Graffiti Walk

I tell you, all I wanted to do was to grab some shots of some of this new stuff before the rain got to it and the vandal-taggers destroyed it, and what happened? I headed out yesterday afternoon and came back with thirty new shots, including a new Nike painting right around the corner that I swear wasn't there two days ago.

Clearly I'm going to have to learn how to make a webpage for all of this, because slapping it up on this blog's gonna waste bandwidth, and anyway, that's not what I want to do with the blog.

What I do want to do with it is report on stuff, and that will undoubtedly start happening Wednesday, as PopKomm comes to town. PopKomm was started some years ago in Cologne with a bunch of Cologne city money, and quickly became the German music-biz event. Which doesn't sound like such a big deal until you reflect that Germany (or, as it's called in the biz, the GAS Territories, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, ie, the German-speaking nations of Europe) is the second-biggest music market in the world. Really: and it's all people most Americans have never heard of. After many permutations and changes of management and all, PopKomm has now emigrated to Berlin, and this year is its debut here. Given that Universal and Sony both have their German headquarters in Berlin now, it sort of makes sense. Given that there are very few clubs for the bands to play in, it makes less sense. Given that few of the bizzers go out to see -- ick -- music, it is, as we say here, scheiss egal.

Anyway, the guys and gals from SXSW are coming to town tomorrow to participate in the PopKomm trade show, which starts on Wednesday, and I hope to be blogging live from the event. Much depends on whether I get a badge and whether there's wireless or other access inside the convention center.

So until that happens, here's Nike's "Les Fleurs du Mal," which isn't the one around the corner, but is one that just sort of appeared on a fence one day, and I like the shot because it gives you the sense of seeing her work in context, and how it just jumps out at you, which is a result both of her great use of color and the fact that it's, you know, a nekkid lady and all. Enjoy.