Brangelina & Kissing Bobbies!

Went to the Silverlake/Los Feliz/Echo Park Artcrawl last weekend. What’s not to like about looking at art (some of it pretty decent), mingling with hipsters, eavesdropping on Intense Conversations among hipsters, meeting new hipster friends, free wine (although one cheapskate gallery actually served Two-Buck Chuck – shame!) and jaywalking across Sunset at sunset? The after-party at the Echo wasn't bad either.

Meanwhile, further downtown, über-hipster "art terrorist" Banksy's warehouse installation was a hipster/celebrity magnet. Even Brangelina showed up! O, Brangelina, whither thou goest, I will go.

Some wacky animal-rights protesters forced the "art renegade" (except how renegade are you when Brad and Angie grace your supposedly underground exhibit?) to scrub the paint off the live elephant (a 38-year-old female named Tai) that Banksy was pimping to make a heavy-handed point about the "elephant in the room," namely world poverty and injustice.

Despite the media circus (ouch), I've been a fan of good street art since I lived in Paris lo those many years ago, where street stenciling is a respected, if still subversive art form. Later I participated in lots of gleefully illicit stenciling and wheatpasting with assorted queer activist groups (hmmm...where are those photos?).

Banksy on Palestine and Israel: "The security barrier separating the occupied territories from Israel is over 450 miles long and 38 feet high."

The Berlin Wall was only 96 miles long and 12 feet high.

Even the Great Wall of China is only 26 feet high (but, okay, in its heyday it was more than 3,500 miles long – longer than the distance between New York and Paris!). My friend Mark and I tried to find this out at our favorite all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet (sesame balls! crab legs!), where a giant glossy mural of the Wall snakes above the vinyl booths. No one could tell us. Well, now we know.