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Culture & Artsby Deborah Rudacille11:59 amMay 29, 20100

"Wild Style" reunion tonight

A Bmore celebration of the classic hip-hop film

Above: Wild Style

New York Times film critic Vincent Canby didn’t quite know what to make of Charlie Ahearn’s WILD STYLE when he reviewed the movie in March 1983.

“The film…looks to be a partly improvised piece of fiction, about the cheeky, high-spirited art of the south Bronx,” he wrote, “that is, subway graffiti, also known as ‘writing,’ and about rapping and breaking.”

He helpfully provided definitions of these then-outre-seeming terms for similarly befuddled Times readers.

Tonite a WILD STYLE reunion — complete with graf artists, b-boys and the director of the legendary film — is happening at the Load of Fun Art Space in Baltimore, where the urban culture it celebrates needs no introduction.

Canby may have been mystified by WILD STYLE, but the high school students and adult cognoscenti (who had lined up around the block when Ahearn’s film opened in Times Square a few months earlier) got it.

“The movie was the second highest grossing film in New York City for two weeks, just after Terms of Endearment,” Ahearn recalls today. “It played at two theaters in Times Square with back-to-back shows because lines were so long to get into the movie. It was a phenomenon that people hadn’t seen before”—kids growing up in some of New York City’s toughest neighborhoods making art that would quite literally change the world. Or at least make some people a whole lot of money.

This weekend Ahearn and many of the original artists who appeared in his film will roll into Baltimore for a WILD STYLE reunion at the Load of Fun Art Space, 120 W. North Avenue in the Station North Arts District.

“I just rented a mini-van and I’m heading up to New York City to get them all and bring them down here,” said event organizer Garth Young, owner of PEDX, a graffiti supply store and street art gallery in Fells Point, when caught on the phone Friday afternoon.

Young, who was only two years old when the film was released, notes regretfully that “I am not the generation of that golden era,” but for him and others his age, hip hop “is what we grew up with,” much as an earlier generation was raised on rock and roll. The key elements of hip hop—music, art and dance—will all be recreated at Load of Fun this weekend to “celebrate 25 years of hip hop culture and the film that helped pave the way for one of the largest cultural movements on the planet.”

The two day event starts with a screening of the film at 6 pm Saturday, with a 4 Hours of Fun B-Boy Jam, the “I Can’t Live Without My Radio” boom box art show, and live painting by graf artists COPE2 and INDIE 184. Other graffiti artists will spray a dedication mural in the alley behind the Load of Fun building. The fun continues on Sunday from 3 pm to 2 am with more screenings of the film, more music and dancing and a meet and greet with Ahearn.

Why bring WILD STYLE to Baltimore?

Well, for one thing, “WILD STYLE has traveled around the world and I’ve always wanted to bring it here,” Young points out. Then too, one of the film’s star MC’s, The Chief Rocker Busy Bee, has lived in Baltimore for twelve years and Ahearn shot a short film about him hanging out with his Baltimore friends, “Busy on the Beach” a few years ago. Bee and Young are co-organizers of this weekend’s event.

The film that started it all had its world premiere in Tokyo in October 1983. Its rawness and authenticity, noticed even by mainstream reviewers like Canby, grew out of the fact that everyone in the film “was on the scene,” Ahearn says, playing barely fictional versions of themselves.

“It was produced completely underground,” he recalls. “I borrowed some from the Warhol movies which were loosely scripted but starred people from the Factory scene.”

John Waters was another inspiration.  “We both shot 16 mm with small budgets, without professional actors. I was a big fan of the Waters movies.”

But the real birthplace of the film, he says,  was 42nd Street in New York City, specifically the kung fun movie houses “where kids would go to watch those movies over and over again” in the days before VCRs and DVD players. “Nowadays we have this whole underground internet culture but back then if you wanted to see an underground movie you had to go to an art house.”

Ahearn is thrilled to be bringing WILD STYLE to Baltimore which has, he says, “this really unique tough urban culture. I have a lot of respect for that.” He’s also heard that “the people who are putting this on are kind of into that whole underground merging of cultures, what WILD STYLE was supposed to be, bringing people together across generations and across different scenes.”

When he was making the film in the early eighties, he points out, “street culture didn’t have a commercial side to it. It was too early to call it hip hop but it was very much hip hop. The film was an attempt to capture that.”

—————–

UPDATE:

Rudacille caught up with a couple of folks at the reunion and sent along a bit more . . . . .

“Back in the day I did all the elements of hip hop,” said WiseAnery, who now owns a Baltimore tattoo
parlor called Booda Monk. He says that when was young–he’s 39 now–“I used to watch WILD STYLE
every day. B-boying, rhyming, graffiti–“it’s my life.”
“Everybody knows about WILD STYLE,” said 25-year old Tom aka Atomic. “We came out today to
support the scene. “I tagged when I was young but I gave it up because of the legal issues. It’s not worth going to jail for.”

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