Global Graphica | Photo Blog of Street Art, Graffiti, Graphics, Interiors, Architecture, Urban Landscapes, City Life & Much More

Photo Blog of Street Art, Graffiti, Graphics, Interiors, Architecture, City Life + | Resource for Global Creatives

February 27, 2005

Los Angeles Graphica 05: "Locals Only" Surfer Graf, Topanga Beach Bench

There's not much graf or street art in the beach hoods of SoCal. But this combo of surfer messages on a concrete bench at Topanga Canyon Beach, near Malibu, caught our eye. The "locals only" scratched into the bench is a warning from local surfers that outsiders are not welcome at this surf spot. Then there's the "818" illustrated scrawl, written in what looks like blue Sharpie. The number 818 is the area code of The Valley, the nearby suburban sprawl of LA, from where every summer weekend millions of people descend on the beaches of Malibu, Zuma and Topanga, (as opposed to the beaches of South Bay, where most city-dwelling Angelenos go). If you're a surfer from 818, local surfers hate you. Food fight, anyone?

February 22, 2005

Los Angeles Graphica 04: The Grove Movie Theater Architecture + Exterior

We revisit The Grove shopping complex in Los Angeles. There we find this example of retro-faux Hollywood art-deco architecture mixed with contemporary, urban shopping-center chic: the The Grove movie theater. We've got really mixed feelings about this sort of thing, but to its credit the facade is an attempt to incorporate historic LA arhictectural cues. This multiplex is across the (fake) street from the Apple Computer Store, so you can check your email and surf the Net for free before seeing a movie or after your movie ends. And, of course, you can look at Apple iPods, G5s, digital cameras, iMacs, etc. In fact, we noticed a lot of theater-goers flooding into the Apple Store after a movie let out, so there's an interesting economic and geographic symbiosis going on here.

February 22, 2005

Los Angeles Graphica 03: Von Dutch Store Facade + Logo, Santa Monica

In the previous post, we mentioned the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. Many of the stores here are the same big branded chains you can find in any shopping mall in the US, or for that matter in any major industrialized city around the developed world--Starbucks, Banana Republic, Barnes & Noble, etc. One shop we're surpised to see here, however, is the Von Dutch clothing/lifestyle store pictured here. Von Dutch is a name that has been around for decades, but as a name purely resurrected as licensed fashion label for t-shirts, etc., its life has been very short and very recent. Von Dutch can be partially credited for the trucker hat trend of the past three years (a trend which seems to be finally, gradually fading out). Von Dutch didn't start the trucker hat trend, but some style-conscious marketing genius quickly cottoned on to it early and commercially exploited it under the Von Dutch label. In doing so helped push the trucker hat fashion past the tipping point and into big-grid Mall-of-America mass popularity.

February 18, 2005

Los Angeles Graphica 02: Apple Store at The Grove

Almost every major city of the developed world seems to now have an Apple Store. Tokyo? Got one. New York? Of course. Paris, Yup. Los Angeles? No. "No?" you say. "What?" you ask, "LA doesn't have an Apple Store?" OK, let's clarify: LA doesn't have "an" Apple Store; it has TWO Apple Stores, which makes the City of Angels one of the best places on the planet to hunt down an iPod, iMac or iWhatever directly from the source. Here is a shot of the Apple emporium at The Grove, the hugely popular outdoor shopping mall that looks like Disneyland's Main Street, but planted in Hollywood's Fairfax district. The second LA Apple shop is in Santa Monica, at another outdoor shopping mall called Third Street Promenade, which is a comfortable place to surf the Internet for free, or test drive digital cameras and contemplate that Mac iPod or iWhatever you want so badly.

February 17, 2005

Los Angeles Graphica 01: Pink's Hot Dog Stand Logo

The first of a series of graphica images from the City of Angels this past week show the logo painted on the wall of the dining patio at Pink's hotodog stand. This famous LA weiner shack near the corner of LA Brea and Melrose avenues in Hollywood was opened 66 years ago. It's still popular with local celebs despite the tourists who make the pilgrimage here for La La Land's best frankfurters.

February 15, 2005

A Bathing Ape 06: Shopper at BAPE Busy Work Shop

In this shot, a shopper in a hoodie checks out the freshest kicks at the A Bathing Ape store, Busy Work Shop, in SoHo, New York City.

February 11, 2005

A Bathing Ape 05: More Interior and Staff at BAPE Busy Work Shop

Here's another interior view from the front of the A Bathing Ape store, Busy Work Shop, in SoHo, New York City. Caught in the snap are a couple of A Bathing Ape staff and a customer.

February 09, 2005

A Bathing Ape 04: Interior at BAPE Busy Work Shop

Taking photos inside the new A Bathing Ape store, aka Busy Work Shop, in New York City is forbidden, as in most retail spaces. So without a telephoto lens, the best snap of the shop's interior was straight through the front. Here we see the interior design and some of the choice, limited edition merch along the wall beyond the sneaker conveyor in the display window. In the back of the store stands a stern-looking staff member, who seemed to be staring at us with disapproval as we took the photo from the street. The employee, a young Japanese woman, is probably a really nice, amiable person and a hard, loyal worker, too.

February 07, 2005

A Bathing Ape 03: Busy Work Shop Signage

The the signage at the new A Bathing Ape store consists of the brand name, logo and shop name etched in a large plate glass window. The Ape logo is directly inspired by the Planet of Apes iconography. Nigo, the Japanese designer and founder of the A Bathing Ape brand, is an serious "otaku" Planet of the Apes fan and is said to have the fifth-largest collection of POA memorabilia in the world.

February 04, 2005

A Bathing Ape 02: Busy Work Shop Storefront

This is a shot of the storefront for the new A Bathing Ape store in NYC. The store is called "Busy Work Shop," and occupies two floors in a newly renovated space in SoHo.

February 02, 2005

A Bathing Ape 01: Window Display Sneakers

In late December, with little discernible fanfare, the first ever official North American outpost of the exclusive, quasi-underground Japanese clothing label A Bathing Ape (also known as BAPE) hung out its shingle on a cobblestone street in SoHo, NYC. Here is a shot of the main store window display, which features a moving "kaiten" of limited edition Bathing Ape sneakers. (A "kaiten" refers to a kind of rotating conveyor belt or carousel used to ferry small seafood dishes around some large sushi bars in Japan.)

January 28, 2005

Bleeding Like a Virgin Rambo

Two buildings on two corners at opposite ends of the same block along Spring St.--one at Elizabeth St., the other at Bowery--are locally famous for constantly being covered with street art, graf and the ephemeral graphics of ambitious guerrilla marketing. Fresh material goes up on the walls of these buildings weekly, amounting to an ever-changing public tableau of underground art and over-savvy youth advertising. (Droll fact: In an intriguing fit of uptown stiff buying into downtown cool, one of the buildings was purchased in 2004 for several millions of dollars by one of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's sons.) The buildings provide a steady stream of new art, which seldom fails to amuse, provoke or hit the aesthetic mark (in other words, kids, the art is mostly good.) But living in the neighborhood, one can easily start to take all this great street art for granted. It becomes just another part of the urban landscape. Recently, however, this serendipitous juxtaposition of various kinds of sidewalk junk, fading art, graf and Basquiat-like messaging on the building at Elizabeth stopped us in our tracks cold. It was the words especially that made us pause to think: "'Holy death before dishonor' / Bleeding like a virgin Rambo."

January 26, 2005

Tiger Jesus Stencil

What does a giant, ferocious feline and the Messiah have in common? Well, if you walk down Rivington St. (which seems to be increasingly the focus of our Nikon cameras in recent weeks) in that gray zone between SoHo and the Lower East Side, you'll find out. On the south side of the street, between Bowery and Chrystie streets near the foot of a tenement building is afixed an amazing piece of multi-colored stencil street art, in the form of a plaque, bearing the images of both a tiger and Jesus. What a combo!

January 25, 2005

"Gusto" on Rivington St., Lower East Side

This weighty tag on a storefront shutter on Rivngton St., between Bowery and Chrystie, has lost some of its luster, but is still an excellent example of the aesthetic style and cryptic lettering usually found in large "throw-ups." Though a bit faded, the tag has survived mostly intact for at least a couple of years--that is pretty amazing considering the short lives of most tags, which sooner or later (and usually sooner) get painted over my shopowners or obliterated by rival aerosol writers.

January 24, 2005

Bäst on Prince St., SoHo

One of our favorite New York City street artists is Bäst, whose work has been featured here before and will likely appear again in the future. We snapped this recent work by Bäst on Prince Street in Soho, about a block from the Apple Store. This black-and-white wheat-pasted poster uses images of a man who looks a lot like 20th century British writer George Orwell and an anthropamorphic cartoon wolf.

January 22, 2005

Blizzard Night on Houston St.

New York City is getting hit by it's first full-bore blizzard of winter 2005. The temperature was about 20 degrees below freezing when this photo was taken looking east on Houston St. at around midnight. The snow had stopped following by then, but a second storm front is due, as are 35-mile-per-hour winds. Bring it on!

January 20, 2005

Electric Reindeer, East Village

Yet another image from the holiday season in the Village. (We promise, this is the last Christmas photo ever--or at least until next December.) This shot is of some seasonal decor in the courtyard of an East Village restaurant. The center of attention is a couple of reindeer made up of white Christmas lights. Sure, the reindeer are a bit kitchsy, but they would be a lot more kitchsy if the lights were multi-colored. Remember, kids, the use of white lights is the elegant option for seasonal decor during the winter holidays.

January 19, 2005

Christmas Decor at Washington Square Park

The winter holidays are now a distant memory, but we had to post this image taken New Year's Day 2005. Surrounded by New York University in the heart of Greenwich Village, the famous arch honoring U.S. President George Washington sits on the northern edge of the aptly named Washington Square Park. The large Christmas tree in front of the monument is a grand seasonal touch that compliments a recently restored arch. Until a year ago or so, the structure was surrounded by a cheap, run-of-the-mill chainlink fence. This barrier was an eyesore and a shockingly undignified way of protecting such a stately historical landmark from would-be vandals. Washington Square Park itself has gone through as much of a transformation in the past couple of decades. As recently as a decade ago, the neatl-appointed square was well-known as a reliable spot for buying illicit herb. The park continues be a space abuzz everyday with chess players, street performers, joggers, and musicians. You may notice on fair-weathered weekdays a lot of people working on Dell laptops (there's a free wi-fi hotspot here) or typing into Blackberry handhelds or talking into their Smartphones--the park is like an outdoor office space for NYU students, professors and technology geeks.

January 18, 2005

Acupuncture Neon Sign, East Village

You see a lot English signs in downtown New York City in front of shops offering acupuncture, massage and East Asian medicinal and health treatments. The closer to Chinatown one gets, the more frequent the signs appear, until, in Chinatown itself, the English mostly disappears from such signs altogether. In any case, they tend to disappear into the landscape of street-level advertising. This neon version in the East Village, however, caught our eye. The shop is closed, but the sign is alive with electric energy. We might walk by this sign in daylight and never notice, but at night the neon effectively plants an idea in our heads. That said, a few years ago we tried acupuncture while travelling though Asia. It was an interesting expereince for a first timer, curious and open-minded, but we didn't feel any better afterwards, healthwise or otherwise, and so we hadn't really given acupuncture any further thought until we saw this sign.

January 15, 2005

Guggenheim Museum Interior Spiral

This shot shows the spiral interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The iconic Upper East Side museum was designed by celebrated architect Frand Lloyd Wright and holds one of America's greatest collections of modern art. Major shows are exhbited in the main spiral, an atrium with a single, circular ramp that visitors walk along while viewing art works. The ramp gradually ascends nearly ten floors high. At the time this photo was taken, a retrospective of American pop artist James Rosenquist was being held. The Guggenheim's permanent collection is shown in an adjacent wing.

October 15, 2004

Celia Cruz Mural

Within a couple of days after salsa-music singing queen Celia Cruz passed away last year, this memorial mural went up on a wall facing East Houston Street near Avenue B. The area has quickly gentrified in recent years, but still retains the flavor of the Puerto Rican community that still calls the neighborhoods at the far east ends of the East Village and the Lower East Side home. The mural was painted by the local artist Chico, whose work can be found throughout New York, but especially in neighborhoods of lower Manhattan.

October 8, 2004

Critter Characters

Like characters out of a children's book, these illustrations of anthropomorphic animal characters look like they were drawn with a Sharpie pen. They appear without any context other than a graffiti-covered surface. We haven't seen these critter drawings anywhere else so they may be a one-off attempt at artistic expression or amusement. If you weren't looking looking carefully enough, you'd probably walk right by these without noticing them--the critters are small and appear on the side of an old, dirty school building on Rivington Street in the Lower East Side.These illustrations are also yet another example of one layer of street art and graffiti "layering" over one another, at once defacing the surface and graf or art underneath and yet annotating the predecessor's work.

October 4, 2004

Source Graf, Lower East Side

For the graf writer, a clean storefront shutter is a tempting blank canvas just asking for Krylon. The shutters pictured here look fairly new, so you've got to pity the owner who's just had them installed. There may be debate about whether or not this kind of graf is art. (There's no question that is vandalism.) At any rate, as graf goes, this is a pretty good example of a work that was interupted while in progress or one in which the writer ran out of white spraypaint--look carefully at the letters and notice how they've been barely filled. Graf aside, there's an interesting jux here: the Chinese characters on the awning, the names of the business ("888") and the tag-annotation of "Fever.

October 1, 2004

Utada Hikaru Poster

On Rivington Street in lower Manhattan, we saw this advert promoting a new album release by Utada Hikaru, a major Japanese pop star. She rose to fame with a series of chart-topping dance pop tunes four years ago. But unlike most young J-pop idols, Utada wrote her own material and had a vocal range that put left much of the competition in the dust. She was a true Tokyo diva without any of the usual diva baggage--no capricious attitude, no pretentious posturing. Plus, Utada's music was really good and represented a fresh break from the neverending parade of dross that passed for a lot of mainstream Japanese pop music. Utada was an original. She spoke fluent English and had lived in the United States while growing up. But what was really amazing about her was that when her first big hit single, "Automatic," arrived on Japanese radiowaves, Utada was only 18 years old. Now she's got a new record, "Exodus," and, in an ambitious attempt to reach a larger international audience, it's being released in the United States, where Japanese pop idols rarely bring their music. Utada's new disc drops October 5.

September 25, 2004

Barking Pink General

Snapped this fresh piece of street art pasted on a vertical I-beam on Spring Street near the southwest corner of Lafayette St., right where SoHo begins to morph into NoLIta. So, let's deconstruct a bit, shall we? Here we've got a disembodied head of a middle-aged man wearing an army helmet. He's a commander barking an order. The man resembles the infamous General Patton, who was one of the great military architects of Allied victory in World War II. He was one tough mofo, a serious alpha-male raised by the a club of ultra alpha-males. What makes this street graphic much more visually arresting is it's color, pink, which is often thought of as feminine, sweet, cute, delicate and pretty--in other words, everything that a four-star general isn't. So, to get back to semiotic the deconstruction ... the pink color, in effect, symbolically emasculates a violent, male authority figure, while simultaneously forcing the viewer to extend the connotations of pink to include the potent imagery of martial aggression. (Yeah, whateva!)

September 20, 2004

Chinatown Graf

Walking towards SoHo along Grand Street through Chinatown, we spotted this piece of graf about a block or so west of ever-shrinking Little Italy and Mulberry Street. "Suicide Bomber" is an ominous enough tag, but one that in New York City, before 9/11, would have been written off as just another hardcore-sounding, hyperbolic moniker by just another tagger vying for attention in the cluttered streetscape. Given the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and the tag's location in lower Manhattan, however, the tag and its fresh, clean, assertive lines evoke a more powerful reaction, reminding passersby with unambiguous clarity of the tremendous death, destruction and terrorism that occured literally only blocks away.

September 15, 2004

End of Summer Days

On West 4th Street in the West Village in an old and cozy 19th century shop space is "Snip and Sip," a barber shop that doubles as a bar with a display window that's like a diorama of summers long past. The scene comes across as a snapshot of beach glamour straight out of Cosmopolitan magazine circa 1966. A fashion-model thin mannequin lounges in beach chair, sand beneath her feet and paperback novel, smokes and Tab diet cola all within easy reach. The pile of Tab cola cans adds a comic touch of absurdity to the scene. As store front displays go in New York City (or anywhere), this is priceless.