The Normal Times

Bango Skank was here.

From Beaux-Arts to slummification to Gray McDonalds, anyone at any time that has lived at least twenty years in cities has seen some degree of big changes. Pizza Huts become bistros, highways widen and roads narrow to make way for bike lanes, lovely old ruined houses are blown down and replaced with plasti-glass condo towers, downtowns are chopped into quaintly named districts and revitalized. Ages fade and one thing remains constant, the human urge to draw on the walls.

Unlike my last city life entry, this isn’t a rant post. It’s a pretentious art appreciation post. As an art school drop out, I am an absolute authority on these matters. Like a cultural acrobat, I am keyed into all the high and fine things of life.

I don’t have strong feelings about graffiti. Like the heavens above, spray-painted scribbles have been present in the backdrop of most of my life. I could probably be made to care more about it, given the circumstance. Fury and wrath if someone drew a big crooked dick on the side of my car. Or perhaps some mild aesthetic pleasure if I came across something neat enough, or whatever. I don’t mean those high-production murals commissioned by city governments after one of those artsy weirdo districts has finally gotten expensive enough to squeeze out the last of the local schizo old guard. No, never that.

The first time I saw graffiti that took my breath away was when I was living in either New Orleans or Philly. I’m a little bit stupid so it’s hard to remember. There was this towering ruin of an old manufacturing building. I’d guess twenty or so floors tall. Some beautiful dreamer climbed to the top five levels to paint a letter into the west corner window of each floor. The cascade of block letters flowed down the side of the building to spell out B-O-N-E-R. This is art.

Last week I came across another slight delight.

It’s not that great. It’s not particularly clever. I call it Suburban Primitive because I imagine the person who did this was raised in a soft house nested in some cul-de-sac tangle with two parents who always encouraged them to Express Yourself and gave them money for their hobbies, no matter how fleeting. Nothing wrong with that, because this delicate creature I just made up managed to create something so different from the standard fare that I stopped to look at it. Cliché in design though it may be, it’s certainly an improvement on those cement blocks the city leaves sprinkled all over town in case a president gets an incurable hankering for ice cream and is sick of what he’s got in the fridge at home. Ugly, overbearing, inconvenient. The barricades could be a symbol of 21st century edition DC. But if they must be there, they can at least look cute. And again, it beats the typical decor.

Graffiti is almost never “art” and it’s not because it’s ugly, trashy, illegal, anti-social, or whatever. It isn’t art because that’s not the usual intent of it. Primarily it is an act of ego with a side of adrenaline rush. Occasionally you see some sentence-long lettering from a hapless poet desperate to get their message to the world. “Fuck (something or someone)”, “Money is stoopid”, “Tasha is a SLUT”, etc. I don’t count these. They’re either a transcription of the cause du jour to earn peer cred, or they’re the leavings of a bored person who is wasting their time getting baked under bridges instead of figuring out how to do something tangibly helpful for their social concerns. Then again, I did recently cite the below image as one of my favorite things¹ about my present environment.

Warning: Snootiness incoming.

But even the shitty stuff sorta kinda is art. It does modify the area it exists in, it does set a certain mood. Whatever the image, is speaks different sentiments to any beholders that are varied and often polarized. “Oh, this must be a bad neighborhood”, “Oh, this must be a cool neighborhood”, “Oh, shit, that’s my dead ex-boyfriend’s tag lol”. In tidy, sterile places most people will make themselves small and quiet. Fewer rip their shirt off and start screaming in the Apple Store. Museum voice is only a few decibels above a whisper. You feel like a rampaging ass if you get too boisterous in these places.

Defaced places pierce the unseen etiquette barrier. They carry subtle vapors of anarchy. Sometimes the scary kind, sometimes the fun kind. When you’re there, you can sense it. These are the places you can day drink while bullshitting the hours away with your buds. Inside or outdoors, these are the places where you can be excited and loud, and anyone who looks at you shitty for it is an un-fun prude. One of my favorite venues is floor to ceiling with this kind of patina. It tells all who enter that, short of brutal assault, anything goes.

This is probably the time to admit, to myself at least, that this post is basically a second installment in an informal series on community or something. I hadn’t planned to do that kind of thing, but between the trash dumping post and the pile of unrefined drafts I’m sitting on, it’s clearly happening. Apparently I have a lot of deep feelings about things like locally famous crackheads and a vague thing I call neighborhood-as-identity. Not sure where it comes from, but I blame Jane Jacobs for making urban development too interesting.

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1. I don’t even strongly agree with the sentiment. What makes it funny to me is that in DC there is either one guy who goes around every time the presidency changes hands to write “Fuck (Name)”, or there are two dudes carrying out a rivalry with one painting “Fuck Biden” and the other painting “Fuck Trump”. I’ve yet to see some washed out old “Fuck Obama” or “Fuck Bush”, so I’m not sure how far back the lore goes. ↩︎

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