HOME FEATURES COLUMNS FILM LIT MUSIC BLOG CONTACT		Lit Free Agents: A History of Washington, D.C. Graffiti compiled by Roger Gastman Soft Skull Press ISBN 1-887 128-94-8 Dondi White: Style Master General: The Life of Graffiti Artist Dondi White by Andrew "Zephyr" Witten and Michael White Regan Books/Harper-Collins ISBN 0-06-039427-7 (Originally published in the Wire) The code of the streets is found on the walls, inked with grace and traced in struggles and squiggles. In a 1995 interview, legendary graffiti artist Dondi White explained his first real exposure to those sacred languages: "(I) think I got into it on my own, because as I would go to different neighborhoods I would always look on the walls to see what gang was in the neighborhood. I was always reading shit on the walls." Once Dondi himself started dabbling in graffiti in the mid-1970s, he and his posse maneuvered the thoroughfares of New York with the keen awareness of amateur cartographers, keeping track of which way trains ran, what boroughs boasted the freshest styles and what landmarks afforded maximum visibility. Not only did writers like Dondi or Washington D.C.'s "free agents" have an acute understanding of Krylon and bubble letters; they were educated in the language of space and geography. Though these two books are both about "shit on the walls," they're also about how different those walls looked in two very different cities. For all its faults, Free Agents: A History of Washington D.C. Graffiti is an indispensable contribution to the culture's mythos, since (1) it isn't about New York and (2) hip-hop isn't giving the off-camera cues. Outside of Michael Walsh's Graffito, pieces of Stephen Powers' The Art of Getting Up and the numerous volumes on Los Angeles gang graffiti, so few books have strayed from the "canonical" stories of the five boroughs and Wild Style. Editor Roger Gastman, who first caught the bug as a part of the city's proud hardcore scene, does an admirable job introducing readers to the D.C.-area's many eccentric characters. There's Scratch Master Kyle (SMK) leaving his initials in front of the White House and roughneck Cast keeping a running log of enemies to beat down alongside his graf conquests. We meet Cool Disco Dan, a pint-sized Go-Go graf legend with an almost terrifying addiction to getting up. At one point, he even begins yelling his own name at every Go-Go show he attends, essentially "tagging" the groups' live recordings! The problem with Free Agents is that it rarely plays to its own strengths, opting to trumpet individual legend over regional exceptionalism. Washington D.C. is weird. It is one of the nation's most dangerous cities as well as one of its most sacred. It is a heavily policed sliver dotted with lawmakers and monuments, and yet it boasts one of the more storied traditions of artful vandalism, refracted through different hip-hop, hardcore and Go-Go scenes. Contributor Neal Eckard makes it a point to introduce the local quirks and hardcore tendencies of the city's unique Go-Go culture in the excellent Disco Dan chapter, but the book as a whole rarely strays from its "yearbook"-style approach, meaning little attention to chronology, context or local and scene politics. In contrast, Dondi White: Style Master General is important precisely because Dondi's story is so New York: a sweet soul full of life, flavor and contradiction. Curators Andrew Witten and Michael White do an astounding job putting together the pieces of Dondi's life, collecting elementary school drawings, rare photographs, private sketches and family portraits to make this one of the most compelling, beautiful and stylish graffiti books ever published. From his childhood sketches of Julius Erving and Jesus on lined filler paper to his 1980s gallery work, the book succeeds in transmitting that lust for life that outlined all of Dondi's pieces in marvelously divine, unseen strokes. It is often argued that the "right authorizing frameworks" are the only thing preventing art snobs from seeing the best graffiti craftsmanship for what it is-not primitive but providential; not reckless but careful, transient and disciplined; too fast to stand around and intellectualize, forget the color wheels and canvases. The dozens of glimpses into Dondi's private sketchbook-bold and clean black ink against aged, frayed and formerly white paper-attest to the man's precision. In commentating on his train work, Witten (better known as graf pioneer and Dondi associate Zephyr) and an assortment of old school cats don't merely memorialize a fallen writer, they mourn the passing of a man who could turn a steaming, silver slug into an undeniable and confounding work of art. Well, the art world did catch on, and the book is also about that odd, early-1980s pollination of graffiti/hip-hop culture and downtown gallery hipsters; one terrific two-page photo shows Dondi and scenester (and Wild Style actress) Patti Astor at a downtown opening, replete with fine wine and a suave Jean-Michel Basquiat looking to be looked at in the background. Dondi's pieces from this period are unsettling and nervy. At first they seem uncomfortable and tentative on canvas, but with pieces like Anno Domini or Psychological Suspense it was clear that his minimalism was by choice. Given the focused childhood of school and church that Witten and White describe, Dondi's juxtaposition of religious and B-Boy iconography-as well as his interest in gallery exhibition-seemed a natural progression. By the time he died in 1998, Dondi White had done everything a one-time "vandal" could ever hope for. Ultimately, Dondi fell victim to the crisis of AIDS that had grown up and flourished alongside his beloved culture, and in this regard he was as much a victim of New York as he was an exemplar of the city's wide-eyed, rags-to-riches possibilities.