"Chris couldn't afford to buy a Ferrari 250 GTO..."

"... so he painted one on his garage door."



ADDED: It's a pretty standard idea for a mural: Make it look like the wall you're painting isn't there — fool the eye into seeing something inside. Here are a bunch of examples of that.

"This is the most ass-o-centric painting I've ever seen."

Say I, viewing this NYT article "Thomas Hart Benton Masterwork Goes to Met."

The photo at the link is only one panel of said masterwork, which is called "America Today."

I've got nothing against it. It's pretty cool.

The 10 panels — most of them seven and a half feet high and of varying widths — depict a panoramic sweep of rural and urban life on the eve of the Great Depression....

Benton received no fee for the commission. “I did it for nothing, just expense money,” he said. “But it led to eight other murals which paid me very well, so it was a good thing for me.” Its critical success became the impetus for the Works Progress Administration mural programs of the later 1930s.

"Obama Mural in Philadelphia Polling Place."

Yeah, but he looks so down and out of it in that depiction, so first debate, that it might not help at all. The word "Change!" seems to be yelling into one ear, and the word "hope..." drifting out of the other.

Looking for the soul of Missoula.

"An artist erased the halo over the late Joe Paterno on a mural in State College, Pennsylvania..."

"The artist Michael Pilato had put a halo over Paterno’s image after the coach’s death in January...."

Pilato added a large blue ribbon on Paterno’s lapel symbolizing support for child abuse victims, a cause the artist said Paterno had endorsed.

“When I took the halo off of Joe, it was kind of saying that he’s a human being, put the blue ribbon on him as well, and that was talking about sexual abuse awareness,” Pilato told ABC News Radio.

Then there's the image of former university president Graham Spanier, which people are "throwing stuff at." Pilato's thinking of things like painting a blindfold on him, but "I have no idea right now, you know, I haven’t slept in days because of this whole thing."

Iconography is difficult. Blindfold? But Lady Justice wears a blindfold.

The blindfold represents objectivity, in that justice is or should be meted out objectively, without fear or favour, regardless of identity, money, power, or weakness; blind justice and impartiality.

So get some more sleep, Mr. Pilato. Maybe paint his hands over his eyes, like the "see no evil" monkey. But no:

The three wise monkeys... sometimes called the three mystic apes, are a pictorial maxim. Together they embody the proverbial principle to "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". ..

The source that popularized this pictorial maxim is a 17th century carving over a door of the famous Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan. The carvings at Toshogu Shrine were carved by Hidari Jingoro, and believed to have incorporated Confucius’s Code of Conduct, using the monkey as a way to depict man’s life cycle....

In Chinese, a similar phrase exists in the Analects of Confucius from 2nd to 4th century B.C.: "Look not at what is contrary to propriety; listen not to what is contrary to propriety; speak not what is contrary to propriety; make no movement which is contrary to propriety"....

Though the teaching had nothing to do with monkeys, the concept of the three monkeys originated from a simple play on words. The saying in Japanese is "mizaru, kikazaru, iwazaru" (見ざる, 聞かざる, 言わざる, literally "don't see, don't hear, don't speak". However, -zaru, an archaic negative verb conjugation, is pronounced the same as zaru, the vocalized form of saru (猿?), "monkey", so the saying can also be interpreted as the names of three monkeys.

"Keith Haring's Men's Room Mural Is As NSFW As You'd Imagine."

"Penises grow human heads with mouths that suck the toes of other human shapes that in turn contort into Mobius-strips of sucking, performing Escher-like convolutions as one body part morphs into another."

Excellent!

The Leadville mural.

Meade points out that the artist included a nipple, and I zoom in to snap it:



ADDED: Commenters request more [ba]zoom.

Liberty Tire.

(Enlarge.)

... a building we rolled by ... as we left Cincinnati yesterday.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo said:

Classic racist American building.

No doubt the tires had smallpox.

Noting the "Liberty" clue, I interpret the Indian character as a Tea Party protester (of the original Boston Tea Party ilk).

Meade says:

Tired of getting rolled? Assert your naturally endowed rights to Life, Liberty, and Freedom From Being Trod Upon!

At the Gas Tank Café...

... it's time to get tanked up.

If you're traveling in the north country...

... where Highway 63 meets Route 2... there is a café... Casablanca Traders...



... where the nice lady kept the place open for an extra 15 minutes so that Meade could have a smoothie and I could have a peppermint tea with a shot of internet. We were the only customers, and Meade said you must do very well in wintertime, and she said that's what she, a transplanted San Diegan, thought when she moved up here and opened the place. But the truth is, no one comes in the winter. The customers come on the sunny warm days (which are few, up north).

In winter, where does everyone go? Don't they want to be somewhere cozy? We drove quite a ways in the Chequamegon Forest. And what we saw were bars, bars, bars. Bars and bowling alleys. The culture up north isn't so much about coffee and WiFi. It's more about beer and bowling. That was my observation, as I drove by....



... with my vision admittedly blurred... by speed, not beer. I was on peppermint tea...



... and to-go chocolate cake, leftover from lunch.

A story about a mural in Prescott resonates with the meme that Arizonans have a race problem.

Here's the story, about a mural that some citizens complained about because it depicted "a black guy" or 2.

I'd like to see a "before" picture, showing the entire mural, because there's some complexity about what it meant for the artist to be told to "lighten" the faces in the painting. The school officials said "to make the kids look like they were 'radiating with happiness,'" so there might be some issue of them conveying the wrong mood. "Lighten" is an ambiguous word — lighten up! — but it's also highly inflammatory to say "lighten" with respect to the skin tone of the faces in the mural.

And then there's City Councilman Steve Blair who had — he's now fired — a local radio talk show, who's been saying things like: "I disagree with the whole perspective that you would have a black guy painted on two sides of that building when the history of Prescott never had a culture issue." You do now.

Speaking of painting, Arizonans are being painted in the media as racists. With the hot national issue about immigration enforcement, any little thing like this will be picked up and used to propagate the meme. You may think you've got a local issue and be willing to engage in loose talk and feel sure you're not really a bad person, but you will look like hell when it's picked up nationally. I've seen a lot of bad murals around town, using big looming faces to convey "progressive" political messages, and I can imagine someone who wasn't a racist at all bitching about them in words that would look quite awful quoted in the national press.

I deplore racism — don't we all? — but can we also talk about the atrocious murals that get slathered onto the walls of our towns? The "diversity" theme is so common in these monstrosities, and I'd hate to see accusations of racism work to silence criticism of artwork that needs to complained about.

IN THE COMMENTS: lemondog links to what I think are pre-alteration photos of the mural, and it's hard to detect a surly, hostile, or aggressive look on the faces. They are already "radiating with happiness." How ecstatic do you want kids to be about going green? I dislike government propaganda murals (and anti-government propaganda murals), but the idea of lightening the faces is bad.

Q: "So is the battle of Tippecanoe the most important historical event that ever took place in Indiana?" A: "That and the birth of Evan Bayh."

A conversation that took place this past Saturday in front of this mural...



... in the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, in Lafayette, Indiana.

And now, Evan Bayh is moving on from the Senate to... ???.

At the Valentine's Café...

... you can post a love note...



... and chat up a guy who looks like George H.W. Bush...

At the Stairwell Café...

... you can get down and dirty.

Coffee time!

Don't forget!



More!



Okay!



That's more like it!

The 55 mice used in the University of South Florida study had been bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease....

When the mice were tested again after two months, those who were given the caffeine performed much better on tests measuring their memory and thinking skills and performed as well as mice of the same age without dementia.

Those drinking plain water continued to do poorly on the tests.

"You know I don't know if there was hidden gang meaning behind it with the cross, with the skull, with the deer, with the police camera's."

"Was there something anti-police about it? I don't know what's in his mind. That's how I viewed it."

Says Chicago 11th ward alderman James Balcer, who got the city's "graffiti blasters" to blot out a mural that an artist — Gabriel Villa — had spent 2 weeks painting on a privately owned wall. (The link goes to Chicago Public Radio, which put that apostrophe in "camera's" — twice.)

Villa did the work as part of a local art festival. The mural itself was on private property, on a wall owned by the mother of a festival organizer. Villa says several Chicago Police officers approached him about the work while he painted. He thinks they may have been offended but he says the painting doesn't have an anti-police message.

Here's a photo of the ex-painting. Judge for yourself. Anti-police?

VILLA: This mural was not a quiz. A lot of contemporary art tries, you know it tries to baffle you, or tries to confuse you, or kind of flip things on its head. I wasn't asking anything.

Villa says he thinks police officers disliked the mural and they called the alderman who ordered the mural to be painted over.

BALCER: Yeah, I'm the alderman here. I was told about it and I okay'd it and I stand by it.

Loveland mural.

A mural in Ashland.

Here are some shots from a mural painted on the brick side wall of a movie theater in Ashland, Wisconsin, on the shore of Lake Superior. The veterans depicted by the artists Kelly Meredith and Sue Martinsen were all local residents.





I liked the way the mural looked reflected in the windows of the library across the street.