Posterchild's Blade Diary » book reviews

FlyerPlanterboxes!

post — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:33:17 +0000

This is the Second-Last Planter!

It is filled with Chocolate Mint, if you can fathom such a thing.

Guerrilla Gardeners! Here’s a tip- Mint is maybe the Guerrilla plant. It is hardy, aggressive, and grows quickly. It spreads like crazy.

Like the first herb I used; Thai Basil, Mint is also decorative and will flower with small, purple flowers. Of course, Mint is also functional. For example, It is good for Mojitos. You know. Something for that businessman-on-the-go, busily making Mojitos on his way to work.

I think it’s time for another Posterchild Book Review!!!

Vandal Squad

by Joe Rivera.

If you don’t know, the New York City Transit Police Vandal Squad (now the Citywide Vandals Task Force) is a notorious department that was created to focus on subway vandalism, and Joe Rivera was one of it’s more notorious officers. Vandal Squad is Joe’s story, in his own words, of his time spent in the department.

The Officers of the Vandal Squad have a famously unique relationship with the writers of New York. The officers job is to prevent graffiti. To achieve this, they must study and understand graffiti- day in and day out. Even if this is all done in an effort to deter graffiti, it is perhaps inevitable that all of this time spent emerged in graffiti culture can cause somewhat of a crossover, as the book explores. It’s no coincidence that the book is made to recall a blackbook, in size, shape and colour. (The Blackbook, a common hardcover black sketchbook, is the traditional book of the tagger- used for collecting the tags of other writers, as well as for sketching out and developing ideas.) On the cover is a work by graff legend SEEN- a work originally commissioned for the jerseys of the Vandal Squads softball team!

Few non-writers have the sort of knowledge that Vandal Squad officers have, and no other sort of person has their unique insiders/outsiders view of the culture. No Vandal Squad officer has ever told their story in a full book before.

So I was excited for this book. It has a unique and fascinating perspective. An important perspective that had not been committed to paper for history yet.

But it was a bit disappointing. The book is quite thin in content. Dismally thin, actually. It has lots of glossy full-colour flicks of graffiti pron, but so does almost every other graffiti book already made (not to mention the internet). The book is much too sparse on written content, and it never digs too deep into what it presents. It is shallow and it holds back. I was hoping that this book would read something like a lazy afternoon in the bar with Joe Rivera. A casual, comfortable time where Joe spins the true insiders tales of his time on Vandal Squad. Joe does narrate in the casual voice of a street-cop, and he does give us a tiny bit of true-crime drama (like the time he had to roll the decapitated head of a subway jumper into an evidence bag) but this is no tell-all. Joe uses more secrecy and innuendo than actual writers do!

Tell us what actually went down, man!

Instead he gives us single-sentence stuff like: “…the V’s that mysteriously appeared over graffiti tags from the 80s through the mid 90s (Which was the way of warning vandals that the Vandal Squad was on to everything.)”

Hey, that’s interesting! Really Interesting! LET’S HEAR MORE. You were actually tagging V’s? Was the whole squad tagging them? Did your superiors unofficially sanction it? Did they know about it? How risky was it to be doing it? Would you lose your job if caught? Did taking that risk make you better understand the risks the writers took? What was it like to be crossing out writers, claiming territory on their own terms? How much of it was really done? Did you target any particular tags, say, writers you had just arrested, or writers you were gunning for? What was it for; to put the fear of god into particular writers, to intimidate all writers, or to feel some control? All of the above? What was the response from the taggers? Did it feel good to do it? Do you regret it? Why did it stop? Were you caught? Did you buy your markers, or did you use the ones you confiscated? Did you walk around with markers tucked in between your gun and your badge? What was it like? Did you feel hypocritical? Did the writers, angry that a cop had crossed them out, (perhaps with a stolen marker, no less) accuse you of hypocrisy?

“Mysteriously Appeared”…… Pfhhffft!!- bullshit innuendo that’s little better than all the rumors already out there!

Where do the rumors stop and the truth begin? I expected this book to shine some light, but it does precious little to clarify. Really, it just muddies the waters. In fact, Joe seems to relish in his secrets and almost seems to enjoy muddying the waters. In an early part of the book, Joe writes:

“In 1987, the unit was in the process of reconstruction. Two of the original Graffiti Squad officers from the mid-late 70’s had retired. It has long been rumored that two other Vandal Squad cops acted as look outs at the Zerega Avenue station on the No. 6 line in the Bronx while SEEN painted a whole car in honor of their retirement. If that really had happened, the Vandal Squad would have been closed down the same day- but that rumor definitely makes for an unforgettable story.”

then later, he writes:

“Mr. X, my last partner in the Vandal Squad, was no doubt the best cop I have ever worked with. He was just as addicted to graffiti as I was. He was an old-school writer from Brooklyn so he had great knowledge about graffiti (when I retired he painted a small train car and put my name on the side in bubble letters). ”

What?

Huh?

Oh, wait, by “small train car” you must mean a MODEL TRAIN? Maybe I’m just dumb, (probably) but I feel as though that sentence was possibly constructed to be purposely misleading. (Or at least, it was poorly constructed.) At first blush, you’re led to believe that an actual -if somehow small- train car was painted. Only after rereading it a few times did the real meaning become clear to me. It would have been easy to clarify the sentence, say, by adding: “ …He gave it to me and I keep it on my desk. I’m looking at it right now while writing this. It’s a cute ‘lil number with my name rendered in gold and pink. I call my train ‘Mr. Choo-Choo Mumbles’.”

Sometimes Joe claims he can’t tell us more because he can’t reveal police secrets, which I suppose is unavoidable, but I doubt Joe worked hard to get anything published under freedom of information or what have you. He does give us a taste, such as when he gives us a scrambled list, a “Confidential Internal Document”, of the top 40 vandals from 1984-2004. (which covers the entire length of time while he was on the force). It’s interesting, but it would have been deadly interesting if it had been organized from Top to Bottom vandal, instead of alphabetically. The disappointment felt at this list that goes not quite far enough sums up the entire disappointment felt with the book-

It is a brief and arms length secret-keeping/legend-building summary, with a very shallow account of, what we can only imagine, was a very interesting time spent on a very interesting job.

Two dead astros out of Five!

Silhouettes And Shadows

post — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 12:47:11 +0000

Here’s the first large window.

A woman reading!

Speaking of which.. I think it’s time for the first-ever Posterchild Book Review!

The Adventures of Darius and Downey (And other true tales of Street Art as told to Ed Zipco)

I was very excited for this book. VERBS (Darius) and Downey are two artists whose work I respect a great deal. They came up around the same time as I did, and then (Like now) I marvel in awe at the scale and audacity of the work that they were doing. I was able to stop myself from ordering this book online, but once it was in my hands, it completely seduced me.

The Adventures of Darius and Downey has a lovely pulp-inspired cover which features the artists public-worker costumes; their reflective vests and hard hats. And you know how I feel about costumes and all that. I had to pick it up. A quick flip through the pages assured me of a rich content- It was full of colour pictures of their great work, but moreover, it also had pages and pages of text. This book promised to do more than show me the work, it was going to tell me the story of the work- and the story of the artists who made it. This is the key element missing from most image-heavy street art books. I suppose we street artists are used to letting the work live or die alone, and that’s fine, but I won’t buy a book full of images I can see, or have already seen online. I might later, when I need cool picture books to cover the many coffee tables of my mansion- but not now. This book was different, it going to give me more insight than I could find online. And it was tactile and sexy too. The Adventures of Darius and Downey comes in hard cover ONLY and has a good heft and feel, with a smooth dust jacket.

Like I said above, I was excited for this book. So much so that I spent the 40 bucks that I didn’t have on it. I was able to justify the splurge to myself as “research” or as “inspiration”, but I got a call from Mr. Visa yesterday- He wanted his missed minimum payment of 53 dollars, and I’m not sure I made the right call anymore.

The book was quite disappointing.

The main problem with this book is that it was written by Ed Zipco. Ed is a college buddy of Darius and Downey’s- as is revealed in the book, they all met while at Pratt, in NYC.

Ed took the job of immortalizing his buddies adventures very seriously. He writes less like he’s been charged with relaying their story, and more like he’s putting down the creation myth of a new religion, whispered in his ear by angels.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that it’s an easy thing to write, and I don’t think that street art is an easy thing to write about, but Zipco’s breathless style makes it hard to sympathize with the difficulty of his task. The first challenge is finding a way to involve both graff-heads and non graff-heads alike, without pages of history or exposition. Then you have to find a way to describe the experience of street art without being boring, which is tricky, because so much of the practical side of it is so similar- “We went to a spot, it was sketchy, it was cold, we got scared, someone almost got hurt, the plan got fucked up, but we pulled it off- mostly.” Sure, I’ll read through all that every time, but I live for this stuff, and even I found it ponderous and repetitive in The Adventures of Darius and Downey . I can’t see a non-head making headway through this book.

See, Zipco writes like he’s in high school. His writing is the sort of thing you wrote in High School, look back at later- and feel that deep, physical embarrassment in your gut at. You know the feeling. The one that makes you palm your face and groan “uhhhhhh….” Like the feeling you get when you remember the first time you got drunk and peed your pants.

I think this particular passage epitomizes what I’m getting at here:

“Leon’s life was going well enough and so like most things hitting their stride, it was due for a strong hiccup. With graduation coming fast, there were major changes on the horizon, no matter how hard he would fight the tide. But bigger, unseen clouds were gathering.

Spring in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, is a tense season. Pratt Institute’s graduating class, oblivious to the weather report, is suddenly thrust out into the real world and everything suddenly goes through a severe disconnect. The people you see day-to-day move, get on with their lives, disappear completely. Even the people you are closest to are compelled to do the same. It’s a point of departure, a transition only slightly less traumatic than birth itself.”

only slightly less traumatic than birth itself?!

Dude, you’re GRADUATING COLLEGE. Have a sing-along to this, have a cry, and then grow a pair.

blagrh.

The style of his writing makes me feel like Zipco’s not convinced that the subject matter is EPIC enough. It’s a shame, because the stories could be interesting, ARE interesting, but Zipco’s trying too hard the whole time to convince readers that he and his college buddies are just soooooooo cool- making even the most interesting stories in the book difficult to read.

It doesn’t help that Ed mentions himself in the book in third person:

“While in Spain, Leon and Quenell meet with another friend of theirs from Brooklyn, Ed Zipco.*”

and then dedicates a footnote to how friggin sweet he is.

“* Ed had recently come into some money by bankrupting a short film with his signing fee, and with the collapse of said film, had plenty of time on his hands to travel. Hearing about the Bull Run, and missing his friends Brad, Leon, and Quenell, Ed quickly sold all his worldly possessions and bought a plane ticket. Following a stop in Japan for a few weeks of whiskey and peyote, he made his way to Spain via Paris. After several days spent living in a public park, he eventually found his long-lost friends, and soon they were all happily in harm’s way.”

All this effort to impress diminishes the stories, rather than enhance them.

So was The Adventures of Darius and Downey totally not worth the money? Maybe not… the book includes a mention about how Shepard Fairey revealed the secret ingredient that prevents paste from freezing in cold weather to the two young artists- SALT. How have I never heard about this/figured this out before? If true, this little tip was more than worth the cover price for me. However, since I’ve just shared it with you, you may want to skip The Adventures of Darius and Downey – or maybe try and find it in your local library. (If you already love street art, it’s worth a read. I’m a bit harsh on the book, but it’s not gawdawful.)

Two dead astros out of Five!