wonderful graffiti

DannyL

Wild Horses
Anyone seen of these guys stuff "in traffic" i.e. running?


I've seen a few live and I'm only on trains once a week. Pretty crude but I think they have much less time than they used to. Idk what it stands for though. I picked up Frontline magazine a few days ago and it's full of similar stuff, apparently austerity related cuts = less security so loads of shit is getting done.
 

luka

Well-known member
Less security plus not bothering to buff. When graffiti really got going was during a much more extreme version of austerity in New York. (... I think)

Funnily enough the train I'm sitting on has a piece running. Didn't manage to catch the name though.
 

Leo

Well-known member
less security for sure, and not so much austerity as a shitty economy and lack of opportunity. but there was also just a more general sense of Wild West anarchy in pre-Giuliani NYC, people tolerated things and actions through the 70s and early 80s that they stopped tolerating once the more moneyed 90s rolled around. there are plenty of photos of people on subways that are covered top to bottom with graffiti on the inside of the car, never mind outside. shit, I remember smoking a cig on the subway in the late 70s!
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
There's always been this weird thing with the way the UK borrows "hip hop" cultures. Lots of people trying to recreate NY in the 70s and it never quite working though people did get over in London for a while and are still doing so again now.

Enjoying this one:
Great production values and a good insight into the madness
 

luka

Well-known member
less security for sure, and not so much austerity as a shitty economy and lack of opportunity. but there was also just a more general sense of Wild West anarchy in pre-Giuliani NYC, people tolerated things and actions through the 70s and early 80s that they stopped tolerating once the more moneyed 90s rolled around. there are plenty of photos of people on subways that are covered top to bottom with graffiti on the inside of the car, never mind outside. shit, I remember smoking a cig on the subway in the late 70s!

David Harvey in his neoliberalism book characterises it as a very early punitive neoliberal austerity designed to bring the city to heel.
 

Leo

Well-known member
hmm...then maybe we're not talking about the same thing.

I think of austerity was cutbacks on social services, programs designed to help the lower income population. those programs weren't cut in the 70s/early 80s; if anything it was probably the peak of the welfare state (and welfare cheats). the change happened once Giuliani was elected and decided the way to attract more global investment in nyc was to hire hundreds more cops and crack down on quality of life crimes: "squeegee men", vacant buildings, broken windows, graffiti, trash in the streets, visible homeless, panhandling, etc.

once that happened, money flowed in and people got pushed out. 9/11 amped up the acceptable of hyper-security and zero tolerance even more.
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
you guys are looking for the term "revanchist city" https://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/tslater/revanchist.pdf

"According to Smith, two important factors fuelled the fire of revanchist New York City. First, the economic recession of the late 1980s/early 1990s (which triggered unprecedented anger amongst the white middle-classes; marginalised populations of the city soon became scapegoats, the supposed source of urban unease); and second, (re)productions of paranoia and fear by the media that amplified and aggravated extant sentiments among swathes of middle-class voters seeking to affix blame for their perceived lack of safety in urban public spaces. It came as no surprise to many that, in 1993, Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor on the promise to offer a better “quality of life” for “conventional members of society”. Smith pointed out that revanchism under Giuliani was sharpened by blaming the failures of earlier liberal policy on the marginalized populations such policy was supposed to assist. Giuliani identified homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes, squeegee cleaners, squatters, graffiti artists, reckless bicyclists, and unruly youth as the major threats to urban order and the culprits of urban decay. A particularly repressive attitude towards these ‘culprits’, as exemplified by the well-publicised ‘zero tolerance’ policies of the New York Police Department under Giuliani’s administration, can perhaps be taken as the hallmark of the revanchist city. As the city’s economy recovered in the mid-1990s, the crime rate dropped further (contrary to popular perception, it had been falling before Giuliani’s tenure), public spaces such as Times Square and Bryant Park were privatised and commodified, New York City became a major tourist destination, and gentrification accelerated and diffused into neighbourhoods bypassed by previous waves of the process. The fanfare of success attributed to a charismatic mayor squashed concerns over those who had to be swept away and/or incarcerated to allow these changes to take place."
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Not surprised you saw a piece running - the HSL guys seem to killing it on the South London lines. I've still not seen any runners on the tubes yet though. That documentary above is fucking bananas - at one point, the dude uses 3 different cutting tools including an angle grinder to get into the yard. What I meant by it being a bit of a cargo cult recreation of 70s NY is that there, shit would run for months. Here there's still a fixation on trains but it all seems so gloriously futile somehow, these pieces are presumably only gonna run once or twice - I can't ever see it coming back with the same force precisely 'cos the security is so heavy now on tubes. But maybe on the railways now the regime is different and it'll flourish. Good luck to 'em.

 
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luka

Well-known member
All the trains in Athens are covered every car, top to bottom, only the windows get cleaned.
 

luka

Well-known member

Look. This has a comment from Jon E Cash, black ops. Turns out he was a writer. also I've heard Flo is George Osbournes brother and even if it's not true it's a good rumour to spread
 

luka

Well-known member
Anyone seen of these guys stuff "in traffic" i.e. running?


I've seen a few live and I'm only on trains once a week. Pretty crude but I think they have much less time than they used to. Idk what it stands for though. I picked up Frontline magazine a few days ago and it's full of similar stuff, apparently austerity related cuts = less security so loads of shit is getting done.

Just spotted my first one go by at London Bridge station.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
That is a brilliant rumour. Was thinking though recently, that writing is a proper unschooled working class artform. It seems so to me anyway. Some proper rough bods involved. All the guys I knew and used to write with were the troubled kids at school. Excluded, expelled. The Sime interview on Killa Kela's podcast confirmed this, he sounds like he eats iron fillings for breakfast.

KK interviewed Teach a day or two back.

Loads more interviews here btw: Snatch, P.I.C., Teach again, various others... the guy who does it was in ATG (I think?). Listened to the Aset tribute a few days ago: http://f24podcast.com/
 

luka

Well-known member
I think like skating it drew in misfits, dropouts, outcasts, from both the working and the middle class. There's plenty of very middle class writers, including plenty of ATG and for instance, Akt.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Actually a lot of guys in those interviews talk about the diverse range of people they ended up meeting so, yeah that's true
 

catalog

Well-known member
vGZQ4ql.jpg
 

luka

Well-known member
I don't like it. The letters are old hat and cramped and crabbed but the s encircling the mart is a little bit of originality I suppose. 4 out of 10.
 
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