skillz to pay the billz

So I went to the city with my friend Tom and took a trip down Hosier Lane to be where the peeps with spray cans are last Saturday.
Tom's a great artiste and has been making stencils of late.
His is the Frankenstein's monster one up above.
See? Skillz.
And he did a stencil for me too, which wass terribly sporting of him. It was a map of Australia and said, 'Australian Values ... Conservative Values?' Which is a fair call but a tad obvious. Anyway, terribly sporting.
But we decided to ask the studio located at at Hosier Lane where we could or shouldn't stencil. And what was meant to be a quick enquiry turned into a lengthy conversation that ended up with this friendly fellow called Andrew asking for Tom to spray his stencils onto some cardboard for which he gave us a dvd of the City Lights project and some other great 'urban' texts.

He said he was glad to see some political stuff being made and put up. Apparently there's not much explicit politics in the urban art scene.
Melbourne City Council's strident anti-graffiti efforts during the lead up to the Commonwealth Games (and let's not forget the temporary accommodation of homeless people!) apparently spending $2m in two weeks alone, was rightfully met with resistance from the scene.
But where's the on-going engagement and display of critical politics? I haven't seen much. But maybe I'm blind.
And maybe I should stop writing about it and start doing something about it...
And I'm not saying that everything has to be explicitly politicised but, well, you know: a little more political engagement would be a good thing.
Instead, here's a cool mushroom.

What's on the box right now: Leftfield with John Lydon - open up (no shit).