Scrawls From The Crypt: Caught in a Mosh '88

What is it?

Whoah! In hindsight this looks like an outtake from William Friedkin's Cruising (1980) with all those tight jeans and contorted facial expressions. Despite the homo-erotic underpinnings, this adolescent doodle is pretty much what concerts looked like in New York during the crossover period of the late 80's. Baldies, mohican mullets, fat longhairs and puffy white Reeboks flying overhead (nice "anarchy" shirt, dude). Unfortunately, there really weren't a lotta ladies to be found. And who could blame 'em? You social networking types should thank your lucky stars that heavy metal finally caught up to the fairer sex, 'cause all the attractive women I see wearing bulletbelts these days DID NOT EXIST in my youth. Developmental psychologists occasionally reference several important stages in a teenager's emerging identity that often cause a "spark" or "flash" of cognition. These milestones usually occur at age 10, 16 and 19. This might explain why whatever you were doing when you were 16 will probably retain some special significance for the rest of your life and always take you back to a very core sense of Self (for better or worse). This might also explain why the few drawings I kept from back in the day happen to be dated 1988. I guess that was a good year for me creatively. Sure, the drawings themselves were obviously flawed in every sense of the word but they were full of personal meaning and contained seeds of things to come. Which, reminds me, I gotta get back down in the studio. There's work to be done...

Caught in a mosh.