there's our catastrophe

because yarn-bombing is the state, that’s why

footscray, melbourne.  seriously, I was so happy to see this intervention on original dumbshit graffiti.  good job, pink cursive graffitist. 

like, school sucks for a lot of people, and going to school doesn’t necessarily make you smarter, yep, yep, but self-righteous “just self-educate!” stuff does nothing to fix the very serious problems facing young people in the West.  and obviously the consequences of not finishing school are a lot higher if you’re not some Anglo punk dude with connections who at the end of the day can flip his septum piercing up and join the mainstream if he wants to.  there is actually quite a bit of this kind of anarchist graffiti around Footscray these days, and there never used to be, and it’s pretty obvious that it’s coming from outside the original local community and tone-deaf to its needs and politics. 

in any case the local library is also a product of social democracy, imperfect but worth defending and improving rather than nihilistically rejecting.  Look, I wanna abolish the state as we know it too, but you’re not automatically more anarchist just because you’re making life harder for yourself.

monsterpussy:

How’s Melbourne for a laugh

coffeebrat:

Secret Side of a City//The Age

“…it takes a certain sensitivity - and some imagination - to discern the true nature of a particular story, or to guess what went on at a certain building, or to suspect the ulterior purpose of a public lavatory. ”People see a place differently if they have a particular interest,” he says. ”So you can be walking down Swanston Street in 1950, 1960 or 1970 and see things that other people don’t see at all - or see them but have no idea what they mean. Or you can see them with what might be described as a ‘queer eye’, a gay sensibility.”

Such places might be the vegetarian restaurant in Swanston Street that was once Val’s coffee shop - a much-loved bohemia frequented by artists, theatrical types, activists and camp men and women (as they were then known). Or what is considered Melbourne’s oldest gay pick-up spot, a urinal outside the Queen Victoria Hospital, known as such since the 1860s (it was removed in the 1990s).

Because homosexuality was criminalised for so long in Victoria, it was pushed underground into such places. ”For camp women and men, social disapproval made it difficult for romantic or sexual relationships to emerge in the ordinary ways available to heterosexuals - through family, church, clubs and at work,” Wayne Murdoch writes in Secret Histories.

The walks that Willett conducts range about the CBD and inner suburbs. This year’s walk, as part of the Midsumma festival, will focus on the ’50s, an era when suspicion, oppression and police entrapment of gay men were at their height.

The Midsumma history walk is on January 22. Bookings at midsumma.org.au, alga.org.au

“fuck blogs, fuck you”

(via saltmarshhag-deactivated2013011)

image description: a three-storey house in Brooklyn, New York City, with some smashed windows etc.  there is a very large painted hand that appears to be reaching out of one window and giving the street the V-sign; it’s by street artist OverUnder. end image description. 

(via renoriginal)

image description: hot pink old-school graffito reading “so much history…ERASED”.  there is a blank stripe down the middle of the word “ERASED” that looks like an eraser mark.  the graffiti is located somewhere, I don’t know where, with a lot of concrete blocks overlooking a body of water, maybe a bay.  you can see tower blocks in the distance over the water.  end of image description. 

(via mewmewfoucault)

fuckyeahfemmes:

Jenny Holzer

I love this picture but to clarify: this is not jenny holzer, this is graffiti artist lady pink wearing a jenny holzer t-shirt.  I feel kind of weird that this was just credited as “jenny holzer” because holzer is a much more famous white US artist who does not have the most amazing history of acknowledging the art of people of colour or art outside galleries — I was pretty shocked that she didn’t challenge the statement that south african kids wearing her t-shirts were coming into contact with art for the first time.  here is a good comment on that article:

This article states that South Africa is a “fragile democracy.” What rubbish!! Many things are lacking in South Africa, but its democracy is sturdy and in no danger.Your American artist in Fashionable New York can undertake a stupid feel good initiative that accomplishes nothing and get a writeup in the NYTimes. There is surely a word for this but it eludes me. . For her to think children in South Africa are disconnected from art is beyond laughable. If she understood the absurdity of this statement she would be ashamed. Fat chance

anyway so I kind of didn’t like jenny holzer that much after that. 

(via fuckyeahfemmes)