too much

fight the power

Got an email today to look out for some tagging on students' notebooks that might resemble the tags that have been appearing in the neighborhood around our school. Fine. I understand that graffiti is vandalism in the dominant culture's thinking. And I understand that we need to prepare our kids to be able to access the dominant culture (i.e. follow its rules) when it's necessary for their success.

But not. all. graffiti. is. bad. Graffiti comes out of the urgent call for social justice that is hip hop culture's history, and although it has been coopted by some who use violence to assert their power, the medium in and of itself is not "bad."

For example, if I happen to "catch" the student who has a tag like this on their notebook:
I'm not going to think that they should be ashamed of themselves for "vandalizing" this back-door of an apartment building. I'm going to think that the dominant culture should be ashamed of itself for labeling a public reminder to "Think 4 urself" as a crime.

aesthetically weak, but theoretically AWESOME

I've said it before, but I really, really want to go back to grad school, despite reading Cassie's blog posts about excessive uppity-ness, because I really, really want to study the ways that teenagers who "hate" school write. And then I really, really want to capitalize on that shit with my own teaching.

I snapped this photo in one of the stairwells at work today. I have no evidence suggesting that the student (I'm assuming) who wrote this actually "hates" school; all I know is that they are/were willing to "vandalize" our school. I also know that I think that s/he is kinda cool. (You gotta look closely.)

Okay this is freaking sweet,

but I don't have time or energy to comment thoughtfully on it:
Graffiti 2.0: Gone By Morning

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Because of some unforeseen circumstances, Cassie and I spent the last two nights in this hostel, which was actually pretty sweet. We chose it because it came up first when we organized the results of our Google search for "cheap barcelona hostels" according to price, but frequent readers of this blog will quickly surmise that there was another reason I was so pumped about this place:














Last night when we asked one of the guys working there what we should do this morning in our final few hours in the city he said, "There's nothing to do here. And it's going to be raining. You should stay here and smoke. And cook pasta. That would be good."

P.S. Props to whoever's photos these are that I borrowed from the common computadora.

Almost as cool as regular graffiti. Almost.

Something I've been wanting to blog about for a while. Walking through my neighborhood, something that stands out is the way that the people who live here use their homes, yards, and cars as spaces for written discourse. People write all over this neighborhood. Below are pictures of just very few examples of all of the writing around here:







The final image, which for some reason I can't get to load vertically, is something I'll probably write more about later. This robot-ish motif is something I've been taking note of all over campus-town. I wonder if there's some artist responsible for all of its instances. Or maybe there's an underground robot art movement. That'd be pretty cool.

One of my favorite pieces of public writing in this neighborhood is something I don't have a photo of yet. One house's address is marked "605?" I can't remember if 605 is actually the number or not, but the question mark is what I like love.

Number of times I used the word something in this post: 4. Now 5.

See what I mean?

We saw this in one of the neighborhoods today. Gang graffiti? Probably not. Hilarious? Yes. Good for you, Ross. Nice one.

in defense of graffiti

One of the most interesting things to me ever is when people write on things that they're not supposed to. It's using literacy to rebel, and it's cool. I mean, it's really cool when graffiti voices some kind of political dissent, but I get just as excited about kids writing on the fill-in-the-bubble surveys we're administering as I do when I hear about the "more like homeland insecurity" that Melissa saw in Atlanta.

But today I'm getting the impression that I may be in the minority on this one. When I checked my email early this morning, I was excited to see that the National Geographic Photo of the Day is this:


The caption, however, reads,

Graffiti covers the side of a ship in one of Denmark's many harbors. Vandalism is rare in this exceptionally peaceful, orderly society where a mere 2 percent of the national budget is spent on police, prisons, and courts. A common saying in the patriotic nation holds that "Denmark is a land where few have too much and even fewer have too little," a fact that they attribute to keeping the crime levels low.

giving me the distinct feeling that the caption-writer thinks graffiti is bad; it's vandalism.

Later in the morning, as I waited for my medium black coffee at Moka's, the local coffee shop, I read an article on the front page of today's paper called "Mobile's wannabe gang problem." The two images in the story are of graffiti. (I couldn't find them online, so below are my photos of the photos.)



The first one really gets me. The caption assures us that "it does not indicate gang 'turf' or a warning to rivals." Um, yea. It says love. Repeatedly the article cites the existence or lack thereof of gang graffiti as a major indicator of whether or not gangs exist in Mobile. Although school officials "have linked some fights to territorial conflicts ... school walls aren't painted with gang graffiti, and [the security director for the school system] doesn't see students wearing gang colors." Don't get me wrong, I'm not downplaying the gravity of the issue of gangs. I just don't see how graffiti and bandannas can be the only evidence available for piecing together a conclusion. The second caption above concludes that "while [the tag] appears to be gang-oriented, it is actually the painter displaying his artistic ability with a spraypaint can." While I take issue with the assumption that the tagger is male, I sort of like how Officer John Young can get down with the idea of graffiti as art. I don't even really think that the second tag is that cool per se. What I do think is cool is the way that taggers use their ability to write as a a way to inscribe public space. It's just so bold. It makes a passer-by see what the tagger has to say, even if it's unpleasant.

Anyway, the survey we're administering asks the kids

Agree/Disagree: Kids who are in a gang get respect from other kids in my neighborhood.

How much do you worry about gangs in your neighborhood?

Have you ever been involved in a gang?

Are you currently involved in a gang?

Do you hang out with members of a gang?

Analyzing this data seems to me like a more reliable source of information about the state of gangs in Mobile than looking at the graffiti and scratching our heads, no?


They published this in TIME a bit ago:

G + K (+ tropical setting) = cool. and folk art is cool, too.

This is the National Geographic Photo of the Day for today:



Pretty cool. The Photo of the Day site says that

Roads on Hawaii’s Big Island are often flanked with miles of "Island graffiti," like this love note. Instead of spray paint though, bits of white coral harvested from local beaches are arranged into messages, which seem to glow against the island's black lava expanses.

But tourists beware: Removing the coral from beaches is illegal. And disturbing an already-posted message is considered rude and supposedly brings bad luck.

I like that you can almost see another message in the distance, which sort of substantiates the claim that there are "miles" of this stuff. I wonder what they mean by "tourists beware" though. Does that mean that local people are allowed to move the coral from the beaches? And does mentioning that messing up an existing message is "rude" aim to stop said tourists from creating their own messages with the coral that said locals have already, lawfully, moved?

Maybe there's another interpretation. Either way, me likey.

This afternoon I went to the Coastal Artisans' First Saturdays Art Market in downtown Mobile. I met Ruth Robinson, a local folk artist who walked me down the street to a gallery to see more of her work. Her biography says, "I grew up on a farm in Grand Bay, Alabama, where my grand daddy farmed until the day he died. We had cotton, watermelon, corn, hogs, chickens, cows, and a mule." The house she grew up in was a brick house, one that her grandfather built for his family in the 1930s. Not a small feat for a former sharecropper who worked his way up to buying the land from the planter. Anyway, here's a picture of Ruth with some of her pieces.