It cannot be the first time that cars in Brighton have been keyed (see http://www.theargus.co.uk/opinion/letters/10252552.So_Brighton___s_angry_brigade_scratched_my_car_____is_this_just_the_beginning_/) and it won’t be, if the followers of Professor Stephen Graham (Prof of Cities & Society) in Newcastle have anything to do with it. http://news.sky.com/story/1058930/graffiti-professor-stephen-graham-to-pay-28k

 

He may not want to be a martyr but he has just been sentenced to 9 months jail (suspended) plus ordered to pay £28,000 worth of compensation for scratching graffiti such as "very silly," "arbitrary,” "wrong" and "really wrong" on 27 cars in his neighbourhood of Jesmond, Newcastle. These were described as “ polite graffiti.” The court were told that “He had a problem with 4x4 vehicles, he thinks they are too large for a town.” He had admitted four counts of criminal damage and asked for another 23 cases to be taken into consideration. It is not known if he will appeal the costs order.

Certainly, Prof Graham’s writings show an un-holy resentment of large cars, particularly if they mimic armoured cars such as Hummers, SUV’s ect. His recent book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism is replete with convulated neologisms that basically boil down to a pathological hatred of cars, it seems. Part of his defence was that “ he was in a "dissociative state" when he scratched the cars, and was detached from reality.” He had also been drinking and on prescribed pills.

His academic work is exciting, in fact: as he puts it “ Disentangling the multiple Foucauldian boomerangs associated with the SUV within the framework of the new urban militarism involves tracing the connections which fuse contemporary auto-mobility with the broader circuits of popular culture, geopolitical power, military stategy, energy (in)security, resource wars and deeply militarised discourses and technologies.”

J. G. Ballard, eat your heart out. (see his seminal works “High Rise”, “Crash“ and Concrete Island”)