Walls Of Fame -- Writers Use The Painted Word To Leave Their Mark

Everyone has a little secret he keeps

I light the fires while the city sleeps

- MC 900 ft Jesus, "The City Sleeps"

THIS IS WHAT IT HAS COME DOWN to, here in the icy 2 a.m. darkness of a foggy February night near downtown Seattle - a moment of heady elation no one can touch: Five hours have passed and the steady fffffff of the spray cans has wheezed to a halt and check it out, there are two live burners on the wall.

The cops came by once earlier, rumbled through the alleyway in their cruiser and wondered what the hell two guys were doing spray painting on the back of an abandoned warehouse, but somehow Rey, in his pronounced European accent, explained their way out of it while Soul, adrenaline pumping, got ready to run - Well of course we have permission, officer. And besides:

"I'm not done yet," Rey had said, big, droopy pants standing in a garden of Krylon containers. "It's going to be beautiful. It's art."

Maybe it was the sheer chutzpah of it all, or maybe it was Rey's unforced look of 19-year-old innocence, but the thing is, the squad car left and never came back. And now it's four hours later and the two pieces are fresh on the wall and Soul can't wait - he goes and gets his Nissan, pulls up and shines the headlights, and the two stand there and gape at the flourish of traffic-cone orange and ladybug red and Montana-sky blue that cryptically screams their names, and this is what it has come down to ...

God, will you look at it, it's beautiful.

IF THERE'S SUCH A THING AS graffiti in the classic sense, this isn't it. If Kilroy was ever here, he left town in a major way. While more people than would probably admit it have dabbled in latrinalia - the sociologist's term for bathroom scrawlings - few go public and rise to the level of hip hop, where graffiti eclipses definition as reflection of subculture.

Hip hop is a subculture, the kind that gives city officials headaches and inspires large corporations to develop amazing high-pressure water hoses and powerful wall-purifying chemicals. The term came from a rapper named Love Bug who used it in a rhyme. New York City subway trains turned into moving art galleries in the early 1980s, and spray painters gathered at designated stations to watch each others' work rumble by. Riding a three-crested, Harlem-sparked wave of rap music, breakdancing and graffiti art, powered by movies like "Beat Street" and offshoot stars like Keith Haring, hip hop spread across the country as Reagan finished out his second term, then went world-wide. Now colorful civil wars are fought in the streets, Seattle's included, between urban hip-hop "writers" and city engineering department workers armed with rollers and paint brushes.

"To me, it doesn't hurt anybody. It's just free art," says a 22-year-old writer who goes by the anonymous "tag" of Bruno. "Just to let people know who I am."

What sets it apart from garden-variety graffiti is that it won't be defined as turf-marker, or appeal to political cause, or malicious expression, or proclamation of young love. These urban guerrillas have no question that what they do is Art, a craft to be practiced and perfected. Their full-scale pieces, often done legit for nightspots or others catering to the young crowd, are elaborate works based on preconceived outlines, with silhouetted cityscapes, cartoonlike characters and yawing arrows.

They've seen the horrified expressions their pieces draw, from people who look at them the way they'd look at someone disrupting the piano player at Nordstrom. Graffiti art? Talk about a contradiction in terms! Like jumbo shrimp! Television news! The tablets carried down from the high summits of the art world say there is a place for art, and alleyways and freeways aren't it.

Norm Chamberlain is an ardent neighborhood activist in the Rainier Valley, the sort who'd throw out your unsightly garbage when you didn't get around to it and then lecture you about it later. Still, he's seen some stuff on walls he's had to wince at having to paint out. "I love art," he says. "I don't always agree with my friends about what is art, but I would fight to keep it if it were in a place that was appropriate. You know, you urinate in a urinal. You don't do it on somebody's front porch."

Writers have heard it all before, and it makes about as much difference to them as Portuguese divorce rates. They sport a philosophy all their own that snubs its nose right back at popular notions of what art and public property are all about. "It could be vandalism," Rey says. "It could be art. I don't think it's a crime to paint on a gray, ugly wall."

Rey got into America's hip-hop scene last spring when he came to Seattle to try out art school. He'd started practicing letters on paper a few years ago, when rap music swarmed his native Europe and rap albums started showing up with the flashy art on the covers. Here he eventually found the old International Motor Sports garage on Yale Street at the west base of Capitol Hill.

The abandoned garage, with its hangar-like doorways, is to Seattle's hip-hop crowd what Venice Beach is to body builders in Los Angeles. It's the place to flex your artistic muscles, to prove you've got the stuff, and you can see it flicker like a jack-o'-lantern at night when hip hoppers do quick-'n'-easy pieces they call "throw-ups" by the beams of their car headlights.

Rey walked his lanky body in there, saw the twisted, effervescent lettering covering the walls like pizza toppings, and was totally stoked because he knew it was the place that would plant him firmly in the hip-hop scene of Seattle. This was where he'd meet Bruno, show off his "piecebook" full of drawings ready to turn into wall-size artwork, earn respect and finally join Bruno's "crew" of writers - 2ZC, or Too Zanee Crue - whose initials are splattered on newspaper and light switch boxes all over the U District and Capitol Hill.

The writers' crusade is an underground movement. The name of the game is recognition. They identify themselves only by their street monikers: Bruno is a stocky art history student at U-Dub, Soul is a 21-year-old with an earring who slaves by day as a Seattle auto dealership lot attendant. There are others, like Biz and Ceser and Severe, probably fewer than 40 in all in Seattle. They belong to crews with names like ECK (Emerald City Kings) and NSA (New School Artists). They wax warlike, say they're going to "bomb" a building, "hit" a site, "battle" a rival crew. And when a piece is up on a wall, it's considered "burning."

They're part of a worldwide network of writers who read magazines like Ghetto Art and Can Control. They attend writers' conferences in places like New York, Vancouver and San Francisco and regularly send each other photos of pieces they've done on walls from Boston to Los Angeles. They blow their paychecks on spray paint and sketchbooks.

"No one would ever know I'm a writer," Soul says with a shackled pride that revels in anonymity but aches to smash common perceptions. "Everyone thinks graffiti writers are all black or Hispanic. But they're everywhere. They work. They go to school. They want to make something of themselves."

Soul is Asian-American, wants to open his own art store someday. He says he's one of Seattle's "old-school" writers. He started with a crew called SODA (State Of Da Art), which became CON (Crime OverNight) and is now DVS (Da Vandals Succeed).

But in this world, "old school" can mean mid-1980s. That is how fresh the coat of hip hop on Seattle is. There are pieces on the walls of RKCNDY and Re-Bar, both progressive music clubs, and Capitol Hill's Comet Tavern is a regular battleground for rival crews. One of the oldest illegal pieces still around is a 1987 SODA piece on an abandoned tavern south of 90th on Highway 99, and there are more, if you know where to look. Most of them are innocuous - Severe has a piece burning on the rooftop level of a First Interstate parking garage in the U District, and Biz, Keep, Bruno, Rey and Soul have all done pieces on a patch of I-5 off Eastlake.

"I think it's just as much art, if not more, than other stuff," says Rey's 18-year-old girlfriend, Elaine. "All my other artist friends, they took years to get good at what they're doing, but this is something young people can do. All the time, every day, Rey is practicing outlines. He tries to get a piece up twice a week, but the whole rest of the time he's practicing, practicing. This is his art. This is his life. He puts this before school."

TRYING TO JUSTIFY ILLEGAL ART with some people is like talking to a - well, you get the idea. One of them is Sue Honaker of the City Engineering Department.

Honaker's duty, as project manager overseeing graffiti control, is to seek out and obliterate unlawful markings on public property. That she does, with the spirited can-do-ism of a United Way volunteer. She coordinates about 30 community groups that handle graffiti on the private front and brandishes studies detailing its effects on neighborhoods. Police assist by giving parents guides to reading gang graffiti to help kids stay out of trouble.

Tough issue, this one. There are so many different kinds. Are we talking racist slogans or Mike Loves Jenny? Political statement or Satanic symbols? People can have a hard time figuring out where they stand. When does it become art? And vice versa? So in these circles, graffiti writers are vandals, plain and simple. Not artists, though Honaker recognizes that a hip-hop subculture does exist. But in Seattle? Not that she knows of. And not that it matters.

"Where we draw the line is, does the person have the approval of the owner? If it's the Mona Lisa, it's a masterpiece. But if it's on the side of your car in the morning and you didn't ask for it, you're not going to see it as artwork."

That doesn't happen much, but there are plenty of neighborhood scrawlings to worry about. The war waged is an all-out assault, like Sherman's Civil War army equipped with rollers and basic shades of paint en route to the sea. When experience has taught you that graffiti left standing invites trouble, there is no other choice.

In Rainier Valley, where wannabe gangbangers ran wild with spray cans, activist Chamberlain remembers: "We had to fight the good fight. There was one building where we had to paint out graffiti 32 days in a row. It's like a contest - you have to be very persistent. But because of our persistency, there's relatively no graffiti out here."

Other neighborhoods haven't achieved that, but Honaker and Seattle police will tell you that this city has it pretty easy compared with places like Los Angeles County, which two years ago spent $150 million trying to clean itself up. Costs here run near $1.5 million annually, most of that spent by Metro to repaint bus stops, clean felt-pen markings off bus seats and replace bus windows that have been carved by taggers.

On a sunny winter afternoon, one of those that reminds you that Mount Rainier is still out there, a pair of engineering-department workers sanitize the graffiti-laden walls of the Denny ramp heading up Capitol Hill. Dressed in immaculate white from helmet to toe, they go about their work with the cocky bureaucratic efficiency of the Works Department guys in the movie "Brazil," fitting the wall with a solid coat of faded-newspaper yellow. Rolling, rolling, rolling. Their whole manner says it. The city will win this war. The city has more paint.

"It takes them a long time to put something up," one of them says. "We can paint over it in 10 minutes."

City officials trade tactics and clean-up technology tips via the National Graffiti Information Network. Science has made headway with killer chemicals and graffiti-resistant paint, but these measures often fail when they don't have a clue as to motivating factors.

In the end, toughening the rules only filters out the window-shoppers.

IT ALL STARTS FROM AN outline on paper.

You draw every night, practice your piece, practice outlines. You don't just throw a piece onto a wall.

You pick out a spot, a place other writers will see and admire, somewhere nobody but the city will freak about. Plain brick is bad - it just soaks up the paint and leaves a mess. Buffed and primered walls are the best.

You can go to bed early, get up at three in the morning. Or just find an obscure place and start after dark. Sometimes, if it's really out of the way, you can do it in broad daylight and no one will notice.

For a really illegal piece that takes huevos, you work at night, in crews - it's faster, and safer. You dress dark, in loose clothing, in case the cops show. You carry your paint in a duffel bag, mark the colors with masking tape so you won't be trying to read the small print when all you got is moonlight.

Style is key. It's gotta be polished - no running paint. It's gotta be original. It's gotta be somewhat complicated. And it's definitely gotta be impressive. You don't want other crews saying, yeah, it's illegal, but we could burn it ...

Bruno and Rey are explaining themselves in a smoky Capitol Hill cafe. Yes, there is a thriving undercurrent here, a whole world you can't imagine unless you've been there. Rey smiles, taps his cigarette. He has brought pictures, examples of pieces he's done.

See, you can get all these different effects depending on the nozzle cap or the way you hold the can. Solid lines that fade, starry effects that seem to glisten.

Sometimes you hit a brick wall with something really basic like your tag, then wait for the city to come along and buff it. "As soon as you white a wall, that's the perfect thing to write on," Bruno says.

He could pass for the kid staffing your local hardware store, and he kicks back, laughs from under a Stussy cap. "Let the city be your canvas," he says.

SOUL'S BEEN THINKING ABOUT it for a while now. He wants to do a piece, one that'll blow everybody's mind. He's gotta be at work at 8:30 the next morning, but he tracks down Rey in a crowded dorm room, shows him his outline, and finally Rey can't stand it any longer and now he's got to do a piece, forget the homework.

It is like an addiction. Pretty soon they're both discussing where to do it. The tracks? The garage? The city is teeming with possibilities. Anyway, they still need paint, and the stores are going to close soon. Soul flashes his wallet. Just got paid, he says, just today.

They climb out of the car near Fred Meyer. With his finger, Rey spells out his tag on the fogged rear window. Inside, they stock tote baskets with 20 shades of Krylon, 70 bucks worth, and it's off to the old Motor Sports garage. They're anxious, excited, like kids who've been inside too long, but it's gotta be the right wall. The garage walls are too squat for the grandeur they have in mind.

But look over here - it's the freshly white-walled Denny ramp - a brand new canvas, pure as the Pope, stretching into the distance. They eye it covetously, imagining what they could do with it. ... Damn! Would that be fresh or what? Look at the way it shines under the light, you can see everything. But it's too risky - the nearby apartment building looks right down on it, and there's people all over the place - Rey got arrested once in Europe, and he had to do community service. Here he could lose his student visa.

They wander into a nearby alleyway, find an abandoned warehouse near a club where a line is forming for a benefit concert scheduled that night. The wall seems big enough, but Rey is still worried. Soul is impatient. They ask around, get unofficial word that the building is doomed for destruction. "Let's get busy," Soul says.

Soul watches, to see how far away Rey will place his cans from the wall. Soul does the same, pulls out a light blue and sprays a light line down the middle to divide the canvas. First come light-blue outlines - these are the lines that guide the creation. Then, holding their preconceived drawings like palettes in their left hands, they shake spray cans with their right as they begin to fill in the design. Shake. Spray. Shake. Spray.

Elaine arrives with a supply of soft drinks and Snickers bars. She likes to prod Rey about his work, his choice of colors. Makes him paint better, she says. And then the cops come by and Rey blows them away with that wild line and magic look of innocence or whatever.

Two hours later, Rey is absolutely smoking on his piece. He works with a methodical, casual silence, doesn't like to be bothered. The piece is taking shape, an orange and yellow frenzy with more twists than an L.A. freeway, arcs that bend the mind's will. It reads "REY" but becomes harder to decipher past layers and layers of color. Brief splotches of baby blue seemingly placed without reason become background shading for dark blue the color of Mexican glassware.

Soul's piece is slower to take form, a murky soup of light blue and rose pink. He places a thick swirl of wavy orange across the piece, then some dark blue arrows, steps back, tilts his head, doesn't seem pleased. "I don't know about that orange," he mutters to himself.

"It doesn't matter," Elaine says. "It won't stay up long anyway. Nothing's permanent in this game."

Rey and Soul pass the time asking about each other's crews, and you can tell that for them, being in a crew doesn't mean rivalry. It's just an excuse to paint. They offer each other tips: How about some shading here? A little rose would look really fresh there. Noise streams from the nearby rock club.

A thick broth of fog pours in around midnight and the temperature has chilled to 38 degrees. Rey climbs atop an overturned garbage can and starts backgrounding his piece with gray. And now, from the club, the critics - vamped-out girls in black stockings, leather-upholstered guys with yo-dude hair - this is the style. They stop in the alley and stare in catatonic drunkenness, they've never seen such a thing. They blurt things like "Cool, dudes!" and "You guys are awesome."

After a while, Rey and Soul don't even notice them, as if they are birds on the back of a rhino. It's not until Sight shows up that they let their attention wander from their work. Sight, a semiretired hip-hopper with a Marine cut who belongs to a crew named Geo Tribe, likes what he sees, says it's inspiring to see them out there on a frosty night. Soul, in typical hip-hop modesty, says well, he just felt like doing a piece, but you can sense his pleasure. The only real praise comes from another writer.

Rey begins his final outline, lays down smooth curves of shiny red, then whiffs of white for a brilliance effect. This is the part that's most fun, he says, because it transforms what seems like chaos into order the eyes can accept. It's also the most crucial - mess up here and it's hard to go back. Soul does the same. "I've been waiting to do a fresh burner like this for a long time," he says.

They tag their pieces with the customary initials of their crews: 2ZC and DVS. Rey throws on the name of his old Swiss crew, EDK (Esprit Du Kartons). They step back in graceful assurance, and Soul runs and gets his car. Maximum lights now: The 2 a.m. matinee begins. The 7-foot-high display spells the contrast between American and European styles: Soul's letters interconnect, bubbly drunk with style; Rey's lettering is simpler, easier to read, but the surrounding design is wildly intricate. But that contrast - fresh! Without taking their eyes off the wall, the two writers lock hands like brothers in the icy fog and nod in cool satisfaction.

"We should get together and piece more often," Soul says.

A week later, the wall is a freshly buffed white.

HONAKER SAYS GRAFFITI GIVES kids with low self-esteem a sense of power they aren't getting somewhere else. Some of them, like wannabe gangbangers and those who draw Satanic markings, get kicks out of scaring people. With hip hop, prestige is the overriding factor. The important thing is to get your piece up and get recognized.

But by whom? Every once in a while, art curators have dared to recognize the hip-hop world, which sets off the usual frenzy of shock and outrage. Whether galleries act out of sincere admiration or just a desire to be chic, the momentary popularity generally has the same effect, and before you know it copycats with the talent of mules have struck everywhere. Earlier this year, in Paris, French Culture Minister Jack Lang, spouting a belief in this young generation of le rap and le graff, organized an exhibit of hip-hop art at the Museum of French Monuments at the Trocadero. It wasn't long before some visitors were marking other museum works with felt-tipped pens.

Say what you want about hip-hop art. Say you like its swirling colors, its immediacy, its rebelliousness. Say you hate it, that it's the work of amateurs and that there is no artistic merit in illegality. But unless you know what it's like to create art on a wall with a spray can in your hand, you might as well be one of those longhaired critics stumbling out of a rock club on a frigid night. The only real praise - and criticism - comes from another writer.

"People who are into it know who I am, when I do a good piece," Rey says. "In this kind of art you have no rules at all, you can do whatever you want to do, it's totally free. You don't have to conform to society - you just take a wall you like and do what you want. And nobody tells you what you got to do."

Fame is Bruno's prime motivator, the one he keeps coming back to if you ask him long enough. He's almost 23 now, considering retirement. Hip hop is a young man's game, and anyway, there's plenty of "new school" writers coming up through the system.

In New York, here's what they came up with: Outlaw sales of spray paint to minors. Brilliant or what? But they found kids were just as creative with markers and ball point pens. Then they succeeded with graffiti-proof, stainless-steel subway trains but ended up with graffiti-covered garbage trucks. Philadelphia gave artists a structured mural program but pulled its own plug by prohibiting aerosol art.

What's worked to deter graffiti? Try pre-decorated public spaces. They can respect that. That's worked with Metro's bus shelters. Mural project manager Dale Cummings says vandalism is way down these days, and he sounds like an official sort of guy until the hip-hop brand of graffiti is mentioned. That's different. "That's a real grass-roots art movement," he says. "It's live. It's great."

What he suggests is setting aside public space for hip-hop artistry, a view held by various sociologists and often hip hoppers themselves. Honaker says Denver authorities tried that, but the project failed when it descended into a no-rules free-for-all.

Maybe order's a bit too much for a chaotic system where kids are bombing here, battling there. It might be shared behavior, but anarchy will be anarchy, and it has to set its own rules. They don't bomb homes, they don't do churches, they strike where they think only the establishment will mind - "where nobody will sweat us but the law," Soul says. "It's like an unwritten rule."

Seattle became a candidate for hip-hop graffiti the moment urban youth began feeling The Establishment had done them wrong, forgotten them, tried to reduce them to Social Security numbers. Their methods still aren't accepted, but dang it if they haven't gone and painted their way into American culture. MTV uses the form in promotional ads, Apple includes it in a computer graphics program and no one bats an eye.

The Motor Sports garage is going to be gone soon, doomed for destruction, developer-style. Owner Martin Selig says he doesn't mind the artwork - something police find hard to believe when they nab a writer bombing inside - but the property has run its course.

Across the street, at RKCNDY, Bruno lays the finishing touches on a piece the progressive music venue asked him to put on an upstairs wall. He signs his tag, punctuates it with a stylized version of 2ZC and checks for flaws. Every bit of space is used, filled with decorative spins and stars. Five hours have passed since he began and the scent of paint rules the room. RKCNDY will be his legacy, a Sistine Chapel with a raging sound system. He crowns the piece with a quote he says was borrowed from a famous scientist in a recent rap song. It says:

"The Great Will Always Overcome The Medium For They Create While Others Destroy."

Creation or destruction? Read the writing on the wall.

Marc Ramirez is a staff writer for Pacific magazine. Harley Soltes is the Pacific staff photographer.

GRAFFITI LESSON -- WHAT HIP-HOP IS NOT

If the walls could talk, Rick Olguin would already know what they'd say. A professor of Chicano Studies at the University of Washington, he has studied graffiti - which translates to "little scratchings," from the Italian verb graffiare ("to scratch") - off and on for 10 years.

He and others like the City Engineering Department's Sue Honaker identify as many as a dozen types of graffiti, including the artsy flourishes of hip hop, markings made by gangs and wannabe gang members, political and idealistic statements, religious ideology, satanic symbols, racist slogans and the prolific signatures of "taggers" who sign their name or nickname wherever they can. All risk a $5,000 fine and/or a year in jail, but writers are rarely caught.

Camera in hand, Olguin sometimes treks Seattle streets and alleyways, tracking local trends. On walls in the Central District, he notes one weekend, are turf markings left by gang members and wannabe gang members - some of them the kind listed for parents on police handouts.

Symbols like pitchforks (a satanic symbol), crowns and the Star of David have become popular among local gangs, he says. Political graffiti are common in the U District and along the Alaskan Way viaduct. Hispanic gang graffiti here differ from what he has seen in California barrios - the calligraphy and styles are different, as if the writers, whisked away from centralized communities elsewhere, are trying to be something they never became.

HIP-HOP TALK -- THEIR OWN WAY OF SAYING THINGS

Hip-Hop - A three-pronged movement of rap music, break dancing and graffiti art that began in New York City in the early 1980s and has since spread worldwide. The term comes from a song by rapper "Love Bug" Starsky, who chanted "Hip hop, don't stop, keep on to the body rock." Rap and the writers' subculture have been the movement's most lasting elements, and both the United States and Europe have developed their own distinctive styles of writing.

Tag - A street name assumed for graffiti-writing purposes. Tagging is the act of painting, writing or etching your name on a surface. Writers who attain reputations as the best, either prolifically or stylistically, are dubbed "kings."

Crews - Loosely organized groups of hip-hop writers. A writer may belong to more than one crew simultaneously.

Piece - An elaborate, large-scale painting based on a preconceived outline. Short for masterpiece.

Throw-up - Smaller and faster than a full-scale piece, these are named for the ease with which they're "thrown up" onto a wall.

Bomb - To hit an area with numerous graffiti markings, whether tags or throw-ups.

Burn - 1. To exist on a wall, as in, "That piece burned for six months." 2. To do something better over an already existing work.

Battle - To duke it out, spray-paint-wise, with another writer or crew.

Piecebook - A personal portfolio of practice outlines and sketches.

To Give Props - To honor or owe respect to. Writers sometimes give props to other writers or crews in their pieces by including their tags or initials.

Wak - An adjective used to describe work that is done badly or that includes inept application of paint, as in "That piece was really wak - it was a total waste of space."