sex on the mind
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today I went over to Berkeley St, about a block or two west of Parliament. I was there to photograph an old facade that is all that remains of the school my grandfather attended. It's propped up by big steel girders, and it's not well preserved. The windows are all smashed, and it looks like it's been falling apart since they demolished the rest of the building.
I found the place, right next to a modern school that looks about five/ten years old, but which is actually still under construction. The old facade stands in an empty lot adjacent to the new school, and is surrounded by a metal fence (I suppose the fence is for the school kids).
As I was approaching – and opening my camera bag – a young woman went by in the other direction, followed by a haggard, scruffy fellow who could have been forty to fifty plus years old. They hurried by toward the new school, and I saw them step over a gap between the high fence ringing the facade.
So I took a few pics of the front of the facade, and made my way around to get some closer shots of the windows and to photograph the back. By the time I got there, the couple had passed through the empty lot.
It turns out that the facade includes, in its upper portion, the remnants of old stairwells and rooms. It also contains some half-buried rooms at the bottom, which were littered with the obvious signs of inhabitation (bottles, used condoms).
Shaking my head at the mess, I took my photos, standing maybe three metres from the foot of the facade. It's f*cking hot in the city today, and I paused to decide how I could best get over to the strip joint I'd noticed a few days before. I wanted to photograph the sign I'd seen, there, advertising 'face dances'.
As I debated the merits of my two alternate routes, I watched the kids playing only a few metres away on the far side of the fence. Then I heard a loud noise behind me. I turned, and realized I could now hear some, ah, vocalizations from the spaces beneath the facade.
The couple I'd seen had not passed through the lot, they'd gone into one of the spaces beneath the facade. And now I could make out some words, and realized that the short list of likely scenarios there all precluded someone standing around with a camera. With a glance back at the school-kids, some of whom were hanging around, watching, I split.
I read in this week's Eye magazine that last year's 'Pussy Palace' event – for which etherlabs.net hosted the web site for over a year – was raided by the police. The account is actually pretty bizarre.