Chapter 1

On the morning of Oct 15th, 2013 my wife sent me a text, letting me know that Banksy was in the midst of doing a residency in New York City and that I should check it out. I googled and found out that Banksy was half way through a 31 day long self-imposed residency in NYC for the month of October. Every day of October Banksy was putting up a new piece somewhere in one of the five Boroughs. It was a project epic in scope, even for Banksy.

The day before Genevieve tipped me off, Banksy had made international news for the 14th piece of the residency, a prank he pulled off in Central Park. He set up a stand, among all the other stands, selling his prints for cheap, which were subsequently ignored by droves of tourists. Nobody knew they were Banksy originals, worth tens of thousands of dollars each. It was wryly funny and critical of the capitalistic culture of value, two qualities I'd come to expect from Banksy.

I was curious about where the 15th piece was going to be that day, so I began to google deeper. I found out that one had been done just that morning at 68th Street and 38th Avenue in Jackson Heights. It was within walking distance! I sprang into action immediately. I did the hundred and one things needed to get the girls ready to go out the door, got them both in the double stroller and rolled.

The girls are Lucia and Sofia, then ages 3 and 4. Little did they care about going to see a fresh Banksy, but I had a presentiment that someday they would, that this would be a momentous occasion for them in retrospect. I pushed the stroller up 39th Avenue to Roosevelt, then up Roosevelt to 68th. Roosevelt is directly under the 7 Train for approximately 75 blocks, which creates a very long tunnel effect. My neighbor Stephen Nickson calls Roosevelt Avenue a tunnel of diversity, as hundreds of businesses of all different cultural backgrounds line the blocks under the tracks. Yet somehow all of this diversity creates a surprisingly unified effect. This was the avenue we walked down for 18 blocks that morning in order to witness a fresh Banksy.

We were still new to these environs. We had just moved from Boulder Colorado to Queens NY. After ten years in Boulder, NYC is quite a change, almost like living in a different country. The skies are bigger in Colorado, way bigger. So are the vistas. The smells, sights and sounds are radically disparate. The people are much less ethnically diverse in Colorado, and they also operate on a much lower vibrational level, baritone, even bass. In New York most people are working tenor or soprano levels. New Yorkers walk about twice as fast as people from Colorado. It's exhilarating, but exhausting. But you build up the stamina, just like in Colorado you build your lungs to acclimate to the altitude.

The downside is no joke though. A NYC dentist told us that teeth grinding is common problem here. Stress is a killer. You have to learn to manage stress. Time goes by faster here, so you have to find ways to slow it down. Otherwise you will age much faster.

On the other hand, contrary to expectations, we found the people in New York to be more neighborly than those in Colorado. We knew more neighbors in the first two weeks of moving into our apartment in Queens than we did after ten years of living in Boulder. The density of people here creates countless small communities, entirely based upon proximity and need.

I quickly began to appreciate what Queens and NYC had to offer. Just prior to the Banksy residency I had been reading Jonathem Lethem's fresh-off-the-presses novel, "Dissident Gardens," about Sunnyside Queens in the 40s through to the 70s, from back when it was a communist cell through to the folk, beatnik and hippy years. I was also taking walks and bike rides everyday through Queens, exploring even the graveyards. You could say I was steeping myself in Queens.

Three days prior to Genevieve's Banksy tip, on October 12th, I had gone with several of the gardeners I had met from the Sunny Gardens community garden, located behind the communal Sunnyside Gardens Park, to see Lethem read from "Dissident Gardens" at the Sunnyside community center. After the reading I told the gardeners that they were the real Dissident Gardens, which got a good laugh. But it was true. Lethem was using Sunnyside Gardens in his novel as a kind of metaphor of defeat; the open backyards of the ideal planned community were now fenced, the dream was long gone. But, far from gone, the socialist dream was still alive and growing in Sunnyside community garden and the amazingly communal park to which it was attached.

So now here we were, walking up Roosevelt with a Stroller, as if dropped in a Lethem novel set in real time, about to see this fresh masterpiece from Banksy, in the middle of his already legendary month long residency in NYC. There was a palpable sense of history to the whole thing.

I pushed the stroller off of Roosevelt and up 68th. There was a little Bodega on the corner of 38th Avenue and 68th and we could see some people crowded around the back, staring at the rear wall. Bingo!  There it was, still fresh, still unmarred. It shone with that mysterious aura of great art.

An hour later this art would be tagged by local hooligans. This was a recurring problem for fans of Banksy, because in the local tagger's eyes Banksy was stepping on territory. The local taggers were defending their so-called turf, which seemed petty in light of Banksy's gift, but for us it added an exciting element to the sport of the hunt, because it made it that much sweeter to get try to see the piece and get a good shot of it before it could be trashed.

We just made it this time, but it was a close one. An hour later and it would be tagged by Topic, then Team Robbo and finally Problem Child. Problem Child! Even the local punk taggers add something indelible to a Banksy piece in the process of destroying it.

Over the next 2 weeks of the residency we would witness more fresh pieces just in the nick of time before they were destroyed, and three of those times even as they were being destroyed. It was a race between my stroller/subway skills with my toddlers in tow and the punk taggers. And victories were sweet.

The text of that first piece we saw on October 15 in Queens reads, “What we do in life echoes in eternity."  Next to the words there is the life-size stencil of a man who is scrubbing the graffiti off the wall, erasing the word Eternity.

The quote is from Russel Crowe's Maximus in the movie Gladiator, and it is a variation from the original by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and philosopher, which is commonly translated as, “What we do now echoes in eternity.” For Banksy, to take a pop culture quote from a cheesy Hollywood movie, one that happens to be both terrible and great, which is in turn a quote, an echo, from hardcore western world Roman history, is a mark of his style. He is in the tradition of Warhol, marrying the highbrow to the low, and consequently, the elite to the common, the rich to the poor.

At first the piece struck me as a simultaneous celebration of both the artist, who persists through eternity, and a critique of those critics who deface art. But as with most Banksy pieces the meaning of the work was far more layered and resonant than it first appeared.

At one level this was a temporary piece of street art that was paradoxically about longevity, and that's why I loved the picture I was able to take of the girls standing in front of it, caught in that fleeting eternal moment. Somehow the girls looked as if they belonged in that scene too. The colors of their clothes even matched. I had extemporaneously captured a moment of their youth that spoke to eternity. Extemporaneous=out of time. It struck me that just by being alive the girls were erasing the foreverness of eternity, that our lives themselves, by being finite, were small erasures of timelessness.

But it also occurred to me just then that, not unlike figurative art, the girls are a literal embodiment of something that I have done in life that will echo toward eternity, i.e. having children. I liked being able to frame this thought in such a perfect way. And we did actually frame the shot later too and give it to my father as a gift, as my girls are, after all, also an eternal echo of something he did in his life, echoes of an echo.

But there was another twist to this artwork that unveiled itself only recently. A few weeks ago some Australian friends were staying with us. They saw the picture of the girls in front of the piece we have hanging in our living room and recognized the font in which Banksy had chosen to write "Eternity."

They told us the story. It turns out that Arthur Malcolm Stace, otherwise known as Mr. Eternity, was an Australian eccentric and soldier, a reformed alcoholic and thief who converted to Christianity and spread his message by writing the word "Eternity" in copperplate font with chalk on footpaths in and around Sydney for about 35 years, from 1932 to 1967. (The first tagger?) Later, on Wikipedia, I found out that in an interview Stace said, "Eternity went ringing through my brain and suddenly I began crying and felt a powerful call from the Lord to write Eternity." Stace was illiterate and could hardly write his own name legibly, but, he said, "the word 'Eternity' came out smoothly, in a beautiful copperplate script. I couldn't understand it, and I still can't."

Stace was breaking Sydney's laws, of course, and he narrowly avoided arrest about twenty-four times. Each time he was caught, he responded with, "But I had permission from a higher source."

It is estimated that Stace wrote the word around 500,000 times. Only one survives, found years later in a bell tower above Sydney's Post Office. One out of half a million! But now there's another one, in Queens, as if from beyond the grave, an exact copy of the divinely inspired original script. Banksy is "literally" echoing Eternity.

Banksy's entire oeuvre echoes Stace's. "But I had permission from a higher source." The story of Mr. Eternity provides a rich allegory to this piece, but it is so subtly presented by Bansky as to be hidden. It's for Banksy himself, and for the few in the know, like our friends from the land down under, and for the rest of us to be discovered later. Banksy's art is one which understands the joy and power of such discoveries.

This easter egg quality of Banksy's work can also be seen in the way his overnight graffiti art stick-ups around the five burroughs that month became like hidden treasures to be stumbled upon and discovered by the the residents of the city. Whole neighborhoods were caught up in the fun. And on that morning one lucky Jackson Heights bodega owner found himself in possession of a piece of art that was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if he could only find a way to remove it from the building and sell it!

It was an auspicious first day out for me and the girls. The moment is still echoing and will be for a long time. But the rest of the month would prove to be equally exciting. Every day, for the rest of October, there awaited adventures which would take us on a magical treasure hunt throughout the 5 boroughs of NYC.

2.. 


2. Sofia banksy in my ear

book launch

How about a New York Times Best Seller of a Dad following Banksy with his 2 and 4 year old girls.

The GeoGraff Girls Unmask Banksy in NYC

All about the hapless adventures of a Dad and his two girls following Banksy around NYC. An art book with photos and text. Thinking Taschen for a publisher.

the story and pictures are entertaining and thought provoking.

it could work.