Writes Of Passage

Under a bridge in a desolate area not far from downtown, where the décor is warehouses and parking lots with giant square trucks, a blanket of paint covers the concrete walls that form the overpass. Hidden well below street level and sandwiched between a warehouse and a carved-out hill, the area forms a man-made gorge with a river of train track flowing at the bottom. Were it not for the occasional railroad engineer speeding by, the spot's colorful walls would probably go unnoticed.

The area -- graffiti writers call it "The Groove" -- exhibits the piece-by-piece product of steady hands, artistic minds and the illicit science of aerosol. Above ground, in the garages of Kansas City, spray paint means speed and sloppiness and dripping. But here, under the bridge, it means patience and crisp lines and colors blended together with glamorous ingenuity. There are backgrounds and foregrounds, cityscapes with tiny characters looming in their shadows. Most prominent, though, are names.

And with each name a twisted typography turns rectangular letters into spastic, wild style retreats from convention.

Through this outdoor hallway strolls a graffiti writer who, for purposes of this article, wants to be called FAUSSE, a twenty-something veteran of the local scene who now sees The Groove as an escape from the rest of the city.

The atmospheric Groove represents a sort of ideal to FAUSSE. In its sanctity, talented graffiti writers have left behind original, Technicolor versions of their tag names for other writers to admire and then outdo in well-considered locations throughout the city.

Just a few years ago, the pieces scattered across town on bridges and buildings were like minor versions of pieces here -- maybe not as elaborate and intricate, but still singular displays of guts and flair. Even the bombs and throw-ups -- tag names painted quickly, usually with only one or two colors -- were of a higher quality than they are now.

Things have changed. Lately, FAUSSE and other veteran writers see their ideal fading.

In graffiti, you start with quick, one-color tags (the quickly painted signatures commonly found on mailboxes and road signs), move on to bigger, more complicated throw-ups and then start painting elaborate pieces. If you're so inclined, you might start seeking legal walls to demonstrate the talent you can't always drop on illegal jobs. That's how it is, how it's always been.

Now, however, older writers aren't happy with what they see. More and more younger writers are simply producing talentless tags, without showing any interest in progressing. This disdain is nothing new in the world of graffiti. In cities around the world, graffiti writers have struggled with the unavoidable glacier that sooner or later chills any culture, no matter how renegade or underground: time. Now it's caught up with Kansas City.

Below the radar of police reports and Kansas City Star articles about faceless vandals who live to destroy property, there's now a rift. It has nothing to do with the illegality of graffiti, but with a definition of what graffiti should be.

"In a city so gray, I'd like to put some color in it," FAUSSE says. "Maybe it will make someone smile. But these people" -- the new generation of graffiti writers -- "don't know who they're hurting in the process."

That may be irreversible. Ego rules in graffiti. Humility rarely exists. And the old guard's only steadfast defense against rebellious minds is the game's first of several loose rules: You suck until further notice.

Last year,Graffiti writers of all varieties, young and old, toy and king, were surprised by the reappearance of a writer named DASE, who had reportedly left the city a few years before.

In recent months, his work has appeared here and there in town. The letters themselves, although original, don't display a particularly outrageous style. But DASE has experience painting full-color pieces, and his control over spray paint is clear even in the simple throw-ups that have recently made him the most widely respected bomber in town.

One late night this summer, DASE and another writer, ELSE, stood on a small platform above the front door of the United States Uniform Company's old building at 200 Southwest Boulevard and painted their giant throw-ups. They worked in a space of a few yards with nothing shielding them from the street and open-air but a ten-foot drop-off. DASE etched a three-color signature in off-white, outlined it in red, then outlined that in black; ELSE chalked up a blue imprint and topped it with a black and white outline.

On another night, they did the same on a billboard hovering near the traffic-heavy intersection at 39th and Broadway. Had it not been for the emergence of another writer last fall, such hits would have made DASE the unquestionable bombing king of Kansas City.

But perhaps no writer has ever attacked the city as aggressively as NOVA, whose crowning achievement came late last year when he painted a throw-up on a bridge at the crossover between I-70 and I-435; just days after the Missouri Department of Transportation removed it this spring, he returned to paint it -- bigger.