Cyrus Yazdani is a 24-year-old convention planner in Las Vegas. But the police say he's also a prolific Los Angeles graffiti artist who goes by the street name "Buket."
Yazdani caught the attention from the 5-0 after appearing on YouTube pulling off daring graffiti stunts like tagging a bridge while hanging precariously over the Hollywood freeway. After watching the clips, a city investigator became weirdly obsessed with bringing Buket down.
The latest performance art isn't Off Broadway, it's further downtown, and a bit more of an active, colorful competition. We told you earlier that New Yorkers are rating it. Now it's being created under the gun in front of a crowd.
Art Battles are live graffiti competitions on the Lower East Side where emerging, talented artists are pitted against each other for a set amount of time--under the watchful eyes of an audience--to create the best graffiti they can.
The finished products get judged by the crowd, who gets to kick back with DJs and beer while the art gets made. All works are also up for auction to the highest bidder at the end of the night.
Interested in seeing Art Battles in action? April 4th is the next one, at 10:30pm. Admission's just $12--unless you're in the mood for a bidding war to take some home. After the jump, check out an even longer video of what the Art Battles are all about
If two is a trend, graffiti is back in a big way. A couple days after a big story on the scene in Berlin, now The New York Times is pointing out the coolest street art in NYC.
There's way more to see than just tags and murals:
Street art can be drawings on paper that have been wheat-pasted onto the side of a building; images stenciled right onto walls; sculptures screwed onto a stop sign pole; even tiles arranged to form 1980s video game aliens, which the French street artist, Space Invader, put up dozens of during a recent visit to the city. Did you notice?
If you didn't, Flickr has a ton of photos of Space Invader's New York art.
Your best bet for seeing good stuff is just walking around, keeping an eye on doorways, lampposts, newspaper boxes and looking down alleyways. Neighborhoods like Chelsea, the Lower East Side, Dumbo and Williamsburg are easily walkable and offer a high concentration of stuff to see. And to get you primed, we tossed together this slideshow of what to expect:
When we watch old movies depicting New York City in the 70s, we admire a few things, including the imitation leather jackets everyone seemed to have, and the insane amount of graffiti all over everything. Now you can relive an even more intense graffiti culture, says the New York Times, in current day Berlin.
Apparently graffiti art is making a serious comeback in the German capital, with famous tags literally all over the place--in the nice neighborhoods, across sidewalks and up buildings. It's currently the most "bombed out" (read: graffitied) city in Europe.
Young local artists are redefining their own version of "Berliner Strassenkultur" and spraying the place up. Photographer Peter Sutherland says:
It's like everyone grabbed a can of paint at one point and just went for it.
And it's not all amateur hour either. You can spot tags by famous graffiti artists like Os Gemeos and Banksy if you know where to look. Can't get there soon? Here's a closer look:
The rules for this one are a little confusing. Is this a contest for the photographers or the street artists? Do individual entrants win, or do their cities? Details are a bit hazy, but the Metroblogging network's street art contest is nonetheless off to quite an interesting start. There's a dedicated Flickr pool with tons of cool pictures from all around the world--Barcelona (above), Copenhagen, Berlin and Miami, to name a few of the cities included. The contest group has also proved to be a great starting point for some odd Flickr exploration, as we discovered the curious "Girls on walls" pool through the Barcelona snapshot featured here. "Girls on walls" is your one-stop shop for girls...on walls...around the world! Amazing.
At behest and via the courtesy of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, Jaunted spent the weekend in 6th Borough for a sleepover and tour--meaning this trip was on Ben Franklin, Rocky, and Boyz II Men--or something like that. Our thoughts are scattered below. Enjoy.
Philadelphia is at no shortage for good french toast, but Sabrina's is one of the city's most popular places to eat it and other brunch goodness. Also a BYOB, Sabrina's is the tradition to Rx's hippie crunch. The wait at Sabrina's can be brutal, but if you arrive early, say around 8 am, you can avoid the worst of it.
On the menu are several decadent varieties of french toast, most stuffed to the gills with fruit and farmer's cheese. You can also get pancakes, eggs, and more lunch-like sandwiches. It's hard to go wrong here, though even "healthy" options like the egg whites are quite buttery, but Sabrina's pretty much does its bread products best. Just the mention of it to our Philly friends prompted stories of all the varieties of french toast they'd eaten there in the past.
As a bonus, you can catch some of Philly's scariest street art right around the corner on 9th street. The entire Italian Market area, within which Sabrina's is located, is full of murals. Check out our favorite piece after the jump.
Randy Newman may have said that "short people got no reason to live", but what about little people? No, not those little people--we mean little hand-painted ones. Do they ever get to leave their display case at home?
It would appear so, over at Little People, a "street art project" that documents these figurines and their travels throughout London. Good to see that even tiny tourists have backpacks--it's certainly an improvement on a tiny fanny pack. Anyway, it's a fun perspective on a huge, sprawling city.
