Euro vandals in NYC subways

[MrBern]

fatal mischief

Heres the very sad side of grafitti. A 13 yr old hit by a train.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070107/ap_on_re_us/train_fatal
Boy hit by train after painting grafitti
Sat Jan 6, 11:47 PM ET
NEW YORK - A 13-year-old boy had just finished painting graffiti near railroad tracks when he was struck and killed by a commuter train, authorities and friends said Saturday.

A Long Island Rail Road train hit Ari Kraft between stations in Queens during the evening rush hour Friday, police said. The city's medical examiner said he died of "blunt impact injuries to the head, torso and extremities."

The teen and three friends had been painting on the elevated tracks near a station, his friends said. As he crossed the tracks to head home, the train, carrying about 1,000 people, slammed into him. Train service was suspended for hours.

Friends said he often created large murals with inscriptions like "Remember 9/11" — under the tag name "Corporal."

 

[Feraud]

Excuse me while a partake of a minor rant..

Heres the very sad side of grafitti. A 13 yr old hit by a train.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070107/ap_on_re_us/train_fatal

Thank you for posting this MrBern. Would it seem really wrong of me to say I have little pity for the family and how this should another wake up call to parents? I will try to sum up this apparently horrid comment at the end of my diatribe, which is aimed at parents.
Let me explain. I heard this news on a.m. radio 1010 the other morning. Certain details of the case struck me as very typical and extremely frustrating..
1 - The family and neighbors typical reply. He was a good kid, student, blah, blah.
Apparently no one knows what their children are up to nowadays! Does anyone walk the streets in these neighborhoods and see kids doing grafitti murals?? What time of day or night are they out doing this and their parents are unaware of where they are?
In general, do parents notice anything about their children's presence at home? Does junior do art? Did you ever see what kind of art he does? Are his schoolbooks covered in grafitti?

2 - The kid was 13 years old! See all comments above!

We all tend to talk about how bad things are now compared to the "old days". We long for the days when kids left the house in the a.m. and returned safe and sound at dinner time. After all the griping and moaning these are the parents who let their children do things with no regard to the environment they complain about! I am sick of these stories and have no more pity for them.
I do not advocate locking children at home. I suggest parents act like responsible grown ups.
Thank goodness a New York City police officer was not involved or the whole community would be up in arms calling for a change in police tactics. What we need is a change in parenting tactics.

You will have to excuse my feelings of disgust about this report but my dopey neighbor just dropped her leash and let her sweet Chihuahua get run over by a car. Thanks idiot.

 

[John in Covina]

Taggers

What I'd like to know is how do they accomplish this without being caught? Are they simply very adept and speedy?

*********
The subway cars are tagged while sitting in the railyard.
I remember in the 70's and 80's the subway cars looked more like a traveling circus train from all the graffitti! Hong Kong bamboo caned the American kid some time back when he was stupid enough to graffitti there. I am all for very tough punishment for graffitti. Out here in LA it comes and goes in waves. It used to be they would not spray over a mural, now any thing goes.

I think we should be allowed to shoot them: you bring the body, the spray paint and a photo of the mess to the cops and they give you a "C" note for diposing of vermin. "Tough Love" but after the first 10 or 100 or 1000 maybe the taggers will give up or maybe we'll run out of taggers. Remember the Chaka story? He tagged the elavator on the way down from getting a minor sentence by the judge, the judge found out and revised his sentence because of the contemptable attitude of the cur. In this instance, I am for the electric couch, put the whole family in it.

 

[dr greg]

Windows

The broken window theory might have a point in urban areas, but I don't know that environment is all there is to it. Where I live, which is bucolic sub-tropical coastline, we have an epidemic of teen gangs some armed, assaulting tourists, women and children being bashed in home invasions by dozens of drunken teenagers, police being attacked by rioting "youth", yet the place is as neat as a new pin, the sun shines, the beaches are clean, and yes there is unemployment, but I repeat, miles of beaches, and rainforest, waterfalls, etc etc, and has been a haven of "hippie" dropouts for the last 30 years at least. It's not like there's "nothing to do". It's the mindset of the kids that's the problem, they all think they are drive-by gangstas even though they were raised by brown-rice eaters doing yoga and have never even visited a medium sized city.
Tne music industry can't avoid some responsibility. It's also considered criminal abuse these days for a teacher to cane a student, or even speak to them harshly.
Bring back the lash I say.

 

[carebear]

The ones who need the lash aren't the kids, in the end they are just responding to the bad parenting they are(n't) getting. I'd start in on the parents who completely abrogate their responsibilities.

They're your kids, you control them. If I (society) have to, I'm going to use the only effective tool at hand, the justice system.

Little Johnny wants to vandalize puplic property? Little Johnny, therefore YOU, are going to pay every penny of the cost to fix what he's done.

Little Johnny wants to play tough guy and beat up homeless people? Little Johnny's just done a grown-up crime and is going down for assault.

Don't come crying to me about him being "a good kid" who "fell in with the wrong crowd". You had your chance to prevent and then fix that.

You should have known what he's up to, it's called parenting. If you are incapable of proper parenting, you deserve to suffer as you watch your kid pay for YOUR mistakes.

 

[MrBern]

I'm still mystified that europeans are flying over to vandalize NYC because of some notion that is a cool expression of art.


incidentally, spraypaint & indellible markers are old news. Those are easily washed. The new more permanent graffiti comes from kids who have discovered glass etching chemicals on subway car windows
or simply use metal objects to score& scratch their tags into th windows & interiors.

guys , dont joke about shooting kids. It doesnt seem appropriate when so many or our young people are being shot at everyday in a real warzone.

 

[carebear]

Art is contextual and intentional.

If I thoughtlessly throw a bottle out of my window to shatter in the street in Anchorage it's just littering.

If I fly to New York City to break a bottle in the street to explicitly remark on how consumerism trashes American culture and history, it's ART.

no smiley, that's actually kinda serious

However, in both cases I should be willing to pay the legal price for my actions. "Making art" does not excuse breaking the law.

 

[John in Covina]

guys , dont joke about shooting kids. It doesnt seem appropriate when so many or our young people are being shot at everyday in a real warzone.

No joke. You can't compare the criminal element with those honorable young people in the military.

The question is the age of responsibility, is it going to be 8, 18, or 80?

At 12 years old you could pick up a sword, join the Roman legion, and start your own family. In the past people learned very young to be resposible, how to treat others and the property of others. Still there is always a remnant that refuses to learn or cannot empathize with others.

Do you recall why they would hang horse thieves?
(Answer, so other people would learn not to steal horses.)

Coddling youth is almost always a mistake. Enabling stupidity IS always a mistake. Learning there are real prices to pay for your actions is always an eye opener and is the remedy to bad judgement. If only our youth could learn rational, critical thinking, if only it were taught.

 

[missjo]

Anyway, this NY metro-er wishes they'd take it to Amsterdam, where they'll probably love it. Here, we've got some old issues with this stuff.[/i]

What makes you think we would love it?
Here in Amsterdam we hate it as well, didnt this whole modern grafitti on train things come from the USA in the first place?

 

[missjo]

this group won the idiots award for erasing ancient grafitti

Meyrieres Cave, is a cave in Bruniquel, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, which contained ancient cave paintings at one time. In 1991, a Protestant youth group, Eclaireurs de France (one of the French Boy Scout associations, whose name means "Scouts of France", rather than "those who show the way", a common mistranslation), as part of their campaign to remove garbage and stamp out graffiti in the area's caves, erased two 15,000-year-old paintings depicting bisons from the walls of the Meyrieres Cave, earning them the 1992 Ig Nobel Prize in Archaeology.
The Ig Nobel Prizes are a parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October — around the time the recipients of the genuine Nobel Prizes are announced — for ten achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think." Organized by the scientific humor journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes genuine Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater.

This is a zillion times worse then ANY modern grafitti, to me there is no punishment imaginable that can make them pay for destroying such history.

 

[Salv]

I think we should be allowed to shoot them: you bring the body, the spray paint and a photo of the mess to the cops and they give you a "C" note for diposing of vermin. "Tough Love" but after the first 10 or 100 or 1000 maybe the taggers will give up or maybe we'll run out of taggers.

What makes you think they wouldn't shoot back?

 

[Harp]

Modern society, however nihilist and morally perplexed, holds
itself innocent, with predictable consequence....

 

[MrBern]

Wow, youre in favor of executing minors over misdemeanors.
Thats like, the most interesting thing I've read all day. You & Mussolini could keep all the trains running on time.

No joke. You can't compare the criminal element with those honorable young people in the military.

The question is the age of responsibility, is it going to be 8, 18, or 80?

At 12 years old you could pick up a sword, join the Roman legion, and start your own family. In the past people learned very young to be resposible, how to treat others and the property of others. Still there is always a remnant that refuses to learn or cannot empathize with others.

Do you recall why they would hang horse thieves?
(Answer, so other people would learn not to steal horses.)

Coddling youth is almost always a mistake. Enabling stupidity IS always a mistake. Learning there are real prices to pay for your actions is always an eye opener and is the remedy to bad judgement. If only our youth could learn rational, critical thinking, if only it were taught.

 

[jamespowers]

The broken window theory might have a point in urban areas, but I don't know that environment is all there is to it. Where I live, which is bucolic sub-tropical coastline, we have an epidemic of teen gangs some armed, assaulting tourists, women and children being bashed in home invasions by dozens of drunken teenagers, police being attacked by rioting "youth", yet the place is as neat as a new pin, the sun shines, the beaches are clean, and yes there is unemployment, but I repeat, miles of beaches, and rainforest, waterfalls, etc etc, and has been a haven of "hippie" dropouts for the last 30 years at least. It's not like there's "nothing to do". It's the mindset of the kids that's the problem, they all think they are drive-by gangstas even though they were raised by brown-rice eaters doing yoga and have never even visited a medium sized city.

Well, there's your problem right there. :eusa_doh:

Regards,

J

 

[John in Covina]

What makes you think they wouldn't shoot back?

****
That's fine, in a firefight I'd still smoke them as I have had more practice. Or you could do the whole stealth thing from about 500 yards off.

 

[John in Covina]

Wow, youre in favor of executing minors over misdemeanors.
Thats like, the most interesting thing I've read all day. You & Mussolini could keep all the trains running on time.

I bet the trains did not have any graffitti on them either.

 

[missjo]

I bet the trains did not have any graffitti on them either.

During ww2 they started writing on trains, especially soldiers would use chalk to write propaganda on the trains taking them to the front.

 

[John in Covina]

During ww2 they started writing on trains, especially soldiers would use chalk to write propaganda on the trains taking them to the front.

Chalk does wash off easy.

 

[MrBern]

During ww2 they started writing on trains, especially soldiers would use chalk to write propaganda on the trains taking them to the front.

I've seen ancient egytian monuments w/ 19th century names&dated carved into the stone.
I think the movie GALLIPOLI depicted this with some Australian cavalrymen.

 

[missjo]

graffiti is as old as mankind, roman soldiers scratched their names into ancient monuments, medieval prisoners scratched huge drawings into the walls of their prison.
I remember being annoyed at graffiti in Canterbury Cathedral... then I realised it was a few centuries old, hehehe