Kylie's Golden Hotpants

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The Powerhouse Museum as got to be one the most excellent museums we've ever been to. It's located next to Darling Harbour in the centre of Sydney, and houses loads of ace exhibitions from days of old, right through to modern design. We spent the whole day there on Sunday and saw;
* Totally fabulous Kylie Minogue exhibition which featured loads of her amazing tour and video costumes displayed on models created to her exact measurements. She is TINY!!! They also showed videos and played her music, and there were cabinets showing lots of the awards that she'd won for performances throughout the years. 'Shaz has had 'I'm Spinning Around' in her head ever since.
* Brilliant Japanese clothing design exhibition, featuring unusual conceptual ideas using weird and wonderful fabrics and mouldings. One of these designs was a dress that could be made to look like a Coke Dispenser machine if you wanted to be 'in disguise'. Very bizarre, but fun!
* Musical instruments and early generation computers and synths. This was Alan's favourite zone he was in there for AGES. He was delighted when he spotted Angus Young's guitar.
* Robots and futuristic paraphrenalia.
* Transportation throughout the years.
* Old and New Sydney including some wonderful photographs.
* Indiginous culture zones.
* Modern furniture & fashion design compared with fashions through the ages, including Alessi ware, Viv Westwood shoes, Balenciaga and Dior ballgowns, all mixed up with Wedding and Mourning wear from the 17th and 18th centuries, and embroidered smoking jackets, and velvet slippers for men.
* Ecological awareness zones. We did this test thing to find out the size of our Ecological footprint, and it turns out that if everyone was like the Eggs, then we'd need to have 12 Planet Earths to sustain all the people in the World. Gulp - time for some re-cycling we think!


One day here is really not enough. We reckon you could easily spend at last 3 days going round this place. It's so diverse and exciting, with lots of well maintained interactive stuff. We can thoroughly recommend a trip if you are thinking of coming to Sydney.

Bye for now, we need to go and get ready for the Opera tonight!
Alan & Shaz. xx

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Photos

Kylie's golden hotpants
As worn in the 'I'm Spinning Around' video. Apparently these cost 50p in a junk shop and were only used at the last minute in the video as the stylists couldn't find anything else to go with the Stella McCartney top she wears.

The Kylie exhibition
This dress is the image used to advertise the exhibition - the dress was designed by Kylie herself and features lots of images of her in magazines and stills from her videos.

Robots...
..which reminded us of the Beastie Boys Intergalactic video. Or Metal Mickey.

Gibson SG
Alan was SO impressed by this guitar as it was Angus Young's from ACDC - if you look closely you'll see that it's signed by him.

Alan sings the Clash
Should he stay or should he go, now?

If he goes there will be trouble...
But if he stays there will be double....

Shaz does Avril Lavine.
Check the 'natural' rock starlet pose.

Shazza's score on the Playstation Singstar
We're going to get one of these for our Playstation when we get home. It marks your singing capabilities and then gives you a score for the notes you get right or wrong. Shaz managed to get second highest score though the choice of Skater Boi song was made by Alan. Shaz feels that she cold have done better with a Dusty Springfield number.

The Enigma Machine
Used in World War II for cracking the German U Boat codes.

Sculpture of a Mimi Spirit
Mimi's are Aboriginal spirits which live in the cracks between rocks. The Aboriginals believe that they lived in the land before the people came, and these spirits taught the hmans how to dance and paint. Although they look scary they are actually considered to be very positive spirits.

Scultped Totem Poles
These were brilliant - they are made entirely from plastic rubbish collected from beaches around Sydney. The photo doesn't do them justice - in real life they looked very beautiful with lovely colours and shapes - and all from a pile of discarded junk.

EMS Synthi-E
One of the first ever synthesisers, used by Roxy Music, Pink Floyd etc.

EMS VCS3
Another early synth - they had other amazing ones too for example Fairlights which were really expensive in their time and used by the likes of Heaven 17, Howard Jones, Depeche Mode and Human League.

Early computer programming
Alan thinks it might have been a TRS80. Shaz hasnt a clue what it was but liked it as it looks like Space Invaders.

Violin made by Scottish guy called William Auchterlonie
He made a total of 51 violins in his lifetime but didn't make his first one until his daughter wanted to learn to play music. prior to this he worked down the coal mines in southern new South Wales. We thought this was a remarkable achievement for a man who also went blind but continued to make these beautiful violins.

Comments

[Gaz]

Dancing Demon!!!!!!!!!
Full marks, Al, go to the top of the retro class!! "Written in 1979 by Leo Christopherson for the Radio Shack Model I computer this is possibly the best game ever for it time. Dancin Demon used Machine Language in BASIC DATA statements a trick which Leo Christopherson pioneered on TRS-80 Model I with Android Nim and Dancing Demon and later Klendathu. When such programs are run, the program modifies itself and a save becomes impossible, but the original version off the original tape or disk can be saved in ASCII or even LLISTed without problem. " from http://www.dnull.com/demon/

[curly]

Dancing Demon
The Dancing demon proggy also had sound, you took the audio from the cassette lead. The program runs very nicely under emulation on my Linux systems.