Jems KFD

In the intro to my interview with Cycle, I mention texting a friend about the interview who said he thought Cycle would be the best candidate for this project. That friend was Jems KFD, a Long Island skater and writer, who, himself, is a really good candidate for this project. 

What did you get into first: skating or graffiti?

Skateboarding, when I was in fifth grade. When I was like 10.

 

Young Jems, about to catch air.

 

How did you get into skating? 

I remember seeing Police Academy 4 with the Bones Brigade, and then I got a shitty board like a Nash or something. Then I convinced my grandmother to get me a Christian Hosoi Hammerhead. That was my first legit board. Then I met a friend in elementary school, Beau, he skated, too. And it went from there, like this is what I want to do. 

How did you get into graffiti?

Around 9th grade I started noticing and thinking, "that's cool." I started seeing Semer and the HTE and ABK guys starting to get up a lot. By tenth grade I had found the ABK pit and had done one or two really toy pieces down there. Also did some tags along the Long Island Railroad in my town (Garden City). Nothing serious, but that was when I first started. 

LIRR tracks circa '98

How did you get your tag?

I don't know how exactly I got the tag Jems. It was just a combination of liking this letter and liking that letter.  

 

What skaters were psyched on in your early days of skating?

All the World guys. Guy Mariano was probably my favorite. That trick he does in the credits of Mouse - switch frontside shuvit switch crooked grind on a handrail - is still insane! Mike Carroll, and of course Gino, the local hero. I was recently watching Dill's part in Snuff. I had the VHS of Snuff and really liked his part. Koston and Rick Howard - any guy who had a really good style I liked. Rudy Johnson was also a favorite, especially during the Video Days time. 

 

Jems jumps down the 9 stair at the Banks.

 

What writers stood out to you in your early days of graffiti?

Semer HTE was probably the biggest standout. He was a guy you saw up in the city, not just Long Island. I remember going to Sohozat to get fat caps and Semer had a fill-in on West Broadway. Hark and Bug'n had really good pieces in the Pit. AE One was up. Demco - I still look at his throw up from back then, it's still sick. Being more north shore LI, those were the guys I was exposed to. Then I moved out to Suffolk (1994), there wasn't anyone really up out there. Phat (now Phetus) had a wall in Huntington that was dope, it was a handball court at the top of a hill that went down to the village. And Foe, of course, was a favorite, too.

Tell me about your crew, KFD.

I guess it was me not taking myself seriously. The original meaning is King for a Day. I'd always say, "it would be cool to be king for a day." My aspirations weren't very big. It was just a joke between friends. It was really just friends, but I guess technically it is a crew. Everyone had three-letter crews, and I wasn't down with any at the time, so you make up your own and that's what we pushed. Then Slam threw me down with ABK. 

In Bobby Puleo's Epicly Later'd, Leo Fitzpatrick and Tim O'Connor talk about how the NJ skaters weren't really accepted by the city skaters in the 90's. And I remember Long Island skaters, who were clearly better than the city skaters, saying the same thing. Do you think there's a correlation with writing: suburban writers not being taken seriously by city writers?

Yeah, definitely.  Especially if you only stick to Long Island, which is understandable. Not everyone has it in them to go all-city or become a graffiti legend. At the same time, if you feel like you deserve respect from city writers, then you have to get up in the city. And they might have to work a little harder to overcome that suburban-writer stereotype that you're not as real or whatever. But there have been a handful of guys from Long Island - and a lot of people don't even realize they're from Long Island, but they are - and they've done interviews and for whatever reason they don't say where they're from, but I know for a fact they're Long Islanders. But they crushed it. And the proof is in the pudding. So, you know, if you're crushing it at graffiti or you're a sick skater and someone is looking down their nose at you, then they're just jealous and being a hater. 

 

Jems at the Banks, circa mid 90s. Photo: Bobshirt

 

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?

It's always a double-edged sword. One of the things that made skateboarding "cool" was the exclusivity of it. It was like a small club.You were dedicated to something that wasn't popular; we were doing it for the love of it. But it's good that it blew up and people can now make money off of it, but then you get a lot of fly-by-night people in it, which is really happening in graffiti, I can't say that about skateboarding because I don't keep up with it as much. But you know, it's like anything else - it's got good things, and it's got bad things. In skating, it used to seem like everyone knew each other, or at least knew of each other, but now it just seems like so many kids are doing it. Which is cool, because they're doing something that's creative and fun. But with that you'll always get the culture vultures that just try to take and not offer anything, which is the bad part of it. There's been a handful of artists who have made it in the gallery world who started out writing graffiti in the streets. Yeah, what they did kind of looked like graffiti but it's not graffiti in the traditional sense. Then they do some self promotion and eventually abandon graffiti and just go for the money in the gallery world. So I don't think they were actually into graffiti in the first place, they were just using it as a vehicle to promote really bad art. 

Jems' board for Wriders' "Graffics" Show

 

In skating, filming at skateparks is frowned upon; in writing, painting legal walls is frowned upon. What are your thoughts on these "rules"? 

I can see the similarities. When we were younger, we were dying for skateparks. Now there are so many. It's kind of crazy.  Skating and graffiti both have that do-it-yourself mentality, like you're making something out of nothing. Like, here's a set of stairs and it has a rail coming off of it, and a skater thinks, "I can jump onto that with my skateboard, ride down it, land and roll away." Whereas in a skatepark, it's all mimicking that vision someone had and realized back in the day. And legal walls - everyone gets the itch. If you're a graffiti writer, you get that itch to paint, while the graffiti world or the streets will respect an illegal piece more than a legal one, if you want to scratch that itch, don't misrepresent what you're doing.

When I interviewed Rebel, I came across a picture of a truck you painted. Do you remember that night?

Barely. When I was in college, I was living in south Park Slope and I was lucky enough to have a truck yard across the street from my apartment. The yard was behind this Muslim school, and I would get wasted and come home from partying and if I felt like painting I'd just hop the fence and paint. So that photo is a result of me drunkenly going over someone who was much more up than I was. I only went over half of it, and a couple months later I ended up doing a second fill-in over it, feeling like I was covering my tracks somehow. Then I almost ended up getting the shit beaten out of me for it, but that's the game I signed up for. 

Jems' trouble truck. Photo of a photo Rebel shot

What would you say are the differences between writing on Long Island versus writing in the city?

Unfortunately, I didn't have anybody that could show me the ropes. It was all trial and error. A lot of it in the beginning was by myself. My freshman year, I was painting in one of those cutty alleys off Broadway in Soho. It was probably the first fill-in I had ever done in the city. I got greedy and started doing another one, and then a cop pulled up at the end of the alley and shined a light on me. I ended up running with them driving down the wrong way on Broadway chasing me. I tried to hide under a car, but they caught me and stole my bag and let me go. It was a couple of years of slow going, by myself. But then I annoyed a couple of my friends enough to go out with me, and they ended up catching the bug. Then during the summer of sophomore year I started painting the LIRR quite a bit with my boy Send, which helped me get more comfortable with going on actual bombing missions. Also, my boy Kleps lived a few blocks down from me in Brooklyn, and we'd go to the city, meet up with a bunch of friends and drink, and catch tags. Then egg each other on to do some crazy shit. Other times I'd paint a spot by myself, usually with alcohol. Again, if you don't have someone who's been there and done that, it's a lot of trial and error. Like a crawl-walk-run kind of thing. 

 

Jems gettin' live in '25

 

Any new skaters that you're psyched on?

This is totally non-controversial, but Tyshawn Jones is sick. I like Nakel, too, he's sick. But there are a lot of skaters out there who are amazing, but they just don't do it for me. 

Any new writers catching your eye?

That guy Anso is up everywhere. I lived in Oakland for a couple of years, and he was up all over there. That seems to be the thing now - guys painting all over the world. That dude Goog; I like his throw ups and tags. False can do it all and he's been bombing like crazy.

Will you hit my book?

Yeah!