- September 27, 2005
- Posted by Marc
Moniker Stories: Part VI
href="http://www.fotolog.net/labrona/">Labrona:
“moniker
story…this is how i remember it….my friends george and anil used to like to
make up names for people, nick names that had nothing to do with the
person..they called one guy in high school labrona for years and nearly drove
him crazy..a couple of years later we were drinking in the kitchen of this dive
apartment we had in banff.my friend george walked in to the kitchen with a big
felt marker and wrote labrona on the wall in giant letters. fast forward another
couple of years, my friend other comes to town and drags me out to paint trains
im standing there looking at my crappy drawing and labrona pops into my head and
now labrona is me…”
align="center">
/>
Blek Le Rat:
/>“Blek le rat comes from a comic “Blek le roc”, we used to read when we were
kids in the school yard. Actually, the comic was drawing by two artists from
Italy and published there ,later it has been translated into French by the
publisher and sold in France for kids in the sixtie’s. This comic was my bible
for a long time.Blek le roc was a rebel trapper fighting against the anglo
canadian army during the second war of independence of the US at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. I took that name and I changed “le roc “which means
in English” the rock” by the” rat ” which is the anagram of “ART” and rat was
the first stencil graffiti I did in Paris in 1981.”
/>
Pez:
“I was walking on the streets and i find two
happy friends and one say to the other. “look is a Fish(Pez on Spanish)”, i was
smoking and i have my lips like a fish when is eating on this moment, this
friends put to me this name “PEZ” and i like the leters P, E, and Z and i begin
to try to do a original form with this name, then i begin to make the first
letters and later the crazy Moby and more fishes.”
/>
Seizer:
Main
Entry: seize
Pronunciation: ‘sEz
Function: verb
- seiz.er noun
/>1 a usually seise /‘sEz/ : to vest ownership of a freehold estate in b often
seise : to put in possession of something
2 a : to take possession of
: CONFISCATE b : to take possession of by legal process
3 a : to possess or
take by force : CAPTURE b : to take prisoner : ARREST
4 a : to take hold of
: CLUTCH b : to possess oneself of : GRASP c : to understand fully and
distinctly : APPREHEND
5 a : to attack or overwhelm physically : AFFLICT
/>6 : to bind or fasten together with a lashing of small stuff (as yarn,
marline, or fine wire)
intransitive senses
1 : to take or lay hold
suddenly or forcibly
synonym see TAKE
It was 1993, I was a
sophomore in high school displaying classic rebellious behavior like taking acid
at school, skateboarding, and getting stoned and riding bikes. I did draw here
and there but I did not feel I had any true talent. I was taking a silkscreen
class and one of the older girls in the class had gone to San Francisco over the
weekend and had brought back a black and white zine-like magazine called “Fat”.
It covered graffiti, skateboarding, music, art and more. I immediately stole it
away from her explaining that it contained nothing of interest to her. I took it
home, made a few knife cut screens from some of the artwork and copied a piece
that read, “POWER”.
I had seen some tags and stuff but nothing as
dynamic as this. After painting “POWER” on the side of my postal jeep and
getting a lot of attention, I realized it was not a good idea to copy other
people’s graffiti. I was quickly informed that “POWER” was a pretty famous
writer in LA and the piece I had copied was out of the LA river next to other
infamous names like CHAKA, MILK, HEX, and WISK to name a few. After getting
schooled on the graffiti no-no that I had committed I went down to Tower Records
and grabbed any graffiti mags they had. Tower Records in Chico was pretty much
the only place you could find any up to date pictures of graffiti.
In
Hype Magazine’s 26th issue they did an article on Little Cesar and the Air Force
Crew, a b-boy crew from LA. I simply thought It just sounded tough, so I adopted
it. Dropping the “little” and changing the spelling, it became CEASE, adding an
“R” occasionally to add length. I painted a little, mostly under bridges, a few
trips out to the local yards, and one legal piece on the side of a tractor
trailer behind the local BMW motorcycle shop. A short time later a crew got a
legal wall right next to the trailer, this gave me an obvious example that there
were not only other people doing graffiti in my small community, but far better
than myself. I found out who they were, they had friends in common, and I made
sure I had an open ear every time I was around them.
GMC was pretty
much the only crew I knew about and If I remember correctly most of the kids I
knew started out representing GMC first because one of the most prolific
members, an older kid, also skated with us. Quickly the younger kids that I knew
out grew GMC and wanted their own. CIK was started by AROWS who ran shit in San
Francisco with ELSE/STEEL from ‘97 on. I was not tough enough, cool enough, or
good enough to be in the crew, but in 1998 when I made plans to move to Europe,
I suddenly had something they wanted. They wanted CIK up in Europe, so they put
me in by force under the strict rule that I had to get up over there. I think I
threw less than 100 pen tags the whole year I was there. But I sure did let
everyone know that I was in CIK when I got back. I don’t think they every really
put me in, but who knows.
I almost forgot, right after the birth of
CEASE, it became CE’S, and then SEES, and finally SEIZE. I realized that a verb
that actually meant something kind of violent was perfect for my projected self-
image of being hard. So I painted some more trains with KAYSE who was in CIK now
known as 4GET. I painted with ABOVE, who now we all know as that weird guy that
hangs arrows everywhere, and that was about it until 2002. At which time while
living in South Lake Tahoe, I took a picture of myself in the bathroom. I took a
white out pen and a sharpie to a blown up photo copy of the picture and out came
the SEIZER icon. An ultra mysterious image that was someone is everyone, and
actually no one.
SEIZER-ONE
If I could go back in time I
would have just chosen my birth name as a the moniker I choose really has
nothing to do with who I am what so ever.
src="http://www.woostercollective.com/images2/showchickmon.jpg" />
/>ShowChicken:
“Showchicken’
was a name that I gave my girlfriend once after her repeated self administered
hair cuts that gave her weird chicken-feather-like hair in the style of s
pecially-bred show chickens. I had been doing bloated littlebirds for a while
and I wanted to get them on a website. The web address
href="http://www.showchicken.com">www.showchicken.com seemed random and
suitable enough so that’s what I got. Now the name is applied to me. For better
or for worse. It’s catchy, weird enough and usually introducing yourself as
Showchicken and the blank expression you get back is worth it.