When I was coming up, bombing in abandoned train yards and throwing up "Hello My Name is" stickers in train stations, I was only trying to be like the legendary Bronx TATS CRU. This graf crew not only revolutionized the world of graffiti, but urban art in general. Unfortunately, most folks in the States, outside of New York, know about them. Well now's your chance - "TATS CRU: THE MURAL KINGS" is a feature length documentary, that details the story of the world famous TATS CRU.
The film follows the world famous TATS CRU as they produce their mural for The Graffiti Hall of Fame in Harlem and prepare to uphold their title of The Mural Kings. Inter-cut with exclusive interviews, you get a first class ride of twenty-five years of graf history, as three Bronx kids begin their artistic careers by creating subway graffiti. Check the preview......dope!!
The first time I noticed Bloods in New York was the summer of 1996. I had just come back home from my 1st year of college. The summer time in the Bronx was no joke then, everyone outside, hot as f#ck, rap and meringue music blaring from every other window. Kids in droves outside, by the hydrants, at the public pools, in front of their neighborhood corner store, or at the park, playin' ball and gettin' blunted.
I had stopped running with a gang by then, mainly cuz of all the sh#t it got me into. Fights, stabbings, even gettin' shot at. It usually went down at the local hot spots, the Fever and the Skate Key, both of them Bronx institutions, where all the kids go to skate, dance, hang out, get on girls and then catch the latest drama afterwards.
One night after Skate Key, my crew and I neglected to walk an affiliated crew girl all the way home from the train. She lived a block away. When word got back that we didn't, the "governing body" for our "organization" deemed we were to be "violated," cracked across the face as many times as necessary with brass knuckles until we got the message that crew was always supposed to see the females to their door, no questions asked.
That's about when things stopped making sense to me - your own crew would f#ck you up, just like every other hater and rival crew? So we skipped the beating and declared ourselves our own entity, a rogue group within an organization. Needless to say, that didn't go over well. We took a whole lot of beatings, and gave out a ton more, but we never violated each other. But something just wasn't right about the whole thing, so I figured the only way out was to get out of the Bronx.
And then my first summer back, I noticed the red flags in Parkchester. I mean, all I knew about red flags was what I saw in movies like Boyz N the Hood and Menace to Society - some California jeri-curl sh#t that was as far away from my New York reality as the physical difference that separated the two coasts. I just figured it was different here - I mean we had gangs - Nyeta, Latin Kings, Zulu, Black Guerrilla Family, the Decepticons, and all kinds of loose knit crews and clicks, but nothing organized like in Cali. I mean, it really was about blocks when I was coming up, neighborhoods. Like I came up in Bronx River projects, so we wouldn't go to Soundview projects cuz they would f#ck us up for not being from there, and so on. So when I saw the red flags, something just stuck with me.
What I didn't realize at the time were big things, humongous things that would change the whole course of an inner city, and its children. Things like the Rockefeller laws and Rikers Island's George Mochen Detention Center (GMDC). I also didn't realize why I was in a gang in the first place, why I was living on the street, homeless, with a bunch of kids I really didn't know from sh#t.....
