Teeth

Teeth factor heavily into both of these boxcar pieces. You see that a lot on the trains - somebody will turn the characters of their tag into personified entities, complete with mandibles and 2 or more rows of teeth. What does it mean to say that a word has teeth? Eyes? Ears?

When words are shaped like things, something cool happens, I believe. It's almost as if both the right and left hemispheres are engaged - the literal and the symbolic. That's what post-modern graffiti bombing is all about, though: obliteration of the literal, analog way of messaging. I've watched people struggle to comprehend some of these pieces before ("What's it say? What's it spell?"), not realizing that the medium is the message, and the message - well, that's something they'll never be in on completely. Unless, of course, they pick up a can of spray paint and give it a go...then maybe, through diligent practice of the art form, they would learn what it has to teach.

I can only imagine what bombing has to teach the world. It's something I'll never be able to do, that's for sure. I can do other things, but I sure as hell can't do that. I look at these phenomenal works of art sliding by my house all day and am just grateful that people are out there doing it: Free, liberated, anonymous art. Not in a museum, not in a magazine, and not for sale. On the rails, man. For all to see. There's really nothing else like it in our culture. So, of course, it's viewed as a nuisance.

I think of these artists - not in a moral or ethical way, exactly - as being akin to the Tibetan monks who spend months at a time forging ephemeral sand mandalas. How many months has the average bomber spent clandestino, in & out of trainyards, throwing up extravagant smoke signals in primary colors? And to watch each and every creation roll out the next morning, into the weird world...it's either zen, pointless, generous, or some function of an indestructible human need to communicate through the act of creation, create through the act of communication, and, yes, to put teeth in the words so they can bite back at the End Times.