Art Rat Tar: The White Bear on Street Art

John Pugh 3D illusion murals

2010-10-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

I have an aunt that sends the whole family emails, almost daily, with funny photos, puzzles, jokes, and occasionally interesting art pics. Today's email from her was a series of murals by John Pugh, in a style he calls Trompe L'oeil, which is French for optical illusion or something. Great stuff, check out the clip, or his website: John Pugh Murals.

Street Art in Shoreditch, England

2010-09-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a really creative video I found showing street art and graffiti in Shoreditch, England. Pac Man anyone?

The Visual Libraries/Leave Your Mark project

2010-08-02T22:03:00.001-07:00

These lovely ladies are Dr. Maureen O'Neill and Claire Sambrook of the Visual Libraries project in Portsmouth, England. I haven't figured out how English women got so tan. They must've had a good summer holiday.

For me, it started with a little display in the Winston-Salem central library. I was staying in a homeless shelter in W-S, theoretically looking for work, but really wondering what to do with my life. I wandered away from the BMX bike, skateboard, and TV industries in the mid-1990's. I wanted to get over my intense shyness and heal from the issues developed in a family that's a bit crazier than most. I worked odd jobs in Southern California, read a lot of books, wrote voluminously in journals, wrote poetry, and did a bit of drawing here and there and an occasional zine. Life didn't make sense to me, and I had a lot of really deep questions I wanted to answer before I moved on. I wound up a taxi driver in Huntington Beach, California, living in my cab and working 100 or more hours a week, struggling to survive. Every day I woke up in my cab, in a parking lot somewhere in Orange County, and my first thought was, "how can I make $200 today?" Taxi driving isn't a job, it's a business, a very, very competitive business. There was no time for creativity, I had to make money.

Then, in August 2005, a veteran driver who owned his cab offered me a deal. I would drive his taxi on the weekends, and during the week I could live in his indie art gallery. I needed a break, so I took the deal. I spent four and a half days each week literally surrounded by art made by several young SoCal artists. On my second night there, I drew a little drawing. Then it just blossomed. As a prolific poet, I tried to make big, hand drawn posters of my poems, drawn in marker. It was an idea I started a few years before. But markers looked really cheesy and amateurish when I colored the drawings in. So I played around with different ideas, and a style of overlapping colored scribbles emerged. It gave my marker drawings non-standard hues, and it also created a textured look, which I liked. I was barely making enough money to survive, even with my cheap rent at the gallery, but I had a lot of fun. The creative guy in me was reborn.

After seven months in the gallery, I went back to driving full time again. I struggled through a year and a half more, as business went down because of taxi company policies and then the recession. I finally walked away from taxi driving in late 2007, so overwieght I was barely able to walk. None of my family and friends would loan me money to get back on my feet. So I wandered out onto the streets of Orange County and lived for an entire year by panhandling. As horrible as that sounds, it was one of the best years of my life. I began to really enjoy life on a moment by moment basis. I went into bookstores and looked through street art books for hours. I sat in fast food restaurants and drew for hours. I tried to get a little sticker business going, selling stickers at a swap meet. I produced a one hour comedy video of myself about homelessness, entirely with panhandled money. I started writing and working out comedy material.

When I walked out on the streets, my health was so bad that I expected to die within two or three weeks. After six months, I realized that I was probably going to survive, and had to try to figure out how to get back into society. Unfortunately, my family had reported me missing, which put a big target on me with the police, as a homeless man. An uncle of mine made a call or two to business associates in Orange County. Apparently they pulled some strings to get the police to "encourage" me to leave California and move to North Carolina, where my family now lives. I knew I would have almost no chance of getting back on my feet in NC, especially with my family involved. The family that refused to help me out when I first need help several years before. Given the choice between homelessness in California and living with my family in North Carolina, I chose homelessness. The police chose North Carolina.

After being literally terrorized by police and sheriff's deputies for a year, I finally accepted a plane flight to NC. I got here in the depths of the recession, when jobs were really scarce. My mom was convinced I was mentally ill, and tried to force me into going on disability for the first seven months. One day I had just had enough. I packed a few things in my little day pack, and walked away from my parents apartment with three dollars in my pocket. I slept in an old graveyard that night, and scraped up enough for a bus ticket to Winston-Salem the next day. Why Winston-Salem? Because that's where the bus was going. I spent that first night in a patch of woods during a serious thunderstorm. Then next day someone told me about the homeless shelters, and I went to the Samaritan shelter.

Suddenly I was on my own again, and had a bed, and three free meals a day for three months. I had no money, and no idea what the hell to do next. Like many of the homeless people living in Winston-Salem shelters, I hiked a mile and a half to the library every morning. That became my ritual. One day I saw a little display by the front desk. It had a few blank journals that were actual library books. After looking at the journals for a couple of days, I asked a librarian about them, a woman named Candace Brennan. We had a good little chat, and she told me the project was called Leave Your Mark. Anyone could write, draw, or do whatever in the journals, and they would remain in the library collection. So I took the journal with the Winston-Salem theme, and drew a pen and ink drawing of a battered outhouse. Why an outhouse? It was just something I had learned to draw in high school, and I'd drawn dozens of them.

I checked the journal out, and did several more drawings, most in my color "scribble style" with markers. Then I forgot about the journals and wound up moving back in with my parents a couple m,onths later. With such a horrible job market, I tried to raise enough money to get the Ebay business idea going again. I wound up selling artwork to my niece's cheerleader friends and doing odd jobs instead. A year and a half after coming to North Carolina, I still don't have a job. I'm squeaking by, and every day I wake up almost ready to just hitchhike back to California. I take my frustration out in blogging since I'm a writer at heart.

Then last week, out of the blue, I got a cal from Candace the librarian, who I didn't remember ever talking to. She said some women from England liked my artwork in the journals in the W-S library. The women wanted to meet me. "Uh... OK. You sure you have the right guy?" I thought. The next day I had a long chat with Maureen and Claire, and learned that the Winston-Salem Library's Leave Your Mark project is an offshoot of Maureen and Claire's Visual Libraries project in Portsmouth, England. Unknowingly, I had drawn the first picture in the first journal of their project in the United States. Combined with my other drawings, they said I was the standout artist of the Leave Your Mark journals.

One day I get and odd phone call from a librarian. The next day I get interviewed by a couple of professors from England, and have a great chat with them. The next morning I do a phone interview with the Winston-Salem Journal, and that afternoon I found myself in an obscure room in the Wake Forest University library at a workshop with professors, art grad students, and librarians. I've never taken a single college course. The only time I ever spent on college campuses was street riding as a BMXer.

I don't know where this journal in the library idea will lead, but to me it seems like a no-brainer. Even in our smart phone, laptop, high-tech world, tens of thousands of people go to libraries every day. Many of them check out books. Why not let the creatively inclined people of every area CREATE a library book. How cool is that? My goofy little outhouse drawing will be sitting in the Winston-Salem library 30 years from now, barring theft or crazy circumstances. That's just plain freakin' cool. You can do whatever you want: draw, paint, collage, insert photos, crochet a bookmark, whatever. Personally I believe that everyone has some creative spirit, but most adults are afraid to let it out. We're conditioned to give that artsy stuff up as we grow up. Yet if you put art supplies and journals in front of a bunch of people who don't consider themselves artist, and you tell them it's OK to do whatever they want, they get downright giddy. Maureen and Claire have stumbled onto a brilliant idea here. OK, they're professors, they didn't "stumble" onto it, they observed a niche that was creatively unfulfilled, and they created a way to fill that niche and provide everyday people and trained artists with a place to share their thoughts and feelings with their communities.

The Visual Libraries/Leave Your Mark projects are the edge of a really big idea. I think we're going to see it go a lot further in coming years. I'm glad I stumbled into it.

My art # 6

2010-08-02T21:53:00.000-07:00

Cigarette smoking alien drawing on the back of my number plate, 2010. This is drawn in my "scribble style," using Sharpie markers.

My art # 5

2010-08-02T21:40:00.001-07:00

That's me on the bike. Wall ride over my sister's head at the Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach, California in 1990. This is from my self-produced BMX freestyle video The Ultimate Weekend. I shot this still off the video while paused on the TV.

For many years, I channeled much of my creativity into the fledgling sport of BMX freestyle. In 1985, I did my first BMX zine. That led to a job at Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, where my boss was a young Andy Jenkins. I got laid off because I didn't really fit in, and Andy hired some kid named Spike Jonze to replace me. I went on to do more zines, freelance for several BMX magazines, produce several bike, skate and snowboard videos, work on over 300 TV episodes, and work on five tours of Cirque du Soleil. It all started because I made a really horrible little zine. Funny how things work out.

My art #4

2010-08-02T21:28:00.000-07:00

Sometimes ideas just pop into my head... I lived for a year panhandling to survive, so that's where the idea for the sign came from. I found a beat up crossbow bolt (arrow) while taking a walk one day. A little store in town was selling used stuffed animals for a dollar each. Somehow it all comes together.

My art #3

2010-08-02T21:18:00.000-07:00

Graffiti'd question for the ages on the side of Urban Artware Gallery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I snapped the photo, but just for the record, I don't know what art is. 6th and Trade street

My art #2

2010-08-02T21:10:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I went to an anniversary party a local TV show was having in Greensboro, NC, with my parents. I was bored out of my skull, and so I wandered around with a camera snapping pics. The Greensboro Grasshopper baseball team mascot saw my camera and struck a quick pose.

My art #1

2010-08-02T20:54:00.001-07:00

This one is a snow sculpture I did here in Kernersville, North Carolina this past winter of 2009-2010. We had seven inches of snow that was a bit powdery when it fell, so I made a big pile and let it sit overnight. I grew up in Ohio and Idaho, so I've had a lot of experience with the many qualities of snow, but I never tried sculptures back then. In this case, it warmed up the next day into the 30's, so the snow packed well. I only had one afternoon to carve, so I just did an abstract thing, playing with shapes and angles that shadows would highlight. Nothing amazing, other than we got seven inches of snow in North Carolina. I was just bored, out of work, and playing around. I also made an tiny igloo, a pyramid, a three and a half foot high Snoopy, and a four foot tall, ten foot long dinosaur over the course of the winter.

For tools, I used a square bucket to make the big pile, and as a seat to sit on while carving. I did the actual carving with a bread knife and a spoon. I would spray water out of my mouth on the finished carvings at night, when it was cold, to build a thin layer of ice on the carvings to make them last longer. Since temperatures warmed back up fast here, all the carvings melted within three or four days.

The Cadillac Ranch

2010-07-28T06:44:00.000-07:00

It was the early 1990's, and I had taken a bus from California to North Carolina. Anyone who has taken a bus across this country knows it is not a ride, it is an ordeal. A coast to coast bus ride is a near death experience. My reason for the trip was to jump in my sister's car and drive with her back to California, where she was to begin her school teaching career after graduating form college in North Carolina. This means I am either a good brother or a gullible sap. Probably the latter.

So I spent three days on a Greyhound, with marginal amounts of often interupted sleep. I stayed one night at some one's house in North Carolina, and began driving cross country with my sister. It was late afternoon on the third day of driving, and my sister and I were on each other's nerves. She bugged me, I bugged her, and we were both tired of driving. She was driving as we left Amarillo, Texas. I saw something off the side of the road, and yelled, "The Cadillac Ranch!" I scared her and she swerved, but she stayed on the road and we decided to stop. We both needed to get out of the car and walk around a little. We found our way to the side road, and pulled into the dirt parking spots. We had accidentally found the Cadillac Ranch. Then again, I don't really believe in accidents or coincidences. I think it found us.

There are no signs for miles to let you know it's coming. There are no flashing lights or neon signs. There's no entrance fee and no gift shop. It's just a field with about ten old Cadillacs sticking their tail ends out of the ground. Some guy built it just for the Hell of it 30 or 40 years ago. Logically speaking, it's ridiculous, there's no reason for it. I mean, technically, it's a junkyard. But I was smiling long before I reached the cars. I couldn't help it. My sister was smiling, too. She couldn't help it either.

We were all alone there, just wandering around the cars. We looked at them. We took photos of them. We talked to a young German couple who wandered up a few minutes later. The Germans were smiling, too. After maybe 20 minutes, my sister and I headed back to the car. We were both still smiling. I said to my erudite sister, the recent college graduate, "I think that's the greatest work of art ever." My sister laughed and we drove off. We didn't fight at all the rest of the night.

Weird stuff across America

2010-06-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

It's not really street art, but I just saw this on Yahoo. Yes, I still have Yahoo as a home page. One more reason not to read my blog. Anyhow, this article tells about weird sites in the U.S., included are Carhenge, a building decorated with corn, and a building shaped like a giant elephant. Not mentioned in this article is the Nascar driver's shop shaped like a giant race car in North Carolina, a building shaped like a giant bulldozer on route 99 in California, the dinosaurs on route 10 near Palm Springs, California, and my personal favorite, The Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo, Texas. Weird roadside exhibits are a form of public art, which is enough for me to add it to the blog.

Top 10 Weirdest Sites in America

The Durham gnomes

2010-06-17T17:00:00.001-07:00

This one falls more in the practical joke category than street art, but it's amusing just the same. In recent days garden gnomes have been popping up in weird spots all over Durham, North Carolina. There have been several TV reports about them, and, imagine this, no one seems to know who's putting them around town. But, there is already a Durham Gnome blog. The gnomes are just statues, like the infamous kidnapped roaming gnome of several years ago, which inspired the current Travelocity roaming gnome we've all seen in commercials. (Oh, naughty fish!)
The Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina area is home to three major colleges, Duke, NC State, and U. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, known for the Carolina Tarheels. So there's a good chance college students may be up to this. Or it could be a Shephard Fairey wannabe who's just not that creative. While there isn't self-created art involved, the gnomes are mostly in high locations involving serious climbing or really big ladders. If you really feel like wasting more time on this, click the link above for the gnome blog. Looking at the blog, whomever's blogging is no doubt behind the gnomes.

The 3d Chalk Art of Julian Beever

2010-05-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

When it comes to street art, there are a small number of artists to actually do their art on the street or sidewalk. Julian Beever is one of those. Even if you don't recognize the name, you've seen his work. Someone, at some point, has emailed pics of Julian Beever's 3D chalk drawings to you at some point, saying "Hey, check these out!" The three dimensional effect he gets is amazing. But he's kind of outside the realm of graffiti and street art to a lot of people. He doesn't run around at night tagging, bombing walls, or throwing up stencils. He does his work in broad daylight, with landowner approval most of the time, I imagine. But it's amazing work, none the less.
I was clicking channels the other night, and I saw a show called Concrete Canvas listed, so I checked it out. It turned out to be a series of shows, ten in all, of Julian Beever going around the world to different cities and doing a big chalk piece in each one. In the course of each show, he also does interviews with graffiti and street artists of that area. In the Redondo Beach/Los Angeles show, he interviews OBEY Giant artist Shephard Fairey and another graffiti artist. If you're into art, and especially street art, check this series out if you can find it. I'll embed the clips I can find in future posts. It aired on Ovation channel, but it's not scheduled for the next few weeks.
TV show distributor Electric Sky's description of the series

Check out Wooster Collective

2010-05-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

The whole street art thing is huge now. Some artists are huge and traveling the world to galleries and events. One of the best sites to check out this phenomenon is New York City based Wooster Collective. They have a continual flow of great videos and pics of street art worldwide. Their focus seems to be on appearances of known artists and gallery events featuring street artists, the official street art scene, you could call it. It's definitely worth checking out every couple of days to see what they have up.

If you're into skateboarding at all, check out the old film, Magic Rolling Board, May 18th (2010) on Wooster Collective. It's a great mix of mid 70's skateboarding, from gorilla grips and hippie jumps to tearing up Baldy Pipe.

Anne Hathaway's boyfriend stole street art

2010-05-19T08:29:00.000-07:00

Anne Hathaway's boyfriend steals street art

You've probably seen this already. Let me think here... Street art, by it's very nature, is technically vandalism, or it's simply left for whomever to collect. One or the other. So how do you steal something that no one owns???

Here's a clip on Mr.Brainwash, whose piece was stolen in New York.

The best street painting I've ever seen

2010-05-10T21:38:00.000-07:00

Like I said in a previous post, I spent more than a decade riding my BMX bike through back alleys, behind shopping centers, and in ditches to find good places to street ride. Doing that, I ran across quite a bit of graffiti. A lot of it was tagging, but like all street riding BMXers and skaters, I've seen a lot of graffiti, tagging, and stickers. Then I wound up living on the streets for a solid year in 2007 and 2008, and I spent hours sitting in bookstores flipping through street art and graffiti books, looking at art from around the world. After these sessions browsing art books, I wandered back out on the streets, even more aware of the tags, graffiti, stencils, stickers, and other art around me. This piece in Winston-Salem is my favorite piece I've ever seen. I think he boy ripping his heart out may have been chasing a girl originally, but this is all there is now. Props to whomever painted this thing, it's amazing.

Need a laugh to get through the workday? Check out my new comedy blog:

The White Bear's Comic Freak Show

Stay Left

2010-05-10T21:33:00.000-07:00

Small Banksy tribute stencil in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

LIFE graffiti in Winston-Salem

2010-05-10T21:28:00.000-07:00

LIFE has tags all over Winston-Salem, mostly the circle ones seen in a couple of the previous posts. This is the biggest and a different style. Art district, in Winston-Salem, NC.

Ask a stupid question...

2010-05-10T21:24:00.000-07:00

Underground graffiti... Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It's literally undergound, in a tunnel downtown.

Trade Street art

2010-05-10T21:21:00.000-07:00

Tags and a drawing, Trade Street. Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Winston-Salem street art

2010-05-10T21:17:00.000-07:00

This looks like a tagger meets the smiley face meets the Manson family. Fourth Street, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Real street art

2010-05-10T21:11:00.000-07:00

On the first Friday of every month in Winston-Salem, they block off Trade Street and have a gallery hop. To keep the small children entertained, there's an area where they can draw with sidewalk chalk. Looks like there's a pretty talented crop of kindergartners coming up.

Then what did he do?

2010-05-10T21:06:00.000-07:00

Some things are just funny, without trying to be. Logo on law office, Fourth Street, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Maybe I'm vain, but I think I would have changed my name when I decided to become a lawyer.

One little letter...

2010-05-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

I walked by this several times before it clicked... RATM, Rage Against The Machine. Trade Street, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Prize Sticker

2010-05-10T20:47:00.000-07:00

When I snapped this photo, there was a rat sitting there mumbling, "I ran through a maze for this?" Fourth Street, Winston-Salem, NC.

Sarcastic sticker in Winston-Salem

2010-05-10T20:42:00.000-07:00

It's too faded to show up in a photo, but the "Hello" sticker on the electric meter here says, "Hello, my name is electricity, shake my hand please." Meter by Trade Street in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Stickers in Winston-Salem

2010-05-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

I spent half my life in Huntington Beach, California, a hub for the early alternative sports world. Surfing, skateboarding, BMX, motocross, even snowboarding are huge there, as are start-up companies. Virtually every garage company starts by slapping stickers all over town there. The Triad area of North Carolina has no alternative sports scene to speak of, and this isn't an entrepreneurial area at all. But there are still a few artists and bands slapping stickers around. I found this group on Trade Street in Winston-Salem, the art street of the city.

More Tags and stickers in W-S

2010-05-10T16:14:00.000-07:00

FOWL, LIFE, Prize, and a few other tags and stickers in Winston -Salem, North Carolina. Yeah, it's the South, maybe even the Dirty South, (I'm not sure what the difference is) but there's a small but thriving art and street art scene here. Who'd a thunk it?

Tags and stickers in Winston-Salem

2010-05-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

The big circle LIFE tags are all over Winston-Salem, and there are a few others here.

Sketchy Alley in Winston-Salem

2010-05-10T15:55:00.000-07:00

I was a wandering BMX street rider through most of the '80's and '90's, always checking out odd urban places for things to ride. I was also a BMX and skateboarding video producer and cameraman, shooting other riders in urban areas, looking for good backgrounds and the best angles. I also worked on several TV shows, mostly as a crew guy, but I got to hang out with a lot of creative, visually oriented people. So when I first saw this sketchy alley in downtown Winston-Salem, I thought of how good it would look on film. The naturally decaying paint in this section, and the video monitoring sign are awesome. This is like the perfect alley to shoot some gangster scene in a movie, the shady drug deal, or the brawl spilling out the back door of the bar. I know how stupid this sounds, but you couldn't make an alley look more perfect for a movie set. And this one is just that gritty and has so much texture naturally. I love it.

FOWL graffiti in Winston-Salem

2010-05-10T15:50:00.000-07:00

FOWL graffiti on a wall behind Trade Street in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. There's construction going on, so this was as close as I could get, between the pickup and the portajohn.

Bouffant Betty Stencil

2010-05-10T15:42:00.000-07:00

This is a faded stencil here in the tiny town of Kernersville, North Carolina. It's a woman with a bouffant hairdo, ala Riki Lake in Hairspray. I've found four stencils since I've been stuck in this lame little town. They are so obscure, they never get painted over. In a southern town that's horribly uptight, it's nice to know there's at least one artistic rebel roaming around.

Be kind to animals

2010-04-29T09:44:00.001-07:00

So I found a banged up crossbow bolt (arrow) while taking a walk one day. Then this little general store in town had stuffed animals selling for $1 each. And I lived for a year as a panhandler, making cardboard signs to panhandle food money. Put those things together with my weird mind and this is what happens.

Funny panhandling signs #2

2010-04-29T09:39:00.001-07:00

See more of my funny panhandling signs at Make Money Panhandling Blog

Funny panhandling signs #1

2010-04-29T09:36:00.000-07:00

Fort Knox graffiti

2010-04-04T22:44:00.000-07:00

I saw a documentary a couple weeks ago about Fort Knox, the Kentucky Army base famous for being the United States gold depository. For decades, tons of gold were stored there, and supposedly still are. As bad of financial shape as this country is in these days, no one's sure if there is still a lot of gold there, but there used to be tens of millions of dollars worth.
According to the documentary (History channel, I think), they would occasionally have to move gold bars around, and in some cases empty vault rooms so they could inventory the gold. They would hire local guys to do this work. One of these workers said that when they emptied vault rooms, there were names and dates in chalk of guys who had moved gold and worked there before. Keep in mind, this is in the most secret part of one of the most secret bases in the U.S. More people have been inside Area 51 than have been in the gold vaults of Fort Knox. More proof that graffiti is everywhere.

The Lobster Bird

2010-03-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

I don't want to make myself seem like some street art veteran in this blog, that's definitely not the case. Like pretty much all creative people, I've done little things in public my whole life that may be considered "street art" these days. Most of them were just little spontaneous ideas the popped into my head at the time. But it was only in late 2007, while living on the streets, that I discovered that street art was actually a "thing." I knew about tagging and graffiti bombing, but until I discovered a bunch of street art books at a book store, I never realized that there was actually subculture surrounding street art. I'd been seeing stickers and the occasional stencil, but thought they were just individuals having a little fun.

Once I discovered that there was a subculture of street artists, as well as taggers and graffiti bombers, I started paying much more attention to all the creative stuff on the streets around me. And I started doing a little myself, playing around with the ideas and trying different mediums, while I was living on the streets.

But I realized, I'd been doing things my whole life that were along the same lines. I'm sure most of you have, too. Maybe you add a response to some bathroom graffiti. Maybe you made a smiley face on a foggy window, or wrote something on a dirty car window. Like I've said before, pretty much all of us made snowmen, snow angels, or sand castles as a kid. This is all in the larger realm of public art if not specifically "street art."

Before I actually thought about all these things, I'd just do little things that popped into my head. One of these was the Lobster Bird. I was a taxi driver in Orange County, California, known to most people as The "O.C." these days after the TV show. I was living in my cab a few years ago, and worked about 18 hours every day, seven days a week. The taxi companies had flooded Orange County with cabs, and we all wound up working really crazy hours to make any money, every single day. Taxi driving is a really tough gig, and you need to just get out of the cab every once in a while to keep your sanity. Since I was driving all over Orange County, I would wind up at different locations, and would just park and take a walk sometimes when it wasn't busy.

One day I did this at Crystal Cove State Park, which is a beach area between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach. I paid the fee, parked, and hiked down to the beach, which is below a tall cliff. Getting out into a natural area for a while was one of my favorite ways to de-tune from the cab, and I'd never explored Crystal Cove for some reason. It was a weekday morning, so the beach was virtually empty, just the way I like it. I wandered along the beach, looking at the little things that had washed up, seeing if I could find anything interesting. There were little rocks of various colors, oyster shells, pieces of kelp, and little pieces of driftwood, all the typical Southern California beach debris. I walked for a while, and saw something odd. It turned out to be the tail of a dead lobster. I'd never seen one before, even though I had wandered around Huntington Beach for years. I picked it up, and looked at it, wondering what had happened to the rest of the lobster. I was intrigued. And that's when the little idea popped into my head.

The lobster tail had spread scales, and reminded me of a bird's tail. So I set it on the sand, and looked to see what else was around. There were a lot of oyster half shells. So I grabbed a bunch of shells, and used them as feathers to make wings to go with my lobster tail. I grabbed a few pieces of driftwood and some rocks, and about ten minutes later I had made a bird shape in the sand, wings spread, out of objects that had washed up. I didn't think about it as art. I wasn't trying to make any statement. I was just amusing myself.

I stood back, looked at my Lobster Bird, and laughed. It looked kinda cool, I thought. Then I continued walking up the beach. I checked out the washed up debris. I peered at the snails and crabs in the tidal pools, I climbed over the slippery rocks that are plentiful at Crystal Cove. I found pieces of crystal in the surf, which give the area its name, and I even found a piece of petrified wood that had washed up from somewhere.

I probably wandered north for an hour, and then headed back. When I came around a corner of the cliff, the Lobster Bird came into view again, with a young couple standing there admiring it like it was a painting in a gallery. It was a pretty cool feeling. They walked around and looked at the thing for a minute or so, as I walked slowly towards them. They walked off, and another person taking a morning walk stopped to check it out. As I walked by it again, I watched four or five people stop and check out the lobster bird in the sand. It dawned on me that I was close to Laguna Beach, the art center of Orange County, a place where people actually like creative works, unlike much of the U.S. I was surprised, to be honest with you. I made the thing, walked away, and had completely forgotten about it by the time I walked back. So it was a trip to see people stopping to check it out. But it felt good. I had a smile on my face as I walked back to my cab to work the rest of my 18 hour day.

Robert Williams interview

2010-03-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across this Robert Williams interview. Check it out. It's amazing what you can do if you actually learn to paint and draw and are weird.

Save money and make money

2010-03-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

I have a bunch of blogs going these days, here are a couple of my helpful hints blogs. Check 'em out.

Save $50 to $500 When You Move

Garage Sale Cash Tips

World Poetry Day 2010

2010-03-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

It's World Poetry Day 2010 today, (March 21, 2010), so read my poems and savor the power words can have when arranged well. Or read some other poet's poems. Or watch the movie Dead Poet's Society, it's still one of Robin William's best films. Here's the link to the poems I have online.

The White Bear's Poetry Blog

Banksy movie coming out???

2010-03-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

According to Banksy's website, he has a movie coming out called Exit Through The Gift Shop. The trailer is on his site. Of course, since this is Banksy, the news of the movie could be just one big prank. In the trailer, it looks like a cross between street art and Jackass. We'll see if it's for real in time...

Exit Through The Gift Shop

... by the way, why have people actually been checking out this blog lately? Is it just because I mentioned Beautiful Losers?
Three minutes later... Nevermind... answered my own question. This blog somehow made it to the first page of Google results. I guess I should stop neglecting it and write more.

Beautiful Losers

2010-03-15T10:20:00.001-07:00

I finally got to see the Beautiful Losers documentary today, most of it anyhow. All but one part of it is on You Tube at the moment. I'm starting a new zine, and had the basic ideas for my zine in mind when I sat down to watch the movie. Now I have totally different ideas in mind. It's not that Beautiful Losers really changed the way I look at the world, but the movie reminded me what's really important in my own life, and that changed my thoughts on what I should write in this new zine. The documentary focuses on these artists: Thomas Campbell, Shephard Fairey, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Geoff McFetridge, Mike Mills, Stephen Powers, Ed Templeton, and Mark Gonzales. The shows and book include Andy Jenkins, Harmony Korine, and Glenn E. Friedman as well, among others.
This documentary is about a loose knit group from a small gallery called Alleged, and all the artists have taken some inspiration from what we now call street culture, particularly skateboarding.
I, too, evolved in the realm that created the Beautiful Losers group, and I knew four of them back in the day. I saw the BL show in Newport Beach a few years ago when I was a taxi driver. I just happened to drive by the gallery a couple days before it opened, and saw a truck on its side in the parking lot. I asked someone what was going on, and came back to check out the show a few days later. I can't tell you how fun it was to see the artwork, some of it by people I knew, and a mini-ramp being skated in pretentious Newport Beach, a block away from Fashion Island Mall, no less. I realized, walking through that show, that there was this group of artists of all kinds in the show, but those were part of a much larger realm of graffiti painters, regular painters, photographers, zine publishers, graphic artists, video producers and other creative people, and that I was part of that larger realm represented in the Beautiful Losers show. That felt kind of good, just to think, "Yeah, I did some of this stuff too back then."
My first zine, a BMX freestyle zine, somehow got me a job a Wizard Publications, home of BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, in 1986. Andy Jenkins was my boss for FREESTYLIN', and he's one of the four people associated with the Beautiful Losers group that I know. Andy and Lew at FREESTYLIN' were more in the hipster/art school end of the punk scene then, and I just didn't click with them. So I got fired and wound up in Huntington Beach in early 1987. There Ed Templeton was one of the skaters I'd see around, and I worked at Vision's video company, where I got to know Mark Gonzales a bit. Meanwhile, my old job at FREESTYLIN' was filled by an East Coast biker/skater kid who went by the name of Spike Jonze. So among a whole bunch of creative people in my world then were Andy, Spike, Ed, and Gonz, all of whom are in the Beautiful Losers phenomena. So as a horribly blocked creative guy then, I was lucky enough to work and ride and skate with some really creative people, a few of which figure into the Beautiful Losers scene, shows, documentary, and book. I've learned from each of these people on my creative journey, and been inspired by them and many others along the way.
I didn't get to check out the BL book until my year on the streets, 2008. I would hole up in book stores and just look at graffiti and street art books for hours, and actually had to rip the plastic off of a Beautiful Losers book so I could check it out while sitting on a little stool.
So if you're reading this blog, you're probably into the street art scene, so check out Beautiful Losers documentary however you can. Then go create something of you own.

Another way to waste time at work...

2010-02-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

I'm a guy with a lot of ideas. That means I now have a bunch of blogs that no one reads. Here's another one:

The White Bear's Quote of the Day

Snow sculpture

2010-02-01T12:12:00.000-08:00

This is the one I finished this morning (2/2/10). A neighbor kid called it a castle, and wanted his mom to take a pic of him next to it, which she did. I had a big, volcano-shaped pile of snow I piled up, which hardened overnight from a fine powder to a pretty solid consistency for carving. It was just a bad shaped blob of snow to carve a character, so I opted for an abstract, sort of castle idea, with a bunch of tunnels through it, and angled flanges coming off it. The snow I carved away to form the shape was stiff enough to cut into decent sized blocks, and I used those to build the igloo to the right.
As a kid growing up in Ohio, every year my friends and I would try to make an igloo. But we never had the right consistency of snow to make an igloo the Eskimo way, out of blocks of snow. We made one once out of a big block of hard packed snow by carving into it, but never a true igloo. This one is tiny, the door is only big enough for a cat. And it's cone shaped and ugly, but it's a true igloo with the blocks leaning in until the roof was fully covered. I'm pretty stoked on it, no matter how dumb it looks. It's freakin' hard to make an igloo. I've got mad respect for Eskimos now.
The castle here is about 5 1/2 feet high, with the tower part.

Are snowmen street art?

2010-02-01T11:50:00.000-08:00

When I started really paying attention to graffiti and street art around me, and started thinking about the whole concept of public art, I realized that all of us do public art as kids. I think every kid makes a snowman or sand castle at some point. Are these street art? You can argue the idea either way, but they are definitely public art. While these activities are thought of mostly as kids' things, there are adults who take both snow sculpture and sand castles to really amazing levels.

After some really crazy things happening in my life, I wound up homeless and was pretty much forced to come here to North Carolina and live with my parents. It's a really long story. The point is, we've had three big snowstorms since I've been here. So I decided to see what I could do with the snow and make the best use of it. Last winter I made a three foot high Snoopy, which surprised myself and the neighbors. It actually came out really well. This year I made a ten foot long, three foot high dinosaur, an abstract sculpture, and a pyramid in the first snowstorm. As I'm writing this, we just had another big snowstorm hit, about 8 inches, which is really unusual in the South. Although it came down as fine, powdery snow, I made a big pile, it hardened up, and I was able to make a castle-like sculpture and a mini-igloo.

Whether you want to classify these as street art or not doesn't really matter. I used an sporadic opportunity, the snow, to create something just for the hell of it. It was challenging, it was fun, and I learned quite a bit about sculpting an ever-changing medium. My neighbors still think I'm crazy, but now they think I'm crazy and creative. And that's good. Above is the dinosaur. His head fell off the next morning as it warmed up.

Free yourselves from this madness

2010-01-25T09:40:00.000-08:00

That's just one of the sayings graffitied and later photographed and uploaded to the website Written on the City. That particular piece is from Charleston, South Carolina. But Written on the City, which has a book out, has graffiti sayings form all over the world. If I were you, I'd read the sayings below and then click on that link above. C'mon, the boss isn't around, and it's not like you actually do any work at work, right? Here are some more graffiti slogans from the site:

"Love is the new hate." - Charleston, SC

"1. Do drugs 2. Kill" -Charleston, SC

"TV has the fun so you don't have to." - Charleston, SC

"If assholes could fly, this place would be an airport." - Brighton, U.K.

"I hate Mondays" (painted next to a broken computer monitor) - Brighton, U.K.

"Art is Crap" - Brighton, U.K.

My Poetry blog

2009-12-16T22:13:00.000-08:00

If anyone is actually reading this, and happens to like poetry, I'm putting what poetry I have left back online: The White Bear's Poetry Blog.

thewhitebearspoetry.blogspot.com

I've written over 450 poems in my life, I've lost all copies of most of those, but I still have 30 or 40 left. I'm putting this online before what little I have left is taken from me.

Revenge as street art

2009-12-16T07:16:00.000-08:00

Here in the quiet little town of Kernersville, North Carolina, the fine, upstanding residents don't have to worry about things like graffiti. Well, not until an ugly divorce comes along, anyhow. Every day I go out for a walk, and several weeks ago, at 509 Salisbury Street, I noticed a big cardboard sign in a window that read "Dead Beat Dad." The grass was overgrown, and I assumed it was a parting message from the ex-wife and kids who had just moved out.
The funny thing is, that sign stayed up in the window for about six weeks. Every day I'd walk by and laugh at it. Then, when it had been there about three weeks, someone wrote on the window in front of the sign in either green crayon or marker. That said "un" then below that, "cheating wife." I think the husband came back, and started to write "unfaithful wife," but didn't know how to spell it, so he wrote "cheating wife." That's my guess. The "un" mistake just makes the whole thing more funny. I kept telling myself I should take a picture of it, but I kept forgetting to take the camera on my walks. The "Dead Beat Dad" sign finally came down last week, apparently by the real estate agent, because they mowed the lawn as well. In any case, I learned that revenge for one person can become inadvertent street art for the rest of us. Gotta love small towns.

My first mixed media piece

2009-11-06T15:13:00.001-08:00

I was four years old and it was the morning of my parents' anniversary. I wasn't sure what an anniversary was, but apparently someone told me that I should do something special for mom and dad, so that's what I decided to do. I always woke up really early as a kid, 6 or 7 am every morning. On the weekends, I'd chew on the arm of the living room chair, and watch cartoons on TV until my parents got up.
But this was their anniversary, I was was going to do something really special, but I wasn't sure what. So I decided to make something really pretty that they'd like. I got a bottle of Wesson oil out of the cupboard and spread a bunch of it on the kitchen floor. Then I took some of the red and green sugar leftover from Christmas, the kind you decorate sugar cookies with. I sprinkled it on the oil, and made really neat designs with my fingers with it. Man, mom was really going to be proud of me.
Lost in the creative bliss, I wanted to do something else, something even more special. So I took a bunch of my big, fat cranyons, with all those pretty colors... and put them in the toaster, and pushed the big button down. That seemed like a great anniversary present to my four-year-old mind, so I went back out into the living room to watch cartoons, basking in the creative glow.
I think it was the smoke from the toaster that woke up my mom. She ran into the kitchen in her nightgown, and I followed her in to see how she liked my present. Much to my surprise, she didn't like it. She started screaming like a banshee at me. Man, everybody's a critic. My memory of the event fades into screaming and pain at that point, but I'm pretty sure I didn't sit down for a week or so after the spankin' I got that day.
As much fun as it was to make, my first mixed media piece was a dismal failure. Well, it was a critical failure, but it did get a huge reaction, just not the one I intended. So maybe it was successful after all. In any case, like all artists, I was crushed by the disapproval, but I kept on drawing and creating anyhow. You just can't stop that need to create.

Halloween decorations

2009-10-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

"Toucha, toucha, toucha, touch me... I wanta be dirty... thrill me, chill me, fulfill me... creature of the night!"

- Janet in Rocky Horror Picture Show, written by Richard O'Brien and Jim Sharman

Harvest Festival.

Summer's End.

Samhain.

All Hallow's Eve.

Halloween.

For several thousand years now, as the green life of summer died into the colors and bare trees of autumn, as the crops were gathered, people have held festivals. It was originally a time to celebrate the harvest and prepare food to last through the coming winter. But something else pervaded this time of year. It came to be known as a time when then dead came near, where people could let their dark sides come to the surface for a night. Even now in the early 21st century, when holidays are so commercial that they should have an "Inc." after them, that air of naughtiness remains.

As I've mentioned before, when I really started thinking about the whole idea of street art, I quickly realized that there are forms of expression that all "respectable" people think are terrible and created by vandals, like tagging and most paint based graffiti. But there are other creative expressions in the public realm that are considered completely normal by our society. Halloween decorations is a great of the example of the latter type.

For reasons I won't go into, I've come to live in central North Carolina, deep within the Bible Belt. It's not uncommon here for complete strangers to say, "Have a blessed day," in complete seriousness; or to comment on how the Lord shined his glory on the Carolina Tarheels the previous weekend. Comments like these, that would have people laughing in most parts of the country, are considered normal here. Whatever their true character might be, most people put on a facade of devout religious belief around here. Yet, walking through town today, there are Halloween decorations all over. I saw pumpkins, witches, spiders, and ghosts. A small shopping center held an afternoon mini-fair for Halloween. While there are a lot of houses that aren't decorated, even here in the Bible Belt, many are celebrating this most pagan of holidays, Halloween. I find that refreshing in this culture of conforminty and corruption that evolved from the days of slavery.
We even have an officially haunted house here in the little town of Kernersville, Korner's Folly, which is the North Carolina Triad's answer to the Winchester Mystery House in California. Although the Winchester house beats the Folly in almost every category of weirdness, the Folly is a bit older, and was begun in 1878. The creation of interior designer and later billboard mogul Jule Korner, Korner's Folly boasts 22 rooms on three floors with seven levels, and has 15 fireplaces.

The Winchester Mystery House, located in San Jose, California, boasts 160 rooms, on seven orginal floors, which were reduced to four floors after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Begun in 1884 by Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester gun fortune, it has 47 fireplaces, rooms with no doorway into them, stairways leading right into the ceiling, and closets full of mini steps. The Winchester Mystery House is a testament to what a professional "psychic" with a super-rich, guilty-feeling client can accomplish by making deals with local contractors. The story says that the psychic convinced Sarah that she had to keep building the house until her death to appease the spirits of all those killed by Winchester rifles. The psychic's backroom deals with local carpenters are purely speculation on my part, but it seems to be the case.

Whatever the case, both houses were works in progress until the deaths of the original owners. This past July, local paranormal investigators concluded there was evidence of ghosts in Korner's Folly, which is less than a half mile from where I'm sitting right now.

I didn't begin this post to lead into a ghost story, I was actually making the point that there are times when even "normal" people, who don't consider themselves particularly creative, can safely put up some crazy decorations and dress in outlandish costumes. But now that I think about it, the two houses mentioned above, both with links to the occult and spiritual world, are other examples of freakishly creative expressions considered odd, but allowed to exist in the public realm because they were made by rich people. Both Korner's Folly and The Winchester Mystery House are regional landmarks today, and have foundations to preserve them.

I think the great thing about Halloween is that it gives average people a chance to let loose and get a little wild once a year. Fat Tuesday and Mardi Gras in New Orleans is another example of this idea. Many of these people, who are creatively repressed most of the year, have an excuse to let loose some creativity on these two occasions. Hopefully for many it sparks them to use their creativity more on the other 363 days as well.

Halloweenie poem

2009-10-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

All Hallows' Eve

In an old graveyard

Draped in autumn wood

I sat on a bench

That for eons stood

Watch over the graves

Of dead slaves passed

Colored carpet of leaves

Hiding the summer's grass

The air was still

Yet to my surprise

Leaves fell one by one

Through smoke scented skies

Each and every time

That I turned my head

Another leaf glided down

To meet the dead

Red and yellow

Orange and brown

I sat and sat

Watching leaves fall down

Surrounded by death

Yet I could not grieve

It seemed the perfect way

To spend All Hallows' Eve

-The White Bear

Give to panhandlers... they need art supplies

2009-10-28T00:16:00.000-07:00

I've started a new blog to share what I learned as a panhandler with the world.

Make Money Panhandling

Check it out.

Where The Wild Things Are

2009-10-25T00:07:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, in the dark ages of the mid '80's, I did a Xerox zine about BMX freestyle that somehow got me a job at FREESTYLIN' magazine. The editor was a guy named Andy Jenkins, who is now the creative director of Girl Skateboards and a well known fine artist. Andy hired me, and when he realized what a dork I really was, he fired me a few months later. Well, mostly I was fired because I didn't like the band Skinny Puppy. In any case, they soon hired a photographer from the Midwest who clashed with the magazine's staff photographer, and only lasted a couple weeks. My permanent replacement came in the form of a biker/skater/photographer kid from the East Coast who'd just turned eighteen. That kid went by the name Spike Jonze.
For the next few years, Spike was one of the photographers we'd all see at the contests, and he was a damn good rider as well. As most of you probably know, Spike has moved on from the BMX world. He started making skateboard videos. He co-founded Girl Skateboards. He started producing and directing music videos, and now he directs feature films. His latest creation, Where The Wild Things Are, was just released a week ago, and it's not only a great movie, but it looks like one time BMXer Spike Jonze has a blockbuster on his hands. Go see this movie.

The Snow Tank

2009-10-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in an earlier post that when I started really thinking about the idea of street art, I realized that most of us have been doing public art our whole lives. As kids, it's considered normal to put certain types of creative work in public places. Nobody's going to call the cops when a kid builds a snowman in the yard, or a sand castle at the beach or in a sandbox. Both of these are creative works, usually pretty spontaneous, in the public realm, and perfectly fine by societal norms. But if the kid who just built a snowman then draws a picture on a dirty bathroom wall, he's suddenly a vandal. They are both creative works in the public realm, but one is considered perfectly fine, and one is not. So it's not that all unsponsored art in public places is considered bad, only some kinds are.
Last winter I was pretty bummed that I had been forced by a combination of SoCal police and my crazy family to move to North Carolina. Once here, I couldn't borrow enough money to pay for my storage unit in California, and wound up losing everything I'd ever created, my life's work. I was one pissed off puppy last winter.
Then one day we got a freak snowstorm here which dumped six inches of heavy, wet snow. My creativity had been really stifled living here at my parents' place, and I just needed to make something. I grew up in Ohio and Idaho, so I knew that the snowwe got was good packing snow, the best for snowballs and snowmen. So I decided to make a snowman. Sure, I'm in my 40's, fat, and didn't have a winter coat, but I didn't care. I took a rectangular bucket and filled it with snow, making big blocks that I formed into a pretty solid obelisk about four feet high and two feet square. In short pants and a hoodie, I grabbed a bread knife and started carving.
I first thought of going classic and doing Micheangelo's David. But since I'd never really carved a snowman before, I figured that was a bit much. I wanted to do something challenging, and decided on Snoopy. Sure, he's a really mainstream character, but he's a pretty simple shape, and I knew making his big unsupported nose would be a challenge.
I sat on the upside down bucket for about an hour and a half, in shorts and a hoodie, in 35 degree weather, and never felt the cold. The power of pure fascination is a wonderful thing, it can even ward off the cold. I carved him out slowly, and had to pack on a couple snowballs and re-carve when I messed up a couple times, but slowly a pretty decent Snoopy emerged from the the chunk of snow. I got a big cup of water from inside and spit-sprayed it on Snoopy to harden the surface. By the next morning, he had a thick layer of ice protecting him against the elements. It warmed up the next day, and I used a bit of red Carolina mud to color his nose, eyes, and ears. Both adults and kids in the complex marveled at my Snoopy. The weather warmed up to the 60's, but Snoopy held his shape for about four days, then melted slowly over the next week. I didn't care, I was just happy to make him.
It reminded me of those days as a kid where we'd just get an idea, and do it. Somehow adulthood seems to drastically overcomplicate that simple process. Like all kids in cold regions, I made snow angels, snow devils, snowmen, snow forts, snow caves, and through myself down hills covered in deep snow just for the fun of it. I even pissed my name in the snow, and my mom said she didn't mind, as long as it wasn't in a girl's handwriting.
But there was one time, when I was nine years old, that my friend Steve and I went much further, we made a snow tank. It didn't start out as a tank, it began as just a pile. Steve had several older brothers, and they also had a long sidewalk going to the garage behind their house. The older brothers had the job of shoveling the walk, which they often tried to pawn off on Steve and I. There was a little patio off the sidewalk, and we started piling the snow on the patio. As winter progressed, the pile grew. We had almost daily games of King of the Hill on the pile, which packed it into a Volkswagon-sized glacier.
Now there was one thing none of us kids ever managed to make in the winter, and that was an igloo. We'd seen old movies of Eskimos making igloos, but we could never get the right quality of snow to make blocks big enough to create a proper igloo. One day Steve and I were looking at the pile and realized that we had an igloo waiting to be made. So we got some garden trowels from the garage and started carving into one end of the pile. It was really hard snow, almost true ice, so we took turns chipping away at it.
Then Steve's brothers and some friends showed up, and asked what we were doing. When we told them we were making an igloo, they decided that was a good idea, and kicked us off our own project. Us two nine-year-olds sat nearby watching the junior high and high school kids taking over our one chance at making a real igloo. We were so bummed.
After about fifteen minute of chipping away at the really hard snow, they decided it was too much work, and told us to keep working on it. We may have been only nine, but we had enough sense to negotiate some concessions, mainly that if we made an actual igloo, they wouldn't destroy it. Thinking that we'd never actually carve that deep into the pile, they agreed. They even gave us a couple screwdrivers to chip the snow away with. By the end of that day we'd only managed to chip about a foot into the pile.
But Steve and I kept at it, and the snow was a little softer deeper in the pile, and within a few days, we had a hole in the pile big enough for both of us and two or three friends. The older kids began to help more, seeing that it was a damn nice igloo we'd made. It was so strong that three or four older kids could walk on top of it at once. Someone decided it would be really cool (no pun intended) of we had an entrance from the top. So while we carved the inside, one of Steve's brothers started carving into the top, three feet above us. The igloo kept evolving. Eventually we closed off the back entrance so you could only get in from the top entrance. The pile was so high that we had a big step in the vertical tunnel so we could actually see out the top. Somebody mentioned that it looked like an Army tank when someone was looking out the top. So I carved a hole in the front where the tank driver would be. Then we found a big cardboard tube and jammed it into the snow tank where the cannon would be. The older kids were gone when we did that, and Steve's mom came out and took a photo of Steve and I in the Snow Tank. It was official, Steve and I had created the most amazing snow fort EVER. Steve's mom sent the photo in to the local newpaper, and our picture appeared a couple days later.
Then Steve and I learned another lesson in public creative projects. We had some after school event the day the photo came out in the newspaper. We came back that night to find out that the Snow Tank had been totally destroyed. Publicity can kill. We soon learned that the culprits were kids from a few blocks away.
I went to see Where The Wild Things Are a couple days ago, and that scene at the begining totally reminded me of our Snow Tank. Oh well. "Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy."

A few quotes...

2009-10-21T06:48:00.000-07:00

"What if you're really as talented as you secretly hope you might be?"
- Julia Cameron

"I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said, 'That's a clever anagram for art' and I had to pretend I'd known that all along." - Banksy

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to their graves with the song still in them." - Henry David Thoreau

"Ooh Ooooh, just another crowd... we need a gathering instead."
- Operation Ivy "The Crowd"

"Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." -Mark Twain

"In twenty five years of teaching, I have discovered that we're all creative."
- Julia Cameron

"Most people say we're seeking the meaning of life, I don't think that's what we're seeking. What we're seeking is the experince of being alive." - Joesph Campbell

Stencils are everywhere... even here

2009-10-18T15:30:00.000-07:00

I went for a walk earlier today here in the tiny town of Kernersville, North Carolina, where I've become stranded. I wound up getting a drink at a fast food joint, but it was pretty noisy in there with all the kids. I was looking for a bit of quiet and solitude. So I wandered around to the back of a shopping center and sat on some steps by a loading dock. That may seem weird, but after living on the streets for so long in California, I actually feel quite comfortable in random urban locations. It was spots like these where I ate many meals while living on the streets.
So I was kicking back, enjoying the relative quiet and drinking my Coke, when I noticed a weird spot on a retaining wall behind the shopping center. It looked like a face. So I walked over to check it out, and sure enough, it was a stencil of a woman's face with an 60's style bouffant hairdo. Just seeing it there made me smile, and I started to think about the effect that random pieces of street art and graffiti can have on people.
As we all know, for property owners, unsponsored art can cause quite a bit of anger. Property owners don't think twice about all of us who have to look at their ugly-ass, architectureally devoid buildings in drab colors, but if someone tries to "beautify" that ugly-ass building, they flip out. Sure, I understand they own the building, but no one's ever asked me if looking at a big, ugly, Wal-Mart offended me. So outside of property ownership issues, there are all kinds of double standards about public architecture, signs, and artwork.
For those not affiliated with a particular building, a simple piece of art can have all kinds of responses. While there are some artists around here, mainly in the crafts and landscape painting genre's, there's definitely not s street art scene like in the much larger city of Winston-Salem. So when I saw that stencil, in a place full of blank walls with no graffiti, I thought, "Heh, heh, there's a little bit of life in this town... somewhere." I've seen three stencils in this small town, two of them well crafted ones. They're so rare, that no one's even thought to paint over them. It just gave me a warm feeling to know that somewhere in this fine, upstanding, God-fearing Southern town ( ahem), there's a weirdo sneaking around at night throwing up stencils in really random places to be appreciated or wondered about by people they'll never see. In my case, having cultivated an appreciation for street art over the last couple years, and having spent most of my life wandering the streets as a BMX freestyler, taxi driver, and homeless guy, I was stoked to stumble across this stencil.
For the few people who would actually notice this thing, the thoughts would most likely be more like, "Who did this?" "Why did someone do this?" or "That's a crazy hairstyle." Then they would spend a few seconds, maybe a few minutes, standing there looking at a wall that few people ever bother to look at. For most of the people, this once bland wall would suddenly have the ability to invoke a smile and a emotional response. That's pretty cool when you think about it.

Panhandling or performance art?

2009-10-14T11:46:00.000-07:00

Since I'm broke and out of work, I went out panhandling yesterday. I hadn't made a dime asking people one on one, and I was bummed on life. So I found a piece of cardboard and walked out to an intersection with a little median strip. Since I just didn't give a fuck, I wrote "Just Lazy" on the sign. I was laughing before I even held it up. A few people laughed heartily and gave me a thumbs up. Several people laughed, then realized I saw them laughing, and tried to pretend they hadn't noticed me. I didn't make a dime from them (cheap bastards!) but I had fun and was in a better mood to continue the day. Aaaahhh, the power of art.

Some of my other blogs...

2009-10-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

I just started this blog, but I come from the world bike stunt riding, or BMX freestyle as we called it in the '80's. My two most popular blogs fall in that realm, but I'm doing some others as well.

White Bear Taxi Tales
This was my first blog, written while I was a homeless taxi driver in the Huntington Beach area of Orange County, California. It's pretty bitter because taxi driving is a tough gig.
http://www.whitebeartaxitales.blogspot.com/

FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales
This one took off, much to my surprise. I was pretty much just venting after coming to North Carolina and losing my life's work a couple weeks later. For artists, I tell of getting hired by Andy Jenkins in 1986, first meeting Spike Jonze, working with photographers Oz and Windy, and a bunch more. At 212 posts, this one is finished.
www.freestylinmagtales.blogspot.com

Freestyle BMX Tales
This one took over where FREESTYLIN' Mag Tales left off, and I'm writing about my experiences in the BMX freestyle sport and industry from 1982 to 1993.
www.freestylebmxtales.blogspot.com

My Huntington Beach
After getting fired from the magazines in 1986, I moved south to the quiet little surf town of Huntington Beach, California. I didn't realize it was also one of the biggest hubs for punk rock, BMX, skateboarding, motocross, snowboarding, and later porn stars. This blog is memories from my times there from 1987 to 2008.
www.myhuntingtonbeach.blogspot.com

What is Street Art?

2009-10-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned before, it was only in late 2007 that I became aware of the term "street art" when I came across a few books about it at a book store. After that, I started paying more attention to tagging and graffiti, stickers, and other creative work in public places. The whole subject fascinated me, partly because I was homeless and living on the streets of Orange County, California at the time. You can't get any more into so called "street culture" than being homeless. So I sought out every book I could find about the various forms of graffiti and street art, and paid close attention to not only urban art, but the street environment itself. I found the world that humans create to cover up the natural world is an ever-changing canvas itself, full of colors, patterns, textures, sounds and smells. First there are the streets and buildings themselves, with different styles from different eras and areas. Cars leak oil on concrete and pavement forming patterns. Everywhere there are hundreds of signs to control our actions or coerce us into buying certain products. We are bombarded by thousands of commercial and social messages both in text and artwork daily. Then there is the official artwork, statues of people from long ago or the bland but technically good paintings or abstract sculptures commissioned by government agencies or corporations.
In our so-called modern society, all of these things are considered normal, and most people walk or drive by all these stimuli without consciously thinking about them. To simply survive in today's world, we must ignore most of it. As individuals we have little, if any, say over the signs, billboards, advertisements, roads and buildings in our environment. We must simply accept these things, be they government, corporate, religious, or organizational, unless we want to start a grassroots revolt. And if you start a revolt against a piece of art or architecture, the lawyers of the well funded opposing side will brand you as lunatics for going against something deemed to be in "the public interest." So we unthinkingly tolerate thousands of images and stimuli because they really don't seem that important or that offensive.
But as soon as an individual slaps a sticker on a sign, stencils a message on a sidewalk, or spray paints on a wall, it's a crime. We have no say in the building of an ugly wall, but if an individual tries to make it more asthetically pleasing by bombing a graff piece on it, then it's vandalism?
I think this is what fascinates me so much about street art of all kinds, the very act of doing it is illegal, in most cases. It gets right to the heart of some of the inherent hypocrisies of modern society. In street art, people can get tickets or go to jail for trying to make something look better, or for trying to make someone laugh, or for trying to make someone think. This seems so ludicrous when you actually think about it.
I began to think about what really constitutes street art. It's a catch all phrase, to be sure, a label slapped on many different genre's that don't really want to be labeled. But when we get right down to it, street art is unofficial creative works in the public realm. Once I figured that out, I realized that almost all of us do that. When you made a snowman as a kid, that's public art. When you made a sand castle at the beach or in a sandbox, that's public art. When kids draw in front of the house with sidewalk chalk, that's public art. When you write a message on a car window in the dirt or frost or fog, that's public art. When you carve your initials into a tree or bench, that's public art. When you decorate the outside of your house or apartment for Halloween or Christmas or any other holiday, that's public art. Even crop circles are public art, and yes they're made by talented individuals, not aliens.
In reality, almost everyone creates public art of one kind or another at some point. There are some kinds of public art that are tolerated by society, and some kinds that aren't. As I thought and journaled about all these ideas during that year living on the streets, I realized that I had been doing public art most of my life, as have most of you. But after discovering that there was a culture surrounding street art, I began to look for opportunities to do it a bit more consciously, and I found daily, nearly endless, opportunities to express myself creatively. I also found intentional, official, corporate, individual, and unintentional art and designs almost everywhere. The urban decay that is the modern city became fascinating to me. I realized art is everywhere, whether you want it to be or not.

Street Performer in Space

2009-10-10T22:38:00.000-07:00

As I'm writing this, in the early am of October 11, 2009, Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte' just returned from space. Yeah... space. Twenty seven years ago, in the early 80's, he hustled as a street performer, playing accordion, walking on stilts, and working as a fire eater in Quebec, Canada. He and some other performers pooled their talents and started Cirque du Soleil, which revolutionized the circus world. It's also the best run company I've ever seen, I worked on the first five Cirque tours that came to Orange County, California. I know I met Guy once or twice in those early years, while working in the box office.
Guy is now a billionaire, and the CEO of Cirque du Soleil, so dropping $20 million for a ride on a Soviet space mission is no big deal financially for him. Even so, he used the publicity of the event to raise awareness of water resource issues in the world. Mad props to Guy for that.
Cirque has been a great inspiration to me creatively, and I'll write more about it somewhere down the line.

Sticker City Book

2009-10-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned earlier, the Sticker City book caught my eye one day and began my awakening to the realm of street art. In Claudia Walde's prose I finally learned that it was a guy named Shephard Fairey that started the Andre the Giant/Obey Giant stickers I'd been seeing for years. I was introduced to Blek le Rat, Swoon, Invader and several others while sitting on a little footstool and flipping through this book at Border's book store at The Block of Orange mall in Orange, California.
Because of this book I started looking at other graffiti and street art books, I started paying attention to the public art around me, and I started doing a bit of my own. Even more importantly, it sparked a whole stream of thought about art, creativity, and the urban environment. I started journaling about these ideas, and realized that, like many creative people, I'd been doing public art my whole life, and now I finally had a context to put that work in. This book really did change my life.

Street Art Book

2009-10-10T14:35:00.000-07:00

Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution gives a good overview of street art as it sprung in a new direction from the graffiti writing world. Written by Cedar Lewishon, a curator out of London, it shows the range of emerging urban art. Stickers, posters, painting, and stencils are all found in this book. There's no accompanying website, but you can find some addtional stuff if you Google the author's name. You can browse the book at major bookstores or pick it up for about $20 online.

Stencil Nation Book and Site

2009-10-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

This book opened up a whole new world to me. Stencil Nation -I didn't think I'd ever seen an art stencil when I first flipped through it, but then I remembered one here and there, and I started to see them on the streets. I'd seen thousands of stickers and lots of posters and tags, and some graff bombings. But stencils had never made an impression on me.
In Orange County, California, I started to see them on a regular basis after checking out this book. I saw my first Banksy stencils in the book, and he's become one of my favorite artists, my sense of humor is similar to his.
Writer, photographer and stencil artist Russell Howze did it right. The 192 page Stencil Nation book can be purchased for $19 author direct, or for a bit more elsewhere. In addition, he has a great website from which the book sprung, and a second website, the Stencil Archive at stencilarchive.org. You could spend days wandering through that website, I think there are over 10,000 stencil photos there, as well as videos, articles and assorted links. If you're checking out this blog, you definitely need to spend some time on his sites. Russell also has a blog, Happy Feet Travels, and there's a video of him on there from a booksigning. Stencils are everywhere, there's one of a Christmas candle wrapped in barbed wire here in the tiny town of Kernersville, North Carolina, a place pretty damn void of art and counter culture.

Street Renegades Book

2009-10-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

Another book showing some of the newer trends in urban creativity is Street Renegades: New Underground Art by Francesca Gavin. It's been a while since I checked this one out. It has a Mark Jenkins payphone piece on the cover, it's 128 pages and will cost you $13 to 20.

Graffiti World Book

2009-10-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

If you look through a bookstore for graffiti books, Graffiti World: Street Art from Five Continents will catch your eye quick. Written by Nicolas Ganz, this is the closest thing to an encyclopedia of street based art. It contains hundreds of great color photos of graffiti from around the world. Most of the works shown are large pieces, murals on trains or walls. There's no place I know of that you can find more photos of amazing spray paint work in one place. If you're looking for spray paint as art this is the book.
I couldn't find a corresponding website, though. So this seems to be the work of a major publisher jumping on the graffiti art bandwagon. There are two other books by the same publisher:
Street World: Urban Culture from Five Continents- This one is another dictionary sized book with amazing photos, like the other two. While it has quite a bit of graffiti and street art portrayed, it's really about the different urban scenes that have developed around the world. There's stuff in the book I'd never heard of before. Somehow, though, they missed the BMX freestyle/street riding scene, which is where I come from. Doh! It's definitely worth checking out, though. This book was written by Roger Gastman, Caleb Neelon, and Anthony Smyrsky.
Graffiti Women- This book is actually my favorite of the three. The male dominated graffiti world evolved from tagging, which is writing the tagger's name in a stylized way. As amazing as many of these pieces are, they have many similarites. The women of the graffiti and street art movements, on the other hand, go off in all kinds of different directions. There's a much more diverse range of work by the women which I find way more inspiring. This one's written by Nicolas Ganz, Nancy MacDonald, and Swoon.
These books have a list price of about $35.00 each, can be perused for free at major book stores, and can be bought online for around $20.00 each.

Public Service Announcement

2009-10-10T07:26:00.001-07:00

Just for the record, I have no affiliation and get no money from any of the websites or books I'm promoting here. If I have anything to do with this stuff, I'll let you know.

Written on the City

2009-10-10T07:12:00.000-07:00

One of the last books I ran into while awakening to graffiti and street art was Written on the City. This one is pretty self-explanatory, it's words and phrases written publicly on cities around the world. Now since I was homeless during this period in my life when I discovered all these books, I spent very little time online, where most people discover this kind of stuff these days. So I just started browsing through graffiti and street art books at the book stores, then paying more attention to the public art, both official and unofficial, around me. But Written on the City started as a website, apparently. It's writtenonthecity.com in case my link doesn't work, and the book is available on the site, of course. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the site:

"Zappa was our Beethoven." - San Francisco

"Cheap art can be expansive." - New York City

"After you wake up, what do you do with your dreams?" - N.Y.C.

"Trust your struggle." - N.Y.C.

"I firmly believe that all police officers & politicians can be rehabilitated." - Berkeley, CA

You get the idea. Check out the site.

Picasso said...

2009-10-09T20:55:00.000-07:00

"We artists are indestructible, even in a prison cell or a concentration camp I would be in my own world of art. Even if I had to paint my pictures with my wet tongue on the dusty floor of my cell." _Pablo Picasso

I found this on the front page of Banksy's website

Sticker City

2009-10-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in the last post, the book Sticker City is what introduced me to the idea that Street Art is a thing. The book was researched and written by Claudia Walde, and contains work by Blek le Rat, Shephard Fairey (Obey Giant), Swoon, and many others. Flipping through the pages of this book opened up a whole new realm to me, a realm I'd been a part of without realizing it for many years. There's a Myspace for the book: myspace.com/sticker_city, which has info, slideshows, and some videos of paper based street artists. Check it out.

Why am I into street art?

2009-10-09T16:09:00.000-07:00

On a chilly day in December 2007 I walked into a Border's bookstore to get out of the cold for a while. A few weeks earlier I found that I could no longer survive as a taxi driver in Orange County, California. I weighed about 365 pounds, I'd had three bad bouts of cellulitis, an infection in my legs, that year, and I could no longer work 110+ hours every week AND live in my taxi. I'd done that for four years, after living on the streets and working a restaurant job for nine months. It had been a rough few years. My feet were cracked and I could barely walk when I dropped my taxi off for the last time and hobbled out onto the streets. I figured I was going to die within a few weeks. My family refused to loan me money to get back on my feet, and my mom wanted me to move to North Carolina with them, a place I'd never lived. I knew I'd have trouble finding a decent paying job there, and my family was more dysfunctional than most growing up, there was no reason to think that anything had changed. I knew I would rather die on the streets than move to North Carolina. So I started panhandling for food money and bus fare, and lived moment to moment, day to day. People talk and write about street culture, but believe me, really living on the streets sucks. But it changes the way you look at the world and strengthens you. Of course, it can also drive you to becoming an alcoholic, drug addict, or completely fucking crazy, if not all of those.

But I don't drink or do drugs. I'm a creative guy at heart, I draw, write, publish zines, and have produced a bunch of low budget bike and skateboard videos. So I decided to write, perform, and produce a super cheap comedy video about homelessness. I had an old video camera in the pawn shop to shoot the video. This creative project literally saved my life. It gave me something to look forward to, something to work on once I'd panhandled enough for a bus pass, hamburger and Diet Coke each day. For nearly two months I stumbled through each day, and shivered through each night. But much to my surprise, I survived.

During this time, I would sometimes hang out at the Van's Skatepark at The Block of Orange, a mall in central Orange County. You can chill out on the upper level and watch skaters and BMXers ride. It's warm, it's free, and I was a longtime BMXer and occasional skater who used to ride there, so I'd see friends of mine there often. A couple doors down from the skatepark was Border's, another good place to hang out if you've got time to kill. So one day I wandered into the art section and a book called Sticker City caught my eye. I flipped through it and thought, "this is so cool." I'd slapped many a sticker around over the years, promoting various bike or skate companies. But I never really thought of them as art. It gave me a whole different perspective on the lowly sticker.

I started checking out the other books on street art and graffiti. This stuff just fascinated me. Since I was living on the streets, I started paying more attention to graffiti and street art of all kinds. There's not a lot of spray paint graffiti in Orange County, but there is some. There is a strong sticker culture, though. I'd been seeing Obey and Andre the Giant stickers for years, as well as Skull Phone and others, but didn't have a context to put them in. Suddenly I started paying much closer attention to things I saw on the streets. There were tagging stickers, some art stickers, and lots of stickers advertising small companies. I saw stickers by someone known as Scuba everywhere. I found graffiti in places I'd never noticed. And I started doing stuff of my own, using mediums no one else was using, as far as I know. Immersed in homelessness and the streets at the most intense level, I started finding continuous opportunities to express myself in the street environment.

Unfortunately, my mom reported me as a missing person because I didn't call them that Christmas. So I came to the attention of the police, which is the worst thing that can happen as a homeless person. Let's just say my life got real interesting for the next year. Fucking with the undercover cops trying to run me out of Orange County became another form of creative expression. But it's hard to do street art when you are under surveillance to start with, so I discovered some street art mediums that wouldn't get me arrested.

As odd as this sounds, that year on the streets was the best year of my life in many ways. I lived at a level of freedom few people ever experience. By the end of that year, the police, or more likely the SoCal fusion center, had spent tens of thousand of taxpayer dollars trying to run me out of Orange County, and their efforts intensified until I couldn't panhandle enough for food and a bus pass. I finally accepted my parents' offer for a one way flight to North Carolina. So that's where I am now.

There are few jobs here, and no chance of making a reasonable living for me. It sucks in most every way. But there's an good little art scene in nearby Winston-Salem, and I have a roof over my head and a computer to blog on. So I'll see of I can get back on my feet here. If not, I'll head back to the streets of California. Wherever I go, I'll take my love of street art with me.

Way old school, part 3, Cave Paintings

2009-10-05T05:40:00.000-07:00

Here's a little factoid for ya: graffiti, in the form of cave paintings, goes back four or five times as long as known civilization. One of the weirdest things about cave painting is that the oldest paintings are the best. Dating cave paintings is difficult, at best, because newer or older bits of organic material in the paint will throw off the date. Some cave paintings simply cannot be dated because the paints weren't made with organic material. Check out the Wikipedia article on Cave Painting for a basic overview of it.
Cave paintings have been found on six of the seven continents, and I think that's mostly because so little of Antarctica has been explored. Here are dates for the oldest cave paintings known.

Europe- Over 350 caves with paintings have been found in France and Spain, the oldest said to date back to 32,000 years ago. Lascaux Cave in France is the most famous of these, and one of the oldest.

Asia- The Padah-Lin Caves in Burma have paintings dated to 10,000 years ago. Cave paintings are found in several other areas in Southeast Asia.

Australia- Paitings at the Kakadu National Park cannot be dated because they were made with non-organic material.

South America- Cave of the Hands in Santa Cruz, Argentina has paintings dating to 10,000 years ago.

North America- North America wasn't even mentioned in the Wikipedia article I sourced for this post, but there are cave and cliff paintings all over the U.S. Southwest. The oldest ones I know of are those I mentioned before from Hueco Tanks, outside El Paso, Texas, some of which date to 8,000 years ago.

Way Old School, part 2

2009-10-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I went on a trip with a few members of the ultra-underground, enigmatic AAA Electra 99 gallery in Anaheim, California. Led by taxi driver and self-proclaimed fame-ass arteest Richard Johnson, the gallery is like none other. The "AAA" stands for "any art accepted," and has only three rules on work: 1) no fire, 2) no live animals, and 3) no hideous smells. For several months in 2005-2006, I was driving A taxi on the weekends and pretty much living in the gallery during the week as janitor/artist/kitten wrangler.
Richard and several others there liked to play poker, and he got a flyer in the mail for a free weekend hotel room in Laughlin, Nevada, along with a murder-mystery dinner. He and his girlfriend Michelle decided to go, and three of us guys from the gallery went as well. We drove my taxi because if it broke down, the taxi company had to tow it on their dime. I ran the meter which racked up a $614 fare, but I was only getting gas money. Anyhow, we had a good time, each doing our own thing in the weird little desert gambling oasis on the riverthat is Laughlin.
While Richard, Michelle, and Patrick played a poker tourney, painter Paul Nagel and I went four wheeling in my taxi to some Indian petroglyphs a few miles outside of town. The site is called Grapevine Canyon. After three or four miles of washboard road we came to a parking area. Then it was a half mile walk to the mouth of the canyon. It's a small canyon, and the rocks are a dark reddish brown, and there are hundreds, probably thousands, of petroglyphs. Unlike the pictographs I'd seen fifteen years earlier in Hueco Tanks, which are painted on the rock, petroglyphs are actually carved into the rock. The former inhabitants would carve through a layer of dark stone revealing light rock underneath. These carvings are said to date back several hundred years, but aren't as old as those at Hueco. There's no doubt that this was almost entirely Indian graffiti. There were geometric shapes, and lots of animal carvings. Paul and I got the impression that a lot of these were made by hunting parties, probably camping nearby, away from their villages. There were deer and bighorn sheep carvings, as if they would carve the results of their hunts.
It was hot out, and I weighed about 350 pounds then, so I just wandered around the mouth of the canyon while Paul climbed quite a ways back into the grapevine choked boulderfield that was the canyon. When he came back, I snapped a photo of him holding a rock like he was carving his own petroglyph. Just to be clear, we didn't mess them up, we just took photos. Unfortunately, there were several places where people had chopped out pieces of the rock with petroglyphs on them. Lame.
While the books at Barnes and Noble champion the early 1970's as the birth of American graffiti, it really started about 8,000 years ago, maybe more. There are several photos of both Hueco Tanks pictographs and Grapevine Canyon petroglyphs online if you search them.

Old school...waaaay old school

2009-10-01T23:42:00.000-07:00

"Are their any Indian ruins or anything like that around here?" skater Buck Smith asked the hotel manager. That's how the day started. It was the summer of 1990, and I was the driver/manager on a short skateboard tour for Vision Skateboards. The tour posse consisted of myself, Florida pro Buck Smith, recent Hawaiian emigrant Mark Oblow, and a couple of fifteen-year-old up-and-comers from Texas named Mike Crum and Chris Gentry.
Mark and I had started at the Vision warehouse in Santa Ana, California three weeks earlier. We drove cross country to Atlanta, picking up Mike and Chris along the way. Buck met us there for a week of demos at Stone Mountain, then we all headed West, doing a few demos along the way. The day before our last demo found us in a hotel in El Paso, looking for something to do.
The hotel manager told us of a place about ten miles out of town called Hueco Tanks that had some Indian ruins or something. Even though it was over 100 degrees out, we hopped in the dually and headed to Hueco Tanks. The state park is basically a big rock outcrop in the middle of the desert. The name comes from erosion carved holes in the rock called huecos in Spanish, and tanks because there were basins in the caves that filled with water, so the location had been used by native tribes for hundreds of years, and also used by American settlers and travelers in the 1700's and 1800's, all because it was a place to find water.
We found the ranger, who was really cool, and he said that since we were the only people stupid enough to venture out there in 100 plus degree weather, he'd give us the bonus tour. The first cave he showed us was near the bottom of the huge outcrop, and there was a bunch of settler graffiti in it, as well as blackened part of the ceiling from torches. Most of the graffiti said things like "Bill Johnson, 1859" or that kind of thing. The ranger said some of it was done with charcoal from fires, but mostly the 19th century graffiti makers used blacked wagon wheel grease.
From there we climbed up steep trails in the rock to the higher caves. These caves weren't like the caves most people picture, going down into the earth for a long ways. Most of these were wind and water carved caverns, with pretty low ceilings, and often only thirty or forty feet long, open on both ends. We began to see Indian pictographs in the lower caves. None of us had ever seen any before, so it was pretty cool. Even though there were large openings to the caves, the temperature dropped ten degrees or so entering them. We also quickly learned that the floors of the caves were slippery. The ranger said this was because of oils from the hands and feet of people climbing in the caves for hundreds of years.
Like most people, we had all learned in school or on TV that Indian paintings had deep ceremonial meanings, in spite of being rather simple paintings. So we all started out with that basic idea in our head. Most of the paintings in the first couple caves seemed to support that idea. There were human and animal figures, masks, and designs. But when the ranger took us to the higher caves, where the drawings hadn't been worn off as much, there was a different tone. He was explaining some of the drawings in one cave, when we all noticed a bunch of stick figures with really big dicks. "It looks like you had some pretty horny Indians," I said. The ranger laughed, and said that not all of the paintings could be explained by archeologists. We all agreed that many of the paintings in that cave looked a lot like stuff you'd find on a bathroom wall. I think it was Mike Crum who finally said, this is all just really old graffiti, isn't it? The ranger agreed that much of it probably was. Mike continued, "So if we graffiti somewhere now, we can get a ticket and they'll paint over it. But if we graffiti somewhere and nobody sees it for 100 years, then the government will pay somebody to protect it."
"That pretty much sums it up," the ranger said with a laugh. Our little tribe of wandering skateboarders sat there fascinated for several minutes, suddenly realizing we were looking at some of the oldest graffiti in the U.S., maybe as much as 8,000 years old. On that hot day at Hueco Tanks, we realized we had more in common with previous tribes than we ever imagined.

You just can't be original anymore...

2009-09-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

"I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said, "That's a clever anagram of art," and I had to pretend I'd known that all along." - Banksy

It was early 2008 when I discovered that quote in Banksy's book, Wall and Piece. I'd been reading about and pondering street art for a few months, and doing a bit of my own. Being homeless then, I had a lot of time to think about it, and had been writing ideas in my journal about it. I'd written quite q bit, and decided there was a Xerox zine that needed to be made on the subject. The Banksy quote above provided me with the idea for my title, and I drew a thing that said, Art Rat Tar. The idea's been in my head ever since, waiting for its chance.
So when I started the blog a couple days ago, that seemed like the title to use. I mean, who else would think of something that weird? Well, apparently some guy in Germany. There's another blog called Tar Art Rat that I found on a Google search. I don't know the guy, and the blog's much different than what I have in mind. So even though the titles are eerily similar, I'm sticking to Art Rat Tar. Besides, he's in Germany...

Is she dead?

2009-09-28T21:13:00.000-07:00

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible, and childish... but that's only if it's done properly." - Banksy

I spent the summer of 2009 living in a homeless shelter in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It's a really long story how that came to be, but let's just say that I was a taxi driver in the Huntington Beach area of California until 2007, the business was going down hill, then the recession hit and business died. I almost died, too, because I had bulked up to 374 pounds in a few years while working seven days a week, usually 14 to 18 hours a day, as a taxi driver while living in my cab. I lived on the streets of Southern California for a year, panhandling for a living while being terrorized by cops. If you're homeless, intelligent, and not an alcoholic, you're automatically a terrorist suspect these days. Let's just say I used most of my creativity simply staying alive for that year. I finally excepted a plane ticket to North Carolina where my very dysfunctional family now lives. When I got sick of then, I headed to Winston-Salem and found the shelter.
During that year living on the streets, I discovered street art and graffiti books, and spent many hours pouring over them while hanging out in Border's to keep out of the cold. Even Southern California gets pretty chilly in the winter.
One of the street artists I discovered was Mark Jenkins, who best known for making body casts out of shipping tape and clothing them. I think I saw one in person at the Beautiful Losers exhibit in Newport Beach, CA, a couple years ago. In any case, I like his work and read online that he was coming to Winston-Salem. But I was living in a shelter that required me to be inside by 8pm, so it looked like I would miss his talk.
All that had slipped from my mind as I walked back to the library after having lunch at the soup kitchen one day. On MLK boulevard, I saw a cop car pull up to the corner a ways in front of me. Then I noticed another one down Trade Street, facing the first. The area between them was blocked from view, so I didn't know what was going on. I was bored, so I headed towards the cop cars, and figured that if I was lucky I might see a fight or maybe the cops would shoot somebody.
I walked a bit closer, but couldn't see anything happening between the cop cars. More cop cars started showing up, and I finally noticed that someone was laying on top of a small, unused billboard there. I wondered if it was some drunk guy passed out, or maybe a body. A bunch of thoughts went through my head, trying to make sense of the whole scene. The person on the sign didn't move a muscle, despite the cops' coaxing. As I got up to the corner, it suddenly clicked... Mark Jenkins is coming to town, he makes dummies. So I walked up to the cops and told them, "You know that' s a dummy, right?" They didn't, they were still talking to it. I explained Mark's work to the cop closest to me, and told him the dummy was probably made of shipping tape. From there, I could see that it was a woman's figure, lying face down, face hidden. The cop wasn't sure, but he wrote down what I said. Then he started asking for my info. I realized that my big mouth had just made me suspect number one. He ran my ID, and afterward seemed satisfied I wasn't the culprit. It's a good thing I didn't have any warrants. By then, there were seven cop cars and a big firetruck on scene. A fireman climbed a ladder, and found out it wasn't a real woman, and after that, the cops and firemen got a laugh out of it for the most part. Eventually, the fireman pulled the dummy and the box she was mounted on down, after a few photos had been taken. The cops tried to figure out what they could charge the artist with after finding a note and phone number with the piece. All in all, the whole scene was pretty damn entertaining.
I walked on over to the library, and wrote about it in my Winston-Salem blog after doing a bit of research. I found a blog article by Steven Matijico of SECCA, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which showed pics of Jenkins scouting locations here a month ago. So I shot Steven an email telling him what I witnessed at the scene, and my blog post about it. The really synchronistic thing about it is that I, of all people, happened to wander by right after the police showed up. Only a handful of people were there besides cops and firemen, and I knew who Mark Jenkins was and that he was coming to town.
It was this whole event, and conversing electronically with Steven that sparked me to start this blog. I basically had Art Rat Tar as a zine idea in my head, but I hadn't gotten around to doing it. So now it's a blog. We'll see what happens.

Mark Jenkins in Winston-Salem, NC

2009-09-27T19:31:00.000-07:00

This is what sparked me to finally start this blog. Reknowned street artist Mark Jenkins just did a series called Sleepers Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I was staying. I just happened to wander up to the woman on the billboard as the first police cars rolled up.

I don't know what art is...

2009-09-27T18:48:00.000-07:00

I don't know what art is, let's start with that. Everyone seems to have a personal definition of what constitutes art and what doesn't. One person sees graffiti as mindless vandalism and another sees it as a great artistic statement. I'll leave those judgements up to you.
In this blog I'm going to write about some of my experiences and things I've learned about creative works, particularly what's now called street art. I'll also talk about artists and other creative people I've known and worked with or met over the years. It recently came to my attention that I've known a bunch of people who are now well known artists, and many more who are highly creative but not well known. I've also become a big fan of street art while being homeless and panhandling for a living in 2007 and 2008. During that time I stumbled across several graffiti and street art books in major bookstores. The more I learned about this thing called street art, the more I became fascinated and paid attention to the street art around me, which was in Orange County, California, better known as "The O.C." these days. I also began to realize that I'd been immersed in and participated in street culture much of my life.
I'm now living in the "Triad" area in North Carolina, much to my dismay. But there's a good little art scene in Winston-Salem, NC, which makes it tolerable here. Barely. I've got a lot of time on my hands, and I had been planning to write these ideas as a Xerox zine, but I don't have the money to do a zine at the moment. So I'm doing this as a blog.
I got really into BMX racing and the new sport of BMX freestyle in the early '80's, which led to publishing a freestyle zine, which led to a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in 1986. Through freestyle and a bit of skateboarding, I stumbled into the world which spawned the Beautiful Losers art gang. I knew a few of them, and published zines and produced low-budget bike, skate, and snowboard videos in late '80's and early '90's. I was introduced to the punk rock/alternative music scene during that time, and spent a lot of time wandering the streets on my bike, usually solo, and I became a part what's now called "street culture" without realizing it. I went on to work on the first five tours of Cirque du Soleil that came to Orange County, that's Saltimbanco, Allegria, Quidam, Dralion, and Varekai for those of you scoring at home. I also worked on a few TV shows, including four years on the stage crew of American Gladiators.
The point is, I've known and worked with a lot of really creative people over the years, all the while coming to grips with my own creativity, which is partially why I wound up homeless. I've done a lot of thinking about art, street art, and creativity in general over the last couple years, and have been cranking out my own work. So in this blog I'll share my ideas and experiences with creative people, and hopefully some of you will get something out of it. Enjoy.