Melbourne Patron

I am an absolute sucker for pretty lights. So when I saw the Dandenong Festival of Lights advertised, I was pretty keen to go. Basically it looked like a big bunch of colourful, lit-up sculptures with a Chinese twist, in a park. The website more classily described it as celebrating "Chinese culture through a display of hundreds of beautiful and unique silk light displays". We chose a night to go - Friday, 2 October 2015 - and rocked up to Greaves Reserve (Dandenong Showgrounds) around 7pm. There was ample parking, and it was needed: there was a queue of people lining up for tickets probably 300 metres long. An usher said it would be the busiest night of the event's duration (why, I'm not sure). The queue moved quickly though - we probably reached the gate within ten minutes - but I did make a mental note for next time, to buy tickets online beforehand. The entrance was promising: a huge, intricate, colourful archway, lit up against the night sky, framed b...

Over the last few years, I have had the pleasure of attending the odd gig as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival . I'm not generally a big listener of jazz, but I do enjoy it live - either a more traditional style, or something a bit more unusual and challenging. Years ago, after a relationship break-up, I took to listening to ABC Classic FM , which ran a late-night jazz show (possibly still does). In one particularly glum mood, I heard the alternately freakish and dulcet tones of David Liebman 's saxophone. It inspired me to buy one of the more unusual albums I own, a collection of his songs named after various colours (including the one I'd heard on the radio), aptly named Colors . It has kept me company in some of my oddest moods - because there is some music out there that magically fits those miniscule flashes of undefinable feelings that flit through our psyche. Ever since then, I have been much more open to trying different kinds of music, and in ...

White Night , according to its website, was conceived in Paris in 2002 as Nuit Blanche , and has since expanded its program to over 20 other cities worldwide. Melbourne was the first Australian city to hold a White Night in 2013, and the inaugural event attracted over a quarter of a million attendees. City of Melbourne's White Night 2014 flags I first heard of White Night just before its Melburnian debut last year, but was sadly unable to go. I was entranced by my friends' pictures, posted on social media, of well-known public spaces transformed by light and colour - much like scenes you'd find at one of my favourite Melbourne events: the annual Gertrude Street Projection Festival . But White Night, as I understood, was bigger (being held across a number of public spaces), longer (running for 12 hours, from 7pm to 7am), more central (being in the CBD), and offered an array of further attractions. Despite not understanding the name at all (white? but it's so colo...