The street art of Buenos Aires is as exuberant as it is plentiful. The painting of murals on outside walls throughout the city is not only accepted, but encouraged and celebrated.

I wandered by the above mural of Argentine deity, Diego Maradona, during my visit to BA in 2009. It’s way more lighthearted and cartoonish than more recent soccer murals, which tend toward the heroic and reverential. A big supporter of the local street art scene is Buenos Aires Street Art. They organize and document projects, offer regular street-art tours and even aerosol classes. You can see soccer related murals they’ve posted here and here.

As all will be watching Lionel Messi’s “date with history,” in the World Cup final of Argentina v. Germany, I thought I’d finally post Maradona and some of the other painted walls I saw in BA. While I can’t give equal time here to Germany’s wall art, I’ve slipped in a mural from a visit to Berlin. I think you’ll figure out which one it is. (Hint: don’t be fooled by the Volkswagen)

 Also check out the NY Times infographic on Messi vs. Maradona.

Scoring in WIlliamsburg

(click to enlarge)

Williamsburg taqueria La Superior, is a casual low-key kind of place that serves phenomenal tacos and margaritas. For the World Cup tournament they’ve installed a couple of TVs and a custom scoreboard. The festive elimination diagram, designed by a friend of the restaurant, consists of Vasarely-like clusters silkscreened onto plexiglass.

Elsewhere in Williamsburg ...

Notice for a filming of Girls this week.

Fabulous wall!

FIFA World Cup: Viewers Runneth Over

I don’t care how little interest you have in football, there’s no escaping the annual hype of the Super Bowl in the U.S. This year’s game made history by becoming the most watched TV broadcast ever, with 106.5 million people tuning in. Compared to viewership of the World Cup Final, however, the Super Bowl is hardly super-sized. The final soccer match of the World Cup gets almost seven times as many viewers.

Truth is, we in the U.S., just don’t feel the FIFA fever. There are pockets of excitement here and there-- this Barney’s ad for $24 team flip flops, and chocolate soccer balls at Dean & Deluca. Not very impressive given that we consume more food on Super Bowl Sunday than any other day of the year except Thanksgiving.

And the final match is only a small part of the entire FIFA World Cup Finals ...


Expected viewership for the month-long event of 64 games, is to be somewhere around 26 billion. That’s a lot of eyeballs.




Sources: FIFA, Nielsen

Old Goooooooooooooooooal!*

Before everyone gets caught up in this year’s World Cup, I wanted to share these vintage soccer-team photos I bought at the flea market in Buenos Aires.

Something about the strange purplish background and the thickly inked emerald jerseys, made me stop and pick up the clipped-out magazine pageof F.C. Oeste , above. Perfect souvenir, I thought, from a land of devout Soccerites (Maradona, of course, is God). Before I knew it, the dealer--yes, vintage ephemera can be very addictive-- had brought out a 6”-thick stack of El Graphico team pictures for me to look at.

Since I do not work for Ralph Lauren (he's actually more of a rugby man), taking the whole pile was out of the question, so I just tried to pick out a moderate handful. Having little knowledge of soccer (or football, or futbol), my selection was based solely on appeal--an attitude, interesting colors, cute players, or details like the black armbands worn by the Quilmes team, or the two Estudiantes players posing with their kids (bottom photo).

I’ve loaded these images at a larger size than I usually do, so you can click to see more detail.






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