D-Graff!
Posted on October 6th, 2009 –
I was having a chat with a colleague this afternoon about living in the city. He shook his head in rejection of it. He liked the burbs, he said. Didn’t like the hustle and bustle of the grit. I can honestly say that the entire time I’ve lived here I’ve not once been hustled, and bustled only on a handful of occasions.
I think what he was referring to were the sometimes congested sidewalks, and usually congested roads downtown. The driving part can’t be helped much. Owning a car in the city is frivolous, if you ask me. Walking for half an hour to just about anything you need isn’t gonna kill either you or your kids — just look both ways. And the congested sidewalks are entirely avoidable — just walk over to the next parallel street. Or, if you don’t mind getting a bit more risqué, the next parallel alley.
Hang on to your hat, you’re never gonna believe what this place is called…
Graffiti Alley
Yeah, I know. I’m gonna go with Graffalley to try to salvage something from it. Maybe it should be District Graff, since it’s really crawling up each of the adjacent alleys too. And it’s on everything:
Okay, that’s kind of a crummy example. But you just have to turn around and travel backwards in time to see a slightly livelier one:
I didn’t think it at all out of character to find someone adding another layer to D-Graff (Ha! I’m already conjugating it!) For example, there was this young man who was just finishing up with the yellow-black octopussy thing on the door:
He tries, in this way, to speak on behalf of the dead, he told me. He’s an artist, he said, and called me an artist too. I blushed.
Maybe it’s easy to be mistaken for an artist in D-Graff because the graffiti is so prolific that to not be spray painting is probably to be loitering:
If graffiti is not encouraged out here, then I don’t know what to think. Some of the stuff seems pretty intricate; I can’t imagine how long it must’ve taken:
And, may I introduce into evidence exhibit B:
Call me naive, but I don’t think fifty foot women are easy to come by.
And I don’t ever remember seeing copyrighted tags before:
No, not Trix. The blue swooshy thing on the right wall.
I did see one attempt to explain how some of the high-flying graffiti was accomplished:
Yeah, unlikely. Unless the human stepladder’s a metaphor, in which case we’re back to square one.
You see, the reason I’m harping on this is not because I’m not impressed, I merely want to know if I should be more impressed. I mean, I’ve already been to two art-related things in almost as many days, so I already have a pretty good grasp on “the scene”. And now I’ve been inducted into its ranks.
Art is … a fleeting thing.
That might mean something. Maybe. Hey, I’m an artist. I don’t have to explain myself.
... with pictures
... with sounds
... with videos
... with opinions
... that's shorter
... that's longer
October 6th, 2009 11:48 pm
I am not a fan of graffiti, but I like what I see here. Though these views would look like…the wild exotica in my environment, but they sat me back in awe because your mastery enabled me to see what's beyond the picture, and thus put the visitor under a charm. I heard the love here , and the miracle happened – I recognized my town and myself in these pictures.
The above may sound strangely, yet that's inescapable when (if) we succeed to free oneself from the bond of our prejudices and go beyond the picture into the spiritual realm where our oneness becomes the obvious.
I would greatly appreciate your visit to my blog (I have 6 plus online gallery of my artworks) I hope you will have a good time there and I will receive your constructive comments that will enable to improve my blogs. I say so because, as a web master, I am very week and need step by step guidance to share properly what overfills my heart.
October 7th, 2009 8:08 pm
Thanks for the kind words, Tomas. I'll rip into your blog like Sunday dinner at the earliest opportunity :)