β
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
β
β
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Americus, Book I)
β
Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.
β
β
Matt Haig (Reasons to Stay Alive)
β
Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.
β
β
Banksy (Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall)
β
Well, while you were in the bathroom, I sat down at this picnic table here in Bumblefug, Kentucky, and noticed that someone had carved that GOD HATES FAG, which, aside from being a grammatical nightmare, is absolutely ridiculous. So I'm changing it to 'God Hates Baguettes.' It's tough to disagree with that. Everybody hates baguettes.
β
β
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
β
I guess love's kind of like a marshmallow in a microwave on high. After it explodes it's still a marshmallow. but, you know, now it's a complicated marshmallow.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Some people become cops because they want to make the world a better place. Some people become vandals because they want to make the world a better looking place.
β
β
Banksy (Wall and Piece)
β
I understood why she did it. At that moment I knew why people tagged graffiti on the walls of neat little houses and scratched the paint on new cars and beat up well-tended children. It was only natural to want to destroy something you could never have.
β
β
Janet Fitch (White Oleander)
β
I liked that he had hair that was growing without a plan. A grin that came out of nowhere and left the same way.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.
β
β
Banksy
β
It's harder to make someone laugh than it is to make them cry.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that's only if it's done properly.
β
β
Banksy (Wall and Piece)
β
gray hair is gods graffiti
β
β
Bill Cosby
β
Speak softly, but carry a big can of paint.
β
β
Banksy (Wall and Piece)
β
Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.
β
β
Hunter S. Thompson
β
Imagine a city where graffiti wasn't illegal, a city where everybody could draw whatever they liked. Where every street was awash with a million colours and little phrases. Where standing at a bus stop was never boring. A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business. Imagine a city like that and stop leaning against the wall - it's wet.
β
β
Banksy (Wall and Piece)
β
I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than whatβs on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Something about first love defies duplication. Before it, your heart is blank. Unwritten. After, the walls are left inscribed and graffitied. When it ends, no amount of scrubbing will purge the scrawled oaths and sketched images, but sooner or later, you find that thereβs space for someone else, between the words and in the margins.
β
β
Tammara Webber (Where You Are (Between the Lines, #2))
β
For a while, for as long as you're looking at it, that painting is the world and you get to be in it.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Remember
Love doesn't make the world go round
Sex makes it spin for a second or two
If you're lucky
So do chips, sausage rolls and girls in short skirts
Remember
Love
Lays its fingers on your heart
And holds it
Under water
Remember that
When the next girl smiles
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
When wanting collides with getting, that's the moment of truth. I want to collide.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Did you know that we're made up of the same matter as stars? We are nuclear energy exploding.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I need the shade of blue that rips your heart out. You don't see that type of blue around here.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
dreaming's the only way to get anywhere.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
...the definition of crazy is doing something close to the same thing twice and expecting a different end.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Mum says when wanting collides with getting, that's the moment of truth. I want to collide. I want to run right into Shadow and let the force spill our thoughts so we can pick each other up and pass each other back like piles of shiny stones.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts!
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Kept dreaming of this spot she had on her neck, this tiny country. I wanted to visit, to paint a picture of what I found there, a wall with a road map of her skin.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
What are you doing?' 'Asking the universe questions.' 'The universe just dumped you over the side of a steep hill. You really want to ask it questions?
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
If you treat glass right, it doesn't crack. If you know the properties, you can make things; the color of dusk and night and love. But you can't control people like that and I really, really wish you could. I want the world to be glass.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Every time he looked at me I felt like I'd touched my tongue to the tip of a battery. In art class I'd watch him lean back and listen and I was nothing but zing and tingle. After a while, the tingle turned to electricity, and when he asked me out my whole body amped to a level where technically I should have been dead. I had nothing in common with a sheddy like him, but a girl doesn't think straight when she's that close to electrocution.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Bursts of gold on lavender melting into saffron. It's the time of day when the sky looks like it has been spray-painted by a graffiti artist.
β
β
Mia Kirshner (I Live Here)
β
I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy
β
β
Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion)
β
Maybe I should add some graffiti to spice it up. For a good time call the Consort. Beast Lord eats your food and turns into a lion in his sleep. Mahon has hemorrhoids. Boudas do it better. Warning, paranoid attack jaguar on the prowlβ¦
β
β
Ilona Andrews (Magic Breaks (Kate Daniels, #7))
β
You know who Mr. Darcy is?"
"I exist, therefore I know who Mr. Darcy is.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Open skies painted above painted doorways and painted birds skimming across bricks trying to fly away. Little bird, what are you thinking? You come from a can.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?
β
β
Banksy (Banging Your Head Against a Brick Wall)
β
Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.
β
β
Banksy (Wall and Piece)
β
You grabbed my arse.'
'You broke my nose.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Nothing about art is a waste of time. "It's the time wasting that gets you somewhere.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I spray the sky fast. Eyes ahead and behind. Looking for cops. Looking for anyone I don't want to be here. Paint sails and the things that kick in my head scream from can to brick. See this, see this. See me emptied onto a wall.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
the people who run our cities dont understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit...
the people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff....
any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you ,, its yours to take, rearrange and re use.Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head..
β
β
Banksy
β
Very well, I promise. So, what did you get for me?" Angeline paused for a beat. "Jeans." "What?" croaked Artemis. "And a T-shirt" ...Artemis took several breaths. "Does the T-shirt have any writing on it?" A rustling of paper crackled through the phone's speakers. "Yes, it's so cool. There's a picture of a boy who for some reason has no neck and only three fingers on each hand, and behind him in this sort of graffiti style is the words RANDOMOSIY. I don't know what that means but it sounds really current." Randomosity though Artemis, and he felt like weeping.
β
β
Eoin Colfer (The Atlantis Complex (Artemis Fowl, #7))
β
Where's the fire, Lucy Dervish?'
In me. Under my skin.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
No guts, no glory. - Bert
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
If my like for you was a football crowd, youβd be deaf βcause of the roar. And if my like for you was a boxer, thereβd be a dead guy lying on the floor. And if my like for you was sugar, youβd lose your teeth before you were twenty. And if my like for you was money, letβs just say youβd be spending plenty.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.
β
β
Raymond Salvatore Harmon (BOMB: A Manifesto of Art Terrorism)
β
We spent a few minutes painting light graffiti. Grover wrote Pan 4ever. I wrote AC+PJ.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Chalice of the Gods (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #6))
β
And I look at him because he needs to be looked at. He needs to be seen. I hate that he has been on his own for so long painting graffiti moons in the dark keeping quiet about who he really is.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
His mouth dips into that freckle on my neck. Thank you, sun. Thank you, thank you, sun.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
It may actually be more healthy to be disturbed, confused, or searching than confident, certain, and secure.
β
β
Mark Scandrette (Soul Graffiti: Making a Life in the Way of Jesus)
β
We're not spending the night looking for ourselves.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Do not try to be pretty. You werenβt meant to be pretty; you were meant to burn down the earth and graffiti the sky. Donβt let anyone ever simplify you to just βpretty.ββ
β Things I Wish My Mother Had Taught Me
β
β
Suzanne Rivard
β
You're weird," she said, falling asleep. "But that's okay. It makes me seem normal.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Do many guys ask you out twice?"
"Only the ones with balls.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
We'll meet and click and sit up all night and everything will tip out of me and into him and the other way around and while we're tipping the night will fade and the world will get pink and in that pinkness he'll kiss me.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I escaped onto the wall, a painted ghost trapped in a jar. I stood back to look at it and I knew the sad thing wasn't that the ghost was running out of air. the sad thing was that he had enough air in that small space to last him a lifetime. What were you thinking, little ghost? Letting yourself get trapped like that?
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Real is better, The truth is better. Painful but better.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I spent the weekend after our date wishing I could stab him with my fluffy-duck pen and staring at the phone hoping he'd call. Dating is a very tricky business.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
... I ask, 'Do you think Dylan's telling the truth?'
Daisy checks her face in a little mirror, then hands it to Jazz. 'You want me to find out?'
'Let's not ruin it by calling them liars.'
'...I won't ruin it. I've got this special way of getting the truth out of Dylan.'
'How?' I ask.
'I kick him in the balls.'
'That's pretty special.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
i have given you the power to turn me inside out, my dearβplease do not use it
β
β
Savannah Brown (Graffiti (and Other Poems))
β
The cream-tiled walls were spattered here and there with old dried bloodstains, deep gouges that might have been clawmarks, and all kinds of graffiti. As usual, someone had spelt Cthulhu wrongly.
β
β
Simon R. Green (Something from the Nightside (Nightside, #1))
β
Love and romance are things worth waiting for.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I walk down the center of the street in our old neighborhood. I recognize the cracked building with the graffiti of an angel that has the words 'Who will guard against the guardians?
β
β
Susan Ee (End of Days (Penryn & the End of Days, #3))
β
Emma Forest?" Jazz asks. "His ex is the girl with the big...?"
"That's the one," Daisy tells her.
Jazz looks at her chest. I pat her shoulder. "Guys care about personality too."
"Girls like me started that rumor.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
β¦sense of futility that comes from doing anything merely to prove to yourself that you can do it: having a child, climbing a mountain, making some sexual conquest, committing suicide.
The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove itβ¦ to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: Iβm so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence.
Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.
β
β
Jean Baudrillard (America)
β
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
β
β
Terry Pratchett (Eric (Discworld, #9; Rincewind, #4))
β
Humor without sadness is just pie in the face
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I look across at the line of the city. The nights are mean in this place, full of smog that eats the stars. 'Who does feel hope around here?
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good". All available evidence, however, points to the contrary.
β
β
Matt Groening (Childhood Is Hell)
β
Some spray-painted graffiti on the wall asks, Is it nothing to you all who pass by? Lamentations 1:12 and I think, No, Lord, whoever the hell You are, this is not nothing to me. This counts.
β
β
Rachel Cohn (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)
β
I was here but now I'm gone
I left my name to carry on
Those who liked me
Liked me well
Those who didn't can go to hell'"
-The bathroom wall
β
β
E.M. Crane (Skin Deep)
β
Go along with it, Ed. I am begging. I am on the ground begging you." "You're standing at a urinal about to take a piss." "Don't make me get on the ground. Do you know how many germs there are in a toilet?
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
The stars are on the inside. They are effing beautiful.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.
β
β
Sally Brampton (Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression)
β
Blank walls are a shared canvas and we're all artists.
β
β
Carla H. Krueger
β
I don't believe him for a second, but I'm not telling Daisy that Dylan lied because I know what it's like to want a girl that much. To get dragged in the dirt behind her hoping you won't lose your grip.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I told her yeah, but there was no skin on my voice and she heard the bones in my words like I did. And I knew.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
His face is more open than an open book, like a wall of graffiti really. I realize I'm writing wow on my thigh with my finger, decide I better open my mouth and snap us out of this impromptu staring contest.
β
β
Jandy Nelson (The Sky Is Everywhere)
β
Don't go confusing stupidity with guts." -Bert
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
This did not comfort me.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
We've basically just met, so I'll say this gently. Are you completely crazy?
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Right now, I'd be willing to kiss Ed through a bag. So it's true what they say about teenage hormones. It seems I'm raging out of control. It's not very Jane Austen of me but it feels pretty good.
The problem is, Ed's acting all Jane Austen on me and he won't stop talking. Shut up, I want to say. All talk and no action is really kind of frustrating.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Most times I look at Shadow and Poet's work, I see something different from what the words are telling me. I like that about art, that what you see is sometimes more about who you are than what's on the wall. I look at this painting and think about how everyone has some secret inside, something sleeping like that yellow bird.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.
β
β
Frederick Buechner
β
No matter how the official narrative of this turns out," it seemed to Heidi, "these are the places we should be looking, not in newspapers or television but at the margins, graffiti, uncontrolled utterances, bad dreamers who sleep in public and scream in their sleep.
β
β
Thomas Pynchon (Bleeding Edge)
β
Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence. Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime. I didn't want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks.
β
β
David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)
β
I look over at Ed. He's staring out the window giving Leo the thumbs-down. I wait till he's looking at me, then I give him two fingers up. He gives me two fingers back. I give him the middle finger. He gives it back to me. I don't know any more signs, so I make up one. Three fingers. Take that, mister. He sticks up four. I call your four and raise you five. He skips straight to ten and does something with his thumb that disturbs me. I bounce my hands on my lap. Ed bounces his lap right back.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
The police have no leads as yet on the person or persons who painted obscene suggestions on the buildings. One store owner said he was going to leave a dictionary on a public bench so the vandals could at least spell the obscenities correctly.
β
β
Anne Bishop (Marked in Flesh (The Others, #4))
β
I can't believe you're still mad at me," Ed says.
"You grabbed my arse."
"You broke my nose."
"You broke his nose?" Jazz asks. "You grabbed her arse?"
"It was two years ago-"
"Two years, four months, and eight days," I tell him.
"-and I was fifteen, and I slipped and she broke my nose."
"Wait a minute. How do you slip onto someone's arse?"
Jazz asks.
"I meant slipped up. I slipped up and she broke my nose."
"You're lucky that's all I broke," I say.
"You're lucky I didn't call the police."
Leo, Dylan, and Daisy slid into the booth. "Did you guys know that Lucy broke Ed's nose? Jazz asks.
Ed closes his eyes silently and bangs his head on the wall.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
Let me meet Poet, too, but mainly Shadow. The guy who paints in the dark. Paints birds trapped on brick walls and people lost in ghost forests. Paints guys with grass growing from their hearts and girls with buzzing lawn mowers. A guy who paints things like that is a guy I could fall for. Really fall for
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the country, people felt they'd really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish Passport Applications. All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimised. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people felt history at their shoulder. All across the country, people felt history meant nothing. All across the country, people felt like they counted for nothing. All across the country, people had pinned their hopes on it. All across the country, people waved flags in the rain. All across the country, people drew swastika graffiti. All across the country, people threatened other people. All across the country, people told people to leave. All across the country, the media was insane. All across the country, politicians lied. All across the country, politicians fell apart. All across the country, politicians vanished...
β
β
Ali Smith (Autumn (Seasonal Quartet, #1))
β
To the train yard,' she says and pushes on the pedals. We don't move.
`Anytime,' I tell her. `You know. While we're still young and beautiful.'
She pushes hard again.
`You weigh a tonne.'
`You need me to drive?'
`I need momentum, that's all. Get off.'
`You're very charming, but you must hear that all the time.'
`Get off,' she says.`I'll ride and you run after me and jump on the bike.'
`Do many guys ask you out twice?'
`Only the ones with balls.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
I hear everything he's ever painted in his voice. I hear that person on the beach, looking at the waves. I hear hearts rocked by earthquakes and disappointed seas. I make myself look at him because he needs to be looked at. He needs to be seen. I hate that he's been on his own so long, painting graffiti moons and bricked-in birds and keeping quiet about who he really is.
β
β
Cath Crowley (Graffiti Moon)
β
She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.
β
β
Francesca Lia Block (The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold)
β
The most intriguing candidate for that "something else" is called the Broken Windows theory. Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes:
β
β
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
β
He set the RAM on the desk, then reached into his back pocket to pull out his grimoire. The size of a small paperback novel, it'd been a gift from Ambrose to help him understand some of the madness that surrounded him, and to answer some of the "other" questions that came up.
"All right, Nashira," Nick said in a low tone. "Talk to me. What the heck is watching me?"
He slid his knife out of his pocket, opened the book, and pricked his finger, allowing three drops of blood to touch a blank page. "Dredanya eire coulet" he whispered, waking the female spirit who lived inside the enchanted pages. The moment he finished speaking, his blood began swirling until it formed words:
Do not fear that which cannot be seen.
For they are lost in between.
'Tis the ones who come alive
That your blood will allow to thrive.
Nick snorted at the cryptic stanzas. "Not really useful, Nashira. Doesn't answer my question."
His blood crawled over to the next page.
Answer, answer, you always say,
But it doesn't work that way.
In time, the truth you shall find.
And then you will understand my rhyme.
"I'm such a masochist to even try talking to you"
Underneath the words, a picture of an obscene gesture formed.
"Oh very nice, Nashira. Very nice. Wherever did you learn that?"
In your pocket I reside.
Ever privy to your deride.
But more than that, I can see.
And that includes bathroom stall graffiti
Nick screwed his face up in distaste. "Oh my God, no. Tell me you haven't been spying on me in the rest room. You perv!"
Calm yourself, you evil troll.
My job is not to console.
But if it is privacy you seek,
Leave me in your backpack so I can't peek.
Now he understood why other people got so aggravated with his attitude disorder. He wanted to strangle his book.
β
β
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Inferno (Chronicles of Nick, #4))
β
Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ...
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.
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Hakim Bey (TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New Autonomy))
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For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite.
Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, even on the hottest days of the summer months.
This part of the state is demographically notable in other aspects, as well. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support--which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Not coincidentally, Utah County is a stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.
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Jon Krakauer
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Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a cafΓ© makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line.
There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyangβwhich is the most favored city in the countryβevery night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.
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Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)