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Brucester
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PostFri Aug 30, 2019 4:52 pm 
Just read this at www.wandernorthgeorgia.com/bell-mountain-hiawassee/ Graffiti a "different shade" of mining?

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Anne Elk
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PostFri Aug 30, 2019 8:21 pm 
Thanks for sharing this Bruce. It's about as bad as the city graffiti pics you posted in the thread you started earlier on Your kit for graffiti removal in the backcountry. eek.gif I'm going to cross-reference it there. The writer brings up a lot of good points re attitudes. But it's like preaching to the choir - those who care are in a completely different mental space from those who think it's fine to deface stuff whether in the city or out in the hills. Those types do not care, cannot be made to care, and yes, they're why we can't have nice things. In some ways they're even beyond the TH break-in perpetrators, since at least those vandals are...looking to steal something to support their addiction, or whatever. Maybe it would stop if there were consequences; but how, if the perps can't be caught? The locals who care ought to step up, enlist the county and make cleaning that mountain up a community project. Check out the video on the products page of the Elephant Snot manufacturer, showing a community doing just that. Then figure out how to keep it from getting that defaced again. One can only hope it never gets that bad anyplace out here.

"There are yahoos out there. It’s why we can’t have nice things." - Tom Mahood
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Brucester
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PostSat Aug 31, 2019 7:51 am 
Anne, I'm not trying to stir up the pot here. I know "we" all care here! Maybe I just need a hug? embarassedlaugh.gif My blind eye is beginning to see again and maybe the eye is telling the mouth "well aren't you going to speak up?" lol.gif Sadly it's only illegal if you get caught.... No one speaks up and tells their employers what their employees are doing.... Maybe then they'd see. I did witness some dude my age, 50's,down in Pioneer Square in daylight, he was "sticker slapping" (Be The Light brand). After that I started to get even more cynical and maybe even more depressed. Like we are loosing control of our planet so we are trashing it even more? I see more doing bad than good. But then again maybe who am I to say? It seems with the present state of the planet graffiti artists are the hip in thing that everyone is doing. And those who pick up litter and remove the "art" are counter culture misfits! I know it's just graffiti and cavemen (and women) did it, but come on what happened to Save The Planet? Plant Trees!!!? About that hug.... smile.gif

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joker
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PostSat Aug 31, 2019 9:33 am 
It's certainly not new in general. Did you ever rid a NYC subway in the era when the cars had top-to-bottom tags? That was quite some time ago - before Giuliani became mayor and started his famed/infamous "broken windows" campaign against crime in the city, which included guarding the subway cars when they were sitting in the yards at night. That said, what does seem new is that more of the cohort that does this is getting out hiking now too - I've seen tags on rocks at places like Cougar Mountain for instance in the last few years. Fortunately the tagging kind of came and went so maybe some of these people are transforming their attitudes as they get out into the wild lands more.

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Anne Elk
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PostSat Aug 31, 2019 10:28 am 
Brucester wrote:
I know "we" all care here! Maybe I just need a hug?
headrub.gif flowers.gif Sorry! No critique intended ... guess I overstated the obvious. I thought of what Joker mentioned, too, about the Giuliani effect in NYC. I think it involved more than graffiti, though. Maybe we could use some of that out here, but it's not PC.

"There are yahoos out there. It’s why we can’t have nice things." - Tom Mahood
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joker
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PostSat Aug 31, 2019 11:27 am 
Anne Elk wrote:
Giuliani effect in NYC. I think it involved more than graffiti, though. Maybe we could use some of that out here, but it's not PC.
Yes, it involved a lot of policing of small potatoes crimes and cleaning up unoccupied buildings and such too. But much was made of the graffiti elimination and if you rode the subways back then you know how pervasive it was and how intense an impact it had on mindsets. That said, there's been some good work that calls the "broken windows theory" into serious question, fwiw But as someone who used the subways both before and after I'm happy they figured out how to keep them cleaner.

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monorail
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PostSat Aug 31, 2019 5:08 pm 
I think there is a world of difference between urban graffiti on concrete walls or train cars vs. graffiti on trees/rock formations/mountaintops. In the city, graffiti is an expression of defiant humanity, of creative transcendence against an overbearing industrialized landscape. But in the wilderness, it becomes the opposite: a symptom of our neurotic compulsion to dominate the natural world. I truly think the NYC subway graffiti era produced some tremendous artwork. A great document from that era is the film "Stations of the Elevated." "Style Wars" is also pretty good. (Incidentally, the subway graffiti was largely eradicated under Ed Koch, several years before Giuliani came along and disneyfied the rest of that once-wild-and-great city). I still often see outstanding graffiti on freight cars, freeway underpasses, and in places like Gasworks Park in Seattle. If you're ever driving westbound across the West Seattle bridge, check out the graffiti on the super-structures of those towers on Harbor Island, north of the bridge. It's quite beautiful, and striking against the backdrop of Seattle's billionaire skyscrapers. But in the wilderness, graffiti is just the work of braindead posers. p.s. here's a great faux-documentary by Portland experimental filmmaker Matt McCormick, 'the Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal.'

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joker
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PostSat Aug 31, 2019 5:33 pm 
monorail wrote:
I truly think the NYC subway graffiti era produced some tremendous artwork.
There was some great artwork on building walls. In the subway (particularly inside the cabins, though also largely true on the exteriors), it was a rare sight. Nearly all of the subway stuff was magic marker tags i.e. names in stylized handwritten script, mostly copying other script. It was just visual noise. An assault. The human equivalent of a dog pissing on fire hydrant. "I was here." Same deal in the stuff at places like Cougar and Si I think.

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FiveNines
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PostSat Aug 31, 2019 6:10 pm 

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ale_capone
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PostSun Sep 01, 2019 5:15 am 
Looks like eagle falls.. bawl.gif I showed a coworker who is into graffiti pictures of eagle falls, and under highbridge on the skykomish.. He said it was bad form. Mixed messages from a generation who want to save the planet while defacing it. I enjoy looking at the trains painted up in gold bar. Like a travelling art gallery. Always wonder where the 'artist' did their work. YouTube victims of fun. A recent documentary about Seattle's graffiti scene. Bellingham has been using art to combat art. An acquaintance of mine has been painting murals all over the city, including the largest in wa?. Did one in ravenna recently too. https://www.bellinghamherald.com/news/local/article218572530.html

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ale_capone
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PostSun Sep 01, 2019 5:18 am 

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Randito
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PostSun Sep 01, 2019 5:50 am 
FYI: NYC largely eliminated graffiti by the early '90s. Multi-pronged effort: two factors helped: 1) Banning the sale or possession of spray paint to persons under 18. 2) Adopting a "clean train" policy, where "tagged" trains are taken out of service until cleaned up. 3) Providing a graffiti reward of up to $500 to folks reporting tagging in progress to 911. And a bunch more.

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ScottP
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PostTue Sep 03, 2019 4:44 pm 
From the Bell Mt FB page.

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