All over the country they're seeing me. It's the same kind of thing as juvenile turfing. Like hip hop graffiti, the writing of contemporary tramps is all about self-identification. Caricatures and monikers dominate the boxcars, but Daniel also comes across sequential art with word balloons, poetry, and occupational folklore. There are also some amazing figures, the range of presenting female form is just incredible.
Some hands are so practiced and make such elegant lines, and others are so raw.
As for Bozo Texino, he's still out there, a timeless icon that is seemingly shared by every generation of hoboes. Next, Daniel plans to shoot a film about traveling carnivals, and its dying subculture of painters and ride builders. Daniel's message recalls the picaresque romanticism of those noble tramps of yesteryear, Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton. That the charmed life on the skids these Hollywood hoboes depicted seems as irretrievable as the Wild West is not surprising.