How to clean up our cities
UPDATE: “The Lynx Effect” on youtube, click here to watch!
I arrived back from Bali full of the joys of Spring even though I had just experienced the wet season. Two weeks in Paradise had lifted my heart, made me look at the world with fresh eyes, and equipped me for the journey of the next few weeks. I was really looking forward to getting together with the bus - my home - which had been parked outside my friend’s house in a quiet inner-city suburb of Sydney Australia. It was time to get back on the road “Down Under”.
I was shocked when I saw my bus. Some thoughtless and arrogant twerp had “tagged it” by which I mean someone had scribbled graffiti on the bus - left their “signature” in bright red and black paint on the side. It looked hideous ! Australia is covered with these “tags” and most of them are simply crude reproductions of what the young people concerned seem to think is “hip”. It’s as if the young people of Australia, or at least a small minority of them, want to change this beautiful place into a facsimile of downtown Detroit and cover all available surfaces with their illegible signatures ! Ugly ugly ugly !
I thought about calling the police to report the damage and then thought better of it, for (after all) it is the job of the police to catch criminals not misguided youths with spray cans. Then I thought I should make an appeal to “Banksy” the famous underground graffiti artist in England whose work is now highly collectible. Maybe he should come to Australia and I could offer my bus to HIM, so that what was a scribbled mess could be turned into a work of art ? Maybe he could show our local louts a thing or two and “upgrade the medium” so that at least it became a thing of beauty ? With these thoughts in mind I got in the bus and drove my friend to work, pondering on how I was going to remove the offending signature which disfigured the side of the bus.
I stopped outside a chemist’s shop and thought it would be a good idea to ask the chemist if there was any product which could be used to remove graffiti. The young chemist had no idea but was in the midst of dealing with a sales person from a pharmacological distributor - those “legal” drug dealers who make such astounding profits. The lady sales person answered my question for me, and I was astounded by her advice. “You should use Lynx deodorant” she told me. Deodorant to remove graffiti I asked myself ??? A long discussion re-assured me that this was no practical joke and I willingly forked out five bucks for a can of Lynx. This was a first for me as I have never purchased a can of deodorant in my life, preferring as I do to smell “natural” and to bath once a day. If deodorant can remove graffiti then what one earth, I asked myself, must it do to the human body ? What’s in the stuff to make it so powerful that it actually dissolves paint ? I laid these concerns aside and thought no more about it as I had various errands to run, and place the deodorant in a drawer in the bus for later use.
Several days later I was at a friend’s house. Jeremy had recently emigrated to Australia and was one of England’s finest photographers. When I told Jeremy about the woman’s claim that Lynx deodorant would remove graffiti we chuckled merrily at the absurdity of it all and decided that we had to establish whether such an improbable claim was true. We also decided that we should film the event in order that our sceptical friends could be left in no doubt as to whether the claim actually worked. The film, we decided, we would post on You Tube, with a link from my blog and a reference to it on Facebook.
Jeremy set up the camera to record my efforts, and I prepared myself for a starring role in “Lynx does Graffiti”. Firstly (on camera) I used the product for what it was (presumably) designed for - namely to stop gentlemen smelling. I liberally sprayed it under each of my arm pits and wondered about the health implications of such a move. Never mind, I assured myself, this is in the name of art. Or more accurately in the name of removing a mess which some dick head THINKS is art. With the camera rolling and a handful of tissues and the can of deodorant in-hand, I sprayed the side of the bus and there before my astonished eyes the offending graffiti literally melted and began rolling in blue and black and pink down towards the ground. I was flabbergasted and it took me a second to galvanize my thoughts and begin wiping off the paint. Deodorant works on removing graffiti ! I had “discovered” one of the great secrets of the universe !
The film will eventually be on YouTube (when Jeremy gets it together) and I am thinking of trying to ask Lynx for a fat fee for demonstrating to them a whole new market for their product. God only knows what it does to people ! I KNOW what it does to graffiti and graffiti is a massive problem in our cities - far more than smelly men ! So come on Lynx let’s go for it - the girls wont mind, and let’s face it, all they need to do is encourage the men to bathe once a day and all will be well ! In the meantime we could (all of us) buy a can of said product, and get off our butts and start cleaning up the mess the young people have made of where we live !
I am writing this in a suburban garden in Sydney Australia. The bus is sitting outside the house in a quiet leafy street. I haven’t seen it this morning, but if that little bastard has tagged it again I’m not going to wait up all night for him with a baseball bat - I’ll simply go out and buy another can of Lynx. So now you my beloved readers KNOW - and I am forced to admit that in a perverse and mysterious way “advertising makes it happen”. When Jeremy finally gets it together there will be photos of the event to accompany this blog. At the moment he’s fast asleep along with the rest of the good Australian citizenry, it is after all only five thirty in the morning and the dawm has hardly begun. This is the time of day when somewhere out there is a little bastard who’s got a paint spray can in his hand - well let me tell you sunshine, LYNX has got your number !!! And if you’re living in America the same applies - except there Lynx is called “Axe” - and the product can be used to chop this problem down to size. Come on people - reclaim the streets ! We don’t have to live in visual squalor ! Death to graffiti, life to art !
