Anxieties Up My Sleeve

Buford Youthward
stockcap@hotmail.com

Beware expensive words used loosely. Exploitation harbors no pangs of regret -- ask anyone who has sold their soul. If they had a soul worth selling, they probably never had much of a soul to begin with.

Manufacturing value is alchemical fool's gold. Freedom and religion have become the latest antonyms of the new great century. Might and freedom, synonyms. Does freedom count if you're not free from rules?

I'll take the Hippocratic oath and bargain a plea. Graffiti is not dead. Just in danger of becoming boring. But that danger is constant. That's what makes the medium perpetual. The same danger lives in music with the same urgency and same consistency. It's a struggle with the arts, a wrestle with the science.

Synthesizing space, figure, time, movements interlocking, weaving in and out, identity and style converge and what follows is the fusion. Graffiti is free from synergy because it is pure synergy.

Graffiti forsakes any complimentary attitude with a stutter and a half step progressing to its own self-affirmation. Its sense of originality is its only date stamp of growth. You work your progression without rules in order to find the rules of what you've done.

That's the dichotomy of any-name game. Kings and fools all have walked down the path. The footsteps continue, persist. Results find their own definitions. Graffiti speaks to the eye, sells to the mind. It is a higher form of advertising and one of the great anxieties of our time.

As graffiti gives concrete form to our blatant and wanton thoughts, it also has the gift of imparting to the most mechanical of emotions admission into our dreams.

Manic fragments out to distill progress, dilute process, can be acerbic and poetic while suggestive compliance moves hunch-like. I move with my anxieties up my sleeve and paranoia on my shoulder. It may not be a picture of virtue but sometimes just moving is virtuous.


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