Dear Layla,
Why did you have to ruin it?
The art competition in the I-90 Mount Baker bike tunnel had been reaching new heights of excellence with no end in sight. Every vertical surface has been an ever-changing canvas of giant letters so expertly spray-painted and stylized as to be wholly unreadable, particularly by people cruising by on bikes an arm's length from the fine works.
Art school hegemony about scale and perspective is the oppressor forever dismissing graffiti as less-than. No more. The art on the tunnel walls refuses to be put in its place! Or even to be viewed, for that matter. For if a person could step back from the six-foot-tall words far enough to take them in—not possible thanks to the confined space of the narrow tunnel—close to none of them would be decipherable even then.
That's thanks to the masterful use of lettering so unusual and jammed together that the world's top typographers and philologists would require weeks of study to translate it into current usage. There are the almost-bursting bubble letters, like marshmallows left on the stick by the campfire too long. And numerous styles using unexpected swoops and angles and arrows, also intertwined and smushed together. Brilliant! These artists make the viewer work to understand what the art is saying, unlike that overhyped Banksy, who serves up the meaning on a silver platter.
So many artists have taken to the tunnel walls as the place for their work to never be enjoyed that they have to spray over what a previous artist did mere days before, sometimes before the odor has dissipated or the WSDOT crews have gotten around to picking up the spent cans proudly left on the ground. It's a call and response dance not unlike a slow-motion bird mating ritual, or the scene from that Pitch Perfect a capella battle in the dry swimming pool. Nerd artists going at it, pheromones in the stagnant tunnel air.
And then, in the midst of the art demanding not to be understood, is a plainly legible LAYLA. Only a couple of feet high, done with conventional lettering and contrast. Easy to read. Memorable. A statement that you were there, Layla. Okay, but damn, we didn't want it to be so easy. We didn't ask for your horn cutting through the fog on a dark night.
You probably don't want to be that way, Layla. I get it, and there is hope! In that same tunnel, you can find the inspiration you need. Walk from west to east and look at the ground. Stenciled on the floor are these simple words:
I AM NOT OK
And that phrase gets repeated on successive pads of concrete, a mantra of despair, until after some number of repetitions, the phrase starts to be accompanied and overlaid by a new phrase:
BUT I WILL BE
Which itself is repeated over and over until, as you near the light at the end of the tunnel, you know you have the strength you need.
Layla, take heed. You will be okay, and you will no longer have to interrupt all the invaluable tunnel art with something people can understand.
Do you need to get something off your chest? Submit an I, Anonymous, and maybe
we’ll illustrate it! Send your unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation to
ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and
the guilty.
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