Maybe this should go in the pit, but others may have a different point of view regarding “urban street art”. IMHO, 99.99% of tagging is vandalism; just some punks with spray paint defacing public property. Only a few blocks from where I live, they’ve adorned mature redwood trees with their friggin’ gangsta graffiti.
But this morning I spotted a perfect piece, sprayed in big white letters on the side of a bridge. The *artiste *must have had a brilliant flash of insight before he decided to declare:
Redwoods is awful. Similarly, a few years ago some stupid hippy motherfucker tagged fucking Stonehenge with green paint. “L I V E”, one letter on each stone.
However I like the tale of the graffiti seen on a wall in a posh area of North London at the time of the invasion of Iraq:
There’s a minor public school a few miles from where I stay, and the building has a grand entrance with some columns in the Ionic style. A few years ago some local teenagers thought it would be funny/smash the system/summon Cthulthu if they sprayed the name of noted Satanist death rockers “DEICIDE” onto the columns, one letter per column. I don’t know at which point they realised there were in fact only six columns available, but the school sported a rather plaintive “DECIDE” for a few weeks.
Yes the tragedy was that the 1,000 people going home on the train were late for dinner due this Darwin Award winner tagging and not being smart enough to stay off the railroad tracks.
Oh and a correction to the news story, he wasn’t a good boy, he was a fucking vandal.
Where I come from “good boys” don’t break the law, and destroy other people’s property.
You seem to be using some definition of the word good of which I am unfamiliar.
That is as may be, but are you really comfortable with how callous you have allowed yourself to become? Are you ok with the idea of hounding a person who shoplifted bread to feed their family for twenty years or more? FTR, I think that vandalism is a serious crime too, and should be punished. I just don’t find myself comfortable with the idea of applauding the gory death of a vandal. (Unless perhaps it was a particularily brutal Vandal from a historic account, heh.) To each their own I guess.
When I was thirteen, my biggest act of rebellion was scatching my name on the pew in front of me at church. The pew was in the sanctuary reserved for kids, and thus it was old and decrepit, but I was nonetheless a vandal. And a remorseless one at that.
Are you telling me that I deserved to be hit by a train for what I did?
It sounds like the boy was at least creating beautiful, patriotic art. If given a legitimate canvas, he could have gone on to do good things in his life. Being tough on crime doesn’t mean you have to be a dispassionate fuck. You can disapprove with what he did while still feeling pity for him.
If all thirteen year olds got hit by a train whenever they did something stupid, there would be no thirteen year olds left. Especially 13-year-old boys.
