My Newtown Graffiti book

The final touches to my Sydney, Newtown graffiti book have finally been completed.  Check it out at Blurb.com (link is inlcuded below).

It’s so cool to have it finally completed.  It catalogues about 4 years worth of photos I’ve taken of Sydney’s graffiti neighborhoods of Newtown, Erskineville, Enmore, Camperdown.  

There approxamately 120 photos in all including the original Banksy in Enmore’s Phillip st which has now faded away; the Idiot Box by Andrew Aitken opposite the Imperial Hotel (which has now been scrubbed).  There are a bunch of early Kill Pixie pieces that I love including the first one I ever came across in Camperdown park which said “They sneak, they hide, they kill for cardigans”.  Plus the prolific pasteups and stencils of Stryder X and Glitagrrl.

Check it out and pass on the link to others you think might be interested.

For those of you keen to check out some more of the photos inside, go to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/noisemachine/

 

Newtown Graffit

Outdoor art of Syd…

By Nick Darcy-Fox

Book Preview

Porsches “creeping takeover” of VW

I don’t count myself as any kind of financial expert but I do like this story of how the luxury car company snuck up on hundreds of hedge funds and simply yanked the rug from under their feet.

Porsche had previously owned 42.6% of VW stock but then through buying options on VW shares rather than the shares themselves (which would have required public disclosure) they have effectively increased their share to around 75%.

Once hedge funds realised that the State of Lower Saxony owned about 20% of the shares, leaving only around 5% of VW shares publicly available they went on a buying frenzy.  Why? Because VW was the most heavily shorted stock on the German DAX, meaning they had sold shares they didn’t own and HAD to buy back the shares at whatever cost to close their positions.

On the morning of the 28th of October the VW share price had risen to over a €1000, valuing it for a brief period as the most valuable company in the world.  It also inflated to the point where it was making up to a fourth of the DAX index’s movement.

Porsche have been attacked for a whole host of reasons around this trading practice and have even been accused of being more of a hedge fund than a car manufacturer, which when you realise that they made 

“€3.6bn ($4.6bn) from VW options and €1bn from making cars and in 2007-08 it is likely to have made even more from its stake and derivatives in Europe’s largest carmaker.”, you might think they have a point. (FT)

The Dax have lowered VW’s percentage on the index to 10% and are investigating the practice that Options can be bought without public disclosure.   German financial authorities are investigating Porsche to see whether they’ve done anything illegal and a bunch of Hedge Funds are probably  licking their wounds, just trying to stay alive.

Reverse Graffiti

 

I love this.  Reverse Graffiti takes the elements of graffiti  that highlight the hypocrisy of council policies, public property laws and definitions of vandalism and ratchets them all up a notch.

It’s so clean in its pure expression of the clumsiness of policy to deal with public art. Reverse Graffiti is the removal of dirt or cleaning away sections to “paint” a picture:

“Instead of applying an image, it is taken away, carved, wiped or power washed out of the omnipotent dirt. The viewer is greeted by a quality piece of street art while simultaneously realising just how filthy the area actually is.”

Miranda Marcus from her article in Sevenglobal makes the point in the article that it’s basically a community service – cleaning walls to reveal something beautiful.

There’s no way you can consider it a crime.  And the only way to get rid of it is to clean the walls thereby further improving the infrastructure of our neighbourhoods.

Link

Source photo: valkyrieh116

New A380 Singapore Airlines Suites, but what is it missing?

 

The seriously-moneyed need look no further for travel.  This is the new Singapore airlines Suites, only available on the A380.

Now, for many of us this may not look too bad, but dig a little deeper and we can always find something to complain about:

 

1)      Where are the chandeliers? Am I seriously expected to eat under naked halogen? 
2)      Tableware designed by Givenchy? Frankly I’d be too embarrassed to eat.   Why stop there? Why not Dolce Gabana if we must celebrate Greek love.

3)      Oh and the pyjamas are also by Givenchy.  Is there a riding crop for hostess?

4)      No fireplace for the Pointsetters.

For just over £4k for a one-way to Sydney, I might just consider it, if they turned the first 30 rows of economy into a polo field.

Link

Bruce Robinson selling 1962 Aston Martin

Withnail and I director Bruse Robinson is selling his 1962 Aston Martin (which apparantly appeared briefly in the movie) for 250,000 to 300,000.

Any fans out there looking for a bit of memorabillia?

Apparantly, “all the things I used to love about driving are all illegal nowadays. It’s a fucking nightmare really,” he complained. 

Link

From another article by Richard Fleury:

“This ambition was fired by the man whose name Robinson took for his most famous creation. An alcoholic upper-class scoundrel, Johnny Withnall (Robinson added the ‘I’) was a friend of Robinson’s father. Obliterated on booze, he took the young Bruce out for a spin in his Aston, stopping occasionally to fling open his door and spew. Bruce was thrilled.

“I must have been eight or 10,’ he recalls. ‘I can’t remember if it was a DB4 or a DB2 but he used to drive in state of complete Messerschmitt pilot danger. Completely pissed. And I really fancied all of that when I was a kid.”

So what’s he been up to?  Well apparantly looking adapting Hunter S Thompson’s Rum Diary for za big screen. Again sourced from Richards article:

“I don’t think anybody can drink like that and stay alive,’ he says. ‘I met him in the Chateau Marmont, that big hotel on Sunset (Boulevard) and he had 200 Dunhills, an industrial coke grinder you could mince trees with, huge pile of coke, huge bag of grass, two bottles of Chivas, and he was presiding over that with a towel over his head, sitting at the table. And in an hour and a half of being there, ostensibly to talk to him, I didn’t say a word to him. Not a single word. He was just so blown. When he went to the bathroom inside his suite it was like a pinball, bouncing off the walls. Christ, that’s a sad sight.”

Link

Sad Trader guys

Its like LOLCats but for traders. Sad traders. Sad traders on trading floors.

link

Source: Boingboing

Newcastle’s stand-in manager lays into the press

I love this exchange, published in all its wart’s and all. I dont knoow anything about football and even less about Newcastle united, but you don’t have to enjoy this car crash in slow motion.

Journalist: “Bollocks to that” is what you said.
JK: Bollocks to that. And what goes after that?
Journalist: That was it.
JK: No it wasn’t, no it wasn’t. What was after it? I don’t know if it was your paper, but what went after it?
Journalist: I don’t know.
JK: It even had the cheek to say “bollocks to Newcastle”.
Journalist: I didn’t write that.
JK: That was my first ***** day. What does that tell you? What does that tell you?
Journalist: Where was that? Which paper said that?
JK: I’ve got it. I can’t remember. It was one of the Sundays, not a Saturday. It was a Sunday.

WARNING: loads of swearing included
Link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/oct/03/newcastleunited.premierleague

Bike courier set

Lately Ive been taking a bunch of photos of Bike Couriers and the their very cool fixed gear bikes. 

Every time I see one of them on their hyper-modified bikes, darting through the mad London traffic or idly balancing at the traffic lights, i think of Hiro Protagonist in Neil Stephhenson’s Snowcrash.

Ok, I know that that was actually pizza delivery, and it was a nano-tech skateboard but this is as close to sci-fi as you can find on the street.

This is a link to some of my latest photo’s in and around the streets of London.

Pest Control v Vermin

 

Seems like the art-graffiti showdown is upon us as Pest Control, the Banksy-backed authentication body set up by Steve Lazarides of Lazarides gallery is attempting to get Vermin’s street art Banksy’s removed from the Lyon & Turnbull Contemporary artauction, set to start viewings on Thursday this week in Marlebone.

The Telegraph has a update on the controversial auction: 

“The sale will clearly be a test case but only, of course, if it actually takes place. As the Daily Telegraph went to press, news was filtering through that Pest Control was seeking to have all the works withdrawn from the sale.”

I’m not surprised they’re trying to get Vermin thrown out. Iif they go ahead it will signify tacit approval that the 2 authentication organisations should generally accepted as  2 sides of the same coin.  I believe a body should exist to authenticate Banksy street art but it should at least be condoned by the artist himself, which it clearly isnt in this case.

As if the Banksy issue wasnt enough, there is a debate going on as to whether Michael Wojas should be in any position to sell the works of the famous artists from the Colony Room Club in Soho since the artists gave the work to the club and not him:

“It is turning very nasty indeed. The members are now demanding that either Wojas proves his title to the works on sale, which is to take place this Saturday and all of which are featured in a lavish catalogue prepared by Lyon and Turnbull, or withdraw them immediately. If he fails to do this, they say, legal action will be taken to have the disputed works removed from the sale.”

Source: The First Post

Great entrance for this art gallery into the art world.

10k Profit off short selling

Get into work, hung-over, and this guy who sits opposite me tells me he’s made a 6k loss on the markets this morning.  I’m staggered, he punts his own money here and there makes a 100 quid, 2 if he’s lucky.

Turns out though he’s moaning that he closed off half his bet last night, and if he hadn’t he would be 15.5k up instead of the nearly 10k he’s made overnight on a £100 bet.

Yesterday at close, he bought Lloyds £100 a point spreadbet at a price of £2.37.

In his own words:

“After close the FSA announced that from today short selling in financial institutions is banned. As Lloyds had been systematically shorted by hedge funds I could look forward to an increase in the Lloyds share price as the hedge funds would need to buy to close their short positions.”

At 9pm, he closed out half his position for £1,6450.00 profit.

“As the markets opened at 8am next day I needed to use my laptop on the train (with mobile broadband) to close the other half of my position.  As I logged on Lloyds shot up to £3.94 so I closed for a profit of £7,850 on the other half of the trade.”

It’s all luck though, he had no idea that  the FSA  would cancel shorting, forcing hedge funds to buy to cover their positions.