Teresa Nielsen Hayden has written a stunningly good tour of Subway Outlaws, a "rich, complex site about the work and history of NYC's aerosol graffiti artists," filled with links to the highlights of the huge site. This is the kind of annotation that hypertext was made for, and is rarely used for.
The lifestyle was hard. Some writers were throwaways or runaways, living wherever they could. Almost all of them were out stealing paint, sneaking into subway yards and tunnels at all hours, and getting into fights with other writers over territory, real and imagined slights, and raids on each others' paint supplies. They tell wild stories about escape attempts, successful and otherwise, when the police showed up. Although their joy was great when they saw a car they'd painted in use in the subway system, in effect a traveling billboard
for their work, there was always a good chance that the cars they'd
just gone to so much trouble to paint were going to immediately get
hauled into maintenance and buffed straight down to the metal, so that no one would ever see what they did.
