Graffiti with a return address

I don’t know much -- or, ok, anything -- about the graffiti community or why people go around “tagging” things, but I have a hunch: Tagging is the spraypaint equivalent of shouting openly in code, like those annoying girls at summer camp who spoke gibberish to each other all the time (“Hiddigee’s siddiguch iddiga liddigosiddiger!” one would say, and they’d both giggle). You write your name in some wacky, tightly fashioned way, and it’s barely understandable to the general public. Even if someone can make out the letters, they’re still only reading a codename. Taggers can recognize other taggers, but that’s about it. The whole thing’s so secretly public, or publicly secret. Or both.

So when I was walking through a tunnel in London, I was amused to see a considerably less cryptic version of this. Instead of leaving spruced-up codenames, a bunch of kids were, as you can see above, leaving their e-mail addresses. They seem to have somehow missed the subtlety of their peers and gone straight for the glory. By now, who knows: Maybe they’re just gluing pictures of themselves to the wall.

I wondered if maybe this is some sort of community-building effort. Perhaps these people see each others’ e-mail addresses and write to say hi. Or, you know, become MySpace friends. So, I wrote one of them on Monday. “Has anyone else e-mailed you because you wrote your address on the wall?” I asked.

Today, a reply came: “NAH DAY AINT U DA FIRST”

That kind of says it all, doesn’t it?

Posted by Jason Feifer at September 29, 2006 12:03 AM