On being a graffitti writer...

Style Wars! the early documentary by Henry Chalfant





Videograf!! documentaries made during my era





If there was anything in my early life that taught me the rewarding nature of good hard work, it was writing graffiti. before i got into vandalising the city with my tag, i had no idea what hard work even meant. besides writing a long essay in a test, or cleaning my room, i had never really accomplished anything that took any work at all. well, except for the fact that i learned to read and write with bad learning disabilities, but i never felt all that proud because i was like the last kid in my class to do that, by several years. so i didn't really get a sense of accomplishment and reward from finally catching up with all the other kids my age. although, it was a nice feeling when i could suddenly read all the store signs while i rode the m104 bus down broadway, Pizza Town, Twin Donuts, Big Apple Grocery Store, Fowad's, Morris brother's, so on and so forth.

Another minor accomplishment was that i performed for audiences as a break dancer, but really that wasn't hard work and i never really achieved any lasting fame from it. Break Dancing was like playing around to my favorite music. it didn't even take that long for me to get pretty good at it because i have always had a knack for dancing. i started dance performance very early, by shaking it to the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack at a christmas party when i was about 5, for an audience of parents. my finest moment in dance performance was the relatively small crowd at Carly Simon's home on the upper west side. it was a small intimate audience that included Rod Stewart and Billy Idol. this is when they ruled the MTV airwaves. Billy idol, who seemed pretty much blitzed at the time said that the show was "bloody fantastic".

but it really wasn't until i went out with a group of friends when i was 14 and took some spray paint tags in riverside park that i started to learn about the "work ethic". back then there was a lot of impetus for a young man to try his hand at writing. first off, there was the fact that you quickly bonded with your friends who you wrote with. you became part of a team, even if it was just two people. there was always the need for another set of eyes, and also there was usually safety in numbers.

then there was the recognition. and i don't mean from the cops. there was a lot of respect for writers who were talented or just up a lot. there was respect from other writers, which there were MANY. respect from non-writers, like just regular people your age. and of course, girls thought that shit was mad COOL. you were a small version of a rock star in that your name was larger then you were, literally and figuratively. people who you had never met from places you had never been, looked at and talked about your artwork. it was actual fame, and in a city the size of NYC, the fame could potentially reach millions of people. at the height of my writing career, i could find my tag just about anywhere in Manhattan ( i never did much writing outside the borough, just a few missions to Brooklyn and queens). I ended up with a lot of positive reinforcement because of that amount of on-the-ground coverage.

simple things like i could be in a conversation with people i didn't know. then for whatever reason it would come up that i was Zen2, and the person's eyes would get wide for a second, and immediately the tone of the conversation would change. that was a great feeling for somebody who had never really experienced any recognition before.

i was once challenged by an art teacher. she was probably the only art teacher i ever had that i didn't actually like. she spoke more about audiences and who you were trying to "reach" with art, then art for the artist's sake. it was kind of funny that one day, when she was being very critical of a sculpture i had made of a knife, with the word "sex" written on it. she would say something that really struck me as ignorant and funny. she mentioned that clearly i had no experience showing my work to the public because of how overly aggressive and "sexist" my sculpture was. i smiled when she said that because i wanted to tell her that more people looked at my art that very day, then had EVER gazed upon her work in her entire life. and when i think about it now, that was most likely the truth.

i spent a lot of nights bombing Manhattan. sometimes with a core group of my buddies, sometimes with a large crew, sometimes i did it completely alone. i was crazy about it because i loved the adventure, i loved spending the whole night into the light of dawn, on the attack. you had to be aware of your surroundings because there was the constant threat of getting caught by cops, or worse, getting caught by crews you weren't down with. i had so many close calls with both i can't easily boil it down to one story. there were times when we ran into other writers in the wee hours and sometimes it was ugly. there were times when i had decided to go out bombing alone, wearing my headphones and listening to mixed tapes or late night DJs on the radio, when i had to suddenly jet out at top speed because i saw bobbing heads coming towards me. i always called crews running bobbing heads, because if you see them from a distance, it looks like a blob with a bunch of bobbing heads attached to it.

i had nights where i climbed up old fire escapes to get to abandoned and rotting industrial buildings on the side of freeways, that i had spotted from a car ride earlier. the best thing about hitting these big spots and doing a lot of bombing, be it on Broadway, or even on a freeway was that the next day, after i had slept into the afternoon to catch up on rest. after i had washed all the paint off my hands, i could return to the scene of the crime in broad daylight and just enjoy the fruits of my labor. it was a real accomplishment to pull that shit off. considering the dangers involved. each successful bomb was a feather in my cap, and they were successful even when we got busted because cops usually didn't press charges over vandalism back then.

it was my pride in my work, and the slowly growing amount of recognition i was receiving that equated to my first experience with what hard work can accomplish. i know that sounds like a fucked up way to learn the basic tenet of life and how to make something of it. but it was a pure example of how the system works. you like something, you will do it, the more you do it, the more you like it, the better you get at it. the better you get at it and the more you do it, the more people will notice you and the more you will be rewarded, so on and so forth. its a positive, self reinforcing system. it had been explained to me by my parents, my teachers, and by just about anybody who wanted to give a kid some "useful advice". but never had i seen it in action until then.

it wasn't until silly things happened like i was in the meadow one day, and a bunch of hard ass dudes came walking up to where i was sitting. one of them was like, "yo, anybody over here know who Zen2 is?". they looked like the types who i didn't want to know so i said no, i guess it was pussy of me, but trust me, you would have done the same thing. but then they said that they were just curious because there were rumors that Zen2 was big and crazy. well, that made my day.

i had a "rep". people were talking about me and noticing my name. i had some fame. some of my friends were up more then me, and together we all had a good amount of city coverage so they were used to it, but i hadn't had anything like that happen to me yet. i felt REALLY accomplished. i was proud of myself. especially since it took SO much work. so many dangerous journeys into and through the night, so many unfamiliar streets, so many truck yards. plus half of what was painted got cleaned within a week, especially in manhattan. 15-20 years later, maybe 1 out of thousands of tags are left.

its hard to quantify how important a lesson that was to me, and how important it is for a kid to know what the feeling of accomplishment is. the idea that i and other people my age could do something on my own that took control of a largely uncontrollable environment like the city and turned it into an expression of myself. like suddenly, a place that was always much bigger then me, a place that i was simply surrounded by, could be transformed overnight, into MY CANVAS. the whole stinking place was my toy, or it was our toy. it was no longer unassailable. we had "killed that shit".

Graffiti was hard and unforgiving, that's why it was so great. it weeded you out from the rest of the pack if you could pull it off. I hope graffiti never dies. its one of the only forms of expression for the masses of unheard kids in the city. its the only thing that can turn tons of concrete and steel, into something that looks lived in. it gives names and real personality to what would otherwise be stagnant and lifeless. if i even find myself in a town or a urban setting that doesn't have graffiti, the first thing i notice is how cold and soulless it is. like it isn't human. i even appreciate graffiti in ancient Europe. its even cooler when its old. check out the Egyptian tomb in the Metropolitan Museum. the one that was actually moved from the middle east. there are rubbed tags all over it. some of them from 200 years ago. that's almost as cool as the temple itself.

Some of my friends are still loving that feeling they get from bombing all night, its an addictive feeling. getting shit done. bombing. getting up. becoming a king. and what's great about this kind of royalty, is that it isn't just inherited. you have to go out and TAKE IT.

As for me, well, the lesson i learned i think is applied to what i ended up doing with my life. I haven't taken a tag in about 10 years now. I chose to express myself through animation. these days i work on the look, color, texture, composition of the final images you see in movies like Shrek, Madagascar, and stuff that is currently in theatres all over the planet. i can safely say that millions, to billions of people have looked at my work. with or without the actual movie credit, i know what i have accomplished, and by the looks on people's faces when i tell them what i have done, they do to.