This tag on a power pole at 19th Ave E and Roy is a sad and odd cultural artefact. It appears to mark the death of 15-year-old Quincy Coleman, gunned down Halloween night in a shooting near Garfield High. There’s another on the back alley wall of the Russian Cultural Center across the street.
Not to become all tagging, all the time here on this site, but this tag, in particular, warrants note because authorities contend that Hill tagging is not gang related. Is this how real gang bangers say goodbye? Is this how wannabe punks do it? Ironic hipsters?
speaking of things that might or might not be art and that I sometimes don’t notice, are there new banners here now? has that been going on for a while?
In any case, that bird is cute.
This is how TAGGERS say goodbye.
oh, so wannabe punks?
testing testing 1-2-3
what bird?
This is just how it’s done. I don’t think it’s necessary to write (heh) off the taggers one-sidedly like that, or to try to categorize them other than to acknowledge that there IS a tagging culture here in Seattle, especially in this case when the tag is an homage and memorial to a dead kid from Garfield.
So why QC and not, say, Ed Jackson? Or the Tuba man?
Because Quincy was their friend, is my guess. Most taggers are middle and high school-aged.
Thought I spotted a silhouette of a bird on one of the banners that came up . . .
…most taggers are despicably selfish and otherwise talentless, slow-minded attention whores.
Haha. Another way to put that would be “middle and high school-aged.”
Friends or admirers but, yeah, I get it. For me, changes the tenor. It’s not ‘gang related’ in that I’m seeing a turf war play out around my neighborhood, etc. But it is ‘gang related’ in that violent shit is going on down the block and the kids that did this tag obviously feel related to it. Not only about the tagging for me. It’s about the relation to the violence.
“Because Quincy was their friend”… Because this shooting did have a Garfield connection (despite what the news reported), it has felt much more close to home–and it has made me realize, in a terrible way, how easy it has been for me to marginalize these deaths, to say, “Yes, this is bad and sad, a tragedy, but it’s a gang thing,” instead of thinking of the slain person as a kid with friends and a sense of humor. Many shades of gray there. The Monday after the shooting, after talking with my kid for a while (and after she showed me the YouTube video) I wrote some more of my thoughts here: http://poe-query.blogspot.com/2008/11/remembering-dead.html.