Graffiti spreading from Manhattan's streets right into the business on the ground floor of Hotel 50 Bowery. Charles Mudede

Comments

2

Charles, I don’t think you could be more wrong about graffiti. It isn’t the sign of urbanity. It’s the precursor to decay and dystopia. I guarantee you NYC and Berlin would love to put the kibosh on graffiti if they could manage it. Thing is, you can’t manage it without having a police state. And civic pride and responsibility is fuck all. I think we are operating under the assumption that graffiti is art and therefore expressive. If it’s art, it is art thrust upon you without your consent. And maybe you’ve noticed? But much of graffiti is butt-ugly from pretty talentless people with spray cans. No. It can turn a pretty little neighborhood into a shithole in no time.

But let us please agree on the Amtrak Cascades. Yeah, that’s what it needs. Let’s make everything forest green and light brown. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a handsome interior, but speed seems more urgent than decoration. Maybe it’s one of those situations where they have gotten Federal funds and have to use them or lose them. So, they said, “Not enough money to improve service. Let’s redecorate!”

Kind of reminds me of those studies Boeing would do. They’d hire consultants and spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars seeking how to improve productivity. And after many months of research, the consultants would come back with something like, “You need to paint the breakroom orange.”

Lastly, have you seen “Triangle of Sadness,” Charles? I think you’ll like it.

3

The Eager tags are pretty tired. Along with lab rat - which ran its course a few years ago.
I have not problem fining mindless tagging. OTOH there were lots of great murals after the BLM rallies, which are now gone. Quality street art should be preserved - like Henry, or the murals along the light rail.

4

Just when Trump finally moved out my head, The Stranger trots him by the front window. Let the man go quietly. This isnt news, this is more hucksterism, Trump Steaks and whatnot.

7

"NFT trading cards featuring cartoon-like images of himself": At this point, NFTs are old hat too; it's late to be getting in on that scam. Then again, few of Cheetolini's fans are exactly au courant, so he'll probably rake in a bundle.

9

@8: Thank you for sharing that memory. You told it very well :)

10

They’re not even actual NFTs, apparently, just worthless fucking jpegs.

11

@2 Bauhaus I, @4 Totoman, and @5 STII (surprise!): +3 Agreed.
Bellingham really could use light rail service between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C.
Amtrak transit buses to and from Seattle from and to the Fairhaven Station, with no train service
to Bellingham is pure BNSF capitalist bullshit. Alas, as STII says, a lot depends on the track design
for light rail to work. I don't think we're at that point (where I live, anyway) yet.
One thing is for certain: we need more Amtrak service, and a lot fewer coal and oil bomb trains!

@8 shoobop: Confess much?

You lost me at Trump, Charles. Please---don't feed the world's biggest, ugliest orange troll!
And WTF is up with your enthusiastic fixation on frigid winter cold snaps? Are you really that
turned on by spinouts, multi-car collisions and traffic pileups on I-5, I-405, I-90, and elsewhere?
Snow days are great for kids--especially during the Christmas holiday et. al season, but still have
to be made up later during the school year. Some of us would like to be able to get around safely,
whether we're driving, using public transit, or on foot.

13

As others have pointed out above, high speed rail in this region is all but impossible without massive seizure of private property to install new grade. It would be Link X 1,000,000,000

The legacy lines (primarily BNSF and UP) are laid out the way they are because that was the only routes possible given the technology of the era they were developed. The Cascades are a compromise and have worked fairly well, that horrible accident a few years back notwithstanding, and he addition of PTC will prevent that kind of engineer error in the future.

One thing about BNSF: They have actually been very good partners with Amtrak and the State of Washington, both for the Cascades and the Empire Builder. They've even considered allowing a local cross-state route, which I think should be a priority over any sort of work in the Puget Sound area.

It's Union Pacific that are the obstructionists, but they always have been. That's ironic because Amtrak was formed to relieve the private roads of the money pit that was passenger service, once they stopped being subsidized by the Postal Service.

15

@10,

Yeah, they're hosted by Trump privately, rather than on the blockchain, which is I guess what gives actual NFT's whatever actual value they apparently maintain. Personally, I'm more of a Trumpy Bear fan myself regardless.

16

'Innercity Bounderies'
NICE.

17

You can't run a Bullet Train at "Bullet Train Speed" when it's stuck on a single track behind a freight train going 25 MPH. And if you could get around it, you'd still be stuck behind a different coal train, going 25 MPH. And if you could get around that, you'd still be stuck behind another Tanker Train, going 25 MPH.

Same problem our little Toonerville Trolley's have. They're capable of going 60 MPH. But they're stuck in street traffic that prevents them from going any faster than 8 or 10 MPH.

18

@candylips "Graffiti is vandalism and a crime. Mostly tagging by gangs for territory" -- that's one of the funniest things I've read all day.

I agree with Chalres, there is a place for graffiti in cities, and all great cities have great graf.

But Charles has never waded much deeper than the surface, ever, in distinguishing tagging and art, which is a shame (but a boon to the trolls here). When I was younger, most of the taggers I knew were pretty dumb and thought that writing their name would bring them fame. Think of people like Tred from the '90s. Dude is about as smart as a bologna sandwich, and has moved on to embrace Trumpism, is a flat earther, etc.

Out of the crew of taggers I knew, a few became serious artists (graffiti, music, fine art). But tagging sucks. I worked on Capitol Hill at a small, locally owned shop and we had to spend money removing shitty spraypaint from windows. Go after the taggers, find a way to let graffiti artists thrive. It's possible to do both.

19

surely we could paint
the entire city
beige

20

and
yes
please sir
could we have a reliable
passenger railway
east-west across the state?

21

"Go after the taggers, find a way to let
graffiti artists thrive. It's possible to do both."
--@bok-bok

Designated Graffiti Zones -- brilliant.

too bad they didn't make a
sealant* that'd make
paint ez to peel

*one that didn't hasten
Death to the Biosphere

22

the City as Blank Slate
there ya go make it all
Concrete gray and let
the Artists do the rest

they could paint the
City that usta Be
with an Acme©
Tunnel maybe

Light it Up.

23

the City
as Gallery.

25

then the Taggers*
can piss off we've
got a City to Paint

*or Up
their Game.

26

The crime of graffiti should be tolerated exactly to the extent that the results have artistic merit.

27

@26 -- that's the Spirit!

and we'll Pay them for
their Skills and they'll
have Guilds appren-
tices and we'll Sell
Tickets & Tourists-
'll be Fighting to
Come to Sea-
ttle. whoa

28

@13 Catalina Vel-DuRay: Thank you for enlightening me about BNSF and their shared business with Amtrak.
Does Warren Buffet own Union Pacific as well as BNSF? If so, Buffet, Omaha, Nebraska based Union Pacific, and UP CEO Lance M. Fritz all need to go. People want to know why too many transported goods are on backorder? Count the number of passenger and freight cars sitting idly while a mile of dangerous crude cars and coal trains go past to and from Alberta. It's profits over people, and the levels of train noise and pollution alone are inexcusable.

29

@15 mike blob: Among all Orange Turd induced monstrosities, along with NFTs there's a Trumpy Bear? YUCK!!

30

Auntie Dear, I don't know who runs UP these days, but real-life Mr. Burns Philip Anschutz is the majority owner (he's also the guy behind AEG and a billion other companies). He makes Warren Buffet look like a saint.

(I could bore you to death with minutiae about UP and Amtrak, having grown up around the railroad and been a member of the Union Pacific Drum & Bugle Corps, as well as an Amtrak wife, but I've already said too much)

Personally, I think the miles-long freights should be illegal.

31

@1: The Stranger’s writers’ acceptance and advocacy of absolute lawlessness does make for a puzzle. Perhaps it’s the dead end of “I’m so far above you, I can’t even see you” hipster posturing which has defined elements in the Stranger forever?

The most interesting part is they can’t see how their chronic shilling for the most unsympathetic of criminals completely undermines the Stranger’s advocacy of police and justice reform.

32

@10 schmacky: It really is too bad that the Orange Turd can always rely on the stupidest and most woefully ignorant of U.S. citizens, and the same exact 75 million idiots to play GoFundMe, while laughing all the way to its bank.

@30 Catalina Vel-DuRay: Thank you once again for enlightening me further on Union Pacific and its major owner, Mr. Burns Philip Anschutz. He sounds like a totally unscrupulous bastard, worthy of acquiring the nickname Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons. He probably plays golf with the Orange Turd at Mar-a-Lunatic on a regular basis. If only Washington State could just cut ties with UP, find a feasible way to extend safely structured light rail service to and from the U.S. / British Columbia, Canada border, and end the massive over-transporting of fossil fuels by rail through the Puget Sound corridor. People will still drive cars, but it could otherwise relieve a lot of congestion on I-5 and elsewhere.

33

@32 continued: One possibility that extending light rail along Puget Sound might be on hold if not entirely out of the foreseeable future, along with necessary infrastructural upgrade funding being astronomically unobtainable-- is that there are also very narrow, forested passages along rocky hillsides with greenbelts that are subject to seasonal rockslides in the wet, stormy fall and winter months. When the railroads were first built, Western Washington didn't have the population explosion and consequential traffic congestion problems it has now.
And we live in a region that is 315+ years overdue for a major earthquake. When that hits kiss your asses goodbye, folks!

34

Fuck taggers and fuck tagger apologists. Artful graffiti is a legit part of a city. Writing your goddamn nickname all over town is not. It's kind of amazing to hear disrespect for others turned into a virtue, but there you go. Making everything shitty is not a solution for inequity.


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