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Street art

THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

Submitted by Editor on

You can travel the world on a Hebridean beach.

Each outgoing tide leaves behind stories: flotsam, jetsam, bookshelves and messages in bottles.

Or you can stay at home and wander the lampposts of Edinburgh.

Some poles include only the tight-packed prose of traffic regulation orders. Others are adhesive palimpsests, competing tales like barnacles encrusting rocks.

Berlin ‘s illicit drug scene features often, as do fascist football casuals from across the Continent. ­

A HEAD OF ITS TIMES

Submitted by Editor on

The earliest known figurative representation of the human form depicts an exaggeratedly proportioned pregnant woman carved from mammoth tusk.

That Hohle Fels Venus, discovered in 2008 in southern Germany, is at least 35,000 years old. According to its finder, Nicholas Conard, it ‘radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Palaeolithic art’.

REMEMBERING THE GREAT HELMSMAN

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This interesting graffiti at the Broughton Street end of Albany Street Lane makes use of a pre-existing incision in a random flagstone.

At first glance it reads like a half-remembered song lyric, but in fact it loosely paraphrases part of Mao Zedong’s concluding speech to the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Party on 6 November 1938.

We thought it might be interesting today to quote from Zedong’s paradoxical Problems of War and Strategy at greater length.

STICKING TO THE FACTS

Submitted by Editor on

The lampposts of Calton Hill are a complete mess. Hundreds of small stickers have been added to them – some to an astonishing height (see foot of page) – by visitors from all over the world.

Rather than succumb to another fit of the Victor Meldrews, Spurtle has this weekend decided to go with the flow and try to understand – even enjoy – these often rather well-designed and enigmatic little messages.

Where in the world will they lead us?

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