WESTSIIIIDE RENAISSANCE CONNECTION

Bow down haterzz...
Speaking of  the whole 'Westside' thing, can you still throw up the dub if you live on the west side of your town but are living on the east coast?  Or what if you live on the West side of one city that is right on the border of a neighboring city. -Aren't you simultaneously on the eastside of that neighboring city? Ice cube needs to clarify this shit if he expects motherfuckers to throw up the appropriate gang sign.

(Good looking out Stephen Mears)

RICKY GERVAIS ON ATHEISM

POLE DANCING FOR JESUS

From what I heard, Jesus doesn't tip for shit... Dude just sits there on the edge of the stage nursing his bottle of Coors light for like 3 hours at a time.

Pole Dancing for Jesus: MyFoxHOUSTON.com

(Good looking out Joe F.)

BLACK JESUS

BLACK JESUS

TWICE THE JESUS, HALF THE HASSLE

It's must really suck when homeboy wants to trim his bangs, but the other dude wants to grow out his beard... Don't worry about it.

SHE'S NOT 100%, BUT...

For future reference, When you get up to speak in front of a crowd, holding a sign,  I'd go with a strong declarative sentence. -Just an idea... I mean when I see a sign with the word 'probably' in it, I have an automatic reflex to stop giving a shit. Then again, the same is true with signs including the word 'Jesus'.  This enterprise was doomed from the start.

HE IS RISEN!

Check out Jesus' rock hard abs on this incredible balloon sculpture rendition of the crucifixion... Motherfucker is RIPPED!

GRAFFITI ART

Regular viewers of the Steve Powers Show know you can call me anything but a Graffiti Artist. I I hate the term more than phase 2 hates the g-word. I love that word graffiti, its everywhere I want to be: Illegal, unlawful, longing to be where it doesnt belong. And I think in 2009 graffiti serves the same purpose it did in 1969, to bring life to dead spaces- rusted trains, brown track sides, Starbucks bathrooms.  But when you go and slap the word art on the end of graffiti it denigrates both words. Graffiti is good at being graffiti, until it starts apologizing for itself. "I dont do graffiti, I do graffiti art"-like youre justifying it to your mom. If your mom likes your graffiti, you may already be falling off. I wrote graffiti between 1984 and 1999. It wasn't after getting a rep in two cities for it, or after writing a book on the subject, but only after I did a good piece in the Bronx that I felt I had done it all, and it was time to quit. I wanted to go away and be a toy again at something else, so I started making paintings. Terrible, terrible paintings. I was a bad artist, but I was making art. The definitions to me are real simple- Graffiti is an advertisement for yourself, art is an expression that exists solely to depict a life and time. That said, I think some graffiti can be art; A lot of what Blade and Reas have done qualifies to me. But unless you are in the gallery world, and preferably the museum world, you're in the wilderness and people can and will ignore you. I wont be ignored. I want to be in league with Matisse and Tom Sachs, the way I was with Cope 2 and Kadism. I know that the art world is a weird place with weird pretentious attitudes, but have you been to a graffiti-art show? psssshh.

In the 10 years since I picked up a brush, I must have done 25 gallery shows, plus many public art installations, its a pretty insane pace, but I'm learning on the job, trying to master the craft, and I felt way behind, being that I started getting serious about art as a 30 year old. Plus 2 year old malcolm needs new shoes, and those european joints look good on him. Lately I've been branching out from the fancy galleries towards spaces I call "beautiful losers" galleries; Smaller, hungrier, showing more young artists and selling more work at a  slightly lower price point than the bigger spaces.  In the last 13 months I have had 4 gallery shows and realized a 50 wall project in Philly. All total- 50 paintings and 50 walls. Thats some renaissance era output there (right down to the 30 assistants I had helping me), and definitely a large percentage of that work that will be identified as important, maybe my best. no homo. 

So all that said, I paint more now as a 40 year old artist with a kid than I ever did as a 25 year old vandal with no scheduling conflicts. Besides the motivation that a kid provides, I have a lot more inspiration to work with in art, theres only so much you can do with 4 letters, or so I thought. In the last year, it's been clear that no matter how long ago I quit, gallery people were insisting on adding ESPO as a middle name or an AKA when they were promoting me. Its been going on since 1999, but this year I started to embrace it. In Feburary in Brussels at Alice Gallery I wrote a bunch of tags inside and outside the gallery. The Philly project was one giant graffiti extravaganza, and I started adding tags into the paintings I make, as icons that represent me, but it went to another level last week in San Francisco at the White Walls Gallery. Justin Giarla, White Walls boss, booked an ad in Juxtapoz for my show as ESPO Exterior Surface Painting Outreach. I had no idea that he had done this until I got to the gallery ready to work. Beyond the weidness as being promoted solely as ESPO, the Exterior Surface Painting Outreach bit was an acronym I cooked up to get people to not call the cops when I was painting gates in NYC in 1997-98. So I busted Justin's balls about it, but only a little, because it's really my fault that I havent defined myself better, I've been too busy painting to get my press releases in order.  After we went back and forth about it for 2 days, I asked him, "can you sell more work if I'm ESPO?" he said yeah, so I went let ESPO out for a walk, and we started tagging the gallery.

Lo and behold what happened was really graffiti art. There was plenty of just signatures and style, but there was a lot of writing that depicted the life and times of our people. Nemel caught a tag and I turned his N into a caricature of him while his nemesis Kaves rains fists down on him and HOT HEAD holds a pistol on him. SKREW driving with coke on the dash (aka dash snow) ok, skrew's more of a beer and hoagies guy, but its a good visual joke. SLOB declaring war on west philly with a slim jim in his hand. After Nemel seemed to be slipping back into darkness, I caught a tag in one shot and a quill brush of his recently deceased IRAK team mate Dash with an upside down cross on home plate and Nemel with a bat in the batter's box. The best of all the graffiti art I did was this; Buck 50 came around the gallery a few times, I asked him to put his man KERSE up, but I asked him to bring his own marker. He never remembered to. Finally Puzl came thru, and on request, put up a half dozen Kerse tags. Buck showed up afterwards and I said, "ahh, it's cool, another seattle resident hooked up Kerse" Buck asked who, and when I told him he laughed, "oh no, we dont fuck with that nigga, is he in there now?" I said, "yeah, come say hi" and a minute later they were shaking hands and squashing some 15 year old graffiti beef. Later that night, close to the opening, the security guard, a long time sf veteran, asked what he should do about taggers. I said "dont let anybody go over anybody" He said "thats gonna be impossible, I mean if this guy (points to a buck50 tag) sees this guy (points to a puzle tag) its gonna be war". I said "well what if its like this?" and I pointed to where I drew a crossword with the solutions PUZL KYT shaking hands with a BUCK 50 represented by a Dollar and 2 quarters. Security Guard said "I would love that to happen, theres been way too much bullshit in SF for too long now". He left the room and me and puzle just raised our eyebrows and went back to work.

“THE DaVINCI CODE" BOOK REVIEW-By Jay Money

I have this buddy who was saying that there are descendents of Jesus Christ just walking around the streets right now. Like, you could be sitting on the bus and the person next to you could be Jesus’ great, great, great grandchild. Buillshit, I said. Everyone knows Jesus was a virgin. Him and his mom were both virgins, I said. I’m pretty sure they even talk about that in the bible. I guarantee there’s nothing in the bible saying that dude was out here getting chicks prego. But my buddy was talking about this book called, “The DaVinci Code” that says Jesus had kids. So I got a copy of “The DaVinci Code,” but the shit is super long, so I found this dude at work who said he saw the movie and just had him tell me about it. I guess the main people in the story are following this trail of clues so they can solve this murder and all these religious, secret society dudes are trying to kill them. Then at the end they figure out that this chick is the descendant of Jesus, but she never knew it. I guess that painter DaVinci hid a picture of the chick Jesus was hooking up with in his painting “The Last Supper,” but everybody thought the chick was a dude for a super long time. I guess that DaVinci dude was pretty messed up, though. I heard he drank a shit-ton of absinthe and cut off his ear and sent it to this lady he wanted to hook up with. They sell that absinthe again now, but I don’t think it gets you messed up and makes you hallucinate real bad like that shit they had five hundred years ago. Plus, if that shit really got you that messed up then all the rappers would be talking about it all the time like they talk about that promethazine or lean, or whatever.

TO THOSE ABOUT TO CHRISTIAN ROCK, -WE SALUTE YOU!

"I'M TRYIN' TO KICK IT TONIGHT, SO TELL ME BABY WHAT THAT THANG SMELL LIKE.."

If you ever used to watch BET 'after dark' back in the day, you may have stumbled across this stunning low budget masterpiece of a rap video by Black Jesus. The title of the song is literally "What that thang smell like?" (I'm not kidding... -Really) If anybody can find me the full length clip of this video, let me know so I can swap it out...-It's super important.