Behind the Scenes Minis: Graffiti Animals

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I am Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson.

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Speaker 1: We talked about.

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Speaker 2: Spray paint this week.

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Speaker 1: Yep, I have a story about my own ding dongri as usual, Okay good. I initially wrote a note at the bottom of this to talk about where I was like, Millet's life sounds sort of awful to me. I travel a lot, but he traveled a lot and seemed to never settle like m And I was telling my beloved about this and he was like, it honestly doesn't sound that different from your schedule, and I was like, shush. But anyway, I played myself on that one, and I do. I really sort of love Millet a little bit because I see things in him that I recognize of myself. I would never claim that I achieve anything near what he achieved, but just that kind of I want to work in a million different things. I want my hands in a bunch of different pies.

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Speaker 2: Busy, busy bee.

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Speaker 1: Thing, I get it. I don't know that I'm done with Frank Millett. There's a non zero chance will get a more in depth version of his life on the show in the future, because I do find him really interesting. Now it's on to graffiti. Yeah, there is an article that comes up a lot in the history of spray paint. It was written in the New York Times like more than a decade ago, and just as we have I think referenced on the show. If you ever just want to be like man humans will fight about anything, go to like the New York Times cooking page or any of their social sites and watch people argue about the recipes. The same thing happened on this article about the history of spray paint and the reference to graffiti art, because a lot of people wanted to grouse and say you cannot put those two words together, to which I say, that is belogne. There is a lot of a amazing art in graffiti art. Not all graffiti is art, but graffiti art is a thing. But it was just fascinating to watch people dig in and some of it did boil down to is it just because the young people do it that you don't perceive it as art? Well, and there there are connections between graffiti and black culture also, right, they're a racism element. Oh one.

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Speaker 2: And like, I super get it.

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Speaker 1: If you own a business and somebody is tagging your door or your window or whatever and you don't want them to be doing that. I understand that that would be a very frustrating experience. But there are graffiti art projects that are beautiful, and also, like, I think there are people on a converse of that who will see graffiti and think that means they are unsafe, and those usings are unrelated. Yeah, I mean in some I mean there's a whole thing to break open here, and I part of me is like, should we do an episode on the history of graffiti? And I don't know is the answer, but like there are interesting discussions to have there, some of which are you know, in the case of graffiti art, there are instances to speak to your point that some people see it and feel like they're in an unsafe place or like it's a bad neighborhood. In some cases, those are grassroots efforts to bring life and some sort of beauty to the neighborhood. Yeah, obviously there are tags that are not meant to be beautiful, and that's fine, but there are a lot that are really really cool.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: One of the places that I see graffiti the most frequently is on commuter rail trains inbound to North Station in Boston. And what I am seeing it painted on is like derelict rolling stock, like train equipment that is not serving a purpose anymore.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and otherwise what would be.

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Speaker 1: There is just a deteriorating piece of train machinery. And now it's a deteriorating piece of train machinery with stuff painted on it. Honestly, the stuff painted on it might be holding it together in some cases. Yeah, yeah, I mean the sometimes paint will reinforce things a little bit in a way that yeah, like will prevent rust from hitting a certain area. The other thing that all of this made me think about, though, was sort of the I don't know that it's irony, but that Frank Millett invented a paint sprayer. Was an artist never thought about its potential application for art, Like if you could travel back in time and hand that man in airbrush, what would his brain dom?

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Speaker 2: What would he make? Something?

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Speaker 1: Mmmm, something beautiful? And also talking about all of this and looking at people arguing about graffiti art made me think of my youth. Of course, there was a trestle near where I grew up that like it was a rite of passage for many people to go spray paint it. But those weren't often like beautiful art. It was like literally someone writing like Ginny was here. It was not really you know, And it would get painted over periodically, and sometimes people.

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Speaker 2: In the community would complain that it.

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Speaker 1: Had gotten painted over, that it was part of like the the you know, youth culture of the area. H listen, I graffitied some not very much. Ye, not there incidentally, but somewhere else. I of course picked a weirder place.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Earlier this summer, we've talked about how I spent a couple of weeks away from my desk doing some family stuff, and I was staying in a very rural part of North Carolina. Just to give sort of an example of where, like, there are two dollar generals between my parents' house and where I was staying. Before you get to a grocery store that is not a dollar general. That's sort of like right, just to sort of set the stage of everywhere. And I will say I did not feel I could be myself in the environment where I was staying, not in my parents' house. My parents are great, but like out in public where I was staying, and afterward leaving, I was flying out of Raleigh Durham and I met up with some Raleigh Durham area friends for brunch before heading out and seeing a bunch of like very affirming graffiti in the bathroom at this restaurant, I was like, I feel so relieved right now to be in a place where even the things that people are writing on the bathroom wall, I feel more at home with. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw some similar graffiti when we were in Rome. The other thing that I just want to say in all of this is that I am grateful for all of these people that develop spray paint, because I sure have used a lot of spray paint in my life. Yeah yeah, I mean I do so many, you know, artsy things, and I have made some big honk and weird costumes that require spray paint, and I have spray painted a lot of things for my house. We have our little Star Wars canteena downstairs. It has a lot of greenbleys in it that have required spray painting. At some point. I feel like I have had spray paint hand more times than I can count. Just when your hand makes the claw because it's been spraying so long. I love those little trigger nozzles. I was gonna say, do you ever get a little trigger the trigger thing to help I do? But then sometimes it just you know, if you're doing it at scale, you're still gonna get paint.

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Speaker 2: It's just a different flavor.

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Speaker 1: I also feel like sometimes the little trigger thing affects your control a little bit, and so depending on what exactly you're trying to do, it can make it easier to depress the thing, but more difficult to control what you're aiming at. Yeah, sometimes some of them are pretty good, but then like you just get the like palm grip ache instead of the ouchy finger ache. Yeah, it's it's very It's all fascinating to me, and I like the idea that you know, many many minds had to come together to get us to the point where we could just run to the hardware store or the craft store. I mean, when I think about how amazing it was touted that there were twenty five different colors, and I'm like, now there's like stuff that has you know, chroma shift flakes in it that look different colors from different angles, and like, yeah, every color of the rainbow and beyond.

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Speaker 2: And I love that.

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Speaker 1: I love it.

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Speaker 2: Spray paint the world. It's the best.

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Speaker 1: I'm also I'm gonna I'm gonna draw iron. Okay, this is such a contentious issue. I deeply dislike woodgrain. Okay, so I want to paint things that are would I know that many people get irate when they see, like antique furniture that's been painted. Not me, paint right over it, baby, make it pink, make it purple, whatever. If it were a very finely finished piece, I wouldn't do that. But I also wouldn't buy that for myself. Yeah, but I will go into an antique store or a thrift store and find a very old piece of wooden furniture and just paint it some pretty color. Yeah. This is not exactly the same thing, but it does connect to the episode when you were talking about whitewashing the basement.

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Speaker 2: I did not really know.

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Speaker 1: And so seeing one of those historical reality shows where people pretend to be back in time, and I think this was one that was a the building of a castle, and I did not refresh my memory about what the title of this was. But one of the things that they were talking about, was like, you would have the castle with these like dark stone walls and sometimes not very big windows because you wanted it to be defensible, not have big open spaces that your siege. Your siege could have people besieging you, just shooting.

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Speaker 2: Arrows through there.

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Speaker 1: And one of the things that they would do was whitewash the walls. And I didn't really know that because most historical sites that I have been to that have had some kind of like castle element, the walls have not been whitewashed. It's just been very dark on the inside. Yeah, And the before and after difference of whitewashed versus non whitewashed walls was incredible. I was like, I've always imagined that this space would have been dark and gloomy and foreboding, but with all the walls whitewashed, it's actually nice.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And that also, you know events things like mildew growth and yeah, bacterial yuck and all of the things that would make people sick if they were hanging out in a castle fortress for a long period of time. So m h. Whitewashing used in a vernacular in a negative way, but the actual act of had a perfect putting. Lime was valuable, is still valuable. It still gets done anyway. Spray paint, I sure love. It makes me want to go make crafty things, but I don't have time yet. We talked about the dick and Metal and some animals that were awarded it. Yeah, I cried about the dick and Metal a lot. I apologize, Holly. She thought it was safe. Yeah, Well, often when I'm working on an episode, I have a good sense of whether it's going to make you cry. And I misjudged this one because I intentionally leaned toward animals who some of them were posthumously awarded the medal, but it wasn't because they died while doing the thing that earned them the metal. And I kind of try to keep the animal harm to a minimum, and so I had thought that made it reasonably safe territory. I was incorrect on this, So I apologize Holly, and I apologize Casey. Are pretty serious. It was the audio edit the episode. Well, I have to distract myself by thinking about Star Wars so that I stopped crying. Yeah, yeah, you know, yeah, about all the animal things.

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Speaker 2: It makes sense.

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Speaker 1: Sometimes I will check with you ahead of time to see if you think something is going to make you cry, And sometimes I am right and sometimes I'm wrong. We all have different things that cause the waterworks to happen. I mean I cry at everything anyway. I was just telling you on a kind of grueling schedule as of late, and it's going to keep going for a little while, and that makes me very weepy, even when I'm not the last bit sad or emotional, Like, I just have a physical response to being tired that is crying. Yeah. Yeah, if I am sick at all. Oh, and it could be like sick and actual illness or sick just feeling kind of bad. Because like, for example, if I have just gotten a vaccine and it's made me feel a little achy, I might just cry over everything.

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Speaker 2: I remember. I can't remember if I had like a.

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Speaker 1: Mild cold, I had something something that was causing me to feel a little unwell, and I turned on my Little Pony Friendship is Magic. Oh yeah, and just started weeping over the theme song it happens. Yeah, I think I've told I may have told you this story. After my little surprise gallbladder surgery last year, which went great, I came home and for the first few days I did nothing but sit on the couch watching Blue and crying, and I was even like, what is going on? And then like that second day, I had like a late lunch and after that I was like, oh, I'm fine, and it was like literally like a window had opened and the sun had come out. And then I read that Delauded, which is a very heavy hitting pain management drug that they would give you in the hospital, one of the side effects is uncontrollable weeping, and it was like, oh, I guess it just left my system because wow, aces now okay, some of it initially was like that I felt like garbage, and it's that thing of like is this my life now? Where I don't feel like myself and I feel like I am incapacitated in terms of my vigor not being here and like not.

00:14:44
Speaker 2: Being able to engage with the word.

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Speaker 1: But that that had, you know, passed pretty quickly, and then I still was like, why am I still crying? And it was like, oh, it's it's literally chemical, Okay, yeah, cool, cool, yeah, fascinating. One of the things that we talked about in this episode was the influence that the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals had on the world of veterinary medicine in the UK, which we have a whole episode on, like a brief History of Veterinary Medicine. I can't remember if that's already been a Saturday Classic or not. Off the top of my head, I don't remember either. Yeah, we talked some about like the shift in focus from large farm animals, especially horses, but also cattle and sheep two more of a focus on companion animals. And there's a lot that went into that. Some of it had to do with how many people were living in rural areas and had a cow or a horse or whatever, and how many more people were living in urban areas and instead have pets. It was connected to how people thought about animals like dogs and cats and pets. It was also related to the people's dispensary for sick animals, establishing this idea that yes, these all these animals also deserve care, including veterinary care. One thing that we didn't really get into, that was discussed in a couple of the things that I read for this episode was that at this point there was a shift in some of the what goes under the umbrella of animal rights advocacy, and how prior to this, a lot of people, a lot of whom were women, who were advocating for animal welfare. A lot of them were advocating for like anti cruelty laws to you know, outlaw people who used working horses in their in their daily worlds, to you know, not allow cruelty to toward those horses, and to not allow cruelty to smaller animals either. Right, And at this point, a significant portion of like the animal welfare advocacy shifted toward providing veterinary care for animals, and that just sort of being a shift in the mindset of what animal welfare and animal rights advocacy meant. Yeah, and now we'll go to the emergency vet and stay up all night with our creatures. Yeah. My last trip to the emergency vet was very comedic in the end. It was scary in the moment and then hilarious because, as I've said, we adopted several new cats this year, one of whom is very hard bonded to me, and there was one night where she was just like breathing really rapidly and it scared me and I, oh, I did. I wasn't sure what was going on, I sent a to the telehealth thing that I have through my veterinarian's office, and the VAT that I spoke with was like, oh, this does look troubling. You should take her to the emergency VET. And we went and I hadn't you know, I had had her like two months at that point, so I didn't know all of her personality quirks. And we went to the emergency VET. We ran a million kajillion tests, we did X rays, we did all the things, and it really came down to the fact that she had kind of she had really bad gas and gave herself a panic attack essentially because she was uncomfortable. Oh she's a chip off the old block. But yeah, she's a hoot, that cat. I love her. I love her. Yeah, I love her. And I mean I'm sure, right, this is the kind of story that I tell someone like my dad and he's like, that is ridiculous, right, Why did you spend all that money?

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Speaker 2: Why did you get It's because it's.

00:18:51
Speaker 1: My my little smooky baby.

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Speaker 2: Not to entrepremorphize animals.

00:18:56
Speaker 1: I don't need her to be a baby, I need her to be a cat.

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Speaker 2: Which I love.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very funny. So this idea of the progression of veterinary care being not initially part of having a pet to where we are now just tickles me.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I have become sort of more aware of how many people keep snakes as pets. Of course I have known people have snakes as pets, Yeah, but how many people have snakes as pets and also don't live in a place where there is a veterinarian who treats snakes, oh yeah, And so not having access to any kind of like emergency or urgent care for their snake when something is clearly wrong. And I see stories about this, and it stresses me out a little bit, and I have to remember, I don't I don't have to read this, this person's forum post about what I don't have to I don't have to read that. Are you into snakes or are you scared of snakes or indifferent to snakes? I find snakes interesting. I have never been really scared of the I have for sure had experiences where like a snake startled me. Yeah, I mean, my husband startles me. Sometimes anything can startle me. So when I was a kid, you know, being in the this would have been like late eighties early nineties, and we had this idea of the latch key kids who were coming home and letting themselves in.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I had a key.

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Speaker 1: To the basement door of the house, and there was some logic for why I was entering the house after school through the basement and not through the front door, and I don't remember what that rationale was. But I was making my way around the side of the house and there was a flowerbed back there that had stopped to be being actively maintained as a flowerbed, and I only had a couple of things in it and was otherwise just bare dirt.

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Speaker 2: And there was a little like a garter.

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Speaker 1: Snake or a black rat snake, like some non venomous, totally normal to have around snake. But I saw it out of the corner of my eye and it startled me enough that I leapt backwards like I was in a cartoon. So anyway, I am not afraid of them. I do find them interesting. I do also find some of them unnerving enough that I like looking at them to just sort of, you know, keep myself acclimated to the fact that snakes are cool and they're good to have around. But I get a little stressed out sometimes that the number of people who's post about their snake is like, my snake is sick and there's no vet to take it too.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, that would suck.

00:21:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is just a thing to keep in mind if you are bringing an animal into your life. Yeah, is veterinary care accessible? Yeah?

00:21:57
Speaker 2: Uh, that's a biggie.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. A lot of people focus on like being able to afford veterinary care, especially when it comes to things that are like expensive veterinary procedures. But there's also just like is there a vet, yeah that you could take it too.

00:22:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, both of these are factors.

00:22:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. I enjoyed working on this episode. I had just as like I said in the introduction to it, just the longer I worked on Buck versus Bell, the angrier I was. And then I was like, we're gonna do some cute animal stories and yes, there's animal peril, but also we're going to talk about some good dogs and cats and pigeons and a horse. If you want to learn more about pigeons, Rosemary Moscow has the Guide to Pigeon Watching that we mentioned a number of other books, so lots of stuff from her if you're interested. Whatever's happening on your weekend. I hope it goes great. If you have some animals in your life, I hope you're able to love on those animals, if they liked to be loved on, if they liked to be.

00:23:05
Speaker 2: Observed from Afar.

00:23:06
Speaker 1: Have fun observing observing your animals from Afar. We will be back with something brand new on Monday, but before that, we will have a Saturday Classic tomorrow. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,