yarn bombing...

This made my day: a yarn-bombed bike-rack in the Bay Area. Here is the full story by the yarn-bomber on her blog: http://streetcolor.wordpress.com/2011/05/02/yarnbombing-the-berkeley-public-library/
And here's a whole website/blog on yarnbombing. Those intrepid Canadian ladies ride again!

I really like this new trend, graffiti with a fiber twist; how can it help but brighten people's days? It seems a non-aggressive, distinctly gendered form of stealth street art that is gaining sway. Its ephemerality is part of its appeal; one of the comments on the boingboing article said that this beautiful clothsnake will start to rot within a week or so...and perhaps that's true, but that makes the collision of art for art's sake and exuberant anonymous subversive (quasi-political, even) gesture all the more touching. And the colors bring to mind Rosa Luxemburg's and Emma Goldmann's desires for a whole self revolution that included eroticism, joy, physical movement, and everyday beauty. The bike-rack shape, too, ensheathed this way, suggest the Uroboros and other primal and mythically foundational serpents, bringing just the right pleasurable instability to the Garden of Industrial Order.