Golf de Rue (Road Golf) - the bottom of a no-parking sign has been turned into a golf hole.

I just got back from one of the first screenings of Alan Kohl’s documentary Roadsworth: Crossing the Line, the story of the Montréal-based street artist turned criminal turned legitimate artist Peter Gibson.

The first time I saw Roadsworth’s paintings, I thought it must have been commissioned by the city. It was so clean looking, obviously referenced the look and feel of the line markings on the road, and so pervasive in my neighborhood I assumed he must have been given permission by some municipal body. As the film documents, a lot of people in city hall thought the same thing. Eventually, however, the law caught up with him and he was charged with defacing public property. The film follows his legal troubles, and in part tries to wrestle with the notion of whether the law should differentiate between empty tagging and art that uses the context of the city to communicate in a way a gallery piece cannot.

There is a lot to love about Gibson’s pieces. They’re simple, fun, and accessible in a way that so much art seems to completely neglect. The movie also makes clear how slow Gibson actually works, taking in his surroundings and making pieces that integrate with the urban fabric.

Those in Montréal who care about these sorts of things should make a point of catching the movie at Cinéma du Parc starting Saturday, November 22nd, until Thursday November 27th. For everyone else across Canada and across the world, you’ll have to wait.

Some zany hipsters in Pittsburgh found out when the Google Street view car was going to come along a certain street, and staged a big party with a marching band, costumes, and confetti dropping from the balconies above.

Visit Street with a View for more.

Reading through James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, which chronicles the sorry state of (North) American urban planning and architecture, which seems to create spaces as forgettable and disposable as the fast food wrappers sold in these places.

Setting aside the many downsides of suburban life, I myself have sometimes wrestled with notion that so many suburban places are just plain ugly. I’ve wondered whether the aesthetics really matter. They almost seem secondary to the argument.

Kunstler’s passage on this issue, which he describes as charm, summed things up for me nicely:

Americans wonder why their houses lack charm. The word charm may seem fussy, trivial, vague. I use the term to mean explicitly that which makes our physical surroundings worth caring about. It is not a trivial matter, for we are presently suffering on a massive scale the social consequences of living in places that are not worth caring about. Charm is dependent on connectedness, on continuities, on the relation of one thing to another, often expressed as tension, like the tension between private and public space, or the sacred and the workaday, or the interplay of space that is easily comprehensible, such as a street, with the mystery of openings that beckon, such as a doorway set deeply into a building.

For more, I suggest Kunstler’s pithy and sarcastic podcast.