Stuff

Tagsploitation

By VICE Staff

Dear Vice,
You folks are clever enough to come up with a comment for this. Perhaps something about a company who owes its success to exploiting graffiti culture paying a non-citizen minimum wage to scrub tags off their gleaming corporate... Oh wait is that the Toronto Vice office?

Oops... Maybe something about overalls.

CINEIMMUNE

Dear Cineimmune,

Yeah, we had a real crisis of conscience when we found out the landlord of the building we rent had hired someone to clean off all the nicknames spray-painted over our windows. It was like, there is no way some stooge is going to disrespect the work of guys like Klips and Steak and B-Mark on our watch. Those boys spent hours on those throw-ups just to get their names out there (you know?) and we're supposed to just stand by while some immigrant sandblasts away their dues? Come on. Besides, we owe it to them on the basis of publishing a free magazine that used to run ads geared toward people who are into graffiti.
Our first plan was to simply move out. Fuck whatever rent we owed, fuck whatever deposits that guy had of ours, just jam on out of there with our integrity. Then one of our interns brought up a really good point: What if we move out and some cred-less new company moves in and just cleans off the windows themselves? Or shit, what if that slimeball landlord decided to clean it all off anyways in order to "attract" some suburban yuppie company into the P-Dale? We can totally see him doing that.
So then we considered just busting up the whole front ourselves before they could get their grubby hands on it, you know? Viking funeral style. But then we realized not everyone would know the full context and could misconstrue the gesture as disrespectful. Finally we decided the most reverent way to handle the situation was to remove the tagged up windows on our own and replace them with fresh panes for their guy to scrub. Right now we've got them swaddled in velvet in a climate-controlled storage room at the back of the office so they'll be safe while we wait for the coast to clear so we can put them back up. Until then just bear with us please.
By the way, your "non-citizen, minimum-wage" worker was an average Canadian white guy. Nice one.