[00:20] Meg: Hi. Welcome to Desperately Seeking the '80s. I am Meg.

[00:25] Jessica: I'm Jessica, and Meg and I have been friends since 1982. We got through middle school and high school together right here in New York City, where we still live.

[00:34] Meg: And this is a podcast about the crime and culture of that period of time.

[00:38] Jessica: Yes. And I cover pop culture.

[00:41] Meg: And I do ripped from the headlines. Okay, Jessica, before we get started, I have some interesting information for you.

[00:50] Jessica: So you've you've pre information information.

[00:53] Meg: Exactly.

[00:54] Jessica: A preamble.

[00:55] Meg: And I think you might I don't know, I think you might be interested in the fact that our listeners are reaching out no.

[01:03] Jessica: No.

[01:03] Meg: Yes. In the form of feedback.

[01:06] Jessica: No. Yes. Oh, God, it's good. Oh, yay so far. Yay. What do these delightful people have to say?

[01:15] Meg: Well, slight corrections, which is totally cool, but I feel like we should address them.

[01:21] Jessica: All right, let's air the grievances

[01:26] Meg: Ah Future Wave, who doesn't want to be a douche, by the way and I let Future Wave know that he or she or they are, in fact, not a douche. To let us know that Jay McInerney was actually nine years older than Bret Easton Ellis, and he went to Williams. He did not go to Bennington.

[01:47] Jessica: Thank you, non douche, Future Wave.

[01:50] Meg: I said. We really appreciate that.

[01:52] Jessica: That is good feedback.

[01:53] Meg: And another thing from Michael, who actually is a good friend of mine. Peanuts are not nuts. They are legumes.

[02:04] Jessica: I'm taking that one to the bank. That's a good one. Thank you, Michael.

[02:08] Meg: Yeah. And I'm sort of excited by this because it means that people are listening and they're responding. So I encourage people to send us your feedback.

[02:18] Jessica: Well, and I had a little bit of feedback today that was very unexpected. It was a direct message through Facebook, Meta, whatever it is now from a very old friend named Faith. Hi, Faith. Who reached out to say how much she likes it and then gave me an idea for a future podcast that I'm already getting very excited about. So. Thank you, Faith.

[02:40] Meg: Awesome. Yes. You can reach out to us through Instagram, through Facebook, on our website. We love it. Okay, you ready? I'm going to do your engagement question now.

[02:52] Jessica: Okay.

[02:52] Meg: I would like you to tell me if you remember a garbage strike from your youth?

[03:01] Jessica: I remember the stench, and I remember walls of garbage bags, of festering garbage bags on the curbs.

[03:12] Meg: Yeah, that's what I was trying to explain to Joe, my husband. They must have been 6ft high, if not more, these piles of black garbage bags. And do you think that that was the garbage strike of 1979, perhaps? Or 1981?

[03:31] Jessica: Well, there were so many. Well, if there were two of them, I can say quite safely that they've blended together in my crumbling memory. But I do remember actually, that's not entirely true. I say that I would remember the 1982 one more vividly.

[03:51] Meg: That's a more famous one for sure.

[03:53] Jessica: Okay.

[03:54] Meg: But I am going to start in 1979, because it's such a damn good story. And my sources are a The New York Times article from May 12, 1979, by Pranay Gupte, an article in Popular Science magazine, and an interview on NPR. Oh, and a wonderful video that I found on YouTube made by the artist Christy Rupp in 1979 that oh, my goodness. I cannot wait to show this to you after we're done.

[04:28] Jessica: Jessica what kind of artist was Crispy?

[04:31] Meg: Christy.

[04:31] Jessica: Oh, Christy. Oh I thought you said Crispy. And it's like, all right, well, I'll roll with it.

[04:37] Meg: Well, actually, I address it in my story, so we'll come back to that.

[04:40] Jessica: All right. I really have to say, though, I'm very chagrin that it's not Crispy. All right, hit it.

[04:49] Meg: All right. On Thursday, May 12, 1979, a woman was walking to her parked car on Ann Street, just south of City Hall. She felt a tug on her leg. The tug became a sharp, searing pain, and the woman screamed. When she looked down, she realized she was being attacked by a pack of rats, one of which was gnawing on her leg. A man who witnessed the attack ran to help her, attempting to use his jacket to swat the rats away, but even more swarmed him, and the man ran off to a payphone to call 911. The woman managed to make it to her car, screaming bloody murder and drove off with rats climbing all over her VW Bug. She barely escaped. When the police showed up minutes later they witnessed what they reported as hundreds of super rats, which are rats who have developed resistances to most rodenticides. They are up to a foot long and weigh nearly a pound. For some reason, the rats have gotten more brazen in the last several days, said Jean Cropper, a deputy health commissioner. The reason was because of a 19 day garbage strike that left trash and refuse rotting in the streets.

[06:19] Jessica: Okay, I just want to have a quick side note that I did just throw up and now need an oxygen tank to get wheeled in here. That is possibly the worst New York story I've ever heard that is like this. Oh, God.

[06:40] Meg: Just buckle up my friend. These are some fun rat facts.

[06:42] Jessica: Oh, I hate rats.

[06:44] Meg: According to 1979 Department of Sanitation poster that was plastered up and down the subway stations. I don't know if you ever saw it. I'm going to put it on the instagram. Rats raise a family every 30 days with a half dozen new garbage eaters in every litter. Rats can swim the Hudson River. Rats can climb a brick wall. Have you ever been by that wall near Wollman Rink?

[07:11] Jessica: Yes.

[07:17] Meg: I go there frequently because I love to ice skate in the winter. And when you walk by that wall, it's alive.

[07:24] Jessica: It's alive. It moves. I know I'm very upset right now. Go ahead.

[07:32] Meg: Rats. These New York rats.

[07:34] Jessica: They're special rats.

[07:36] Meg: They jump 8ft in the air. Rats are a living flea flophouse, carrying enough germs on their hides to destroy an army. Rats can gnaw through cement, oak planks, telephone cables, but not galvanized steel. That's good to know.

[07:54] Jessica: That's something can I make an outfit? Galvanized steel. Go ahead.

[08:00] Meg: Here are even more specifically New York City rat facts. Rats are provincial. They stay close to home. So East Harlem rats are different from East Village rats in the same way that New Yorkers are from Texans. Fascinating, right? Residential areas are better homes than touristy areas, and better habitats mean better babies. So rats prefer the Upper East Side to Times Square. We are sitting on the Upper East Side right now.

[08:33] Jessica: I am genuinely speechless. You're going to, thanks for this. I just want you to know that I'm going to call you at three in the morning, screaming, rats, rats. You're just gonna have to deal with it.

[08:45] Meg: This is a very fun rat story.

[08:48] Jessica: Oh God.

[08:50] Meg: In 1982, Sefta Viyavesis was the proud owner of a pair of black and white leather cowboy boots with red inlaid snakes slithering up the sides. She's working at a bar, and late one night she closes up, restocks the shelves, stuffs her boots with $200 in tips, and then descends into the subway at four in the morning. So the rest of this is in Sefta's voice. I transcribed it from an interview.

[09:21] Jessica: Don't do a voice because I don't think

[09:22] Meg: No, I'm not going to do no, I'm just Sefta.

[09:25] Jessica: Okay, Septia.

[09:26] Meg: Sefta, sorry.

[09:27] Jessica: Sefta.

[09:28] Meg: You can imagine people that ride the subway at four in the morning. You have to really kind of watch yourself. And I sat on the train and across from me were these two huge guys that looked like they had been out for a night of partying. And I had only been sitting down for about a minute when the guy across from me says out loud, he was really loud, boisterous, what you got there on your boots? And I thought, I know he's talking about me, I'm just going to ignore him, ignore him. And he's like, hey there, little mama, I'm talking to you. What you got on your boot? Is that a rat? And I just thought, you know what, I'm just going to look straight into this guy's eyes and I look straight at them and I say, that's not a rat, that's a snake. It's a snake. And I thought, what are they on? You know? And he said, well, maybe that snake is going to eat that rat. And I went to kind of tuck my money to make sure it was safe and secure inside my boot. And as I got ready to do that, he kind of lunged at me and grabbed me and said, that rat's going to bite your finger off. And as soon as he said it, I looked down at my boot and when I had been in the basement restocking this bar, I had inadvertently run into a sticky glue trap with a rat still stuck to it and it was a live rat, a New York City style rat with a twelve inch long tail. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life. And I remember throwing myself down on the train and on the floor of the train and just screaming, help me, help me. And the guy started laughing hysterically. And he went, he's like relax, little mama, we're going to help you, but we're not going to be able to save your boot.

[11:37] Jessica: That is why we still live here. Despite the rats. Because the people are so good.

[11:44] Meg: Yes.

[11:45] Jessica: Despite the many murderers that you've already profiled.

[11:48] Meg: Right. So now I'm going to talk about Christy Rupp for a little bit. In 1980, the artist Christy Rupp lived on Ann Street, where that rat attack that I told you about at first, where that rat attack happened and was both shocked and inspired by her rodent neighbors. She used the rat on the Department of Sanitation poster to create posters of her own and pasted them all over the city. Wherever she found a rat infestation, she would put one of these posters in order to warn people wandering by. So as you're walking, you would just see have you ever seen them? It's like graffiti, except it was like a poster of a very realistic looking rat. And when people saw it, they would know, oh God, I better cross the street. Okay, so it was art, but it was also like a warning sign, a public service announcement. Absolutely. And she went on to create an art exhibit that was displayed at The Times Square Show. Have you ever heard of this? This was in 1980, and it was housed in an old massage parlor in Times Square. And it was an incredibly influential, collaborative, self generated art exhibition that featured experimental painting, sculpture, music, performance, and video. And Christy showed spray paintings of rats on newspaper sets of life size plaster rats and her by now famous rat poster.

[13:18] Jessica: Wait a minute. So can we just roll back for a second? Sure. Is your segment today about garbage or rats? Rats. I can't. I love you. I support you entirely.

[13:32] Meg: I previewed this for Joe, and he was interested in knowing, having grown up in San Diego and not experiencing rats, if New York kids had really great rat stories.

[13:47] Jessica: Do you well, did you have an encounter?

[13:50] Meg: I guess they were rats. They were in the basement. I grew up in a townhouse I have to say, my mother's going to hate me for saying this, but I used to think, I mean, yes, we had a rat issue now and again, and we had roaches and again, of course. And they both came in like jumbo size, to the point where you imagine that they must have been like, cohabitating together and feeding each other and helping each other.

[14:21] Jessica: Well, that's a children's book that's waiting to happen.

[14:25] Meg: There are a lot of children's books.

[14:27] Jessica: About first off, I think it's despite my nonstop projectile vomiting throughout this presentation, I think that rats really do capture people's imagination. Because look at the fame of pizza rat.

[14:43] Meg: True. Very famous New York City rat.

[14:45] Jessica: Yes, but I was looking at apartments many years ago. It was the ten minutes when I was single, and I went to see a duplex, like a really cute duplex on the Upper West Side, and these two girls were living there, and they showed me the whole place and they looked at each other at the end of the showing and said, you shouldn't take this place. And I said, do tell. They said, rats come in through the toilet. And I was like, well, you could rock me to sleep. Thanks for that one. Yeah. Could you imagine sitting there and it's like a rat, just like hey.

[15:27] Meg: Well, I mean, my father said I've searched for apartments frequently in this city.

[15:33] Jessica: You can never go to a basement apartment, ever.

[15:35] Meg: Not a basement apartment. This is the best advice my father ever gave me. Not above a restaurant, never. Which seems like a no brainer, but unless you're told that, how do you know?

[15:50] Jessica: Well, also, apartments in New York, like in old tenement buildings where you'll have windows onto the street, and then it's a railroad, so it goes to the back of the building where the garbage cans are. You can't ever take a first floor apartment because you have new pets coming in straight from the garbage. So yeah, it's gross.

[16:13] Meg: Do you want me to tell you another rat story?

[16:16] Jessica: Well, of course I do.

[16:17] Meg: I don't know if I've told you this. This is actually a quarantine rat story.

[16:21] Jessica: No.

[16:24] Meg: I had a zoom with a friend, and I will not mention her name. I'll give her the heads up before she listens to this. But she had had COVID and she'd been in quarantine. It was right when things are beginning to open up and maybe there's some light at the end of the tunnel. And she goes out to dinner. No. With her friend.

[16:46] Jessica: No.

[16:49] Meg: Obviously sitting outside, because that's how we were doing it. And she thought that a cat jumped on her head.

[16:57] Jessica: Shut the fuck up.

[17:00] Meg: She saw the look on her friend's face.

[17:04] Jessica: And knew she was not a cat. God, did she have to chop her head right?

[17:13] Meg: I actually was having a zoom with her the next morning. She had a black eye and scratches on her cheek.

[17:21] Jessica: Did she goes directly to the hospital?

[17:23] Meg: Fortunately, her father is a doctor and he talked her through the whole thing and she was well taken care of. But isn't that horrible?

[17:33] Jessica: How do you go, you can't go on in life. You have to kill yourself.

[17:37] Meg: But she didn't, thank God, because she's a wonderful person.

[17:40] Jessica: I'm very glad that she didn't decide that that was the moment.

[17:44] Meg: As I recall, the restaurant people were like, oh, yeah, we used to put the garbage here. So they'd moved the garbage place and put a table there, not thinking that maybe the rats would go trying to find their garbage that they usually ate from, and instead finding a table full of people, they weren't thinking.

[18:06] Jessica: I can't go on in life.

[18:10] Meg: And of course, the rats were also starving because what, they couldn't figure out.

[18:15] Jessica: That the garbage was, like, 10ft away? I'm sure they were able to figure that out.

[18:19] Meg: No, because of all of quarantine, all the restaurants had been closed down for.

[18:23] Jessica: So long, they were very hungry, actually. I read about how they were becoming more aggressive, and that during the summertime, when people were eating outside and dropping food every place, that they were really wilding. Revolting. Although I have a weird New York City animal story that I don't know if I ever told you.

[18:45] Meg: Yeah.

[18:46] Jessica: So rats and roaches and pigeons are the expected wildlife of New York.

[18:54] Meg: Yes.

[18:54] Jessica: Right. And then there are the bird watchers, who, like, every now and then, there's a hawk or something really exciting. Right.

[18:59] Meg: My mother's a bird watcher.

[19:01] Jessica: Yes, I know. So this was easily 20 years ago. I was in remember when we had gypsy cabs? It was before Uber. So I was way uptown, way in Harlem.

[19:17] Meg: Well, explain what a gypsy cab is.

[19:19] Jessica: Okay, so a gypsy cab was basically proto Uber, right?

[19:25] Meg: Exactly.

[19:25] Jessica: Someone's car.

[19:27] Meg: People just rode around in their cars, right.

[19:30] Jessica: But they worked through a dispatcher.

[19:34] Meg: They had special license plates, so you knew it wasn't just a random guy.

[19:38] Jessica: Right. But that person. It was also just their normal car when they were not doing their thing. But they were always, like, beaters. They were always in a Green Cadillac from 1972. There was a lot of talking with the driver, and it was funny. And when we were kids, I remember being told, like, if you go into one of those, you will instantly be swept off into doom and death. But as a grown up, when you're, you risked it and it was not an everyday thing, it was usually when you were really far uptown, really far downtown, or in the outer boroughs. So anyway, it was a New Year's Eve, and it was freezing cold. Like, the kind of cold in New York where the sidewalk is like iron. It rings. Right. So a bunch of people got into a gypsy cab that we had called with me. We were just packed in there, and we had the wonderful experience of just zooming down Fifth Avenue. I love that. With not another car in sight. It was so great.

[20:51] Meg: Hitting all the lights.

[20:52] Jessica: Hitting all the lights. And then we started to get to Fifth Avenue in the 90s, which is really very posh. And we hit a light. So we're sitting there, and over the wall of Central Park comes a dark shape, and the gypsy cab driver and all of us are now stricken. And we're watching, like, no one can turn away because we don't even know what it is at first. And it takes its time, the lights green. We don't move. It takes its time and ambles across Fifth Avenue when we realize it's a raccoon. Oh, my God. And the raccoon taking its time. And it's no small critter. Like, it's a fat, nasty raccoon waddles its way across Fifth Avenue, calm as can be, and hops into one of the little planters around the trees that are all outside the fancy buildings on Fifth Avenue. So they're these very pretty little well tended planters, and it's really sweet. This thing pops over the little barrier of the planter and shits in the planter like it was its toilet, finishes and waddles back to the park. And all of us were silent, just, like, watching it like a tennis match. Everyone's head slowly turned, watched the toilet experience, and then turned back. And we're like, did you like, we know we're on drugs, but did everyone see the same thing? Okay, that happened. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. My fear is always like, what else is coming? So the rats, it's so horrific because, you know, they're always roiling someplace, like, just out of sight. They're waiting for you.

[23:00] Meg: It's not just one.

[23:01] Jessica: No, but that thing about the woman on Ann, they're, like, 20. Yeah, the Ann Street thing. That is the worst thing. Like, most horrifying and nauseating imaginable.

[23:13] Meg: It was a big news story.

[23:15] Jessica: Oh, my God.

[23:16] Meg: But to close this out oh, what's the upside? You have got to watch this video that Christy Rupp did. Please call her Crispy. No, because I would love it if she followed us or something, because she is a renowned artist.

[23:32] Jessica: Oh, is she?

[23:33] Meg: Yes, she is, as it turns out. I apologize. And this video that she did in the 70's is incredible and you can find it on YouTube.

[23:43] Jessica: All right, well, that is exciting. Cool. Thanks, Meg.

[23:49] Meg: Hey, Jessica, your turn.

[23:51] Jessica: Oh, good. Before we begin, I have to tell you that while we took our little break, my friend Steven was texting me, and I told him that we were in the midst of podcasting, and I told them we talked about rats. And Steven, who is always good for a quip, immediately texted back, oh, they have garbage parties all night long. I saw them doing a conga line on 49th street, and I don't doubt him. So I am really interested that we were talking about that you brought up Crispy Christy, who is Christy Rupp. Rupp. New York City artist. Yes, because I'm going to talk about New York City art.

[24:36] Meg: Oh, cool.

[24:37] Jessica: And what I'm going to talk about is the progression of street art to fine art oh, awesome. In New York City and I found out some really amazing things about graffiti in the city and why it became such a thing in the 70's and 80's and then what it morphed into. Okay, so my first question to you is when you think of subway graffiti, what do you think of, what do you envision?

[25:13] Meg: Well, there are a couple of things. I mean, obviously the subways were covered in graffiti when we were growing up, and I didn't necessarily look at that as decorative. But then I started noticing taggers around the city, and I started hearing interesting stories about different people who were taggers who would climb onto buildings and bridges and do sort of death defying feats in order to put their tags that were really elaborate. And that is an event in and of itself just to see art in just crazy places like that.

[25:48] Jessica: I, too, have those memories. And I also, just as a quick side note, I found out that there's also scratchiti, which is, you know, when you're on the subway and you see on the window that it's been scratched with a tag,

[26:01] Meg: That's different. Okay.

[26:04] Jessica: I was thinking about art, and obviously the ultimate New York City expression of art is graffiti. But I realized I didn't know anything about why it was such an iconic 70s to 80s thing. Like, why was that the time period? And in my research, I found out that as with most things that we are talking about on this podcast, we can trace the origins to the time period when the city was bankrupt.

[26:38] Meg: Okay.

[26:38] Jessica: And it actually all started during Abe Beame's time as Mayor and then continued on.

[26:44] Meg: And that's do you know that offhand.

[26:46] Jessica: 60s, right into the 70s.

[26:48] Meg: Okay.

[26:49] Jessica: Do you remember in the movie Fame, how there's the character, Ralph Garcia, Raul Garcia, and there's a scene where he goes home through the South Bronx and you see that he's just walking over rubble. It's like buildings have just been leveled. It's a war zone. Well, that is absolutely true. And also indicative of what was happening for kids in schools that were not as fantastic as the High School for Performing Arts. In fact, New York City was slashing all education budgets, and art specifically was the first thing to go. Grrr. Yes. And so there were all of these kids who didn't have an outlet, an artistic outlet at all. They also were so neglected by the city, and they were angry. And the combination of a need for an artistic expression and this anger actually motivated a kind of activism. And that's how graffiti began in the 70s, that it was all of these kids who could go to the rail yards where the subways were, and it was so easy to break into the subway as well, after hours.

[28:10] Meg: And just to clarify that that's where all of the subways were parked overnight, or I don't know when they were parked there because some of them ran during the night, but it was like the parking lot for subways.

[28:21] Jessica: Exactly. And they did all of this tagging, but they were experimenting and they got more and more elaborate, as you said, and more and more skilled at their art. And so what became, what started with I don't know what you call them, like the giant sharpies, but it's like a flat tip on it. Do you know what I'm talking about?

[28:48] Meg: I think so.

[28:49] Jessica: Anyway, starting with those and then spray paint.

[28:53] Meg: I bet it was competitive too, right?

[28:55] Jessica: Extremely. And people would tag and then write over someone else's tag. But in doing so, it created a community. And as with most things that have some kind of artistic basis and then there's a little competition, then there's a community. Now it's an art scene. So these kids, who were mostly boys, were running around the city doing this. And what happened was some of them became so well known, so ubiquitous, and they got so good, as you said, at getting beyond the subway and going onto buildings and even taking over billboards. And I read that they were able to cover an entire subway car in under 2 hours. So it's also like kamikaze crazy art, just art bombing.

[29:55] Meg: Right, but isn't it also sort of like why you go to the circus? It's like it looks impossible. How can you possibly do it?

[30:02] Jessica: Yes, and it was considered a scourge in New York.

[30:07] Meg: It was.

[30:07] Jessica: And my opinion, looking back on this, is that that's very racially motivated, as with many other things that we've talked about, that when those kids in the Bronx and Brooklyn and Upper New York were marginalized, this is just another reason to say, look at how bad they are. Which, of course, is insane. But out of this came some really, really big deal artists. And I was thinking, like, who were the big deal artists at the time? Who mattered? And I was trying to remember if I remembered any of these names, and I did. So tell me if you remember. Zephyr.

[30:48] Meg: I can picture it.

[30:50] Jessica: Yes, right. Like that's crazy dondi. D-O-N-D-I. Yeah, absolutely.

[30:56] Meg: But I don't know anything about who these people were. You just remember the visual.

[31:01] Jessica: Right. So can you imagine what a rush it was when you've been so silenced to have everybody in the city know your name?

[31:08] Meg: Right.

[31:09] Jessica: There was Lee Quinones and JonOne, Demon, Lady Pink. But there was also our good friend Keith Haring.

[31:18] Meg: Okay.

[31:19] Jessica: And Keith Haring became so well known because he was the next evolution in the graffiti as public service announcement as social movement with his Crack Is Whack. I am 90% sure that it was on like, we're in a playground where there was like a handball court. And that was during the period when crack cocaine came roaring into the city and really was killing people. And so Keith Haring did this enormous mural and with his signature look of the little figures that are dancing and radiating lines off of everything. And because he did something that was considered positive by New York City exec officials, it wasn't covered up, it wasn't taken down. And a lot of the subway art was sprayed.

[32:18] Meg: They tried to power wash it, but they couldn't keep up. That's what I remember.

[32:22] Jessica: Constant. It was a constant battle, so they said. And there was a perception that those subway artists were also violent, but they were not. So Keith Haring wound up becoming the darling of the downtown art scene. And we all know that now you can't walk into MoMA without buying a Keith Haring T shirt or mousepad or keychain. Jean-Michel Basquiat. Interestingly, less on the walls, more on things or rather not on the subway, but walls and things and signs around the city building.

[33:05] Meg: You can still see a lot of Basquiat stuff, which fortunately wasn't destroyed because he became so popular, but you can still see it on buildings Lower East Side.

[33:15] Jessica: And I was amazed to find that there are still if you look online, there are tours that you can take of surviving 80s graffiti art.

[33:23] Meg: Very cool.

[33:23] Jessica: So for anyone who decides to come to the subway, to the subway, to New York City, come and see it. Interestingly. Did you know that subway graffiti art is back on the rise right now?

[33:36] Meg: No, I did not.

[33:37] Jessica: It is. And as with what happened in the 70s and 80s, it's because of a social movement, or more accurately, sort of a societal change, which is COVID. So COVID took police off the streets, and a lot of police just said, forget it, I'm not doing this anymore.

[34:00] Meg: Right?

[34:01] Jessica: And the representation of the police in the subway specifically was at an all time city low during COVID which became an opportunity for graffiti artists to come back and to do incredible work. And they've moved beyond tagging. Okay. And they were describing basically like three train cars in a row that were an Alice in Wonderland theme in full color with some drug references in it and Alice and all of the characters, which is amazing. It is amazing. And of course, the city's first response to that was, it's bad. It's about drugs. And it's like, this I, so I saw photos of it and we should post it on the site. But it is glorious.

[34:56] Meg: I was just thinking, I don't look at the subways. I've got my ear pods in, or I'm looking at my phone or whatever. I'm not really looking at a subway car in order to see art, because that hasn't been a thing for quite a while. And now I'm going to open my eyes.

[35:16] Jessica: Yes, it's on the rise. And there's a commitment from our new mayor, Eric Adams, to put many more police in the subway, not specifically because of graffiti artists, but because, as we both know, there is a huge increase in.

[35:33] Meg: Violent crime.

[35:34] Jessica: Violent crime. So we'll see what happens with those artists. And if we get another rash of really fantastic street artists who become collected artists, who knows?

[35:46] Meg: Very cool. Thank you, Jessica. I have a story that I'm going to tell, not right now, but probably in a couple of weeks, that will dovetail on this. That is a ripped from the headline story.

[36:01] Jessica: Really?

[36:02] Meg: So this can be a partner segment.

[36:05] Jessica: Oh, here's another interesting thing. I read about the kids in the 80s who were doing this. They all learned really fast to wear rubber, sold shoes. Guess why? The third rail. I was going to say the third rail. Yes. It just occurred to me. Yes. So they learned pretty quickly how not to expire while doing their thing. And oh, the other thing that I was thinking about was it became like, subway art and graffiti art became kind of like a thing, like a cultural phenomenon that went beyond the city. Looking, I was researching everything and I saw, like, all of the tags. Not all of them, but a lot of them were someone's name and then a number. Okay. Do you remember that?

[36:46] Meg: Sure.

[36:46] Jessica: It was like John 156 or whatever. And I immediately remembered the worst movie ever with Timothy Hutton and Robert Urich called Turk 182.

[37:00] Meg: That sounds familiar.

[37:01] Jessica: Do you remember this? Yeah, it was from, like, 1984, I think. And the premise was that Robert Urich, who was Timothy Hutton's brother, was a firefighter who was injured and then not taken care of by the city. There was something and he was protesting it and he started putting up tags all over the city that was Turk 182 and mayhem ensues. But if you look it up on Rotten Tomatoes, it's got like a 15%. It's absolute garbage. But I thought proof positive that it had enough graffiti art, had enough weight to make someone in Hollywood have a big idea. Capital B, capital I. Oh, and the other thing that is sort of connected to this is I did a book, I packaged a book oh, my God. Like, 15 years ago. That was done by two of the guys who were the first hires at Def Jam Records okay, Cey Adams and Bill Adler. And the book was called DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop. And it was fascinating because it showed how street art affected Hip Hop art, which then shaped our advertising culture and then what's considered legit art. And a lot of that, you know, if you see this book, I highly recommend it. It started at that time. There you go. That's a little process. It just occurred to me. So in summation counselor. So Christy Rupp is a graffiti artist. She is. Or a street artist. A street artist. In that context.

[39:01] Meg: I think she would consider herself a graffiti artist. Yeah, of a kind.

[39:06] Jessica: I think. Yet again, we dovetailed.

[39:09] Meg: I know. Interesting.

[39:10] Jessica: Really weird. It's like a weird twin thing. It started yeah. I think we spend too much time together only. So, yeah, I love that you began with some listener feedback. And I just like to say that anyone who's listening, who has something that they'd love to know about New York City in the 80s, no matter how weird, grizzly, gory, funny or psychotic it may be, please let us know through Facebook and Instagram and our website, which is desperately80s.com. Com. And we will tackle the difficult topics that you bring to us.

[39:48] Meg: We would love to. And if you have a second to rate and review us on Apple podcast or Stitcher or Spotify, we would greatly, greatly appreciate it.

[39:58] Jessica: Do you want to hear something really cute?

[39:59] Meg: Sure.

[40:00] Jessica: So my dad was trying to rate and review.

[40:02] Meg: I love Bert. Yes.

[40:04] Jessica: The best. And called me to see if I could walk him through it.

[40:09] Meg: Yes.

[40:10] Jessica: And I was like, Call Meg.

[40:16] Meg: Actually, I think my mom could help him now, because I showed her how.

[40:19] Jessica: She was trying to figure it out. No, but he needed to put a nickname in, but when he tried to type it in, it wasn't working and I was just on the floor. I was like, I spend every day doing some kind of IT assistance.

[40:37] Meg: What I love is that my mom is your dad's tech support.

[40:43] Jessica: Is that the weirdest and most pathetic blind leading the blind.

[40:48] Meg: And also very sweet.

[40:50] Jessica: It's charming.

[40:51] Meg: And it actually warms me to know that she is trying so hard to promote our podcast.

[40:57] Jessica: Bless both of them. And very cute. My dad calls me every time he listens to a new episode and is always very enthusiastic. So I think it's nice our parents are still putting our finger paintings on the refrigerator. It is essentially. Thank you, Meg.

[41:13] Meg: Thank you, Jessica.

[41:15] Jessica: Until next week.