Global Graphica

We’re in Tokyo, Japan this week, where we stumbled upon these super cool Google billboard ad campaign in Shibuya Station. The design uses the “pin” graphic that’s part of the company’s “Google Maps.”

Beautiful ephemeral artwork on Crosby Street in SoHo, in downtown New York City. The creator made use of a hole in the cast-iron wall on an old loft building and fashioned a dragonfly with tape and stickers. Full of awesome!

Graffiti-tag stickers repeated on road-works construction barriers on Lafayette Street in NoHo, in downtown New York City.

Ridiculous, yet strangely intriguing vinyl LP album cover design for “Kenton in Hi-Fi” from (we’re guessing) the 1960s. We found this tucked behind wine bottles among a stack of old records that decorate the end of the long bar at Lolita, a watering hole in the Lower East Side of New York City. Kenton? Never heard of him, until now. But he’s been immortalized in the decor of a downtown NYC bar. What more can you ask for?

Welcomed wheat=paste street-art freshness from Spazmat. This signature skull-with-cellphone image  was recently put up  on a construction site hoarding at the corner of Broome Street and the Bowery, in downtown New York City.

Massive, beautiful, sun-drenched mural on the side of a building housing a “clinica” at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Echo Park Avenue in Los Angeles.

We recently went to the Museum of Contemporary Art ( MOCA) in Los Angeles to see “Double Standard,” the retrospective exhibition of assemblage, paintings, video, sculpture and photography by the late actor-artist Dennis Hopper. Included in the show was the work “Within a Man of Light, There is Only Light; Within a Man of Darkness, There is Only Darkness,” which is pictured below. It’s a sublime, beautiful piece of photographic work on a lightbox. It totally moved us.

Los Angeles is a fuckin’ parking lot.  After a pre-video-shoot lunch at a large strip mall, we had a little trouble finding our borrowed gray Honda/Nissan/Toyota-Japanese-whatever-it-was car in the massive parking lot. We’re non-car-owning, non-driving New Yorkers, so the car culture thing takes a little getting used to when we’re on L.A time.

One among our group of favorite actors of all time, Bill Murray is shown here on a faded wheat-paste poster in the Little Tokyo section of downtown Los Angeles. The last time we saw Murray captured in street art was in Reykjavik, Iceland. The man’s image gets around. Love it.

The Shangri-La Hotel in the heart of Santa Monica is a beautiful, wonderfully preserved piece of Los Angeles art-deco architecture dating from 1939. The building is across the street from Palisades Park and the cliffs overlooking the wide expanse of beach front and the city’s iconic pier.

On the back of an old building in the Little Tokyo area of downtown Los Angeles is this large “Mexican Jesus” mural (is it Jesus or a saint?) The painting can be seen from across a parking lot adjacent to the Geffen Contemporary galleries of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA).

Super sexy classic sports car parked at an Los Angeles strip mall.

Volleyball players on Santa Monica Beach, in Los Angeles.

A Peds-Bikes sign on a classic Los Angeles art-deco lamp post on Santa Monica Beach.

Big, pristine wheate-paste street art of graphic-novel-style illustration on Rue Saint-Laurent, the main thoroughfare running from from the old city through Chinatown and into Mile End, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The message is “Je deteste les Lundis,” which is French, we think, for “I hate Mondays.”

The traffic and the sign at the Canada border inspection station, at the US-Canadian frontier between Quebec Province and Champlain, New York state.

From the 17th floor of Le Westin Hotel, a view of the western edge of downtown Montreal, Canada, and the Palais des Congres at Place de Jean-Paul Riopelle. Montreal is awesome.

The flagship mega-store of Swedish clothing retail giant H&M in Shibuya, in Tokyo, Japan.

View of garden at the Museum of Modern Art ( MoMA ) through light and glass on a recent summer afternoon.