St. Petersburg Graffiti

Random samplings of street art from St. Pete. (Evidently someone there really has a thing about The Simpsons - also see a previous post here.)

Red Kid Graffiti

You see graffiti in Naples so infrequently, I'm always pleasantly surprised when I do. This specimen was spotted on a dumpster in Olde Naples. What is it exactly? Not sure. A kid bundled up in a hood like South Park's Kenny?

Fat Guys With Beards Are Everywhere

A good graffiti meme these days apparently consists of confounding the viewer with its randomity and relative meaninglessness. Look no further than Saxapahaw Sam and Gulf's work for examples, and now this, seen in two locations in St. Petersburg, many blocks apart from one another.

"Fat Guys With Beards Are Everywhere". Okay.

I stuck my beak in the search engines for a moment and all I saw was that similar stickers with that same catchphrase are being offered on Cafepress by some company that makes lame stickers, buttons, and t-shirts of the "being obnoxious, snarky and random is what passes for humor these days" school.

So are they mocking fat guys with beards, or expressing solidarity with them? Honestly, I don't even think they're doing either; that would imply too much logical thought process, which is a quickly vanishing commodity in this zombie nation.

St. Pete Graffiti Stickers

I'm finding that Saint Petersburg is a real hub for cool graffiti, especially stickers. This pair of metal doohickeys in an alley downtown serves as a splendid gallery for some of the local hipsters' finest work.

Nelson from The Simpsons always makes for a classy spray.

Pixie Is Present

Walking in Gulfport, I looked down and saw something tiny at the base of a large tree, something so small only shoegazers and children might have a chance of noticing it. I got down on my knees to examine it, and it's a tiny green door with an even tinier doorknob. And a tiny handpainted sign nearby reads, Shhhh! Pixie is present & is sleeping. Quiet please!"

I didn't open the door. Who am I to disturb a pixie?

"Gulf" Graffiti

And then there was the casefile involving a paint-pen-on-sticker bit of graffiti art seen on Treasure Island, involving some sort of cyclopean alien worm-guy, the tag "Gulf", and a scrawling in pencil, "oh, butts, vaginas and diarrhea, great, that's what the world is coming to."

Saxapahaw Sam

Did a double-take when I passed this paste-up graffiti in Ybor the other day. Some sort of parody of noted groundhog Punxsutawney Phil called Saxapahaw Sam, and with the cognitively-dissonant caption "I Will Kill You."

(What is up with Florida and "kill you" graffiti lately?)

According to this:

Richie identified the work as that of Saxapahaw Sam, a well-known Franklin Street tagger in her UNC-Chapel Hill years. He was popular until he took it a step too far, rather than defacing an abandoned or under construction building, as is the case in Durham, he painted on the walls of an open establishment, which was naturally quite upset.

That article, from 2013, made it sound like Sam is retired from the tagging game, but this graffiti is new. New enough that a fellow seeker of arcane lore, one BXGD, took this picture of the very same graffiti in Ybor just days earlier. And then there's this recent aggregation of Sam's oeuvre in other locales.

I haven't delved much further into the matter because it's often the case that finding the story behind enigmatic graffiti is disappointing, and I usually much prefer not having it explained. I just like Sam in all his mystery the way he is, on his own merits.

Kill U

Graffiti spotted on Bird Key.

Is this somebody's alma mater? I attended Whassamatta U. myself.

Keith Haring's Ghost

For reasons I was probably not put here to get, someone has been putting up surprisingly well-done imitation Keith Haring graffiti paintings around Jacksonville. What does it all mean?

What baffles me, though, is that they're actually signing them as Keith Haring. Does he walk among us as a zombie, and if so, can a zombie reboot of Jean-Michel Basquiat be far behind?

The two examples here are variations on Haring's Untitled (Buddies with Heart), 1987.