My good friend Mare put me on to the documentary The Cool School which is about the modern art movement happening in LA in the 1950’s - particularly the Ferus gallery which premiered young artists like Ed Ruscha, Frank Gehry, Dennis Hopper, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses and many others. It also exhibited the first solo show by the then unknown Andy Warhol. In the movie there are also clips from John Baldessari speaking on the L.A. Art scene of the time.

This year I had the opportunity to sit down and interview John Baldessari at his studio out here in Venice. In our talk we discussed art, and his career as both a teacher and as an artist. I also had a chance to see his retrospective Pure Beauty at LACMA. This exhibition has since left L.A., and is currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC until January 9th (the only other living American artist to have a retrospective at the Met was Jasper Johns). If you are in New York, don’t miss the chance to see this show by one of the great American artists of our time.

Long ago (1992), in a land far-far away (Downtown NYC) things were bubbling. Hip Hop was enjoying it’s re-birth, you could still buy a nickel bag of weed anywhere in town, and New York was still New York. In this climate PNB Nation was founded in the beginnings of what we call “street wear” today.  This is long before there were blogs and beasts, there was no internet, and we were still doing all of our graphics by hand (that’s right kids, NO computers). At that time there were a few brands of note on the scene – There was GFS (Gerb, Futura, and Stash) - think Phillie Blunts, there was 2 Black Guys (Rob & Adrian) - think Black Jesus, and then there was us – a Jew,  A Japanese African American, two Chinese Jamaicans, A Korean, and a Puerto Rican. We came from different parts of town – The Lower East Side, The Upper West Side, Harlem, Queens, and Coney Island. We were entrepreneurs,  we were Graffiti writers, we were DJ’s, and we were cultural critics. I will break down some more about PNB in the future, but for now I wanted to hit y’all off with a little Holiday treat.  Amongst our other ventures, we liked to cook - and more importantly, we liked to eat! In the summer time we used to have cook-offs. We would battle in a particular style of cooking. Sometimes it was Carribean, sometimes Italian, sometimes Asian .. L’s were sparked, friends and family came from all over the 5 boroughs, there was music, there was drink, and there was good food! Out of these parties came a group of T-Shirts that we made with hangtags (below) featuring some of our crown winning recipes. This Holiday, if your trying to impress your lady (or man) – look no further – these four are bangers….

Brue, Bluster, Zulu, Sung, Shara and the whole PNB Massive and Crew – HOLD TIGHT!

I usually do large paintings, but here’s a a relatively small one (22” X 30”) that I recently traded with a fellow 12oz. Prophet..

I don’t really collect anything, except for books. This love probably goes back to collecting comics as a kid. On of my teachers, the great poet Amiri Baraka once told me how important it is to build a library in your home. Now with access to so much information at our fingertips this idea seems outdated, but in truth it is more important than ever. The look and feel of a book when you hold it transfers more than it’s content -it conveys a feeling, and holds history.

A few years ago my friend Ken brought me this jewel from Japan as a gift. It is a special volume put out by Playboy in 1980 of the photo essays of the Japanese photographer Yoshihiro Tatsuki called My America. In it he visits strip clubs, Ku Klux Klan rallys, and other crazy spots. In the essay below he catches a glimpse of the South Bronx in the late 1970’s, and he hangs with the outlaw Savage Skulls, and the Savage Nomads. The film 80 Blocks from Tiffanys really breaks it down, but these pictures capture the mood of this place I remember passing by as a Kid on the Cross Bronx Expressway…

Peace Party People. I have been wanting to get started here for a while but I keep getting distracted by life. Over the past year I have had all of my flicks, paintings, sketch books, black books, and paraphenalia scanned and shot. I came across this after-school punishment assignment from the sixth grade at P.S. 199 - complete with the forgery of my mother’s signature at the bottom. This about sum’s up my thoughts on the delay in getting my blog cracking. Until next time…