Week 2 – Image Junkyard 1

Roma.  We’re going to Roma. 

The train was very comfortable and had huge windows from which to watch the countryside pass.  We traveled South and as we left the mountainous region, the terrain became softer, gentler, and then, the tunnels.  Every time we went through a tunnel my eardrums retracted with the pressure and I found myself clasping my hands over my ears even though it did nothing to relieve it.  When I opened my eyes, I noticed the Italian woman sitting across from me was doing the exact same thing.  We exchanged grimaces in a shared form of bonding.  She in Italian, me in English, no translation needed. We worked our mouths in an effort to find relief and grinned when we finally achieved equilibrium and once again watched the rolling hills and graffiti takes turns gliding past our window like a B-movie whose scenes were disconnected, yet somehow came together at the end exposing connections not fully realized at first.

The graffiti was beautiful to my eyes, but in a different way from the rolling hills with houses and castles perched atop their summits.  At one point, we passed an intersection where the graffiti was layered, sloping up the hill, stratified in one beautiful layer after another.  It was if the artists were competing for a valuable prize to create the most beautiful, meaningful, work of public art.  The colors, the techniques, the messages were interspersed with icons, like company logos:  Tisko, Smithereps, Hot Boys, the Rung seemed to have quite an extensive territory, almost as large as the Hot Boys.  Vibrant green and yellow with accents of hot pink colored the wolves representing Lupi, wolves.  This philosophy seemed to be in compettion with a little blue space creature embedded in the Goonings’ message that popped out of a purple and yellow color scheme.