The walls and things of Owen Sound

The wall of Alexandra Elementary School.

The Owen Sound Coliseum

Strathcona Slave Trading Junction

That’s an ATE bomb across the water.

The age old question of “what now?” so eloquently answered with a generous stroke of contemporary nihilism.

Owen Sound Graffiti Update

ATE, your town is mine now!

[M@KP] Pack FM .:. Click, Clack & Spray ; (graffiti essay)

A SAKE bomb, Montreal

Click to listen to “Click, Clack & Spray”

Artist: Pack FM

Album: wutduzFMstand4? ( 2006 )

I think there’s no more of a perfect canvas for art than the street.  Walls, trucks, mailboxes, bus shelters, buses and benches should be rich with designs – no mundane surface should be neglected.  Nothing displays urbanity to me like when I see the whip and flow of tags so free, to be the voice and vision of livin’ as a name, runic arcana, superstition, political statement or ego trippin’ – upon walls, across doors, barroom stalls, subway floors, up-down escalators, a name soars above power lines and cars on the grain elevators.

Graffiti encompasses bravery, brevity, acrobatics, artistic merit and real consequences (plus it’s sexy to commit misdemeanors).  Besides that, there’s all of the intent of other forms of art, and more.  I can’t pass by a piece of graffiti, regardless of its intent, without acknowledging it, analyzing it (if I have the freedom to) and sometimes memorizing the motions of it.

I saw Akira when I was 10.  Besides being the best cartoon I had (and maybe have) seen, I was subconsciously drawn to the detailed graffiti that can be seen in many of the frames.  Other formative media experiences informed a love of one thing and another: urban decay and tagging.  In Final Fantasy VII when you climb up to the Shinra Building in Wall Market you can very clearly see many tags, and in the context of the scene they seem like a very defiant cry against poverty and oppression (something I could relate to,

growing up in a household of 5 on a single paycheck far below the poverty line).  Even in the deceptively innocent 2001 animated film Metropolis uses graffiti in the lower levels of the city.  More and more of what I indulged in carried some sort of inscribed messages on the walls, always reminding me of Egyptian heiroglyphs and runic language.

Unfortunately, Owen Sound never had much of a graffiti scene – just swastikas and bad words thrown up across the Coliseum bleachers – and I didn’t get any exposure (however limited) to real graffiti until I moved to Kitchener.  Now, you have to understand that K-W’s graffiti scene is far from dense, and is mostly bored kids throwing up their name for entertainment, but there was still something magical in seeing that.  My brief time in Toronto entranced me with the impromptu murals, and I decided that at some point in my life I’d like to collect photographs of transient art.

As of last August on the 10th Street Bridge in Pittsburgh was a large scrawl “POVERTY IS THE BIGGEST PRISON THE GOVERNMENT EVER BUILT”.  Disagree with whatever you will – it’s not about the politics – what got me was that somebody felt it enough that they had to put it up.  They needed other people to see it, to feel it.  I felt it and held it close.  Elsewhere in Pittsburgh I saw public art commissioned by the city, or corporate sponsors, or whatever.  Sometimes that’s kind of interesting to look at, but it’s entirely inoffensive and doesn’t really make you think, decipher, or feel. There’s no need behind it beside the malignant desire to gentrify, gentrify, gentrify.

Montreal represented to me a place where art really meets the streets in all of its forms.  Busking, poetry, performance and especially graffiti.  Everywhere in the city you can see tags, political statements, stencils, bombs, and more.  In it was motion, and also the urban scene that I’d been looking for.  Across the cityscape I found comfort in seeing the tags of SAKE and NIXON around every turn.  I remember the sense of wonder I felt when I saw SAKE’s name boldly posted across the very top of silos across the canal.  There was a real thril in going out to real run down, dirty abandon complexes and seeing the full-sized murals – it was like going to an art gallery except you had to jump fences to get in and you didn’t really know who was responsible for any of it.

I saw these eyes everywhere, these eyes and letter envelopes, and I thought to myself “These would trip me out if I were going crazy” – by that time I was going crazy.  The effect the tags had on me was evidently profound, especially looking at the art that I’ve done then and since.  These simple symbols spread across the urban landscape carry a sort of apocalyptic weight to them.  I associate them with very powerful themes (similar to the eyes in the Great Gatsby and all they embodied), a carefully crafted image appearing across the cityscape serving as foreshadowing from those who see it.  Recently around Kitchener I’ve begun to see this dead bee stencil sprayed around, and there’s something in it’s message and construction that’s been emblazoned in my brain.

There’s something cryptic and intimate about this type of graffiti. It’s not a tag really, but it’s like delving into someone’s thoughts and lifelong knowledge. The message flies off the fingertips of “the crazy.”

There’s so many paths and reasons that lead up to it, but you can never truly know why or how it happened.

That, I think is where I’m going with my own graffiti, at least on some level.  With the bus shelter I went entirely postmodern, offering anybody who passed an intimate and perhaps even uncomfortable look into some of my own imagery.  It’s deeper than something than some text waiting to be deciphered, but a code to another human being’s experience – trying to establish intimacy without any actual interaction between two people.  Of course, that is providing the city crews aren’t threatened by my gesture and remove the work within 24 hours.

Cryptic ghosts and shadow selves

I woke into a tangle of covers, noonhour late entry into waking life.  Started the morning with stretches and pushups,  washed my hair and pulled myself together, made a quick coldcut and tangerine breakfast, drank a single cup of burnt black coffee, checked some torrents’ status, shot off several resumes, and looked at the small stack of change on my table.  Enough for a Jones soda.

I bypass the clusterfuck of Kitchener streets with the train tracks.  There was marginal city planning (if any) in the rise of the old industrial Berlin, the streets turn irrationally making sickle spins, sometimes giving the illusion of a straight away until you discover a subtle curve elongated the route of point a through b by about 5 blocks.  If you follow the main streets you’ll see the parallel ones turn away from each other like split ends, but the train tracks cut through them all in the other direction making a short of pretzel that can save upward to 30 minutes cutting across town.  The tracks are peaceful, quiet non-places where the world seems to stop, save the flies and the sparrows.

I found my centre of balance, focused and walked down a rail from Ahrens down to Guelph street, determined not to fall even once.  I did, once, but blamed it on some voodoo hex out of my control.  Down on Moore, beside the cemetery I noticed something curious marked across a pane of a bus shelter.  In frantic, lowercase black printing that looked as if it were scrawled out by a crazy under pressure was a long poem that filled the entire pane of glass.

I examined the poetry and the font it was written in very closely for several moments, reading and re-reading the poem.  The letters formed a cryptic mess of fragmented images, something delicate and jarring like seeing the twisted insides of a fancy windup clock strewn across a table, beside the face and ornate casing – uncomfortably honest and alien.

I recognized all of the pieces, fragments of the poetry, the words and arrangement.  They were mine.  So was the printing.  But I don’t remember writing it, and it wasn’t my poem.  Just pieces, little ripped up flakes of Apartment 10 and Ravines thrown in the air like confetti, landing in this way.  But it wasn’t randomly arranged, or it didn’t seem like it if it was.

I took several photographs of it with my camera phone, and cut through the cemetery to Central Market.  I bought a Jones Cream Soda, and stole a pen from the checkout.  I followed the same way back, stopping again at the bus shelter to copy the poem down on my arms.

I want to be barrooms

fixed-light red liquors;

stalwart image of myself

the people are desolation

dragged with bound ankles and

wrists by marching tribes of st. catherine

basement sundown

embroidered on man by cold air and bottles

unclean laundry; hallucinations

from our sun inside of trivial pills that gave him

things and places from an empty outline

of lost letters and faded fragments

I read a lot of snowfalls

breath clouds the street

freezes their canyons

windowless barren soil

laugh cracked streets;

spaces in-between those dark

reflections of politique

from far off televisions:

chinese and the whites in a welfare office

with coyote faces chatting to themselves

imaginary pianomen listen

hearing voices myself

and I swear an accusatory empty world:

“one of six people on here…

and soon you won’t see streets

of a man bound at golden glory and

then you’ll become crazy?”
have a dollar to give galaxies?

I’m lying on desert drought

and we need it to feed

flower shadows

everywhere

The fortune under the Jones’ lid said:
“The deeper you go
the more you will find”.

[M@KP] Immortal Techique .:. The 4th Branch

Click here to listen to “The 4th Branch”

Artist: Immortal Technique

Album: Revolutionary Vol. 2 ( 2004 )

The new age is upon us
And yet the past refuses to rest in its shallow grave
For those who hide behind the false image of the son of man
shall stand before God!!! It has begun
The beginning of the end.

The voice of racism preaching the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu’ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin’ to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleeza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemmings
I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology

Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I’m facin’ assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave?
Indigenous holocaust, and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin’ offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism?
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won’t trade humanity for patriotism

It’s like MK-ULTRA, controlling your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fighting for freedom and fighting terror, but what’s reality?
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

Flow like the blood of Abraham through the Jews and the Arabs
Broken apart like a woman’s heart, abused in a marriage
The brink of holy war, bottled up, like a miscarriage
Embedded correspondents don’t tell the source of the tension
And they refuse to even mention, European intervention
Or the massacres in Jenin, the innocent screams
U.S. manufactured missles, and M-16’s
Weapon contracts and corrupted American dreams
Media censorship, blocking out the video screens
A continent of oil kingdoms, bought for a bargain
Democracy is just a word, when the people are starvin’
The average citizen, made to be, blind to the reason
A desert full of genocide, where the bodies are freezin’
And the world doesn’t believe that you fightin’ for freedom
Cause you fucked the Middle East, and gave birth to a demon

It’s open season with the CIA, bugging my crib
Trapped in a ghetto region like a Palestinian kid
Where nobody gives a fuck whether you die or you live
I’m tryin’ to give the truth, and I know the price is my life
But when I’m gone they’ll sing a song about Immortal Technique
Who beheaded the President, and the princes and sheiks
You don’t give a fuck about us, I can see through your facade
Like a fallen angel standing in the presence of God
Bitch NGHs scared of the truth, when it looks at you hard

It’s like MK-ULTRA, controlling your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view in the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fighting for freedom and fighting terror, but what’s reality?
Martial law is coming soon to the hood, to kill you
While you hanging your flag out your project window

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn’t speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone!
And you know it’s serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they’re fair and balanced
When they’re some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven

We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don’t get the contracts to make money off ’em afterwards!
We don’t get weapons contracts, NGH!
We don’t get cheap labor for our companies, NGH!
We are cheap labor, NGH!
Turn off the news and read, NGH!
Read…

read…

read…

10 Images from Montreal