Gary, 25. Marangaroo

Its the art, not the exhibition, whats written not read, frozen on the doorstep of your beloved. I cycle into town and the freewheels sing like crickets. the sunset in Hyde Park and that twilight airport feeling, had to collapse, i'd been up a mountain too long, sweating fever, the sweetheart fever, that after head space where your bones dissolve and mornings swell in the mantra of sun lit curtains. beside the water i lit up and dreamt of asking Sarah, flux you fly girl from years back ,just what becomes of these dreams built on scenes? With a thick Glasgow accent she tells me that even our dying is narcissistic, - don't think of it as a popularity contest. Try and witness yourself. If you are true to yourself you will be special in your own way.' I feel the affirmation push out my chest and I head onwards to Spectrum, down Beaufort street that beautiful 80's airbrushed boulevard of broken dreams.

Inside I meet Brad, another friend from days of the beautifully ram shackled spirit of the painting sheds at SOCA, a school that's got it right, that puts play before polish. Its a Broken Sound night and he's backing on cello for rabbit island, who pull out a rare bedroom-baked warmth that captures like an over-exposed Polaroid. Later I'm introduced to the singer, the beautiful Amber. I confess to goosebumps and the boys are cheeky and rip air guitars behind her back. i know everyone would agree if not hiding behind black sunglasses.

A drone outfit follow and proceed in mashing our heads into a fine paste. I see watery people around me dilating in their own secret aural sex and i suddenly feel so privileged to be part of this great show of uncommercial genius. It feels almost like it's ours, secret, but its not, its just not popular, because the best things about it, the really beautiful parts, are totally unmarketable!' -I'm bellowing into Brads ear. He agrees, 'the middle class goes to paradise!' he shouts back, hands cusped together and opening like a flower.

I find five bucks in my pocket and get another cup of wine. Ben floats in favourite uncle styles and we contemplate the shack next door, covered in some demented graf like acid fungal blooms. the bands are packing and I'm flirting on the verges of people I don't know, feeling a little monosyllabic. I drift off thinking of the consistent sweet ones Ive had at Spectrum over the years and what a space like this represents as an uncharted realm of the academy, breaking a widely held taboo by including people not yet out of art school, avoiding the worthy in favor for the wacky and giving young artists the breathing space to think out-loud and make footholds (however lofty) outside the prevailing sprawl of cookie-cutter ommercial galleries. Then I think of the new breed of 'urban gallery' you see all around William street now who rightly do connect street art and fashion to the wider arts scene to some degree but which seem stuck on reevaluating the decorative as a kind of modest formalism - something starting to seem an overplayed line by now in the worst sense.

the Kuta she once knew as paradise, sunsets which lingered on seventies string bikinis and blow wave hairstyles, now a tourist resort for westerners who wear '10 things not to do in Bali' t-shirts.

Back to the smutty, cut-throat, Qantas media-award winning local journalism, of course then there's those galleries like Breadbox and Pica, the muscle of the more conceptual, politically conscious, more worked-out end of the scale. Reliably rut-a-tut-tut, both these galleries have a standard they keep consistent, progressive but invariably narrowed to nationalistic themes. I wasn't surprised when past applications to both of these spaces were rejected, man sometimes you just wish they'd show the kind of work that doesn't belong there, the kind that don't-quite-know-where-I'm-going-with-this.


ah finally jay and we're at Brad's on the rooftop with a neon steeple near. We laugh of the songs that keep coming and how the grit will someday make pearl. Some random sake enters the equation and for some time we poke at all this pinnacle bullshit in the art scene lately. I tell him i like it when its animal nature and humble like tonight, closer to the earth and out running the duke.