A room in the Overlook Hotel

Graffiti poet/artist Laser 3.14 talks to us about the poems he has been writing all over town.

By Richard Jurgens

Over the last few years mysteriously charged little poems have been appearing all over the city. See one of them and you might easily dismiss it as the spontaneous gesture of someone with a spray can. ‘Nuclear Polynesia’, say. But see a few more of them – they’re easily recognisable from the hastily painted letters and the signature, ‘Laser 3.14’ – and you quickly realise that this is work worth reading.

I came across one recently in Old West that really caught my attention. It was: ‘This contraption called life.’ It’s quite something to suggest that life is ‘a machine or device that appears strange or unnecessarily complicated, and often badly made or unsafe’ (New Oxford Dictionary of English).
But then I saw that the location itself added extra sting, or sharper teeth, to the words. It was painted on one of those temporary container offices from which building projects are run, and in which workers eat sandwiches and drink tea during their breaks.

Lines have to be drawn, obviously. Technically, of course, graffiti is a form of vandalism. Personally, I dislike the stupid, uninteresting tags that so many toys (‘trouble on your system’) are leaving on the houses of innocent citizens these days—or citizens, anyway. But as an inhabitant of a reasonably graffiti-literate city, I enjoy the many interesting and creative pieces to be seen in various public locations and I would miss them if they weren’t there. The verve, the energy, the crazy, multi-dimensional letters, the characters… A good piece adds colour, energy, excitement and imagination to urban spaces that would otherwise be as grey and spiritless as a banker’s soul. Or to change the metaphor slightly: remove all the graffiti from a city
and you turn it into Pyongyang.

Laser 3.14’s work is usually to be seen on building site hoardings, rubbish tips and temporary offices. His work is accessible to people who may not know the more arcane meanings and symbolism of graff genres. They don’t have any of the other visual elements of mainstream graffiti—blockbusters, bubble letters, clouds, backgrounds, karaks and the rest. Laser 3.14’s things consist of words that anyone can read. ‘They want you dead or in their lie.’ ‘Are you awake, or still in dreams?’ ‘City in chaos city of God.’

And he’s prolific, too. Not in the sense of taggers, who repeat their initials all over the place like automatons. Laser 3.14 seldom repeats a performance anywhere. I have collected more than 60 of them, and I have not doubt there are lots more. They cover a wider range of topics and tones than you’d expect from your average writer. ‘Kenny Loggins drove me to drink.’ ‘Her eyes dead her pain fierce.’ ‘Exit the white dove.’ ‘I never picked cotton.’

Clearly this is not just some kid with a spray can. These phrases leap out, sometimes with angular humour, sometimes with whimsical insight, sometimes almost with something of a prophetic tolling. ‘Just like the monster Victor built.’ ‘The wounded sky above.’ And, painted on a building tip: ‘You’re in a box’. Taken together these phrases read like flashes from some larger poem that we can sense behind the words but never quite see. In a sense, that poem is literally behind the words: it’s the city itself. Someone is writing on this city in a new way.


Laser 3.14, or rather the man behind the tag, lives in Old West. Maybe this is why quite a lot of his work occurs in West and especially in the Staatsliedenbuurt, where his work is well enough known to be collected on a local website, where visitors can add their own pictures of ‘Lasers’.
But he doesn’t limit himself to these areas, he told me when we took a walk around town to look for examples of his work. He knows the city well enough, considering he’s been writing since he was eleven.

‘I started tagging in the early 1980s,’ he said. ‘It was a heavy, exciting time. Rebellion was in the air. The Staatsliedenbuurt, squatters everywhere. The punk era had just finished. Electric boogie, pirate radio, graffiti, ska. That was the ska period… I was young, only ten or eleven, and I soaked it all up. When I started, I wrote the same shit as everyone else. I started writing MIKE L., then I was ARE.’

Ask him how he came on the tag by which he has become known and you get different answers. In one interview he said that he hit on the tag as early as 1987, after he had a bust-up with a friend he was writing with under CROE. ‘So I had to find another tag and I had no idea what,’ he told one magazine this year. ‘I was a fan of science fiction films and I suddenly thought: “Laser, lezer, laser.” Meanwhile he told another magazine that he preferred to keep the meaning of the name wrapped in a ‘veil of mystery’. And he told me the ‘laser-lezer’ thing but added that in the end he had just liked the tag. Indeed, it must be a tiresome question.

Now 32, Laser 3.14 comes from a Surinamese background but grew up in Amsterdam from the age of two. He was the second-youngest of five brothers and two sisters, who were brought up by their mother. His father didn’t feature in his life much. ‘But that was the great thing about having so many brothers,’ he told me. ‘You got all those different styles of music.’ He liked art and from a young age had plans to become an artist. But after several applications to art schools went awry he did graphics school and now works freelance as a graphic designer. When he is not working he likes to watch films or play the guitar, which he started a month ago, or to write–literally; the man writes poems too, lines from which he sometimes uses in his street work.

He never had any ambition to do performance work, though, he told me. ‘What? No way. I’m too shy.’ His musical tastes are varied. He grew up listening to 1970s rock, but later also to rap and hip hop artists. ‘I like a lot of things, but I don’t like everything. Take The Geto Boys, say. Great rhythms, but the texts are very heavy.’ (The Geto Boys, of course, were responsible for the classic hip hop singles ‘Mind of a Lunatic’
and ‘Damn it feels good to be a gangster’, among others.)

In a way his eclectic tastes reflect one part of the tone of his work as Laser 3.14: a penchant for gritty realism. The 1970s were the golden age of Hollywood film, he maintains. ‘Films like Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, The Godfather. In those days they weren’t scared of an unhappy ending,’ he said. ‘Do you know Seven, the film with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman? Apparently Morgan Freeman had to fight for the original ending to be kept. The studio wanted a happy ending. That doesn’t happen much any more in Hollywood. Now it’s all happy endings there.’

Another part of the tone of his work relates to a quality that some have described as prophetic. ‘Till Armageddon no shalam and no shalom.’ ‘God lies Jesus cries.’ ‘Pray and you will create great evils. Fast and you will be doomed.’ ‘What do the innocent know but what the guilty teach them.’ Spray phrases like this around town and people are going to get the idea that someone in their midst is having visions. Indeed, in one interview Laser was asked straight out if he was a prophet. He dismissed the idea out of hand. The last person to call himself a prophet ‘brought one of the greatest abominations ever known by man into the world,’ he said. ‘I refer to the Gospels of Mary Magdalene, from the Dead Sea Scrolls: “Beware of false prophets. They are wolves disguised as sheep.”’

But the enthusiasts over at the Spaarndammerbuurtklieklijn, a website that runs a page where pictures of Laser 3.14’s work are collected, had picked up on something. This is the influence of the Bible, Laser told me. ‘My mother was a church-goer, so we all had to go too. I didn’t like it much, and I’m not a believer, but I read the Bible a lot when I was young and got a lot out of it. I still do. Great language, for one thing.’

Language, in a way, is what his Laser poems are all about. Well, they’re not about language, but they’re made up of it, and he finds it fascinating, he told me. ‘The denser the way of saying something the better,’ he said. ‘I like coming up with paradoxical formulations. I like the idea that one of my texts might make someone stop and think. And then, they also have to be short enough to go up in public. That really gets me thinking.’

Laser had been out of the graffiti writing scene for a few years when he came up with the idea for some new work in that direction. He had spent seven years focussing on writing poems and on painting on canvas, and he was clearing out his studio one day when he found a couple of old spray cans. ‘I went out [that] night and sprayed until they were empty,’ he told Z Street Magazine. ‘It was such an adrenaline rush that I immediately wanted to do more. That day I went out and bought some more cans, and ever since then I’ve been pretty active.’

Exhibiting as a painter was a strange experience, he found--enjoyable on the one hand but alienating on the other. ‘I am a very solitary person,’ he said. ‘With graffiti, you’re not there, you don’t have to explain it to anyone, you’re gone before opening night.’

So put gritty realism, a feeling for paradox and mystery and a talent for pithy expression together and you get Laser 3.14. Is his work graffiti? Not in the sense understood by oldskoolers and newskoolers alike, because they don’t include images, Laser insisted during our walk. But then again, maybe they are graffiti in the sense understood by officialdom. (Laser insists that his days of messing people’s private property are over, though. He claims that he only writes on boards, containers and other temporary, movable items.)

His new work in graffiti is really a new genre, he feels. It came out of suddenly realising that he could combine his various interests--writing, art and well, writing. So what to call his work? They might almost be poems, except they’re too short. And in his estimation, at least, they’re not really graffiti in the old sense either. To my mind they’re more like graffiti aphorisms. Graff aphorisms, say. Graffisms?

Anyway, to my mind, Laser 3.14’s one-liners show interesting similarities to the aphorisms of William Blake. I’m serious. Just recall a few of the famous ones from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ ‘The fox condemns the trap, not himself.’ Remember these? The almost Biblical tone, the paradoxical formulations, the sense of sharp irony are similar. If there is a major difference, it is perhaps that Laser still has to acquire some of the joy, or visionary confidence, of his great counterpart. ‘The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.’
‘One thought fills immensity.’ And so on.

But maybe he will. Laser is still on his journey of exploration. As he puts it in one of his graffisms: ‘Today I hired a detective to track me down.’

This article was published in the Amsterdam weekly Volume 2 issue 43 November 2005