But I do like the "Boys of Summer" installation by artist Michael McLaughlin that appeared about a year ago. As it's Santa Cruz, and not exactly the Arctic, you'd expect these to be sculptures of surfers. But no, it's a series of two foot penguins that grace both sides of a block or so of Pacific Avenue. I see half of them pretty much five days a week as I walk to the bus station and they never fail to cheer me up a little after the work day. I find them marvelously expressive and give me a lot of hope for representational sculpture.
You can see a lot of these up close and personal on Cosmo Curiosity's photostream, but here's a nice group shot from when they first arrived from the sea. (Yeah, I don't know why they didn't sink either...)
There was a nice article about all this by Wallace Baines in our local paper if you'd like to know more.
I tend to like good murals better than public sculpture, but that's one gracefully aligned group of penguins.
ReplyDelete==========================
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
We've got murals too. A lot of them. In fact, I might make one muralist the subject of my next post here.
ReplyDeleteI mentioned the murals of San Francisco's Mission District in one of my Bouchercon posts, which included a photo. The ensuing discussion turned to Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program, which has put many attractive murals on city walls. The program published a calendar each year illustrated by the murals and may still do so.
ReplyDeleteI've been following along, but I will have to go back and look at the mural post more closely.
ReplyDeleteI devoted no post solely to murals, but two of the posts, in fact, are illustrated with murals. I spent a fair amont of time wandering about the city, which kept my camera fairly active, perhaps more so in the Mission District than elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, I remember them now that I look at them. I was remembering the street signs and addresses more.
ReplyDeleteThat's been an object of fascination since I was a child: words functioning as display. I always liked signs. The murals thing came later. Of course, so did most of the murals themselves.
ReplyDeleteI was probably just trying to read the signs in my childhood, never mind thinking beyond them.
ReplyDeleteI did enjoy Walker Percy on semiotics once I got to college, though.
You enjoyed Walker Percy in college; I pestered my parents to buy me a mock traffic sign that read "Enter Only Through Exit" on Cape Cod when I was a child.
ReplyDeleteYour achievement is more impressive.
No, just happenstance. And right now, I'm trying to remember just how I happened upon Walker Percy. I came across a book called Message in the Bottle right after I dropped out, but there must have been some lead in.
ReplyDeleteLost in the mists of time, I'm afraid.
I read Walker Percy not long after I got out of college. If anything literary or artistic is lost in the mists of time for me, I'll usually assume I first encountered it in The New Republic.
ReplyDeleteV-word: mompup
It's odd that the word verifier would echo Christopher Buckley's Losing Mom and Pup, especially after a comment about the New Republic. Not sure what it's driving at. Is it trying to comment that the magazine drifted a little further right since the time you read it, or just what exactly?
ReplyDeleteOr maybe just that the word verifier is better read than I am.
ReplyDelete