So the plan. The plan boils down to stealing ideas from people, in a couple different ways. The first idea stolen has to do with finding a means to co-opt the open spaces of the city in a way that doesn’t put me on the wrong side of the people I’m trying to communicate with. Like I’ve worried before, the majority establishment doesn’t have any love for street art in any form, and you have to accept that even with the best intentions, a street artist is always going to risk harming those that live and work within that establishment. When ‘street art’ becomes perceived as ‘graffiti’, it devalues the homes and businesses that it exists on, regardless of intentions of it’s creator or the qualities of the creation. That’s a risk that I don’t feel I’m ready to take while I still feel that what I want to create doesn’t have the value, even to myself, to make that cost worth it.

      But it has to go somewhere.

      That’s where this stuff comes in. Ages ago, I heard tell of two enterprising chaps about town what that had some of these concerns that I have. Everything they made went onto this magnet sheet material to be spread around the city at their leisure. Everything was benign, non-threatening, harmless. ‘Green’ was the world they used, in that it doesn’t have any permanence unless others wish it. Legal, first and foremost.

     While that’s all well and good, what appeals to me most is that it makes this into something tangible, and object that can be interacted with, possessed and inserted into any context with a ferrous metal surface. To be honest, that quirk is more what this is about than anything else. I don’t care about being kid friendly, or acceptable to those that would frown on me otherwise. I want it to be my project and to be happy with it, and this is what I see as the path of least resistance towards that goal.

     As an added bonus, since I’ll be prefabricating everything, I have all the time to myself to produce things I’m proud of without the pressure of making everything out in the street. As an untrained visual creator at best, I need space and time, an environment where I can make mistakes without making people look at them. Unless I choose to. Which I imagine I will eventually.

     They don’t have to be very big, probably around postcard size for most things, perhaps larger on special occasions. I don’t mind them being subtle, easy to miss. Not invisible so much as unobtrusive, a reward to the observant and the vigilant.

     Hopefully a reward, I mean to say. Another perk of being able to make these objects is that I can tell immediately if someone enjoys them, if and when they take them for themselves.

     So that is the majority of the plan. The lesser part of the plan is where things get a little less palatable.

      So the point is that I want a piece of that. I seethe for want of it, to be honest. Seething for want of things both literal and figurative is how I am currently filling most of my free time. I do not count that among my healthier hobbies, so maybe this is a good thing to strive for.

      The problem is Fear.

      A problem is Fear. There are several problems but Fear is pretty much the top of the list.

      There are a lot Fears, like Punishment. Denver will drop a hammer on you for graffiti, relative to a lot of other cities with much bigger graffiti problems. Even murals and commissioned pieces about town were destroyed when Obama showed up during the elections. Some of the yokel in this city coming to the fore, this undercurrent of resistance towards what bigger, older, and grungier towns have come to regard as just another part of life. You get caught here, they make you pay for it. Knowing how great my Good Fortune is, getting caught pulling this sort of stunt is pretty much a guarantee.

      And I Simply Do Not Have the Time or Patience for That Bullshit.

      Which dovetails nicely into the second Fear, which is Legitimacy (Or Lack Of). A pretty big part of the mystique of street art is the risk one has to be willing to run get make a Statement. If it means anything to you then you have to be willing to pay for it, whatever the cost is. It’s what makes this Powerful. As well you run the risk of destroying Legitimacy if you are an Imitator, which I am, and has been a part of what is going to occur here since the beginning.

      Which becomes the Fear of Inadequacy. Maybe, maybe you can get a free Legitimate hall pass if you happen to be talented. But I have never really been a visually inclined creator, with little education and even less practice in drawing and painting and so on. There won’t be a spot and an immediate place in time where I will be able to create anything worth looking at, even to mine own eyes.

      What is comes down to is that as it is now, Fear is still greater than Want.

      So what I need is a Plan.

      And a Plan is what I have.

     So I must confess to an occasionally fanatic interest in foreign street art. It may take some time to make this particular interest relevant to how I feel about what Denver is and is not. But. The first thing that grabs me is the compulsion of these artists to forcibly express their ideas and emotions on their environment wherever they find it instead of where they are offered it. Part of what a city is the blank spaces that nobody really owns. The park, the sidewalk, etc. Some people paid for it and some did not, but everyone gets to help themselves to it. There’s a pretty good chance that whoever paid for it is probably even dead and several different generations past. But these things that no one owns, they have a shape and a texture and a location. Most of them are blank. They have a potential because people have a potential. The potential that a street artist sees is a vehicle for the jumble of crap inside their heads.

      If you don’t have this perspective than the ordinary vehicle for the jumble of crap inside people’s heads is called a gallery, or, if you happen to be dead and/or famous and people liked the jumble of crap you had in your head when you were alive, it is called a museum. And these are pleasant enough, but the space within them is finite and the time and money required for them is prohibitive. If you don’t have the time or the money, but still possess the unlimited human capacity for creation, then you have to take it somewhere.

      Or you could just cut straight to the chase. Really if you aren’t concerned about consequences, or just feel entitled from the get go. Anywhere people go, you might as well show them something. Billboards, dumpsters, post boxes. Most of us fed our resources into those, too, in one way or another. Why not come to collect. If you have something that needs to be said, you may just be stopping at nothing.

      Now that I’m well into rambling I feel like I should not be trying to explain a process that heretofore I haven’t had anything to do with, and that I can’t put into a coherent framework. I don’t actually know the compulsion at work in producing street art. But maybe it doesn’t matter. In the end, what a street artist does is provide a product that does not have a demand, so you imagine one has to take their jollies in the means of production. Legally there is what you might call a negative demand, in that the law prohibits and penalizes this creation as vandalism. Even beyond that, there are those people afraid of the ideas and expression of others that will vilify volunteering art on the otherwise unoccupied blank spaces in their immediate spheres of influence.

      That is where, in this country particularly, that street art butts up against so much resistance. Graffiti here in the eyes of the majority establishment is synonymous with criminals who are far beyond defacing property. Street art means gang tags to the nine to fivers. Given that they are uninitiated they hit pretty close to the mark on this one. American street art in a large majority is inspired by the gang tag. Not exclusively, but still, a large majority. Just a name, is all it takes to claim a little part of a city for yourself. No matter how complicated and intricate you make it, it is simple and pointed.

      And in my eyes, ultimately shallow. Elsewhere, in Europe and a lot of South America, your name is not really important. Instead of a name you have to show an idea or an icon or a character or a message, and show it in new places and new ways while still having something that is yours. If you do that long enough, then your name becomes important to those who follow along, while still showing something with substance to those who don’t and who never will.

     It feels like an act of love and not an act of possession.

     So the thing about Denver is that we’re all still just yokels who happen to live in a moderately sized city. We are an oasis in the desert of America’s mid-bits, we are adrift in a sea of small towns and middle-of-no-wheres. We can take sanctuary in our mountains or our suburbs, our little satellite retreats. We can hide from our city if we choose to, if it offends us or smothers us or depresses us. This is our crutch that keeps us from being what might be ‘city folk’. We have no sense of the internal pressure of a city that can be an entire world to the people inside; a New York, a Rio, a Hong Kong. Neither are we an old city, a city that has seen the rise of our nation, or been the source of the greatest of our people. Our city is not built on the crypts of our ancestors. It is not made of the stones that saw the blood, sweat, and tears of all our collected forefathers; we are not London, or Paris, or Moscow. Our wealth and prosperity was brought to us by others, by Texans and Californians and others still. When I see our city and those of us who live in it, what I feel is that by and large we watch the world, but the world doesn’t watch us.

     It isn’t as though that I consider this a flaw in any way, as if this leaves us lacking in capacity, but rather just as the way things are. It gives us opportunity, and perspective. Denver does not give us an identity, the same way Boston or San Francisco adds an identity to the people born there. We can believe whatever it is we want, with only the scrutiny of one another. The only expectations that this place has are the ones that we have. We can see anywhere in the world, meet anyone, and this is still home, even when it has nothing to say about itself.

     Every day, we wake up to see a city that is a blank canvas.

     And by we, specifically I mean me.