Sometimes I get that weird little feeling as if the universe is conspiring in my favor...and today's events have definitely left me buzzing with pronoia...
I was eating a delicious portabella sandwich today at Liquid Earth on Aliceanna (basically next door to Sticky Rice), and picked up a copy of the Urbanite , my new favorite Baltimore rag to read a couple articles on local graf art. Naturally that put me in a sweat, but I was a total mess by the end of the second article where it so casually referenced an XTC song from the early eighties that has been adopted by local great Cuba. (Song would be "Living Through Another Cuba," and yes you would be correct in the assumption that it's brilliant)
But let me back up. Looks like there's a dude calls himself Gaia who has been throwing up beautiful drawings matted onto sagging overhangs and derelict building fronts. He's twenty-two and goes to MICA, where I just interviewed for a position at the Writing Studio. There's one of his grandfather on Park and Franklin, but other than that the are mostly figures with animal heads and human bodies and hands, usually wrenched in some sort of anguish, presumably because what was once a human head has gone animal. My plan is to become infatuated with spotting these around town now. My next stop is at W. North Ave. and Pennsylvania, but I'll have to take some breed of large male with me. The images, according to the article, are affixed with wheat paste and glue, and go up in a matter of seconds, (obviously he couldn't do the drawing on the buildings themselves for reasons of bad medium and the small legal issue), the way graffiti artists choose names that are short and sweet and go up fast under the cover of night before anyone can hear the tell-tale rattlerattlerattle, ch-shhhhhhhhh.
The next article was about this guy Cuba, an older head who also went to MICA, and was a good friend of the author's until he faded into legendary obscurity. The author, Charles Cohen, said last he'd heard of his boy, he'd O-Ded on heroin in like '82. Not only false, but a direct quote I'll take the liberty of snagging from the article went like this:
"Doing drugs was a way to do myself in and still enjoy it until I got close [to death]. Then I realize I ain't going out like that. I'll take a bullet in the head. No I won't. Fuck it, I'm never going to die."
...which I think really eloquently sums up the impetus these artists have for doing what they're doing. While the one motto goes, "nothing is sacred," in that most people who actually notice street art are liable to erase it, the other one is about marking out your space, the art making you immortal. In an environment particularly like Baltimore's where death marks just about everything (see R.I.P art), there are those who know their days are numbered. So what do you do? Write up your will, spit in the ocean, become a makeout bandit, make a baby, make a song, or imprint your soul on a slab of concrete that couldn't care less how you make it?
Even if you're not involved in a gang war, this is probably the most relatable existential fear, of the Nothing eating you alive, wiping you out forever with nothing to show for it. A professor from Pratt and a kind of friend of mine told me he started smoking cigarettes as a way to kill himself as slowly as possible, all the while
dutifully scribbling, etching the mirror of beauty he encounters for whomever will care about it later. When I think about the kind of writer I'll be known as, I know I won't be a Stephen King, who will survive the eons perhaps as a cultural icon, a genre writer who gave words to some of our darkest nightmares which necessarily illuminate our assumptions and attachments to the things we care about most. He's experimented with writing under a pseudonym to test out whether his success has been valid or just a clever marketing scheme. The essays still sold really well. So, props to him. He's no literary giant, just a guy with a great thing going. I've toyed with the idea of writing some great erotic trash to make my millions before The Cicada Killers breathes life of publication, but I can't see myself doing it. Nope, I'm going to fiddle and fuck around and produce some terrible trash until finally, on my deathbed, I produce my life-affirming work, only to be appreciated by a handful of maladjusted teenage art students decades after I die. And what's really sick about it all is that I've resigned myself only in hopes of the opposite actually happening.
These articles found me just a week after I bought Style Wars about the early hip hop/graf art scene in NYC, and two days after British street artist Banksy was commissioned to draft a new couch gag for this Sunday's episodes of The Simpsons.
I for one am impressed that no heads have rolled over this. Impressed and hopeful. We are fortunate to be so immersed in The Great Recession that (IMHO) the highest art forms like satire and street art have room and audience to thrive. I'm becoming very excited about living in Baltimore, where there are more gravestones than citizens, and there is an urgency to the art being produced. Live live urbania!
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