INTRO

…tattooing is for the time being a hobby I took up this year, I am still trying to finish an MA at the University of Auckland Art History Department and work some hours for NZ VANLINES (Furniture Removals) for some extra money to feed the family. My interest in tattooing started back in high school. Me and a mate made a machine with CD-walkman motor and used guitar strings as needles and inked a few guys at school. I never thought seriously about it then but quite recently a family member saw some drawings of mine and suggested that I do a tattoo for him. He purchased the gears online and things just happened from thereon. Although its just a hobby now, hopefully in the near future we can do something with it. So, this blog has little to do with historical aspects of tattooing in the traditional sense, although I do talk about ideas relating to the contemporary landscape in which it may exist now. If you want to see some awesome tattoos visit Carl Cocker's site - www.tongantattoo.com. I do tattoo weekly sometimes three tattoos a week which I will post when I can get images of.

It’s hard to be informed here on where the blog stands in terms of theme since I tend to be interested in a wide variety of things. Most of which are events taking place now especially as portrayed in the media. So, it’s ‘kinda’ like a media blog but I appeal here to issues of culture and identity as they might be reflected and sometimes influential in how images of people and places are filtered and re-presented in the media. How people (of Pacific origin in general) utilise the media is response whether consciously or unconsciously. 'Aesthetic' is an interesting notion in that it usually escapes popular analysis and therefore understandings of youth cultures. It is sometimes referred to and often discounted as having actual meaning and significance to ways of understanding and intellectually perceiving ‘youth cultures’. Likewise, the kind of posts published here appeal to elements often discounted in dominant discourses which concerns itself with explaining the influences of (commercialised) media in general on the younger population or generation. I appeal more here to everyday prose and concepts often subscribed as vehicles of communications and understanding amongst our generations. Terms which are hardly recognised as important to implicit understanding of the ‘goins-on’ of such ‘objects of enquiry’.

In this sense, hip-hop and rap are fundamental issues of focus here, in-so-far as they embody the simplicities of the elements to which our questions and investigations ought to be directed…..2bcont