Graffiti was the newspaper of people who did not own a newspaper. The wall was the front page. The spray can was the press. The tag was the headline. The headline said I WAS HERE and the headline ran every day on every wall on every block on the Lower East Side and the circulation was everybody who walked past the wall which was everybody.

The city called it vandalism. The city had a word for everything it did not understand. The city understood murals because murals had permits. The city understood billboards because billboards had leases. The city did not understand a fifteen-year-old kid climbing a fire escape at three in the morning with a can of Krylon to write his name on a wall that belonged to a landlord who had never visited the building. The kid was writing his name because nobody else was going to write it. The kid's name was not in the newspaper. The kid's name was not on a lease. The kid's name was on the wall and the wall was the only document that proved the kid existed.

The tags were signatures and the signatures were everywhere. The mailbox. The dumpster. The phone booth. The subway car. The handball wall. The door of the bodega. The awning of the laundromat. Every flat surface was a page and every kid with a can was an author and the Lower East Side was the most published neighborhood in New York City. More words per square foot than the New York Times. The Times had editors. The wall had no editors. The wall published everything.

The murals were different. The murals were graffiti that had grown up. The murals took days instead of minutes. The murals had colors instead of a single tag. The murals had faces and landscapes and messages that said something more than I WAS HERE. The murals said I WAS HERE AND THIS IS WHAT I SAW. The mural on the wall of the bodega on Clinton Street had a face that watched the block for fifteen years and the face was more reliable than the cops and more present than the landlord and more patient than the tenants.

I played guitar under graffiti for fifty years. The tags were above my head and the tags changed every week and the tags were the marquee of my venue. The venue did not choose its marquee. The marquee chose itself. One week the wall said SAMO. The next week the wall said something else. The wall was a program that updated itself and the update was a kid with a can at three in the morning and the kid did not know he was programming my marquee and I did not know I was playing under his name and neither of us owned the wall and both of us used it and the wall held both of us the way the wall held everything. Without opinion.