Living Walls The City Speaks 2010

Seriously,

I have been waiting for the new B.I.P. post talking all about the awesome Atlanta conference that opened last weekend. There is NOTHING more fitting for this blog's theme. Our good friend, Monica Campana (what, what?!), was half of the team that organized street artists from all over the world converging in a warehouse in Atlanta for a week. I'm not sure there is a worse idea in exsistence; a wonderful, stupid, amazing idea. The AC in the warehouse (Eyedrum) kept the temperature inside down to about 90 degrees. You cannot possibly imagine the fatal mix of sweat, paint fumes, and more beer than the weight of everyone there. The most accurate explaination I've heard is when I was going home Thursday night (after forcing strangers into manual labor for a structurally questionable door hanging -> should have taken physics) someone said, "you can't go home now, it's street art summer camp!" I'm saving up vacation time for next year.

One corner of the wall of bikes, don't worry they were ALL fixed gear.

The borrowed studio space for artists with one bathroom to share.

New tattoo

The amazing Ms. Campana

Since everyone else in the world has posted amazing pictures of the actual art and my photos of the walls aren't all together edited yet, I'll just link to some of the pages rather than poaching the pictures (like i did with the ones above).

Official Blog

Living Walls Facebook

Creative Loafing Cover Story

Creative Loafing - search results

Brooklyn Street Art

On the Radio

Juxtapoz 1

Juxtapoz 2

Juxtapoz Here Today Gone Tommorrow

Burnaway

March of the Dudecake

Meet Sigurd. He agreed to be March's pin-up boy on the condition that he could deliver this message in the public service from the Physical Culture Society of Williamsburg: It is nice out. Go to the park.

And speaking of public, enter this contest to win a sweet Public brand bicycle: Bike Contest.

Email Bag

I have been getting a lot of links today. Mostly from my boyfriend. They are all significant enough that I felt I should roll them together into some kind of link digest, as they are all on subjects of urgent import to the average Bad Idea Potluck reader. All 30 of you.

Here:
Google finally has biking directions!

A history of the breakfast taco

How to get West Coast coffee in a city as backward as New York

Regarding beer

You should be pretty set now.

Your Monthly Male

This month's dudecake was chosen to honor the makers of Cycles Gladiator wine who are proudly standing up to persecution in the state of Alabama for their supposedly obscene label.
Clearly, wings and nakedness just went together with bikes in people's minds during a certain era. I think this one is very tasteful.

New note:

Wings, bikes, naked ... having thought about it in light of some books I've read dealing with the early history of cycling I realize that the wings and the naked went with bikes because, when they were first invented, they symbolized a kind of magical freedom for people. Sort of like how you feel when you first get a bike as a child or realize as an adult that, actually, you don't need a car after all.

Road Culture

So I went to the coffee shop where about half of my friends seem to work now for a visit and introduced myself to the one girl behind the counter I didn't yet know. She introduced herself in return and, gazing through the window behind me, asked, "is that your bike?"

Nothing was wrong with the way I'd chained it up, she just liked the looks of it. I don't have much bike pride, and, though mine is fashionably fixed-of-gear, I swear that was an accident of fate. But I don't mind telling people (as if it wasn't obvious) that it was made with spare parts, and I don't mind pointing out where local cycling enthusiast and bike fixer Randy Garcia used Mod Podge to create the unique paisley design on the fork.

So, before I even realized what was happening, we all trooped out of the shop to stand around my bike and discuss it. You know ... like a bunch of hot rodders. But, like, ecologically conscious. If Norman Rockwell was alive today, he would have shown up to paint us.

I think there's something in the American soul that needs to stand around vehicles of any kind and admire them. We can't seem to help ourselves. It's inborn. Or maybe it isn't.

Do Canadians act like this?

Old News

It's been about nine months since the last post. The tragedy of this is that they have been prime months for exactly the sort of things we like to share with you at Bad Idea Potluck.

So prime, in fact, that I am now unemployed and living in Atlanta.
My boyfriend, who will be upset to have been mentioned here, had to move. I saw a golden opportunity to destabilize my life. Road trip!

We got my car, his truck, a U-Haul, a lot of records and a neurotic fifteen-pound cat
to Atlanta. This is despite car accident-inducing chaos during a blizzard in the mountains outside of Flagstaff, a Bahai faith-theme diner in Flagstaff, sopapillas and and a hostess in Austin so delicious we very nearly jettisoned our theoretical destination and an animatronic Lyndon Baines Johnson at the LBJ presidential library.

He was dressed as a cowboy and telling jokes. It could have been the end of us all but the museum was closing.

Whatever hit me after I slid off the road outside Flagstaff busted my tail light and my trunk up pretty bad. But the light still works and so far packaging tape is keeping the whole back end marginally street-legal.

You may fear I might not have the same opportunities here for the breathtaking stupidity I enjoyed in Las Vegas. But I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
You see, I have already purchased a refurbished fixed-gear bike. It's a little rusty and unbalanced but the paint job is killer.

So far I have met with no major mishap. Stay tuned. I have a lot of time on my hands.

In the mean time, please consider the day's posts a recap of 2007's Bad Idea Highlights. Or: The Year In Things We Would Probably Do the Same Way Over Again But Only Because We Couldn't Stop Ourselves.

For my part, I am unscathed and have learned a lot about commas, I think.