Aww man... I'm here in H-town trying to figure out what I wanna do for NYE... and Austin seems like it'll be off the chain.First Night - Hip Hop Block Party with of course the B-Boys... Austin Poetry Slam... DJ Nick Nack... and graffiti artist Nate Nordstrom... with special guests... NOOK and Blacklisted Individuals @ Congress between 5th and 6th... NYE Dec 31st!
Here's to a Happy and safe New Years!
I picture this thing like Dave Chappelle's Block Party...
More info:
Nate Nordstrom once stood in the Mojo’s alley, hearing teenagers talk about Sloke’s art. They didn’t know the 32-year-old beside them was responsible.
“There’s a secret identity,” Nate said. “They get to see your mark, and you get to scurry across rooftops or something.”
He remembered the Mojo’s saga in his house, where several fans whirled, and a wall was covered in silver, red, orange and green paint. Beside monsters and aliens, and the phrase “Good girls are never remembered,” a girl with a flower in her hair said, “It feels so good to be bad.” Along the stairwell were four stencils of a woman with wavy hair in a cutoff tank top and a skirt. Her statements were: “Welcome home, Nate.” “Where’ve you been?” “I missed you!” “Now get out of my house.”
He’s “old school;” Al Martinez taught him the basics in the early 1990s. He tells those who are serious about graffiti to get a mentor, to learn etiquette (don’t paint over someone’s work unless you’re better), to practice so you have more than the bubble letters of your name to put on concrete, to be more than a tagger, to be a writer.
“All these tags look like shit,” he said. “They were an original part of graffiti, they were your signature. But now, kids don’t want to learn. They learn how to do bubble letters, and then they go over our work.”
Nate helped form the No Boundaries Krew, which he said “put Texas on the map.”
“Today, there’s a whole new generation of writers: Friks, Gomer, Degas, Mes Cents, Heavy. They’re 18 to 25 years old,” he said. “A lot of kids, when they get into graffiti, they get into it really young.”
