#40: Tram Wire Triangle

Holešovice, Prague

The Curse

Holešovice, Prague

#2: The Blue & the Gray

#2, Prague

Welcome back after a week of sequential anarchy that I never again hope to repeat. Excited to try something new, I was wholly unprepared for the tremendous unease of seeing 1 jump to 88, then 139, and so on throughout the week. Frame Week was a good experiment, but it has caused my order-seeking mind much calamity and chaos, and if you don't believe me, then you'll have to picture me pouring myself yet another single malt scotch, listening to Nina Simone and weeping into my hands while fending off nightmares of a world where 4 comes before 3. I've got at least two more of Ms. Simone's CDs to get through, but I'm nearly out of Laphroaig, so rather than take my chances, I'm going to seek solace in another tried-and-true method of organization. After today, numbers can go take a holiday. It's time for some serious color coding.

Remember Garanimals? That line of children's clothing that worked on the premise of coding certain articles of clothing so that a six-year-old could learn how to mix and match outfits? All you had to do was find a shirt with a gorilla tag and a pair of corduroys with a gorilla tag and voila! It didn't matter if you were colorblind. You were sure to be a well-matched, well-coordinated kid, at least until lunch time when you'd spill grape juice all over yourself. It took a lot of guesswork out of the daunting prospect of getting dressed in the morning, at least it did for me, and there was the added thrill of kind of having this totem animal that you were carrying around with you. You looked like a normal kid at the drinking fountain, but really -- unbeknownst to all but you -- you were a freaking SHARK. I miss that. Maybe it's time to start sewing some ass-kicking animal tags into my sweaters. I need a pick-me-up.

In any case, here's the plan for this week. Last Monday kicked things off nicely with a Sienese #1, so here, as promised, is this Monday's #2: a bold, cobalt number plate set against a two-tone gray background. The rest of the week will scrupulously follow the blue and gray palette, eschewing all wanton displays of ill-sequenced numbers, and let's see if my tremors don't start to abate by mid-week. You can still get your number fix on Mondays, but now I hope you'll allow me to tempt you with some other savory typographical offerings: text, alphabets, words, and signs.

Incidentally, lest you think that my Garanimals nostalgia is without cultural precedent, there is actually a Garanimals-inspired typeface -- think Zapf Dingbats, only cuter -- that you can use. You may not be able to read a whole document in it, but it might come in handy for making those clothing labels. I'm off to lionize some trousers. See all you people later.

#58

#58, Holesevice, Prague

Atop a lonely bluff in Prague overlooking the Vlatava River, the remnants stand of a sign that reads RESTAURANT PRAHA EXPO 58. It's like the Hollywood sign, only more ramshackle, but unlike Hollywood, where "youth" springs eternal, this sign is a nod to the past. OK, quick: World's Fair. What springs to mind? Maybe a few memories or associations are knocking about up there like marbles. You've heard about all the things that were invented or introduced for the first time at one fair or another: the ice cream cone at the 1904 St. Louis Fair, the Ferris Wheel in 1893 in Chicago. Maybe you think of that serial killer from Devil in the White City. But invariably, you think of the past.

In 1958, Brussels hosted the Expo 58. It was the first of its kind since the 1939 World's Fair in New York. World War II had, er, interrupted proceedings, and there was a great feeling of optimism about the Expo 58. Czechoslovakia, still reeling from Stalinism, was under strict state control, but the arts flourished. One exhibition that got a lot of attention was the Lanterna Majika, or the Magic Lantern, a performance piece with live dancers and actors interacting with film projections -- a highly novel notion at the time. Also, Expo 58 was home to the award-winning Restaurant Praha built specially for the occasion, a curved steel construction with an aluminum glass facade.

Czechoslovokian participation on the world exhibition in Brussels was significant in a sense that it meant the return of the country into civilised Europe . . . The steel construction bore no comparison to the previous totalitarian era. The basic idea behind the architectural design was contrasts of glassed-in, airy parts with mighty pavilion cubes.

Mighty pavilion cubes. I love the quirky linguistics of translated websites.

The Restaurant Praha Expo 58 was later dismantled and re-built in Prague at the edges of the Letenske Orchards in Holesovice: hence the hilltop advertisement you see in the photograph. The building still stands but it's no longer a restaurant. After suffering a chaotic phase of changing ownership, looting, and vandalism, it was eventually restored in 2001 and converted into -- what else? -- an office building.

Many Belgians ate soft-serve ice cream and drank Coca-Cola for the first time at Expo 58. The Russians were ahead in the space race and Sputnik was a big hit. Orson Welles was there. There was a real "World of Tomorrow" optimism to the theme and design. I especially love the Expo 58 logo.

We're so globalized now that a World's Fair seems, sadly, beside the point. Stupid things are being invented every day, all over the world; innovations spring up and we use them without thinking; our international artistic exchanges now take on the ghastly shapes of Baywatch and the Eurovision Song Contest. But those feeling retro might want to take the ViewMaster tour and imagine what it must have been like at Expo 58. Futu-rama!

#54

#54, Hradčany, Prague

Basically, my favorite.

#45

#45, Mala Strana, Prague

The re-numbering of buildings is something you see a lot of in places like Prague and Venice. As the city's streets and layouts continue to shift over time, many of the buildings still retain signs of both the old and the new addresses, often with both in plain sight. Even though the bright red 389 claims to be the proper address over this doorway, here it shares aesthetic duties with its old neighbor. I love the faded, framed 45 and the ghost of a text still lingering on the window over the door in gold letters. Look closely at the middle of it all and you'll see an anchor.

#43

#43, Staré Město, Prague

There are colors in Prague that you can only find in Prague. One of the earliest pleasures of the pre-Pantone days of my youth was looking at a fistful of paint chips and sounding out the names of the colors. These hues had names more exotic than those found in the standard box of Binney and Smith, though few childhood experiences of mine surpassed the joy of cracking open a fresh-smelling box of 64 crayons. Those perfectly pointed tips, that dizzying array of color, that little sharpener in the back of the yellow-orange box. What could anyone possibly need other than these 64 colors? Well, 64 was soon bumped up to 72, 72 went up to 96, and by 1998 Crayola was cooking with gas and 120 crayon colors. Progress. Snazzy new hues were introduced: there was now Shamrock and Mauvelous and Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown alongside the old fuddy-duddy Carnation Pink and Periwinkle. I thought a good deal about color for this 43, striving for le hue juste. It's been a nostalgic-for-no-reason week over here at &7, so I thought I'd stick with the theme and go straight to the source.

Casting a cold eye at the current list of colors on the Crayola Crayon Chronology , it's hard not to feel scandalized by the brash new colors with their cutesy-clever names and to read, as one would the obituary page, the roll of old colors that have gone to eternal rest. When I read the following sentence: Thistle was removed from the 120-count assortment to make room for indigo, a tiny part of me shriveled up and died, falling to the floor like so many carelessly peeled bits of crayon wrapper. Not Thistle! But nevertheless, it was true. Crotchety old colors like Maize and Raw Umber have been booted out for the sunny, youthful likes of Dandelion and Razzle Dazzle Rose. Fair? Hardly. But the color wheel of life rattles onward and so, too, must we.

But how do you describe the colors here? When a building has been weathered this much, bit of Burnt Sienna and a dash of Goldenrod isn't going to cut it. Then again, the times they have a-changed over in that crayon factory I so idolized, so it looks like we're stuck with Wild Watermelon. Except even that's outdated. In 2008, said color was renamed once again to, yes: Awesome. Ick.

#40

#40, Stary zidovsky hrbitov, Prague

Braille in public space and architecture is usually limited to the pragmatic: it's there on signs and labels to give instructions to the blind or visually impaired. Braille is something most of us encounter every day of our lives but rarely see: inside elevators, along corridors in hotels, on vending machines and inside public bathrooms. If we do ever engage in any discourse about it, it generally doesn't extend beyond the "Hey, did you ever wonder why drive-through ATMs have Braille?" variety. (The Straight Dope, as always, has the answer here.) In a weird reversal, we are the blind ones when it comes to understanding Braille. It clearly has its uses, but it also has possibilities. Why should Braille be limited to purely practical purposes? Could it also be art?

In late August of 2007, an artist named Scott Wayne Indiana framed this question into a mission. He began sticking strips of specially printed paper dubbed "Braille Graffiti" throughout the streets of Portland: on electrical boxes, along railings in music stores, above windowsills. The messages in Braille were not room numbers or instructions but philosophical tidbits. One read: "You don't have to be blind to see that the writing is on the wall". The artist explained his project was "an attempt to create a unique moment for a blind person who might happen across one of these bits of graffiti." You can watch a brief clip of the project here.

In France, a street artist named the Blind has taken it to the next level, making his own mark with Braille graffiti. His starkly beautiful creations, first sprayed onto walls with the aid of a stencil then finished off with rounded white 3-D half spheres roughly the size of half a golf ball, have popped up in highly public places, a la Banksy, on city walls, pedestals of monuments and outside the Palais de Justice. They evoke an immediate reaction as works of art. The white Braille, clean and perfectly aligned, has a cool, modernist look against the weathered classical architecture of Paris. But the longer you look at them -- and this may be the point -- the more you begin to wonder what they mean.

With the aid of a good Braille directory (provided on the Blind's home page), I did eventually puzzle out a few of his pieces, though the process of translating Braille to French, then French to English, was so time-consuming and frustrating that I walked away from the exercise with a headache and only a few fragments of words. But more than that, I came to a much deeper appreciation of the resourcefulness of anyone who has ever, out of necessity or out of a desire to help others, had to learn how to read not with one's eyes but one's hands. Ouvrez les yeux, reads one line of the Blind's graffiti beneath a statue in Paris. We might yet benefit to try to see things from his point of view.

So much for art. Next, I'd love to see how Braille can be worked into architecture.

#33

#33, Terezin, Czech Republic

What I remember about my visit to Terezin is not the place.  I remember the drawings by children who would not live to see their next birthday, paintings of blue skies cut through with barbed wire.  I remember the musical scores trapped behind glass, knowing that many if not most of the composers had been killed in the Nazi death camps.  In short, I remember the only things my mind could latch onto in a place that had seen such atrocity: art, music, these necessary, brave, humanizing things.  My own words fall short.  Especially redemptive and of interest is this site that provides history and insight into the musical activities of those imprisoned in Terezin.  Also, organizations such as the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation exist today to honor the resilience expressed through these works of art and to commission new works by emerging composers.

Though the setting and context could not be more different, I am reminded of evenings at the Mast House in Woodstock, Illinois.  This was a monthly folk music gathering/pot luck that my Aunt Casey would sometimes take me to on Saturday nights.  It's a ramshackle, cozy place where stringless banjos and guitars hang from the wall, friends and family gather and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" still surfaces as a sing-along.  The seats are metal fold-out chairs and cups of hot chocolate make the rounds as performers of all ages come up to the front to play songs in 10 minute slots.  And if you look up to the loft in the barn-like interior, hanging over the stage, you'll see this painted on the wooden beam in large block letters: "Music alone shall live."

#31

#31, UPM, Prague

Those in the know call it UPM, those in English-speaking parts of the world call it the Museum of Decorative Arts, and those undeterred by syllables call it Uměleckoprůmyslové museum. My sole association with this Prague museum, regretfully, is this single photograph as the UPM was closing its doors upon my arrival. Yes, that is a picture of the door.

My time spent in cities is so often spent on the streets (this sounds much more destitute than it really is) that it's only after I get home and click on Ye Olde Internette that I smack my forehead in disbelief at all the indoor treasures I missed whilst trawling for architecture. Not that I'd have it any other way. But my mind runs in circles when I learn that the UPM is home to some 300,000 objects. Breaking it down, that's 35,000 posters, 70,000 photographs, and some 30,000 books.some 100,000 folios of drawings and graphic art, the compelling-sounding Ex Libris collection (about 15,000 objects) and 15,000 small devotional objects. There's more, I'm sure, than is dreamt of in my philosophy (calendars! playing cards! labels! postcards!), otherwise I'd be waxing rhapsodic on the quality rather than the quantity.

Update to #31: People are often asking me why I'm always carrying around notebooks, writing things down. The answer is because I have to and I love to. But another reason might be that I have the short-term memory of a hummingbird. Further investigation into the matter yielded much forgotten fruit. Here is a page from my sketchbook from the UPM that I apparently didn't visit. It's a sketch of a Walter Crane illustration for George C. Warra's book Echoes of Hellas. Note the running catalog of numbers 81-100 on the opposite page. This was the trip that started it all.

The author of this blog would like to point out that she on occasion suffers from Stendhal Syndrome, a severe nervous condition and state of confusion often brought about by overexposure to large collections of particularly beautiful works of art. Do not, under any circumstances, let her write an art history manual.

#25

It's &7's Silver Anniversary! When you post every day, it's easy to start racking up those milestones. The way my calculations go, I should be on my way to lavish gifts of diamonds by, oh, March 2nd. So to celebrate 25, here's not one, not two, but three twenty-fives. (I am fully aware that I have a few steadfast Guardians of the Sacred Apostrophe among my ranks, hence my reluctance to write 25's or 25s.)

#25, Charles Bridge, Prague

#25, Sandymount, Dublin

#25, Temple Cottages, Dublin

On occasion, I do face the daunting prospect of choosing between two particular twelves or mediating a Survivor-like selection process among an even larger pool of contenders. While consistency certainly has its appeal, so does overindulgence. Enjoy.

#13

#13, Zlatá Ulicka, Hradcany, Prague


They call this section of Prague Zlatá Ulicka, or the Golden Lane. These cramped and charming row houses on the grounds of Prague Castle (where this 13 originates) were built in the 16th century in the Mannerism style, each painted a different bright shade. While reading up on the etymology of the place name, I came across this (allegedly dodgy) fact (bold print not mine):

Golden Lane got its name from the story of alchymists living in the street during the reign of Rudolf II who tried to make not only the philosopher stone or the elixir of youth, but also to transform metals into gold.

So ensued a stroll down Tangent Lane. Misreading the bold print (and why the y in alchemists?), I delightfully thought I'd stumbled upon the collective noun for alchemist. A murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, and now -- a story of alchemists! Further research proved inconclusive, though I did find this diverting exhaustive list of unauthorized collective nouns. An absence of waiters, a billow of smokers, an obscurity of poets.) And if you fancy adding your own suggestion, you're welcome to do so.

#12

#12, Nové Mêsto, Prague

A wink of Art Deco on a quiet residential street. I love the shade of bottle green and the molecule model shape of the iron work. Simple and elegant.

#9

#9, Malá Strana, Prague

While exploring Malá Strana ("the small quarter"), watching boats launching leisurely onto the Vltava River, I happened upon this number 9. This was one of the first numbers I remember deciding to photograph, so details of context I'm so careful to make note of now weren't yet on my radar. Was it a door? The side of a boat? I do recall it sat very low to the ground, so low I had to crouch down to grass level to get the shot. Bits of rust are flaking away near the bottom, so it must be metal. Beyond that, I'm stumped. I'm also stumped why I never did find that Infant Jesus of Prague despite all maps insisting I was standing on it. Note the little fishy tail of the 9. As of yet, I've never seen another like it.

#3

#3, Prazsky hrad, Hradcany, Prague

When I was about seven or eight years old, just copping on to this notion that there was such thing as cursive handwriting, I began asking myself if there was another way of drawing numbers. This line of inquiry led to many experiments in crayon and butcher paper as I tried to "invent" cursive numbers. Help came from who knows where, maybe my oldest brother who was studying engineering, but after abandoning the drawing board, I started making my numbers in the way engineers or architects did (so I believed). In any case, this picture comes very close to what makes, for me, the perfect number 3. The fact that it is not a "3" at all but an "1843" with a very exaggerated last number, makes it all the more charming.

#1

#1, Parizska, Josefov, Prague

It is very easy to get lost in Prague.  It's even easier when you're more interested in looking at walls than at a map.  You're only there a week, you'll never figure it out, so why bother over the coordinates?  You can always look at a map later.  This is one of the earliest numbers of my project, gathered as part of a 3-city, 2-week scavenger hunt across Prague, Vienna, and Budapest.

I've gathered thousands of images since the mad dash of 2006, but I still love this tiny #1.  The scale is hard to judge from the picture, but it was hardly the size of a silver dollar.  It, and the charming red line of pipe, was an underdog amid the maze of ancient streets and dizzyingly beautiful streetscapes.  I remember distinctly the goblet of Delirium Tremens, mussels and frites consumed at the nearby Les Moules afterward as, mid-afternoon, it started to rain.