Phone snap potpourri.

Guilt over losing my digital camera in Brisbane hasn't subsided so I'm still snapping neighborhood pics with a hand-me-down Nokia phone. If some look familiar it's because you've seen them on Facebook. You get what you pay for ... and this is a free blog.Morning in Caulfield Park.
St Kilda Botanical Gardens.
Fall colours along Balaclava Rd.
Local street art.
Saturday at Chadstone.
Shell-shocked face of a man whose wife is shoe shopping on Bridge Rd in Richmond.
Nothing screams 'Quality Merchandise!' like the frontage of this shop on Bridge Rd in Richmond.
Beloved literary character pimped out for overpriced threads. Or did Harper Lee decide to hawk women's clothes?
Oscar is Kitty King of the Mountain.

There's joy in that-there rock.

Been a while since I walked out of a rock club dripping with beer-scented sweat. Yet there I was on Swan Street in Richmond last night with a few hundred other soggy souls courtesy of Brooklyn-via-Minneapolis band The Hold Steady. They played a raucous 100-minute set at a sold-out Corner Hotel. Crowd seemed a bit heavy (literally) with music biz types but the front of the house hung on every word spit by gentile madman Craig Finn and pumped fists to Tad Kubler's soaring solos (some played on a Jimmy Page-circa-1975 double-neck guitar). They opened with 'Stuck Between Stations', performed on the Letterman show in 2007 in the video above.

Quite a musical Monday: Springsteen and the E Streeters obliterated the bar for future Super Bowl halftime shows in the am; The Hold Steady blew the doors off the Corner Hotel in the pm. Rock lives. Long live rock.