Tagging Along

There's a new guy out there. His tag is "Krash UCUT." It's all over our neighborhood. He's taken over for "Kermit" who favored a wide laundry marker for scrawling over objects that foolishly stood still in front of him. Before that was "Dokie" who was more of a mixed-media guy, using markers or paint, and even the occasional scratch into plexiglass with key or screwdriver. "Krash" is strictly paint and brush. You can tell by his "font" and the casual drips at the bottom of his letters. This guy is an artist.
Except for the fact that he's slapping black paint on property that isn't his. I tried to figure out what the ethos was for picking surfaces on which to tag. Walls, especially those hidden from direct view of the main street, trucks (mostly white panel jobs with lots of room to write), and the occasional fence - as long as the slats were reasonably close together. The walls and fences make sense to me. They're flat and they don't tend to move. The trucks would seem to fit in that category, but there is no assurance as to when they might suddenly leave the block, or city for that matter. Maybe these were the vehicles that had become fixtures for the neighborhood and therefore were essentially firmament.
Why not tag cars? I suppose if one sat long enough by the curb and showed no signs of being owned by a large and/or insane person then that car could lapse into that stationary thing that is no longer a threat to cause fear or retribution. This is the part that takes the "art" out of graffiti to me. Tagging a school that is dark and empty for many late night hours seems like no big stretch. It seems a little like kicking a blind dog. You're probably not going to get much of a charge out of it. Unless you're a real twit.
That's what I'm worried about. My school has been remodeled this summer, and as part of the millions of dollars that have been funneled into this project for the past seven years, we have had a security guard watching the place at night. That's primarily to keep the construction materials and machinery safe, since it had little deterrent on the fire that was set in one of our dumpsters. Still, the frequency of the tagging at our school has dropped off with all this extra attention. They're supposed to be done with construction in the next couple of weeks. No more security guard. All those big, clean walls. Maybe "Krash" will run out of paint.