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Citizen complaint of the day: Why aren't you pushing back on the forces of our earth?
By adamg on Sun, 12/29/2019 - 4:31pm
A concerned citizen filed a 311 complaint about this long message scribbled on the side of a building at the corner of Gloucester Street and Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay.
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Comments
I don't believe someone would
I don't believe someone would mark up a nice clean corner of a building like that.
But seeing can be a sort of belief system.
Preserve it
Everyone needs to see that.
Yes!!
What great street art -- I hope it stays on the wall a long time. I like the poem.
And what is your medium?
(And funny/ironic that the 311 complaint says that it is offensive... maybe because it implies putting down the phone for a few minutes to be present in real people's lives.)
But I am grateful to the 311 complainer, because if it weren't for this post I might not know it is there. Might walk by to see it on New Year's Eve while in Copley Square.
Probably one of those...
obnoxious cell phone freaks that cause a disturbance on the buses and trains being upset about even suggesting they put their phones "that they have the right to use because they paid for". They do NOT have a right to be a nuisance. Many anti-nuisance laws on the books.
As for the poem painted on the corner here, I agree. Please preserve it.
Better than
sNot fArt
Cambrdge Wall Poem
Makes me think of a poem that was painted in fragments on various walls in Cambridge in the mid-70s. The most prominent fragment was on a wall in the old, deserted Kendall Square, pre-renovation/gentrification, pre-Mariott hotel. I still have it committed to memory:
Pull this change
Sweet and twenty
Reckless dust
Back then it seemed very mysterious to me as why this poem was there. Much later I found this all about it on the internet:
https://multicians.org/thvv/wall-poem.html
Eat more Ovaltine
Word salad wooden bowls
Little Orphan Annie decoder ring
Eye shot out
Meaning cloudy
i want to believe.
i want to believe.
Graffiti
Can we not encourage more graffiti please. Graffiti only places you own seems a reasonable mantra to spread.
Unfortunate
No doubt the person who tagged the wall thinks it's poetry. To me, regardless of the sentiments expressed, it's just vandalism and pretentiousness.
Grafitti is just visual clutter that makes the urban environment feel even more frenetic and chaotic than it already is. (Of course the same is true of much advertising signage, especially the video signs.) Nobody is going to be converted to a more loving attitude by what this vandal wrote on somebody else's wall -- nobody -- just like nobody is going to be converted to Nazi-ism by what some vandal of the opposite persuasion might tag somewhere. Grafitti's only real effect is to make the urban environment more visually hyperactive for everyone.
Why?
Because you love censorship? You hate art?
LOL
"Offensive: Yes"
Lots of graffiti lately...
...all around Back Bay at least, and much of it includes (or is solely) the flying eyeball thing at the bottom of this particular graffiti. Spraypainted on buildings, trash cans, mailboxes. I don't understand the need to fuck up other people's stuff (and I'm not even one of the stuffy, old, white people that normally inhabits the Back Bay!).
City may not act
It's on a private property. The city cannot do anything until the property owner signs a waiver allowing the city to steam blast it and be held without liability for the process.
You know who pushed back on
You know who pushed back on the forces of our earth? Roger Babson. After his sister drowned, he spent his life and fortune trying to figure out how to fight the force of gravity. You can see his "gravity stones" at Tufts, Eastern Nazarene, and other local schools.
Here's the one at Eastern Nazarene: