Dubai Debt Issues Push Stocks Down
GMA: Adam Lambert, No; Chris Brown, Yes
Family Gets Early Christmas Gift From Ellen DeGeneres
Mayor: Sex Trafficking Victims, Please Speak Up
Street Artist Proposes on Subway Signage
Our long civic nightmare is over! Late yesterday afternoon, the Astor Place Cube was cleaned with high power hoses. Apparently chalk graffiti washes off! Still, while the damage has been undone, the psychic scars remain. Where will these chalk bandits strike next? Are any of our post-modern monuments safe?
Photos by the one and only Dogseat on Flickr.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Yeah, nevermind that that just cost taxpayers money. :-\
haha. this post cracked me up.
although, postmodern? watch out!
yeah, first it's chalk, and then some douche asshole will break out his silver permananent marker. what will the chalker next to him say?" don't do that!". I don't think so. Chalking leads to marking, that leads to spray painting and that leads to the moral decay of society. Fuck those chalkers in their hipster assholes. chalk your mother's cunt: there's a lot of space there after you came out of it.
chalk is murder
chalk kills young malaysia children in far away sweat shops and makes the oceans unsafe for sea lions.
--
btw, I thought Mr. Simon claimed/promised HE would clean the cube if the rain didn't do the job...
can't trust'em...
Chalk is a gateway drug! Next thing you know people will start laughing, or dancing or god forbid start riding bicycles. People might actually stop being mindless consumers for a second and instead be humans having fun! Egads, this chalk craze must be crushed!
For gods sake…The cube is not the center of the universe.
More people piss on the cube then have acts of vandalism carried out upon it anyway.
Mindless consumers, eh?
Mike, quick: what kind of computer did you type that on?
Agree with #3 that chalks can only lead to something more permanent, heavy fines or forcing the perps to clean up the Cube should be the punishment, although jail time might be too much. All these being "kids" excuses are lame, it was luck that these hipster morons didn't get nightsticked on their stupid head.
everyone just fuck off!
the ones that should be royally pissed are "Pinhead" and his Cenobite entourage. But, do we hear them complaining on a lame blog?, no. They take the higher road.
chaulk rules.
link
theres still a little bit left. If its not gone by this weekend, i'll clean it up myself.
if you want to come, please join me.
and for the record, the first thing i wrote that day was "die hipsters die"
Simon, simple question...your gay right?
i'm only as gay as you are mature.
It was called "Broken Window Syndrome." If you let one window remain broken in an abandoned building, the rest will be broken in short order. If you let chalk remain on the cube, others will most assuredly try to push the limits of what they can use, and it will get worse. Why do you think there's no such thing as a plywood construction barrier with only one flyer posted on it? As soon as somebody sees one, they decide it's okay to post their own. Besides, in addition to the cost to the taxpayer, the need for a pressure washer has 1) caused unnecessary wear to the new paint job, shortening its lifetime and 2) possibly forced water into the new bearings. It's not just harmless fun.
BTW, Simon, what makes you think the people who drew on the cube were "hipsters"? The truly hip/cool don't need to join in with what everyone else is doing nor do they desperately need to make themselves the center of attention.
They were still cleaning the cube today, so it looks like the chalk f'ed things up a little more than people thought. Further, if you look, you'll notice that it's all scratched because douchebags like Simon were crawling over it.
It's amazing when the city spends thousands of dollars to fix something and make it nice (the cube looked so beautiful the day it was finally returned to us), and then some losers can come and ruin it for everyone. If it gets too expensive to keep fixing, the city will just remove it anyway, and then shitbags like simon will have no shade under which to hide.
"BTW, Simon, what makes you think the people who drew on the cube were "hipsters"? The truly hip/cool don't need to join in with what everyone else is doing nor do they desperately need to make themselves the center of attention."
I didn't say they were hipsters. I never did. What are you even referring to? I don't have such a trite definition of "Cool" as you clearly think I do. Please don't jump to conclusions, please don't judge me, and please don't make baseless assumptions. I didn't do this because I thought it was cool, I did this because I was messing around with chalk and got carried away.
And what I said is that if the weekend came and there were still remnants of what I had perpetuated (e.g., chalk on the cube), than I will clean it up myself.
I don't know.
I had interpreted that "vandalism" as an appropriation by those kids of the monument. But I guess that's because I knew Astor Place in the eighties, when it felt like it belonged to the young. A good chalking of it wouldn't have bothered me back then. It still doesn't bother me now.
I have mixed feelings about this whole episode.
My only question is why would you need a power cleaning to get rid of chalk? Chalk washes off sidewalks with the rain, and they're more porous than that monument. Maybe it's the cleaners who need rebuking for overdoing it.
Simon,
I misunderstood. I thought you were saying you had written "die, hipster, die" here. But apparently you're one of the vandals. Think what you will of my definition, but it will always be true long after the fad of the day is dead. The coolest people I know never demand attention, but they get it anyway.
newyorkette,
Chalk can be quite persistent. Look at any school blackboard. Even after washing down, there's always chalk on the board, isn't there? Is it ever as black as a brand new blackboard? Carbonates can be very difficult to disperse. They're less noticeable on sidewalks because they quickly mix with dirt and grime underfoot. Chalk used for bouldering and mountain climbing, although a different carbonate, is similarly defacing and increasingly frowned upon for regular use because of the deposits it's leaving behind on popular climbing routes. Today's preferred practice is to use chalk while climbing only when absolutely necessary.
I see.
Well, I suppose I'm just one of those people who think nothing should be pristine, nothing lasts forever, and a sculpture that was built to be interactive (doesn't it turn around if you want to push or pull it?) should've anticipated acts like this and should've been made of something easier to keep clean. Because there's always someone out there who doesn't know the limits. Astor place is still a place of drunken idiocy at night, after all. It's not Lincoln Center or Disneyland. Yet.
But I see your point.
the chalk they use in schools is a of a higher quality then they kind we used.
De La Vega, for instance, uses school chalk for his street murals, whereas we got an economy size tub for cheap.