Best Street Scene The crowd outside Hanny's.Best Happy Hour, Scottsdale The Roaring Fork.Best Happy Hour, Tempe Robbie Fox's Public House.Best Happy Hour, West Valley Tim Finnegan's.Best Happy Hour, North Phoenix Blue Martini Lounge.Best Happy Hour, South Phoenix The House at Secret Garden.Best Happy Hour, Downtown Phoenix The Main Ingredient.Best Poolside Bars Shade Lounge and Sunset Beachįor a Twilight Drink The Thirsty Camel Lounge.Best Pool with a Bar Hyatt Regency Scottsdale.Best Place to Find an Underground Dance Party Stratus.Underground Beer Society Arizona Society.Best Underground Music Venue The Underground.Best Underground Music on Mill Ave The Big Bang.Best Underground Bar Legend Incognito at the Safari Hotel.Best Basement Bar Awaiting a Comeback Monroe's Food & Fine Spirits (RIP).Best Place to See an Underground Punk Show Inner City Youth Center."Probably in an unstable way." To see more photos of Ike's graffiti, It's my way to stabilize myself," Ike says before pausing and becoming thoughtful for a minute. Other people smoke pot or read the Bible. You have to have some emotional problems. "Writers are doing graffiti for a reason. He uses mostly spray paint, favoring Montana, a high-end German product designed by and for graffiti artists, and he budgeted about $1,500 last year for paint. He likes text, and that affinity is literally expensive. That's how we gotta be."Īs a kid, Ike got into graffiti through skateboarding and hip-hop. Painting train cars is safer footing but requires ninja-like skills in getting over fences and past security. "The craziest thing is painting the freeway signs," he says, then describes running across five lanes of traffic, shimmying up a sign pole, hanging over it and onto it for dear life while painting one-handed and upside down as traffic thunders by below. Staying underground is harder work, more purposeful, and dangerous. "People call you a sell-out, bitch, pussy, artsy-fartsy when you try to go legit," he acknowledges. There's legal painting - businesses like carwashes and pawnshops, skate parks, fundraisers - that brings graffiti into the mainstream, but not without a cost to the artist. But, he's careful to emphasize, graffiti and gangs are not mutually exclusive. "Some crews hook up with the gangs for protection," admits Ike, who's seen and been in the throes of serious violence, even gunplay. When one writer goes over someone else's graffiti, it can escalate to violence. He says, "Trying to bang on each other through graffiti - that needs to stop." Along with competition among top crews, there are rules in this world. In fact, Ike might be considered a pacifist. But there isn't a trace of aggression or threat in his voice.
"I'm gonna get my message out there whether you like it or not," he says, and describes some anti-SB 1070 writing a lot of crews have been putting out there. Then, when he was 16, he was arrested for painting downtown - a felony carrying serious consequences that bleed into his adult life. He tagged a bathroom and the school pressed charges. Ike - a college student who studies art and marketing - is part of a local graffiti crew that actually accepts commissions and participates in competitions, which means he lives with one foot above ground and the other deep underground. Others, and the law, label them criminals, which is why they fiercely protect their identities and practice their art under cover of night. Some might argue that these artists do us all a public service. That film presents street artists as talented, cerebral, invested, politically clever, sometimes disturbed guerillas, and it's brought street art into the public consciousness. Ike doesn't consider himself a street artist like Banksy of Exit Through the Gift Shop fame.
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