CBEE KSA

 I've been wanting to interview ‘CB ONE’ for some time now. After connecting through our mutual friend, ‘Sneek’ KSA, I finally got to sit down and talk with #CBKSA about skateboarding and graffiti. While we were discussing things, ‘CBEE’ even managed to link DJ'ing in within this dynamic. Read on to learn about how he got down with KSA, bombing with ‘TKA’, acting in the movie ‘Kids’, and much more…

CBEE & Seno

What did you get into first, skateboarding or graffiti?   Graffiti for sure. Around 1980, when I was five. You know that's the age when you start getting into things, and the whole B-Boy and Breaking  Culture was a thing, so that's what got me into it. I was writing something between the ages of five and ten, but I didn't start bombing until I was 12 or 13. Then skateboarding came after BMX’ing. My bike got stolen twice. I had two Redlines, which were expensive. Skateboards were less expensive. So after getting two bikes stolen, I decided to start skateboarding. 

A young CBEE catching air. 

With the growth of the industry in the late 80's, skateboarding just caught my interest more, anyway. With competitive skateboarding, eventually I got hurt. Blew my knee out pretty badly filming, and couldn’t ride the same anymore, so I had to retire. That's how I got into graffiti more. Ultimately, I got into DJ'ing in 1995 and playing a ton of raves and clubs and flying everywhere. It's like one thing led to another.

Who did you look up to in your early days of skateboarding? 

The Shut guys for sure, Jeremey Henderson. This is pre ‘Supreme’ and ‘Kids’ and it was all still kind of underground. No one on the east coast was really well known. My first board was a Santa Cruz Duane Peters. It was a boat! Then I had a Jeff Kendall. All the early Powell guys from Public Domain were an influence, too.

Who were you inspired by in the early days of graffiti?

A lot of people. Probably more of the Queens guys. Obviously we were exposed to the stuff coming out of the Bronx/Manhattan, on the trains and Video Graff, and the worldwide zines. Living in Queens exposed me to the guys getting shit done on the expressways, because no one was bombing trains anymore. I think that doesn't get talked about enough - there should be zines on just the expressways. In the outer boroughs, our parents had cars, so we saw the stuff on the highways. Fib, Med, Jest, TKA, Desa, Set, Trap, Joz & Easy. Cost, Chester, Air. I was inspired a lot by Chester and Cost. I want to shout FCEE - he really influenced me a lot in the beginning.

FCEE GAS crew & a CBEE floater.

 

Cost KRT & CBEE KSA

Seno KSA

Jasper KSA

How did you get your tag? 

It's my initials. At first I used to do just a C and a B. Eventually I added the two E's to it because it gave it more letters to work with, especially when I started doing pieces and burners. First comes bombing, but at one point I got tired of it. Looking back, I don't regret using my initials, because everything I've ever done (graff and DJ'ing) is under one brand. My initials or my actual name; graff, acting, music. You're down with KSA, yeah, Keeping Style Alive. Killing Shit Always. Krazy Skateboard Artists. It started with friends ‘Marcus Jurgenson’ and ‘Jasper’. Somehow they knew my friend ‘Seno’. I would skateboard until really late at night. I'd skate home alone, with my backpack on which was full of paint, and I'd see the streets were dead. So I'd take my paint out and do a fill-in. I started getting up a lot, writing by myself at first. During that time, I started writing with ‘ADA’ (Another Dope Artist). He was one of my best friends, and he also got me into DJ'ing. Then I started skateboarding with ‘Seno’, but not writing with him just yet. Eventually I got down with KSA through ‘Seno’ and other crew members. KSA was a skateboard and graffiti crew. ‘Celk’ went on to trademark Keeping Style Alive years later. We didn't know skateboarding was going to blow up the way it did, and literally go MAINSTREAM. 

 

CBEE & Celk KSA

 

CBEE & Jasper

 

What was it like writing with ‘TKA ONE’?

I met ‘TKA’ through the rave scene. We were hanging out a lot and bombing a lot, promoting for NASA together. There was a period where we were racking paint and markers a lot. He was Chinese, not Korean. It's not ‘The Korean Artist’, but I don't know what it ever stood for (some people say The Krazy Asian), I think he just liked the letters. ‘TKA’ was really good at forging people's tags. He'd sit on the phone all day just forging people's tags with pen and paper. He had a legendary run; he was in and out. He did what he had to do, and had some really high moments. He had heart, and when you rolled with someone like that, you knew the difference. King TKA - no one did bigger shit than him at that point in time. He did top-to-bottoms like no else. I was there with him. The trust fund writers might have been doing their thing, but it's not the same thing. There are guys who got into this with no money, and got very far with no money. Then the culture vultures started sweeping in and claiming it theirs. Last time I saw ‘TKA’ was about ten years ago. I was visiting NYC from Iowa (I lived there for about eight years), and somehow I connected with him. He's a changed man these days. He got into finance back then, I believe. He cleaned up his life, meaning, he did what he wanted to do (with graffiti), and he's onto something else. Similar to why I don't DJ much anymore, I enjoy making music now. Also, why I don't bomb anymore. I did what I wanted to do with it. But, if someone said, "Hey you want to paint this huge wall with us?" I'd be like, hell yeah! I'd love to do it. We didn't really talk about graffiti, I was a bit lowkey when it came to letting people know what I wrote. I think some people get to a point in life where they are happy with what they accomplished in that scene and then something makes them say, "I don't want to deal with the beef and the politics, or the drama." You get tired of it. I think maybe ‘TKA’ was a part of that for too many years. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. You get arrested on a holiday weekend, you're not getting out for three days. 

Photo: @90s_interlude

 You probably don't remember this but I met you back in '94/'95 while you were painting a legal wall on 28th St/Broadway.  Do you remember that wall?

Yes, I do. I'm pretty sure my mother had something to do with getting me the permission to paint that wall, however I can’t remember the connection. A cop came and approached us, you know, the way they do. But once I pulled out the permission slip, the cop changed his tune real quick. I was painting that day with ‘Mosp’, short for (Mospeda), a black and Chinese friend who lived in Jamaica. He was good friends with another one of my friends I went to Art & Design with, ‘Nem’. ‘Mosp’ went to Bronx Science. This is the Jamaica ‘NEM’. The ES (Extra Skills) ‘Nems’. I started doing a lot more pieces with the ES crew out of Jamaica, Queens. ‘Mosp’ taught me a lot, cutting techniques while we burned Franklin K. Lane and Hillcrest High School‘s, and used it as our concrete canvases. Mosp, you know, was an intricate part of ‘Queen Andrea's’ (QA) early career. But anyway, I had my bombing era, then I had my piecing era until I got too busy, DJ'ing. 

CBEE and Mosp at the 28th St wall.

 That video of you, ‘Kech’, ‘Giz’, and ‘VE’ has gotten a lot of action on Instagram. Do you remember that night?  That was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn near the Acid factories. That video has become sort of legendary clip. At the time I had no idea it was in ‘Video Graff’ because I was busy doing other things. I remember ‘Kech’ telling me, "Yo we were in ‘Video Graff’ - did you see it?" And I was like, "What are you talking about?" Again, because I was so busy with other things, I didn't know what he was talking about. But the unromantic detail no one talks about is that we got caught for that shit. If you look closely, mine looks unfinished. The bubble on the back doesn't have an outline. I think we spent a night or two in jail. Now, going back to what I was saying about people nowadays paying to paint and paying to not get caught...! Back then, we were paying with fines and jail time to do the real thing! That's the sacrifice, because out of that came a nice piece of footage that the world got to see. 

 

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A post shared by Christian Bruna (@christianbruna)

 

How did you get in ‘KIDS’?

I think it was Sid (@sidlifecrisis), an old school club kid friend of ours, ‘NASA’ guy, he's the one, I think, that helped get us all into ‘Kids’. Some of us had an opportunity to audition. I didn't take it seriously, so I didn't get a real part. They still wound up throwing me in the movie. I just played myself, and the whip it scene I share with Justin Pierce and others, has a few ‘CBEE’ tags behind me. On top of the money we got paid to be a part of the cult classic film ‘KIDS’, my DJ career blew up because of it. It's great to talk about this, because people are always chasing the paper and the promotions, but sometimes in life you gotta do something because you want to do it and something else could come from it, without having those expectations. Yes we got paid and fed, but it was an indie film, so it wasn't a lot. But when that movie came out, my DJ career blew up. I started playing out in the summer of 1995, which is the year that movie came out. The rave scene was starting to use the fact that I was in the movie in promotions. They definitely exploited me up to a certain degree. Some people might say ‘Larry Clark’ exploited all of us, but who gives a shit?! As long as we got something out of it. I was skateboarding with ‘Larry Clark’ when he was just a photographer and he was mad cool. I don't see it as us getting exploited. I got a DJ career out of it. I threw a weekly party for 15 years and then some. I made a legit living Dj’ing, I was just immersed in the culture, right time and place. But at the same time, ‘Kids’ (and even Supreme) did a lot of good things, but it also turned a lot of people into really big headed egotistical monsters. 

CBEE and Justin Pierce on the set of Kids with CBEE tags in the background.

 What do you think it is about these two cultures, skating and graffiti, that they both attract a lot of the same people?  It's like what I was saying before... You could grab your skateboard and go out at any given moment and skate until whenever time you want. And because of that, if you had a marker or a can of spray paint on you, you could get away with tagging something. If you were a skateboarder, it (graffiti) was accessible. More accessible than if you were a BMXer. With a bike, you have to worry about this thing you're sitting on top of. But with a skateboard, you could have that skateboard in your hand, and use it like a weapon while you're doing a fill-in or catching a tag. There's something about creatives, in general, that make us skateboarders artists, and eventually, graff writers. You know, guys like ‘Neil Blender’ and ‘Andy Howell’, ‘Ed Templeton’ and ‘Mark Gonzales, and ‘Ducky Talavera’ for the real old schoolers. But you know, I'd say that you could even include raves/DJ'ing in this dynamic, because there were times I would show up to ‘NASA’ on Fridays, with my skateboard and paint on me! Then we would paint early in the morning in SoHo and beyond. There were trucks laid up around there that ‘Seno’ and I would hit. 

CBEE & Seno KSA

 You have a bit of background props at the Brooklyn Banks (Gotham Park) in old skate photos and videos, yeah?   I'm in ‘Harold Hunter's’ ‘Sky Pager’ part. I have a squiggly straight letter ‘C-B-E-E’ on the wall on bank. ‘Seno’ did a bunch of S's on the back wall. I think ‘Seno’ went back with ‘SN’ and did more stuff at the Banks. ‘Seno’ comes out in a lot of background in  ‘Larry Clark’s’ photos from the Banks. Back in the 80's and 90's, skating and graffiti weren't accepted by the mainstream. Nowadays they are both accepted a lot more, it’s amazing how far they’ve come. 

 

CBEE in the background of Harold Hunter's Skypager part.

 How do you think this warm welcome from the masses has changed these subcultures?      I think it's hurt the cultures. Same exact thing that happened to skateboarding, happened to rave/electronic music/EDM. At this point, whoever has the most money has the biggest chance of succeeding. All the small brands now have to compete with these big companies who want in, too. It takes money to stay relevant. You have to have real money to sponsor Tyshawn. The top guys are going to want real money. So who's going to run the industry? The guys with the most money. While the people who started it all struggle. Like the guy who made ‘Video Graff’, you think he got rich off of that? No. But he put a lot of people on the map. I feel that it's unfair that everything that started out with no money has become about money. The pioneers don't get any credit, while the millionaires and billionaires who invested in it to turn it into a business, now decide who gets the credit for whatever culture they are exploiting. 

How do you compete with that? This is why you can't do the things you love for money. I got lucky with DJ'ing, but I've has shitty retail jobs and service industry jobs on and off my whole life. You don't think a company like ‘Zumiez’ won't put a small skateshop out of business? And that's the problem - we all want things to get big, but at what cost? There's a small window in either cultures' time that the real heads are going to be able to make some good money. I think that window has passed for skateboarding, and for EDM. The people ruling the ‘EDM’ industry are the elite, the 1%. Whether they are making any money or not, they at least have the money to create the smoke and mirrors that they are. Again, it's a small window for the real heads, but when the people with wealth see that happening, that's when they swoop in to get some for themselves. 

Nem & CBEE

Last question: will you hit my book? 

Yes, THANK YOU! Of course, my pleasure!!

 

 

Eli Morgan Gessner

 

Zoo piece by Eli Morgan Gessner

I recently got to nerd out on all things skateboarding and graffiti with self-proclaimed nerd, Eli Morgan Gessner.  From hanging with TC5, to getting the Soul Artists' blessing to use the Zoo York name, we covered a lot of NYC skate & graffiti history.  

  

What did you get into first, skating or graffiti?

My relationship with both skateboarding and graffiti is like this: I was never like, "I want to be a skateboarder" or "I want to write graffiti". They both just came into my life at different times. I was a crazy kid in New York City playing roof tag and climbing trees in Central Park and riding on top of subway cars. Just doing daredevil stuff. 

I was aware of graffiti. My dad was the dean of kinetic arts at the School of Visual Arts. When graffiti first started showing up on the subways, in the mid/late '70s, nobody knew how it got there. And not knowing anyone who wrote graffiti, it was magical to see. So my dad and I would look at it and the colors and cartoon characters and the scale and think, "How did they pull this off?" My dad thought they must sit and wait for the train and do the piece little by little, and catch it every time it goes around the loop. He thought it ran on a loop, like a Christmas tree train. It was definitely cool, but I didn't know anybody who was into it. 

So like I said, my dad was a dean of arts, my uncle was a famous playwright, my mom was an art director and all our friends were artists or teachers. So I made art with all the kids I grew up with. All I did was just draw draw draw. I probably have some kind of ADHD or something, but back in the '70s all they had was the short bus and Special Ed. So once the teachers got to know me, they would just let me draw. They must have had a note, "this kid likes to draw," and just afforded me passing grades. But through that, the older kids who wrote graffiti would approach me and ask me to draw stuff for them. Dragons, Spider Man, bugged out dinosaurs - pretty much just characters. I didn't understand how to draw letters. 

 

Did you ever see any of your characters on a train or a wall?

I'm not going to say any names, but... You know how you give piece books to friends? Well I know I gave people piece books that I had pieces in and then would see a character on a train that was mine. And I'm like, "are you kidding me!" And I know who it was. But I don't want to make it sound like that happened a lot, because it didn't. It was a rare event. 

 

So that's where my world was. I was blessed and cursed to be an artist. I never had a say. When you're a kid, you're like, "I can be an astronaut or president of the United States." I knew I could not be an astronaut, I knew I could not be president of the United States; I couldn't be a lawyer or a doctor. I get to draw. Which I'm totally OK with. 

 

The real kind of like "Oh shit" moment for me was (still pre skateboarding) when I was going to Alexander Robertson on 95th and Central Park West. There was a kid in my class whose name was Chris Green. He lived in the West Gate projects and we would hang out. I went to his apartment one day after school and walked into the bedroom he shared with his brother. Above his brother's bed were all these graffiti photos. At this time, there was still no Subway Art and I had never seen anyone take a panoramic picture. So, over the bed there were these twelve-inch long, full-car photos taped together and stuck to the wall. I was like, "What is this?!" And Chris said, "Oh my brother is a famous graffiti writer. He writes Doze." Then he opens up the closet and there's all this spray paint. It was weird to see that. It was like seeing behind the magic; like backstage. I was seeing stuff that the general populous didn't get to see. I was like, "How does he afford all this paint?!" Not realizing it was all stolen. And, "Who came up with the idea to take multiple pictures to make a panorama?" That alone blew me away because I never thought of doing something like that. 

 

 

Then, around the same time, there was a shop called Wings, on Broadway and 93rd. This was probably '80/'81. (I started skating in late '82). In the window of Wings, they had airbrushed graffiti t-shirts. Chris took me there to meet Doze. All the TC5 guys were there airbrushing t-shirts: Doc, Beam, Seen (black Seen), and other TC5 guys. I lived a block away, so I would just go and hang out with them. I was this annoying, weird, little white kid with glasses hanging out with these black/Dominican/Puerto Rican grown men. They tolerated me. But they also would teach me things and they liked that I could draw. I was like, "This is what I'm going to do. I'm gonna get into the graffiti thing." But I still hadn't been to a train yard. I had been to the ghost station and the layups a couple of times. I was just street bombing around Riverside Park at night writing "Nost".  And they would call me toasty Nosty. I was around 10 or 11 years old and still not skateboarding. But I have no idea how I got my tag, and I never liked it. I learned to write it OK, but I did not have a good hand style and I was always ashamed of that. I could do dope wild style pieces, but I had no hand style. I really loved Zephyr's tag. But I aspired to do stuff like Dondi's chisel tip hand styles. 

 

Photo: @kids_theze_days

 

There was this graffiti writer Midas who I had seen in the Upper West Side. On my block was a movie theater called The Thalia. They showed rerun movies. I couldn't leave my block, so I would just end up hanging out at the movie theater or Wings. One day I went to The Thalia and there's a new employee. This calm, well spoken, black kid. I saw him drawing and I was like, "oh you write graffiti." He said yeah. Then he went into his wallet and took out a piece of paper that was folded up into a square. Back then everyone had piece books or a graffiti jacket and it was real aggressive and hostile. Midas' style was more like chess. He hands me the square and I unfold it. It was a full color with splatter paint stars airbrushed graffiti piece that said "Midas". On a piece of lined paper with holes in it! The psychological implications were devastating. This guy put all this work onto a piece of loose leaf paper?! Then folded it up and kept it in his wallet?! Anyone else would have framed it! So I was really intrigued with him. And it didn't matter to me if I saw you up a lot if I didn't like what you were doing. Or, inversely, someone tried to do a tag or piece and I loved it and it would stick with me forever. The psychology behind the art was always more compelling to me. I didn't even like the idea of writing the same name over and over. I really felt like I was alone in that. When I would go out writing with other kids, I'd sometimes write another name and they'd all get mad at me like, "what are you doing?!" I'd say, "I don't want to write an N today, I want to write an R." 

So I meet Midas, and he had a skateboard. He was a graffiti writer who skateboarded. He was from the UWS, so I assume he got into skating because of the Zoo York crew/Soul Artists guys. The original graffiti writing skateboarders. Midas had a real skateboard from a skateshop. I even think it was a Steve Olson. So I tried his board, but I was riding it laying down on my belly. The Thalia is on a hill, so I'm belly bombing this hill. And they were all, "No! You gotta learn how to skate!" So they'd send me down this hill. But I was like, "I'm going to go too fast." He taught me to go at an angle across the street to go slower. Zig zagging, back and forth, curb to curb. Not bombing the hill straight. Then he showed me how to do grinds off this little ledge. Midas ended up meeting this guy Ben Alvarez, who was a real hardcore skater. Midas just skated around and maybe did bonelesses and powerslides, but Ben was doing frontside ollies out of curb cuts and maybe even doing street plants. I was like, "these are my people." So I went to my mom, and I was like, "I need to get a skateboard."  

 

Eli at the Con Ed Banks in Astoria, Queens, 1988. Photo: Bryce Kanights

 

At the same time, I was going to a private school named York Prep. While I was there, I befriended a kid named Nicky Carlson, this rich kid from the Upper East Side. His dad was a stockbroker, and his mom was the beauty editor for Harper's Bazaar magazine. He had a skateboard, but it was a Variflex or some shitty skateboard. He hated the graphic and was embarrassed by it. So I said I could paint him a graphic because I can draw graffiti. So I wrote his name - Nicky - and I drew a bunny rabbit doing a frontside air with a machine gun. Now he didn't feel bad about having a shitty skateboard because it had a cool graphic. So he went to Dream Wheels, a skate shop on Mercer Street right off 8th Street. At the time, I didn't even know skateshops existed. I just thought you bought them from the back of Thrasher. So Nicky called me up to tell me about going to Dream Wheels, and he said they loved my graphic (bunny w/ machine gun). They were passing it around and no one could believe a guy my age (12 years old) could draw something like that. So all the planets aligned: I was like, "Mom! There's a skateshop. They know me and my reputation. I got my money. Let's go get me a skateboard." My mom said she will meet me after work. So I went after school, and I'm waiting for my mom to come around 5:30. The shop was off 8th St., and I knew 8th St. well. I was like an 8th St. kid. But I never knew there was a skateshop there. I'm looking around, and I see a skater walk into a shop, and I'm like I guess that's where the skateshop must be. I get to the shop and on the window is a graffiti piece of a skateboard demon monster face painted on the glass. I was completely blown away by the idea of painting on glass. I walk into the shop dumbfounded like, "How did that... who did that?!" They said, "The best skateboarder in NYC: Ian Frahm. He writes Thor IBM."  I was like I know the tag, but I didn't know he skateboarded. Then I was like, "Do you remember a kid that came in and he had a board with a rabbit and a machine gun?" They were like, "Oh yeah." I said I drew that. They all started laughing and saying, "Bullshit man!" I was like, "You want to see some more art?" And I go into my wallet and I take out a little paper square. Which I learned from Midas. As soon as they saw that, everyone at the skateshop was so sweet to me. 

So then the skate crew showed up. It was Bruno Musso and Ian Frahm and Bosco Money and Weasel; all the instrumental 1980s skaters came through, and it was my first time seeing a gang of skaters. It was one of the most formative days of my life. So Ian walks into the shop, and he was more punk rock. He had a flannel shirt that was just dirty. But looking back now, it was probably because he was writing graffiti in tunnels. Everyone is like, "This is Ian; Thor!" Then they tell him that I'm the kid that did the drawing, as they hand it to him. I could tell he was impressed, but he dismissed me. And he did that because I was a toy. And I was a toy. And I am probably to this day a toy. So Ian says, "It's cool, whatever." Then I point to the drawing on the window and say how amazing it is. Ian says, "Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I'm going skating." Then he kicks the door open, holds his board over his head like Conan’s sword, and does a bomb drop. I was thinking, fuck this kid! I was so mad. He was really mean to me and publicly shamed me. Even the guys at the shop were like, "He didn't have to be like that to you." After that I was like, I'm gonna get good at skating and show this guy! I really believe that. That sometimes you MUST have some kind of enemy, even if it's a frenemy. Whether it's sports, arts, politics - you need the other. That's how you get better; you outdo one another. That's the basis of graffiti writing: to burn. That's the basis of winning a skateboard contest (although we all know that's kind of bullshit). But you can be like, "Fuck this guy... I'm gonna get a full page picture in Thrasher." At least for me, I grew up in a competition-based thing. Most artists that I meet are unilaterally on some hippy dippy shit, like, "It's an expression of who I am." I'm like, "Invalid! I don't care." Unless it's a transcendence of your existence. But if it's a representation of who you are, I don't give a fuck. I like the craftsmanship and the rules and the limitations. You need to achieve this within this limitation. That's where the true essence of anything that is stylish or good comes from. Because of social media, I think this whole inclusive "it's an expression of who I am" thing is where we are currently. And it might suck, but for reasons beyond our control, the algorithm picks it up and this person finds success. You know who is a really good example? I don't know the guy, but what I know of his music, I dislike, as well as his personality, is DJ Khaled. He's a radio DJ from Miami. He started putting out records and making hits. Just yelling "DJ Khaled" throughout the track. I'm like, "Is he a producer? No, He made this beat? No. IS he the rapper? No." And I'm like - How did this guy get to this position? How did a person who is incapable of doing the art get to the point where superior artists are working with him? So the story goes: he was on his jet ski livestreaming and ran out of gas as the sun was going down. He's freaking out, "You guys gotta help me! I’m gonna die out here." And the internet went crazy, "DJ Khaled is going to die!" He gets rescued and that's what made him famous. That somehow validates him as an artist. 

 

Eli crail grabbing off of a tree in NYC, 1989. Photo: Bryce Kanights 

 

It's like this mess (Eli points to a Wombat scribble on a wall), who is this? Wombat, right? Antistyle - I don't believe in it. If Wombat was doing whole-car style burners in the traditional sense, then decided to do scribbles, then that's different. Take Picasso or Lichtenstein. Before Picasso's cubism, he had a decade of painting photo-realistic portraits. Lichtenstein was an amazing landscape painter, but the concept was, "I'm making a comment on our society, even though I can paint a perfect oil painting landscape, I'm choosing to do a detailed comic book strip and force you into an art gallery and look at this." There's a concept behind that. There's no concept behind anti-style. It's completely surface. It's "this is what I'm selling, if you're buying, great." I don't know who's buying it... I remember when we had the Shut skate shop, one of the guys who worked there was listening to mumble rap or trap rap. I said, "I don't get it. Help me understand why you like it." Now, if my grandfather asked me why I liked Punk Rock or Hip Hop, I could spend hours telling him the reasons. But this kid was like, "I don't know. It's just fresh! It's dope!" So now when I see kids and ask them what they're into and why, they're like, "I don't know." So if they don't know, who does? How can you not describe or understand why you like something? They are ships lost at sea. 

 

So after they put my skateboard together, the Dream Wheels guys took me skating down at Washington Square Park. From there, I started skating. You had a skateboard and it was a signal that you were a skater. And that first year or two of skating was when I was like, I'm giving up on graffiti. It was really the TC5 guys. I had high hopes that Doc - who I love; he's one of my favorite artists - Doc and Beam and them are gonna take me to the train yards and show me how it works. I thought I was going to be their apprentice. But right when I got into skateboarding, the city started cracking down on graffiti and there was the Ball Buster Crew. I got shot at twice while writing graffiti. It was heavy! Gangs of kids would come into Wings like, "What do you fuckin' write"! It was violent, and I didn't want any of that. But also at that time, Doc said very clearly, "We are not writing any more graffiti after 1985." I was like, "What are you talking about?" The TC5 guys were like, "You don't get it because you're young. But when we were your age, we would just steal paint, grab a beer, and walk right into the yards and paint all day. No one bothered you. Now, it's just so difficult." I was like, I'm not ready to get into a fight over graffiti. I figured, if I'm going to get hurt, I'm going to hurt myself. I think that's what I liked about skateboarding - it put my potential pain in MY hands. If I fall, it's my fault and I can make corrections. Whereas, you're writing graffiti and you think you've plotted it all out, and you miss something and you get fucked up. Having said that, I got arrested a bunch for writing graffiti. I think that my personality type wasn't suited for graffiti in the sense that I was kind of reckless. Or maybe not reckless enough? Reas and Ghost and those guys were way crazier than I ever was, but they somehow just kept going. So I was like, I can't get arrested anymore, so I'm just going to skateboard. The graffiti aspect for me, when I got into skateboarding ('83/'84), was like a NYC stamp of approval. 

 

Late high school, I was writing graffiti, but just for fun. I was a sponsored skateboarder at this point. I was still friends with Arson and Reas and Mesh and Chisel and those guys. I remember going to the subway tunnels with them, and these guys would get fucked up and were just wasted writing on the train freestyling it. I felt like a spy in the House of Love. These guys are real graffiti writers and this is what it's about. 

I suppose that if you are a great graffiti writer, your sense of self and value comes from getting up and name recognition from other graffiti writers. I didn't care about that. I didn't care if you knew who I was. I got more of a thrill from going out and doing tricks. One night, in Washington Square Park, Ian Frahm and I were learning how to do ollies over a skateboard on its side. We had no money, but Ian wanted beer money. So he convinced us to go to Bleecker Street and do inverts for change. It worked! It was like a break dancing circle! I had been practicing ollieing by myself, so I knew I could do it over a board. Ian was the HoHo master. So Ian says to the crowd, "I'm going to magically levitate my skateboard over this other board." He tries, but keeps messing up and hitting the board. I'm like, "Let me do it." I ollie the board and the crowd goes wild! This drunk blonde guido lady gave me five bucks and was like, "How did you do that? That's amazing!” A single ollie. Ian got so mad he took my money! He's like, "That's mine!" And he goes and buys a six pack and I think I got a Gatorade.

An inverted Eli. Photo: Stana Weisburd 

 

Jumping ahead, me and Beasely were skating a lot, but Beasely was more into writing graffiti than I was. We started going out to nightclubs. Payday was an early hip hop party, and Jeremy Henderson convinced them to build, not a halfpipe, but two quarter pipes on a stage at the club. Me and Beasley would go and skate there. Through all that, we ended up working at Mars (on West 13th and the West Side Highway) as party promoters. We used to go to the club during the day while we were skating around there. One day we discovered a supply closet full of spray paint, and some kind of polish with fat caps which no one knew how to get. So we took all the fat caps. After that I remember being in one of the offices and the boss was like, "Someone stole all the caps off of the cleaning supplies!" And we were like, "Oh fuck!" 

 

 

 

 

Then we'd go skate with our paint and the fat caps, and during that time, Beasely (Beasley 79) was up all over downtown. At that point, I wasn't going back to my original tag. So I'd write dumb shit and make joke tags. Like "The Frog" or "Liar"; it was always something silly. That said, we would bomb! That was when I got back into graffiti for a bit. A little after that, after Mars, we started Phat Farm. I was working with Alyasha (Alyasha Owerka-Moor). Aly is a great artist, and he has the one thing I never had, which is hand style (Relax BYI). I love his hand style. When we were at Phat Farm, I'd look at Aly's stuff, and his hand style was so good and mine was shit! I was doing more of the computer graphics stuff, but that's when I decided to improve my hand style. I want to learn how to write like Dondi. So I made a conscious effort and started getting better at it. Around the same time, Rodney and Bruno ended Shut. Soon after, Rodney told me he was starting a new skateboard company called Zoo York. 

 

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Were the Soul Artists guys cool with Rodney using the name? 

When I was a kid, I grew up right there with the Soul Artists. Futura's first girlfriend was my mom's pilates instructor. As a little little kid in the 70's I'd see them all skate at the Outlaw Ramp in Riverside Park, and I thought it was the circus; it was that foreign to me. That said, graffiti was even more foreign. I'm not trying to say I was down with them back then, I was a child, but I was aware of all of them. In the 1980s when I was skating with Ian Frahm and those guys, you'd see Zoo York, not as a tag but as a cross (like Dog Town) on everyone's griptape and sneakers. It was a skate thing; it wasn't a graffiti thing. This all goes back to the 70's. There was the Soul Artists graffiti crew: Futura, Haze, and so on. They all skated but were graffiti writers. Then there was the crew that were more into skateboarding: Andy Kessler, Puppet Head, Papo, and other guys. They were the Soul Artists of Zoo York. But the Zoo York crew were the skaters. Kind of like the Dog Town of the East Coast. They have really amazing stories, like Haze meeting up with Tony Alva when they came here in the 1970's, and Haze is also friends with Hosoi from back in the day. I even skated for Hosoi’s wheels back then. Rockets. So when Rodney was like, "I'm going to do Zoo York," I had already done one or two Zoo York boards for Shut. So Rodney approaches Futura about using the Zoo York name, and Futura says you have to talk to Mark Edmonds. So a phone call was set up and Rodney got the blessing from Mark. At the time, I was friends with Andy Kessler. He was not in a good place at the time, and so we reached out to him offering to be a part of this. He said no, he was done with skateboarding. 

We knew we needed to get a tag for the brand. While I was at Phat Farm, I was copying the Zephyr tag. So I decided to make the Zephyr tag into the Zoo York tag. Except, I'm not Zephyr. I don't have that hand style. I tried so hard, every way you could think: with markers and mops and spray paint. In hindsight I probably would have been better off trying to find him and being like, "Can you write Zoo York for me?" The reason why Zephyr is so dope is because of how the letters work together. Other skaters were bringing artwork, like Zoo York pieces and tags, and it all looked like trash. So I went into a meditative state trying to improve my hand style. Like hours and hours just writing "Zoo York". Now, after all that, I have some modicum of notable hand style and when people ask me to do their tag for them, I'm happy to. In some ways, I'm a serious toy. I think Sacha Jenkins said, "I'm a really good graffiti writer and I can skate, but I never got sponsored." I'm the reverse. I did get sponsored for skating, but I never went all city. I'm even nervous just doing this interview, because the success of Zoo York and the tag has put unwanted focus on me. I'm telling you, I didn't get dope hand style until I was thirty. Now I'm lucky that I have my own system of writing graffiti.   

  

Who did you look up to when you first got into skating?

The guys in NYC who could skate. Ian Frahm, Ben Alavarez, Bruno Musso. There were no NYC videos or magazines so you just jocked the local rippers. And obviously Gonz, Natas, and Tommy Guerro. Street pioneers.

Who did you look up to in graffiti?

Doze, but not even just graffiti, but in art in general. Going into his bedroom, without his knowledge, just influenced me so much. Then hanging out with all the TC5 guys. Midas is one of the greatest graffiti writers no one knows about. I did see him up and I think he did some cars, but he's not remembered. He's a musician, too. I think he left NY to pursue jazz guitar. I really love Reas and Ghost. And then I’ve always been impressed with just the sheer scope of JA "whoa JA is up out here in Nebraska?!”  Funny story - Me and Jeff Pang and some surfers were driving through Baja Mexico in the middle of the desert on a surf trip. We pulled over at a pile of giant boulders to eat lunch and there was a giant Twist ’screw’ and tag on the rocks. In the middle of the desert. Crazy.

In my interview with Hour KRT, he mentions meeting you at Union Square and you inviting him and Akira down to Zoo the next day. Sound familiar? 

I don't remember that. But I know the spot and I know those guys, and that's how it happened: they were skating well and you can tell when people are putting the time in and they deserve it. But when Zoo got really big and everyone wanted to skate for us, we'd get stacks of sponsor me tapes and we'd have whole team meetings. It was like Animal House when they were choosing people to join the frat. We'd be real mean, like "get this shit out of here!" But when we'd see a good tape, Jeff would be like, "he better be 13!" Then we find out he's 17, and we're like, "he's too old!" 

In skating, it's not cool to film at skateparks; in graffiti, legal walls aren't cool. What do you think of these "rules" in each subculture? 

I am someone who has watched it all occur. There was a point in my life where I had access to a video camera, so I was filming skating and hip hop as it was occuring around me, and nobody was happy about it. The skaters accepted it a little more than the hip hop people. Filming skating in the 80's was just bizarre. Nowadays, you can go out by yourself and film yourself skating a handrail. As long as your iPhone is filming, you're good. Back in the day, you had to get somebody to film. Or, like two or more people to witness it. For example, I was the first person to ollie the Met steps (Metropolitan Museum of Art). On that day, I said to my friends, "I need you guys to watch." I did it, and it wasn't on film. But the next day I went to Washington Square Park and everyone was like, "yo you ollied the Met steps!" But if I had asked someone to shoot a photo or film it, they'd be like, "What? you're not doing this for real! You're doing this for image!" Nowadays, no one goes skating without a camera. Like as if it doesn't count if you didn't film it. I would argue that it counts more if it wasn't filmed. On the graffiti flip flop of that, somebody sent me a really well edited Tik Tok of a girl graffiti writer interacting with the camera, doing little dances, it's all chopped up, and then she does a graffiti piece. My friend who sent it asked what I thought of it. I said, "You're not showing me a graffiti piece; you're showing me a performance art piece." The girl was more concerned with what the camera saw of her doing this experience. It's almost like her graffiti piece is a victim of her desire to be famous. It kills the magic. The true greatness of graffiti is how did it happen? It's Tuesday night, the sun goes down, people go to bed, and they get up the next morning and there's a full car! Who did it? How did they do it? That's the magic. Speaking of, I actually hold magicians in the highest regard. And I think they should exist somewhere in this venn diagram, because it's like Midas taking out the folded piece of paper. A magician doing a trick in front of you... he didn't just learn that. You're witnessing an action that's been practiced and labored over for decades. But at the same time, I feel that the best artists of nowadays don't get the love of the "most liked" on Instagram and there's something really dangerous about that. But I think in skateboarding, if you're a really good skater today, you'll get the props, and you don't have to win X Games or whatever to get those props.   

What is it about these two subcultures that they attract a lot of the same people?

I read an article recently about how big finance destroyed skateboarding and surfing by basically taking something that was essentially a big "fuck you" to society and scraped it for parts. The author was trying to make the point that capitalism is more brutal than skateboarding or graffiti. But, yeah, that's why it is: if you're a skater, you're probably somewhat predispositioned to finding comfort in stressful situations. I love it. I got into surfing because it was a new way to almost die. Now I've gotten into (NYPD and the FAA are aware) flying drones around the city. It's stressful: sweaty palms and almost hitting buildings. One wrong move and this giant hunk of plastic is gonna kill somebody! I think that's what it is. I think skaters and graffiti writers are the same person in that way. Skaters are extroverts; graffiti writers are introverts. By nature, graffiti writers are sneaky and want to do something loud, but they're not going to do it with eyes on them. Whereas skaters are like, "watch me jump these stairs!" The skater is welcoming the world to witness his defiant act, while the graffiti writer is not inviting the world to witness the act, but the world can see the result and the result will speak for them. 

Back in the 80's and 90's, skating and graffiti weren't accepted by the mainstream. Nowadays they are a lot more so. How do you think this warm welcome from the masses has changed these subcultures?

I am complicit in destroying the thing that I love. I didn't know what that was until it was gone. I thought that skating and graffiti and surfing were all was so pure and awesome, and by sharing them with the world, what could go wrong? And what went wrong was gatekeeping and hierarchy was lost. When I got into writing graffiti, I had to humbly hang at the feet of the TC5 guys. The first time I went to the Banks, I had to make sure I was OK to skate there and I wasn't going to get punched in the face. It's because of the way society went with participation awards and inclusivity and "express yourself" - you're basically inviting an orgy of amateurs. The suffering to get good at something until you're accepted is gone. I went to the reopening of the Banks and it was a catastrophe. None of the skaters knew each other. You can see who's good, but the kids who are good are subjected to the ineptitude of enthusiastic amateurs. Whereas in the 80's and 90's, if you showed up at the Banks and the Shut team was skating, you sat down and watched and learned. But now it's like "skating is for me and everyone is invited." Too much inclusivity; inclusivity to the point of destroying the thing you love. A graffiti example is Five Points. Everyone who got up at Five Points was knowledgeable enough and skillful enough to know the right people to get a spot there to paint. If Five Points was still around today, it would just be Wombats and worse, because there would be no one there to tell them, "the only reason you are here is because of us, and you can't do that." That's gone. That is what I'm culpable in, because I was selling it. But my heart was in the right place. But then, do I want a world where there's 30 mean skaters guarding the Banks, or do I want a NYC where everyone skates and there are skateparks everywhere? I want the latter. What we have now is better. But I will miss how I had it. I would like to think that I am evolved enough as a person to accept that the things that upset me are insignificant to the benefit that skateboarding and graffiti have delivered to our society. 

 

Last question: will you hit my book?

Yes!