TACKY IS AN ANGLO IDEA,
or,
NEW BRACELET!

65K, 700 x 555, 1983, felt pen, approx 11x14", by Chris Wayan


I like bad taste. Taste always tasted like another Anglo conspiracy to keep me from having fun. Comic books, bright colors, science fiction, short skirts... whatever I liked was always wrong.

The graffiti-poem on the steps,

Que tacky
is fea
es el Anglo's
idea...
--Burma Chavez
refers to something common in mid-20th century America but now largely lost: the Burma Shave company erected sets of five small signs, spaced about a quarter mile apart, on a lonely stretch of highway. The first four would each have one line of a comic poem (rarely linked at all to aftershave); the last would simply be signed Burma Shave as if the can of goo itself was some graffiti-poet. A few of these poems still survived on desert roads when I was a kid. I liked the wait between signs. Like in a comic strip (or haiku), the real action was in the gaps!
cartoon of the Mission District in San Francisco, with graffiti poem by Burma Chavez
Burma Chavez is a slightly more political pun that it looks. Here in San Francisco, the main street in the southern Mission district was called Army, because an old barracks stood at its end in the 19th century. A lot of local ignoramuses thought it was to honor fallen soldiers in some war or other, and freaked when the Latino community tried to rename it for labor leader Cesar Chavez. The name-change made the ballot a couple of times, and the streetsigns waffled back and forth for years, bewildering tourists and alternately annoying Anglos and Latinos...

Good old schizoid Mission!


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