Global Graphica

An example of yarn-bombing par excellence: A Volkswagen Beetle and a bicycle completely wrapped in bright-colored knitted yarn on Elizabeth Street, south of Broome Street, in the Chinatown-Nolita hinterland of the Lower East Side, in downtown New York City. Abso-f*cking-lutely brilliant.

Hearts Challenger, the pink ice cream truck often spotted at art and fashion events in New York and Los Angeles, is seen here as a collaborative brand-mashup with Colette, the influential Paris-based clothing-lifestyle store on Rue St. Honore. The  vehicle was parked on Ludlow Street, in the Lower East Side, in downtown New York City, as it was being prepared during the recent fashion week. The truck can often be found parked in front Global Graphica HQ on Ludlow.

Love this image. It’s actually two images: The picture of the Blackberry and the photo on the Blackberry screen itself.

The combination of the striking image and the mobile-device medium is interesting. The photo displayed is of a Japanese man passed out drunk on a Tokyo street the bright morning after a night of heavy drinking. It’s a little disturbing because he looks like he’s dead. Seeing the pic on a Blackberry contextualizes the image within a cool, mundane, far-removed and technological setting of a cellphone screen.

We snapped the pic of the phone in a dark bar in New York City, minutes after the photo of the man was snapped in the Japanese capital and sent to us by photographer Mayumi Ono.

This Apple iPhone 4 has been super-pimped-out with a customized Hello Kitty theme by girl in Tokyo, Japan. (What would Steve Jobs think?)

All photos courtesy of Mayumi Ono. (Copyright 2010 Mayumi Ono. All rights reserved.)

The wall of framed Down Beat magazine covers from the 1950s and ’60s at a cafe named after the publication in Echo Park, in Los Angeles.  The exterior of the cafe is pictured below.

“Follow the Crowd” painting at Down Beat , a cafe in Echo Park, in Los Angeles.

This is a pic of the ultra-comfortable and minimalist “listening room” that’s part of the exhibition of artwork and performance by artist Christian Marclay at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Visitors can sit on the large sofas and listen to music created by the artist. The window is a distinct architectural feature of the museum building itself but compliments the space.

Beautiful “Old” art-deco era building  on Sunset Boulevard, near Sunset Junction in the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. We suddenly noticed the building awash in afternoon sunlight as we were driving and hastily took this picture from our car as we were briefly stopped at traffic light.

Billboard ad featuring American actor Tommy Lee Jones for Boss, a popular brand of Japanese can-coffee, in the Daimon / Hamamatsu-cho area of Tokyo, Japan.

Found this “fucking awesome” graffiti on a trashed segment of fence in Miyashita Koen, the small, hidden and dumpy park elevated above the JR Yamanote-sen rail tracks leading out of Shibuya towards Harajuku, in Tokyo, Japan. Love this.

We stumbled across this mural in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal. There’s a lot of street art like this around the nabe, which has rapidly evolved from a mixed ethnic hood in recent years into an even more culturally diverse, hipper place, already deep into its long march of gentrification.

This mural is not as interesting to us aesthetically as it is  (1.) as an example of the artwork and atmosphere in the area; (2.) across the street from St-Viateur Bagel, one of two famous Montreal bagel shops (the bagels are awesome and yummy in their deformed, thinner-than-normal un-bagel-like plainness and shape); and (3.) intriguing ’cause if you look at the wall-painting closely, you can kind of see a person’s ass. No, seriously, look at it. Now look again. No? Keep trying.

Fascinating video by IKEA of an informal research experiment to see how cats behave and interact with its furniture when let loose in a store in Wembley, in north London, U.K.

The glowing street-level sign for the discreet, ultra-minimalist and inscrutably perfectionist basement bar “Bar+ D.C.B.” in Daikanyama, a relatively quiet neighborhood tucked between the busy hubs of Shibuya, Ebisu and Naka-Meguro in Tokyo, Japan.

“SLOW” graffiti-tag sticker in the super-hyper luxury shopping back streets of Aoyama, near Omotesando, in Tokyo, Japan.

This hoarding in front of a future retail space has a “Coming Soon” sign in English overlaid with the Japanese kanji character for aki (which means autumn or fall) at the Tokyo Midtown, a new, massive shopping mall in Roppongi, in central Tokyo, Japan.

More snapshots of a random Japanese girl’s cell phone (or keitai denwa ) in Tokyo, Japan. Love the design, accoutrements (see the “Dunny” strap image  below) and details of this device.

Our beautifully graphic-designed ticket for the outstanding Mori Arts Center (a.k.a., the “Mori Art Museum”) at Roppongi Hills, In Tokyo, Japan.

We couldn’t resist taking a snap of this stranger’s cell phone lying on a nearby table at a rooftop beer garden in Tokyo. We like the design and the  image, even though it’s a bit blurry and not a very good pic.

Sign for the Original Fake shop near the Prada Building in the Aoyama neighborhood of Tokyo.

Cargo train as seen from passenger window of airplane sitting on the tarmac at Detroit Metro International Airport.