Aiko and friends have been stenciling up a storm in the top floor stairwell of the luxurious Standard Hotel
in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The hotel boasts an innovative design, built on stilts straddling the High
Line. Last year hotel guests cavorting naked in front of their floor to ceiling windows, gave passersby an
unexpected X-rated peep show.  Now Aiko’s sexy stencils covering walls, stairs and ceiling will envelope
visitors as they walk out onto the roof deck with its amazing wrap-around views.

No one was more surprised than I to see a series of 7 tiny drawings about graffiti in this week’s
New Yorker. The New Yorker has long peppered its pages with line drawings of everyday life that
don’t relate to the surrounding articles. For the past few years, these so-called “spot” drawings have
had a theme or told a story. In the March 8, 2010 issue the 7 sequential drawings seen below were
printed somewhat randomly from pages 29-75. They are only an inch or two high.

The story line is a familiar one of a writer being apprehended in the act of spraying and having to paint
over his tag with a paint roller. But the beauty of this particular tale is that the final frame shows our
intrepid hero unbowed and clinging one-handed as he sprays again, this time out of reach of the authorities.
I give the New Yorker a gold star for that surprise ending. For a staid magazine, it’s positively subversive!

Unfortunately it’s nearly impossible to figure out the artist of the drawings because no individual credits for
drawings are given. Big up to you whoever you are!!

I don’t like my copyrighted images to be reproduced in books or elsewhere without my permission.
But sometimes I get a kick out of seeing how my documentary photos have morphed into something
completely different. Lady Pink sent me the photo below from an art piece by a collective in Rochester,
NY called The Sweetmeat Co.  I admit Pink does look like an angelic vandal in my original photo taken
in 1982 (see below) but it was a surprise to both of us to see her sanctified in 2010.


Yes—that’s Skeme on the right. You are seeing the full frame for the first time. He was hidden under the
slide mount which was removed for the drum scan for our 25th anniversary edition of Subway Art.
Who knows what may be hidden under other mounts??

For the past two days a few of my upperwestside neighbors toiled molding ice blocks and building a
fabulous igloo in Riverside Park that looked just like the real thing. They sprayed it with water to make
sure it was frozen solid. It was open at the top so there was no danger of the roof falling in. Beside the
igloo they sculpted an Inuit ice fishing.

The installation was a spectacular work of art and architecture and immediately became a community
gathering place and a super photo op. It was especially popular with toddlers who fit perfectly through
the low arched doorway and whose parents could hoist them up for a peek through the open roof. But
sadly the killjoys in the Parks Department demanded that the igloo be leveled.  It was unsafe! The guys
who were ordered to accomplish the destruction were chagrined. One told me that he had planned to
bring his young daughter the next day.
So just who are on the igloo safety committee and against what criteria do they measure? Is there such
a thing as an igloo building permit? Aren’t snow forts a traditional and treasured part of winter.
C’mon—give us a break!

The night I spent in the New Lots Yards in 1980 watching Dondi paint a top to bottom whole car was the
highlight of my graffiti photographing experience. Dondi called that piece “Children of the Grave Part 3”
Later I realized that “Children of the Grave Part 2” was one of the first whole cars I’d photographed but
I always wondered what the first Children of the Grave had looked like.

Last week, 30 years later, I found out at Francisco Reyes II’s photo exhibit at BronxArtSpace. Francisco
hadn’t taken many photos of graffiti but, by luck, he’d shot Dondi’s first Children of the Grave. Here are all
three pieces seen together for the first time: