TAKI 183

A new book on graffiti prompts me to reblog on Taki 183.

I am afraid that Google Maps will catch me in my own driveway–schlepping my dry cleaning, picking my ear, or worse. It makes me nervous that I can be seen from above, like my house, with its fading stucco, its quorum of neighborhood cats, its blue mailbox. Does my roof need repairing? Can the satellite tell me without charging me for the estimate? Does this tell me where I am?
For years I’ve tried to write a poem about Taki 183, and failed. So I’ll try to write about it here. Taki 183 was a very early–maybe the first–tagger in the NYC subway system. He’d just write–TAKI 183–in black. I’d see his tag when I was a kid riding the A Train. It impressed me so much. He was FROM 183rd Street–Washington Heights–but he wasn’t there anymore–now he was HERE. And, well, so was I. But here was changing–179th St., 125th St., 4th St. These were significantly not the same place. And I was not the same person as I changed place.
Taki, I recently learned, was a nickname for Constantine. He was Greek, and as an adult ran a fancy auto body shop. You can buy an image of his tag on the web for $400.00 if you are so inclined.
And after all, the New York Subway system also has a map, or is a map, the map as good as the territory, a territory of transit, rather than just destination. Taki 183.

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Celebrating Forefather of Graffiti

Guernsey’s/Associated Press
By RANDY KENNEDY

A short Greek-American kid named Demetrius who lived on West 183rd Street in the late 1960s was by no means the first teenager to think of writing something in indelible ink on someone else’s property. He never considered himself an artist, and his illicit career of leaving his name and street number on hundreds, maybe thousands, of surfaces throughout the five boroughs of New York City ended after only a couple of years, when he put aside his Magic Marker and went off dutifully to college.
But the sheer ubiquity of his neatly written signature — TAKI 183 — and an article about him in The New York Times in the summer of 1971 combined to transform him into a kind of shadowy folk hero, inspiring hundreds of emulators and, by general agreement among urban historians, making him responsible for starting the modern graffiti movement.
Viewed in some circles as an American art form on a par with jazz and Abstract Expressionism and in others as vandalism, pure and simple, the movement has gained momentum ever since and has spread around the world.
Its pioneer, meanwhile, has been out of sight, absent from the celebrations and exhibitions of old-school graffiti now taking place with increasing regularity. But on Thursday night at a signing party for “The History of American Graffiti,” an ambitious new survey of the movement written by Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon and published this spring by HarperCollins, a short Greek-American man named Demetrius, now 57, with glasses and a bush of salt-and-pepper hair, arrived, took up a marker and began to sign his name again, this time legally, on frontispieces of the books.
“What does he look like?” a HarperCollins publicist had asked Mr. Gastman earlier in the afternoon, before the arrival of the near-mythical guest of honor.
“He looks like somebody’s dad,” Mr. Gastman replied.

For the rest of the article, see The New York Times.