Thanks to recent patronage and recognition by historically holier-than-thou academies — to wit, JR’s TED Prize, Banksy’s Oscar nomination for Exit Through the Gift Shop, even Shepard Fairey’s moonlighting turn as political propagandist — street art is under a mainstream microscope like never before. Grimy subversion is trendy again among the artistic aristocracy, and this time the momentum isn’t limited to a couple New York City crossover street artists with interesting names and/or marketable minority status. Rest assured that, just as disco supplanted the longhair political ballad, as Eminem’s daughter replaced Eminem’s homicidal mushroom trips, as the Macarena hokey-pokeyed all over Cobain’s grave, pretty shiny things will soon return to favor — Jeff Koons, breath easy.
Until then, however, the masses need to prep for First Thursdays and Third Firstdays in Soho and Soma, in Silver Lake and the Marigny and the Pearl, at Moma and Lacma and the De Young and other venues and warehouse neighborhoods where the promise of free Rossi and cocktail wieners attract the more self-respecting and educated of the city’s impoverished alcoholics. They need banter material, and to banter passably, one must know enough to feign expertise — preferably in something current, hip, and, crucially, appealing to attractive members of the desired sex.
Herein, as always, enters Taschen: In Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, the iconic publishing house provides an encyclopedic overview of 150 of the most influential and relevant players in the game today. In profiling the core of the famously insular clique, Trespass sheds light upon an esoteric world dominated by semi-anonymous characters and complex discourse over the last few decades.
The book, released worldwide earlier this year, features context and commentary from the likes of Marc and Sara Schiller (Wooster Collective founders) and Carlo McCormick (senior editor at Paper magazine) alongside sprawling images tracking the evolution of the art form from its emergence in the early 1980s through the present day. The inconsistent quality and chronological distribution of the book’s photos would seem to owe much to advances in technology: Due to its ephemeral nature, urban art has long proven difficult to document, but thanks to the ubiquitous camera phone and the viral immediacy of twitter and its ilk, most works by today’s prominent artists are captured, disseminated and critiqued by the graph-geek crowd long before city workers or property owners get a chance to paint over them.
Portraying works by Keith Haring, Richard Hambleton and Paolo Buggiani, Trespass traces the roots of modern street art to Banksy and other contemporaries while posing a fundamental question about the motivation of its practitioners: Is street art an evolutionary step in the progression of human visual communication, or simply an instinct to mark territory as a dog would with its urine? This latter notion of human “aesthetic territorialism,” editor Ethel Seno asserts, dates back to the Paleolithic, in the form of cave paintings. And thus the crux of the debate is clarified: Is street art intended to push boundaries and awaken a systematically numbed public, as many of its major players claim, or is it merely “Kilroy was here” delivered in ever-more-elaborate forms? In other words, for all the artists’ grandiose proclamations of subversion and iconoclasm, is the basic motivator really just a yearning for recognition? In the case of NYC train bombers, BNE guy, Neckface, and your average neighborhood tagger, the answer would appear to be a resounding “yes.” When it comes to Banksy and Swoon, among others, the verdict is “uhhhh…well, that, uh…depends?”
To step backward for a moment — and not to get too abstractly philosophical up in here — many artists do seem to crave recognition and its attendant trappings of respect and, with the right medium and image, riches. Banksy can spit in the face of collectors and authority all he likes, but he’s no fool — he knows the best way to make a name (and a few enemies) is to upset the status quo. So when street artists attribute their work’s inspiration to principled flashpoints like “promoting the First Amendment” or “speaking truth to power,” digest this with the knowledge that controversy and artistic emergence are often symbiotic.
This, as outlined in Trespass, is where the prospect of publicity and mainstream acceptance threatens to endanger the multifaceted medium: Street art began as a form of protest — against the galleried art world, against municipal intrusion on freedom of expression, against crooked politicians, against the concept of rules and authority in general (although the anarchist angle rings hypocritical considering that old-school street artists operated under rules of etiquette so revered that they were often backed up with the promise of violence). Now, with its international profile on the rise and its most prominent artists on display in chic galleries and auction houses on both sides of the Atlantic, street art must accept the fact that it has become, in large part, a contributor to the art-world status quo. While perhaps not a full-privileges member of the establishment just yet — with Warhol’s Marilyn portraits in mind, let’s wait five or so years before issuing such a declaration — the subculture has surrendered some measure of its power to subvert simply by virtue of gaining acceptance. As the authors of Trespass point out, a fundamental tenet of street art is that it question general consensus from an outsider’s perspective — from the viewpoint of the willful nonparticipant oppressed by the whims of society’s majorities. The question is, will the medium’s leading artists retain the ability to effectively speak truth to power if they’re on the inside looking out? Can street artists still subvert now that their work has been sanctioned by the powers that be (cops excluded, of course)?
To that end, street art’s celebrities must reassess the impetus behind new work: With a newly-informed public finally thinking critically (and en masse) about street art — that is, dismissing authorities’ adorably outdated blanket condemnations of street art as vandalistic rubbish — the audience for such artworks has grown dramatically of late. Whereas street artists originally painted and drew with only their fraternity in mind, striving to out-do the next guy in terms of innovation and — perhaps more importantly — base prolificness, the primary audience of today’s stars has expanded to include the art establishment and the general public. With this in mind, street artists stand to make money (and plenty of it). One must assume that this will affect the intentions of some street artists while encouraging more persuadable (or desperate) practitioners of classically acceptable artistic genres to try their hand at street art.
The relationship between street art and the gallery crowd has recently undergone a radical reinvention, both following and stoking renewed public interest in, and acceptance of, prominent artists and works. This, in turn, is placing successful street artists in a conflicted position, one in which commercial success may prove groundbreaking while simultaneously calling into question the artist’s ability to carry out one of the original aims of their craft. How this will all play out is anybody’s guess, but Taschen’s Trespass does well to supply readers with the street-art background necessary to formulate such a prediction — a prediction, we remind you, that should prove très useful at the gallery next week when you’re trying to impress that waif with the regrettable fixie tattoo. And don’t forget a Ziploc: Nothing screams “breakfast!” and “free!” like a pile of soggy celery sticks and picked-over cheese wheels. Godspeed.
Note: This post has run in a slightly different form in years past.
More important note: Recent paucity of DCQ Daily posts notwithstanding, we’re still working on things over here. Big things. Potentially monumental things. Just not the daily-blog-post sort of things. Please trust us. Your boundless loyalty will be rewarded in the not-so-distant future. Details coming soonish.
Pop quiz! Guess which of these Greenwich Village townhouses exploded exactly 40 42 years ago today…
a.) The one that looks different than all the others; or b.) One of the others
Answer: A! The building with the funky-angled protruding living room.
Yes, that’s the one. A few members of the Weathermen (l/k/a the Weather Underground) apparently mishandled some nails and dynamite and…yeah, kablooie. According to ever-reliable Wikipedia, it took nine days of body part collection to determine that three people had died in the blast. Two others survived and escaped arrest, with one remaining on the lam for more than a decade before getting pinched for pulling an armored car heist with Tupac’s stepdad. We are not making this up.
A slightly more thorough reflection from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn here.
Late. Late. Late, late, late. As always, we’re late on this. Well, actually, that’s subjective: If you’re in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Miami, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, D.C., Austin, Chicago, or the Greater Tri-State Area, we’re a good year late. If you’re in the rest of the country, we’re right on time. And if you’re in Mississippi, we’re eight years ahead of schedule. For you, Jed, we’re delivering news from 2019. Runtell your Unclebrothers and Sisterdaughters.
Exit Through the Gift Shop is Banksy’s feature filmmaking debut, and he remains true to iconoclastic form: Famous for his bold, rebellious street art and legalities-driven obsession with anonymity, Banksy has made his name — and, more recently, growing fortune — by undermining institution. And the movie, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2010, certainly excels in this regard, and on multiple levels.
First, though, a thorough, semi-spoiler (!!!) synopsis for the uninitiated: Exit is essentially a profile of Thierry Guetta, an excitable, thirtysomething Frenchman with no discernible job, a lovely and supportive family, and a habit, rooted in childhood trauma, of videotaping everything lest he forget anything. Guetta’s cousin, the film asserts, is the prominent street artist whose nom de guerre, “Invader,” is derived from the mosaics he epoxies to the sides of buildings in cities worldwide — works inspired by the heavily pixelated classic video game “Space Invaders.” Guetta follows and videotapes this cousin as he and other street artists decorate the walls of Paris, London, and other European locales before eventually landing in Los Angeles. Guetta’s big break comes when he meets up with Shepard Fairey in an L.A. Kinko’s (Invader is “sick” and thereafter more or less absent from the film) and convinces the RISD alum to let him shadow him; before long, Guetta has proven his mettle to Fairey as both a documenter and accomplice, and the unlikely pair sets off on a trans-continental spree of rooftop stenciling, scaffold wheatpasting, and cop-ducking.
However, for all Guetta’s happenstance success in videography — the courageous and innovative vandalistic exploits captured in Exit are many, and much of the footage is breathtaking — the film’s protagonist is never sated. Guetta is portrayed throughout as more or less ignorant of the genre’s major players and their oeuvres, yet for reasons only cursorily clarified in the film (personable guy, trusted accessory, charming accent, “eccentric” facial hair?), he’s fully cleared to tape their illegal nocturnal (and occasionally diurnal) forays. Never star-struck (because he doesn’t know who the stars are), Guetta is nevertheless entranced by the thrill of street art, and for a brief time, he seems relatively fulfilled — that is, until somebody clues him onto the existence of Banksy, the Zeus of contemporary graf-culture mythology.
Nick “Diamonds” Thorburn and Honus Honus share vocal duties for nascent indie super-conglom Mister Heavenly when they’re not fronting Islands and Man Man, respectively. (Yes, the same band that features Modest Mouse’s Joe Plummer and (for now) Michael Cera.) We caught up with them after their show last week at San Francisco’s Cafe du Nord. Among much malarkey and nonsense emerged these nuggets: Mister Heavenly’s as-yet-untitled debut album should come out around the end of next year (a new Islands album is also slated for release around the same time). Their current sound is “doom wop”; the ultimate goal is “reed-based jazz” (this means NO flügelhorn), and everybody respects everybody. Just watch the damn video already. Full transcription below.
Dunce Cap Quarterly: So tell us how this came to be — how you guys got together. Tell us the genesis.
Nick Diamonds: Mutual friendship. Just mutual friendship.
DCQ: And it’s been a few months in the works, right?
ND: Yeah, it’s been about a year. We came up a year ago, and we said we wanted to make a song or two together, and we ended up making a whole album, and we just mutually respect each others’ work.
DCQ: And you’re still doing the Islands thing, right?
ND: Still doing the Islands thing. Gonna make an Islands album in January. I think it’ll come out at the end of the year. The Mister Heavenly album will probably come out at the end of the year, too — the end of next year.
DCQ (referencing Cera): How does that Hollywood guy, the actor guy? I forget his name. He did he get involved?
ND: Oh, Keanu Reeves.
DCQ: Yeah. How’d you get him in the band? How does that work?
ND: We were just big friends of Bill & Ted’s, and The Matrix, and we just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Bill — or Ted — played bass for us?’ It was bogus, but…Bill was our first choice, but we got Ted, and…
DCQ: And the rest is history.
ND: …take what you can get, you know?
DCQ: This is a typical musical pseudo-journalism question, but what sound are you going for?
ND: Jazz. We’re trying to make a really authentic jazz record.
DCQ: Jazz? You seem like you might be a little bit…off.
ND: We’re working on it. I think it might take a couple records to get it to completely jazz. Right now what we’ve settled on is doom-wop, and that’s our genre. Doom-wop.
DCQ: Doom-wop.
ND: Doom. Wop.
DCQ: Describe that.
ND: Well, it’s doo-wop with doom-like subcultures. Sub…subcultures? Subtexts.
DCQ: Sub-something…
ND: Lyrically it’s doomy, but with a doo-wop aftertaste.
DCQ: Gotcha.
ND: But what we really are all into is clarinet-based jazz. Reed-based. Anything with a reed in it. So bass clarinet, clarinet, saxophone…
DCQ: Well, we’re looking forward to it…And what’ll this album be called?
ND: I don’t wanna scoop too much, but…we haven’t settled on a title yet. But Mister Heavenly is the band — that we know. Sub Pop is the label — we’re contractually obligated to put (that) out. And (the rest)…we’ll figure it out.
(irrelevant non-sequiturious banter, cut to credits)
We also got ahold of the set list from one of Mister Heavenly’s earlier shows (not sure if this is from Portland or Seattle). Some guy told us that the track “Charlyne” was an ode to Michael Cera’s ex-girlfriend, but we have no way of verifying this, and, what’s more, nobody really cares. Song names, courtesy of Honus Honus:
Note: This post ran in a different form on March 6, 2009.
Pop quiz! Guess which of these Greenwich Village townhouses exploded exactly 40 years ago today…
a.) The one that looks different than all the others; or b.) One of the others
Answer: a! The building with the funky-angled protruding living room.
Yes, that’s the one. A few members of the Weathermen (l/k/a the Weather Underground) apparently mishandled some nails and dynamite and…yeah, kablooie. According to ever-reliable Wikipedia, it took nine days of body part collection to determine that three people had died in the blast. Two others survived and escaped arrest, with one remaining on the lam for more than a decade before getting pinched for pulling an armored car heist with Tupac’s stepdad. I am not making this up.
A slightly more thorough reflection from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn here.
(Note: Every so often, we run short of rational ideas and dip into DCQ’s archives. The bulk of this post, intended to remind our East Coast followers that the specter of the eternal winter is so much peacenik propaganda, originally ran on June 20, 2009.)
Puerto Rican flags and bandanas were flying off the shelves in Los Sures and Spanish Harlem and on D-Block over the last few weeks. On recent weekend days, you couldn’t round the block without catching Big Pun blaring from a passing SUV. The PR trinket hawkers crowded out the Halal cart guys and the Mexican mango stands, pushing them off the corners with sprawling setups dripping red, white and blue. Then, finally, Sunday came: The one day of the year when browns outnumbered whites on 5th Ave. With the JAPs and WASPs retreating to their Hamptons cottages, the Upper East Side belonged to the Boriqueños.
Def Jam’s street soldiers came out:
As did the hooptie crews:
And the merengue fellas, with the requisite porcine drummer man:
Then there was this guy; photos don’t do it justice, but as you’ll pick up, the owner’s clearly a fan of vintage Pacino:
Backside detail: so excessive, it just might be genius. Or a ludicrous waste of money — jury’s still out:
Chicken trike man rocked a picture of his chicken trike ON his chicken trike! A proud fan of fowl:
Jewish Hipster or Hip Jewster? Hewish Jipster? (Did we manage to offend TWO long-persecuted ethnic groups with the latter? Awesome.):
Note: The documentary Los Sures, released in 1984 by WNET and Terra Productions with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is not available for online viewing or outside of limited view-only locations in New York City, including New York University’s Avery Fisher Center. Thus, all photos are physical screenshots, and quality is accordingly poor.
by Ben Fuchs
A quarter-century ago, several years after New York City’s flirtation with bankruptcy and societal collapse but well before Giuliani and broken windows, Abner Louima and the jailhouse broomstick, the Hipster Grifter and Sunday brunch on Bedford, south Williamsburg was a ghetto. Forget the abandoned factories and blown-out industrial blocks that begat the schizophrenic skyline of Williamsburg’s modern-day waterfront. Long before developers lampooned city zoning regulations in drowning the northern reaches of the neighborhood in condo towers — many now paralyzed as steel skeletons, rusting in the subprime hangover — the tenements of “Los Sures” served as the heaving, pulsing epicenter of the area’s residential core.
Labeled “the poorest section of New York City” by Diego Echeverria in his 1984 documentary Los Sures, south Williamsburg became the first mainland destination for many Puerto Ricans during the 1960s and 1970s. The film, available for public viewing upon request at NYU’s Avery Fisher Center, profiles five residents of Los Sures — five people whose places in life, while highly divergent in fact and form, are similar in that each arrived there through desperation born of abject poverty. There’s Tito, for one: With a mother, wife and two young children depending on him for financial support, Tito spends his waking hours smoking pot and masterminding myriad petty criminal endeavors. Stoic and centered beyond his 20 years, he appears committed to a life of hustling. “I used to work,” he states. “I was proud…but like I say, eh, if you can (get) faster money out in the street, I’ll stay in the street and make a faster buck, as long as I don’t get locked up, you know, and be a sucker.”
With a friend in tow, Tito takes the filmmakers along as he dives into one of the cornerstones of his considerable portfolio — chopping a stolen car on the fly. Future self-styled repo men of the world, take note (and remember to account for inflation): “We drive (the recently-jacked car) over here in the garage, take everything out right there, and (be) careful, having guys looking out left and right,” Tito explains, describing the process in the matter-of-fact tone of an insurance salesman. “Then we’ll get (to haggling) on the prices: Here, gimme 50 (dollars) for that. Gimme 200 for four brand-new tires. Gimme 15 for the battery. The radio go for 30, with speakers. The interior go for 175. Depends — if it got t-tops, 200 dollars. You want the roof? We’ll cut it off, give us 100 and it’s yours. Cars bring you money, man. It’s a lot of people out there with cars. It’s a lotta cars in the world. Yep.”
Tito (above, at left) and a friend chopping a stolen car, and at home with his wife and children (below).
Among Tito’s 20,000-odd, largely-Latino neighbors is Evelyn, who shares Tito’s embrace of self-sufficiency, if not his interpretation of morality. Vaguely described as an employee for a local women’s nonprofit, Evelyn effectively serves as a one-woman, mobile triage center, coordinating logistics for local families in need (helping one family find temporary shelter, for example, after a fire races through their run-down apartment building). The only subject with any apparent grasp of the city’s municipal structure and bureaucratic shortcomings — as well as the only one, in fact, with a reliable job — Evelyn admonishes the city for its perceived indifference toward the neighborhood’s plight: “You stay with your family, you’re safe. You stay with the system, you’re fucked. There’s no two ways about it.” At the same time, though, she harshly criticizes her own community for failing to police itself as the crack epidemic reaches Los Sures and alters the character of entire buildings and blocks.
“You have to say excuse me to the junkies so you can walk out of your own door,” Evelyn complains, adding that the community’s inaction equates to acceptance in the eyes of the impressionable. “All the little ones are seeing (that this) is easy money…it’s change, and it’s sad. Because it was a joy once. There was a sadness, but there was a joy. There’s no joy anymore. There’s only a lot of pain.”
Not everyone interviewed in Los Sures shares Evelyn’s absolute sense of despair: Marta, a single mother to five children from three different men, espouses the virtues of living in a close-knit community, a place where she’s spent years with virtually every soul in a five-block radius. “I know this neighborhood. I know the people. I know I could walk around; I know I could ask. I know that, to an extent, I’m safe here. I could say I’m among friends, y’know? I don’t find the need to leave Williamsburg to move to another area so that I can solve my problems. I’m gonna deal with my problems here.” She soon admits, however, that she’s got no choice in the matter — conceding that, in effect, her earlier bravado merely masks the fact that she feels trapped in Los Sures: “When you live in an area like this all your life, and this is all you know, how do you get out of it?”
In employing a spectrum of perspectives to bring the full extent of the area’s deprivation into focus, Echeverria also spends time with Cuso, a 43-year-old general contractor who struggles at times to break even on jobs amid fierce bidding wars. Installing a floor’s worth of windows in a tenement fronting Sternberg Park (just across the street from present-day Dunce Cap headquarters), Cuso calls Los Sures “a neighborhood of struggle. We’ve been struggling since we were kids. If it ain’t one struggle, it’s another struggle. You’re always fighting. You gotta fight.”
For Ana Maria, who reared seven children in Puerto Rico before bringing the whole clutch to south Williamsburg, her battle was with one of her sons’ attraction to gangs. Dance competitions among neighborhood b-boy crews became more intense, eventually leading to physical confrontation, retaliatory violence and, ultimately, the calcification of these groups as rival street gangs.
“People would call me saying, ‘Ana, they are going to shoot your son,” says Ana Maria in her native Spanish. “And I would drag him away from the sticks and the guns. All this I fought alone.”
As for Tito, the small-time street hustler, he arguably lost his fight, winding up in cuffs and prison blues as the film’s credits roll. With his brother already gone — shot and killed at the corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets years earlier — Tito says he’s resigned to the fact that, however unlikely in a neighborhood full of lifelong acquaintances, he is alone.
“Nobody is my friend no more,” he says. “I just hang out with a couple of guys…and that’s it. I can’t call nobody my friend no more…it’s hard, bro. And it gets harder every day.”
The corner of South 2nd and Havemeyer streets, 1984 (above); Tito in the kitchen with his family (below).
Cuso, (above, at left) and one of his workers in Sternberg Park after finishing a job near the present-day headquarters of Dunce Cap Quarterly.
Tito in his new confines (above); looking south through the neighborhood toward Broadway and the elevated J/M/Z subway line (below).
We braved Olympic-sized slush puddles Sunday night to drop by the East Village’s Mars Bar, known around town as an anachronistic ode to “authentic New York.” In bar-speak, this translates to “dim lights, cheap drinks, and Trainspotting-worthy toilets” (it apparently also means “desirable place to stage awkward celebrity photo shoots”).
The occasion: Mars Bar was getting a makeover, courtesy of a dozen-plus local graffiti artists. The show’s curator, Grimace, gave a nod to the establishment’s history as a hub for street art, mentioning Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lee Quiñones and Keith Haring — arguably the three most influential names behind graffiti’s acceptance by mainstream gallery culture — as one-time patrons. Pointing out that he and his collaborators had protected a swath of the bar’s pre-existing wall — a colorful mish-mash of abstract geometrics hovering above a guitar-playing skeleton — Grimace stressed a desire to “bridge the gap between the old and the new” in reinventing the bar as “a living, breathing, drinking art piece”:
The artists overhauled about half of the bar on Sunday, whitewashing and painting directly on some walls and installing hung pieces on others while adding complementary flourishes to the bathrooms and the underside of the weathered, wooden bar itself. Other surfaces — notably the ceiling — will receive facelifts sometime in the future, according to Grimace.
We caught up with a couple other street art vets, New York natives both: Like Grimace, who spins regularly at 3rd Ward’s massive “Danger” bacchanals in Bushwick, ShazOne and Milk are renaissance men of sorts. In addition to their involvement in street art, both now focus, to varying degrees, on music, with Milk professing to having “retired” entirely from graf writing. They also share a measure of dismay over the perceived degradation of graffiti etiquette in New York, with ShazOne the more outspoken of the two. Here, he describes the graffiti community’s self-imposed justice system — and we’re inclined to trust his explanation, given the assumption that his residence “in the mountains for a couple years” doesn’t mean he was opening for Don Rickles in the Borscht Belt:
Milk employed a different, yet related, euphemism, explaining that “in the early 1990s, I kinda terrorized the L train, the M train, and…doing that type of work kind of led me to a 10-year vacation.” He also forwarded a theory that sound entirely plausible to anyone who’s familiar with the recidivism rate of American ex-convicts…or the origin of the MS-13 street gang…or the move Blow: that New York City abolished its practice of sentencing artists convicted of vandalism to clean graffiti-adorned walls because such programs promoted networking among artists, who would bond over the cleaning and plan future ‘bombing’ sessions — with “future” typically being “right after we’re done cleaning this wall”:
If you’ve ever strolled the streets of San Fran, Manhattan or any number of other global metropoli, you’ve seen the BNE guy’s work. It’s pretty basic: Put “BNE” in all-caps Helvetica Neue Condensed, black on white. Multiply times 100,000 or so. Travel around the world, affix to stop signs, parking meters, streetlight poles, etc. Wait for people to get curious.
We started seeing the BNE stickers around SF in 2006 or thereabouts; the perpetrator would get slap-silly on entire blocks of meters in the Tendernob. Someone working for Gavin Newsom noticed it soon thereafter, and the mayor caught a few headlines — and, more significantly, contributed to the BNE guy’s murky legend — by putting a $2,500 bounty on his head. Nobody managed to collect, stickers kept going up, and the artist’s identity remained an enigma.
Then, news broke earlier this month that the guy behind BNE was setting up for a show in Hell’s Kitchen. The Paper of Record scored an unprecedented interview with the alleged artist and managed to reveal next to nothing about him. We took matters into our own filthy hands. NYC ad agency Mother, underwriting the show at its new warehouse on 11th Ave. and West 44th, tried to play up the show’s import by making it an exclusive “who do you know” deal, complete with a tight guest list we managed to weasel onto. For all the frills — dance floor, DJ, pretty people, free booze galore — the show felt uninspired: The artist’s trademark, predictably, dominated the landscape in varying forms, the most evocative of which was a 15-foot-tall block-graf rendering running the length of the north wall. Most of the other pieces commented on the alleged artist’s announced desire to rival the visibility of multinational brands. (He told the Times that “I don’t see other graffiti writers as my competition anymore. Now I’m going up against the Tommy Hilfigers, Starbucks, Pepsi. You have these billion-dollar companies, and I’ve got to look at their logos every day. Why can’t I put mine up?”)
We’re a day late on this, but the LA Times piece on Norteño-turned-faux accountant Richard Rodriguez has us mulling and pondering: a.) How long till the cop gets sent up the river? And, more importantly; b.) Is an upper lip tat necessarily detrimental to the credibility of a court testimony? Mightn’t it bring in sympathy points in some cases? An example: Say you’re on trial for a petty crime in Australian ranch country — shearing sheep out of season or disparaging Chopper Read, I dunno. The jury is composed entirely of poor ranching folk whose cattle compete with kangaroos for a shrinking stock of grassland. Your upper lip reads “kangaroos are great…for dinner” in Olde English. Helpful or harmful? I say helpful. Chopper would probably agree.
The moral of the story is that sometimes growing a moustache to cover up a tattoo is not always a smart legal maneuver, though in the case of Rodriguez it would seem to be a good move because without it he basically looks like your standard-issue Dodgers bleacher fan slash Latino gangbanger. And no jury in the world likes both of those things.
For our sadistic brethren, graphic video of some fat (and hopefully soon-to-be-indicted) policeman steel-booting Rodriguez here.
…we have fire hydrants and streetball. When the temp breaks 80, the people of Los Sures break hydrant caps.
Then grandma breaks out the oil-drum barbecue, and it’s officially a summertime Saturday afternoon.
The only question is whether or not the firefighters will be able to get the thing back together. In this case, the answer was a resounding ‘no’; two weeks later and it’s still gushing Catskills clear onto brown pavement.
Meanwhile, next to the BQE, a team from Rodney Park is eternally playing some other team from Rodney Park. Or so say their jerseys. I don’t even know if Rodney Park is a place or a man (or maybe the requirement for joining the team is you are a Rodney Park?!), but these guys can run. The teams seem to play one of only two styles: Aggressive, flashy and mistake-riddled with lots of sensational dunks or aggressive, flashy and fundamental with no dunks whatsoever. Either way, the Caucasian baller here is regarded as rare a sight as the post-Giuliani Manhattan street whore or the red panda courtship ritual.
