To my dismay, I missed the opening night…
…but I am absolutely, positively going to see this in a couple of weekends.
When I was in college, the “City Lets Artists Decorate Symbol of Said City!” art trend was in full swing. I saw unenthusiastically painted cows in Decatur, Illinois once, so far did it spread. But in Boston in the early oughts, they had fish. It was long enough ago that a slightly better than cursory Google of it found nothing.
Some people who lived in my college’s main dorm managed to:
- Drag one of these really quite heavy and large sculptures down one of the busiest streets in Boston, completely unaccosted by onlookers or authorities.
- Drag it into the extremely busy dorm lobby.
- Carry it up a set of turn-of-the-century marble stairs.
- Get it past the security guards.
- Get it into the elevator and up several floors.
- And drag it into their dorm suite.
But someone found out about it, and so the police had to demand entrance… to retrieve a giant, painted fish brandishing a giant novelty parking ticket, hauled out on a dolly like the best trophy.
Anyway, the Repeated Things in a City with Art and Whatnot thing is still happening. Behold: fluorescent snails in Sydney.*
In his followup to Dancers Among Us (which is just delightfully, harmlessly ominous), Jordan Matter posed athletes in unlikely places. And beautifully, too – look:
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was one of the first things that made me actively want to be an artist. I couldn’t believe that a person could make drawings so gross and so wonderful. (The other thing: The Little Mermaid.) It tops this list of books banned in Washington.
*The name of my techno-ukulele duo. Watch for our new album in winter 2014: The Trails We’ve Left.