Alphabet City
Should I be an artist or a writer? Would it be words or pictures? I couldn't decide. The authorities said I was able at both. A travel writer-photographer, they suggested. But that's not me. And speaking of travel, at the time I knew job one was simply staying out of Nam. Which I managed by marrying at eighteen then fathering a year later. Then . . . in time and in a way I solved the original dilemma by becoming a magazine art director. But art director's words and pictures are usually never their own. So I settled in and fell asleep, figuring that was my lot.
Then suddenly along came Barbara Kruger who proved art can be made of words and pictures. Then came graphic novels. And there was always graffiti, then newer graffiti. Not the big handsome pieces but the tags . . . tags upon tags, that were nothing more than letters upon letters where words emerged created by an alphabet sprayed and sprawled robustly by kids soon to be known . . . as writers, not artists.
