Sommerloch '06, Part 3

Linienstr., a block from my house, has been undergoing some sort of awful renovation for most of the year. The street is impassable, several businesses have closed during the day because the dust and dirt flying through the air makes customers stay away, pedestrians get diverted from one side of the street to the other almost randomly (and you have to watch when making the crossing that one or another Berliner driver, made psychotic from the heat, doesn't aim at you and try to run you down), and the whole thing is a ghastly mess.

That's why it was very cheering to walk along it on Sunday, when someone did this:









The perpetrators of this outrage against Berlin's mandatory impassability and ugliness may be spied in the next to last photo, two young Japanese folks with a tripod camera. I know they weren't just photographing it because the woman had a large straw basket with her which contained a few more tulips. I didn't even bother to check whether the tulips, all absolutely perfect, were real. If so, this was one expensive art project.

Needless to say, it was all destroyed first thing Monday morning.

***

While I was shooting that, I decided to shoot the graffiti mural going up on the wall by my building. There's more to it now -- a green head with a very sad expression on it has been sprayed between the two monsters, on the ground -- but more sure isn't better. I do like the way it invokes the Wall, but my heart sinks every time I come home and see the aggressive ugliness and lack of content in this thing. The artists -- there seem to be two or three -- sport horrendous blotchy "tribal" tattoos, which should have been a clue to someone that they lack all esthetic sense. But I guess I'll have to live with this until I move -- or until some other taggers come along to spray their critiques.