Byline: Pop Rock

Buford Youthward
[email protected]

The relationship between graffiti and photography is like pop rocks and soda pop. All fizzle and rumor bubbling around a captured correspondence.

In the afterglow everyone will know, basking in the fire and basing base information with a bic lighter. I light up my prints, destroy all negatives and sport a look like a crook struggling with inward torment, trying to uncover and experiment with deep secrets of human nature.

I see souls in two dimensions and seek an annulment of the flesh, bootstrapping crosses of beauty and getting sent off on a search for a style to worship. Ageless columns of dancing light transform the human into the ideal, setting all our desires ablaze.

We gather around the bonfire, dangle consequences and conjure ghosts that melt into screens of meaning. Finding analogies for angels in high definition, the screenwriter stares at the blank page.

Some of my best friends sing songs like priests in the strictest sense, accompanied by the smell of scents delivering dirges, ditties and drones in the crowded marketplace. Sailing in an arctic cesspool I watch the submarine machine polarize fans and enemies alike, but the frozen ocean inside needs no ice pick, no axe, nothing mistaken as art to waken from the hearth.

Words have rhythm but nowhere near as much as a can of spray paint rattling around in the dark or stuffed under a subway seat.

Graffiti kids play in the primordial soup, lifting letters from the alphabet, stars from the sky and cans of pastel pink off the hardware store shelf. Parochial pedestrians caught between the limo and limbo, become swayed by charming alarmists anticipating perversion for profit.

Their non-inspiration smells a mile away, beyond the borders of truth and dignity, hope and refusal, twilight and isolation.

The flash goes off as the camera gets steadied against lines of communication. The carbonated syrupy concoction misfires and spills its candy coated pretense. Behind the scenes, beauty prepares for her close up.

Read more in Byline

Art Crimes Front Page