Word: graffiti
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...least, both hands are left free. One can juggle his packages, take notes, doodle graffiti or gesticulate wildly. But if something goes wrong with the call, one can no longer seize the receiver and use it to bludgeon the instrument into oblivion. The hands-free public phone may eventually replace many of the traditional booths in big cities. Though its sturdy, simple construction should frustrate vandalism, it is obviously no cure-all for all of Ma Bell's problems; while checking out the four new phones at Pennsylvania Station recently, a traveler discovered that two were out of order...
...turned the two-night extravaganza into a community project. The Minsky show was staged in the nearby Shubert Theater, and post-performance parties were thrown at the Gayety. Some 100 lady volunteers scrubbed away part of the Gayety's grime and even painted over the most unsavory washroom graffiti. Sixty years of libidinous musk was impossible to eradicate, however; before the opening-night party, Flit guns filled with Nettie Rosenstein perfume were distributed among the ladies...
...Sorbonne-trained McLean's collection, suitably surrounded by a scholarly text on the subject of erotic folk-art forms and published under the imposing title of L'Iconographie Populaire de L'Erotisme (The Erotic Iconography of the People), is the first serious study of the sexual graffiti that for uncounted generations have embroidered France's capital...
McLean's book is an important addition to the literature of graffiti (from the Italian graffiare, to scratch), if only because this highly perishable form of folk expression has seldom been taken seriously. It is at least as venerable as the human ambition to defy convention and authority-and both convention and authority, down the ages, have diligently worked overtime trying to scrub the walls clean. They can never, of course, successfully purge the record of these irreverent footnotes, which proliferate in both written and pictorial forms. When archaeologists unearthed Pompeii beginning in the 18th century, they found scores...
...accessible edifice, public park and mountainside in the world. In the same spirit in which schoolboys surreptitiously carve their initials on a desk, passers-by like to leave a record of their presence wherever they may go, either writing or carving their names and messages onto the nearest surface. Graffiti are simply man's attempt to proclaim his immortality against irreversible odds: he will die, but his name, crudely hewn in some rock of ages, will nevertheless endure...