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New Day Cafe - Saturday: The Crack Mender [1]
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Date: 2023-05-27
Good morning, Newdists. I’m writing this and I’ve seen that Tina Turner has joined the ancestors. Do you have attachment to people from afar who you never think of as ever leaving? Ms. Turner has/had that affect on me. Against all reason I felt she’d always be with us. There've been multiple times in my life, when her words and music helped me make sense of what I was living. Our experiences were not the same. Far from it. But the words of many songs felt like they applied with startling accuracy. She was a gift. A powerful gift. And simply the best.
I’ve been watching the old Poirot series on BritBox. I’d forgotten they are so much fun to watch.
Newdists, are you still masking, distancing — when possible, and hand sanitizing? Some parts of the world are seeing a new wave [Fortune dot com].
Onwards!
Your Cafe Long Legs—
Stuff —
You’ve heard of the whales sinking boats?
Orcas have sunk 3 boats in Europe and appear to be teaching others to do the same. But why? [LiveScience]
x The replies to this tweet are not giving me a great deal of hope for the future of humanity — Dr. David Shiffman 🦈 (@WhySharksMatter) May 27, 2023
Vive la révolution. Long may the Orcas rule!
x The 2018 Central Park Squirrel Census is one of my favourite quirky datasets out there. Very pleased to see the good folks at @Datawrapper making use of this important dataset. The map shows squirrel density. Source:
https://t.co/aEdskOCBK1 pic.twitter.com/MoGB1QIKka — Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) May 24, 2023
Newdists, please grab a cuppa, a plate of food, admire some photos and join us in the thread.
The Crack Mender
When you google Ememem, you get a whole lot of info on Eminem…
Apparently the name of one confuses Google to produce a plethora of information on the other. One is a mosaic artist from France, the other is a rapper from Michigan. Not significantly or even remotely related...at all.
In Europe, cities with cracks in their sidewalks, streets, and sides of buildings are revamping by inviting Ememem to come and help them. You see, he is the crack mender. He has an agent —
Guillaume Abou, who has known him for about fifteen years. He offers an intriguing description: “He is someone who has a great need to give and to share,” he says. "He's pretty laid back, but has had a bit of a turbulent life. » Someone else who has met him is Jeff Carpentier, the director of Planètes Carrelages in Amiens, northern France, where Ememem sourced tiles for a puddle he created as part of a a local arts festival called IC.ON.IC. "He's quiet, but also very outgoing and passionate about what he does," he says.
The correct term for this activity is “flacking”. I’d never seen any other artist mosaic into and over architectural cracks as Ememem has done. And so he can be forgiven for asserting that this is original format. However, apparently, there is an American and an Argentinian, who’ve been doing this since 2013, and Ememem began in 2016:
What is certain is that Ememem created his first “flacking” in February 2016 in an alleyway in central Lyon. They soon became an obsession. “During the first years, he was completely frenetic,” says Abou. “He created at least two a week.” As the legality of his practice is rather fuzzy (he doesn’t ask for authorisation to intervene in the public space), he works exclusively at night. For added discretion, he sometimes adopts disguises or brings along props. Abou recalls how Ememem once dressed up as a plumber and also how he installed cones and red-and-white barrier tape around a pothole in Guadeloupe to give the impression he was doing legitimate work.
So who the heck is this mending genius and what’s his schtick?
Lyon native Ememem, aka “the pavement surgeon,” examines the streets of European cities and checks for splintered pavement and sidewalks fractured in pieces. Using tiles and stones, he patches the gouged wounds with vibrant mosaics, which nestle into uniquely shaped outlines in walkways and walls. The street-based interventions brighten the otherwise gray asphalt and cement with radial patterns and color-coded stripes that the artist describes as a “free and spontaneous surgical act, which repairs as much as it beautifies.”
x Have you ever seen such a beautiful pothole?! I'm smitten with the sidewalk art created by @ememem.flacking. He creates street art called 'flaking' from run-down sidewalks or concrete by patching them up with mosaic tiles. 'Flacking' comes from the French word 'flaque,' whic… pic.twitter.com/60MPDZVqfE — The Sidewalk Club (@sidewalkclub) December 9, 2020
Some have tried naming him as the French Banksy. I don’t know why something can’t be an original all by itself. One can have a Banksy and also an Ememem. They can coexist without having to be like the other. Come on!
Potholes can be irritating for everyone. And one ingenious European artist has come up with a novel way of solving the problem—by filling them up with mosaic tiles. There are some 350 in the southern French city of Lyon alone and more across Europe. Like the British street artist Banksy across The Channel, Emenem is anonymous and very little is known about him. He doesn't want to be photographed and he doesn't give interviews. He has an agent through whom people can get in touch and a press kit on a website but other than that, he says “it’s important for me to remain a little mysterious,” as quoted in The Observer. “And it’s also because I’m not very talented when it comes to social interactions.” Ememem is a self-described “pavement surgeon” and “pothole knight.” He calls his art, flackings, which refers to the French word, flaque, which means puddle. Not much is known about this man who focuses on the "art of healing the street" except that his father was a tiler.
and —
Since I can’t get Instagram to work for me, some of Ememem’s crack mending can be found on this site. [Upworthy]
New Day Cafe is an Open Thread
What do you want to talk about today?
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[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/27/2171197/-New-Day-Cafe-Saturday-The-Crack-Mender
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