Those Rundle Street Days
Writing blog posts tends to feel like an obligation once you’ve started. That’s why everyone apologises profusely when they have left the writing dormant for a while. Well, I would feel the same way—if someone were paying me to do this. As it stands, I’m not sure what interest level people actually have in noiseandmusic, but I do get enjoyment out of the reader spikes, and the gentle hum of daily hits. It also gives me a forum to propose my counter-counter-culture whinging, and—at the end of the day—I can show that, not only have I put a fair amount of thought into “music and art in this digital age,” but I have a place to broadcast these thoughts, and contribute to the slow chipping-away of ingrained cultural values.
And it seems to be working: this last week two of my top searches were “black people staring at white girl,” and “did Charlie Puth hire a marketing firm?” If that isn’t chipping away at culture, I don’t know what is.
So, the real reason I haven’t written anything for a while is that, over the last month, my girlfriend and I both got a job, and an apartment, in Adelaide. I’m really interested in cities, and I knew that once I had a job sorted out in Adelaide, I wanted to move into it. Danielle and I were both living with mum in Toorak Gardens, a suburb about 10 minutes drive from where we are now.
There is a clear distinction in Adelaide between the suburbs and the city. The Adelaide CBD is basically marooned from its neighbouring suburbs by a moat of parklands—some attractive, some outright desolate. Greater Adelaide has a population of about 1.3 million people, the CBD is only about 15,000. But the experience of a place is defined by more than simply how many people live there—more important, I would say, is how close they live to one another—the population density—and what type of property-uses exist there. Suburbs are made up of low-density, almost purely residential properties. The cities are made up of a higher-density mix of commercial, residential, and public properties.
Danielle and I now live on Rundle Street, on the 3rd floor of a commercial building. Our neighbours below us are a vegan restaurant, a vintage clothing store, and an Italian shoe store. It is a beautiful old building, with wonderful high ceilings that I’m sure no developer today would deem a cost-efficient use of space. But what it lacks in space-efficiency, it makes up for in soul-warming homeliness.
This is our kitchen:
And the picture at the top is our view onto Rundle Street. You can thank Instagram for the hipster chic.
So for everyone who assumes that a bigger population inevitably leads to a more diverse, “vibrant” lifestyle, consider that I’ve moved from Boston—a city of about 4.5 million—back to Adelaide—1.3 million—and I’m now living in a more diverse, and more vibrant area than before. It was reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities that really got me thinking about the city/suburb divide here in Adelaide, and cemented in my mind that, when I did move, it would be into the CBD, into a dense, preferably commercial area. I could only imagine what it would mean for a local arts community if more of my musical friends took this approach, if we were all living a short walk from one-another, and the places music and art is made. You don’t get Greenwich Village living in Connecticut, is all I’m sayin’.
I hope that I haven’t ostracised my readers with my absence over the last few months, and I genuinely hope that you can join me for my next big, researched blog post about how Adelaide operates. Cya then.
