Word: graffiti
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...stands for maximum cool, part of the patter of a complex, sometimes convoluted, urban street culture that includes rap music, graffiti art and dancing that goes by a couple of generic styles and several specific names. Like spray-painted murals down the side of a New York City subway, or a ghetto blaster carried on a shoulder broadcasting 130 beats a minute all over a Bronx street, this subculture, nicknamed hip hop, is about assertiveness, display, pride, status and competition, particularly among males. Clothes are not only a part of this offhand cultural statement; they are a kind of uniform...
While the vanguard of this scene may have passed into their 20s, the audience is largely high school. The boys may like to imitate the cocky flash of what a graffiti artist named Phase 2 calls "the stickup kids," but most of them score their clothes as gifts from parents or-goodbye to another bit of downtown mythology-pay for them with money from part-time jobs. Clothes in this culture are seminal enough to work hard for. "People tend to think if you're poor, you're not supposed to have anything," Phase 2 says. "But when...
...came upon the evidence serendipitously while visiting Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park. The Prestons noticed some old Indian petroglyphs, the technical name for the spirals, crosses, lizards, birds and other rock carvings found throughout the Southwest. Anthropologists have tended to view them as little more than ancient graffiti, but the Prestons saw a message. As sunlight filtered between two large rocks, it formed dagger-like beams that swept tantalizingly across the petroglyphs. At once the Prestons suspected that the carvings might be a little solar observatory...
Nothing could be more obvious than the evidence supporting Riesman. Scofflaws abound in amazing variety. The graffiti-prone turn public surfaces into visual rubbish. Bicyclists often ride as though two-wheeled vehicles are exempt from all traffic laws. Litterbugs convert their communities into trash dumps. Widespread flurries of ordinances have failed to clear public places of high-decibel portable radios, just as earlier laws failed to wipe out the beer-soaked hooliganism that plagues many parks. Tobacco addicts remain hopelessly blind to signs that say NO SMOKING. Respectably dressed pot smokers no longer bother to duck out of public sight...
BOSTON'S STATUES LIKE THOSE of most modern cities in the United States, go pretty much unnoticed these days, except for the sporadic attention of a few graffiti artists and the ever-present urban pigeon. The Bicentennial celebrations of the mid 1970s, a high-water mark for statuesque snapshots of Paul Revere and the Minutemen, attracted a mob of patriotic Americans who looked for history etched in stone, but since then Bostonian public sculpture had faded into the surrounding landscape once again. Now, though, controversy over one such artistic conception of the past may result in the removal...