(25) Graffiti

We have not really felt the need to promulgate a formal policy regarding graffiti, except to remember that it has two letter f’s. Instead, we have tried to make graff-by-graff floating assessments. Now, graff is like the weather, sometimes good, sometimes bad, always inevitable. In a large urban area graff is inescapable and most of it is brutally mediocre and easily ignored. It is unfortunate to have to say that but it is true. The quality of good graff has never been better but the flood of weakly designed, artistically bereft tags and just plain vandalism has never been larger either. Reefer-addled adolescents mar the cityscape to fulfill nothing other than a fuzzy belief that what they are doing is transgressive.

Going back to school in 2007 we had the four-month-long misfortune of sitting next to what turned out to be a local youth with a taste for krylon. This young man has vandalized probably half of the west end. Hoping for the kind of direct front-line insight a corporate cool hunter would kill his grandmother for I attempted to engage young Samuel [not his real name] in non-judgemental conversation about his hobby. Alas, the primary impulse for a puerile spray can cowboy is nothing much more than when an ill-bred toddler, with a rich future in the meat packing industry, draws a stick figure on his bedroom wall right after his very cross mommy washes one off the living room wall.

Even allowing for the vast amounts of too-powerful BC bud these young people smoke the mental framework behind an activity that impinges on an environment shared by hundreds of thousands of people is shockingly clueless, inarticulate and in its sparseness downright fucking boring.

We do hate to trash the youth (In large part because this means we are no longer among them) but I cannot help feeling that this infantile pseudo rebellion is a negative. We admit we have never really been that comfortable with graffiti. It can destroy the historical context for viewers of particular buildings, is disrespectful to public property, is costly to remove, creates a threatening environment for women and children and speaks to disorder in general. While uneasy in the past we were willing to embrace a certain amount of mediocre graff in order to have the kind of unappropriated-by-the-man moment we so cherish when we come across good graff.

The truth about graff is disappointing and we may have to set the Cray III supercomputer to drafting an action plan before the local environment is despoiled beyond repair. The image above is from Saturday’s walk. It isn’t too bad as far as it goes. A version exists in three locations I know of, including one where Punk Rock Girl used to be (she disappeared three days after I took that picture, if any of you have seen her, tell her to please, please call me, I forgive everything).