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I have been reading the Washington City Paper regularly ever since I moved back to D.C. in the summer of 2004. That was right around the time when the now-ubiquitous “Borf” tags began to appear on random light poles, mailboxes, and the like. I’m sure that many people, including myself, assumed that once this stealth tagger was captured, as John Tsombikos was in July 2005, that all the Borf adulation in the local print and electronic media would soon die off. Not so. The most recent issue of the City Paper had not one but two Borf-related articles (“Washington just wasn’t big enough for both of us,” 2/24; “The Tagger, Confined,” 2/24)—one an interview with the art student himself. The ratio of media coverage to public interestedness in this subject is absurdly high. Your editors and freelance writers may get off on covering the juvenile, yet highly visible, acts of a youth who has sadly mistaken delinquency for social disobedience, but the reading public does not. I hope this recent paroxysm of Borf fever turns out to be an overdue coda to the City Paper’s two-year love affair with the ignoble character. Now let’s get on with more important reportage, such as what the hell the opening of a Buffalo Billiards is going to do to the fledgling-but-hip drag of 14th Street NW south of U! Thanks.
U Street