaps those angles are actually about incorporating and reusing what was there?).

The longer I spend in the city the more that thought was reinforced no matter which way I looked. Packer's Baranagaroo dominating to the north west looking like an 8 year old's drawing of a middle finger - fat in the middle pointed at the end - obviously not a Packer finger which I imagine to be like fat butcher's sausages all pink and lined with white and grey. That building irritates me no end. It shouldn't be there at all. Its a manifestation of the corporate legal corruption that shapes and characterises this country. When I look at it I see more than the gross testament to gambling and excess and power that it is. Its built in a place that we shoud have all remembered as Barangaroo's - and been able to visit in that memory of all that was lost, and all that which we can, indeed, resititute and recover a little if we try and if we want it badly enough. Instead of that place we have an affront to its very idea. This buidling reminds me only of Alan Jones lining up meetings between James Packer and the then Premier Barry O'Farrell to push it all through - regardless of the city/state and its public. The building says if you are rich and you want it, you can have it without consideration to any other need or damage. Its a continuation of the process by which we destroyed ways of living that had until then looked after this place for 60000 years.

As I look to the east across the quay there is that most obstinant series of Sydney buildings that appeared while I was off backing-packing in the early 00's. I returned to my much loved home to find some rich arseholes had built their apartment blocks in such a way as to completely alter the very silouette that for had for me always defined this place; a garden on the harbour trailing down to the Opera House - a house so grand and so public that noone could ever own it (in fact from memory, some of the same pricks were involved). Sydney and Australia was like that then - before Howard - something you could be proud of, a wild untenable place that we only just clung on to. The harbour used to be like that - a place we occupied/colonised rather than shaped. The Opera House moored - a visitor from some more hopefully cosmopolitan Australian future.

Now I look out from Circular Quay and see a big concrete curtain. The curtain is incomplete as if to show you little glimpses of that which it suffocated. Moments of green through glass and concrete. One gap partially filled in by a sky bridge joining two of the buidlings - a concrete curtain clip - as if those who occcupied such spaces were too important to descend to ground level and walk between buildings like the rest of us. I wonder whether the space is an extension to the penthouse in one building - wealth extending by force of wealth into the ether. I can barely make out the lines of furniture or something - private, domestic accoutrement - this is a city where the rich can do whatever they like - colonise the sky, partition off the harbour. Just don't fuck with their view or their view of things.

When I'm finshed at the MCA I'm tempted to go find Macca's and an empty foyer but its no longer my place. Its no longer our place. There is no longer any room for the public here - no space for happenstance emergence, no space for occupation, no space for culture. No space for culturing a future. This city is written by the rich and the corporate alone. Why would you bother occupying this?