And then squirming through a cluster jam of dribbling faced, snot-nose drenched denizens and gawking tourists who pinball bump their way around because they're listening to a guide tour that soundblasts their ears so they can't hear you, and they already weren't looking because they're walking all over the place with their eyes, and that damn audio guide filters their aesthetic experience with average facts about exceptional things, and it just makes you a little depressed and somewhat angry and horribly frustrated with the idiotic experience of moving about through a museum that makes such a fuss about trying to be a dry, sacred place? But then you forget about all that because good god James Brown, those paintings are fucking amazing.
Anyway, what beats it? Well it's probably worth it, but for a change of viewing pace, how about walking through one of the many mural alleys that serve as public art corridors through sun or moon, rain or shine, broken glass or sewage waste? San Francisco has a long history of mural art dating further back than Diego Rivera's famous paintings in the 1930's, and many official muralists or wraith-like graffiti artists continue the legacy to this day.
While many city dwellers are familiar with the Mission art corridors--the likes of Clarion Alley's vibrant path negotiating Mission streetlife and Valencia boutique etiquette, or nearby Balmy Alley's themes on indigenous self-determination and revolution--the SOMA district boasts its own public graffiti wall in the form of a two part Bluxome Alley.
The walls, warehouse windows, pipes, poles, air ducts, staircase banisters, and all other unidentified objects of industrial infrastructure act as canvases for Bluxome's alleys graffiti art. Colorful names stretch across a dingy background wall space of pale tan tone. The letters form complex geometric shapes and sometimes integrate faces into its composition; winding, swiveling, screeching, and bubbling into the third dimension.
Bluxome St. lies within the developer dream neighborhood, Mission Bay, parallel to Townsend and passing through 6th and 5th streets. The tiny two part alleys cross perpendicular to 125 and 145 Bluxome. Enjoy a pleasant day admiring the rising of catastrophic condominium buildings aligning the highway entrance and the concrete lined corridor of beautiful image poems (you know, graffiti). Bask in the absurd clashing of contemporary urban lifestyles right in the thick of it! The threshold lingers on.
And before you let those markers loose, peep the rules, son. However you want to take them.
View the entire flickr set here.
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2 comments:
whoa wait, hold on bro. were these photos taken in san francisco, los angeles, berlin, paris, spain or new york?
That's Frisco. I'll tell granny wess to clarify next time. She forgets that SF isn't the center of the world.
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