Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Daniel Johnston Original

Daniel Johnston is a singer/songwriter/artist and sufferer of bipolar disease. He painted this mural on the side of a store facing The Drag* fifteen years ago. (It was a secondhand music store called Sound Exchange at the time.) The mural has been preserved through store changes and is considered iconic by his fans. There was a documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, released in 2006 about him. There is a fan site I found for him.

I like the picture because besides showing the stark black and white and simple lines of the preserved mural, the newspaper boxes (one conveniently toppled when I walked by) look like crayons ready to color it.

*The Drag is Guadalupe as it runs along the west side of the UT campus. You pronounce Guadalupe in Austin not in Spanish (Huadalupa) but GWAD-Loop or some such. Not that we don't know a lot of Spanish around here (we pronounce guacamole correctly about half the time) but for some reason street names have a pronunciation key all their own.

5 comments:

  1. You're right about those newspaper boxes looking like crayons beside the mural. Great capture!

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  2. That's some of the best graffiti (okay, mural) that I've seen in a while. Something about it's simplicity just works.

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  3. I know that one well!

    And am a Daniel J. fan.

    This is going to sound funny. Just for the heck of it I clicked on the "Austin" tag on Blogger, as I live in Austin and up popped your site's link.

    Pretty cool.

    I'm relatively new to blogging and loving it.

    Nice to "meet" you!

    Jannie

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  4. Nice to meet you as well-- pls. come back often.

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  5. GUADALUPE!(gwadalupay)! NOT huadalupa OR (gwadaloop) hahaha That really blew my mind when I moved to austin from MX.

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