For months I'd been meaning to get myself a copy of Small Scale Arson, a tiny hardcovered zine-y book by Beware the Walls, and I finally bought one the other day (along with The Most of P. G. Wodehouse and a yoga magazine--don't ask--and the freakish contrast of topics occasioned a comment from an otherwise uninterested salesperson).

Arson is a seven-page story about a man who conceives of a series of violent acts against "all prominent large outdoor advertisements in his city." Instead of being reviled, he becomes a folk hero, à la Natural Born Killers, even as officials deem him a terrorist. A national movement explodes. But his blaze of glory is short-lived, and Arson ends on an exhausted note.

The ending is unusual because Beware the Walls is a stencil gang, and Small Scale Arson has the air of a manifesto. If it is, it's a manifesto of tremendous ambivalence-- of conviction and also resignation. Which, when you think about it, is an interesting ethos for a gang bent on what is illegal and largely considered vandalism. This, I think, is a telling attitude for a time when graffiti is no longer a loud shout from the powerless, or is no longer only such a declaration, but is also imitated by people with plenty of power. It might be said that when frat boys start tagging, tagging loses its power. I'll say it. There.

You've probably seen the work of BTW around town, in--for example--those black-and-white little-boy faces that have cropped up near Consolidated Works, hanging off telephone wires, and (my favorite) on the I-5 overpass at Boren Avenue and Pine Street. I loved looking at that one; it gave me a vertiginous rush. There was also, about a year ago, a perfectly placed image of a madly barking chained-up dog behind a hurricane fence in Pioneer Square.

I was keenly disappointed to see recently that the Boren and Pine face had been painted over (this, in graffiti slang, is known as getting "buffed"; for the last word on the accidental beauty of graffiti removal see Portland artist Matt McCormick's film The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, narrated with thrilling gravitas by Miranda July). A dynamic, underseen corner of the city had been returned to dullness. But when I e-mailed my BTW contact to tell him, he responded with the e-mail equivalent of a shrug, and the observation that a lot of things have gotten buffed lately. (More than one person has noted that the anti-graffiti truck has been spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill.) I guess you have to be philosophical to be a graffiti artist; the disappearance is part of the art.

Small Scale Arson is available at the Elliott Bay Book Company and Confounded Books.