Envy Apartment

The long retail spine of Sydney Road, Brunswick, just north of Melbourne's CBD, was once a prosperous trading outpost on the way to the goldfields. These days it's a bohemian mix of variety stores, op shops, halal butchers and Lebanese bakeries. Take a side street to the west, however, and a different picture emerges. Sandwiched between Sydney Road and the Upfield train line is an area undergoing rapid and widespread transformation. Light industry is fast being replaced by mid- rise apartment buildings , their inhabitants attracted by the short commute into town and cheaper prices than in the city's south-east. The quality of these units is, on the whole, depressingly bad; think poor ventilation and bedrooms that "borrow" natural light (a weasel word for being dark and windowless). The occasional jazzy façade tries feebly to make up for otherwise cheap construction amid a chorus of greys. At ground level, carpark roller doors alternate with mean pocket garden...

The following story appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on October 26, 2006, the day after Danny Rolling was put to death. Also included are photos covering the period from the time of the murders to the day of Rolling execution . Rolling Executed By Chris Tisch, Tamara Lush and Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler Times Staff Writers STARKE – The drab brown curtain between killer and survivors opened at 5:59 p.m. Wednesday. Danny Rolling lay on a gurney. A prison official asked Florida 's most notorious serial killer since Ted Bundy if he had a last statement. Rolling responded with a twangy hymn, apparently self-penned. "He who flung the stars into heavens above, created the oceans, mountains, eagles and doves," he sang. "None greater than thee, Oh Lord, none greater than thee." Family members of his eight victims - five in Florida and three he was linked to in Louisiana - clutched each other, rolled their eyes or shook their heads. One family member later ...

Chris Kraus remembers the late writer, in life and in death. Kaucyila Brooke, Untitled #94 from Kathy Acker’s Clothes , 1998/2005, color photograph. From the cover of After Kathy Acker . Like everything in the past, everyone remembers it differently, and some of the people involved hardly remember at all. We’re talking about something that happened more than seventeen years ago . But on January 23, 1998, which was a Friday, friends of the late writer Kathy Acker drove from San Francisco to Fort Funston, about twenty-five minutes away, to scatter her ashes. She’d died two months earlier at an alternative clinic in Tijuana, where she received palliative care for late-stage, metastasized cancer. The ash scattering—like the wake at Bob Glück’s house on December 13 and the memorial reading at Slim’s Bar where Michelle Handelman was booed off the stage for no reason she can recall—devolved into a kind of black comedy, the way these things often do. I remember Cookie Mueller at Jackie Cur...

The Cary Town Council on Thursday reached a deal with a local apartment complex to replace buffer vegetation that workers cut down earlier this year, prompting a $70,184 fine from the town. Cary fines violators of its buffer rules $2 to $4 per square foot based on the amount of damage documented. In April, the town fined Amberwood Apartments for damaging more than 17,546 square feet of vegetation at the corner of Piney Plains Road and Southeast Cary Parkway . The incident outraged some residents, including a Cary councilman who said he wanted the management group to “feel the wrath” of the town. Amberwood representatives initially disputed the town’s violation report, saying it contained inaccuracies and that Cary was trying to make an example of the complex. The deal approved Thursday requires Amberwood to deposit $40,000 into an escrow account, where it will stay until Cary says that new trees and shrubs have been planted in accordance with its revegetation plan. Cary wil...