Writers' Block: Graffiti News

I started a regular stint writing on graffiti for the Bay Guardian. Its called "Writers' Block" in tribute to New York's original Writers' Bench as well as a play on words for a suppressed medium or restrained creative force. In my first article I explored the phenomenon of crushed newspaper dispensers and placed them in a broader historical context of modern graffiti's evolution and spread across the globe. I think I'm going to just republish all the articles on the blog for organization purposes, so enjoy and tell me your thoughts!

Modern graffiti practice -- born out of New York’s behemoth subway system nearly 40 years ago -- has diffused across the globe arguably faster and further than any other subculture of our time. Many thought the prohibitive end of New York subway graffiti in the mid-1980s might mark the death of the movement itself. But the phenomenon has instead grown vibrantly, evolving in imaginative and cunning ways while unexpectedly inspiring thousands of offspring movements worldwide. Regional mutations of graffiti now prosper in urban centers from São Paulo to Tokyo, as well as the sprawling suburbs spanning Paris and Phoenix, and even in small town America.

San Francisco was one of the earliest cities outside of the East Coast to contribute heavily to graffiti’s development. Young writers painted on freight trains in attempts to mimic their eastern counterparts’ love for subway cars, but they also brought the medium to life on the more stationary public spaces; walls, rooftops, billboards, and street furniture all gained color in rhythm. To this day the city is a hotbed for the creative evolution of style, approach, and placement. Graffiti tattoos the skin of our city, breathing vivaciously yet ephemerally in the rapid changing visual landscape.

During my morning routine in San Francisco’s SOMA district I come across hundreds of graffiti pieces. The moment I step outside my flat, vibrant names call forth on the neighboring walls, twisting and swinging frenetically in with an incandescence that is brighter than the fog-smothered sun rays. A school of simply stenciled koi fish meander curiously along the concrete sidewalk, snaking up the side of a storefront’s iron cage that is painted with a woman’s statuesque face locked in distant meditation. I jaunt over to the newspaper dispensers and reach for the daily only after appreciating any new stickers and wild, hand style lettering or drippy, dirty tags and rotating wheat paste prints, all competing equally for my attention. And I take a moment to imagine the people out there who took the time to get up, the thrills they must have felt, the inspiration that brought them out to the streets to write a shadowed name or post up a devilish cartoon character.

Is the newspaper vendor not the prime placement for graffiti -- both literally and metaphorically -- in this post-subway train era? Covering the pervasive street furniture are the etched names of hundreds of locals. Some invent complex calligraphy and craft intricate geometrical balance to stylize their nom de plumes. Some choose the course of improv for the signatures and let the muses of the moment guide their ink-saturated markers. And still others invest countless hours of preparation to the act of clandestinely posting up ready made stickers during the dead of the night or even the grind of the day.

A writer’s obsession with the news dates back to a now infamous article published by the New York Times in 1971 on the city-wide popularity of Taki 183 and his many pen pals. As soon as the article hit the streets circulating around the boroughs, young people quickly realized just how famous Taki had become. It spawned even more imitators and helped catalyze a movement. The irony of Taki’s expanded notoriety is that he refused to provide his last name in the article. Even though roughly the whole city discovered that “Taki 183” referred to a Greek 17-year-old named Demetrius who lived on 183rd Street in Washington Heights, nobody knew a thing about him beyond his omnipresent signature.

The writer’s signature is not an autograph in the traditional sense. The graffiti autograph is the mark of an alter ego coming into being. And that alter ego is the work of art itself, just as Calvin Broadus Jr. creates the living artwork known to many as Snoop Dogg (or in comic art, just as Bruce Wayne offers the performance piece Batman). Rather than a mark of ownership over another piece of work, the graffiti signature is a disjointed movement towards self-ownership. Instead of glorifying the originator of the artwork, the writer’s signature celebrates its own existence in a self-referential movement leaving the creator of the work anonymous. The writing of the autograph affirms an identity, its personality shaped through the stylization of the letters. And though graffiti puts emphasis on an individual’s yearning for self-affirmation, the practice is ultimately not an indulgent or egotistical project. The graffiti signature takes place in the context of a city’s public space, an environment that provides a vehicle for developing a social identity and facilitating collective dialogue among all people as free and equal citizens. The signature is a coded cry for both personal and social recognition.

While writers rarely make the news in all-out Taki 183 glory, the graffiti-strewn surfaces of newspaper dispensers distribute the news to the people. Each piece tells an intricate story saturated with drama, intrigue, and mystery. Every day we choose whether to make the effort to read these encrypted tales, whether to participate in the dialogue. We choose our responses from indifference to engagement and enthusiastic appraisal to vehement disgust. Some people challenge their underlying assumptions about the stigma of graffiti whereas others stubbornly adhere to their beliefs about its devastating harm to our quality of life. But I suggest at the least to pay attention. Otherwise you might just miss out on some of the most compelling, awe-inspiring stories that San Franciscans tell each other every day all over the streets, all over the news.