public art filled shopping saturday

It's been another big, long and involved day... and it kicked off with me hitting the supermarket at the ungodly hour of 7am.

There were actually two reasons for this... this first of which was that Ma was getting her hair did today, but the main reason was that somebody decided that Saturday morning and closing road between 8am and 10:30am which would have either trapped me inside my apartment, or conversely, outside.

So instead I decided to forgo the usual trip down the road to Northpark and instead as soon as I got up I threw myself in the shower and then hit up the Foodland in the North Adelaide Village which opens at the slightly insane and aforementioned time of 7am.

Unsurprisingly there were a number of early morning gym goers picking up some breakfast, but beyond that there seemed to be more staff roaming around than shoppers.

And even though I shop at the Village regularly, I normally just wander around aimlessly until I find what I'm looking for, so I haven't really got everything mapped out in my head in the same way that I do with the Foodland at Northpark.

But I still ended up with the majority of the stuff I needed. While there were a number of staff around the store, there was only one register open, which always seems a little silly... especially since I ended up having to go through the "12 items" lane with all of my shopping.

But even after taking a side trip to Bakers Delight and the greengrocers, I was still home by 7:45am...

It gave me plenty of time to tidy up, do some dishes and generally potter around doing all the things that I normally do before we go shopping.

Ma turned up around 10am, showed me a few things she'd dug out of "the family archive"... the most interesting of which was a letter written to my grandfather by someone he served with in World War II.

When we headed on out, I remembered that I wanted to divert down Waymouth Street because I'd seen a "new" Benzo piece on Instagram the other day and since I was already carrying my camera, it seemed like the right time.

If there is one thing that you can say about Benzo's work (and trust me, there are MANY, MANY things I can say about it), one of them is that he knows how to put light and life into eyes with only a couple of colours of paint.

And since I also took a few shots on my phone, I fiddled around when I got back in the car and turned one of them into my new lock screen wallpaper. Which means that in the five plus years I've had an iPhone, Benzo has ALWAYS been my lock screen. First it was the Pencil Solider... then the Blue Spaceman... now The Mystic (all names are one's I've made up, obviously).

The actual destination for today was the poor man's Sculpture By The Sea, the Brighton Jetty Classics Sculpture Exhibition. That's not to say it's not enjoyable, especially since we've been to four out of the last five years, including this one... but as I think I generally say about stuff like this, I don't know if was a good as last year... and there certainly weren't as many people around making use of the beach as there were the year before.

By which I mean I didn't have the opportunity to take anywhere near as many slightly pervy photos of hot guys on the beach.

It wasn't a total loss though.

Ma's having some issues with her foot at present, so we didn't go rushing around... although given the fact that as a general rule people don't bother to pay attention to whether or not that's completely in the way and generally taking up space at something like this, it's always more of a stop-start stroll than it is a forced hike.

As always, I strapped on my giant-fuck-off telephoto lens because it's more often than not easier to just photograph around people from a distance than it is to wait for them to move completely out of the shot. Also, it's good for photographing people on the beach.

I don't know how many pieces were in previous exhibitions, but I think Ma said this one had around 120, but I felt like there were less pieces this time. Or else there were more small pieces, so it didn't cover as much ground.

After we'd done the usual circuit and poked around the pieces in the Surf Club, we headed up to Jetty Road and had lunch again at the same place we went last year, Enuf Burger Bar.

I know, I know, I keep saying that I'm swearing off burgers, but also like last time this was one of their chicken burgers, and it was really good. Plus they make really nice fries.

When we'd finished lunch, we headed back to the car and took the "much longer drive than it seems like it should be" from Brighton to Port Adelaide (although looking at it, it's a half hour, 20km drive, so no wonder it took a while).

Of course, the trip to Port Adelaide was to check out the finished works from the Wonderwalls extravaganza last weekend.

The two that were probably the most different from when we saw them last are the two above... Josh's aerialist stencil piece and the amazing, amazing piece by Smug One. The even more amazing thing about Smug's work is that while it almost looks like an oil painting from far away, when you get up close to it, especially on the lower land, you can see the obvious marks of the spray can.

Just blows my mind.

We finished up, like last weekend, with the two gigantic pieces on the former Department of Marine and Harbors Building.

From there we headed back here.

So kind of a full day really... and not bad overall. But at least I didn't get sunburned this time!

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