a eulogy from the getto boys…

and the incomparable one… who also passed too soon. mr. marvin gaye takes us to church.

Adidas recently launched its Urban Art Guide to Berlin, a slick interactive gallery dedicated to the city’s best urban art and graffiti. Users can also download the free iPhone app which features a Google map interface, city tours and the possibility to find the closest art pieces in your viscinity using the phone’s geo-positionning capability when you are walking around the city. A very cool cousin application of CitySPK that might spread to other cities after the German capital.

imaginaryanimals.com

terryhughesimages.com

We are happy to announce that the streets of Montreal are once again graced with the Hunter S. Thompson sidekick styled art of Other. After an extended two year disappearing act to Berlin, he is back to leave traces of his lovely mind in the form of words and pictures on walls all over the city. If you don’t know his work, i would recommend you visit any number of train yards in the city. Or check his site where he often has things for sale at a remarkably good price.

The word is a sneak preview of 30 new pieces for an upcoming LA art show are going to be diseminated on the hush hush in a week. If you haven’t sent him your email yet to see… send him your mail at troy.lovegates@gmail.com, and tell him cityspk sent you…

I am still hoping that he delivers on an impending project in which people send him found sweatpants and then he paints on him. I would definately file that under one of the most unique projects ever heading. As far as the background, he tells me of his buddy Hal: There was a guy named Hal over in ottawa who found some dirty old sweat pants on the street. He wrote a story about it. How if you start looking for it there are all sorts of dirty old clothes beaten by the elements. Like a sock that turned some blue, some green and has bird shit and finger paint on it in the lane. Clothes like that — that have been sitting out for some of the seasons in a row, and starting to mix right in with the pavement. But that is a bit of a dime a dozen. The real and somewhat rarer gem is the abandoned sweat pants. It was some years ago i read his story. But he found them on a bike ride, chucked his old shorts and rode around town in the found sweat pants until he came to the bay and then he went swimming in them and they ballooned all up in the water. He said how he took a real solace in the comfort of those worn in sweat pants in the shallows of the bay. He made that throw away his…

So, now, all of that is lost to history, but i ask you still to help Other recreate the sweat pant nostalgia and send him your found sweatpants to paint on. If you wanted to set something up, you could maybe just write him at the aforementioned email. Only the most crusty need apply…

This is a city like a jig saw puzzle; assembled and disassembled by time. And still there are holes where once a security zone was. I see bullet holes in stone facades also. And museums made of slate, so many museums. There is a lot of gray and grit by the old Berlin Wall. And the murals commemorate where the wall once stood as a barrier but now burst in unity and celebration with colour. This is the East Side Gallery; a 1.3 km. stretch of The Berlin Wall still standing and converted into the worlds largest open-air art gallery.

From the remains of Reichstag and the Brandenburg gate to The Bundeskanzleramt and the Sony Center, I see the past — buildings erected in the 1800’s standing like sentinels next to todays state of the art modern day structures. Things looking more like computer screens than buildings. And virtually all the people in Mitte are artists dressed so funky that they might even have suits made of micro chips and mortar. Saint Augustine said that every city is a living body, and that seems to be everywhere here, all these people and places from the future and the past colliding, to make this place seem like a present always in flux and never quite locatable.