Confessions of a Download Junkie

I did it again man. I got home from work and locked myself up in my room. I closed the blinds and locked the door with the dead bolt. Not that anyone in San Francisco really cares. Hell I saw some old guy doing it in a cafe last week. No shame. But it's still embarrassing for me. I just prefer to be alone when I do it alright?

Just me and the succulent adrenaline that it brings. Oh I love that rush of blood straight to my eyes, squeezing them big and painting them glossy. Sometimes I don't even mean for it to last more than a couple hours. But then I just keep on digging into the veins. There's all sorts of hidden ones, the virgin, untapped ones. Oh those beauties. No broken links, just pure life and gorgeousness ready for my assault. Begging for my hands to possess it and drink down its love.

If you can hit one of those cavernous forgotten ones, that's when the trip feels real nice. Beautiful. Sublime. A release. When I find those man, I can go for hours, I can go all night fucking long. I pass out for an hour or so as the sun rises, crippled on my chair with a bent back like the letter C. It's still glowing that bluish hue of electronics in my room. The computer is still humming along, ushering my own breath, as if saying it's all going to be OK. Yes computer, we'll make it through.

But I don't know if it will. I keep going back. I keep on wanting more. And more mother fucker I need it. Don't take it away from me. I feel gluttonous. I'm repulsive. This is all so disgusting. I mean at least it doesn't cost me anything. But all that time that I'm just sitting there, whisking my life away into the corrosive depths of blogspots and torrents. Waffles for breakfast and soulseek for dinner. Google blog searches for a snack -- snacks all the time. I mean they're just there to help me right. It's not like they want me to hold onto this addiction.

Are bloggers the new pushers? What the hell am I thinking. This is ridiculous. Yo wait a minute, is it high quality shit man? I'm not fucking with that unless it's at least 320 kilobytes per second. Holy shit, I just found the complete 16 volume Dusty Fingers compilation in FLAC. I'll finish this post later.

Project Kill Nazi Redemption

Before seeing Quentin Tarantino's alternate World War II story, Inglorious Basterds, I reflected on a few Nazi killing fantasies that have impressed the world's imagination in the past couple decades. The most brilliant I believe is the computer game, Wolfenstein 3d, created by id software initially just for Windows in 1992. Wolfenstein started the 1st person shooter genre in the gaming industry that has now become a multi-billion dollar industry in itself.

As a young Jewish boy growing up in Los Angeles, I was already familiar with playing video games glorifying violence. But I distinctly remember the irreproachable morality of playing Wolfenstein. In other words, my mother did not seem to feel any guilt allowing me to play it. And we offered the game as gifts for the birthdays of many other Jewish boys during my elementary years.

In this alternate world, I took on the avatar of a Polish, perhaps even Jewish soldier, attempting to escape a labyrinthian Nazi castle, killing the bastards along my way. In fact, little did I know that I would eventually be the Rambo-like agent overthrowing the entire Nazi regime, assassinating Hitler -- the final boss. I mean what foresight in 1992, Hitler as the final boss of a shoot 'em up video game. And I killed that mother fucker over and over again.

The dream of reimagining more redemptive ends to World War II run deep in the American collective consciousness. And that ferocious fantasy is exactly what Tarantino taps in Inglorious Basterds. *(Spoiler) The concept of annihilating the most powerful Nazi heads -- including that of Hitler -- within an occupied Paris cinema is Tarrantino's brilliant representation of such a revenge fantasy. While the Nazis watch a self-congratulatory spectacle of their own feats, at least three separate groups of conspirators successfully plot their deaths and thus the end of the war.

The fantastical demise of the Nazis within the French cinema is ultimately the brilliant concept that holds the film together. The cinema -- as repository of chimeras, alternate realities, and the realizations of our most unimaginable dreams -- is the magical setting of this revenge. Perhaps the cinema is the contemporary symbol most capable of vindicating us from our traumatic histories and horrific truths, at least for those sublime moments of experiencing catharsis. And within this particular Parisian cinema, we can obliterate the masturbatory spectacles of Goebbels' Nazi film making with the dramatically explosive, Jewish fueled cinema of modern day America.

And as if burning, shooting, and blowing up all the head Nazis wasn't enough, we also get to dream revenge in the shape of carving a swastika into Hans Landa's head. The act, I know, may seem too ethically abrasive for a Jew. Although if you've ever studied Passover, then you know that atrocities from 4000 years ago still irk us. Ultimately, the swastika carving points out that the identity and moral implications of Nazism goes beyond the typical episodic nature of warring parties. Once the war is over, a Nazi should not so easily shake his or her affiliations with the machine.


So, it seems we've entered a new stage of viewing WW II. One where we rewrite the history and satisfy our inflicted guilt and anxieties, as the last horizon of people holding real memories of the events die off. The said truths shall become legend and in legend we can invent myth.

Unfortunately I could not find a copy of Wolfenstein 3d for Mac OS x as I did want to revisit some of my childhood simulations of Nazi killing catharsis. However, my good friend Adia did draw my attention to a promo "Bear Jew" game posted on Eli Roth's myspace page. I suppose I'm not so far off associating the Wolf with Inglorious.

Vacations and Gaslamp Killer

Hey blog world! I've been on vacation up through Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver and then back down the coast to San Francisco. I have some great Vancouver graffiti pics and also a few little timber towns I'd like to write on. But until then, I'll try to satiate my five readers with a piece I wrote on The Gaslamp Killer for the Guardian. It's been my most thought out article yet on music, and I'm quite proud of it, even though somehow along the copy editing way someone got rid of one of my periods and two sentences train wreck! But really, who the hell cares?

I wrote about Gaslamp the first time I saw him DJ at Minna in SF. And I've come to associate Foucault's writing on limit experiences with Gaslamp's turntable performances. A limit experience is the pushing of the self to the limits of its familiar understanding so that the experience itself deforms, mutates, and transforms the self as a result. Foucault reads the notion in the works of Nietzsche and Bataille. It does not have to be quite as disruptive as Gaslamp's performances, which are charged with aggression and loudness; but the effect is always disruptive, jarring, but restorative. In fact the limit experience can be a simple daily exercise, reading a book without preconceptions, training a heightened awareness of one's surroundings so as to develop a less rigid source of knowledge. Anyway, the limit experience is a fascinating concept in Foucault, which he only briefly touches on in a few places a couple years before his death. Here's GLK.


Music can teleport you to far-off lands and spark nostalgia for distant times. It might elicit lost memories or even summon illusions. You may have never visited Istanbul or São Paulo or lived in the 1960s, but music infects the imagination with a visceral experience of the unknown. The effect is uncanny, mesmerizing, beautiful, and even therapeutic.

But what happens when music pushes its ability to displace to an extreme? When music annihilates your familiar sense of space and warp holes your usual expectations of time? Can listening to music transform you? Los Angeles-based beatsmith and DJ the Gaslamp Killer certainly thinks so. "The music I'm looking for is the stuff that will cut through your brain and just make you feel ... almost overwhelmed," Gaslamp slowly explains. Whether arranging cosmic abyss mixtapes like I Spit On Your Grave (Obey, 2008) or crafting his own twisted productions, including his just-released debut solo EP My Troubled Mind (Brainfeeder), Gaslamp displays a developing genius for charting hallucinatory odysseys into vertigo. His haunted, cinematic music unhinges the listener, approaching a surreal dissociation and restoration of the self.

William Benjamin Bensussen didn't identify as the Gaslamp Killer until some time after moving to Los Angeles three years back. He grew up in another troubled Southern California paradise cloaked in its own rusted mythology: San Diego. There, a restless Bensussen was already broadening his musical horizons in the fifth grade, listening to Too Short, Jimmy Hendrix, and Dre. A few years later he attempted to satiate his curious, nearly frantic energy by freestyle dancing at raves and in b-boy circles — to electronic and hip-hop music respectively. But it was DJ Shadow who bridged those fractured worlds for Bensussen and ignited a desire to dig into jazz, funk, and psychedelic crates. "I started on this frenzy trying to find all the originals. And then I realized that Shadow had sampled half of his stuff, and he wasn't as much of a genius as I thought he was," Gaslamp recalls, laughing. "That's when I started looking for older records and thinking, well, maybe I could do this."

Bensussen's dark nom de plume is a bittersweet tribute to his unlikely origins. As a 19-year-old college dropout, he flipped wax in San Diego's glittery Gaslamp District to a sometimes hostile crowd. Bensussen remembers bitterly a particular confrontation with a vindictive listener. A strikingly beautiful woman — who intimidated the then-teenage DJ — queried him angrily why he wanted to ruin her time with his fucked up music. Why? Dumbfounded, wounded, and angry, Bensussen drew sadistic nourishment from the provocation. It helped inspire his first mixtape project, the circa-2000 Gaslamp Killers, a lo-fi guzzling of psychotic drums and horror sonic bits. Recently, Bensussen decided to rename himself in light of this original labor of love.

Gaslamp has yet to settle down. He helped found L.A.'s monolithic weekly showcase for uncut beat-driven tracks, the Low End Theory, in the fall of 2006. And he's secured a close affiliation with Flying Lotus' bubbling imprint, Brainfeeder. But Bensussen's troubled mind still wanders, like his music and his words, in perpetual hunger for the rawness of life. "[My music] comes from more of a vicious area," Gaslamp explains, searching for the right words. "Not angry, just passion — but a passion that can't be sugar-coated."

This unmediated passion takes Gaslamp into many dangerous and strangely ethereal caverns. It also jettisons him to the homes of foreign musicians marked by the same shattered pathos. My Troubled Mind gathers its influences from all over the globe — Turkey, India, Russia, Mexico, Germany, and Italy. But the way Gaslamp employs samples from these regions defies their idiosyncratic place of origin. He has a rare skill for extracting universal otherworldliness from regional sounds. And he implements their fiercely destructive yet uplifting spirituality into his mind-melting compositions. His music and DJ sets become performances, elusive experiences leaving you charred and fiending for more of their ineffable allure. "I'm glad people can't describe it," Gaslamp says, nearly yelling into the speakerphone. "Once they are able to describe it, that's when they chew it up, spit it out, and leave it behind. The more indescribable and amazing it is, the more you'll hold on to your people, your listeners."

Writers' Block On The Run

I've produced a couple new articles on graffiti in San Francisco that were both published in the SFBG this week. The first is oriented around this week's free issue and explores five lesser known public art locations in the city. I got a chance to catch the grand opening of Kommunitas, of Bluxome allery fame. It has some mind blowing murals now, the most stunning piece boasts over 500 colors across maybe 50 feet of wall space. Check the picture above.

You can find pictures of the Mac Dre in Langton Alley here, 3 parts of the Defenestration here. And a historical document of the Defenestration building at Funk and Jazz. No pictures of Lilac but Plug 1 has some shots of the Iz the Wiz tribute. Historical document of Bluxome / Kommunitas at Graffiti Archaeology. Nothing for Oak Parking lot yet, anyone got some?

I also wrote an article in defense of the tag. Oh the hated on tag! I thought it could use some love or at least a bit of context. The film Infamy (2005) does a pretty good job providing more background and perspective on the aesthetics of and lifestyle emerging from the tag.

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.

Where Worlds Cross

The other day I dropped by Moe's in Berkeley to peruse their lovely book collection. I usually start out in art book section and then move my way up to the language department, ending with the sweet dessert of philosophy topped with some social theory cherries. That's the shit right there.

This time though I halted in the art books for a little longer than usual. I found a Prestel Publishing book in their street art series called "Paris Street Art" put together by Romuald Stivine and Vito Del Forte. Dragging my fingers through the brightly colored pages, I recognized many of the pieces gracing the Parisian street walls. I also recognized the neighborhood; the curving walls at the bottom of Parc de Belleville or the swooping landscape of Pere Lachaise, even the alley ways off Rue des Cascades or by Cafe aux Folies.


I would see many of these paintings in the magnificent Menilmontant neighborhood, right over the hill from Belleville, the two districts where graffiti artists lay down the law of beauty in the streets of Paris. Well, I would more than see them, you could say that I was a regular collaborator. Especially during the Winter months of 2005 and 2006 where civil unrest uprupted in the streets all over France in response to the oppressive use of police authority in the ghettoized suburbs and then later, the government's attempt to liberalize worker's laws.

Those were the glory months of graffiti during my stay in Paris; classes canceled for months, the feeling of uprising in the air, creative energy spewing rainbows from spray cans onto peeling gray walls. It was an empassioned and naively brilliant time reminiscent of the the acclaimed phrase of May '68 tattood to the walls of the old vanguard; "Sous les pavés, la plage."



Anyway, while flipping through the pages I had a thought, "Wouldn't it be crazy if one of my paintings just happened to be in this little flip book?" And sure enough, on a page parallel to the geometrically balanced works of l'Atlas, one of my schizophrenic little monsters gaping a toothsome mouth at the moon in torment.

What a strange experience. An experience where so two idiosyncratic and divided worlds cross spheres. I surreptisiously slid through the the streets at night and put up these strange scribbled marks on the stone walls and corroborated heavens of Paris. Days later, and it must have been only a few days because that painting was buffed quick, a street photographer by legal name Vito stumbled upon this horrific mural, and it touched him. He took a picture, expanding my transient moment into a pixelated image with thickness.

After assembling many other photos in the streets of that Winter and Spring of protest and violence, Vito finally published a book that was distributed worldwide. He searched out as many source names as he could, but in the world of graffiti the signatures (where they are actually authored) do not so easily trace back to an identifiable, legal origin. So there I was, holding this book in my hands, my mind traveling distances to recount the swiveling paths that finally closed their abysmal, cipher loops into that moment.

I wonder now, do I find out who Vito the photographer is and tell him of my experiences? Do I pursue this path of hardening the loops of anonymity into a reciprocal moment of direct acknowledgment? Or do I enjoy the pure incognito relations we developed, basking in the beauty of two contingent lives dialoguing from a resonant distance, and letting go? Or is this blog post, shot out in the depths of the internet waves, already taking the next step towards such mutual recognition?

My scribbled Demon which Vito published is mysteriously missing from this following collection of photos.




Vito, si tu lisait ce message, envoyeriez-moi un email!

Battling Wanderlust

In moments when I am stricken ferociously with the itch to move, the curdling desire to travel across the vast lands of earth, bitten by the anxiety for adventure, I turn towards the masterful expertise of Seneca. The Roman politician turned Stoic philosopher offers endless suggestions, maxims, and daily practices of mind and body for those who choose to work towards pursuing the good life. He affirms

We should live with the conviction: "I wasn't born for one particular corner: the whole world's my home country". If the truth of that were clear to you, you would not be surprised that the diversity of new surroundings for which, out of weariness of the old, you are constantly heading fails to do you any good. Whichever had came first would have satisfied you if you had believed you were home in all. As it is, instead of traveling you are rambling and drifting, exchanging one place for another when the thing you are looking for, the good life, is available everywhere.

Meditating upon such a maxim evokes a sun stroked revelation. The spirit clears its throat, my veins breathe in the wild concrete, and I find myself briefly at home in this strange world.

The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 4

Lying underneath the freeway and cradling the dusty shores of the bay is a stone of unusual powers. Submerged in buzzing fumes and caked in greasy feces is a stone beaten by the winds of time and mutated by humankind’s fists. A stone unlike other stones. A stone that speaks voluminous stories about an unfinished future yet imagined. A future anticipated only in the unconscious memories of a dream’s shadowy characters. A future yet crafted. The hardness of the stone still unformed, almost soft. An unrecognizable future still waiting to pave its way into the gut of our fragile species.

It is true that we no longer live in the ancient age where a human might be transformed into a pillar of salt at the instant of a wrong turn. Nor are we born into a mystical age where an omniscient being speaks the guiding, absolute Truth by way of burning bushes. We do not even live in the majestic epoch when feeble heroes (David) overcame enormous villains (Goliath). But a delicate spark of such ancient mysticism lingers in the darkest fog puddling over our melancholic modernity. We still live in a time where things breathe the puzzled allegory of prophecy. And we must not neglect these signs! Yes, we must engage in meticulous exploration. The future calls on us to practice refined exegesis of the riddles scribed onto nature’s wrinkled skin. Belshazzar ignored the writing on the wall, “numbered, weighed, divided” gleamed the symbols before the fall of Babylon.


An imprinted face of the killer stares back at us in globular strokes of white paint. And what a mysterious beast of unimaginable disfigurement! Or is it supernatural origin? His spiked skull adorns two hooked horns reminiscent of Michelangelo’s horrific Moses. An ovular beak clad with forests of teeth beams sardonically. The empty eyes spin in endless cyphers. His skull is curved in the skeletal shape of a scream or a Faustian bird.

Or, the image strangely resembles the white rabbit in demonic form. Its face is melted to the rough bone and ears charred to tree stumps of cartilage. Burnt fur settles into the recesses of the rocks among gray pebbles and plastic needles. I cannot make out the scribble of yellow paint framing the bottom arc of the teeth. Words or mere ornamentation? A signature or a title? A prophecy or an accident? The return of Belshazzar’s mistake?

I cannot make out whether its a portrait of the murderer or the murdered. Did the white rabbit paint the killer’s image in aid of our detective pursuits? Or, did he in his last moments wish to once and for all imprint his own visage in a rocky eternity upon the melting shores of the freeway?

If you were chased by your killer and knew you would not survive, what would you do? Imagine. In your last moments would you fill your heart with redemption, scribbling anxiously the portrait of your killer on nature’s palette? A just being will see the signs and avenge such unfairness of your death you reassure yourself! Your pen grows steady and you gather strength in the thought of such tales of justice and balance. Or in those last moments would you etch yourself onto the solidness of a stone that would outlast your rotting corpse? A last shadow by which others may remember you. Paint the tribute to such an astounding life on the elderly palm of this crumbled mountainside! Pray to the drenched sands of Narcissus for your future my white rabbit! A vengeance, a memory, a story told--your destiny is finitely returned.

The Melancholic Death of the White Rabbit: Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Guider to distant regions of the earth and discloser of worlds of infinite possibility, how your death renders me forlorn! A death so melancholic that we do not yet realize the extent of your passing. The wretchedness of your threaded corpse--impaled on the sliver end of a lone support beam--still requires time to be seen and felt. Our bodies lug forward listlessly in your wake, driven by a mechanical habit heavy with rust rather than the joyful spirit of volition.

Was it the Madman who guarded the entrance to the belly of the freeway who caught you in a moment of indecision? Perhaps the whooshing noise of this demonic land under the concrete behemoth freeway startled you, or the sporadic spouting from the steamy sewage pipe slowed your foot. Or, did the Madman manufacture a trap, designing it from strewn shopping cart pieces and rubber tires, powering the engine with stolen electricity from the hidden underpass wires?

It must have been the fastidious Troll! Have you heard of that wide-eyed Troll who patrols the entrance to thresholds? He planted a garden rich in engineered seeds, watered his crop with guzzling waste, and cultivated roses in the filth of it all--was it he who offered the rabbit to his gods? Was it this robber of imagination who required a sacrifice to construct his gravely altar honoring the specters of the forgotten past? Did he wish to strike vengeance and fear in the hearts of all who could not believe his previous mythological predictions? All who laughed carelessly in his face and spat at his boots? And what will become of us now, the bearers of dead white rabbits and compelled believers in porcelain gods? By what creative powers might we invent a destiny still unwritten and a future worth living? By what means will we gather a courage never before demanded for humankind?

Oh, what dissemination I trick myself into believing! If the white rabbit is dead then only we could have killed the beast. Yes, you and I--we are his murderers! The troll has built a tomb for his lord in this illuminated garden of excrement. And he has forgotten his own graveyard, leaving its nurturing to the deadening drone of the cars on the freeway and the fleeting pounding of the trains that come and go like clockwork. The open toothed sepulcher takes nourishment in the sewage spilled forth from the city's most dreadful underground arteries. And it bathes in the shit, the dirtied plastic, the oily purple waters of the bay's shore.

But how did we do this? How could we pollute the entire sea with our excrement? Who gave us the rag to muddy the the skies? What were we doing when we chained the stars to the earth? Where is it moving now? Forward, forward, endlessly forward? Towards mass produced horizons? Is there any other direction? Are we not straying even through an infinitely organized nothing? Do we not feel the horrendous grumble of heavy space? Has it not become hotter? Is night not continually closing in on us? Do we need not yet feel the divine composition of the white rabbit? White rabbits, too, decompose. Springs of inspiration may be drank up and pissed out.

Yes, the white rabbit is dead. The white rabbit remains dead. And only we could have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, us most pathetic murderers of all murderers? What was most adventurous and outstanding of all the world has yet seen has bled to death under our waste: who will wash the blood from our hands? What unadulterated water is there left for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games could we ever invent anymore? Is not the despair of this deed too hopeless even for us? Must we ourselves not become white rabbits to even appear worthy of it?

Upon the horizon of the junkyard docks, a makeshift, stuffed white rabbit bobs in the blinding skylight. It sways in a dissonant percussive rhythm like the chopping of a sail's broken mast in the shifting winds.

The Bayview Graffiti Warehouse: The Bombers' Temple

In the weary streets of the Bayview district, slabbed down against the gooey Bay waters of the Central Waterfront, nestled in between the funneling lines of the colossal highway buzzing with destination and a shiny skate park clanking with consecration, lies a behemoth brick and cement structure, abandoned by those in charge of the means of production, opening up the space for its artistic renovation.


Seek and ye' shall find the foreboding gateway to a land few and far between in these modern days of urban gloss overs. Jump the weeded blocks, scale the seaweed clad fence, rusted by the hands of bronzed clams, and fiddling through clunking sewage waters, just a hopscotch distance from brittle tire isles, a punctured tin opening calls to you, my wide eyed urban explorer.

The solid tin lining of the gateway reach towards the heavens like a Romanesque Church's ribbed vaults. Paralleling the hierarchal scaling of Church murals that divides the secular and the sacred, the graffiti elevates in accordance with risks indulged and craftsmanship mastered. The ambitious bomber seeks the highest point to make a mark that leaves a legacy.

And just like the sweeping windows of a thick walled basilica, the white sunlight washes the towering gateway in a luminescent glow, spotlighting stylized letters of the English language, bathing wooden planks and haloing swirling lines in a celestial splendor.

Oh, let us baptize this behemoth the Bombers' Temple by dunking its goliath skull into a vat of bubbling aerosol. I walk softly on my toes in your gateway with head cocked upwards so as to respect the gods and their idols that leave behind their earthly spirits to linger naturally according to the toils of time!

But higher than all fly the nomadic pigeons, who dive through the broken plexiglass and swoop across the rectangular arches, finding refuge in the heights that encourage an avian paradise for feces dropping and psychotic wing flapping. Tarred feathers stick to the muddied grayish black soil that mars the gateway floors, making the city slicked explorer trudge deep through even more shit to pass through the portal.


Slide through the portal, and cross the brightly lit basilica that stretches further into the outlands, supported by cigar shaped drum columns, each colored with vibrant geometrical designs overlapping one another in a fresco frenzy. A coating of sandpapered wood chips graces the floor, fooling the visitor in a disturbing trompe l'oiel, as if the ground was the natural soil of the Earth, and not the desolated erosion of human junk.


I know not of the machinery that still straddles the many rooms of this behemoth warehouse. Perhaps ships used to be stationed in the stalls, like horses waiting for the necessary cycles of grooming and sleeping, or perhaps even a changing of parts, hanging on tightly to the same definitive form, but gradually becoming a whole new structure over the course of many physical replacements of parts.

At what point may we call the abandoned warehouse an urban museum, glorifying the works of hundreds of participating community artists, and free to the public viewing for appreciation, cognitive development, and cultural criticism?





View the entire flickr set here.

Bandaged Buses

O bandaged buses! The wounds of time have taken their toll on your hard metal exoskeleton, leaving the gutted remains of an abysmal inside pilfered by the wind and carried far from home, the carcass abandoned to rot yet placed neatly into organized lines for the sake of careful observation by blue costumed workers, closured tightly within high sparkling barbed fences, waiting and decaying.

Graveyard of another era, preserve what you can, for as long as you can, until your eventual recycling into the next species to come, the new centipede like wheeled animals, wind themselves sinuously through our glistening paved streets into the promise of the future!


Decay quietly old vehicle of burden; the time of youth yearns desperately to sing its own swan song.

The Sun Sludge

A smoldering San Francisco sun hardens the slushy waste into a cement paste, bubbling thick with mutant moss and oily rubber scraps. These chunky waters never expected a sun so sweltering, the microwaved air sticking to my skin like hot molasses, absorbed heavily into my dusty bones. Typically a cool wind sways over the gray sludge, washing away the sweating aroma of caked combustion and lingering sewage, allowing the fog to refreshingly bathe your body in its soft mist.

But today, the horizontal rays of the white sun beam down onto the egg yoke interior of the sludge, boiling up the forgotten junk to its surface, heralding in the sad ascension of industrial waste and foreboding weaponry. The seconds stretch like rubber bands, bound to give in and break at any moment. An auspicious beginning and a lonely end.

A rusty shopping cart lies on its side floating atop the water’s brownish puss slightly higher than its brother showing the wrinkled age of the elements, sinking into the slime like a juiced up needle into bumpy flesh, its plastic melting away, drying hard, and then melting once again in a trudging cycle. They surely belonged to wandering nomads, pitching tented homes in the near vicinity, and then pushed out to continue their eternal odyssey by the patrolling authorities, hardly marred by the nauseating stink of this place, a perfume that tells stories of the distant land known as home.

A sinuous aorta cuts across the land, trickling lightly with an oily grin, splitting off into narrower tributaries by a sun bleached construction cone that still wears the pinkish remnants of its loud orange past. Even the barbed wire and chain fence constructed to ward off visitors have decayed and fallen into the pit, catching greasy feathers and blackened twigs in their iron spikes, decomposing calmly under the pitiless sun and screeching herons.

The seagulls sit on the sun pocked boulders that form the boundaries of the cove – cradling the corroded timber columns that once held up a bustling pier ushering in cargo ships to the bursting industry, the glorious Port of San Francisco – then waft over the crumbling concrete land buttressed by eroding steel platforms dripping with its liquid rust, only to make a hungry return to the cascading rocks.

They call it Warm Water Cove, a land where bright graffiti murals painted with swirling letters once littered the warehouse walls and the cement factory fences, now buffed over by a long abandoned feces grey that mirrors the mossy sewage of the sludge waters. The waters hardly resemble the substance of H20, while the cove is nothing but a dank abyss underneath the crumbling concrete, serving as shelter for some of the more feral life of these lands. Newly installed surveillance cameras mark the territory, patrolled from some unseen headquarters, ensuring the territory only for the lives of animals and waste. The specter of human activity lingers annoyingly in the mud.

They also call it Tire Park, baptized with good reason by the uncanny sight during low tide of a truck tire cemetery on the southern side of the bay. Soaked in the gooey paste, the tires clamor towards the shimmering asphalt rocks, planted by the rippling tides into the beach like gravestones of some mysterious sea creatures, or a foreign ritual, an industrial sacrifice in hopes of a moment of serenity.

What will come forth out of this oily sludge, concocting what sort of potion out of scrap metal, discarded rubber tires, the stilling ammonia of feces and slime? Will the heat of the sun give birth to a modern Aphrodite out of this castrated port, floating towards shore atop a rotating tire spinning vigorously like a dervish, inspired by a crazed mission of urban redemption? Or will the slithery serpentine paint spread its draconic fingertips across the totality of the cove, slathering narrow concrete paths and weedy flowers with a smudged layer of cultivated dullness?