Why Closing Southbank Skate Park Would Suck for London
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to London, but if there’s one thing this city is lacking it’s coffee and sandwich shops. Many’s the time I’ve found myself approaching people in the street, saying, “Hey, you know what this city needs? More cafes.” Because there just really, genuinely aren’t enough. I mean, take supposedly gastro-friendly Spitalfields Market, for instance; there are only four Prets, three EATs and two branches of POD in a five-minute radius. And as for fusion taco stalls and Evisu stores? Don’t even get me started. Honestly, it’s like living in Brezhnev’s Russia sometimes.
It seems the good people at the Southbank Centre share my opinion, as they’d apparently like Londoners to forget about that world famous unofficial skate park next to the Royal Festival Hall and instead associate the area with places where you can spend an hour’s pay on a sandwich. The planning committee has announcedplans to “refurbish” the area and move in high-rent retail units, shunting the skaters from the brutalist, graffiti-splattered enclave of banks, ledges, and stairsets they carved out themselves, to a new council-built spot beneath nearby Hungerford Bridge.
A video shot at Southbank and other nearby spots in 1991.
It’s an expensive development, coming in at a reported $183 million. There are a lot of fierce opinions flying around, as well as a petition addressed to Lambeth Council, the Southbank Centre, London Mayor Boris Johnson, and the Arts Council. Naturally, the skate community and anyone who has a vested interest in London not becoming a massive shopping center on the outskirts of Guildford are up in arms about it. We went down to Southbank to gauge what the local heads were thinking and find out what the future holds for the site, the skaters, and London as a whole.
Since I was too busy listening to Cypress Hill on my Discman outside a nearby chain music shop to get involved in the early Southbank scene, I thought I’d speak to somebody who knew what they were talking about. Lev Tanju, founder of Palace Skateboards, is someone who’s been skating Southbank for 15 years.
I asked Lev about the first time he ever skated Southbank, when he was young and “proper shit” (his words, not mine). He painted a picture of a lost time, the days before South Bank looked like a Richard Curtis set.
“It was kind of at its most legendary then, because it was before South Bank was redeveloped. There were no shops or cafes, it was like a no man’s land. The only people there on the regular were homeless people and skateboarders, and the skaters there at that time policed the place and wouldn’t take shit from anyone. There was a feeling that you had to know someone to skate there.”
Have you noticed how lame graffiti in New York has become in 2013? Especially the one-liners you see more and more of, with their pseudo philosophy and visual impairment. Where exactly is the art? And what’s the message? The vast majority of the graffiti that’s out there pales in comparison to the classic Wild Style of the late 70s/early 80s, though how could it be any other way? Is it the same in other cities? Or is the increasing irrelevancy of graffiti related to just how deadly boring and commercial New York feels right now? And to how overly policed it’s become? If so, couldn’t it feed off of that? Why isn’t graffiti commenting on the shitty sad state of things? On its co-option? On being chased inside? Graffiti can be, or at least once was, an expedient way of inserting social, political, and cultural comment into public view. One of the best examples, a huge wall painting on a building alongside the BQE, visible to every passing motorist, ridiculing CON$ervative GovernMENt as nothing more than CON MEN.
As far back as the “talking statues” of ancient Rome, whose pedestals were inscribed with anonymous barbs aimed at the church and state, graffiti has been another way of spreading the news, sharing caustic opinions and cranky dissent for all to see. But nowadays, apart from the tags that kids still write, and probably always will, graffiti seems like an advertisement for itself, or for an overeducated, underemployed class that wants to use the street as a springboard to careers in art, advertising, and fashion. Or it’s a vivid backdrop for an otherwise forgettable product. You see a tag in the street and look it up. Within seconds you’re delivered to a gallery, a shop window, a clothing or skateboard line. You come face to face with the fact that the whole world is infinitely more professional and commodified than ever before, and it can only get worse. “Hip” will either go willingly or be taken forcibly, which translates as: You can sell it to us… or be ripped off. So don’t feel that you’ve sold out before you’ve been bought. That’s the writing on the wall, and it’s been there for some time now. I really don’t hate graffiti. I only despise what it, and almost everything else in this town, has become—a shadow of the shadow of its former self.
At the risk of waxing nostalgic for the supposedly good old days of graffiti covering every available surface, it’s worth recalling how it felt to enter a subway train that was totally bombed inside. For some, it was nothing less than an assault. It was visceral and it was violent, and it was hard to think of it as an expression of art or joy, especially if its acidy vibe was encountered at 7 AM on your way to work. (This was the era of “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”) For others, it was something wondrous to behold, to see a giant painting glide through a subway station, or along the tracks above the street. Whichever side you were on, it seemed as if there was no Escape From New York.
Koch: I wanted to get rid of New York’s graffiti problem, but I wasn’t in charge of the subways, the MTA was. I called the MTA into City Hall and told them they had to get rid of the graffiti. I presented them with a plan to do it: Kids were spray-painting train cars in the yards at night because there weren’t any fences. I told them, just put up a fence and put some dogs inside. They got scared, worried that the dogs would bite people, so I said, “OK, if you don’t want any chance of dogs biting people, get wolves.” That’s the problem with the new Liam Neeson movie, The Grey. There’s no recorded case of a wild wolf ever having bitten or attacked a single human being in North America.
I don’t believe that. Well, it’s true. The next day Clyde Haberman of the New York Times came to me and told me he’d checked my statement and that there are records of domesticated wolves biting humans. I said, “I know that! I’m not talking about a domesticated wolf. I’m talking about wild wolves. Let’s have wild wolves protect the trains. If the wild wolves become tame, replace them with more wild ones.”
So you recommended that the MTA fight graffiti with wild wolves? Yes.
An anonymous activist who participates in the graffiti movement.
When Tarek Algorhani walked out of a Syrian prison in June 2011, he had no idea that a revolution had erupted in his country—or that it had ignited over a cause he had been thrown in jail nearly six years for championing: inalienable human rights.
In November 2005, Tarek and eight other bloggers founded Al Domary, a political site that used cartoons and other drawings to criticize the Syrian government and demand an end to the Assad regime. It quickly became one of the most popular anti-regime sites in the country. The Al Domary crew successfully used masked IP addresses and pseudonyms to evade the Syrian secret police until, three months after the site’s launch, one of their bloggers was arrested, tortured, and forced to give up the location and identities of his comrades. The authorities shut down the site, confiscated their computers, and destroyed all files related to the operation. In February 2006, the bloggers were convicted of treason and each sentenced to five years, except for Tarek, who received nine because the authorities considered him to be the site’s mastermind.
Tarek was sent to Sednaya, a political prison 14 miles north of Damascus, where his jailers subjected him to marathon torture sessions. They stuffed him inside a tire, spun him around for hours, and beat him so badly he couldn’t walk. “We had prisoners who were moved from Abu Ghraib to Sednaya. They would cry at night, saying, ‘I want to go back to Abu Ghraib,’” he said.
The dark prison cells were filthy, and some of the inmates’ wounds became so infected that their legs had to be amputated. Escape was impossible; even if someone managed to sneak out, the surrounding desert was seeded with land mines.
Five and a half years into his sentence, Tarek was pardoned for reasons he still doesn’t understand. He returned to Damascus and discovered that a series of anti-regime demonstrations had begun. The thought of going back to prison didn’t stop him from joining the movement, and he returned to agitation in no time, teaching activists how to shoot videos and upload them to YouTube. He kept detailed lists of the missing and killed to send to human rights groups, and established contacts to get first aid to anyone injured.
Barely six months passed before Tarek once again became a wanted man—his name had been flagged at security checkpoints, and he was listed as an enemy of the state on official records. In January, he fled to Tunisia and began another human-rights internet project—this one centered around tagging anti-regime graffiti throughout the streets of Syria. In mid-October I called him up to ask how the fight was going.
A paper stencil against a wall in Syria that reads: “The Martyr Ahmed Asham.”
VICE: What prompted you to use graffiti to push back against the regime? Tarek Alghorani: The revolution in Syria started because of graffiti. A small group of boys from Daraa watched the Egyptian and Tunisian revolution on TV, and they spray-painted the slogan “the people want the regime to fall.” The Mukhabarat, the secret police, arrested them, tortured them, ripped out their fingernails, and that’s when the rest of the country broke out in protests. At the beginning of the revolution, whenever people assembled, there were only a few of them. The police and security forces could easily split them up with no trace left behind. That’s where the idea of drawings came in. Even if the police came in and dispersed people, anyone walking by later would know, “There was a protest here, revolutionaries were here.” It’s a stamp, a mark. And it’s difficult for the police, because they get tired. Every time they would clean up a wall, something else would appear.
What role do you play in this graffiti movement? In the beginning, activists would just quickly spray the walls with words and phrases like “freedom” or “down with the regime,” like the kids from Daraa, but it was rushed. I wanted to introduce an element of art to it, something to commemorate the martyrs we have lost in the revolution. Our goal is to use art to voice our concerns. In April, I started uploading videos on YouTube of how to spray-paint walls and put stencil drawings on Facebook for graffiti artists to use.
You may know André Saraiva as the man behind the club empire Le Baron, but in this episode of VICE Meets we talk about how he got involved in graffiti and his installation at The Hole Gallery in New York. The show was worth a visit, and we should really look into getting that large mechanical penis installed at the Brooklyn VICE office. You know, for when we have special guests.
Cat Marnell’s Amphetamine Logic: Graffiti, Crackheads, More Cocaine, and Miami (Bitch)
I’m sleeping alone in the backseat of a parked rental car at 5 AM in a terrible neighborhood in Miami when the door opposite me clicks open and a grizzly old black drunk man slides in next to me, shutting the car door behind him. His eyes and skin are the color of urine, and he smells equal parts like sour beer and sweet death.
“AH!” I cried out, half-snapping awake. “NO!”
“It’s ooooo-kay,” the strange old man mumbles, and I am about to scream again when all the car doors open at once, and Mint, Serf, and BC the Kid, a 17-year-old “graffiti intern,” hop in. And maybe Same.
I glare at BC the Kid as he smooshes the man into the middle of the backseat between us. We drive exactly two blocks through this ridiculous ghetto and screech to a halt in front of a liquor store.
Nobody says anything for about ten seconds.
“What the fuck is going on?” I practically scream. The bum and I are pressed up on each other.
Serf turns around in the passenger seat, suddenly very grave in the face.
“Marnell,” he half-whispers. “We need you to give us $2.”
“What?” I hiss. “What did you say? You need $2?”
“Yes,” Serf whispers. “Two. Dollars.”
“Why? For what?” I hiss again. “You know… I don’t care.” I rummage through my purse, hand Serf the money. “Here. Two dollars. Take it.”
BC and the man get out; Serf gets out; BC gets back in. I watch through the window as Serf talks to the man and gives him my two bucks. Then Serf gets back in the car.
Nobody says anything. They know me; they’re waiting for it.
“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?” I screech. “WHO THE FUCK WAS THAT? DO YOU KNOW HOW SCARED I WAS? WHY DID YOU LET HIM IN THE CAR FIRST? WERE THE DOORS EVER EVEN LOCKED WHILE YOU GUYS WERE OUT THERE BOMBING?! DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT?! I WOKE UP AND THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE!”
I take a second to breathe. CLANG CLANG CLANG go the spraypaint cans in the back of the car; the sound that has been giving me a headache the entire time I’ve been at Art Basel.
I think there’s an appeal to a lot of those movies, like Escape from New York or Maniac Cop, a view of Manhattan covered in garbage and graffiti. The graffiti was sickening! I never extolled graffiti as a new art form—that’s bullshit. Put it in your house, but not in my house, and not on the subways.
That’s what those films tapped into—that fear. Yeah, there’s no question about that. Particularly in the subways. Let me be maybe too bold about it. Can I tell you a little anecdote?
Do it. I wanted to get rid of New York’s graffiti problem, but I wasn’t in charge of the subways, the MTA was. I called the MTA into City Hall and told them they had to get rid of the graffiti. I presented them with a plan to do it: Kids were spray-painting train cars in the yards at night because there weren’t any fences. I told them, just put up a fence and put some dogs inside. They got scared, worried that the dogs would bite people, so I said, “OK, if you don’t want any chance of dogs biting people, get wolves.” That’s the problem with the new Liam Neeson movie, The Grey. There’s no recorded case of a wild wolf ever having bitten or attacked a single human being in North America.
I don’t believe that. Well, it’s true. The next day Clyde Haberman of the New York Times came to me and told me he’d checked my statement and that there are records of domesticated wolves biting humans. I said, “I know that! I’m not talking about a domesticated wolf. I’m talking about wild wolves. Let’s have wild wolves protect the trains. If the wild wolves become tame, replace them with more wild ones.”
So you recommended that the MTA fight graffiti with wild wolves? Yes.
As a punk kid growing up in Queens, Craig Costello would scavenge for supplies to paint the walls and buildings of New York. His desire to create larger pieces and invent unique graffiti tools led to the development of his internationally recognized ink and paint brand Krink Inc. Craig’s signature style morphed out of his modifications and innovations with paint tools; using a fire extinguisher filled with paint and paint markers rather than spray paint, his style became an instant hit in many cities around the world.
