Tag: Street Art

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City Life

The Lost Basquiat

Abstract image formed by multiple layers of graffiti on the glass of a bus shelter.
Shot in bus shelter on NW corner of Dupont and Dovercourt

I confess: I’m responsible for rumours of a lost Basquiat. I’d written a story about how Basquiat painted a fence and I posted the story on my website. It turns out there are a lot of people who can’t tell the difference between a story (work of fiction) and a story (piece of news). I’m not sure the difference is all that meaningful, but that’s another story. In any event, my story (work of fiction) sprouted legs and skittered into the shadowy reaches of the internet where it got quoted as god’s awful truth in threads about neo-expressionism. Faster than you can say “by-line”, somebody on Wikipedia posted a link to my story (work of fiction) as evidence for the existence of a lost masterpiece. Given that a Basquiat sold in 2017 for $110.5 million, you can understand why the hunt for a lost Basquiat turned into the art world’s equivalent of a gold rush. People flocked to the Lower East Side, pulling up graffiti covered fence slats and inundating galleries with demands for authentication.

I took down my website at the beginning of the pandemic because I got tired of all the questions coming through my contact form. In retrospect, it was naive to assume that most people have the fiction version of gaydar that automatically alerts them when they’re reading fiction even when it masquerades as reportage. Anyways, to my story. As I say, I took down the website, so my story has gone missing even on websites like the Internet Archive with its Way Back Machine. But I remember how it went, so here it is in broad strokes:

In the mid 80’s, when Ronald Reagan was still using shoe polish to colour his hair and Oliver North was still siphoning money to the Contras in Nicaragua, Jean-Michel Basquiat shot up in a 3rd floor tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. The owner of the apartment wanted to watch TV but the young artist was splayed across his favourite spot on the couch so the owner dragged him onto the fire escape and forgot about him. Almost a full day later, Basquiat woke to the sound of a basketball banging on the pavement of the parking lot below. A refreshing breeze cooled his body. Slivers of light fell through the ironwork of the fire escape and settled on his face. Like pigeons taking flight, laughter rose up from the parking lot. And, for a few minutes at least, Basquiat was happy. He felt gratitude. Like St. John of the Cross, he had known his dark night of the soul and now he lay on the metal landing, safe and awake and free from the harrowing.

Struggling to his feet, Basquiat leaned on the railing and watched the kids shooting hoops. The far side of the parking lot was bounded by a plain wooden fence and, at least in Basquiat’s mind, its plainness cried out to him the way a blank canvas cries out for paint. Its plainness was a blight. Its plainness was an insult to the joy of the kids running layups in the sunlight. He crawled back through the window where he found his canvas shoulder bag full of spray paints and he stumbled downstairs. He would thank the kids by turning their fence into a testament to their joy.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the artist OD’d and, as always seems to happen, Death strolled through all the galleries of Manhattan, waving a bony finger and converting Basquiat’s art into money. But Death forgot to wave a bony finger as he passed the parking lot where the late artist had lately spray painted his message of gratitude and joy, so the owner of the tenement building, (mis)taking it for vandalism, painted over it with a dull grey wash. And there the painting lay, hidden beneath a soul-deadening layer of paint and accumulating grime, on through HIV/AIDS, and the Gulf War, and 9/11, and the invasion of Afghanistan, and the collapse of the Lehman Bros., and the election of Obama, and the defeat of Clinton at the hands of an overblown grifter, and the arrival of Covid-19, and rants about a stolen election. All these layers of misery laid down over a single fleeting moment of gratitude.

And that was my story. Or at least the gist of it. As I say, I took the original down and it’s since disappeared. If I rewrote the story, not as fiction but as reportage, and I scraped away all the layers of this historic palimpsest, I’m not sure I’d ever come to a sunny day in Basquiat’s youth when a wave of gratitude and joy swept over him. That is the fiction. As reportage, I’m inclined to think I’d find misery all the way down to that very first needle in the arm, maybe even down into the cradle. The idea that he might once have known joy: that is the lost Basquiat.

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City Life

Flash Fiction: Houston We Have A Problem

A Nuit Blanche outdoor contemporary art exhibit on Toronto's Queen Street West featuring orange cherry pickers extended high above the crowded street and laden with palm fronds.
Gap Ecology (Still Lives With Cherry Pickers and Palms) by David Brooks

A dick pic started circulating around mission control and, after some investigation, Dr. Laura Bybis discovered that it had been leaked from Commander Niezosi’s confidential medical file. Niezosi complained of tinea cruris and had sent a photo of his groin area to the ground-based medical team. Unknown to everyone involved, the default email settings automatically copied communications from the crew to a minor administrator who didn’t realize the sensitive nature of Niezosi’s complaint and laughed when she saw the poor man’s penis floating weightless between two patches of flaming skin. She’d been sleeping with a kid on the engineering team and forwarded the pic with a note: “If you ever let it get to this, don’t even think of crawling into my bed.” Once in the engineer’s hands, the image went viral.

Bybis called a team meeting and addressed everyone about the indiscretion and what it meant for crew morale. The crew, of course, was not present at the meeting because, at twelve million kilometres from Earth, a signal took forty seconds to travel in one direction. Forty seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but it’s enough to make live meetings unworkable. Instead, Bybis played a pre-recorded address from Niezosi to his colleagues on the ground. Bybis hadn’t screened the video before she pressed play, a decision that struck her in retrospect as regrettable.

Niezosi appeared on the main screen in mission control and addressed the team while framed on either side by screens that displayed diagrams of the mission’s trajectory to Mars. He was unshaven, haggard, dark circles under his eyes. But there was no hesitation. As you’d expect of a mission commander, he got right to it: “I want to thank all you assholes, all you dim witted engineers and shit-for-brains medical people for failing to anticipate the obvious. If you add up all the time we were confined to our space suits during the initial phase of the mission—prep in our cockpit twiddling our thumbs, then blast off, then the initial burn—you get nearly three days confined to our suits. Plenty of time for the rot to take hold.

“Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent nearly nine days in their suits and neither of them complained about jock itch. But look what you give us to wear for the rest of the mission. For more than three fucking years we’ve gotta prance around in these skin-tight get-ups. No natural fibres. No breathable cloth. It’s as if you’ve vacuum sealed my dick in a Petri dish. What the hell were you thinking?

“And then there’s the medical team. I’ve searched our module from top to bottom and I can’t find a fucking thing. No anti-bacterial creams. No anti-fungals. I’ve searched the pantry for ingredients I could throw together. Make some kind of powder or balm. But the rest of the crew is worried I’ll compromise our food supply. I’ve taken to floating around au natural. At first, the rest of the crew thought it was funny, but between my feelings of humiliation and their feelings of embarrassment, it’s starting to take its toll on morale. Never mind morale, I’m so fucking itchy I’m going out of my gourd.”

The ground crew at mission control was an international team, and Dr. Bybis worried that many of the people wouldn’t understand the phrase “out of my gourd” but, as she later discovered, it’s an expression transferable to many cultures. Everyone on the ground knew exactly what Niezosi meant. And although a few of them suffered the same malady, they at least had the reassurance that, whenever they liked, they could drive to the corner Walgreens and pick up some ointment.

A man wearing special glasses stands in a crowd gazing at the sun. In the background is Toronto's Old City Hall on Queen Street West.
Gazing at the sun during a solar eclipse
Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Death Knocks On Luther’s Door

Black and white painting of skulls and hellish faces on fence in Toronto's Kensington Market
Painting on Fence in Kensington Market, Toronto

I must confess I was rather pleased with myself, almost giddy, for arriving at the Luther household with a hammer and a bag of gleaming nails to mark the 10th anniversary of that most illustrious of illustrious events. Like many of the others who shared schnitzel and beer at Martin’s table talks, we had taken to addressing him as Herr Doktor even though he affected modesty and insisted we call him Martin. So I felt somewhat deflated when the eminent man himself pulled open the door and, before I could utter a greeting or proffer my gift, advised that if I wished to cross his threshold I would first have to don a mask. They had received word only that morning of a fresh outbreak, a family on the next street manifesting buboes on their armpits and groins, and a little one who, sadly, had succumbed the night before. I complied of course, drawing from my pocket a face covering made from multiple layers of a fine linen which my Helga had purchased in the market.

Martin ushered me indoors. After surrendering my hammer and nails, I asked if he had any more theses he wished to add to the 95 he had already fixed to the door in Wittenberg, to which he answered that he could not say for certain; he would leave that for Herr Gott to conclude. I chortled until my corpulent midriff shook the floor and remarked that hopefully Herr Gott would conclude it in favour of brevity, otherwise the work would grow so large—

As large as you? and he elbowed me in the gut.

—grow so large that the weight would pull the door off its hinges.

I took a seat at the table where I stared directly at a woodcutting on the opposite wall, a framed work in the manner of Albrect Dürer, Death riding through the town on an emaciated steed. By contrast, Martin’s Katharina offered portions which were generous and, as she often said, would keep me looking as little like Death as any live man would care to look. I declared that I preferred not to be a Diet of Worms, but my joke fell flat amongst those at the table, most of whom were students from the university and either too thick or too drunk to appreciate the humour of intellectuals like myself.

Martin commented on the redness of my nose to which I answered that it was better red than black, for a red nose meant that I was still above ground.

As we ate, and as the Herr Doktor held forth on his latest theological musings, a knock came at the door. We fell silent while Martin opened the door and greeted a student, glassy-eyed and thin. As with me, Martin requested that the young man don a mask.

The young man’s voice rose as he spoke, and we could not help but hear his refusal.

Then I’m afraid I can’t allow you into my home.

Well then fuck you, Herr Doktor.

As the boy grew louder, it appeared to us that he also grew larger, as if by a magical mechanism that pumped air into his body and expanded it, as one sometimes sees with sausage casing that fills with a noxious gas when the meat inside begins to rot.

The boy proclaimed Herr Doktor Luther a hypocrite who, though he held himself out as a reformer and man of the people, what with his shitty Bible translation and his cavorting with drunks and his rescuing nun/whores from the clutches of the Church, but he was still nothing if not orthodox when it came to public health protocols. Wear a mask! Your mind has been taken over by the forces of evil.

The boy pointed to the woodcutting of Death fixed to Luther’s wall.

You think a little bit of cloth will do any good? It seems you’ve fallen in with that Copernicus heretic who puts his science before faith.

Luther said he was sorry the boy felt that way. But it didn’t matter because, at least in his own home, Luther was free to exclude whomever he pleased. And it pleased him very much to exclude drunken fools who refused to wear masks.

With that, Luther slammed the door shut in the boy’s bare face and returned to his schnitzel.

Categories
City Life

Fading Street Art: The Times They Are A Changin

Old graffiti painted on paper that is peeling off a rotten sheet of plywood.
The Times They Are A Changin, Dupont/Christie, Toronto

This concludes a month of images curated on the theme of “things which were but are no more.” My final image captures a rotten sheet of plywood that covers the window of a decrepit building, former home of a hair salon near the southeast corner of Toronto’s Christie/Dupont intersection. Someone spray painted bubble letters on the plywood and then someone else (or maybe the same person) added words inside one of the letters: “The Times They Are A Changin.”

It’s the title of Bob Dylan’s song released in 1964 on his album of the same name, a call to hippies to resist the oppressive forces of the day, McCarthyism, Jim Crow, the police action in Vietnam. On this sheet of plywood, someone has invoked those times to resist the oppressive forces of today. But the times aren’t really a changin, are they? The fact that people say this over and over again demonstrates how little the times are a changin. To bastardize lyrics by Dylan’s son, Jakob, the only thing that’s changed is that things are exactly the way they used to be.

Things have taken a turn to the pernicious. In 1964, Bob Dylan didn’t have to name the forces of evil at work in his world. He sang his song and everyone in the audience knew exactly what he was singing about. But things have gotten confused since then. As someone who feels politically aligned with the hippies of Bob Dylan’s world, I look at my current world and name certain things: the oil and gas industries, consumption beyond the planet’s limits, accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. I want to sing “the times are a changin” but the world doesn’t agree with me.

Other’s challenge my perception of reality. They tell me the forces I name as forces of oppression aren’t even real. Climate change isn’t real. Collectively, we’ve never been better off than we are right now. Soon I begin to doubt myself. In another time, I might have called this gaslighting. But today’s forces of oppression take it one further and tell me their gaslighting is really gaslighting at all; it’s just a description of the way things are. In fact I’m gaslighting them.

For the sake of clarity: I’m not gaslighting these people even though they say I am. The purpose of gaslighting is to destabilize a person’s basic beliefs about the state of the world by injecting profound uncertainty into their thoughts. These people—the denialists, the conspiracists, the ideologues—haven’t enough uncertainty amongst them to fill a thimble.

Which takes me to my final observation: maybe Bob Dylan’s call for change is misdirected. The times are never a changin, or if they are, it has little to do with human agency. The only change we can ever effect is the change we inject into our personal thinking. And the only way that happens is if we cultivate mental habits like curiosity, and if we revel in the pleasure of uncertainty. The problem today with the people we disagree with is not that we disagree with them, but that we have all turned to stone.

Categories
Street Portrait

Adrian Hayles: Yonge Love Mural North

Adrian Hayles works on Yonge Love Mural, north side of 423 Yonge Street

Graphic artist Adrian Hayles takes a break from working on the Yonge Love Mural North, a project commissioned by the Yonge Street BIA and decorating the north face of 423 Yonge Street. The mural celebrates the many styles of music that accompany people as they move through the streets of Toronto. I captured this moment in September, 2016 when he’d come down from his cherry picker to take a breather and, presumably, wipe the paint spackles off his glasses. The building that serves as his canvas is 22 stories high so, beyond a certain height, he had to give up the cherry picker and shift to a swing stage platform. If he’s afraid of heights, he hides it well.

Yonge Love Mural - north side of 423 Yonge Street