posted on Friday, December 10, 2004 3:12 PM
by
Endie
Signs and Signifiers
Sometimes I think too much about The Text, and having been submitting myself voluntarily to reading John Major's Incredibly Tedious Memoirs (729 pages of remembering how very dull he really was at the time, and no mention of Edwina Curry...) I started looking for *anything* more interesting to read. So my favourite three pieces of graffiti from the weekend were, in reverse order:
1) "Smash Neo-liberalizm" [sic] - I would have imagined that before someone knew they wanted to smash neo-liberalism they'd already be so well-educated that they could spell it.
2) "Looting Takes the Waiting Out Of Wanting" - A nice piece of alliteration, and a bon mot which only lost points for being (a) painted not on McDonalds but in the safest and least relevant place to paint such graffiti I have ever seen (round the back of a stonemason/gravestone merchant) and (b) being a slogan and thus not original.
3) "Why don't you *** off back to Wales?" - This was a brilliant non-sequitor, as well as articulating an emotion we can all empathise with. This political cri de coeur had immaculate punctuation and capitalisation and was written in a well-formed and thoughtful script. There was no textual context: it stood alone and unchallenged on the wall of a disused Church. The author simply knew that someone Welsh would eventually walk by, and when they did... bang, he had them. If you paint it, they will come. And with any luck they'll then go.