Blowing My Own Horn Dept.

Knowing me as well as she does, Pepita came home on Saturday with a brand new book as a surprise. The recently published Street Art and the War on Terror is a copious collection of the fiery graffiti that sprang up around the world in response to 9/11 and the War on Terror bullshit. The book, from Portugal, has been painstakingly edited by the London-based Eleanor Mathieson and Argentine-Catalan Xavier Tapies. It's lavishly printed with full page color photos of ballsy acts of civil disobedience from around the globe. Well known artists like Shepard Fairey, Dolk and Banksy are all represented, but most of the work was done by unknown and unsigned scribblers from Paris to Sydney to Baghdad.

Imagine my amazement when I turned to page 34 and found that the single image representing Seattle was an angry little piece of work by the Gurldogg herself. It's a stencil that Pepita imagined and I cut one summer night, and I sprayed it around town for about 3 weeks before the stencil bit the dust. Within a couple weeks most of the images were gone too, as expected. But somehow, someone in Portugal got a photo, and Pepita and I are now anthologized. And empowered. There's even a silly little blurb explaining how we "used one of the classic figures of American childhood to highlight the illegal torture." Sure. Why not.

I've done a lot of graffiti in my time, but this is the first time I've ever seen a piece of mine preserved for posterity. What can a gurl say? I'm chuffed.