Supplemental Blog

I just reread the blog I wrote last night and realized I didn’t actually write about the one thing I intended to write about, which was not the poetry reading but some cool wall art I saw on the way there.
I’d intended to walk to the reading, if the weather wasn’t too horrible, or a combination of foot and tram, which is the quickest, but I turned into the Metro station out of force of habit (and it was kind of drizzly) and only remembered my final destination as the doors were closing. No matter, many ways to get there. So, I changed at Florenc, went the one stop to Vltavska, and then caught a tram one station to Pražka Tržnice, and walked from there. A lovely walk, along the river for a ways and then there’s a bend in the road. As I approached this bend, I noticed a huge mural, at least a couple meters high, and it was four people, heads, inside frames, but I didn’t recognize any of them, and then as I saw further around the bend, there were, 5,6, probably 8 or 9 in total and I thought, well, that’s pretty cool, maybe I’ll recognize some of them closer up.
Here’s the cool part: close up, they are just splotches of paint, you have to see them from a distance, and they are clearly meant for the benefit of people driving by more than pedestrians but it was an amazing optical illusion.
I mentioned this to a couple of people at the reading and one guy knew exactly what I was talking about and knows the artist personally because artists in Prague, you know, small world.

Then today, I saw on Facebook a proposed new work by David Černy, the Czech artist who did the babies climbing Žižkov tower and the big, purple middle finger that was floating in the river for a while a few years back, and it’s going to be a pedestrian bridge between two buildings modeled after the Montparnasse Train Wreck of 1895. It’s definitely be something to take tourists to look at.

So, three cheers for Prague artists!