HIP AND GROOVY FIGHTS FOR ELBOW ROOM

Heroin, as shopkeepers from Smith Street to Springvale are bitterly aware,
resonates.

If an area develops a reputation as a smack-trade centre, then before long,
in the public mind, that's absolutely all it is. Every other aspect, every
other facet, is seen through the repellent context of heroin.

The corner of Bourke and Russell streets in the city is now infamous as a
grubby smack zone. This is so much the case that it even has its own,
doubly punning, nickname. It is known as the Golden Elbow.

The pavements outside the Hungry Jacks there, and for many metres in either
direction, have become places where the innocent and drug-free tread warily.

It is a place where anyone, just by being there, is assumed by the
small-time dealers to be in the market. As a result, suspicion runs
rampant: everyone checks out everyone else, glancing furtively, afraid to
make eye contact.

And this is terribly sad, because those who manage to look past the
heavy-lidded junkies on the corner find around the Golden Elbow a precinct
of unique and colorful variety.

For all the spirit which the smack trade sucks out of the block, there is,
in the tiny shopfronts of the streets and arcades, a turbulent and raucous
celebration of life. And even, perhaps, in the case of the Midtown Arcade
shop with its windows packed with Buddhas, afterlife.

A few steps from the Buddha shop is another little store called Star Wall.
It specialises in big, bold, cartoonish Hong Kong kitsch: pastel-colored
smiling cats, chubby ducks, funny shoes and so on.

Then there's the mobile telephone shops with their extraordinary selections
of brightly colored, beeping, flashing mobiles, organisers and other
niftily pointless bits of miniaturised electronica.

Or the tiny place that specialises in videos and compact discs from
Thailand, its window plastered with notices, posters and fliers in two or
three languages. (Your correspondent last year discovered a rather juicy
Bangkok band called Fly. He asked in the Thai shop for the CD, only to be
politely told that Fly had been popular the year before - the implication
being that his tastes were woefully old-fashioned. He felt like such a dag.)

This past week saw the disappointing news that two of the city's better
known pop-culture stores - Minotaur on Bourke Street and Comics R Us on
Russell - are set to leave the Elbow. Both stores have blamed the smack trade.

Having the degrading practice of heroin trading going on all around one's
shop is certainly a disincentive to business, but a walk around the Midtown
and Village arcades suggests that there might also be another factor at
play in the traders' decisions. Plain old capitalist competition.

Both Minotaur and Comics R Us trade in superheroes: in comics, as models,
as accessories, ornaments, videos, books, and DVDs.

So, too, do a couple of other stores, hidden in the arcades. There are
places that specialise in video and DVD sales and rentals, especially in
the areas of Japanese animation and Hong Kong fight films, both of which
are currently fuelling popular culture.

The Anh Tranh video store in Midtown has windows plastered with lurid
posters for Manga films and punch-up flicks with clunky titles such as Fist
Power and Stories From Afar II. It has Disney features dubbed into Cantonese.

Across the way, the Japanese Hobby Shop has a range of Manga models and
American superhero stuff easily the match of Minotaur's. As well as Batman
and the Terminator and plenty of wide-eyed buxom Tokyo cartoon heroes, the
shop also features, bizarrely, half a window devoted to models and kits
based on Tim Burton's film Nightmare Before Christmas.

Manga merchandising and associated pop-culture references are commonplace
around the Elbow. In their bright colors and studied juvenile appeal, they
present a jarring contrast to the dull-eyed junkies and dealers who often
stagger past.

Anyone standing still and looking lost in the Elbow for more than 10
minutes is highly likely to be either asked for money or offered smack.
Perhaps that's why so few people who aren't on the nod remain stationary there.

On days of nice weather, the pavements and arcades are liberally sprinkled
with young, well-dressed people zipping around on tiny metal scooters. They
fold them up and stick them under their arms whenever they go into a shop
or a cafe.

There are two cultures trying to occupy the same space at the Elbow - a
very hip and groovy culture, and the deadening society of smack.

The users and the dealers seem to be winning at the moment, but the hip mob
are by no means in retreat. The day when the smack moves from the Golden
Elbow might come too late for Minotaur, Comics R Us and Darrell Lea, but,
in the arcades at least, it's possible to feel that such a day will
eventually dawn.