There's a graffiti artist in my neighborhood whose tag is great. It's a cartoon of a boy walking, head-on, his right knee bent back and the shoe vertical, his left foot forward; his right arm lifted and the fingers splayed in a bursting wave. The boy's mouth is a wide, rectangular grid of teeth superimposed on his round face – the borders of the mouth are actually outside the borders of the face. He's got a zooey expression and abstract, spiky hair. The image is joyous, positive, affirmative somehow, yet also faintly disquieting (that mouth!). The artist sometimes draws a suggestion of a sidewalk beneath the boy's feet, and usually a "© 2002."

He also sometimes refers to the surroundings in his tags: I see them a lot in the subway, drawn in the white space of an airline poster that mentions foreign cities and seems to change cities from week to week. When the poster said Paris he drew an Eiffel Tower behind the boy and, weirdly, a landscape of snow-covered mountains in the distance. When it said Rome he drew the leaning tower of Pisa.

He also sometimes incorporates messages. On another poster in the subway he drew the tag and these words above it: REGAIN CONSCIOUSNESS Early in the morning, underground, waiting for the train, I can't help but perceive this as something like a divine command.