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The Lord Givith and The White Man Taketh Away

"The Lord Givith[sic] and The White Man Taketh Away"

[ Found on a bridge near NAU campus. It appeared sometime in the past week as I haven't been down that way for a few days. ]

Down to Blaze

Sometime since I was there last someone repainted the big boxy thing that I photographed back in October 2008. It was kind of a sky blue color before but now it's dark green. I'm sure it was the city applying the "broken windows" theory. Unfortunately it didn't work as the graffers found it and tagged it again:

That's gotta be frustrating - you send some guys around to clean stuff up and a kid with a spray can messes it up again a day or two later. I bet they feel like they're trying to shovel back the ocean.

The signature down at the bottom of the 'T' is "bonez", a name I've seen in other graffiti around NAU. The backside of the green box is a bit more artistic but has no apparent signature:

None of this appears to be gang-related, although the swastika is a little worrying. It's a backwards "left-facing" swastika so it's apparent that whoever placed it there doesn't know their historical fascist symbols very well. Most nazi-era swastika flags were "right-facing" with the arms flipped opposite to the above configuration and rotated 45-degrees.

Dirty Arborglyphs on the Weatherford Trail

A few weeks back while I was hiking the Weatherford Trail I stepped off the trail a few feet to rest. While I was sitting on a rock enjoying the coolness of the aspen grove and the soothing sound of the breeze rustling the leaves I glanced to my left and WHAT THE HELL??!!!:

It took a second but then I realized that I was looking at Arborglyphic Porn!

Yikes! There were a lot of other carvings in the same grove dated from the mid 1960's so it's possible these bawdy scratchings are forty years old or more. That's not old enough to be from the Basque sheepherders - more likely it was just some teenagers up for a day hike.

Someone once said that everything becomes art if it's old enough. Are the above drawings art? If not, how old will they need to be before they are? Or is this just obscenity, a particularly stupid reason to deface/damage a tree?

Mötley Crüe #1

Back in the 80's someone felt that it was important that everyone hiking the Abineau / Bear Jaw trail for, oh, the next hundred years or so, know that Mötley Crüe was number one:

Also, Santiago Parra pwned the Bear Jaw trail two years in a row back in '69/'70:

Santiago's entire crew for the next few years couldn't be left out of the show so they had to carve all their names and witty sayings into the trees, too:

I wonder where Santiago and his friends are today and if they remember cutting these trees?

The straight up gangstas

Monday morning I checked on the cliff swallow colony and discovered that over the long holiday weekend they'd gone all gangsta on us:

I bet the hoods who vandalized the wall never realized that watching from the shadows just over their heads was a bunch of very nervous South American birds.

DGK's stickin' it to the man

Over the long Memorial Day weekend someone tagged the loading dock of the computing services building here at NAU:

Obviously they were attempting to strike a blow against the powerful forces of deeply entrenched institutionalized racial oppression and discrimination at the university. I'm not sure, but I suspect that DGK's message would be more effective if it hadn't been misspelled and posted in the darkest, least visible place on the building. Next time I'd suggest a well thought out letter to the editor of the AZ Daily Sun or even the The Lumberjack.

Tagged Tree on Mt. Elden

During this morning's hike up to Mt. Elden lookout I was disappointed to see the following tagged tree:

I can't make up my mind if this was just a kid messing around (the lettering looks a little child-like) or some especially cryptic gang graff script. In any case it's kind of surprising to me that someone would go to the trouble to carry a marker half way up the side of Mt. Elden - arguably one of the most difficult trails near Flagstaff - and scribble some gibberish on a dead tree. It's not cool. Although I guess the marker is less destructive and permanent than carving your initials into an aspen tree, which lasts for the life of the tree and beyond.

F*ck Chainge (bike)

Last week this appeared over the entrance to the new central campus parking garage:

Obviously someone is trying to convince drivers to switch to a greener, healthier and sustainable form of transportation. The expletive was probably added later by a second chalker who understood the pointlessness of trying to dissuade people from burning fossil fuels.

I guess I'm not surprised that this appeared where it did. What does surprise me is that it's stayed there for as long as it has. By the way, this type of graffiti is called "chalking" and NAU's student paper discussed it back in February.

Sick

One more picture from the south NAU campus tunnel:

I love the stylized fonts that these guys use.

The Conan O'Brien Zebra-Splat

Here's some more graffiti images I snapped in the tunnel (click for bigger versions):

To get that first one I had to stitch a couple of iPhone pics together in PhotoShop using the photomerge function. I was surprised at how good a job it did with only one-click.

Looks like someone went home with a red hand. Try explaining that to your parents! Although, if you're out tagging stuff at night then your parents probably don't care...

And here's my favorite, the graff Conan O'Brien: