Word: graffiti
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...kept love letters carefully folded in his Michael Jackson wallet. He and a friend were on their way to a Chicago Bulls basketball game and stopped at a housing project on the west side of Chicago to see a girlfriend. As they approached the back entrance of a graffiti-scarred tenement, a group of youths taunted them. Delfonic approached tentatively, then turned and ran. One of the youths casually drew a .22-cal. handgun and shot him. "We had a good kid coming along," said Delfonic's grandmother. Now that he was becoming a man, she had gone...
anti-Communist, really "just a young brat writing graffiti on the walls." But in Czechoslovakia, that meant he was frequently jailed. So in 1975, when she was ten, Porizkova moved to Sweden with her parents, and by 18 she had dazzled much of Europe as a top Paris model. Then she came to New York City where she now earns $300,000 a year with the Elite modeling agency. She is here on a working visa and has not yet decided to seek citizenship. "What I love and hate about the U.S. are the same things. I hate that there...
These population shifts change all the bric-a-brac of life. A car in Los Angeles carries a custom license plate that says SIE SIE LI, meaning, in Chinese, "thank you." Graffiti sprayed in a nearby park send their obscure signals in Farsi. A suburban supermarket specializes in such Vietnamese delicacies as pork snouts and pickled banana buds. The Spanish-language soap opera Tu o Nadie gets the top ratings among independent stations every night...
...visual fluoride. Its role has also withered as social compacts about the use of public space have been trashed. The aerosol valve has done for eyes in American cities what the suitcase radio has done for ears: civility dies before the corrosive jibber-jabber and the intrusive spray can. Graffiti are the strangling weeds on the ruins of the idea of public art. No wonder most city dwellers today think of public sculpture as just one more semivisible addition to an already cluttered environment, and would rather have a nice tub of petunias...
...About four years ago, I used to live in the East Village. I used to love hanging out at the Roxy with all the break dancers and graffiti artists and the deejays. Everybody had a tag name they would write on the wall like "Whiz Kid" or "Hi-Fi." The thing was to see how much you could "throw up" (get your name up) everywhere. It was a very territorial thing. One day I just thought of BOY TOY, and when I threw it up on a wall, everybody said they thought it was funny too. They understood the humor...