Graffitti

"I have a Vespa." "That's almost a motorcycle!"--American Graffitti

When I was at York University, they were digging up the ground for a new building and exhumed a huge tree stump that was still solid.  Someone got the idea of mounting the stump on a podium, and someone else wrote on it, "This is not art"!

I lived in Glasgow, Scotland, for a year three decades ago.  Some people took to writing "Al Jolson" as graffitti in places.  I guess it was vaguely racist.

I remember seeing a wall where someone had written "Clapton is God," and someone added a word to make it "Clapton is Godawful"!

And I remember one school where someone wrote on the outer wall "Mr. _____ is a faggot" and it was also stated in more explicit terms.  I didn't like that teacher myself, and I understood why they did it.

In college, I had a desk on which someone had written, "Washington owned slaves and blew dope and they won't admit it"!

Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, set in wartime Britain, describes this graffitti: "To all sluts and their pimps, a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea"!