A WILD STYLE AND A DEADLY ART BY NIGEL CLARKE

2 CommentsMonday • October 31, 2011 • by CLOUT

By Nigel Clarke | @masternever

 In the late ’70s, in lower Manhattan, a skinny Black kid wrote all over Smith Projects. He wasn’t a graffiti writer, but he threw up tags, burners and pieces. He wrote THE DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL for all who would see.

He was writing for his friend who got hooked on smack. He wrote for his family and his community. He put his hood up! When people looked at his art, they saw some Karate or even Kung Fu. Others, trapped inside the projects, saw his art as a way out. Others saw it as he intended it. A means of survival. The young artist used his skills to help those around him. He kept writing, hoping that the city would remember him. Momentarily this kid, lost faith in his art. He started losing faith in his city. He changed his tune. He started writing “Money is the real deadly art of survival!” The city listened. Shakespeare listened. Then Romeo and Juliet jumped all of the Shaolin monks in the middle of Time Square. Shakespeare took over “The Deuce.” Shakespeare was mob deep.

Although briefly sidetracked, he remembered why he started writing in the first place. He wrote for his hood. Eventually a young Power Rule listened. The young lord went All City. His writing was seen by a visionary. The only artist to rewrite graffiti history without a can. Charlie Ahearn is known internationally for his groundbreaking film WILD STYLE, which introduced the elements of Hip Hop in a documentary style film. The film made Hip Hop universal. Hip Hop went All World. However, before WILD STYLE was even conceptualized, before Ahearn gave Fab Five Freddy any dap, the young film maker created the martial arts film, THE DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL, which summarized the story of the Smith Project’s own, real life hero, Nathan Ingram.

Ahearn, had the knowledge and foresight to see the similarities between martial arts culture of the seventies and Hip Hop. Before the Ruler Zig Zag Zig Allah put this combination together, Ahearn was documenting Nathan’s deadly art, graffiti, seventies martial arts and break beats. I sat down with Ahearn, north of the Smith Projects and about eighty blocks from Tiffany’s. He spoke on the correlation between Hip Hop and martial arts cinema, the importance of Time Square for New York City’s culture, seeing emerging Hip Hop and how Nathan Ingram’s profound story, would give birth to a wild style that changed the world.

Although I have seen WILD STYLE a number of times, I had not recognized Nathan, who appears in the opening scene as a transit cop, chasing Zorro through the train yard.  “Nathan is in WILD STYLE. Nathan is chasing Lee. I made sure that he is in the movie. At the time when I met Nathan, I was fascinated by street culture. I was going into the Smith Projects. I had already had a number of epiphanies. I was seeing something amazing and I did not understand what it was. I went into Smith Projects with a 16mm camera. My idea was an interactive cinema. You go into to a community, you shoot something and you return the next day and project in on the wall. It draws people to what you’re doing. It’s an alternative to the art world,” said Ahearn.

Ahearn’s project flick, which took a year to create, summarizes many of the real life experiences of Nathan Ingram, in a martial arts fairy tale form. Nathan, plays himself and  he is the focus of attention, from a rival school, run by the infamous Handsome Harry, at the Disco Dojo. Harry, is a cheeba smoking sensei who exploits his students and conspires with Mafia bosses and a couple of ninjas to take out Nathan. The Ninja’s even steal son’s baby. Nathan is also blamed for being involved with someone’s woman and like every other guy in the hood, the decision of living as a square or the fast dollar and its illegal life.

In the end, Nathan chose his art instead of hustle and flow.

Ahearn himself weighed in on the construction off the film and offered his own critique saying, “It was a Super 8 movie being done on weekends with kids who were in high school. It was like an after school film project. You can see that in the film. The Super 8 sensibility, the way in which the film was made, I would meet with Nathan largely on weekends when people were available. We would talk and I would shoot scenes, the scenes were more product of or reflection. I was trying to imagine what he imagined. I was trying to create something that reflected his fantasy or the way he imagined his world, which included — as you know the Deadly Art of Survival was the name of his school. Part of what they did, they created live Kung Fu plays or shows in the community. A lot of this, reflected stuff that they were doing. They would come to a community center and have a play with martial arts in it and that’s what this is. I took that reference point away, I did not show them doing a play. I show them doing a movie. Not to say I am not responsible for its weak points.”

Those weak points are overlooked once you realize the importance of the film from a  Hip Hop and martial arts perspective. Predating THE LAST DRAGON, it may possibly be the first film that merged martial arts and Hip Hop culture.

The participants in the film were Nathan and his students, who would put on live demonstrations at various community centers throughout the city. Their acting in the film, is an extension of their live performances. They weren’t training to be actors, or ever been on television, they were trying to communicate a message and help others appreciate an art form that would help them surmount the debilitating conditions in which they lived.

The guy you know from WILD STYLE as Zorro — Lee Quinones, is absent from the film, but his art is visible throughout. Ahearn captured several murals from the handball courts of the Smith Projects and  at the  Disco Dojo.

Ahearn spoke on his inception to the Smith Projects saying “I went into the Smith Projects in 1977, before all of this stuff, and there was a DJ playing cuts of James Brown’s Soul Power. In the room was rows of guys facing each other. At the time I had not scene these before. To me, it looked African to me. They were not doing anything special, but they were dropping, kicking one leg out. That was Uprocking. The other thing, I became or I was seeing, Lee Quinones’s graffiti murals around Smith Projects. This is ’77, I had not met him yet.”

During this time, the mid to late’ 70s, the Smith Projects and New York City was plagued by drug abuse. Heroin addiction was rampant. Nathan’s devotion to martial arts, made him an adversary to drugs and drug dealing. When Nathan walked into an area, the dealers moved out.

Ahearn’s relationship with Nathan, may have prevented him from exploring more or reporting on some of the more criminal activities in Smith at that time. Ahearn recalled “When I was working with Nathan, I would always be looking down toward the other side of the block. I’d always go ‘Who is that? What are they doing’ and he say ‘Don’t mess with those guys!’ Nathan had strong lines. You don’t mess with these people or that guy. I did not have those attitudes. I was interested. Everything was open. To respect Nathan, I didn’t.  Nathan knew that there was Hip Hop there, he later told me that he saw Grandmaster Flash there. Nathan did not think of this as his thing. He felt that it was on the other side of the fence. When that culture presented drug dealers or graffiti writers, he was not into in it. When you cross and enter into Hip Hop, that’s a world that encompasses criminal and non criminal and it does not have fine lies. Where Nathan was,  it was us versus them. Nathan was a walking, talking real life Kung Fu movie hero, in good and bad aspects of it.”

Nathan, the real life Bruce Leroy, whose story includes stints as mercenary, unknowingly putting in work for Nicky Barnes, affiliations with the infamous Chinatown gang “The Ghost Shadows,” association with Chinese gangster Nicky Louie, training Black panthers in Brooklyn, confrontations with some Sopranos and a harmless incident known as “The Pool Hall Massacre.”

When he wasn’t kicking dealers into the water, Nathan was trying to help the community by providing them with a productive or alternative to the the bleak options that they were presented with.

Ahearn spoke on his initial meeting with Nathan saying, “So, I was involved in a film project. I set up the film projector in a community room. I handed out fliers and no one would respond to these things and then, the room fills up with kids. Nathan walked in and they watched what I was shooting and they said they wanted to make a movie with me. Of course, I did not hesitate to making this movie. That’s how I got started with Nathan. Through Nathan I became obsessed or more obsessed with martial arts movies. I was going to forty second street and Chinatown regularly to get inspiration. I became fascinated, the other fascination was, there were these teenagers, African American teenagers watching these films in a foreign language that was dubbed, it was completely foreign, yet there was an obsession with detail around these movies.”

When New York was still vice city, both Chinatown and Time Square played a part in Kung Fu cinema culture. Ahearn spent time in both locations, learning and noticing the form and cultivating his appreciation for art.

“I was a big fan of the movies that would play on forty second street and the movies that would play in Chinatown. Also I was going to the Sun Sing Theater. It was under the  Manhattan bridge in Chinatown. It was kind of a decrepit old theater. It would be filled with people, it would be filled with whole clans, it was so cheap. Forty second street was my real obsession and seeing Kung Fu in its full context, in terms of a ghetto art form. There were twelve movie theaters shooting Kung Fu action on a regular basis,” said Ahearn.

Before Othello choked out the drunken masters, Time Square was the place where martial arts cinema thrived in New York City. It was here, that movies were seen and fans would take Eagle Claw, Preying Mantis and every other style that did not work in a real fight, back to their hoods. Although Nathan had further influenced him, Ahearn already had an affinity for the Kung Fu flicks. He was actually attracted to the diverse crowds who yelled at the screens, and had a connection or devotion for style. Watching a movie in Times Square wasn’t a problem for Ahearn. He knew the code of the streets, he knew better than to sit in the “Sho’s row!”

“I would tend to go on Saturday nights. I wanted the full thing! I would walk in the theater. It was alive with people walking around and there were people yelling at each other or people yelling at the screen. And when you settled into the seat, your feet would cement into the floor from the generations of Coca Cola, which would be on the floor of the theater. And then there would be like rats running on the floor, back and forth. To me it was the ultimate art house. I looked at Kung Fu movies as the ultimate art movie. Better than the film forum or the art houses. I consider Kung Fu movies the ultimate art form, as cinema,” said Ahearn.

Like every other kid in the projects, Bruce Lee was a huge influence on Nathan. Why did these kids from the ghettos of New York City, have such devotion for martial arts films and a dragon who died years earlier?

“Obvious reason, the hero always kicks ass. The hero was fighting, the hero was filled with self power, the hero was had a great deal of power. He would fight against forces of oppression. The government and he was fighting for liberation, that’s how I see those movies, especially Bruce Lee movies. Bruce Lee was not known in this country until after he died. He was kind of mythic, or saint like character in the housing projects. People would endlessly gossip. He was long gone, most people only got to think about Bruce Lee after he died. People would endlessly gossip about things that they had heard. Bruce Lee could do such and such or he learned he could do the magic finger. All these things that were rumors. He was a real person who worked with Hollywood people. In a sense he was an American, who went back to China. It was kind of interesting. He was the ultimate, ghetto icon” explained Ahearn.

The mythology of Bruce Lee was widespread. He was trending and he had followers all over the city. Without any Google or Facebook, kids from all the boroughs gobbled up the story, took hold of the myth and it became reality to them.

Ahearn explained how the knowledge of Bruce became widespread, saying “There were piles of Kung Fu magazines sold everywhere. There were Kung Fu schools. I don’t think that this obsession with Kung Fu cinema, started until after Bruce Lee died. But people looking at these movies, there were not anybodies, they were intelligent. A movie like MAD MONKEY KUNG FU became a hit classic. Word would spread from forty second street into all the projects, in Brooklyn and everywhere else. MAD MONKEY is playing or FIVE DEADLY VENOMS is playing or 36 CHAMBERS is playing. All these classics. To me that had real artistic quality. Kind of balletic choreography, I would look at them and think of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin,” explained Ahearn.

When I built with Nathan, he explained that he did not like the way he was portrayed at times in the film. His vision didn’t necessarily coincide with the finish product. Ahearn and Nathan had different agendas when teaming up and each had a different vision of what the film would do.

Ahearn shared his view, saying “It was part of something that could have been something, but what it was, it was striving to become, it wanted to be accepted in the community that it was in. I think people were confused. Even Nathan was somewhat confused. While I am working with them, they have fantasies of who I am, what I was doing. They did not have a check on that. They might have imagined that this movie would be playing in the movie theater and they would be rich and famous and that everyone was going to love their movie — they would be movie stars. Especially Nathan had these ideas. I frankly never thought that. My ambition was to try to make a new kind of art movie that could be shown in a community center. It was not ready for a movie house. It was to fragile of a form. Also, the way I was making it, I was embracing very contradictory things, I was embracing allowing things to be amateur on purpose. I was embracing the amateurish as a form. I wanted it to look like what it was. I was not trying to make a Bruce Lee movie. I was making a high school play for this group. I was hoping they would see it and laugh at it and with it.”

Ahearn’s after school project was still important. The film served as a calling card for Ahearn, uniting him with Fab Five Freddy and the same artist who attracted him to the Smith projects.

“Lee’s work with Howard the Duck, on the handball court at the beginning of the movie — if you saw my book (Wild Style Sampler) you’d realize that Lee arrived at that moment and had a little motor bike and a little scooter and had a big afro. He was a kid. I told him, ‘I want to work with you, we should work together’ and he said ‘cool’ and I asked if there was a way to contact him and he said ‘not right now, but I’ll be back’ and he goes off on his scooter, and I did not see him again until I met him with Fab Five Freddie. It was a year later, or actually two years later in the summer of 1980, the Times Square show, Fab Five Freddy came, we were in an abandoned massage parlor. This guy approached me with dark sunglasses and and I did not know who he was at the time. He mentioned that he knows Lee. He saw the posters for the DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL. He saw the posters because he was hanging in Lee’s neighborhood. He was organizing a show for putting graffiti in art galleries. He started talking to me. ‘It would it be great to do something like that with graffiti, like the DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL with graffiti and rap music.’ I said ‘Come here tomorrow morning and bring Lee here and I will have money for you guys to paint a piece on the wall outside of the building.’ I had fifty which I gave them to buy spray paint and they did this Fab Five piece in front of the building. I look back at the first check I wrote for fifty dollars and I consider it the first check or money for WILD STYLE,” said Ahearn.

In retrospect, Ahearn appreciated that he should have shot the film differently, and perhaps approached the film with more of a documentary focus. Inadvertently, Ahearn did create a documentary film. Capturing the raw essence of a New York that is long gone. Scenes of Nathan walking through some of the cityscapes will have you wondering if he had run ins with Sonny Carson and The Lords. And whether or not he was amongst those who Cyrus called to the park, to unite for one common cause — “Can you count suckers? Can you dig it?”

“This movie led to me making WILD STYLE. I learned from every mistake, there are endless things that I did in DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL that I did not do when I made WILD STYLE. WILD STYLE was created as a commercial film. It had a simple storyline, I avoided a lot of talking scenes, which I thought was my weakness in DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL. They looked bad, they sounded bad. I later wished, I remained closer as a documentarian and inspired them to do more things for the camera, just basically showing who they were. The story got in the way, the amateur story gets in the way of the profound actual story which I think, Nathan’s story in this community is profound. Instead of making a film that was a reflection of this high school’s fantasies, I would have, I should have spent more time on what they really were doing. When I made WILD STYLE, I tried to cut out all that play acting dialogue and just create moments for them to do what they did in real life. WILD STYLE was another art movie, it was not a commercial movie. It’s intentionally an art movie that combines documentary elements, with narrative, with music elements, all those contradictions on the screen. I learned from making the DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL, how to get better sound, keep the story simple and not focus on the story,” said Ahearn.

Ahearn would visit countries in Europe, showing THE DEADLY ART OF SURVIVAL, but it wasn’t until WILD STYLE that he received international acclaim.

Nathan and Ahearn would lose contact after WILD STYLE. It would be fifteen years before the two would build again. Nathan continued with his art. Developing and teaching, and establishing his martial arts school in Chinatown.

That skinny Black kid got older. He still wrote. He saw the city’s landscape change. It got cleaner and safer but along the way it lost its appeal. The essence of the city was gone.

The skinny Black kid kept on with his art. He kept up his writing. He tried to go All City, but eventually, the city turned a blind eye to his art. He remained in the faithless city. Saving who he could.

I saw that skinny Black kid’s writing. He wrote a message to a city that tried to forget him and his art. He wrote about a lost generation. He wrote about a forgotten time, that is sealed away on Ahearn’s film.

He wrote his last line, hoping that someone would listen. Glaring me in the face, I saw his etched out wisdom. Begging this city, to remember, if not him, then what made it what it was.

The deadly art, that created a wild style.

 

By Nigel Clarke

Web: www.masternever.com

Twitter: @masternever

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