"It sounds like the police are just really angry at him for messing up their cars."

Said Ron Kuby, a lawyer for Jakhi McCray, quoted in "Brooklyn Activist Charged With Arson in Torching of 10 Police Vehicles/Jakhi McCray, 21, faces federal arson charges in connection with the burning of police vehicles in a parking lot last month" (NYT).

McCray is, according to the Times, a "pro-Palestinian activist" accused of burning 10 police cars. In the packed courtroom were "his mother and more than two dozen supporters in the courtroom, most of whom donned kaffiyehs, a symbol of Palestinian resistance."

"After the court proceeding, an expletive directed at the police was found scrawled on a bench in Judge Kovner’s courtroom."

Speaking of vandalism... did you see this: "AOC's campaign office vandalized with red paint in NYC" (CBS)? Note the sign: "AOC funds genocide in Gaza."

"Reading it today, I find that I Am Charlotte Simmons agitates and excites me once more. It is a profoundly pessimistic novel..."

"... not because of its interest in conservative ideas or its sex panic, but because it refuses to grant its characters a moment’s reprieve from the social system that it so brutally and correctly indicts. Perhaps my optimism is simply self-protective; I have taught college students for over a decade now, and I like to believe that they have experiences that cannot be reduced to the quest for social dominance, that their desire to belong does not always end in the dreariest conformity."

Writes Merve Emre, in "An Unsentimental Education/Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals" (NYRB).

I know you're unlikely to have the needed subscription, but that essay will appear in a new edition of the novel, coming out next month (so wait for that edition if you're thinking of buying the book).

And I would encourage you to click that link if only to see the top of the article, which is illustrated with an Elliott Erwitt photograph, "Women with a sculpture personifying the alma mater at Columbia University, New York City, 1955."

That's one of the best photos I've ever seen! And it is evocative today, with Columbia so much in the news.

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" got a lot of attention when it came out in 2004, and it will be interesting to see reactions to it 20 years later. 2004 was the first year of this blog. I read the book.

"It appears that every historical monument in DC is being vandalized with no intervention from the police."

Writes Ian Miles Cheong on X, with this video:

It appears that every historical monument in DC is being vandalized with no intervention from the police. pic.twitter.com/dQxKcW0NlS

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 24, 2024

In an alley next to the Palace Güell in Barcelona, Spain...

... my son Chris photographs that mural and this poster....

A closer look:

"This is people taking it upon themselves to use a space that in many ways was abandoned by people with money and power."

"In the 1990s, there was this moral panic about graffiti being linked to gangs, but times have changed... Even if people don’t like it — and they’re entitled not to like it — they understand that graffiti is not connected to violence."

Said Stefano Bloch, "a cultural geographer, a professor at the University of Arizona and a former graffiti artist," quoted in "Multiple Floors of Los Angeles Skyscrapers Are Covered in Graffiti/The graffiti has brought attention to the empty buildings, which have been abandoned since 2019 and are across from the venue where the Grammy Awards will be hosted on Sunday" (NYT).

Human activity flows into unused spaces. It's the story of civilization. But is that unlinked to gangs? Don't gangs come into existence where there is emptiness in the social order?

Nature abhors a vacuum.

At Just This Café...

... what else are you going to do?

"We said 'never again.' The UK was a safe haven. Now..."

"... after the biggest massacre of Jews since the holocaust, British Jewish children are being advised to hide their identities as they walk to school, for their own safety. There should be mass outrage that this is necessary."

Writes J.K. Rowling, at "X," showing us this letter to the editor of the London Times from London resident Dr Sarah Nachshen:

Sir, On advice from her school our teenage daughter has gone off without her blazer this morning. Her male classmates have been advised to cover their skullcaps with baseball caps. On her pre-school dawn run yesterday she ran past the broken glass of a kosher café’s windows and a fresh anti-Israel slogan painted on a bridge. All my grandparents were Holocaust survivors who found safe haven, and built new lives, in the UK, so of course I am twitching with latent anxiety and the creeping dangers of the masses not speaking out against terrorism. I sincerely hope Rishi Sunak honours his pledge to stand with Israel and protect British Jews. 

"A stolen traffic sign that someone had painted over with the slogan 'Stop the Steal 2020' and the image of a grinning skull with Donald Trump’s hair, smoking a cigarette..."

"... had an undeniable flair, even if its iconography was hard to parse. More poignant was a strip of blue fabric with the word 'pence' in white letters that had seemingly been torn—in anger? sorrow?—from a 'trump pence' flag. A white poster board was stencilled with... 'time to cross the rubicon.'... [Photographs of] graffiti... such as 'power to the people!' and 'where are you thomas jefferson?!,' along with—easy to parse—an S.S. symbol.... [A] photojournalist, Madeleine Kelly, donated the protective vest she was wearing when she was kidney-punched by a female protester who shouted, 'That bitch is photographing us!' When Kelly returned home, she found a slit in the vest; she’d been the victim of an attempted stabbing. For the record, no one at the museum seems much interested in acquiring the furry Viking-style headpiece famously worn by Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman (not that he’s offering it)...."

From "Insurrectionabilia at the Smithsonian/In 2026, we will celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial, and also the fifth anniversary of the January 6th uprising. Curators diligently preserved detritus from the Capitol attack, including photos of a wooden gallows" (The New Yorker).

"I admit with deepest embarrassment that it was only after what regrettably happened that I learned of the monument’s antiquity."

Said Ivan Danailov Dimitrov, quoted in "Who Knew the Colosseum Was So Old? Tourist Apologizes for Defacement. A man who etched his initials and those of his girlfriend in a wall of the nearly 2,000-year-old monument wrote a letter of apology, and his lawyer says he is hoping for a plea bargain" (NYT).

Il Messaggero, the Italian newspaper, said the apology "defaced common sense."

"What do you stand for?"

Another photo from my trip to lower Manhattan, from which I returned 3 days ago. It's been cold, snowy, and overcast here in Madison, but I expect to get back to my sunrise routine soon.

Please use the comments section to write about whatever you want.

Street portraits.

I'm back in Madison now, but here are 3 shots I took in Manhattan a few days ago.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"Make Love Great Again."

Photographed yesterday in the East Village.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

A New York doorway (photographed yesterday).

"Zeus"/"He smiles..."

Photos from an East Village walk today.

"Bob, he's a genius. He's like Picasso. He sees the angles and planes in what, for you, is ovoid."

I wrote, discussing Bob Dylan's analysis of "Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves." 

And then I saw something my son Chris sent me from across the sea, from the coast of Barcelona — a photo:

"Over the course of a week last summer, a number of street art pieces appeared in seemingly random parts of Norfolk and Suffolk."

"The artworks were eventually verified by Banksy, but the fate of each piece varied drastically. What has become of them - one year on?"

BBC asks.

The answer is there are a lot of protective screens. But here's how the graffiti art looked when it went up and was fresh and surprising:

 

ADDED: I think they should have been left unprotected. Let them live and die like other graffiti.

Delightful exuberant charming art or endless mindless straining for attention?

Hey @elonmusk I just doodled my Tesla pic.twitter.com/2IA8obuz34

— Mr Doodle (@itsmrdoodle) July 26, 2022

I watch TikTok for you — and here are my 9 new selections.

1. An accurate miniature of a heavily graffiti'd ice storage box.

2. The way someone talks when he wants to get you to volunteer to wall-mount his TV.

3. The charitable work of detangling someone's hair.

4. A cat sings the blues.

5. Reacting to the news that someone's tested positive for Covid — in 2020 and in 2022.

6. Seeing if the dog likes celery.

7. A quick animation of Joe Biden, telling about when he was a little boy.

8. Discovering just how introverted you are.

9. A famous fractal — the Sierpinski triangle.

"It’s an insane spot! And a huge piece. A few people have asked me if it was commissioned because they couldn’t believe someone could get away with painting that type of spot."

Said Luna Park, "a photographer and author who documents graffiti culture in New York City," quoted in "Artist Spray-Paints Massive Graffiti on New Museum/It’s unclear how 'Acer,' as the anonymous artist is known, evaded the museum’s security officers and surveillance cameras" (Hyperallergenic).

Yeah, I have the same question. What's the answer?

The black, white, and red graffiti spells the moniker “Acer” in large block letters on the museum’s third level, facing Bowery Street. The graffiti was painted a few feet above artist Glenn Ligon’s installation “A Small Band” (2015), which features the writing “blues blood bruise.”

It's useful publicity, so I'm skeptical.

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"'The statue came down. That’s one thing. I felt like our voices were definitely heard'.... But the pedestal and the space around it 'felt like home'... Seeing it go is kind of sad for me."

"'That’s where we met up before protests. That’s where we felt like family, we felt like we could come together and be understood when the world couldn’t quite understand us.'"

Said Paris Somerville-Cox, 35, quoted in "Protesters transformed Richmond’s Robert E. Lee memorial. Now they mourn the loss of their most powerful icon of resistance" (WaPo). 

They're talking about the empty plinth. They got the statue of Robert E. Lee removed, but now they miss this meaningful space, the place where they protested.

“That space has a lot of meaning to it,” said Princess Blanding, who became an activist and third-party gubernatorial candidate after her brother, teacher Marcus David Peters, was killed by Richmond police during a mental health crisis. “By removing that pedestal,” she said, “it’s a way of completely erasing it and making it as if none of that ever happened.”...

“This was our altar space. This was where we came to be together and do the uprising, you know?” said Lil Lamberta, 40....

“I’m glad the pedestal is coming down,” said Janice Hall Nuckolls, whose home looks out at the site. “As important as the base is to people of the [Black Lives Matter] movement, it is also a lighting rod for other people that are offended by the hateful and profane graffiti. The statue is gone. The novelty has worn off. The base just looks tired and bit of an eyesore now.”.