Aug 28, 2024 5 min read NYC

"Only damn fools pay no attention to visions."

Under Marcy Avenue Station.

All these shots were taken on or very near the western end of Broadway in Brooklyn, beneath the JMZ elevated track, between Marcy and Montrose Ave.

As always, if I've shown your work and you want credit, send me a note.

Thousands of people have worked on this over the years.

I find excuses to go here, because it's beautiful, and because there's a bar/coffee shop called Fiction on Hooper Street which is a perfect amalgam of the hundreds of eclectically-furnished community rooms I've loved across the years, and when I go there I feel connected to myself at all those points spread out across time and space.

People baked all these bricks, then moved them here, and stacked them in place.

A couple weeks ago I went out there to buy my buddy Hubs some birthday slices at L'Industrie. After we drank canned margheritas in the park, then walked down Broadway to the G train.

I wonder if it was one guy or two who climbed up on the Link to write this tag.

This is some of the oldest elevated track still in use in the city. I think this chunk is from 1888.

Why paint when you have graffiti artists?

There are several different vibes coming together here, which is of course what makes it so wonderful.

There are lots of ethnic groups and people of varying prosperity living around here, and no one group has a clear majority.

Zexor stretched the paint for this big job and you can see the rain eating away at it to bring back the brick. Killer texture.

These make for the best neighborhoods, because without a majority, no particular group gets too arrogant.

Rude but it looks great. I'm sure they had a reason.

That's why I hate TriBeCa. It's a beautiful area, but it's full of assorted cops and rich whites who're all living in fear of not wasping hard enough so it frequently feels like a suburb.

As a wanderer, I can tell you with certainty that the more homogenous a group, the less welcoming of outsiders they are. I guess this is obvious.

It wouldn't be hard to dip chain link in some kind of kaleidoscopic paint.

The world is a lot more interesting when all the people around are formatted different.

Plus everybody under an elevated seems to share in the compression and weight and the thunder passing by over head.

If you click on a sticker's QR code, your phone's dick might fall off. But I like how the pink plays through.

On certain days if you asked me, I'd say I was in New York chasing 3 men.

Hanging on with the left hand, writing with the right. High-grade creative process.

William Burroughs, Walt Whitman, and James Baldwin.

They drank the city's blood in a way that I as yet haven't.

But at least I'm smart enough to know...

Seems arbitrary to me, the authorized vs. unauthorized paint.

Only damn fools pay no attention to visions.

Kerouac put these words in the mouth of Old Bull Lee, a character based on Burroughs.

Kerouac definitely stole that line from Burroughs.

All those Beat fuckers were just pissing with Billy's bladder.

I think of Burroughs as every weirdo's grandfather. He jumped out of the plane just before take-off, giving up his seat to Shangri-La to stay here and teach us peasants how to see. And I love him for it. The bastard.