Hello all,
Welcome to my personal blog about the exploits of my life and my views on culture, graffiti, poker, business and life. I don't have any specific goals with this page but I hope to keep it regularly updated. In an effort to provide everyone with a little context and background for my perspective, I'll tell you all a little about myself. I'm a 21 year old student of Anthropology at a local junior college, waiting on responses from Universities at the moment. I'm living in Northern California in a moderately small town and work in a generic food-service job in a nearby town. In my free time, I enjoy gaming, hiking, working on a website I hope to launch at the end of the year that I'm pretty psyched about, and my biggest passion besides my education; poker. I played poker "professionally" (I use this term very loosely) for a couple years in between jobs and am constantly working towards making this a lot more viable option of an income source. I will, of course, provide as much context as I can so that my stories and posts will make sense. I may change names, dates and other small details to conceal the identity of those involved.
Now that my identity has been outlined a bit, let's get right down to it. I'm sure you're sitting there wondering why I called this blog ''The Anthropology of Graffiti" if I don't plan on talking about graffiti exclusively, or even primarily. Well, I'll tell you a little story...
I graduated from high school in June of 2009 and within 72 hours of receiving my diploma I boarded a plane out of Oakland headed towards Christchurch, New Zealand with my father for my graduation gift. I was extremely excited, and couldn't believe I was finally headed to the place I had wanted to travel for as long as I could remember. This was my first out-of-country experience and at this time I had no idea what Anthropology even was let alone knowing it was something I would eventually major in. Fast Forward about 30 hours and a deadmau5 album on repeat for the good majority of it later, I decided to get my Internet-Fix after our first day of walking around the town and use the hotel's free computers to surf the web.
While I was aimlessly clicking my way through facebook or whatever online forum I was browsing at the time a man sat next to me and began browsing. After about 20 minutes of us glancing back and forth from each others screens avoiding eyes he asked where I was from, I told him California. His reaction was rather surprising, and consisted of him asking me tons of questions about how California living is and especially how the graffiti looked in my area. He explained to me that he was a graffiti artist who lived in Australia with his wife and child, and that he had just "done a run on these Kiwi's". He told me that Kiwi's (New Zealanders) and Aussies tended to "battle" back and forth by coming in groups and tagging trains, buildings and basically everything they can get paint to stick to in a couple of days before flying back to Australia. I was dumbfounded that someone could consider this their passion or even profession, although I did think it was cool. In the midst of my ignorance, this guy shows me some of the works himself and his crew had done on the current trip they were on. He showed me picture upon picture of art, not what I had thought was graffiti. He changed my perspective on graffiti in just a dozen or so photographs. He showed me images of train-length dragons painted by crews of guys in a matter of minutes, not days.
Years later that guy and his art still resonated through my mind when I was taking a class on Folklore and we watched a video called Style Wars on Graffiti in NYC (Link to view: ) and it finally clicked with me that Graffiti is more of a representation of our society in it's truest form than anything else I could think of. Essentially, Graffiti is each of our generations honest opinions and struggles, and I'm talking everything from hatespeech scraped into a bathroom stall to Banksy's newest piece, it represents us. I find this is a fitting title to this blog, as I will be writing about current events, my opinions, and my honest thoughts.
Welcome to my blog, feel free to comment and ask questions, I look forward to hearing from you.
Welcome to my personal blog about the exploits of my life and my views on culture, graffiti, poker, business and life. I don't have any specific goals with this page but I hope to keep it regularly updated. In an effort to provide everyone with a little context and background for my perspective, I'll tell you all a little about myself. I'm a 21 year old student of Anthropology at a local junior college, waiting on responses from Universities at the moment. I'm living in Northern California in a moderately small town and work in a generic food-service job in a nearby town. In my free time, I enjoy gaming, hiking, working on a website I hope to launch at the end of the year that I'm pretty psyched about, and my biggest passion besides my education; poker. I played poker "professionally" (I use this term very loosely) for a couple years in between jobs and am constantly working towards making this a lot more viable option of an income source. I will, of course, provide as much context as I can so that my stories and posts will make sense. I may change names, dates and other small details to conceal the identity of those involved.
Now that my identity has been outlined a bit, let's get right down to it. I'm sure you're sitting there wondering why I called this blog ''The Anthropology of Graffiti" if I don't plan on talking about graffiti exclusively, or even primarily. Well, I'll tell you a little story...
I graduated from high school in June of 2009 and within 72 hours of receiving my diploma I boarded a plane out of Oakland headed towards Christchurch, New Zealand with my father for my graduation gift. I was extremely excited, and couldn't believe I was finally headed to the place I had wanted to travel for as long as I could remember. This was my first out-of-country experience and at this time I had no idea what Anthropology even was let alone knowing it was something I would eventually major in. Fast Forward about 30 hours and a deadmau5 album on repeat for the good majority of it later, I decided to get my Internet-Fix after our first day of walking around the town and use the hotel's free computers to surf the web.
While I was aimlessly clicking my way through facebook or whatever online forum I was browsing at the time a man sat next to me and began browsing. After about 20 minutes of us glancing back and forth from each others screens avoiding eyes he asked where I was from, I told him California. His reaction was rather surprising, and consisted of him asking me tons of questions about how California living is and especially how the graffiti looked in my area. He explained to me that he was a graffiti artist who lived in Australia with his wife and child, and that he had just "done a run on these Kiwi's". He told me that Kiwi's (New Zealanders) and Aussies tended to "battle" back and forth by coming in groups and tagging trains, buildings and basically everything they can get paint to stick to in a couple of days before flying back to Australia. I was dumbfounded that someone could consider this their passion or even profession, although I did think it was cool. In the midst of my ignorance, this guy shows me some of the works himself and his crew had done on the current trip they were on. He showed me picture upon picture of art, not what I had thought was graffiti. He changed my perspective on graffiti in just a dozen or so photographs. He showed me images of train-length dragons painted by crews of guys in a matter of minutes, not days.
Years later that guy and his art still resonated through my mind when I was taking a class on Folklore and we watched a video called Style Wars on Graffiti in NYC (Link to view: ) and it finally clicked with me that Graffiti is more of a representation of our society in it's truest form than anything else I could think of. Essentially, Graffiti is each of our generations honest opinions and struggles, and I'm talking everything from hatespeech scraped into a bathroom stall to Banksy's newest piece, it represents us. I find this is a fitting title to this blog, as I will be writing about current events, my opinions, and my honest thoughts.
Welcome to my blog, feel free to comment and ask questions, I look forward to hearing from you.
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