Chichen Itza, Easter Island, the Sphinx, I am a sucker for artistic wonders, seeming impossibilities, creative miracles. How did humans make these artistic monuments? I've seen Chichen Itza, but missed seeing the Sphinx on the family trip to Egypt because I couldn't take vacation from my new after-college real job, and Easter Island is a really long trip for someone who doesn't love flying. But I've discovered I can find plenty of jaw-dropping creative works right here in the U.S.A.. It's called graffiti. This urban art never ceases to fascinate me, and with recent train trips to New Jersey, I've had plenty of time to indulge myself all along the Amtrak corridor.

Everything about graffiti is a conundrum to me, even though I've been painting as long as I've been reading (a couple parents offered to buy my seascape on display in the school hallway in fourth grade, an honor I have yet to repeat), drawn my share of pudgy or bell-bottomed letters on notebooks and various posters over the years, and tangled with spray paint cans aplenty. Yet I still don't get how these artists get such straight clear long lines. Or such uniform color. I've been told they are using airbrushes. I've also been told anyone can use an airbrush. It's easy. This I do not believe. High on my list of things I need to try is airbrushing. But even if air brushing is easy standing on the ground in a car body shop with all your supplies at hand, or in a T-shirt studio on the boardwalk, how is it easy balancing on top of a railroad trestle over a river, or forty feet off the ground on the side of a warehouse building, or sixty feet off the ground decorating an advertising billboard? I don't know how people reach these locations in the first place, let alone how they can be changing colors or creating such sweeping masterpieces with no one seeing them? In the middle of the night? For this is a criminal activity, defacing public and private property. And no doubt that is what gives this urban art that much more of an edge. To what ends the people at the other end of the paint will go to make their mark on this world, literally.

I watch a lot of documentaries about different fringe groups within our one big grand human culture — motorcycle gangs, polygamists, tibetan monks — but I have yet to discover one on graffiti artists. I think I would love to see some hidden camera footage of how these shadowy creators accomplish their markings. And then I think maybe I like it better not knowing at all. Maybe I don't want graffiti to be anything but what it is right now — a very local, very prevalent wonder of my modern world.