apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Heh heh - I've always daydreamed of chaining the little bastards to the wall with toothbrushes and bottles of bleach and making 'em clean off their own mess.

Great idea!

Most of the time the clean-up crews are kids who got caught in the first place doing their community service time...

Graffiti is a major quality-of-life issue for those of us who live in cities. Neighborhoods who are plagued with tags begin to look seedy in a relatively short period of time. Solution? The only one I know is to remove it as soon as possible after it appears.

I love grafitti! Fair enough tagging is sometimes boring and seedy-looking, and obviously some of it is just stupid and crude, but it can be skillful and expressive too. I'd rather people wielded paint than knives or guns. Some grafitti I saw near where I live recently said, referring to anti-grafitti campaining, "art is now illegal so lock up the canvas painters too". And I looked at it and thought, well good for you, anonymous painter! My favourite ever grafitto (graffiti being the plural, see!) was a red heart painted over a boarded up window over which was written Aldous Huxley (uncharacteristically humane) assertion that "It is a little embarassing that after 45 years of study and research into the human condition, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other"...

That should be Huxley'S assertion, d'oh!

There's definitely a difference between graf/mural work and the blight known as tagging. In our hood, tagging is especially undesirable, because it's not just people trying to "get up", but to designate gang turf. But it's hard to sometimes explain the difference between graffiti as an art and tagging (I find this a generational gap issue, like how some older folks think "hip-hop" and "rap" are the same thing). Personally, I love graffiti up on walls or on sides of buildings...it's an extension of LA's mural history.