If you drive past the site you will notice we have been putting up scaffold. It showed up yesterday and we didn’t have a box to keep it in overnight – that’s pretty much my life savings in that scaffold – so Greg and I had to have a sleepover. We drank beer and watched how the street behaved. Tim is back in town and he came down and hung out. It was a real scummy party.

Nobody tried to steal our scaffold which was lucky; Greg had brought a knife.

If you’re in the neighbourhood and we’re about on site, stop by for a beer. It would be nice to rant to somebody about how shit the Council are.

Thanks to Matty J for the sweet camper.

I’m looking forward to 2012. I was getting worn down by 2011. Bar falling down, insurance scraps, non-stop trouble with finding a new site, the Council saying the right things in public then finding nothing but obsticles in my way when I tried to get back into the central city… Nothing seemed to be easy.

So, I’m hoping the hard work is behind me. We have secured a site. The Council seem to be playing ball. Construction has begun and we hope to be open shortly.

Goodbye Blue Monday has finally made it onto the immediate demolition list which is shit for the building but makes getting insurance money a lot easier. I went into the Red Zone last week to see what Sam at C1 is doing and it is like a wasteland in there. We are going to need pioneers like him to get that part of the city on its feet again.

This will spell the end of Goodbye Blue Monday. I didn’t want to take the name to our new site as people would have just complained that the new place isn’t as good as the old. Tim has moved on and the Council has indicated it is anti live music; so the next spot will be something different. I quite like the idea of GBM being mythologised and never having to go through that cycle all bars go through where they eventually get shit.

We are calling the new site Smash Palace which we think is fitting in the current environment. Currently it is a flat bit of land on the corner of Victoria St and Bealey Ave. The plan is to create something temporary that will be on that site for at least a year. Following this, we hope to pack it up and relocate it on GBM’s old site. But if the last 12 months has taught me anything, it’s that long-term plans often work out quite different to what you had envisaged.

So here’s GBM as it stood last week. I love the old sign that has been uncovered by the building next door coming down. I thought it was hilarious that it sold sperm but Tony d tells me this was quite a common type of oil in the olden days.

Food carts are so hot right now. I feel like we are onto something with our proposed gypsy encampment. Check out this article here.

Here is a picture of me smashing a Waynzo hotdog for breakfast. Living the dream…

It’s Rosie’s birthday today. Happy birthday Rosie.

At our new bar, Rosie will be all grown up and operate her own caravan. I will wait ’til she has finalised her menu etc. before announcing too much, but I thought I’d let you all know that we have gone and picked up her caravan off the ferry in Picton, towed it back, and she is in the process of setting it up.

It’s all very exciting to us to finally have some forward momentum in a year where it feels like we have constantly been knocked backward.

Here’s the caravan on the way home.

Dear diary,

Sorry I haven’t written in a long time. It has been weeks and months of frustrations down here and I began to loose sight of reopening the bar. GBM still stands smashed in the city, while we sit and wait for insurance to come to the party. We can’t get paid out because it is still there and we have been struggling to re-open anywhere else due to lack of funds. We went to the bank to borrow money. They didn’t want any of our houses as collateral due to them all being quake damaged… So, yes, it has been tough.

But this post isn’t to grizzle about how hard it has been. It is to announce that an anonymous funder has lent us some money, the bank has loaned a smaller sum against my Riley and Recover Canterbury have been very helpful. On this note, we have bought a bus which we are currently converting into a bar. We have bought a caravan to serve as a kitchen and we have hopefully secured a site within the city. All going according to plan (which history has taught me never happens), we will be announcing our site over the next week or so. Following this, I would love to say that we will be open this summer. All it’s hinging on now is for the Council to approve our site and plans.

I will seek to keep you all up-to-date with progress and hopefully we will all be drinking vast quantities of Bodgie Beer again soon. Thanks for all the support and for sticking with us. Here is a photo of the May family in front of our bus (which they have parked on their neighbours drive).

I had a soft launch of my garage on Saturday night. Our motto was “If You’re Looking To Meet Girls, You’ve Come to the Wrong Place”. We had 12 boys, 8 bikes, a bunch of beer and a whole lot of laughs. I’m proud to announce I won the midnight wheelie competition, while Jimmy won the hard-luck trophy for arriving in a puddle of oil to discover his gearbox had shit itself. Luke Wood had the nicest bike that worked and Greg and Ramon were handiest equal.

I live in the city. Right on the edge of the Cordon. I think about 15 people are living in my entire block at the moment. Round here it’s like a sideshow during the day with rubberneckers, while at night the streets are deserted. This can be nice when you and a bunch of like minded idiots feel like riding dodgy dirt bikes with no mufflers up and down the back street at break-neck speeds for short intervals before hurriedly heading back behind the gate, sure the police must be on their way.

At the end of the night the Garage was good and full. It made me so proud and I asked Mark to take a beautiful photograph of that moment. I was quite pissed by then.

Bikes in the Garage

For those of you that don’t know, Tim is heading off overseas for a period. So, this Saturday(August 27) at the Brewery will be your last chance to catch Von Klap for a while. They are supporting O’Lovely who are always excellent. So, get down there and say goodbye to Timmy.

In bad news Waterfront Auckland has pulled the pin on the Auckland project. I was really excited about the prospect of getting out of town and representing Christchurch during the Rugby World Cup.

In preparation for the event, Waterfront Auckland has developed a bunch of hospitality tenancies on the North Wharf. At the last minute one tenant pulled out and in a panic they called my old mate Johnny d to see if he could throw together a pop-up bar to run during the tournament. He already has two new restaurants to open and threw the opportunity my way.

So I flew up and looked at the space and decided we could do something pretty cool. I had this great idea that we could do a Christchurch thing. We would fly up Christchurch bands each week and they would work for a share of the turnover. This would mean we could promote Christchurch music and these guys could get a gig and make some money (both of which are tough to do in this city at present).

We would do Canterbury wines and Christchurch craft beers and fly up some of our best chefs to represent the province. We gathered together the old gang from way back in the early Cartel days with the plan of injecting a little bit of our city into the tournament and reminding visitors that Christchurch wasn’t finished just yet.

So I pitched this to them and they were very supportive of the idea. I flew up to Auckland a bunch of times, setting up suppliers and bludging all the equipment I would need. Two weeks and a couple of grand later and some egg-head at Waterfront Auckland decided against the plan. Where I had been getting nothing but support for my plan, suddenly I couldn’t get anyone to answer their phone and then I was informed that live music did not fit the mix. The whole thing was a bit alternative and they didn’t want “a bunch of scruffy kids damaging our tenancy”.

Now, I have worked creating precincts in the past. I know that the mix is important and some concepts don’t fit the mix. And I know that what we were proposing was edgier and dirtier than what they have up there, but I thought that was the point. I thought it would be fun to bring a crowd down to the waterfront who might not otherwise participate in the RWC. I also thought the feel-good element of the concept was something that visitors, Aucklanders and Cantabrians would embrace and support.

What fucks me off is that I feel like I was strung along and essentially told that all I needed to do was sign-up and it would happen. I wasted a couple of weeks of my time when I could have been working on setting up something down here. I wasted a couple of grand and while that’s not a heap of money, it’s enough when you have fuck-all and what you do have you are trying to pay your mortgage with. Then I had the carpet pulled out from under me at the last minute because some fuckwit is precious of his Gib-board.

So any of you that are heading to Auckland are to avoid North Wharf and are instead to support Johnny d’s empire which includes Britomart Country Club, 1885, Racket Bar and Angents and Merchants. I am indebted to him because he has now provided employment to the people who had given up their jobs to come up and work for me. So “thanks” to Johnny and crew and “fuck you” to Waterfront Auckland.

A couple of weeks of little activity, a bit of bloody snow, and then this week it’s all on.

My house got a red sticker which was exciting. This meant it was illegal to enter the property. They slapped it up and drove off without even ringing the buzzer and telling me that I was breaking the law by sitting on my couch and looking at motorbikes on the Internet.

I called the Council, I called CERA, I called the Council, I called CERA, nobody knew who had put the sticker on and why it was there. In the end I left a bunch of abusive messages on various people’s phones and the following day some egg-head from the Council came and removed it. Really, I am starting to worry about the people that are in charge of this city.

In other news I got to go into the Red Zone for the first time. The Red Zone is the part of the city the public aren’t allowed into. I do know of two retarded friends of mine who drank 23 pints at Poms and decided to break into the Red Zone just to proove they could. Well, they got in and didn’t get caught – hiding in shadows while the army drove past and climbing over razor wire – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t idiots. Afterward I asked what it was like in there and all they could remember was that it was very dark and one of them had a squeeky shoe. But that’s another story for another day…

Yesterday, I got in by legal means to empty a friend’s office. You are accompanied by an engineer and you’ve got to wear all the safety gear etc. It’s very exciting to go where nobody besides Prince William and Rachel Hunter can. I can report that shit’s totally fucked in there and a saddening amount of empty lots creep ever closer to Poplar Lanes.

Finally, I’ve been offered a sweet job in Auckland for two months to run a bar for the Rugby World Cup. While I am working furiously to re-open a bar in Christchurch, it has been frustrating and I’ve been running dangerously short of money. So, the chance to get an income was pretty appealing. Plus the idea of the bar is to showcase Christchurch music, so it’s not like I’m heading up to run a Tui Clubrooms. Fear not people, we will re-open in Christchurch as soon as possible. We just need the bar to be either knoecked down, or not not knocked down so that our insurance company can make sweet love to us.

If you haven’t already been down, you should check out the Brewery in Woolston. It’s great to have somewhere new to visit and nice to have anywhere to get intoxicated on the East Side of town. Tim is working there which means you can get that surly service that you all knew and loved at Goodbye Blue Monday.

So, if you’re wondering what to do this Saturday Night (July 23), come down and check out Von Klap, Undercurrents and DJ Big Gay Tony. I believe Von Klap are among the top seven bands performing in Christchurch this weekend, so make sure you pop down and check out what the lack of fuss is about.