A Monday without Graffiti
Jan. 21st, 2007 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dedalus_1947I know exactly how many times the surfaces of my school have been “hit up” with graffiti. I can check my digital photo record and document 12 mornings when I’ve arrived on Monday to discover graffiti covering school, auditorium, and classroom walls. There have been 12 other graffiti incidents at the school since July 1, 2006. Those occurred on other weekdays: four times on Tuesdays, twice on Wednesdays, three times on Thursdays, and four on Fridays. The sight of a vandalized school is so sad and depressing, that I can honestly say, a Monday without graffiti is the only good way to start a week.
A school is a home; it is the place where children and adults come together to laugh, learn, eat, and play. It should be an idyllic place of health, safety, and care. I feel a personal violation when I see my “school-home” desecrated and despoiled. The sight of garish lettering and words is offensive and ugly. It is demoralizing and upsetting to all members of the school community: administrators, teachers, students, and parents. The first impulse I feel is anger, and, then, the desire to lash out at these vandals. I visualize savage fantasies in which I strangle, shoot, or throw “taggers” off their high perches and roofs. The second feeling is frustration. The culprits are long gone, and there seems little that we can do to catch them, or to stop further graffiti.
Graffiti is a broad, generic term. It is the plural form of the Italian word graffito, which means, “scratch”. The earliest examples of these Italian “etchings” were found 2000 years ago on walls of the ruined city of Pompeii. The word itself doesn’t adequately describe the variety and styles of lettering, designs, messages, words, initials, and names that decorate and disfigure walls, doors, windows, brick, tile, and glass. It does however give a hint to the human compulsion to communicate on the property of others. I’ve seen graffiti all my life and I have seen it change and evolve, as I’ve gotten older.
My first contact with graffiti was as a sixth grader in elementary school. I remember seeing it on public bathroom walls, especially in toilet stalls. These early versions tended to be short, written messages, about a variety of topics – mostly sexual. Men would brag about their genital dimensions and sexual prowess, and invite comparison or comments. Another common expression was publicizing the services of a girl by writing her phone number, with a few encouraging words: “Call Becky for a good time”. The topics and writing styles broadened and improved when I found them in college restrooms, but they remained juvenile and egotistic. In fact, I associated graffiti with toilets, until I went to México City, in 1966.
While attending the National University of Mexico that summer, I experienced, first hand, political protests, and student strikes. I saw how students used graffiti as guerrilla writing to express their goals, issues, and demands. Their weapons were paint, brushes and spray cans, and their targets were walls, statues, and buildings. Students would use any surface available to publicize and communicate their cause. The word HUELGA , written on a university wall, was a command, an appeal, and a description of the emotions and demonstrations rocking the university over the course of the sixties. My romantic infatuation with this politico-activist graffiti lasted until the late 70’s, when I collided with the renaissance of urban gangs in Los Angeles.
In the late 70’s and 80’s, when I was teaching and advancing into school administration, graffiti and “gangbanging”, seemed to proliferate throughout Los Angeles. Old and new ethnic bands grew, expanded, and marked their territory by spray painting, penning, or tagging their gang’s name on walls, sidewalks, and buildings. 18th Street, Barrio Grande Vista, Westside Crips, Bloods, White Fence, Barrio Van Nuys, and Canoga Park Alabama were gang names that covered Los Angeles, from East Los Angeles to Compton, and to the San Fernando Valley. Accompanying the group name, a roster of member’s names, by their chosen “monikers”, would follow: Tiny, Flaco, Puppet, Maze, Dopey, Rascal, Oso. These individual placas or “tags” were the nom de guerre of the new type of warrior-thug, whose life style was becoming immortalized in “rap” and “gangsta rap” music. While the script of a few gangsters could be stylish and colorful, it simply became known as “Gang Writing”, synonymous with violence, crime, drugs, drive-bys, and retaliation. I would even find this graffiti on the binders and notebooks of my students, when I taught in public and Catholic schools. Even though they were not gang bangers themselves, these “wannabe” gangsters would “claim” a particular gang, practice their “tagging”, mimic their dress and speech, and listen to rap. The growing gang graffiti was a blight, but by the end of the millennia, the evolution of new groups, and new styles of tagging, would take graffiti to higher levels of destruction, as well as art.
When I was assigned to my first middle school as a principal, in 1991, traditional ethnic gangs had mutated into a virus-like, plethora of “tagging crews”. These juvenile “cliques” would organize themselves around teenage music and their youthful pursuits, and then they would “hang-out, party and tag” together. There were skateboard crews, rap and hip-hop crews, drug crews, and drawing crews. It did not take much time, members, or reason to create a crew, and the activity that defined them was tagging. Initiation rites centered on tagging, and rival crews went to war with other crews by tagging, crossing out, and tagging over other crews. What these crews lacked in the rituals, violence, and crime of traditional gangs, they made up in willful, or thoughtless, vandalism. This is the main source of the graffiti that despoils my school on a weekly basis. When I drive into the parking lot, I start craning my neck to catch sight of the more prominent and accessible walls, to see if they have been marked. This year, they usually are.
As I mentioned earlier, I experience a predictable sequence of feelings when I see my school covered in ugly, scrawling, graffiti: from anger to vengeance to helplessness. In this emotional fugue state, I ask myself, “Why would they do this? What does it mean? Who are they?” I sometimes create an imaginary police lineup in my head, and think of all the “usual suspects” I would round up and place there. These are the “misfit students”, the gang bangers and cholos, who are constantly in trouble with teachers and school authorities for defiance and disrespect. They are always thought to have sufficient motives to lash out against a school. However, before I’m tempted to act on this impulse, I revert to our Graffiti Protocol, which calms me, offers me hope, and gives me a specific course of action to follow.
Graffiti vandalism can be stopped, but it takes a lot of effort, and luck. The first thing we do is photograph the evidence. If I am first on the scene, or quickly available, I take pictures of all the names, initials, and drawings. We then have our own staff begin painting over, or wiping off, the offending markings as soon as possible. What we can’t remove, is referred to District painters and sandblasters, who finish the job. The next step is the most crucial; we distribute prints of the visual evidence to deans, teachers, and staff, and ask them to be our detectives. These adults become our army of motivated investigators, who are deeply offended at the damage done to their school, and want to stop it. They snoop, ask questions, and inspect student writing on papers, notebooks, and desks. They tease, cajole, and solicit information from the most knowledgeable or willing students. And sometimes, we get lucky; sometimes we catch the vandals.
In my experience, I’ve found that “likely suspects” rarely commit this type of graffiti vandalism. It is almost disappointing after the emotional buildup of anger, revenge, frustration, and the hunt to find these vile perpetrators. When tagging culprits are discovered, they usually turn out to be ordinary adolescents without disciplinary records or prior offenses. They generally tend to be kids who started, joined, or were curious about hanging with, a crew of some kind. The crew can consist of a small group of friends or school acquaintances who like to be together. Their parents are always surprised and unbelieving when we show them the pictures, and make the evidentiary connections. They believed that their child was simply spending time with friends to pursue common interests, like sports, music, biking, skating, or art. They are never prepared to discover that their child used “tagging” as a criminal means of expression, which would cost them embarrassment and hundreds of dollars in damages and fines.
I’ve painted a very negative picture of graffiti. But, as I discovered in Mexico, there are positive sides to it as well. Graffiti can be used as political and philosophical communication, and it is a valid art form. Graffiti always had an artistic aspect that went beyond the ordinary lettering of names and initials on walls. It takes an exceptional individual to identify and foster his artistic talent. The graffiti artist is the outsider, the visionary who sees gaudy images, designs, and words as a form of beauty and meaning. Walls become the canvass where these artists can express their edgy and unique style of art. It is garish and shocking, but the color, content, and composition, catches and holds our attention. This art stimulates our senses and makes us think and feel, but only for a moment. Graffiti art is transitory: it is imprinted onto a surface that will not allow permanence. I discovered one such work in 1988, when I was an assistant principal at a middle school in Van Nuys. Someone had spray painted a comic book-style image of a slouching, youthful skateboarder, in oversized pants and hooded sweatshirt, with a baseball cap cocked to the side, on the front wall of the school. It was impressive. I hated to order its removal. We never discovered who the artist was, and my only regret is that I never photographed the image. It is gone, a memory on an impermanent surface. A few of these pirate artists manage to mature and crossover into the world of mainstream art. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the New York street artist comes first to my mind. I saw his exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. It was incredible to see his evolution from minimalist graffiti “tagger” to blossoming painter.
There is a world of difference between the juvenile taggers that we sometimes arrest for vandalism and the artistic painter. It has to do with choices. The graffiti that greets me on a Monday morning is not a product of practice, planning, or hard work. It does not tell a story of style, design, or composition; it simply shows the thoughtless actions of adolescents. When we question the few vandals that we catch, they always respond, “I dunno”, when asked, “Why did you do it?” That is what is so infuriating about this type of “tagging”; it is the product of mindless, thoughtless, juvenile decision-making. I inhabit this world of middle school thinkers. My only solace is the knowledge that destructive graffiti tends to be random, and it comes in waves, with peaks and valleys. We are going through a very serious peak, and it is demoralizing. Only the constructive actions I outlined above will help us get through this period. Thank goodness, adolescents grow up.
A school is a home; it is the place where children and adults come together to laugh, learn, eat, and play. It should be an idyllic place of health, safety, and care. I feel a personal violation when I see my “school-home” desecrated and despoiled. The sight of garish lettering and words is offensive and ugly. It is demoralizing and upsetting to all members of the school community: administrators, teachers, students, and parents. The first impulse I feel is anger, and, then, the desire to lash out at these vandals. I visualize savage fantasies in which I strangle, shoot, or throw “taggers” off their high perches and roofs. The second feeling is frustration. The culprits are long gone, and there seems little that we can do to catch them, or to stop further graffiti.
Graffiti is a broad, generic term. It is the plural form of the Italian word graffito, which means, “scratch”. The earliest examples of these Italian “etchings” were found 2000 years ago on walls of the ruined city of Pompeii. The word itself doesn’t adequately describe the variety and styles of lettering, designs, messages, words, initials, and names that decorate and disfigure walls, doors, windows, brick, tile, and glass. It does however give a hint to the human compulsion to communicate on the property of others. I’ve seen graffiti all my life and I have seen it change and evolve, as I’ve gotten older.
My first contact with graffiti was as a sixth grader in elementary school. I remember seeing it on public bathroom walls, especially in toilet stalls. These early versions tended to be short, written messages, about a variety of topics – mostly sexual. Men would brag about their genital dimensions and sexual prowess, and invite comparison or comments. Another common expression was publicizing the services of a girl by writing her phone number, with a few encouraging words: “Call Becky for a good time”. The topics and writing styles broadened and improved when I found them in college restrooms, but they remained juvenile and egotistic. In fact, I associated graffiti with toilets, until I went to México City, in 1966.
While attending the National University of Mexico that summer, I experienced, first hand, political protests, and student strikes. I saw how students used graffiti as guerrilla writing to express their goals, issues, and demands. Their weapons were paint, brushes and spray cans, and their targets were walls, statues, and buildings. Students would use any surface available to publicize and communicate their cause. The word HUELGA , written on a university wall, was a command, an appeal, and a description of the emotions and demonstrations rocking the university over the course of the sixties. My romantic infatuation with this politico-activist graffiti lasted until the late 70’s, when I collided with the renaissance of urban gangs in Los Angeles.
In the late 70’s and 80’s, when I was teaching and advancing into school administration, graffiti and “gangbanging”, seemed to proliferate throughout Los Angeles. Old and new ethnic bands grew, expanded, and marked their territory by spray painting, penning, or tagging their gang’s name on walls, sidewalks, and buildings. 18th Street, Barrio Grande Vista, Westside Crips, Bloods, White Fence, Barrio Van Nuys, and Canoga Park Alabama were gang names that covered Los Angeles, from East Los Angeles to Compton, and to the San Fernando Valley. Accompanying the group name, a roster of member’s names, by their chosen “monikers”, would follow: Tiny, Flaco, Puppet, Maze, Dopey, Rascal, Oso. These individual placas or “tags” were the nom de guerre of the new type of warrior-thug, whose life style was becoming immortalized in “rap” and “gangsta rap” music. While the script of a few gangsters could be stylish and colorful, it simply became known as “Gang Writing”, synonymous with violence, crime, drugs, drive-bys, and retaliation. I would even find this graffiti on the binders and notebooks of my students, when I taught in public and Catholic schools. Even though they were not gang bangers themselves, these “wannabe” gangsters would “claim” a particular gang, practice their “tagging”, mimic their dress and speech, and listen to rap. The growing gang graffiti was a blight, but by the end of the millennia, the evolution of new groups, and new styles of tagging, would take graffiti to higher levels of destruction, as well as art.
When I was assigned to my first middle school as a principal, in 1991, traditional ethnic gangs had mutated into a virus-like, plethora of “tagging crews”. These juvenile “cliques” would organize themselves around teenage music and their youthful pursuits, and then they would “hang-out, party and tag” together. There were skateboard crews, rap and hip-hop crews, drug crews, and drawing crews. It did not take much time, members, or reason to create a crew, and the activity that defined them was tagging. Initiation rites centered on tagging, and rival crews went to war with other crews by tagging, crossing out, and tagging over other crews. What these crews lacked in the rituals, violence, and crime of traditional gangs, they made up in willful, or thoughtless, vandalism. This is the main source of the graffiti that despoils my school on a weekly basis. When I drive into the parking lot, I start craning my neck to catch sight of the more prominent and accessible walls, to see if they have been marked. This year, they usually are.
As I mentioned earlier, I experience a predictable sequence of feelings when I see my school covered in ugly, scrawling, graffiti: from anger to vengeance to helplessness. In this emotional fugue state, I ask myself, “Why would they do this? What does it mean? Who are they?” I sometimes create an imaginary police lineup in my head, and think of all the “usual suspects” I would round up and place there. These are the “misfit students”, the gang bangers and cholos, who are constantly in trouble with teachers and school authorities for defiance and disrespect. They are always thought to have sufficient motives to lash out against a school. However, before I’m tempted to act on this impulse, I revert to our Graffiti Protocol, which calms me, offers me hope, and gives me a specific course of action to follow.
Graffiti vandalism can be stopped, but it takes a lot of effort, and luck. The first thing we do is photograph the evidence. If I am first on the scene, or quickly available, I take pictures of all the names, initials, and drawings. We then have our own staff begin painting over, or wiping off, the offending markings as soon as possible. What we can’t remove, is referred to District painters and sandblasters, who finish the job. The next step is the most crucial; we distribute prints of the visual evidence to deans, teachers, and staff, and ask them to be our detectives. These adults become our army of motivated investigators, who are deeply offended at the damage done to their school, and want to stop it. They snoop, ask questions, and inspect student writing on papers, notebooks, and desks. They tease, cajole, and solicit information from the most knowledgeable or willing students. And sometimes, we get lucky; sometimes we catch the vandals.
In my experience, I’ve found that “likely suspects” rarely commit this type of graffiti vandalism. It is almost disappointing after the emotional buildup of anger, revenge, frustration, and the hunt to find these vile perpetrators. When tagging culprits are discovered, they usually turn out to be ordinary adolescents without disciplinary records or prior offenses. They generally tend to be kids who started, joined, or were curious about hanging with, a crew of some kind. The crew can consist of a small group of friends or school acquaintances who like to be together. Their parents are always surprised and unbelieving when we show them the pictures, and make the evidentiary connections. They believed that their child was simply spending time with friends to pursue common interests, like sports, music, biking, skating, or art. They are never prepared to discover that their child used “tagging” as a criminal means of expression, which would cost them embarrassment and hundreds of dollars in damages and fines.
I’ve painted a very negative picture of graffiti. But, as I discovered in Mexico, there are positive sides to it as well. Graffiti can be used as political and philosophical communication, and it is a valid art form. Graffiti always had an artistic aspect that went beyond the ordinary lettering of names and initials on walls. It takes an exceptional individual to identify and foster his artistic talent. The graffiti artist is the outsider, the visionary who sees gaudy images, designs, and words as a form of beauty and meaning. Walls become the canvass where these artists can express their edgy and unique style of art. It is garish and shocking, but the color, content, and composition, catches and holds our attention. This art stimulates our senses and makes us think and feel, but only for a moment. Graffiti art is transitory: it is imprinted onto a surface that will not allow permanence. I discovered one such work in 1988, when I was an assistant principal at a middle school in Van Nuys. Someone had spray painted a comic book-style image of a slouching, youthful skateboarder, in oversized pants and hooded sweatshirt, with a baseball cap cocked to the side, on the front wall of the school. It was impressive. I hated to order its removal. We never discovered who the artist was, and my only regret is that I never photographed the image. It is gone, a memory on an impermanent surface. A few of these pirate artists manage to mature and crossover into the world of mainstream art. Jean-Michel Basquiat, the New York street artist comes first to my mind. I saw his exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. It was incredible to see his evolution from minimalist graffiti “tagger” to blossoming painter.
There is a world of difference between the juvenile taggers that we sometimes arrest for vandalism and the artistic painter. It has to do with choices. The graffiti that greets me on a Monday morning is not a product of practice, planning, or hard work. It does not tell a story of style, design, or composition; it simply shows the thoughtless actions of adolescents. When we question the few vandals that we catch, they always respond, “I dunno”, when asked, “Why did you do it?” That is what is so infuriating about this type of “tagging”; it is the product of mindless, thoughtless, juvenile decision-making. I inhabit this world of middle school thinkers. My only solace is the knowledge that destructive graffiti tends to be random, and it comes in waves, with peaks and valleys. We are going through a very serious peak, and it is demoralizing. Only the constructive actions I outlined above will help us get through this period. Thank goodness, adolescents grow up.
