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Combining a detailed film analysis with archival research and social science approaches, this book examines how American Graffiti (1973), a low-budget and star-less teen comedy by a filmmaker whose only previous feature had been a box office flop, became one of the highest grossing and most highly acclaimed films of all time in the United States, and one of the key expressions of the nostalgia wave washing over the country in the 1970s. American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation explores the origins and development of the film, its form and themes as well as its marketing, reception, audiences and impact. It does so by considering the life and career of the film’s co-writer and director George Lucas; the development and impact of the baby boom generation to which he, many of his collaborators and the vast majority of the film’s audience belonged; the transformation of the American film industry in the late 1960s and 1970s; and broader changes in American society which gave rise to an intense sense of crisis and growing pessimism across the population. This book is ideal for students, scholars and those with an interest in youth cinema, the New Hollywood and George Lucas as well as both Film and American Studies more broadly.
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“We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.” In the age of commissioned wall murals and trendy street art, it’s easy to forget graffiti’s complicated and often violent past in the United States. Though graffiti has become one of the most influential art forms of the twenty-first century, cities across the United States waged a war against it from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, complete with brutal police task forces. Who were the vilified taggers they targeted? Teenagers, usually, from low-income neighborhoods with little to their names except a few spray cans and a desperate need to be seen—to mark their presence on city walls and buildings even as their cities turned a blind eye to them. Going All City is the mesmerizing and painful story of these young graffiti writers, told by one of their own. Prolific LA writer Stefano Bloch came of age in the late 1990s amid constant violence, poverty, and vulnerability. He recounts vicious interactions with police; debating whether to take friends with gunshot wounds to the hospital; coping with his mother’s heroin addiction; instability and homelessness; and his dread that his stepfather would get out of jail and tip his unstable life into full-blown chaos. But he also recalls moments of peace and exhilaration: marking a fresh tag; the thrill of running with his crew at night; exploring the secret landscape of LA; the dream and success of going all city. Bloch holds nothing back in this fierce, poignant memoir. Going All City is an unflinching portrait of a deeply maligned subculture and an unforgettable account of what writing on city walls means to the most vulnerable people living within them.
The definitive book on New York's subway graffiti movement, "Graffiti Kings" features personal interviews with the artists and more than 275 full-color, previously unpublished photographs that bring the movement's origins to life.
Cholo writing originally constitues the handstyle created by the Latino gangs in Los Angeles. It is probably the oldest form of the graffiti of names in the 20th century, with its own aesthetic, evident long before the East Coast appearance and the explosion in the early 1970s in Philadelphia and New York. The term cholo means lowlife , appropriated by Chicano youth to describe the style and people associated with local gangs; cholo became a popular expression to define the Mexican American culture. Latino gangs are a parallel reality of the local urban life, with their own traditions and codes from oral language, way of dressing, tattoos and hand signs to letterforms. These wall-writings, sometimes called the newspaper of the streets , are territorial signs which main function is to define clearly and constantly the limits of a gang s influence area and encouraging gang strength, a graffiti made by the neighborhood for the neighborhood. Cholo inscriptions has a speficic written aesthetic based on a strong sense of the place and on a monolinear adaptation of historic blackletters for street bombing. Howard Gribble, an amateur photographer from the city of Torrance in the South of Los Angeles County, documented Latino gang graffiti from 1970 to 1975. These photographs of various Cholo handletterings, constituted an unique opportunity to try to push forward the calligraphic analysis of Cholo writing, its origins and formal evolution. A second series of photographs made by Francois Chastanet in 2008 from East LA to South Central, are an attempt to produce a visual comparison of letterforms by finding the same barrios (neighborhoods) and gangs group names more than thirty five years after Gribble s work. Without ignoring the violence and self-destruction inherent to la vida loca (or the crazy life , referring to the barrio gang experience), this present book documents the visual strategies of a given sub-culture to survive as a visible entity in an environement made of a never ending sprawl of warehouses, freeways, wood framed houses, fences and back alleys: welcome to LA suburbia, where block after block, one can observe more of the same. The two exceptionnal photographical series and essays are a tentative for the recognization of Cholo writing as a major influence on the whole Californian underground cultures. Foreword by Chaz Bojorquez.
A rich source of inspiration for anyone interested in do-it-yourself culture, this is a guide to the materials and techniques used in today’s most creative and progressive art movement. In hundreds of pictures and illustrations and dozens of interviews with the world’s most famous artists, the authors show exactly how graffiti is made. From spray techniques and hand styles to tools and style analysis, this is a trip around the world for the tricks of graffiti writers. Includes • tips on how to create your own piece, tag and throw up • how to use textiles, glass, metal, concrete or wood • with Swet, Jurne, Mad C, Egs and Chob as some of the featured artists.
As dazzling as the art it celebrates, this volume is packed with 1,000 full-color illustrations and features in-depth interviews with more than 125 train artists and "writers" to provide unprecedented perspective into graffiti.