Bombastic Melbourne Christmas gestures, including insect romance (porn?)

Brunswick: so delighted to see this riding home one night.

And right next door. How about that hedge?

These two are from another street in Brunswick. Slightly more modest, and a little bit delicately beautiful, I think.

Dazzling kitsch from the Abruzzo Club on Lygon Street.

This was at Esprit in Carlton: just horrible. If you don’t buy stuff from a chain store, you’re not generous, and should feel guilty? (According to beautiful girl with a dreamy cloud of curly hair, who actually looks a bit whingy and insipid?)

More Lygon St East Brunswick action. I guess the Coca Cola industry benefits quite well from Australia’s climatic conditions at Christmas?

Who’s going to stand up for everyday Australian blandness in the face of this cloying whimsy?

Had a weekend in Blairgowrie, hence had time to take photos of Christmas beatles close up. My friends and I actually set these two up. This was the courting period.

Now is this actually mating? Not being familiar with the biology of Christmas beatles, we were unsure. For more insect porn, see Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno. Seahorses are the most romantic.

Christmas bike. Awesomely decadent, entirely unnecessary. Brilliant. At Canning Street lights (best bike lights in Melbourne?)

I featured this guy in my last post. Blow up Santa on blow up snow globe, which actually blows with snow (it’s electrically powered). He’s located in an alley in East Brunswick. People stop and gawp (including young teenage boys on their skateboards, not too cool evidently?)

Anyway, he has a night persona, but it’s friendly and not threatening.

Last I saw he wasn’t doing so well, but yesterday I saw the woman who lives there wearily trying to fix him up, looking a bit weary and sick of the whole thing actually (I guess she’s under pressure from her kids).