Gypsysavage’s Weblog

While traveling through Wilkes-Barre with my friend Beau we came across an overweight kid standing by the side of the road who was dressed up as the Statue of Liberty. He was promoting a public accounting firm that was having some gimmicky savings special. “Oh my God!” Beau shouted. “That’s the best commentary on America I’ve ever seen.”

I swung the car around, forcing the traffic behind me to swerve and slam on their brakes to avoid hitting me, and I tossed a camera into Beau’s lap. “You have to get a picture,” I said.

As I pulled into the parking lot of the firm, Beau raised the camera. The kid flashed a smile and gave a thumbs-up, and Beau snapped this picture. “Nice,” we said simultaneously, and screeched out of the parking lot, laughing our asses off.

We’ll take your tired, but mostly we’ll take your hungry…

I’ve begun to cover a story about my good friend, Beau (a.k.a. Optix), a guerrilla aerosol artist whose nom de plume riddles the urban skyline of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He is part of a sub-culture whose art is taboo, in fact illegal, and he prides himself in gaining access to seemingly impossible places and using brick walls, trains, or the underside of a bridge as his canvases.

Walking downtown, Beau says, “Check this one out,” and points to the scrunched and exaggerated letters that tower above a fire escape of an old corporate building that spell out some inside joke or a name. But it’s not the vibrant colors or the detail of the piece that I find fascinating, its how the artist got up there and planted his flag, a piece of art that the whole city can see, like or not. That’s the thing about aerosol art; it’s definitely in your face.

Ironically, instead of being arrested (again) for his craft, he was approached by the executive director of a non for-profit arts program and the director of the Business District Operations to spray paint privately owned, dilapidated downtown buildings in an effort to beautify the city.

I look forward to covering this story, not only because it’s a great chance for local artists to come together and share their talents, but it’s chance that my hometown might look a little more… colorful.

Southern New Jersey’s rural landscape is a vanishing commodity. Farms and woodland are almost utterly spent, replaced by five-bedroom houses whose development is ravenous and eerily similar in appearance, springing up from the ground faster than what was originally planted there. To take from Alexander Pope: Grove nods at grove, each house has a brother, and half the neighborhood reflects the other.

So, I savor the opportunity to walk my dogs in a patch of woods a quarter of a mile from my house. Here, I can free my lab and golden from their leashes, and watch as they sniff and roll in the gross remains of dead things, swim in one of several ponds, and meet with other dogs that smell just as bad and canter just as happily along the beaten paths that wind their way though the wooded acres of the park.

You could almost call it a community of walkers, good people that enjoy every moment of their pet’s supervised freedom. It is a community of people that savor just as much as I do one of the few sanctuaries left in an ever-growing, sprawling suburbia.

One of these walkers, a gentleman by the name of Ben, is amateur photographer. He was kind enough to take a picture of my golden, Sam. Thanks, Ben.