the Wall - EXXXtreme graffiti writing

our crew's favorite spot for murals was a test in extreme graffiti writing. it pushed your ability design under confined spaces and perspective, while testing your balance and disclipline. kind of like a kung fu movie.

there was a large wall at the very end of the west side. it held up the neighborhood from the lower tracks used by metro north. before trump plopped his foul yuppy towers and populated the area with snooty bridge and tunnel a-holes, there was abandoned grass and this mammoth wall. the wall had a ledge about 3 feet wide running along it above the tracks. the ledge was about a story and a half above the tracks and it was PERFECT for graffiti since it allowed you to paint very high up, high enough to be seen from the west side highway.

it was a perfect place to do murals, out of the way from most people and cops, and it did have audiences, in the form of amtrak trains full of commuters to watch us as we worked. there were no cell phones so we could even moon the trains without worrying about some good Samaritan reporting us to 911 as they whizzed by at 50 mph.

we also learned to work in a huge scale, like 25 foot letters, WITHOUT the ability to back up and gauge how they were looking. we learned to use arm widths to make sure we were staying to the correct scale. it was a serious task, and the design skills learned there are useful for me to this day. i even painted it in college to pay homage to it. i posted a pic of the painting above.

one moment stands out. there were many moments there, like the time we used 30 buckets of paint and a roller brush on a pole to make a tag that was at least 100 feet wide, to be seen by new Jersey or a plane passing over. but the moment i think of was when my friend Self, an incredible and focused artist, took a backwards digger off the ledge. possibly proving that you can sometimes be TOO focused.

we had been working on our murals for an hour or two. i guess he had taken perhaps one too many deep breathes near the can, basically huffing spray fumes. add that to limited visibility, and then possibly stepping back a bit too far to look at his work. i was busy spraying my own masterpiece so i only heard him cry out, and looked just in time to see him start to fall backwards.

luckily, it was spring, and several small saplings had sprouted out of the filth right below where he was on the high ledge. so he ended up falling backwards through these saplings, tearing off springy branches as he fell. what should have landed him in the hospital just landed him in this anecdote. he had fallen backwards 15 feet, all in the name of his art. he proved himself like a shaolin monk. he know-the-ledge now. Self was now the guy who flew backwards of the wall, and lived to tell the tale.