THE NAKED CITY with Coffin Ed, Miss Death & Jay Katz

NAKED NOSTALGIA

These days historic and heritage buildings are a top priority with governments and local councils and preservation orders are handed out with the frequency of parking tickets. But what about that slightly less tangible area that we often label as nostalgia whereby the cultural artefacts of today are preserved for generations to come.

We often look back and ask whatever happened to the old style Tatler Hotel in George Street, the WC Penfold cart and horse, the barrow style fruit stands, newspaper sellers who barked out their product outside Wynyard Station, the plethora of Sunday afternoon soap box orators in the Domain, elephant rides at Taronga Park, double decker buses, milk bars and even those highly radioactive fluoroscope shoe machines.

What if governments and councils had the foresight to recognise genuine everyday icons before they disappeared from our streets and existed only in the minds of the older generation. Sure it would take considerable faresightedness to distinguish between what was merely an affectation of the time as opposed to something that reeked of the period and needed to be preserved forever.

The question also arises as to whether there is in fact anything worth preserving in Sydney 2011 but the trick to identifying real nostalgia is realising its worth long before it has disappeared. So here is the Naked City’s  short list of Sydneycentric cultural ephemera that needs to be safeguarded and mummified for generations to come.

The Piccolo Bar: Sydney’s last bohemian style coffee shop needs to be enshrined, encased in protective glass and its ebullient owner Vittorio cryogenically frozen to emerge one day in a more enlightened era.

The Carpet From The Annandale Hotel: With its future very much up in the air, the Annandale Hotel needs to give up its squishy carpet for posterity and see it rehoused in Hobart’s Museum Of New & Old Art as a living miasma of indie rock grunge.

The Oceanic Café (Elizabeth Street): Who needs fine dining when cheap home cooked food is delivered in a spartan but cosy no frills setting that hasn’t changed in decades.

Porky’s Christmas Pageant (Kings Cross): Who knows whether we will still have strip clubs in 3011 but Porky’s annual illuminated Christmas decorations are the prefect reminder that the sex industry still has a soft spot. Another possible installation for MONA in Tassie.

The Injecting Room (Kings Cross): When the war on drugs is finally won or when a whole new range of socially acceptable stimulants becomes available, the Injecting Room could be converted to a museum of old style narcotics and a monument to the folly of prohibition.

THE HOT LIST:

Texas Chainsaw Trivia at the Darlo Bar in Darlinghurst (cnr. Darlinghurst & Liverpool Sts) is Sydney’s meeting of the minds every Wednesday night from 7.30pm with your hosts Jay Katz, Coffin Ed and Miss Death plus an assemblage of Mensa students, local eccentrics, assorted congnascenti, reconstructed bohemians and guest celebrities. It’s a trivia night like no other and has been likened to a kind of intellectual Zumba workout.   www.mumeson.org