After three delays, one of which was a canceled flight, I finally got into Manhattan around 2am Monday morning. Slept a good 8 hours and then started making phone calls before breakfast. One of those calls went to Logan Hicks, who now lives here, and we planned to meet up Monday evening for a few hours. Hadn’t met Logan before, so was glad to get to finally hang out with this amazing stencil artist. After wandering around the Lower East side of Manhattan most of the day, looking for stencils in the freezing weather, I hopped a train over to Brooklyn and rang Logan’s door. He was waiting for FedEx to mail a pile of packages, so we spent the first hour in his apartment. FedEx never came so we then wandered down the street to have some pizza and then went to his old studio (empty for the most part except for random studio things of Logan’s mate HAZE). His working warehouse location is heavily guarded due to the potential to rack (steal) all of his SABATOZ paint cans (Logan is the North American distributor for the brand). Other than talking about his new son, who tagged along (pun intended), Logan and I shared stencil stories, talked about the paint can business (much more competitive now), the art of being a successful artist, the trappings of the art world, and we caught up on mutual friends. Things got down to the book, so I showed him the first draft, edited with red markings by me and Jennifer before I left SF. He liked it and saw a few new artists whose work he didn’t know. Jetlag began to hit me when his girl showed up to their place. Logan had just given me a copy of “Stencil History X” from Paris. I already knew that some of the artists that I feature (Jef Aerosol, Logan, Peat W, M City) where in this French book. What I found out as I flipped through it was that some of the SAME photos where in there too! So began a mad rush to flip through my roughs and find as many of the same photos as possible. I think I found a dozen, and, to his credit, Logan only had one cross over (Peat had four!). As the jet lag got worse, I got a bit manic and messed up the page order of the print out. Logan was super nice about my going into editing mode and sat at his computer and hit me up with about two dozen new photos of his works and a few new Peat W. and M City pieces. One thing that kinda freaks me out is that Justine only used some of my photo selections for the first draft. This means that the replacements, which I didn’t have at Logan’s place, may be in the French book too! Logan offered to send me photos of the book pages (he got his copy from Chris Stain) if I needed them. Looking at his happy family, I thanked him and gently said that I’d never do that around this time of year. Calming down, his girl and I fondly recalled her days living in SF. Then it was off to trains back to Manhattan, a few of which my meddled mind missed stops on, making the trip back about 3x too long!
The Sun Ra Ship is Leaving this Planet!