The anti-long weekend

Long weekend's for someone of my age bracket tend to be a cliched affair of booze filled late night's, domestic travel to a rural area - which triples in size upon my arrival - parties and bands, which are all followed by the inevitable Monday morning hangover combined with a sense of failure for not doing those pesky tax returns, for being broke at the start of the week, for wishing you had done something worthwhile; and as the day goes on, reality eventually pierces through the smell of stale tobacco and mildew and one comes to the realization that the bill for their weekend extravagance is yet to be paid: the empties need to recycled, the kitchen needs to be cleaned, the house needs to be aired out and vacuumed, plus the preparation for the entry level job - if one is lucky enough to have one - has to be done: the brutal, menial task of washing clothes, the buying of cheap convenience foods, the returning of video tapes, and as the fog of the mind begins to lift one comes to the conclusion that, "I'm too old to be doing this," or the question, if one is being particularly reflective, "is this really what I want to do with my life, is this all there is?" which is always followed by the exclamation, "I'm never drinking again!"

My weekend has been a kind of anti-long weekend, the bare minimum of alcohol consumption, the smallest amount of correspondence between friends, the sojourn outside my warm room into the dirty, cold, empty streets of Auckland was done only to engulf some culture. The Academy has a rather good documentary on graffiti art called, "AlterEgo," showing right now and I highly recommend the documentary to any art lover, or anyone looking to get a further insight into one of the most oft' talked about art forms of this century. I was expecting a superficial look at the world of graffiti but was surprised to get an international, all encompassing look at graffiti with some rather interesting theories, our own Askew, some incredible graffiti coming from Brazil, and Berlin - which seems to be over run with graffiti. The doco touches briefly of tagging, and whilst it posits a particularly slanted and un-objective view, it actually makes the viewer reappraise their understanding of tagging and why it exists. There's some amazing artists on the documentary like DAIM, whose work shown in the last photo, SMASH 137, who has a website www.smash137.net showing all his work, and finally Herbert Baglione, who is an incredibly interesting artist that uses an ordinary brush and paint for his street art and has just had a few gallery exhibitions, of which, a sample of his work is shown in the photos above. The trailer for AlterEgo is below but go for a google of the artists I just mentioned and have a look around.



At the Academy screening of AlterEgo there was also a short doco called "Sand Dancer," which is awfully made, and contains no real information, but does have images of some amazing work by Christchurch sand artist Peter Donnelly, check it out below.