Graffiti

I wanted to keep the street talk (as seen in Jaie's "Filthy Pendulum") going, so here's a couple bits I jotted down about graffiti a while ago:


Dear Space:

Sometimes I look up at your sky and realize something extraordinary is happening to me.

As I project myself onto buildings and crumbling bridges, and turn inert fumes into something tangible, and flee sirens of invading blue noise then melt into shadow to reconstruct myself – I’ll punch another anonymous hole in your flesh – I’ll dilate your pupils, world – I sit out-of-breath in my apartment with paint dripping down my fingers, preparing another wet dream with which to defile you – my canvas, I want to make love to you like a painter would with his, and hear our breath intertwine… I realize something extraordinary is happening to me but it is not something I can identify, except to say that it comes with a new sense of clarity and that in that clarity I see how void everybody else around me is of clarity…

There is no more eminent an expression than the graffiti of Neoteric Minds. Especially in the now, when all visions are suppressed, when every voice is muffled, when cyberspace is much more tangible a place than earth. It’s imperative that human beings continue to express themselves. If only to remind a world becoming increasingly impoverished that voices like ours still exist.

They will tell you that graffiti promotes crime. But it is the general state of anesthesia that has turned the world into what it is. The mosaic of meaningless sound and image and advertisement, the drought of intellectualism. There are the robots and there are those still made of flesh. Flesh is what I am trying to preserve, in everything I do.

Almost got caught again tonight. I’d been eyeing this building on the horizon for a while now but once I got on the roof I realized I’d have to be in plain sight for anyone to see anything I put up there. It looked like it would be easy to hit stealthy from the ground… anyways, it wasn’t, Brookline Ave. is way too busy at any hour (that’s where the appeal was, for me, but it obviously makes the mission dangerous), and I got busted after writing V-I-R… cops are so diluted with themselves that they will always let you know they are there, expecting you to give up without a fight:

"Freeze!" he said after the cruiser door slammed right outside Cask ‘n Flagon. I was up about twelve feet but I wasn’t going to "freeze" and submit (Banksy, the stencil artist, said it’s always easier to get forgiveness than permission… I say it’s easier to remain transparent than to beg their pardon) – (and my visions articulate throughout the city streets, hungering for solid breaths. I have a lot at stake, is what I’m trying to say…). I took the drop and got tangled in the net of streets and alleyways and some train tracks, and in the distance heard echoes of his footsteps and a myriad of voice cascading around me, tumbling through space. I never lost my cool. You start to panic, things inevitably start going downhill.

I’ll return tomorrow, or maybe give it a couple nights, to finish my work, assuming they haven’t washed over it yet. The more you put at stake for your art, the more effectively you communicate your message.

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Graffiti is explosive wet dreams. Keep the oil paints in the museums. It has always been the goal of the artist to magnify the canvas, to stretch arms like scissors through the parchment’s skin. But what of the men who make the world their canvas? And what’s more, they operate without a face. They punch anonymous holes in space. They scream in the dark only to add beauty to the industrial machine that stands so void of refinement, to paint melodies on nothing. Here we are in the chaffed throat of turmoil and still there is beauty that exists for nothing but itself. Doesn’t it make you swell up inside? Doesn’t it make our own flesh and blood insignificant, to know even in the cracked cement fabric of hell one man has spit elegance for us?