Graffiti: [redacted]

[Post removed on the grounds that it's dumb of me to involve myself in high school love triangles period, in particular the high school love triangles of kids I don't even know. Apologies to those who left comments.]

Graffiti: Rock and Roll

Just west of Riverside, IA:


What I like best about this one, I think, is the thoughtfulness of using (electrician's?) tape on the sign instead of the harder-to-remove markers or paint.

Iowa: home to gay marriage and considerate vandals. (Massachusetts, eat your heart out.)

Iowa City Graffiti: Rose

Feeling kind of out of it again today (which is Thursday, even though you're reading this on Friday), but in this case I think I know why: we went to Iowa City on Wednesday and I wound up walking around outside for most of an hour. Not particularly horrible in itself (in fact I kind of liked it), but my body is not accustomed to me doing a whole lot of walking anywhere, and especially not when temperatures are in the 20s (F: this is -2 to -7C). So I'm paying for the walk today in the form of a slight headache and overall tiredness.

But I got to see this.


I'm not positive that this counts as a graffito, in the sense that I'm not positive it's unwanted (certainly it's been at this location for a while, and nobody's removed it, plus it's prettier than most of the other graffiti I've seen), but it's outside, on a building, in spray-paint, so I think it's close enough.

The only question remaining, then, is: what species is it? I'm inclined to go with a rose (even though the number of petals is wrong), because of the shape of the buds, but I think an argument could be made for Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus). Though the number of petals is still wrong, for Catharanthus.

Iowa City Graffiti: Sin

This, clearly, is an incredibly wicked and depraved dumpster.

Iowa City Graffiti: Free the Slaves

Date: September 29, 2009

To: Graffiti artist / stencil designer

From: Iowa City Dumpster Journal

Re: "Free the Slaves" design

Thank you for your recent contribution to the 700 block of South Gilbert Street. Here are our thoughts with regard to your submission:

Although your graphic design is clear and effective, the message of your graffito is unclear on several counts.

1. We would like specifics about which slaves are to be freed.

2. We would like to see a more precise definition of "free" in this context. Do you mean "having nothing left to lose?" The ability to attend, or not attend, a church of one's preference? Unregulated capitalism? The capacity to make a living?

3. We would like some kind of guidance as to how this freeing is to be accomplished (at what time? Using what methods? In conjunction with which, if any, governmental or international agencies?).

4. We would like clarification as to whether you mean "the slaves" to be understood as all slaves, everywhere, or some particular subgroup of slaves.

We encourage you to resubmit a piece which addresses these concerns. You may find it useful to revisit our guidelines for new submitters, currently located on the dumpsters in the Kum & Go parking lot at the corner of E Burlington St and S Gilbert St, in Iowa City. We appreciate your interest in publication in the Iowa City Dumpster Journal.

Iowa City Graffiti: The Only Way

It perhaps reflects the amount of time I spend on-line that my first reaction to this was well, at least they spelled everything correctly.


This particular specimen is located in a tunnel that goes underneath some train tracks, a block or two away from a Church of Christ in Iowa City. (It's basically right where Kirkwood Ave. bends, for those of you in town.) I think it's a not-unreasonable assumption that the author probably attends the church, but even if they don't: who proselytizes through vandalism? Could this possibly be effective? Or is it some kind of sneaky reverse-psychology anti-proselytization?

Looking back, I mainly regret not adding something to this to make it funny. Funnier. Whatever.

Iowa City Graffiti: Misbehave

About a month before we moved, at least two of these (in the same handwriting) showed up in our general area of town. I assume there were probably more than that, but I only saw the two. I don't know if college students really need to be encouraged to do dumb shit, but whatever.

The pink and blue streaks running down the side of the building were pre-existing, and look to have been done with paint-filled balloons. I think the little three-balloons icon is probably drug-related, and probably a late addition to the composition, though of course it's hard to know for sure.


Have not yet determined whether Lone Tree has graffiti or not. I mean, it seems like they'd have to, somewhere, but it's hard to imagine where. We only have just so many buildings in town, and it's not like the teenagers here seem significantly more discontented than teenagers anywhere else. I'm sure if there is some, I'll find it sooner or later.

Iowa City Graffiti: The Birds

I'm afraid I have not yet completely managed to get my head around the Iowa Supreme Court's UNANIMOUS decision this morning. I'm still working (writing this very quickly while on lunch break, at home). Every so often, I remember what's going on and think to myself, HOLY FUCK, but then the moment passes and I forget again. This will probably be happening a lot for a few days.

For those who have asked: yes, the husband and I will be getting married (in as cheap and low-key a way as possible, I think) when the opportunity exists. I've been reading that it will take a while for the 99 county courthouses to get themselves set up to be able to do same-sex marriages (the delay, I'm guessing, has mostly to do with printing new forms? I'm really not sure, and nobody has said), but the Des Moines Register said that it should be possible by April 24. As I officially came out to my parents on April 30 (1997), I'm leaning toward April 30 to do the actual marriage (beats April 25, which is Mom's birthday), but we'll see how things go.

I appreciate all the people who have stopped by to say congratulations. I'm basically out of time now, but there will be more talking about this later, after I've had time to read some stuff and finish the plant-watering I started yesterday and so on and so forth.

Oh, and I would appreciate it if my co-liberals could refrain from acting like this is totally out of character for Iowa to do. The Upper Midwest in general (IA / MN / WI / IL) used to be progressive all over the place. There's a history. Try not to look so shocked that it's Iowa. We're not all a bunch of slack-jawed reactionary bigoted hicks here. If it were Oklahoma, or Utah, then maybe you could be surprised.

Now I want to try something.

I want a million, billion dollars.


Ah. Apparently Lantana pictures aren't magic. Oh well. Worth trying.

EDITED TO ADD: Like it says, the post was written in a hurry. I did not mean to suggest that everybody in Utah or Oklahoma are slack-jawed reactionary bigoted hicks. (For example, some Oklahomans have very taut jaws. I kid, I kid. . . .) I know they're not. But still, Iowa is a good order of magnitude less surprising than Utah would be. It's also worth noting that if you haven't already seen it, there's going to be a backlash coming: the way the Iowa Constitution is set up, it's hard to change, but you can bet that there are people organizing now who are going to try, and a lot of money is going to be changing hands in order to make that happen. No victory is ever so solid that it can't be lost.

One bright spot I see is that even the bigots are likely going to see Iowa benefit from this. We have no residency requirement for marriage here, so anybody can come across the border and marry, which means that not only are we going to be seeing a sharp spike in wedding-related business in the next few months, as couples who have been waiting for something like this start planning and having their own weddings, which will be awesome for those of us tangentially connected to the floral industry, but there's going to be a lot of money coming in from out of state too, and possibly people moving to Iowa. This will be good for Iowa. Maybe not so much for MN/WI/IL/MO/NE/SD, 'cause I assume they're the states that will be losing most of the people who do come here. And if the Iowa economy improves as a result, even the hard-core bigots are going to be a little less worried about it.

It also means that every drought, tornado, car accident, flood, or, you know, livestock escape from now until 2030 is going to be attributed to the Judgment of the Lord Upon the Wickedness of Iowa. But, you know, the 2008 floods happened when Iowa had last (barely) voted for Bush and had a Defense of Marriage Act restricting marriage to one-man-one-woman, so I'm not going to be convinced God cares unless our next disaster is a lot worse than that. Ask Cedar Rapids how bad that would have to be.

Iowa City Graffiti (advice)

I suppose it's sound advice, technically, but it seems like to most people it would be self-evident -- I'd expect that nobody who needed to be told this would be capable of reading it.

Also of interest is its location: the parking lot of the nearest Catholic church. Which may or may not be relevant, but makes the possible interpretations more interesting.

-

Unrelated: if you visited late enough yesterday, you saw an alternate color scheme I was trying. After fifteen votes, more than half of the readers polled were saying they didn't like it as well as the original one, so I've switched back. I'll try again some other time.

Iowa City Graffiti (Statue of Liberty)

I'm just not quite sure what to think about this. So many different things it could mean, good and bad.

Iowa City Graffiti (self-negation)

I'm pleased to see that they at least spelled it correctly.

Iowa City Graffiti

Personally, I prefer to maintain a pleasant but neutral facial expression, among the morally ambivalent. It's just practical. Plus, benign neutrality never goes out of style.

Iowa City Graffiti (naughty language)

Since I stayed out of the emergency room yesterday, I guess we can try to return to normal, or something kind of like normal. I'll be meeting with my boss at some point today, to discuss whether there's anything that can actually be done re: the heat exhaustion thing, which might allow me to keep my job. I have my doubts, but I'm still trying not to think about it much, and mostly I'm succeeding.

Meanwhile, we have graffiti. I don't anticipate this becoming a regular feature, but I saw this one a while back and thought, what the hell? And I have, semi-recently, posted a sort of graffiti picture from Cedar Rapids ("WE HOPE OUR LOSS GIVES U SCENIC PLEASURE") So why not.

No clue what it might mean, but it's interesting to me that this was an important enough thought to somebody that they took the time to write it on a wall. Somebody's to-do list?



A more plant-related post will follow shortly.

Cedar Rapids (pictures)

The husband and I went to Cedar Rapids on Friday: I'd wanted to check on Pierson's, to make sure they'd come through the flooding okay, and also to look at plants that I didn't have to take care of, and we both sort of wanted to look at the downtown area to see the extent of the damage for ourselves. Which was, yes, gawking. Well before we were done, I was pretty ashamed: feeling a pretty strong sense of we should not be here, now.

There are, of course, huge chunks of town that were more or less unaffected, where business proceeds as usual, but in the parts of town that were affected, I didn't really have to aim the camera. Any direction I shot was going to show something. So, without further ado, I give you Cedar Rapids as of June 27, 2008:

Downtown is full of guys running around in white hazmat outfits, big dumpsters on the street, and lots of cleaning companies, dehumidifiers, etc. Traffic moves, but slowly, and all the equipment narrows the streets down considerably from what they usually are like.



The message is "WE HOPE OUR LOSS GIVES U SCENIC PLEASURE." Interpretable in more than one way, but it doesn't, you know, sound particularly friendly. I was assuming it was sarcastic, which made me 1) want the picture more and 2) feel more ashamed of taking the picture.

Piles upon piles of garbage. Siding, washing machines, tires, chairs, paper, swingsets -- all the stuff you've got in, on, or around your house, soaked for a week and a half in toxic water and then collected in piles.


Something that fails to show up well in the pictures: everything's also covered in dirt. I mean, in the pictures it looks like just a road, but in person, it's muddy and smelly and neverending.





Houseboats on the (still very high) Cedar River. Can't really tell from looking at them what kind of damage they sustained, but it's obviously not all fine.


And then the part that shocked me: Pierson's. The business is not gone altogether, because they had two locations: this one, the original, which was where the tropical plants (most of them, anyway) lived, and then another one elsewhere which seemed to be mostly for flower deliveries. The latter is far from the river and therefore fine, but the original location is basically ruined. Some plants barely visible in this pile: some unknown bromeliad, a sago palm, a croton.

A couple panes of glass were broken in the greenhouse: I couldn't really see much in there, though it was obvious that there were plants in it still. I couldn't really tell if they'd moved anything out or not: either a bunch had been taken away before the water hit, or else a bunch fell over in the water and nobody had been in the greenhouse to pick them back up yet.
Couldn't make out much of what was going on inside the store, either, though some of the walls didn't look like they were there any more. I could kind of make out a couple studs with debris hanging off of them.

Pierson's is especially sad to me because I can relate: Pierson's is to Cedar Rapids more or less what my employer is to Iowa City, and we were at one point expecting to get more or less what they got: we just dodged the bullet. Plus, on a completely self-interested note, I now have that many fewer options when I want to go out of town and buy a tropical plant. But it's hard to look at that and not wonder what they're all going to do. I mean, the oldest greenhouse was indeed very old, and if they were insured, then they might be better off in the long run to be rid of it and build a brand-new one. But how likely is it that they were insured? They were only a block from the river, it turns out (seems longer, somehow, driving to them). So maybe.

I was kind of telling myself while taking pictures and feeling ashamed that it was okay, karmically, because I was going to be posting them for other people to see, and that meant there'd be help coming, and I was therefore doing something useful even though I wasn't, you know, doing anything useful. But that's kind of a crock of shit. I mean, people knew there was a flood anyway, help was already coming. I was just taking pictures because there didn't really seem to be much else to do, because it was too much to take in all at once, because it was impossible to look away. It's pretty overwhelming in person.