Looking beyond the square glazed window and on into the bush, I can see Mount Wellington in the distance.  This is the southern tip of Tasmania and, for all intent and purpose, the bottom of the earth.  Clouds float by at the same speed as anywhere else, while life, in the affectionately named and nearby “Slowbart” floats by at its own sweet pace.  The convivial lubricant to life in this part of the world, and dare I say Australia as a whole, is “grog”, and the sidewalks along Salamanca that connects the state Parliament to its constituents are packed with bars, people and the proverbial slosh.

Vintage cruisers, tall ships and sailing yachts slink in and out of the harbour, whilst Hobart residents drink away the shining hours on the quayside, Boag’s or 9th Island in hand.  From the colonial-style ex-customs house to the 1930s office blocks, Hobart is a patchwork of new and old, where tradition and style fastidiously remains, for new money or old, and where any man or woman can ply their trade and win or lose a fortune.  Via the arterial veins of Davey, Macquarie, Collins and Liverpool that run through the heart of Hobart, to the winding lanes that take you up through the beautiful Battery Point and Sandy Bay, the city itself bristles with history; a sense that every dweller pays their respect to on a daily basis, but who knows for how much longer.  Like the coffee palaces and temperance hotels long since gone, nothing quite lasts forever, and in spite of the centuries-old raw history that has stuck around, and perhaps could be said to bind generations past together through a shared sense of fate, the impact wanes.

Like the mountains that contrast with the low-rise, low-impact buildings of the city and its sprawl, the state of being in Hobart always stands in stark opposition.  This might be the new world, but around here there is no easy passage from old to new, from the traditions to the notion of reinvention. Big and disruptive ideas jostle for position in the minds of the locals, and all too frequently get beaten down.  Seemingly immune from the troubles that beset the rest of the world in these times of big economic woes, Hobart, and Tasmania as a whole faces its own cultural and social battles. The likes of MONA, painted as one man’s folly to the island state, to me seem like the perfect gift, fought tooth and nail as a rear-guard action by the aged, blinkered and conservative population.

Ragtime floats through the summer air in downtown Hobart adding its own colour to the canvas that is a city beset by troubles past, but which is slowly but surely being forced to change.  Yet, for every last bit of change, Tasmania has an unchanging heart of natural beauty.  The neo-mythical Kookaburra bird laces the days with it’s own unique song, whilst with each dieing day of summer, the sun casts its most beautiful yellow & orange hues over this island state and the Bass Straits that “connect” the island to the mainland.  Nature’s bounty is in abundance here and the quality of life is certainly a lot greater for it; from the oyster beds at the not too distant Barilla Bay to the dairies and vineyards found just offshore at Bruny Island, and on to the awesome and majestic views atop Mount Wellngton at sunset.

I suppose the sense of Tasmania that you perceive, much depends on the angle from which you look, and your own sense of place on this planet.  Hobart is a comfortable and quiet place with much to offer on many levels, and it’s peripheral part in a big regional player is slowly changing, for better or for worse, but I would like to think that it is destined for bigger and better things, should the right economic, social and cultural forces win out.  Perhaps a big “if”, but change will most certainly come to this place, no matter what.

There are so many reasons why I love Shoreditch: from the braggards to the hipsters, to the charity mums, to the Sunday flower market jaunters. Shoreditch is not just a pastiche, it is a living organism that with every day awakes, kicking and screaming to life, reminding the world of what a unique, if somewhat troublesome child it can be.

But for all the reasons I love Shoreditch, there is truly only one that pins my heart to a hoarding on Great Eastern Street, announcing to the passing crowds of out-of-town commuters and lorry drivers alike that this is the place of my soul; and that is, the sprayed up, pasted over and fucked up walls of the hallowed triangle and its periphery.

For as many years as I have worked in the area, and eventually come to live, I have been inspired to document the activities of each and every ne’er do well that sees fit to climb out of bed at a god-forsaken hour and crawl through the darkened back streets & passages for the sake of their art: for “as the city sleeps, the walls they weep.”

Who could forget the likes of Paul Le Chien and his 3 metre high penis adorning the side of Starbucks by Old Street roundabout, or the street conversations starting with “love don’t pay the rent.”  It’s these piffy statements on life according to the Shoreditch triangle that make it a unique spot in London, at the heart of which, the Foundry, soon to be gone, but hopefully not taking the spirit of the ‘ditch with it, as the inevitable wrecking ball hits.

It may well be that the council, alongside developers, is taking a heavy hand to the ‘hood, and the graffiti contained therein, but Shoreditch was, and remains, the place in which Banksy cut his teeth in London, and which saw his ‘battles’ with Eine. And of course, when other battles ensued, and the likes of Damien Hirst threw the legal book at a “young upstart vandal”, the crews closed ranks with their own, and fought back!

Despite the negative effects of gentrification and the mass of graff that marks out the railway lines on the way up north, or that spans the walls of the Regent’s Canal and other quarters, I still like to think that Shoreditch is the spiritual home of graffiti in the capital. And with the likes of Dscreet, Cept, Sweettoof, Gold Peg, Mighty Mo and the rest of the Burning Candy crew still plying their trade, alongside upcoming stars like Malarky, the walls of Shoreditch are very much alive and singing!

From the earliest times, when hordes flocked to the Curtain Theatre at London city limits, till the ever present moment, Shoreditch has been a creative force in the beating heart of London, and graffiti is just another beautiful facet of that.  Graffiti and street art might be one man’s scourge, but it means so many things to so many different people, and to me it makes Shoreditch the inspiration that it is, and is very much part of the place I have come to love and call my home.

If Jonathan Jones’ opinion on Art as a whole even matters, then I have to say we are all screwed.  Art as a medium of communication, conveyance, or anything else, as we know it, is dead!  That’s because, in his summation, street art, and in my opinion, by proxy, anything less subversive, or alternative art forms, have become nothing more inspiring than a mortgage for a 2-up and 2-down in some suburban jungle of South-West London.  As if the likes of David Cameron made the genre of “Street Art” fashionable by merely taking a sample of work by Eine to the White House as a gift from one nation to another.  The reality is though, that Prime Minister Cameron rides nothing more than the crest of an existing wave, created by others, and that his rubber stamping of 1 specific artist, does not gloss over the credentials of the rest.

Jones’ published piece, Street Art is dying, is risible. The notion that Street Art’s acceptance by the middle class is simply killing it, is a joke.  Banksy might have become a by-word for respectability, as has Eine with his shutterfronts & murals spelling out any number of words in the English Oxford dictionary, but many an artist, or rather “vandal” sits beyond this perimeter.  The plethora of names to drag, kicking and screaming, out of the proverbial bag is enormous, perhaps even so long that Jones would be dead by the time it has finished being recited, but beyond this: what is dead about street art? I ask.

The kind of tripe that is written by Jones, can only come from the mouth of an individual who has no creative soul or emotional investment in any kind of art and who would find the likes of Dali too flaccid and Miro too evasive.  Who knows, maybe he likes to kiss the arse of many a living artist, any of which should remain nameless for fear of being outed (with lipstick marks freshly imprinted on cheeks for evidence).

When was the last time any self-respecting middle-class wonk opened a broadsheet to find out about the latest in the world according to #streetart? As if middle-class broadsheet-o-meter was any indicator of the ‘decline’ of street art.  By this projection, blockbuster shows by Titian and Turner, helping to fill the coffers of under-funded, under-valued and flagging institutions, not only represent truly dead artists, but also dead art forms.

The hubbub around these events that Jones simply dismisses as signs of a dying corpse may well not be in the printed media at large, but it has been covered by national/international television stations, and, more importantly in this day and age, it has cluttered up the inboxes, streams and feeds of those who actually care about these things.  In fact, the event specifically referenced, #seenoevil in Bristol, was a collaboration not just between 60 street artists from around the world, but with the council, to try and improve the state of a apparently decaying part of Bristol, which will have major knock-on effects beyond the event itself that took place, and it’s Jones’ rather 2-dimensional and cock-eyed view that causes councils and communities to lose out on the potential opportunity of these things.

Street art may well not be what it once was.  You can hardly blame it for the popularisation and spread of culture in a better connected world, but to claim it is dead and lacking in creativity is harsh:

Clearly there’s a fine line between street art and vandalism, and the defining lines appear to be the cheque book and/or expressed permission, but that being said, there will always remain an air of cool and respectability around defiance of the common marketplace and the culture of sell-out, and for every dozen Banksy’s there’s a legion of other street artists doing their work in dark corners at night.  So if you don’t like what they do, you can find yet another soul plying his trade in the same field. And if you are still dissatisfied, you can jog on to the taxpayer funded institutions that hang work by many a dead fella.  All that besides, perhaps before Jones goes pontificating on the longevity of Street Art, he should go about understanding the wider scene a little better, not least by picking up a book or two by Cedar Lewisohn.

To my mind, these events prove that street art is very much alive, kicking and taking no hostages. 50 somethings checking out the latest in the graff/street art scene might not be cool to Jones, but it’s a tad more accessible than Titian and his buddies, and generates better long term benefits for less money, and who is to say that’s not cool or representative of the death throws of street art.

All in all, Jones misses the point, and, in my rather brutal opinion, should really be demoted as some kind of “art” columnist for the Guardian newspaper.

It’s not very often that I pick up a book that isn’t by an American author and feel compelled to read it cover-to-cover, but such was the case with Patrick McGuinness’ The Last Hundred Days, currently long-listed, and soon hopefully short-listed and winner of the Man Booker Prize 2011.  I have to say that this is probably one of the best books I have read in eons, and which, on top of its historical relevance and harsh realism, paints an exceedingly descriptive and lyrical picture of the very dark days in the twilight of the Romanian brand of East European communism and its ultimate failure.

We all think we know the story of 1989 and the drawing back of the Iron Curtain that fell across half of Europe after WWII, but do we really?  To have lived it is to have experienced it, and few of us can say that.  With the privilege of distant observers we can but only imagine, and if you think the fear instilled in the general population by the recent riots was something, then “you ain’t seen nothing yet!”

The book itself depicts a less than rosy view of every day life in Romania in the run up to the December revolution of 1989  that saw the cobbling but ruthless dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, put down aside his hapless wife, Elena.  It’s a book of a normality that makes you question everything.  Nothing is ever what it seems, something that goes well beyond the bounds of the pure surveillance and torture, such are basic tools in a bastard regime run with ultimate fear.  In the end you find yourself questioning even the actions of the most kindly Romanians.

The recurrent themes of boredom, duplicity, and self-interest pervade the book from beginning to end, the utter control and desecration of a culture is relentless, but where the book leaves off, come December 25th, 1989, you know is only the beginning of more of the same. The conductor and the orchestra change, but the people are forced to continue dancing to the same old music.  After 50 years of cleptomania and ‘ineptocracy’, the sad fact is that it will take another 150 years to rectify political and social ills instilled by the misappropriation of the communist dream.  This may be a work of fiction based on past events but the political agitators in it are very real, and ever present in the Romania of today, alas.

McGuinness has done an awe-inspiring job of capturing the sordid, decaying and disjointed “communist way of life” in Bucharest during the summer of ’89.  McGuinness’ love for poetry and the written word as a whole shines through in his inimitable style and to fault him on certain aspects of his writing would be merely pedantic, and I am certainly not here to nit-pick!

The Last Hundred Days is timely in its printing, coming 20+ years since the revolution and last year’s appointment of Müller as Nobel Laureate.  These are silos across the face of Romania’s revisionists, and a kick up the arse to generational amnesia.  And to those who think that with revolution and change comes the benefit of democracy, it’s clear you are naive and blissful in your ignorance.  This is a book that doubtless will never see the light of day in Romanian print, though one can but hope – the networks remain!

Thankfully, the vast majority of the book is set in the run up and focuses on the character development and events surrounding them, rather than the raw and pure facts of history.  This is, for its own benefit, not a history textbook, and as with many a character in the book, you have to read between the lines, analysing the words and actions within the story and the insinuations of thereof rather than to take them at face value.

As you might well have gathered, I have nothing but good words for this book and I would recommend it to everyone!  All that is left to say now is congratulations to Domnul Comrade McGuinness on this incredible work, and on his inclusion in the listing for this year’s Man Booker prize.

Good luck, and I hope you win!