So much for lovely, safe, pacific El Cerrito. Received this on the phonecam from Amy while at work today – our garage has been tagged with graffiti, right in the middle of boring suburbia. And not very impressive graffiti at that. They at least could have taken the time to leave us some artwork. Well, it’s better than machine gun fire and people getting beaten up on your sidewalk. Nowadays the most disruption we get is from kids going door-to-door selling chocolate bars for little league. At least this provides a little excitement.
Music: Orchestre Murphy :: Hilversum
That’s clearly a violation of rule #1 in “Bomb the Suburbs” (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1887128441/103-1477790-9451807?v=glance): don’t tag anybody’s house, or garage, or anything an individual has a claim to. Highly uncool. It’s not even a good tag — looks like an upside-down Burger King crown.
the bastards! I’m so sorry for your garage, and am embarassed by the whiny, bored little ruffians of el cerrito. geez, go tag Bed, Bath and Behemoth.
You get candy sellers? All I get are Jehovahs Witnesses, despite living in a security building and having only a buzzer and intercom for contact with the outside world. That, and the police looking for the former tenant.
Not sure which side of El Cerrito you live on, but I used to spend a good chunk of time at my uncle’s house on San Mateo. There is a little park that is off Central. When I was very young I used to play there, but later on, in the late-eighties and early-nineties, it was always covered with low budget graffiti. Lots of thugish looking kids would hang out there too. I was in the area a few months back and the park looks to be cleaned up now. Hopefully there won’t be a resurgence of that again.
I always thought that the neighborhood west (????) of San Pablo and bordered by Central and the bay was one of the best (and safest) neighborhoods in the entire Bay Area. Even better than most of the stuff in Albany. Ahh, the memories…
The most basic deterent is to quickly paint over or clean the tag, even if it means it an imperfect paint job.
Don’t allow them to take pride in their ‘work’, form a habit, or claim a territory. Leave it there and they’ll start to they grow attached to it and think , “That’s mine, it’s my mark”. Perhaps even rivalry will break out as competing taggers try and take the spot as a trophy.
Paul, absolutely. Kind of like how people will further mess up a messy public restroom, but will respect a clean one. We painted over it the next day.
pamitha, we get candy sellers, jehova’s witnesses (i tell them I’m a card-carrying atheist, which isn’t true, but it gets rid of them), tree huggers (i always give them money)… you name it. “All part of life’s rich pageant.”