Subscription to Mischief

Last weekend I got to attend the opening reception of a fantastic new exhibition put up by San Francisco’s Letterform Archive: Subscription to Mischief features a beautifully curated collection of photos, correspondence, and other ephemera from the dawn of graffiti zines in the 1990’s. It’s an amazing window into the pre-internet days when zines like Skills, 12 Oz Prophet, and Can Control were the only way writers from around the world could learn about each other’s work. The exhibition runs until November 2023. If you’re in the Bay Area, don’t miss it!

San Francisco outspends other CA cities on the buff

This article in SF Weekly brings up the issue of how much taxpayer money in San Francisco is wasted painting grey rectangles all over town, as compared to other California cities. It’s got a nice quote from Graffiti Archaeology pal Steve Rotman as well.

Full article after the jump.

Continue reading San Francisco outspends other CA cities on the buff…

Bay Area Graffiti, the book

Photographer Steve Rotman (better known online as funkandjazz) has just released his much anticipated book, Bay Area Graffiti. It’s the first book ever to document the San Francisco Bay Area’s vibrant graffiti scene. Steve’s been a good friend and contributor to Graffiti Archaeology for years now, and his work is consistently the best of the best. Get the book! You won’t be disappointed.

If you’re local, there will be a book release party on February 6th, from 4 to 9pm, at 111 Minna, and on the walls will be artwork from a number of writers featured in the book. Don’t miss it!

Bruce Tomb’s deappropriation project

If you live in San Francisco, you may have seen a certain wall on Valencia Street in the Mission district that’s been covered with posters, street art and graffiti for the past several years. The wall belongs to designer Bruce Tomb, and he’s been documenting its changes since 2001. His archives are now online at deappropriationproject.net. Needless to say, we love this project over here at Graffiti Archaeology!

Tomb is holding a public meeting about the project at Southern Exposure tonight at 6:30pm. It should be pretty interesting event! Many thanks to Mike K for the link.

Help plan the future of Tire Beach!

The big paintout last weekend, and the security theater that followed, have shown that the City of San Francisco wants very much to be taken seriously in their effort to eradicate graffiti art from Warm Water Cove.

They claim to be doing this with community support.

I don’t believe that’s true.

They haven’t heard from the true community of Tire Beach: the writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, DJs, dancers, fringe artists, and fans who have collectively spent more time in that park than anyone else. These are the people whose watchful eyes made it a relatively safe place to be, despite unpleasant conditions and utter neglect from the city. And these are the people who, against all odds, turned this smelly armpit of a park into a place of thriving grass-roots culture. You, dear reader, may be one of these people. And the city hasn’t heard from you.

The good news is, the plan for the future of Warm Water Cove is not yet set in stone. The planners are asking for input from the community (remember, that’s you!) before they make a final proposal. Even better, we have a deadline: if we don’t speak our minds by September 25th, we’ll miss our chance.

Of course, we don’t want to just whine at them. It’s better if we can talk amongst ourselves first, and come up with some kind of coherent plan to bring back the art. Dav Yaginuma has created a discussion group so we can do that. If you have any opinion at all, please join the group. Got a great idea? Share it. Think it’s impossible? Tell us why! Even if you don’t have much to add, join anyway! Numbers can carry a lot of weight.

I’m not taking charge of this effort, or promising to see it through to any specific goal. Heck, I might wake up tomorrow and decide it was all a waste of time. But I feel that at the very least, those who care about the art need to be heard. If that’s you, go ahead and join the group, and let’s make some stuff happen!

Tire Beach redux

A volunteer works to protect the City from unauthorized Art. (Photo by Dav Yaginuma)

Well, the Tire Beach paintout has come and gone, and the walls are now a uniform dark green. I still have many thoughts I’d like to express about these events, but that’ll have to wait. In the meantime, here’s a roundup of the latest articles and postings:

The SF Chronicle 8/4/07
SFist 8/4/07
Dav Yaginuma’s blog 8/4/07
Dav Yaginuma’s photos on Flickr
interesting background on Mohammed Nuru, by Josh Wilson 8/4/07
New: Warm Water Cove Supporters (a Yahoo group. Join it and get involved!)
Laughing Squid 8/5/07
KTVU’s slideshow of pre-buff photos [carefully selected to omit all the most colorful pieces!]
SnarkyNinja writes a letter to the mayor, 8/6/07
whatimseeing.com 8/7/07 (with photos of blank walls & signs)
SF Examiner 8/7/07 [note the biased language: “graffiti artists” versus “community members”.]
SFist 8/7/07 [shot of police cruiser and green wall]
Graffiti Archaeology News 8/7/07

Previously:
Graffiti Archaeology’s timelapse of the eastern wall (click on “cove/eastZ”).
Photos in our Flickr group tagged with “Tire Beach”
funcheap.com discussion 7/25/07
SFist 7/30/07
whatimseeing.com
Chicken John 8/3/07
SF Chronicle 8/3/07
SF Examiner 8/3/07
Graffiti Archaeology News 8/3/07

I’ll update this list as I find new links.

The end of Tire Beach?

I don’t normally like to inject my personal opinion into the discussions around Graffiti Archaeology, because I like to think of the project as having a neutral attitude towards graffiti: not pro- or anti-, but merely documenting what occurs. I also don’t like to say too much about specific places, because I value the discretion that allows them to stay interesting (to me) as graffiti spots.

But it looks like in the case of Tire Beach, the cat is not only out of the bag, but is actively clawing up your sofa. So I’m going to break both of these rules in one post, in the hopes of doing some good.

In case you haven’t already heard the news: a well-meaning group of folks are getting ready to “reclaim” Warm Water Cove, aka Toxic Tire Beach, this Saturday, August 4th, at 9am. Their aims are twofold: clean up the park itself (pull weeds, remove trash, etc.) and paint over all of the graffiti. In their call for participation, they equate weeds, trash, and “graffiti vandalism”, as if these things were somehow one and the same. (The unstated assumption being that graffiti equals danger.) I beg to differ. The weeds and trash can go, but the constantly changing graffiti art on the walls is pretty much the only thing this park has to recommend it. In fact, I’ll go one step further and say that the graffiti is one of the few things that keeps the park safe.

Continue reading The end of Tire Beach?…

reconstructing a wall from video

reconstructed from video

Originally uploaded by otherthings.

Yesterday I met a filmmaker named Dean Mermell, who shot several pieces of footage at one of my favorite walls back in 2002. I was able to reconstruct part of the wall from this video. This is just a rough stitch for now, but hopefully I’ll get my hands on some more detailed footage later!

Best viewed at full size.

Quality of Life on DVD

Quality of Life, the excellent feature film about two young writers in the San Francisco graf scene, is now out on DVD. It looks like there are lots of fun extra features, including a 38-minute making-of documentary, which I’m really looking forward to seeing, because this movie was made and funded in a very unusual way. Speaking of which: buying the DVD directly from the creators is the way to go. I just ordered my copy.

Quality of Life: review coming soon…

Just a quick note to say that I saw Quality of Life tonight, and found it very very good. It’s a terrific story, told with grace and style and a lot of heart. I’ll give it a proper review when I have time, but for now I’ll just say this: this is not just a movie for graffiti heads. Anyone with a soul will enjoy it. Go see it while you can!

It’s playing through Sunday at the United Artists Galaxy 4 Theatre (at Van Ness and Sutter) in San Francisco.