Grafitti Note

<h1>Grafitti Note:<br />
<strong>The Bus Ride</strong><br />
by Kevin Courtney</h1>

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<p><strong>​Re-PLACE-ing&nbsp;Philadelphia is building&nbsp;an expanded archive of cultural memory that includes multiple histories,&nbsp;re-place-ing&nbsp;the&nbsp;established with new&nbsp;narratives and understandings. Notes consider place via the street, sound, food, trees, and other portals.</strong></p>

<p><em>In partnership with educator Joshua Block, students from Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy are creating and publishing their Philadelphia Field Notes. Kevin talks about graffiti on his bus ride.</em></p>

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<p>School District of Philadelphia buses are the worst type of transportation in the city. The drivers don’t even care what they do. Most of them will drive recklessly. Sometimes they will keep repeatedly hitting the brakes making the bus bounce back and forth. Everyone on the bus is too bouncing back and forth. The buses give me headaches all of the time just because of the vibration of the engine that really needs to be worked on. Sometimes the transmission of the bus doesn’t even work at a stop light. The bus driver would have to keep tapping on the gas pedal to make the bus have this slow bouncy awkward motion until the bus decides to take off to reach up to between 25 to 30 miles per hour on every single block. Lastly the suspensions on the bus are horrible because each time the bus hits a huge pothole in the streets of Philly the suspension doesn’t have a good reaction. After the impact of the pothole the bus will either shake side to side or make everyone bounce up and down. Those buses seriously need to be worked on or we need new buses made for the city of Philadelphia.</p>

<p>My high school baseball team has to use them to get to the field we are scheduled to play at. The bus is the easiest transportation to use because using public transportation would even take longer to get the field. I like to sit in the front of the bus to avoid most of the shaking and bouncing. I usually stare out the front window looking at streets of Philly for a couples of reasons. One reason is to focus and get ready for the game. Another reason is to clear my mind from school and not to focus on the crappy bus my team is on. Finally the last reason is to look for cool graffiti designs on old abandoned buildings or walls.</p>

<p>The picture above was taken from the front seat on the bus heading to a baseball game. It looks like the graffiti designs were done on a old abandoned factory. My question is who did that? And how did they get all the way up on the walls and roof? I don’t care at all because the graffiti designs stands out the most instead of that family dollar sitting in front of it. The words don’t make sense but it makes me want to keep looking at them. The fonts are different and big. They each have different colors. What I like about these graffiti designs is that colors seem darker because maybe of the area it is in. The coolest thing is that the sky was cloudy and for some reason the dark colors of the designs were brighter. Whoever made those designs did a beautiful job to catch my eyes to look and take a picture of it.</p>

<p>I forget what area this photo was taken because sometimes when we’re heading to the game the bus goes through neighborhoods I haven’t seen at all. But wherever we go I always try to find graffiti just to look at because graffiti is my favorite kind of art. I encourage people to look any graffiti designs and analyze them and possibly write a graffiti note for the Re-PLACE-ing&nbsp;website.</p>

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