An interview gone BLEAH.

"I've been watching you," she says the moment I approached her. Her blood-colored lipstick is wearing out, revealing colorless lips from the inside. "You've been walking around in circles all afternoon. Didn't you hear me calling you a while ago?"

This is the fifth abortionist I'm attempting to interview in the black market surrounding Quiapo Church. She is fat and squat, with the frizzy hair of someone who's undergone an electric shock.

The first time I attempted to interview an abortionist she said, "No." And that was the end of the conversation.

The second time I attempted to interview another abortionist I said I'm a student from UP Diliman and may I interview her, please? "No." And that was the end of the conversation.

On the third time I approached an abortionist I pretended to be interested in her products, asking, "Ooohhh! What's this sort of vegetable do?" The moment she finished talking I asked if I could get an interview for just ten minutes tops with a timer on my hand, please. "No," she said. And that was the end of the conversation.

The fourth time I approached another abortionist, I bribed her with a hundred pesos for a fifteen-minute interview and she said, "No." Three hundred! "No." Four hundred! Four hundred pesos! "No." Five hundred! God damn it! I'll give you five hundred pesos! She paused and marshaled her thoughts. "No." And that was the end of the conversation.

Now on my fifth, I have to resort to strategies that will test my substandard theatrical skills which includes feigning shyness, meekness, and fear of the Lord.

"I'm sorry," I say to her, "but you must've mistaken me for someone else."

But yes, that was me. Of the estimated thirty stalls of "pamparegla" fencing the Quiapo Church, all the women vendors of abortificients would lure you smiling with their eyes, drawing you with a hand to come and join their league of sinners. There's something sinister by the way they look. It's as if they're surrounded by this heavy, demonic aura, or like some invisible horned devil is puppeteering them.

"Ah, yes. It could be someone else," she says. "There's so many women here they all look the same. Pamparegla?"

What a clever way to euphemize abortion. Each stall has a sign of this "pamparegla", and they all sell the same merchandise: herbs, roots, incense, bottles of oil, and rocks of different colors and opacity. Where we're at is behind Quiapo Church, a few paces away from the Monument for Children. The Monument includes a giant statue of Jesus' wounded hands, the left hand cradling a baby, the right protecting the baby. The hole on Jesus' right hand unwittingly resembles a vulva.

I fib I'm three months pregnant by a married man.

"You wouldn't say," she says regrettably. "Your stomach doesn't show though." Her eyes turn from my stomach to my breasts. "But your breasts. I can tell it by your breasts."

"My breasts are getting firmer and heavier," I say, looking at my own twins naturally cup-sized C. "Do you have anything I could drink maybe, to flush this thing out?" I pick out a small vial of oil with snake skin inside.

Quiapo Church is a paradox. Outside are a parade of abortionists offering a quick fix for unwanted babies. Inside, oversexed women drop on their knees praying to have a baby, please, Dear God Almighty. Contraceptives never occurred to women who want an abortion. Consulting a gynecologist never occurred to women who want to have a baby. At this age of fast food and automated teller machines, everybody wants it quick, cheap, and easy. Miracles for abortion, miracles for fertility, women go to Quiapo Church for both.

She tells me my options. She has oils and ointments you can lather on your abdomen. She has herbs and tablets. For herbs you'll need three sachets of some dried leaves which you'll grind and insert in your recreation orifice three times for a day, P150 each. "Just lie down and wait for about twenty minutes," she says, "and then you'll menstruate in clumps."

As she says this, the posters from the church's bulletin board riffle through my head. Flash: an image of an eight month embryo wrapped in a snot-like membrane. The caption says , "Save me! Stop abortion!"

But if you want it more effective, she offers Cytotec.

Flash: aborted embryos looking like ground uncooked toccino.

Cytotec is a prescription drug for ulcers. Before it was banned, it cost only P20 over the counter. Here in Quiapo's black market it costs P70 to P150.

You'll be needing six tablets for P100 each. At 9 in the evening, insert one into your sex hole and drink another of the same tablet, coupled with an herbal capsule to ease the pain. At midnight, you drink one tablet of Cytotec and one capsule of the herbal medicine. Just run to the toilet the next morning. The baby will be flushed out as easy as a turd. "Parang tinae mo lang," is her exact words.

Flash: six-month-old fetuses chopped up from suction.

Flash: unborn babies turned black and dried up from salt poisoning.

"We can also do it here." She pats the rickety wooden stool beside her as she fishes a checkered blanket from underneath her table.

"What, here?" I say, snapping a finger at the murderous chair.

"It'll be discreet. No one will notice, I promise," she reassures me. She unfolds the blanket and nods her head, Come.

Flash: "Pregnant? Buntis? May problema ba? May mga taong handang tumawag sa iyo. Tumawag sa," and then the number.

"But I don't like it here," I say.

"We can also do it at my place if you have enough money." She stands up from her seat, and immediately, her height registers to me as a gnome's. I also notice she's pregnant. She unfolds the blanket and tries to wrap it around my waist.

"Wait, wait, wait!" I shriek. "Not so fast. I don't have enough money with me right now."

"How much do you have?" She sits back with the blanket on her lap, and fans herself furiously with a pumpkin-colored cardboard.

"I'm not really sure if I still want to get through with this," I tell her. I forget I'm not pregnant.

Suddenly, her facial expression slackens into a scowl. She stops fanning.

"Say," she says, her eyes narrowing into suspicion, "are you here to set me up?"

"No! Of course not!"

"Raids and arrests are a common occurrence here. If you're here to trick me, my husband is right there to clobber you." She points at the burly Fuji apple vendor across the street. She fans herself again.

"Relax, relax!" I say. "I'm really interested. It's just that it's the first time I've been here and I never knew these things existed. Where do you get these things?" I pluck out a pretty brown, translucent rock from her merchandise and study it in the light with one eye. It has a tiny insect fossilized inside.

"We have a supplier." As she says this, two prostitutes, one with long hair the color of margarine, the other with coin-shaped scars all over her legs, hand her rolls of hundred peso bills. "Our supplier smuggles them from Korea. Those girls," she fingerpoints at the sluts walking away, "they're returning customers."

"I take my job seriously," she continues. She calls abortion services a job. "It's our only way to get by."

"How many kids do you have?" I eye her swollen belly.

She rests her free hand on her stomach and says, "Four."

"And that's your fifth?"

"Yes," she says, laughing. "I don't believe in abortion, you see. Whatever explanation people have, abortion is a sin." She touches the black wooden pendant of Jesus' face in between her pendulous breasts. "I'm a Catholic."

According to Pro-Life Philippines, one out of four pregnancies in the country end up in abortion. Apparently, this abortionist happens to be pro-life. I'm confused.

"I'm pro-choice," I tell her, making it sound like a conversation than an interview. "That baby inside you, I don't think it's a person just yet. I guess it's a matter of opinion."

A pending bill in Congress practically legalizes abortion. It empowers women to make choices about their body. The debate goes, abortion is illegal in the country. Thus, women resort to unsafe, clandestine methods, resulting to hospitalization, or worse, an earlier ticket to the grave.

"Don't you feel guilty doing this job?"

"Of course I do! Who wouldn't?" she says. "Every day I swallow my dignity and go here for my children." She panics a moment and says, "What's up with all these questions? Are you sure you're not here to set me up? Are you going to buy or what?" She raises one overplucked eyebrow.

"I'll think about it."

"Think about it!" She's hysterical. "You come here with all these questions and you're not going to buy anything!"

"I'll come back I promise," I say, preparing for an exit, stage left.

"When?"

"Maybe later or tomorrow," I say, itching to run away.

"All right. Just give me a second to give you my number." She reaches for a pen and paper underneath her table, scribbles something, and hands over the paper to me. "Text me when you're coming back. I'll be expecting you!"

I take the paper, study her name and number written in long, cursive loops, and walk away while saying, "I'll text you."

"Don't set me up okay!" she yells at me from my behind. I melt into the crowd.

The moment you read this sentence, you are not the same. I'm not here to tell you you're a product as much as a toilet duck cleaner is a product. I'm not here to tell you you're not responsible for how you look. When your father squirted his DNA into your mother, the sperm cell that you once were didn't have choice but to swim and wriggle eggward in a marathon against five hundred million other sperm cells. It's not that you won the race. It's just that everybody else lost. You didn't choose that eye color, that height, that gender. I'm not here to tell you you never had the choice to be born or aborted. Who ever gave you the freedom to decide to exist? You didn't. I'm not here to tell you you never decided where to be born, in which house, in what country, to whose parents, in what century. I'm not here to tell you your body is entirely yours. That each cell of you, you own it for seven years and is shed off on your pillowcase, on the sidewalk, on the bathroom floor, and is reunited back with Mother Earth. I'm not here to tell you you're not responsible for what you think, say, and act. That soap you rubbed on your skin this morning, that underwear you picked from your closet, that breakfast you shoveled into your mouth, somebody else made those choices for you long before you even decided on them. I'm not here to tell you you don't have a choice. It's just that all of you is a collaborative effort.

I'm not here to preach against consumerism, the government, education, and religion. I'm not here to say that consumer culture is crap. The point of living is to be rich, powerful, and gorgeous. I'm not supposed to say that the government has made you an animal instead of a civilized person. We need the government to prevent us from nuking each other. I'm not supposed to tell you to drop out of school because you'll survive either way. You need school to get a diploma to get a job to be rich and powerful and gorgeous which is the point of your life. I can't even say that you were born an atheist and was baptized against your will. You need religion to comfort you against the black hole of stark nothingness beyond death. I'm warning you, this is not an accurate description of what the world really is. This isn't a manual on how to be free. I'm not saying that you continue reading this because this won't in any way enlighten you about how you should live your life. You should not be interested in this because Freedom is not really interesting. I am no teacher, no guru, no spiritual giant like Jesus Christ. Call me Nobody. I am just as metaphysical as the word Nothing, or Zero.

Let's begin by smashing the television with a baseball bat. The television is teeming with evil spirits. These evil spirits you call actors and broadcasters and other sorts of puppets invade your homes, bore into your skull, and condition you into thinking that you are weak, helpless, inferior, incomplete, and ugly. You need television to replace your boring life with its hand-me-down, secondhand, pseudolife experience. You need this milk to improve your rusty memory. You need this soap to lighten your brown skin. You need this black spray paint to cover your bald spot. You need this razor to epilate unwanted body hair. You need this product not because they care about you but because they need your money. The moment you wreck your television, you realize you are free from your desire to be strong, powerful, superior, complete, and beautiful. It will take some time before you realize you're perfectly fine the way you already are. You also realize you are bored. That's alright, boredom is a normal thing. Boredom is the basic ingredient to being free.

Now what do you do. Let's go into your room and dispose things with no use or have sentimental value to you. Get a giant box and throw in those souvenirs, photos, and stamps you collected from traveling all over the world. The truth is, nobody cares where you've been and what proof you have for being there. Toss in the clothes and shoes you no longer use, the stacks of books you've read or books you bought but have no plan reading, those film and music collection of CDs and DVDs you could've gotten digitally instead, those toys from your childhood, those exercise equipments whose fat-burning mechanism you could've sweated from hiking mountains or running around with children; and other things that unnecessarily clutter your life. If you just imagine the millions of people who possess these same things, the corporations and factories that created these things, and all the people involved who toiled every day to produce these things, they've all contributed to suck in nature's resource to provide you these garbage. I am no environmentalist, no scientist, no economist, but all energy, time, space, money, and effort invested into these you and everybody else could've invested in something more important.

I'm not saying you should be a monk. Renouncing material possessions and spending a lifetime cracking the mysteries behind some imaginary deity is in itself slavery of thought. I'm not saying organized religion is just some twenty-first century superstition. That without an afterlife, you might reconsider that an earthly life is all you have. Freedom is cutting all the strings these things hold you back, form circles underneath your eye, and exhaust you instead of giving you more energy. Pets, for instance, tie you down and require money. If there's anywhere they belong, it's either out in the wild or in your refrigerator, cut up and chilled for cooking. It's the same thing with working on a desk job you don't enjoy, or living with a handsome but boring partner when you could've married your bestfriend. The same thing with owning a mansion whose space wastes your life planning, building, cleaning, and repairing. I'm not saying you surrender your luxuries and desire for wealth, power, and beauty. All I'm saying is being not rich, powerful, and gorgeous isn't so bad. If you think about it, civilization hasn't really made us any happier and more liberated than we were as nomads.

Warning, this is heavily based on ugly pictures.
Warning, the pictures were taken from my camera phone.
Warning, my phone was just stolen in the jeepney.
Warning, this is a skool paper, not a blog entry.
Warning, prepare to yawn and be bored.
Warning, I wrote this for a grade.
Warning, so what else is there to warn about?
Warning, yes that's a seven-letter word that begins with W.
Warning, has the same number of letters as Wordgasm.
Arr, no. Wordgasm has eight.
Warning, cucumbers really are just pickles.
Warning, you are about to begin.
Warning, do you really have to read this?

Graffiti is in the eye of the beholder. It is a crime, which is part of its beauty. Some people think it's art and anarchy combined. Some people think it's a violation against public and private property. The crime concerns the basic questions: who, what, where, when, how. The who is composed of white wall violators, whose goal is personal advertisement, expression of ego and style, or to spread an idea. The what are the visual art themselves painted on the walls, ranging from the sociological and political, to the poetic and the reckless. The where is inside the University of the Philippines, Diliman, on canvasses made of bricks or cement that used to be bleak and empty. The when is the clean up during the Centennial Celebration last year, after almost all graffiti were painted over with a watered-down coating of dull, yawny white paint, and only a few survivors remain today. The how concerns different techniques and styles, from spray paint and brush paint, to stickers, markers, and stencils, with influences from the Victorian period to Hip Hop culture. But what we always fail to ask is the why. This essay concerns us with questions that boggles the mind: why people defile blank walls, why in the University of the Philippines, why this or that medium, why graffiti exists, and why we even care.

Why graffiti and why not vandalisms or murals? Of the three, graffiti (graffito is singular; graffiti, plural or mass noun) catches the most attention because it is creative and illegal, involving concealment, sneaking in the dark and avoiding the authorities. Thus, it is risky, daring, and dangerous, all the more intriguing when we think it doesn't last long. It is ephemeral in a way that contradicts our basic idea of preservation in the art world. On the contrary, mindless vandalism is artless and offensive, mostly using curse words and sketches of the male and female genitalia. A mural, however, is a permanent painting on the wall, ceiling, or other surfaces that requires permission. Due to its immensity, cost, and work--some even taking years to finish--it's usually commissioned by a sponsor. All three originate from prehistoric writings on the wall inside caves or tombs, where they survived perilous weather conditions and catastrophes, thus preserved.

The basic idea behind graffiti is to commemorate the person for being there. It is an act of primordial expression, basic and fundamental, to recreate one's self, sometimes provoking mystery and intrigue.

The graffito above is called "throwies" or "tags", a visual personification of Hip Hop using bubble letters or twisted lines that overlap each other. It is spray painted by someone named Chi. It says outright: I am different, I am cool, and I've painted this to prove it. We see them scribbled on bathroom walls, scratched on armrests, in jeepney stops, bulletin boards, or spray painted on buildings. People write them for fame, glory, or recognition. They want to get noticed, because right now they aren't getting the attention they deserve. They want to prove they exist, because right now, it appears that they don't. The logic is that they think they're cool and unique, but other people don't notice it, so they recreate their self on the walls to force people to think that they are. On the other hand, some people write them just because they can.

Another form of graffiti uses an image representation of the artist's alter ego, in this case, a gorilla face.

The artist shows us how he was able to paint this sketch multiple times and not get caught. It subverts authority figures right away. How many times does this happen in our society? How many times do people commit crimes and get away with it? Authorities would argue people who paint these don't understand basic property laws. It is sheer vandalism, defacement, gang-related, and it brings the city down to the tribal level. But who's bringing the city down, the violators or the watchmen? An online research tells me the artist who did this was also the one who painted the worms and maggots in the campus. In an interview he says, "Painting these images on the streets and people interpreting them gives me the thrill of doing it more often. The more I spread these gorillas and maggots the closer it gets to my idea of criticizing our system. Decay and rot!"

A more sophisticated version of this is the smiley artist.

Painting the geometric circles indicated above requires some sort of contraption, most likely stencil plates with perforated circles. Stencils use cardboards or other forms of sturdy paper that can be cut through, or custom designed on metal sheets, and then spray-painted over for a sharper image. This graffiti requires more time and effort, and still the artist wasn't caught. How long does it take for authorities to catch criminals? Are they doing their job?

Stencil graffiti covers a vast number of walls in the least time possible. Other versions of this technique use only one color, usually black, and spray-painted over a white wall, thus providing more contrast.

It's a stencil graffito of a schoolgirl reading something in her hands. The girl could be a foreigner; schoolgirls in this country don't normally wear long-sleeved uniforms. And the thing she's holding could be anything. It could be paper money, a wallet, a map, a romantic poem, an erotic novel, anything. But given she's a schoolgirl, most likely she's reading and not just looking at something in her hands. Right away it startles and provokes intrigue: what does it mean? Is it saying something about the system of education in UP? What about the future generations of scholars? Why is it even there? Are we even supposed to create meaning out of it?

Meanwhile, other stencil graffiti are less mysterious.

The graffito above is an advertisement of a missing or rather missed unknown person. The choice of word is intentional, implying acceptance that the person is not just missing, but already gone and will never return. Its anonymity can represent anybody. It represents you, me, your boss, your housekeeper, the stress balls door-to-door salesman, the manicurist next door. It represents the two missing UP students, abducted, tortured, and raped inside the Military Camp in San Miguel, Bulacan. It represents these students' family and friends, mourning and tortured and sodomized just the same. It represents us, their schoolmates, who are similarly affected. It represents the cynical youth stripped off of aesthetics and freedom of speech. It represents every Filipino, every activist, every anti-government organization demanding reformation, social change, and one plastic bag of NFA rice, please. But who is this missed person, really? Whose face was it patterned from?

Another stencil art shows an anonymous person blindfolded with an inscription of emancipation.

It is signed by TMTK, a group of underground anarchists inspired by the Filipino poet Eman Lacaba. In his Salvaged Poems, Lacaba says,

You want to know, companions of my youth,
How much has changed the wild but shy poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot
A turban around his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside,

There still is that same constipated fight for revolution waiting to explode, but all he manages to do is fart in the form of poetry. Sure, most anti-government sentiments take the form of essays printed in newspaper columns or aired in late night TV commentaries. But what about those who don't have access to information? Those who cannot afford to buy newspapers, let alone television sets? These stencil graffiti are painted right on the streets to reach a wider audience, to stir interest, to promote an idea, to ignite conversations, discussions, to rise and fight against our system of government.

The graffiti of missing people replicated everywhere have gained so much attention that even the carabaos, birds, and Santa Claus' reindeers have noticed them and did the same thing--to rise and fight against their Carabao System, Bird System, and Reindeer System of Government.

Unlike the stencil art of missing people, these of missing animals border on a whole new dimension of enlightenment. Their meaning is so indecipherable, so vague and perplexing, that there's no other logic to it than the animals did it. Perhaps it's one way to divert attention from the missing human beings, that an animal's life just costs as much as a man's. Or that The System itself spray-painted these to imply all these missing animals, and that includes the missing humans, are part of a cosmic blah art that doesn't mean anything. Or maybe it's a reaction against those graffiti of missing persons, mocking them and blurring the distinction between what's serious and what's ridiculous, that none of their efforts are going to change anything. Is it even saying anything at all? Whose pets are these away?

No doubt there's a dialogue in the graffiti community who are occupying the same space, acting and reacting against one another without even seeing or knowing each other. For a moment we think that's the end of it, but another figure springs up: a missing winged tarsier.

It verges on the fantastic it's mocking all the graffiti of missing persons and animals. It's questioning the power of all these political graffiti to influence public opinion: Are they effective? Have these artists changed anything at all? What happened to the opinion pages in newspapers? Are they losing their ability to influence people as well? Or is this dialogue among artists a visual representation of the dialogues we see in print, an exchange of opinions and not resolving anything?

Finally, someone sprays the end to it all.

This graffito merely says "ART" but says it differently given a specific angle. It's direct and self-referential, and yet abortive and suicidal. It's paradoxical in other words. It may not be even part of the dialogue, and yet it's painted there attracting some sense of purpose. What is this all about? Should we not care or should we?

Besides the stencils, there are other kinds of graffiti that have survived the clean up during the Centennial Celebration, one of which is the sticker graffiti. The stickers are no bigger than the size of a bondpaper, and they use a special kind of glue that would take you forever to peel and scratch off using your fingernails. Even if the stickers are removed, they leave this ugly smudge of white paper that would collect grime and turn black, looking even uglier than they used to be. Nobody wants a filthy wall, so chances are, you'll rather leave the stickers as they are.

A monster terrorizes UP Diliman. It is funny and amusing, but to some it elicits shock and anger. What have we done to the president? This is blatant vilification of the highest authority figure in the country! And yet we laugh at the caricature so hard it sinks in: the president controls everything, including the system of education in UP, including us. We are under the power of this monster. Who do you think is laughing now? Us or the president?

Other kinds of sticker graffiti promote an organization (UP Anino, top center) or an individual (Sicboy and Hepe). Unlike traditional graffiti which takes time to finish, sticker graffiti is the most efficient and effective way to advertise a person's art, a group, or an idea. There are no pressure or labels such as "success" or "failure" to limit them. The art was already preconceived and put on paper. The last thing left to do is paste them on walls where the guards are out of sight.

The sticker graffiti of individuals portray a different kind of frustration. Though the work they've done looks creative, smart, and crafty, wanting their art pasted there forever just shows how desperate they are. The artists who paste the same art they've made do show their artistic genius, but it's the cowardly, hesitating form of artistic genius they portray. It lacks the risk, danger, and suspense traditional graffiti artists go through. It could've worked to their advantage if they used this sticker form to advertise different variations of their art, all the while retaining the same style with or without the signature.

While the stencil and sticker artists are playing safe, other artists are out there to make a public performance. They are more creative, spontaneous, and reckless, too broke to go to art school, but not too broke to make art.

Street art like these have literally left the graffiti scene in UP. The cleaners must've left them out either because they're placed in abandoned areas or are farther away from the center of the campus (as in the case of the graffito fronting Bonifacio Hall). No fresh graffiti this spontaneously painted have ever appeared since the clean up. Have the spontaneous artists abandoned the campus? Obviously, the creative drive has dried up that even the yellow whale graffito was painted over with the same image due to the stagnation of imagination.

But still, three graffiti have remained to do more than disturb our stream of consciousness as we pass them by. They demand a second glance and linger in our memory longer than those previously mentioned.

This graffito features someone who looks like Darth Vader, and displaced the gun with a spray can instead. It uses a technique called "stenciling", which involves multiple layers of sprayed over stencils. It says, "Coloration is better than violation," grammatically rendered as "Graffiti is better than violence." It's the sort of graffiti that ignites a train of thought in our head. Is a battle of spray cans and skill better than a battle of knives and strength? Of course, the statement is a fallacy. It's like saying scratching out your enemy's eye is better than cleaving his head into two with a pickaxe. Both are an offense, one is just graver than the other. Substituting graffiti for violence doesn't solve the problem of violence; it's just justifying its point of existence. But then it strikes another question: why is it justifying its existence? Why should graffiti, all graffiti in general, exist?

The second was painted on a solitary wall standing across the College of Social Work and Community Development. Was the wall built for this graffiti or was the graffiti painted to beautify the ugly and otherwise purposeless wall?

This was painted by UP Alpha Phi Omega, the same fraternity who runs around naked at Oblation Runs every December. The first boy is sleeping; the second, saying "Isang Mundo ... Isang Pangako"; the third kid behind the wall says "Wait..."; and the fourth, "Ang hirap ng buhay, parang life." The style is generic; something a high school student can doodle at the back of his notebook. But given the blending of colors and ideas presented, not to mention the money, time, and effort invested to paint it, it's surprising to bump onto it amidst the mediocrity of the setting--it's something we don't see everyday.

And yet there's a plethora of prettier graphics we see everyday. They are glossy and stylized, complete with titillating fashion models promoting signature brands. They are sprawled on billboards, on huge skycrapers, on buses and trains, every single one of them screaming for our attention. But why do we find graffiti more interesting than advertisements?

Advertisements have all the tools to grab our attention and yet we don't look at them, much less pay attention to them. But when we see something like this, we are in shock. We protest: this should be inside an art gallery or a museum! What the hell is this doing out here? Most importantly, why?

The graffito on the tiled bench portrays a Victorian painting of an alfresco cafe with three gentlemen at a table, one of them eye-flirting with a woman at the other table. In a moment, our interpretation and criticism skills hang paralyzed, tossed out our brains. We don't know what to think, what to say, or how to react. We just stoop there gawking, not even wanting to sit on it. It's too beautiful to deserve our butts. It's too beautiful to turn our back to. But its stands there free for everybody to see and sit on. After we've absorbed all the details, the question boomerangs back to us even louder: why?

When we think about our advertisement-saturated streets, there is art everywhere. Some are even more clever and artistic than this one. But mostly they give us eyesores, trespassing into our heads. Graffiti and advertisements both promote something. But what's the difference?

If you have the money, you can put your graffiti on every billboard, on every street, every wall, every newspaper, every magazine, every web page, every imaginable space there is on the planet for all eternity. Money brings with it the absolute right to convey your name, your message, your idea, your art, in all forms of media and all kinds of space without violating the law. It all boils down to sheer capitalism: all this visual pollution is controlled by people playing lordship at the top of the food chain. They shape our dreams and desires at the subconscious level. But when it comes to personal space, those we call our brains, advertisements too invade our private property.

There's no question why graffiti grips our attention than advertisements do, no question why it even exists. Graffiti is art that doesn't lure us into giving the artist our money. Graffiti is art that doesn't require money to be plastered on a wall. Graffiti is free for artists to make and free for people to see. It's the homogenizing non-profit-driven commodity that shakes political and economic power. Graffiti slaps our faces and awakens us from being puppeteered by people we call authority and corporations. Graffiti is real and it exists to make a difference. In this world of fast cars, fifteen-minute fame, and branded lifestyles, we don't stop to smell the flowers any more. We stop to look at graffiti.

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