Writing's On The Wall

Sister Dearest and I are a bit obessesed with street art at the moment.

It comes as I prepare for my last week in Sydney before heading back to Queensland in lieu of my departure. As I visit my favourite places, eat at my favourite cafes and make the most of my final smog-laden breathes, I've been made privy to a side of Sydney which up until now, I've always taken for granted.

I frequently walk past street art but rarely stop and really appreciate it. Maybe it's because I live in a city where everything is on fast forward or the fact that I am surrounded almost entirely by concrete. But you'd think then that the coloured artworks which are secretly painted onto billboards and building walls in the witching hours would stand out amongst the city doom and gloom.

It's not until I take a moment to really look for it that I discover that street art is everywhere. The one-way streets and alleyways which coil throughout Surry Hills are an urban gallery of guerilla artworks. But this is no haphazard vandalism. This is the result of a creative eye and of careful planning. This is the result of a few creative individuals who want to make our city more beautiful and who want art to be available to the masses.

Politicians, city counsel workers and people with no creative appreciation are quick to label street art as grafitti - 'vandalism' by a public nuisance who couldn't keep his paint brush on the paper.

One of Britain's most famous public nuisances is Banksy, a guerilla artists who is no stranger to narrow-minded opinions. His own outlook on politics, war, homophobia, sexism, religion, materialism, advertising (shall I go on?) has been painted, sprayed, glued and 'grafittied' across every possible surface in Britain. The Metropolitan police consider him a vandal and his work an eyesore. What Banksy is is a libertine who believes that the true defacers of public property are the advertising giants and political executives who's slogans contribute to the inadequacies which filter through our lives.

It may not be quite as serious in Sydney, but the city's most famous creative milieus - Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Kings Cross and Newtown - have gained their fame courtesy of the creative types who push boundaries (and buildings) with their artworks. It's why people - executives, lawyers and bankers alike - flock to these suburbs. They set up their houses and fill them with brands and BMWs and material goods and relish their being apart of such a socially-distinguished suburb.

Ironic really, given the messages these urban artworks were painted to promote.

Ciao for now.

(Image Credit: Banksy and Darlinghurst Nights)

SIDE NOTE: Wear Are The Pants?

All I can say is... Amen!

Ciao for now. xo

A New World of Excitement

It's exactly one month until I go overseas.

One month.

That's 31 days.

31 more days of twiddling my thumbs, frugally counting every dollar and shamefully abusing my journalism skills by investigating every minor detail I can dig up about Appel Farm, my summer camp and soon to be home away from home.

And don't even get me started on the Facebook stalking. Needless to say, it's hitting an all time high. Is it so wrong that I want to see who my fellow counsellors will be and what the camp looks like, based on the thousands of photos posted between 1960 and now?

I don't think so.

Now that the count down is really on, now that I am a mere month away from traveldom and can almost feel the aeroplane cabin air sucking the moisture out of my face, I'm getting excited. Really excited. The kind of excited that keeps you up at night (no kids...not THAT kind of excited...) but the excited that gives you verbal word vomit wherein you can't speak, write or dream about anything else.

And I'm not kidding about the dreams either. I am a woman obsessed.

I tried to put it off for as long as possible by denying myself the excitement. I tried pushing camp and my inevitable travel plans to the very back of my mind and not indulging in them. Partly, because I was worried that if I gave into the excitement, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. For six months, I would have to put up with this rabid excitement eating away at every aspect of my life.

No, I wouldn't be able to live with myself. And neither would anybody else.

But the excitement eventually found me. It sniffed me out, jumped up on to my lap and wagged its tail while looking longingly into my eyes. So I gave in and allowed the excitement to make itself at home.

And has it ever.

Hence the word vomit. Now that I am no longer living in travel denial, all I can think about is camp. All I can talk about is camp. All I can facebook stalk is, you guessed it, camp. I am obsessed and greedily hungry for any smackeral of information I can get my hands on. Every photo, video or review brings me that little bit closer to working out what is in store for me - who I will meet, what I will do, who I will be. And the more information I find, the more the excitement intensifies and even if I try to abstain, the excitement ends up power spewing all over the people I love.

But after everything that's happened in my attempt to make this adventure possible, I figure I'm allowed to be excited. I'm allowed to do a celebration dance simply because I purchased my backpack today (I actually did - both purchase my packpack today and do a celebration dance). I'm allowed to toss and turn all night because I can't stop going over every detail in my head. I'm allowed to let the excitement in.

I'm allowed, because just like buying your first pack and crying at the gate of the airport and taking a million photos nobody else cares to see, it's part of the backpacker's rite-of-passage to be excited.

And to make everybody else jealous.

Ciao for now. xo

What Internet?

Hello my loves!

I know it's been awhile. I know it looks like I've forsaken you and that The KH Chronicles has fallen subject to laziness. But it's not true! The KH Chronicles has fallen subject to the internet, or a lack there of.

Without any kind of connection at home (my modem seems to have waved farewell and passed on to the land of dead modems) I have had to come to the good ol' library in order to pump this post out. Hopefully, this will only be a short term fix, as much like a dog who won't pee when it's watched, I get nervous knowing that the people around me are shiftly watching my screen.

So sit tight! Report back! Hopefully within the next 48 hours my new modem will be purring and fresh posts will be coming your way.

Until then....

Ciao for now. xo

WHO Do You Think You Are?

Ergh... I am so sick of all these body-image-self-love-anti-flagellation messages that seem to awash every magazine cover I come across.

It's not the idea of loving one's body that jerks my chain. It's the ironically backwards way these magazines go about trying to make women feel more comfortable in their skin. When really, they're saying one thing and doing the complete opposite.

I know it sounds like I'm flogging a dead horse. I've touched on these topic plenty of times before. But it just goes to show that as boistrous as some (okay...most) magazines are in the messages they promote about body image, they aren't getting the message themselves.

This week's guilty party is Who - usually one of my more favourite glossips for their superb balance of celebrity garbage and fashion front-runners - but this week, the trash talk and fashion faux pas fall short. Because gracing the cover is Rikki Lee Coulter, Lisa McCune and Johanna Griggs beneath a bright pink banner CELEBRITIES WITHOUT MAKEUP.

I know what you're thinking, because I thought the exact same thing. Sweet - celebrities baring their blemishes, puss-filled pimples for all to see, pores the size of Peru , blackheads, bags under the eyes - all those ugly traits which us normal people hide beneath layers upon layers of Revlon Ultra-Conceal.
What better way to perk myself up than to see 'the beautiful people' looking like every day, normal hags.

Well not in this magazine they don't.

I'm sorry to dissapoint, but there was nothing oozing, nothing red and nothing inflamed from excessive squeezing. In fact, normal was far from what I saw. These women looked like they'd walked out of a three-day spa fix in the Maldives where they'd been scrubbed, soothed and spray-tanned within an inch of their relaxed lives.

In other words, they looked beautiful, and therefore, completely unrealistic.

Staring at these flawless complexions, I became confused. What was I supposed to learn from this? What message was Who trying to sell me? Here are three women who look even more beautiful without make-up, tanned and natural, yet completely unnatural at the same time. Maybe one in every million women look that good without a link of paint, leaving the other 999,999 to feel even more self-aware of their 'beauty'.

It seems now, not only do we have to cope with hoping to look beautiful with makeup, but we have to cope with hoping to look beautiful without makeup too. Awesome - another message about body-image which has further scrambled my insecurities.

So I don't know what to think anymore - about Who or about body image. It's all smoke and mirrors, if you ask me.

But if it's reassurance they were going for, had they feature Rikki Lee with a dirty big Z-I-T on her nose, I'm pretty certain I would be feeling a whole lot better about the face that greets me in the mirror each morning.

Ciao for now. xo