Another typewriter has appeared on a wall in Reading, England, just three weeks after the now world famous Banksy mural was spotted at Reading Gaol. This new black-and-white stencilled image looks exactly like the Banksy typewriter, but is on the wall of a bridge. First it was there on its own, now it is suspended below an image of a pensive boy beside the words, "Cherish, Love and Hope". The original at Reading Gaol had a "Team Robbo" tag added over the weekend, but that has now been removed. The new mural has under it the word "Peachy" in a typewriter font. All a bit of a mystery really. We know "Robbo" was a Banksy rival, and maybe "Peachy" is another street artist adopting the "Banksy-style". The original, an escaping prisoner using bedsheets to lower himself and a typewriter, was thought be to a nod to Reading Gaol's most famous prisoner, Oscar Wilde.
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In Seifhennersdorf in Saxony, Germany, Steffi Rücker, dressed up as Lotti Langohr in an Easter bunny costume, sits at a Robotron typewriter in a wooden house on the grounds of the children's and youth recreation center "Querxenland". Baskets of mail from children arrive at the Upper Lusatian Easter Bunny Post Office every spring.
Yesterday was "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day" in San Francisco. Here poet James O'Brien Makowski types on a Royal Quiet Deluxe portable during an impromptu gathering outside San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore in remembrance of Ferlinghetti, the bookstore's co-founder. The day before the gathering, February 22, Ferlinghetti had died of interstitial lung disease. Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti was a poet, social activist, publisher and painter. He would have celebrated his 102nd birthday yesterday. He was best known for his first collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and has sold more than one million copies.
Maybe the typewriter murals will start appearing every place like the desert obelisk did this past year.
ReplyDeleteOh, I like Bill's idea. The Banksy typewriter ought to become iconic and viral.
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