SOUTH MINNEAPOLIS TRANSIT GRAFFITI TURF WAR FACE-OFF: Draughtsman vs. Coxswains.
The BOATS tag was photographed on a bench in the heated bus shelter on Lake Street by the Hiawatha LRT station. I’m just guessing it’s coxswains that have done this. It could be midshipmen, windjammers, yachters, scullers or tarpaulins, too, I suppose. Who else celebrates the use of boats? There aren’t a lot of boats in South Minneapolis. Boats are an Uptown thing; that’s where all the lakes are. Although there are always flocks of really noisy seagulls hanging around the Lake Street Target parking lot. I’ve never understood that.
The PANTOGRAPH HANDLE sticker tag was photographed over a door on a southbound Hiawatha LRT. Again, I’m guessing it’s draughtsmen that have done this. Who else celebrates the use of the pantograph? I thought at first the sticker meant “pantone handle,” as in, “my pantone handle is 101 C” (roughly the color of the inside of the LRT trains) and it was a designer joke I’d pretend to be hip enough to understand but would email Erik when I got home and ask him to explain for me. “Pantone handle” actually sort of makes sense, in this context, but a pantograph is something else entirely.
A pantograph is, as I’m sure you know, “a mechanical linkage connected in a special manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one specified point is an amplified version of the movement of another point. If a line drawing is traced by the first point, an enlarged (or miniaturized) copy will be drawn by a pen fixed to the other.” So says Wikipedia. In fact, I once worked in a store that sold pantographs, for six years. In all that time, no one ever bought even one.
Is this one of things like the Conrad star fiasco, where everybody knows exactly what BOATS and PANTROGRAPH HANDLE means, and I’m the only one in the dark? I hope not, because I really like the idea of roaming gangs of coxswains and draughstmen tagging the train platforms and bus stops of the southside.
