street art & graffiti - found by a Sydney cabbie

A zombie film of Sydney Street Art

Mon, 8 Mar 2010 23:59:59 +1100

This is it.

I spent whole hours over a few weeks making this film.

And many more over the past few years doing the project it is based on.

Also on Youtube here.

films

Thu, 4 Mar 2010 13:47:26 +1100

I’m very excited about the film I’ve just made.

But that’s just a five minute indulgence that took about a week and a bunch of fun to make. It’s about something I’ve been doing for a couple of years, but that doesn’t count.

I really should promote LC Beats’ new “Kaos In King St”.

Here’s LC Beats himself -

I'd like to let you know about my latest claymation which is called Kaos in King St. It will be available on DVD in June 2010. The film has taken me 12 months to create.
It features caricatures of 4 of Sydney's pioneering graffiti artists’ Teazer, Pnash, Phibs and Mistery showcasing their art on a small scale.
This 20 minute film shows the impact of the recently enacted anti-graffiti laws, this new law states that any person caught in possesion of an aerosol spray can be jailed for their art.
The film is sponsored by graffiti supply shop 567 King in Newtown, and Australias aerosol paint company Ironlak.

This film is being launched at The Vanishing Point Gallery (565 King St, Newtown, next door to you know where) this Saturday night March 6. The Facebook event page is here.

“Kaos In King St” will be screened again at Carriageworks in Wilson St on March 20 as part of the Sydney Hip Hop Festival.

There’s a great page with a lot of the “Making Of...” this film here.

And there’s a trailer for “Kaos In King St” on that page too.

LC Beats earlier claymation “Mayhem In May Lane” can be seen on Youtube here.

My own film involves me singing, me skating, me painting, me pasting up, me pontificating narratorially, even me driving a cab! It also involves pictures of street art from the past few years, especially a few by Felix, Syke, Ears, Rackles, and more who I don’t even know.

anyhow...

(That “anyhow...” means I’m lighting another cigarette, as those whose minds were formed by Winfield advertising campaigns in the 70s would know)

anyhow...

I did have some thoughts to blog here, but you can think them for yourselves this time. There’s too much fun going on at the moment for me to render my thoughts in words just now.

Just look to the right and down below at all the pretty pictures. There’s more than enough thought in them.

Until next time, try to make a space in your busy social schedule for Kino Sydney # 34 this coming Monday night at Fraser Studios.

My five minute zombie street art film is showing there, and I took advantage of their kind loan of a camera to shoot it.

They put on a fine night. For $15, you get to see lots of short films, network with the film makers, there’s a band called Ma launching their album and some of the films will be clips for their tracks, there’s food and Jamesons Whisky until they run out, and wine.

If you get in touch and volunteer to help them serve the crepes, or other roles, or bring a plate (and isn’t that a fine old tradition recalled), you can get in for free!

More info and contact details for Kino Sydney here.

Or, if you’re on Facebook, the event page is here.

I just found some fresh pieces under the Concord Bridge at Rhodes by someone I haven’t seen anything of before, called Frankie.

Below those are two new additions to the extension of the Off Broadway Stencil wall, by Blue Chip, who has been filling Chippo with Chaplins and more.

Under that is an array of recent Konsumterra / Crash pieces. He’s been very busy of late.

Under that is a big Peque piece at May Lane.

Then there’s two shots of new work in Enmore back lanes by Teazer and Water and others, on a theme of light to dark.

And at the bottom, a bunch of odd little quips found around this past month.

That’s all on the left side of the line. Most on the right is captioned.

Stayers 2

Tue, 9 Feb 2010 21:08:22 +1100

What makes a piece of graffiti stay up, undisturbed, unbuffed for weeks, months, even years?

There’s no knowing. There is no formula. There is only luck.

There may be some planning. There may be some careful choice of site and means of application. There may be all that, and the piece will be gone in days.

This piece of bloggage is to celebrate a bunch of pieces that have remained, untouched, for the past year and more. Many are in places which you would expect will be cleaned up, or postered over, in days or weeks.

But they remain.

I can’t figure how, or why, but I like to see them live a long life and die a slow, natural death.

If you put up a piece and it stays, you can claim that it is your skill and judgement. If it is buffed, you can cite the sheer bad luck of it.

I hope to make this Stayers exercise each year. I wonder how many from the first Stayers blog will still be there next year?

The past year has been a lot of fun.

There have been more than enough street art pieces, paste ups and stencils and little sculptural bits, to keep me finding new stuff most every time I look.

It’s like a game for me. I get a little reward thrill every time I find a new piece.

I’ve also gotten more interested in graff writing pieces, and even some tags. I’m appreciating the skills involved, and the design of them.

I’ve especially enjoyed Bane, whose tag I first saw around the place, and then some stencils, then a fine little painting in Kings Cross, and some carpet cut-out donkey heads.

I don’t who he is. I’ve asked around a little, but no-one seems to know Bane.

I love the name for tagging - like ‘bane of society’, and it’s also a description of the sound a donkey makes.

Below is a little representative sample of Bane’s stuff I’ve snapped, starting with that painting in the Cross, and then a donkey head carpet that belongs to the right of here, as it has stayed up for the past year now.

What Was There

Fri, 5 Feb 2010 17:13:54 +1100

On a cold night long ago, half a dozen ne’er-do-well lads met at the Pyrmont end of a dis-used swing bridge across Darling Harbour. It was a derelict, industrial site then, all shut down freight railyards and wool warehouses.

We were there with some notion of a party to support a new and raucous volunteer radio station. Someone had a PA, but there was no power for it. We broke into a rail shed and couldn’t find an outlet, only a cord looped to a toilet hand drier. We ran one end of a power lead to it, snipped it live, also snipped the end of the dead lead. I stripped the sheathing off that with my teeth, as was my way in those roadying days, and someone else exposed the live wires and we hooked them up.

But no band turned up to play. I had a cassette tape of a NZ industrial noise band called Foetus Productions (different NZ musos from Jim Thirwell and his “Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel”, “Foetus Uber Alles”, and “You’ve Got Foetus On Your Breath”). We played that, and it made the wind blow chilly from the Pyrmont squats. So we dragged some forklift pallets from the back of a nearby truck and set a bonfire going.

Then we heard the sirens, and watched the fire trucks and the police come around from the city. We didn’t run. We accepted our fate, and were locked up for the night in the Central cells halfway down that little lane off George St where the Metro is now, and the Tivoli was then, behind what was The Lismore Hotel. There was no charge. We were taken in by judicious use of the Intoxication Act, and sort of slept on wooden boards on a freeezing concrete floor in a dank stone room underground, with a derro who woke every hour to cough what sounded, each time, like a death rattle.

I only ever saw one gig at the Lismore, and I was reminded of it a year or two back when I started seeing posters for the 21st anniversary gig of The Hard Ons. It made me feel old. That gig at the Lismore was the first ever Hard Ons show. The Lismore Hotel hasn’t been there for years.

Back to that old Pyrmont Bridge. It was all shut down and derelict then because the civic leaders were planning to make Darling Harbour what it is now. When the Exhibition and Convention Centres and all the nicely paved shops came there, for years, for me, it was not a real place. It was just tourist fakery, and no real Sydneysider, I insisted, would ever travel on the monorail. Nothing real would ever happen there. No real memories would be made there, only passing amusements.

The Olympics made it something. Darling Harbour became the gathering point for visitors from everywhere. It was still a tourist place, but stories were being set there.

The Mercure Hotel, right by the Pyrmont end of the bridge, was where the great French runner, Marie Jose Perec and her entourage were accommodated. Outside the hotel was a pick-up point for journalists covering the games, so every time she left the foyer, she saw queues of journos and photographers, and believed they were paparazzi waiting for her. When she looked out from her hotel window, she saw an entire city building facade decorated with a giant picture of her nemesis, Cathy Freeman - a rear view, like she might have been fated to endure in her race. Something broke Perec, and she pulled out of the competition.

A few years after that, I walked across the Harbour Bridge with my mother, and hundreds of thousands of other people, in a mass public gesture of reconciliation with Aboriginal people. That march culminated at Darling Harbour, with gatherings and concerts all over it.

Darling Harbour was becoming a real place again. Goods were not shipped in or out of there any more, but real human gatherings were making stories and memories of the place.

The most spectacular piece of public art in Sydney is the Opera House, where once was a tram depot, from when Sydney had a huge light rail system. The American singer Paul Robeson was the first to perform there, when it was still under construction, to the workers who were building it. But many had sung at that site before. Before it was a tram shed, it was a bushy point where Bennelong lived, and before that, it was a midden - a place where people ate so much seafood, for so many centuries, that the place was covered deep with seashells. You can still see fragments of these shells in the mortar between the bricks of the Hyde Park Barracks, where the shells were carted to, and used for a lime substitute.

On the sandstone wall at the roundabout at the Opera House end of Macquarie St, where Opera Goers turn into the underground carpark, you can still see “Stop Vietnam War”. I had not noticed it, in all those years driving a cab on these Sydney streets, until I started paying attention to graffiti.

Long ago, if you lived in Sydney and had some money, you didn’t want to live down by the water. That was where all the work was done that made you the money. Down by the water was where all the stinky industry was. There were rotting whale carcasses from the energy trade that lit up London in the 19th century, and abottoirs and leather tanners and power stations and iron foundries and all the rail yards. There were coal mines in Pyrmont! The pits were called “Hell”, “Heaven” and “Purgatory”. People with money, then, lived up on the hills, where the air was better.

Sydney had a competitive advantage as a trading port - a natural deepwater harbour. Most ports spend a lot of resources continually dredging shipping channels.

Now, the harbourside land is more valuable for residential apartments, and the cargo trade goes to Port Botany, on a shallow, sandy bay, that must be dredged continually.

If you walk from Circular Quay, up George St to Broadway, and then up City Rd and down King St through Newtown, you walk an ancient trail that the Eora people used to get from there to Botany Bay. Through Newtown, it is an elevated route. You might notice that the side streets go downhill from King St. Animals, like humans, on open terrain, like to travel along high ground when they get away from water, for the aspect, so they can see around them, and to their destination. You can see the same effect on other Sydney roads, like Military Rd through Neutral Bay and Cremorne, Oxford St, Darling St in Balmain, and the Pacific Highway in the upper north. They run along the spines.

Sydney is a mongrel town, organically grown, unplanned. It carries the shape of the land in its street patterns.

Now, tunnels go under the land to provide time warp effects in transport. One minute you’re coming off the Anzac Bridge from the west over Hell, Heaven and Purgatory, then it’s like you’re flushed down a toilet, and you’re spat out in the Eastern Suburbs with Kings Cross behind you.

These musings were inspired by something an old friend wrote, in his introduction to an issue of The Group, which is a new literary web magazine hub site, here. He did me the honour of introducing this site at the top of his list.

I missed something in King St, Newtown, this past week. I can’t think how it happened. There was a wonderful picture of Robert de Niro with guns drawn (as Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver”?) on a broken glass door. It was there for weeks, but I never saw it. My efforts as a street art snapper were bested by Baddogwhiskas, who got a photo of it up here. It’s a great piece, but gone before I could find it.

Finally, a word about The Invisible Man, and his stuck up blocks with his current rantings, a few of which I’ve tumbled at the bottom of this blog.

He seems to be making a point about some sort of comparative injustice concerning Aussies in trouble abroad.

I suppose I should care, but I’m having trouble trying. That might be because his pieces generally give me the shits anyway (although I liked the Anaconda Cock Bone last year), and he is putting some of them on top of much better stuff.

But before those shots, here’s a Newtown back lane scene featuring a woman going through garbage, one of my Picasso faces in the background, and a flower.

Play With Toys

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 02:15:30 +1100

Children are frightening.

Their minds are so active.

Everything is newer to them, they are learning about it all.

How they learn best is to play.

Watch children playing together in a yard, or a playground. Listen to the hubbub of their voices. Try to hear what they are saying. The most common phrase is “Look at me!”

They are learning what they can be, what they can do, by playing with each other, and playing to each other.

Then, if you watch a bit more, you will see one off on their own, engrossed in something else, oblivious to the others.

Every child is that child sometimes, off in their own little world, absorbed in watching ants trail across a path to a dusty patch, or tearing up a leaf by its veins, or putting sticks into its mouth.

But some children are that child more often than others.

Are these the children who will grow to be artists?

No. Well, maybe, but not necessarily.

Artists, like children, are not always one thing rather than another.

Like children playing and learning, artists might be bossing others around, making up new rules for the game, performing themselves to each other, or they might be so focussed on their task that are barely aware of others around them.

The same artist will operate in both these modes, in different parts of their creative process.

The French philosopher Rousseau made a distinction between what he called ‘amour propre’ and ‘amour de soi’ as two forms of self regard. The first is sort of a proper love of one’s self for its own sake. The second is more like a performing self, a love of the self as it is presented for others to perceive - “Look at me!”

‘Amour propre’ is no more proper, or worthy, or desirable than ‘amour de soi’ (forgive me if I have these terms wrong).

Different people seem to show more of one than the other, but everyone is some of both.

Some Australian blokes like to think themselves above fashion. They’ll tell you that clothes are for comfort, and accessories are only for use, for them. It’s a favourite boast. They don’t care what others think of them, they’re better than that.

But take such a bloke, and show him a small bag that might be of great use for carrying a bunch of screwdrivers, say. Challenge him to walk down a busy street with it, past a pub where his mates are drinking in the front bar. If that bag looks too much like a ladies handbag, he won’t do it, or if he does, he’ll carry it like it’s a football.

Tools!

I once picked up a passenger who was wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Tool’. I assumed it was a rock band T-shirt, but he laughed at that and pointed to where it said, under ‘Tool’, ‘Not the band, I’m just a tool’.

How are tools different from toys?

Maybe toys are just tools for playing.

For graff writers, the worst insult is ‘toy’. Write that on one of their pieces, they will want to know who wrote that. They will feel challenged, like to a duel.

Some graff writers and taggers regard other sorts of street art - stencils and paste ups etc - as ‘toy’.

It’s a good word. It’s catching. I saw another driver do something silly the other day, and I felt an urge to yell out “Toy!”. I’m expecting this word to catch on outside of the graff world, any day now.

Much of what I like best about street art is what makes it toy.

Most street art is in parts of town where art students hang out. These are kids who are learning, and playing with the world around them, and discovering what they can be. These are people whose minds are active and engaged.

Colin, who likes toys.

This bus stop shelter is at La Perouse. Cover your left eye with your right hand. Walk into the shelter, face the back wall. Keeping that eye covered, turn to your right, and again, all the way around. Spin that way for a hundred full turns. Spin fast, so that it only takes about 2 minutes. Then stop, facing the back wall, and now cover your right eye with your left hand and spin the same as before, but the other way. Stop, facing the back wall. Fall over and vomit. The bus has come and gone. Everyone on it is still laughing at you. You’ve done something good for them. They all feel better about themselves now.

Same Beat

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 23:05:12 +1100

A fellow took his fiancee for a night out last week in Sydney. She will be his wife in a few weeks from now.

They got into a taxi, told the driver to take them in to the city, and they were on their way downtown.

"I remember you" said the cabbie to the fellow, "I picked you up last week from that brothel!"

...

Late that night, the same fellow, alone, got into my cab, and told me about it. I laughed a little, sad to say.

He said it's not funny at all. He had spent the whole evening assuring his fiancee that the cabbie was playing a mean joke, that he hadn't been to any brothel. He is very upset with the cabbie. He means to lodge a compaint about it. He has the taxi's number.

He is glad, this fellow, that his fiancee is so cool about it, that she believes him.

I wouldn't try such a trick. It's not my style.

I have, in a lighter manner, done something similar...

Once, when my passengers were a middle aged fellow and his son, we were stopped at traffic lights at the BMW showroom at Rushcutters Bay. Both passengers, I saw, were looking longingly at the array of flash cars on display. I pointed to a red sports coupe, and said "That's the car you're giving your son for a surprise present next week, isn't it?" Then - "Oh shit I'm so sorry. I've stuffed up the surprise! Oh well, I'm sure your son is gracious enough to pretend to be surprised when you give him the keys"

No damage done. Just a little giggle all around.

I can see how a cabbie, by the end of December, can bring himself to pull such a spiteful trick.

December can be cruel to taxi drivers.

Cabbies work hardest in December. They have to work while the work is there to be done, because the bills are always there to be paid. For a night driver, the madness starts from Melbourne Cup Day. That corresponds with students finishing their exams and essays, and then the school formals kick in, and after that, the office parties.
Cup Day till Christmas is the busiest time. There might be 30 hours in each of those weeks when it seems obvious to the travelling public that there are not enough taxis in Sydney. That's because almost everyone wants a cab in those hours. The other 138 hours in those same weeks, cabbies are still cruising around vacant a lot of the time.

And when the office parties are spilling out, that's the messiest time. Many people don't much like their work, but they tolerate the people they work with within office hours. In December, they are obliged to pretend to enjoy each other's company, so a few drinks help. Some of these people barely drink at any other time, and they are not used to it. December means amateur drunks. December means drunks who don't know how to be drunk. December means blokes in suits who've been trying to get a cab for 35 minutes, but it feels like 2 hours to them, in that state. Sometimes it means extra mess in the cab.

Long ago, In Brisbane, the Queensland Govt backed a public education campaign to let everyone know that, if they vomit in a taxi, it will cost them $75. That is the fee. I've been told that people in Brisbane know this, and accept it. If someone vomits in your taxi, you can't go on with the night and pick up the next fare. You must get it properly cleaned, and take time out to get this done.

Here in Sydney, people haven't been educated about this. As taxi drivers, we are entitled to charge one hour of time off the road plus cleaning costs when a passenger soils the car, which comes to at least $50. But, at such times, many taxi drivers feel lucky just to get rid of the passenger and get paid what's on the meter.

What's the worst part of a car to clean up vomit from?

I once picked up a giant of a punk and took him home from the city to Sutherland. He sat in the passenger's seat beside me with his seat belt on, and, half way home, quietly, almost daintily, spilled out noxious chunder all down his front and onto his lap. Then, when he got home, he paid me the fare on the meter, opened the door, unclicked the seat belt, carefully let it go back into its retraction casing, stepped out and walked away.

He did it so well that he left almost nothing on the seat.

But the seat belt!

Spew is tough to remove from the webbing, and I had to get my tools out, take apart the workings of the seat belt retractor, and clean each piece. I was gagging on the smell - beer and kebab and more beer - all the time.

Sometimes, a chundering drunk will be all apologetic, and claim that this is not them at all, they aren't the sort to spew in a cab. But they do. So they are.

One such, going north up the Pacific Highway, I told him that he should pay for cleaning and time off the road, but he insisted that he had vomited with his head out the window, and that it was all outside the cab. He didn't have any more cash on him than the fare. I pulled into a servo a few miles before his destination, and told him to get out and clean it up before we go any further. Then, I had one of the best ideas I've ever managed. I pulled the car up to the water and air point. There was vomit down the door, inside and out, and a little inside the window seal. My passenger worked with the water and the sponge, and I got the air hose, and with the door wide open, I used spurts of high pressure air to blow the spew off the fabric surfaces, and out of the seal. Then, let the window go up a bit, and repeat. Let the window up some more, and repeat the whole process until it was pretty clean.

Take that as a tip from me. One day, you might find it useful to remember that the air at a servo can help a lot with cleaning something. Thank me when you do.

I carry a barrel of Wet Ones with me. At the start of each shift, I use it to clean many of the surfaces that the taxi washers at the base don't get to, all the grime that builds up on the dash implements, the inside door handles, whatever else I see that needs a wipe.

But they are also good when someone is sick.

If a passenger looks a little green, I let them know that I am very happy to stop if needed, so they can get out of the cab to empty themself. Then I offer them a Wet One to clean their face. It makes them feel much better. Better out than in.

But the reason I tell people, if they ask, that I carry Wet Ones, is this - sometimes, someone will get into the cab late at night, name a suburb, then fall asleep. You get them to the suburb, then you wake them. But that isn't always so easy. I've discovered that if you wipe their face with a Wet One, they wake up much less aggressive than if you kick them into the gutter and piss on them. I can't think why, but they do.

Aah, December. I hate December - deliberately. The Xmas Grinch is part of who I mean to be.

I'm serious about atheism, as a long term goal for humanity. I'm not the only one. Many others, with bigger soapboxes than me, and more eloquence, envision a better world where people have to get on without appealing to higher powers.

I'm a bit weak about it. I don't lecture passengers in my taxi. But I do feel it would be a travesty for me to return a seasonal greeting with "Merry Christmas". I don't say "Happy Holidays". That sounds pissy. I'm not like those, in generations past, who would not set foot in a church for any reason, on principle. I see the hurt it causes, but I respect that. I just don't let it show, mainly, and try to keep up the goodwill without personally encouraging religion.

Long ago, Patrick Gibson used to have a sort of post punk lounge band called "No Night Sweats". They played in Sydney pubs in the 80s. One song, that I thought was their own cheesy invention of a mock gospel tune was "When Was Jesus Born". I've since heard many versions of it, including a ripper by the Blind Boys of Alabama (not to be confused with the blonde boys of California, or the bland boys of Montana) and it seems it is a traditional spiritual. I've heard it sung with intensity and force and passion, in the gospel spiritual manner, like it is God's own truth revealing itself in their soaring voices. "When was Jesus born - last month of the year.... December 25". But it is pretty surely not true. It is very unlikely, from the sources of information about the Roman Census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, that it was anywhere near that time of year. I must assume that the spirited truth driving those voices so strongly is not at all literal. So, I am free to believe that the truth of that spirit is in the joy of communal singing.

December doesn't hate me. It's been a pretty good month to me these past few years. I've had almost no trouble from passengers, and it has helped me to pay some bills.

The worst this season was near the start of December, near the beginning of a shift, not far from my cab base, thankfully. It was a radio job, a local little hop from Waterloo to Redfern. I found the address, amongst low income housing commission terraces, and there was an afternoon family party winding down. It took several minutes for a younger relative to help my passenger, an old woman, swaying very unsteadily, into the back seat. I put on my infinite patience act - "No worries love, take your time, it's not a race" and she settled in and the younger relative gave me an address in the housing commission towers a couple of blocks away. As I drove her there, she told me her late husband was a taxi driver. I offered to help her out of the car and to the lift. She declined, a little forcefully - "No thank you driver, I'll be fine". She wouldn't have been fine, but for a big rough looking man arriving home to the same towers, who offered to help her out himself, and did so very sweetly. As he led her away from the taxi, I saw that the back of the old woman's dress was wet, and I smelt the tang of urine in the back seat.
That's why she didn't want me to help her out of the taxi. She had embarrassed herself.

It wasn't a big deal. I was only about three minutes from the taxi base, where the night manager and the cleaners replaced the back seat for me in about two minutes.

So, that was the worst bother for me, as a cabbie, this December, and it was nothing really.

I worked on Christmas Day this year. It was good. There was no traffic anywhere, so I could get people where they were going quickly and easily. There aren't enough Bhuddist and Moslem cabbies in town to cover the work, so I feel that an atheist like me should chip in, and profit from it.

I didn't work on New Years Eve. It's not worth it, and I had better things to do.

New Years Eve of 1999/2000 was worth it. That year, taxi drivers were allowed to charge $5 per passenger on top of the fare, which was at the plus 20% night rate throughout. Every passenger that year accepted that charge without argument, with gratitude, even with tips.

I've worked some New Years Eves since. There are some traps.

For the first part of the shift, everyone you pick up goes to the same sort of place, a harbour vantage, amongst cloggy, pissed off traffic. And every other cabbie in town has just dropped there too, so there's nothing for it but to look at each others' vacant signs and scatter. The fares don't match up head to tail, so it is not so profitable.

Then, around 9pm, things get a little quiet for a while, as people are set for the family fireworks display. Around midnight, nobody wants a cab, so there is another dead spell. Then, if you are unlucky, you can get caught in very bad traffic jams. One year, I was stuck in the back streets of Mosman from soon after midnight till about 2am, not moving an inch. Radio jobs were going off all around me, but there was no way to get to them.

Then, when you do have a passenger, you're not making any more money just because there are 1500 people in the next block screaming for a taxi.

You can work hard in a taxi on New Years Eve, expose yourself to more chance of various bothers, and make less than on a reasonable Saturday night. If you work in a bar, or wait tables on New Years Eve, you expect to earn at least double time, or triple, or whatever the boss has to promise you to show up for the shift.

Whenever I've watched the New Years Eve fireworks in past years, I've always noticed a train trundling across the Harbour Bridge in the middle of it all. I've told myself, one year, I'll be on that train.

This summer, I checked the timetable and found that the train from Central to Milsons Pt leaving at 8.55pm would be on the bridge during the 9pm display. I talked my wife into the idea with the promise of a picnic in Wendy Whiteley's Secret Garden (here) and a good position for the midnight display.

It worked! It was great! The train was moderately full as we left Central, but most people got out at Wynyard, and it was less than half full as we crossed the bridge. I'm surprised that more people haven't thought of this. I was telling others on the train about it before we got out of the tunnel. There were fireworks from harbour barges on both sides of the train as we crossed, and we got out into the clear air in the gap between carriages. It was beautiful.

Next time, I'll try for the midnight display. At midnight, lots of fireworks are set off from the bridge itself, so it should be incredibly loud. And, I've noticed, the train that crosses the bridge during the midnight display always stops about two thirds the way across for about five minutes.

The midnight display goes for about 25 minutes, so I reckon you could cross in the midst of it, get off at Milsons Pt Station, cross the platform, and catch the next train back to get it both ways, then stay on that train to arrive at Central Station ahead of the crowds.

Colin, who thinks that will be the best, no worries way to be in the thick of the New Years Eve fireworks, and hopes to see you there next time, and might even start a Facebook Event to invite friends along, make a party of it.

Sum 1

Fri, 4 Dec 2009 00:16:46 +1100

In the past couple of years, in my cab, about a dozen times, passengers have confessed to me that, when they were kids, they used to tag with a crew. They ‘confessed’, I say, because they say that they regret it now. They’ve said they find tagging ugly and stupid now, when they see it, and wish they hadn’t done it.

Not all passengers in my cab are urged to talk about street art. I often go through a whole shift, or go a few days, without ever bringing it up. But, if they seem like the sort who might be interested, and especially if we we pass by some prominent piece, and of course, if I see a passenger glance towards a bit of street art...

I take the opportunities as they arise.

That small group I opened with, who confess to having tagged as kids, I’ve taken lately to then asking them about the crew they ran with - “Did one of them take it further? Did one of your friends get right into letter styles? Was there one amongst you who started doing pictures too?”

There is always one. My regretful passengers will tell me proudly of one who kept it up, who might still be at it, whose pieces were legend in their group.

I picked up a couple last week from a party at a house gallery in the inner city. I’d had time to peer into the place, which looked like a Glen Murcutt style corrugated iron renovation in the midst of a row of terraces. The walls within were art gallery white, with framed artworks arranged sparsely.

When they got into the cab, I asked them how their night had been. They were happy to boast of a fine dinner in a gallery. “How were the artworks?” I asked. “Oh, pretty minimalist” he said, “But it wasn’t about the artworks”. “So” said I, “Ultimately decorative”.

His ears pricked up at that, and he demurred, but only slightly. So I modified my summation - “More design than expression?”

Which got him asking about me. He wanted to know what I do other than driving cabs. (This often happens, I’m too well spoken sometimes). He insisted I must be somehow arty.

So I confessed to my hobby of seeking out and documenting street art and graffiti.

Seems he is a teacher at art schools, and for a while, he taught art to juveniles in trouble with the law at an institution, which he named, and which is familiar to me. So he was teaching art and design techniques to kid graffitists, and he was tickled to see that his efforts improved their work appreciably. Although these kids wouldn’t own up to having been taught anything he could see the the designs getting better.

We talked a little bit of the split in the street art world between art school kids and hardcore graff taggers.

Some graff kids adopt a renegade attitude, that might be defensive at source, but wants to posture as offensive. They need to think that the whole world is against them.

It isn’t. But for a while, some kids need to believe that, and there is plenty of evidence to support that posture if that’s all they’re looking for.

The art school street artists look soft to these kids. The graff kids guess that the arty types hate them.

They are wrong on that too. Many street artists admire the graffers - for their skills, for their style - and want to pretend to a bit of their careless audacity.

My art teacher passenger asked if there is a Sydney style to street art.

I can’t answer that. I see most everything that gets up. I look at all of it, much of it over and over, and catalogue what I find in sets, here, for my own purposes. I think about what I see, and write about it. I take people on tours to see lots of it.

But, I can’t spot a trend, I can’t pick a thread from which I could spin a yarn.

Any institutional puff piece about any part of culture tries to identify something meaningful and specific to its own town, or state, or country. It’s required. But it is rarely convincing.

Maybe Sydney’s street art has a prominent theme of boldly drawn characters that appear across certain parts of town, got up by the same artists. They act as avatars to record the presence of Eels, or Ears, or Sprinkles, or Houl, or Felix, or Bane, or Vars. These are welcome. I enjoy seeing them, and spotting where they appear. They are like pictorial tags.

But this might happen as much in other cities. I only know Sydney. So, I cannot identify this as a phenomenom that is particular to Sydney street art.

Sydney is often regarded as somewhat soulless. It is thought to be too flash, all pretty blonde front and no substance. I don’t buy that.

Sydney’s street art history has some soulful moments.

It goes back further than the reformed derro who spent decades writing ‘Eternity’, before modern tagging had been invented.

It includes the Buga-Up (Billboard Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions) campaigns on tobacco and alcohol billboards in the 1980s.

Most of the works of the Unlimited Audacity Production crew are still treasured by the passing parade in Newtown.

We’ve just about forgotten the fine dada gesture of those persons unknown who, one night about 20 years ago, painted everything at Macdonaldtown Railway Station bright pink.

Pretty Corpses

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:16:51 +1100

“Which would you rather?” he said from the back seat - “To get $4 million - That’s option one? Or, the other option is you get $5 million but everyone you know gets $20 million? It’s a dilemma.”

She, also in the back seat of my cab, thought seriously about it, and said that she would surely take the second option, but she worried that her freinds would be having holidays, with their $20 million, that she, with only $5 million, couldn’t afford. That could get irksome, she said.

So I piped up from the driver’s seat - “Is this like something I once heard two writers musing about? That it is not enough to achieve literary success, and to be lauded as a genius, but everyone around you has to be seen have failed.”

The fellow liked that thought. It seemed that his dilemma for the day was not entirely esoteric. There was something in it from his law firm’s calculating of yearly bonuses.

What a surprise, that these two would be lawyers! To be musing on such things...

He put it to me - “Which would you choose?”

Obviously, I would choose the latter option. If my friends couldn’t abide me being so much less rich than them, I’d ditch the lot and get a better class of friends.

But, I said to him, if this is to do with rewards for good work, it’s a different question, as you would be rating my worth as 1/4 the value of those around me. I might feel a bit miffed by that, but I’d find a way to cope.

Besides, I said, if you ask such a question, you can’t hope for a real answer. People will say what they think will impress you. Or maybe they will say what they think will rile you, I don’t know. If you want to test that by making the offer for real, go right ahead.

Street Art lives on the streets, on the walls, out in the open.

It dies on on the gallery wall.

It can make pretty corpses in coffee table books.

And its ghosts Flickr on line.

I’ve been saying and writing that for some time.

Melinda Vassallo is a pretty perky woman with an enthusiasm for the street art she sees around the inner west of Sydney.

She has gotten herself a little bit of funding, and some help from a bookshop, and put a lot of her time and effort into producing “Street Art Of The Inner West”.

It’s a good book, with lots of photos of much that is up on the walls around town. The panoramic spreads of big pieces are very pretty to look at.

At the front end of the book are displays of some of the big pieces that are local landmarks, and some good information about them and their creators, especially about Andrew Aiken, Mistery, and Julie Pryor - the Unmitigated Audacity Productions group who did the Martin Luther King “I have a dream” piece and others.

Further into the book, several individual artists have feature pages of photographs of their work, and some fun text accompaniments to show some of why they do it and how they feel about it.

I’m not a photographer, just a snapper, and therefore I won’t pretend to give a critic’s informed approval of the pictures in this book. They look pretty good to me.

The only fault I can pick is one glaring omission - the Fooling Fools four walls of narrative pictorial rendering of a lifetime obsessed with plastic bottle caps, that I watched being produced slowly over months, and took many photographs that can be seen here.

I recommend this book as a present for a friend who has lived around the inner west of Sydney, and is now elsewhere. If you have more than one such friend, buy more copies and give them away. If all your friends have $20 million, give them this book anyway. You’ll all be the richer for it.

The Big City Freaks won’t approve. On their blogsite, they have an entry about this book titled “Don’t Buy This Book” and a brief complaint about typos and photo cropping. It seems they saw an early proof copy, were told that only 50 of these were printed, and somehow thought that was the final product and that there would be only 50.

There have been a few more printings, with corrections along the way. They are selling pretty well, and Melinda Vassallo is encouraged enough to want to produce more next year.

BCF are upset now, that their work was included, even after they requested that it not be.

That’s too bad. Any decent exposure of Sydney street art would not be complete without some BCF pieces. They do great work, and lots of it, and go to some trouble to make opportunities for themselves.

The Big City Freaks do have some authority to decree what the protocols are when representing Sydney street art. They have more authority than just about anyone else. But that’s not a lot.

The core of street art is illegitimate, and therefore ungoverned. It is not a Hobbesian world. Life doesn’t have to be nasty, brutish and short (although some of the best pieces are). But, if you put something out there on a wall, in the open, against the law, that is a gift freely given. What others do with that gift is beyond your control.

Melinda Vassallo is not getting rich off the artwork of others. No artist is having their reputation hurt by her presentation. Most are happy with her effort.

The BCF crew are working hard at presenting themselves very professionally. They get permission from property owners for their pieces. But they don’t make rules that anyone else has to follow.

The other book pictured above is from Germany, but it ranges wide, across the whole world and a long way back through history.

It is called “Street Art” by Johannes Stahl.
It is an Art Pocket production through H.F. Ullmann publishers, and it is a great little book.

It has Blek Le Rat’s Tom Waits stencil prominent on the cover, and even a picture of the actual stencil used for that inside.

The main argument of this book is that street art has a history as long as history. It graces Blek Le Rat with the title “Father of modern street art”, but it goes back much further.

The presentation of this long history is a little jumbled, but it is cohesive and convincing. Much is made of scribblings on walls in Pompei, “Kilroy” pieces during last centuries European walls, tagging and writing pieces in New York and Philadelphia in the 1970s, and much more.

Colin, who wonders if that lawyer gives me $5 million and gives all of you $20million, will you still read my blog?

Style Cats

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:43:10 +1100

Style is the answer to everything.

Fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous day.

To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style.

To do a dangerous thing with style,
is what I call art.

Bullfighting can be an art.
Boxing can be an art.
Loving can be an art.
Opening a can of sardines can be an art.

Not many have style.
Not many can keep style.
I have seen dogs with more style
than men.
Although not many dogs have style.
Cats have it with abundance.

When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style.

For sometimes people give you style.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Jesus.
Socrates.
Caesar.
García Lorca.

I have met men in jail with style.
I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.

Style is a difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.

Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water, or you, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.

Above is a poem by Charles Bukowski. That poem is recited with a jazzy drum groove in the song you can hear above.

I think that the poem was written for the film “Tales Of Ordinary Madness”.

Here’s a quote from Banksy -

In the future, everyone should try to be anonymous for at least 15 minutes.

“Not many dogs have style. Cats have it with abundance” (from that poem).

There are so many cat stencils about at present. The many in Newtown and Enmore are large moggies, striding out. The ones in Glebe are fewer, and kittenish, looking up all cute.

Street artists have an affinity with cats.

Style, to start with. And they operate at night. And they are unruly.

And they are our pets. We love them, but we have learned not to expect them to come when they are called.

“Dogs have masters, Cats have staff” says the old bumper sticker.

To put it another way - A dog will look around itself, see that there are people who look after him, feed him, run him in the park, play with him, make him feel loved. The dog thinks - “They must be Gods!” and is grateful. A cat will notice that there are people who give it shelter, feed it, share their warmth in their bed on cold nights. The cat thinks - “I must be God.”

Same observations, different conclusion.

How do you make a cat go “Wooof”?

Douse it with petrol, light a match and “Wooooof!”

How do you make a dog go meow?

Freeze it, start up the power saw and “MeeeeEEEEoooOOOoowwW”.

If all our public artworks are our urban pets, perhaps the commissioned public art projects, those pieces begging to be loved, are pet dogs. And the illegal stuff, that happens at night and can scratch you as soon as brush your leg, they’re cats.

Dogs make great partners for working blokes, and steadfast companions for the emotionally needy, but living with a cat is like having a graffitist around the house.

We, humans, as a species, have done weird things to dogs. They’ve been bred into such a range of oddities. They’re all wolves from way back.

Cats have not allowed us that much control of them.

But consider the dingo. It’s a dog. But it’s relationship with traditional Aboriginal populations seems to have been a little more distant, much less cosy, than dogs in other parts of the world.

A dingo’s breakfast? A piss and a good look around.

Fun has been had these past weeks. And a few more books have been read. I hosted a Saturday arvo bus tour with Bunkwaa. I’ll review those books, and tell of what I’ve learned from the tour, in the next bit of bloggage.

It will be called “Late Onset Delinquency”.

War On The Walls

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:54:55 +1000

There is conflict in the street art sites of Sydney.

No. It’s not a ‘war’. Military hardware is not being deployed. Planes and ships and tanks and bombs are not being developed and built for sheer destructive purposes with no concern for environmental sustainability. Populations are not being shifted away from their homes. Agitants are not being rendered to torture sites. People are not getting away with rape and theft and padded government contracts.

But, a few people are getting a pissed off and their toleration, their co-operation with street art and graffiti is running thin.

One Saturday afternoon in the cab recently, I picked up a fellow who told me he’d just been painting. Turns out he is part of the Big City Freaks crew, so I asked him why BCF sites are usually left alone by other artists.

Do they have some willing muscle to deal with those who might mess with their work? Or, are BCF pieces respected by others for their quality, their skills?

My passenger was happy to talk about it. He liked the thought that his crew’s stuff is left alone out of sheer admiration, but he ceded that one of their leaders is ex-SAS (highly trained armed services).

I mentioned one Big City Freaks piece in South Newtown that had been messed with - the voluptuous woman figure had been traced over by an inferior hand (here). He said that this will be dealt with soon, and a week or two later, I saw the BCF crew right there, busy re-painting the site with a new and complex piece.

My BCF passenger told me of another of their sites in Surry
Hills, which another crew entirely had taken over to do their own major piece. This annoys the Big City Freaks, because they put a lot of time and effort into seeking permission from property owners to paint on their walls. 90% of their approaches come to nothing. It’s galling to see one of their sites taken by another crew, after they’ve put in the work.

See all my Flickr photos of BCF sites here. Also the Big City Freaks blogspot here.

I asked my passenger about the Enmore Stencil Wall, which had been capped a few days before by a throw-up tagger. The wall’s owner had left a notice objecting to this, and inviting stencillers to resume their fun on the surface that he had buffed. My BCF passenger told me that this tagger is a fellow from Paris, who has some fame in the graff writing scene. His tag is ‘Cispio’, and he grew up in Paris’s suburbs, where the conflict between street artists and taggers is a bit more jagged and hard core. Cispio might think that he was just doing what he has always done, and that stencillers don’t deserve respect anyway.

My passenger told me that he is not anti street art and stencil and paste up himself, he often enjoys seeing that stuff. But he did give me a summary of the gripes that some graff writers have against street artists - that street artists are usually rich kids at art school; if they get into trouble, their parents get them bailed out; they do 20 stencils and then start clambering for gallery exhibitions; that they haven’t spent years developing real skills like graff writers - they claim more attention and kudos for less work, sacrifice and risk.

I’ve spoken to some street artists who grumble about graff writers, and particularly taggers, because what they do is ugly; it’s mainly just a name, which makes it unseemly egotistical; the public doesn’t like it - and that makes it harder for street art to exist.

So, that’s the shape of the argument.

My own preference is for the street art side of things, that‘s what gives me easy laughs and thrills my anarchist soul. But I do respect the skills and the ‘Fuck you’ attitude of graff writers. I’m getting to like it more, even the tagging, which many in the general public detest. And, I regard the graff writer tradition as something very special and valuable in modern culture.

Later that same Saturday afternoon, a woman in my cab told me of her old days (when she was younger, go figure) running with graff writing crews. She told me her graff name, which I don’t recall ever seeing, but the graff name of her then boyfriend is still about, I’ve seen it. She said that she would like to get some illustrative stuff up again soon. I think she mentioned that she was exhibiting somewhere. What was most interesting to me, is that she claimed that she had a personal ethic to never put up only a name, to always have something more in her pieces.

That Enmore Stencil Wall is still looking pretty dowdy after its recent attacks from Cispio.

I was there yesterday afternoon, and I spoke to a man who was carefully painting the entire Gladstone St wall dark grey, with a brush and paint from a tin.

He was buffing the whole stretch. He owns the property, and he likes good street art, especially stencils.

He liked the Teazer ‘Nice City’ piece that incorporated wildstyle graff writing and illustrative elements (here). He also liked the Ears ‘Wise child blind man’ piece that was around the corner (here).

He especially liked the row of burlesque dancing girls on the Zap background.

But all this had been capped by inferior stuff, with no permission sought. This man was sick of it.

His roll door has to be replaced now, because so many layers of paint on it have made it unworkable, and this will cost him money.

This man has supported street art for years, giving his walls freely for some of the best of it.

But now he feels embarrassed to host clients, because Cispio throw-ups have made his place look decrepit, rather than interesting.

He told me that he plans to buff all the way down to the end of his wall, and to make it his daily practice to paint over any art that appears on his Gladstone St and Phillip St walls every day.

He will re-paint the stub end of his wall, that faces the corner, to provide a fresh field for one, small stencil wall.