August is ending and the world is a better place.
The biggest and best news is that I finally heard from Betty Jack DeVine, the genius behind the gay NASCAR site Gaytona.com. She was every bit as charming in her email as she is on the site and I'm looking forward to interviewing her. Especially since that damn New Yorker ran their own article about NASCAR this week. Though, weirdly, the most interesting stuff is not in the article but rather in the Q and A with author Kevin Conley.
Finally started reading The Lonely Planet guide to Toronto this morning riding the el to work.
In 1999, Chicago held "Cows On Parade" with lots of artist-decorated fiberglass cows decorating the streets. Other cities copied the idea (Chicago had copied it from Zurich, Switzerland who did it first in 1998) and in 2000, Toronto decided to fill their streets with Moose. Mooses? Moose, yet plural, that's what they were up to in Toronto in 2000 and fortunately, like cows, there was a ready pun; Moose-eum. Note that they opted not to use this pun and instead settled on Moose in the City which would make a very good Sunday show for HBO-CANADA, I think (Giving the parade a dull name was bad but worse was to make the commercial sponsor not Moosehead Beer).
I should point out here that if your municipality would like to have a slew of whimsical, painted animals on YOUR streets, you might want to check here with the folks at cowpainters.org who offer not only unpainted cows but also a frigging ton of other animals including alligators, pellicans, a whippet and three kinds of turtle. If that is too much hassle, you should just go to cowparade.org. They offer "A Turnkey Art Event" for cities (Hello Atlanta!) who would like to jump ahead to the snapshots by tourists and the charitable auction, skipping all that tedious "call to artists" business. One call and cowparade does it all.
But back to the many moose(s). According to Lonely Planet's account, some citizens of Toronto (hey, what's THEIR plural? Torontons?) were outraged that the city would spend money on the moose thing and not on affordable housing, education, blah blah blah and began defacing the sculptures. So an emergency hotline was established, along with a website www.antlerwatch.com both of which ensured a rapid response to the issue of moose vandalism.
Those of you who are fed up with animals on parade...actually even if you adore animals on parade, you might want to read this excellent piece from the departed but not forgotten suck.com. And you also might want to take a lesson from Chicago; cows work.
Other stuff????
Chicago's follow up was ping pong. Not whimsical, artistic interpretations of table tennis. Just Ping Pong.
Ping pong tables were put in public places...building lobbies, outdoor plazas, under the Picasso sculpture. An odd choice to follow-up the cows but the cows brought strangers together which was the plan for the ping pong tables. Nope.
After the ping pong fiasco, Chicago tried a parade of fiberglass...sofas. Yep. Sofas. "Suite Home Chicago" had 1) the fiberglass and 2)the cute pun. But no one gets excited about having their picture taken next to a sofa. ("There's a sofa with wings!" "There's a sofa balanced precariously on something!" etc.)
By last summer, the city had more or less given up and settled on "Music Everywhere". In this press release, Mayor Daley threatens that municipal musical chairs could be among the attractions while Cultural Commissioner Lois Weisberg insists that Music Everywhere will amuse and delight both visitors and Chicagoans while featuring value-added incentives and special hotel rates.
This year Chicago got the All-Star game and managed to completely blow exploiting the game in a fiberglass manner by using All-Star Bobblehead Dolls situated on a few (33) street corners. They looked like spraypainted store mannequins with poorly attached heads. They were hard for kids to reach and adults weren't that curious about making their not-unusually-proportioned heads bobble so they just stood there, unwhimsical and desperate looking.
Listen people. If you want a parade, I say "Cow." "Moose" is actually a really good choice for Toronto since it's Canadian and it offers a lot of surface area to work with and "Moose" is a funny sounding word and presumably they too got some mileage out of the difficulty-with-plurals schtick...nice work Toronto! Other cities-if you have something big and tenuously associated with your city ("The Big Pig Gig" was the event for the Area Formerly Known As Cincinnati...hey I don't recall any prior Americana celebrating the pork of Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky but I try very hard to not think much about Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky so that's probably my bad) you might consider it. But please keep in mind that cows have both proven public art fair cred but also enormous popularity in greeting card shops.
Weirdly, another greeting card shop staple, Angels, were not such a hit when they paraded in (duh) Los Angeles. This site explains the A Community Of Angels project ("In 2001, over 170 Angels graced the streets of the Southland. This year, our goal is to expand that to 200 angels. If you don't know what A Community of Angels is all about, keep reading!") The deal sounds perfect-artists would make angels, communities would display them, citizens would bid on the angels with the proceeds going to charity (after, presumably, the organizers got their cut for running the whole thing), new angels would appear in the neighborhood and the delighful process would begin again.
Sadly, the splash page (www.acommunityofangels.com) today blares
BLOWING THE WALLS OUT
EVERYTHING IS ON SALE...PICK UP GREAT GIFTS
The store and project close down at the end of December.
OWN A PIECE OF L.A. HISTORY
and shows a warehouse of angels lined up like giant pigeons if giant pigeons had been airbrushed like conversion vans of the 1970's.
