Which is why Sutherland photographs the majority of the graffiti lifers, legends and come-ups with their faces covered in some fashion, often with tags commissioned for the book. As the photographer explains in an interview, "I think people write to fight back against the gentrification that has happened and is still happening in Manhattan, Brooklyn and parts of Queens. There are yuppies everywhere, wearing polo button-downs, talking on cellphones and walking wiener dogs; it gets boring. I think today's writers glamorize an older, grimier New York. Writing is a way for them to identify with it, to play some part in it."

The gritty pleasure of transgression is on regal display in "Autograf." Sutherland hounded Gotham's graffiti pantheon until it agreed to sit down long enough to be photographed in the time and place of its choosing. The result is a hard-boiled portfolio that evokes the docudrama of both Marc Singer's "Dark Days" and Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets," rounded out by a parade of middle fingers. It might feel harsh, but as graffiti settles into the mainstream, it's harder every year to maintain that much-needed edge. As REVS writes, "We need to be paintin' 5, 10, 20 story buildings top to bottom ... where none of these people in power (the art critics, historians or politicians) can discount [our] existence!"

Like countless outsider artists that were eventually legitimized, old-schoolers like FUTURA and DOZE, new jacks like KAWS and COPE 2 -- as well as the many more that appear in "Autograf" -- will probably be sainted, not imprisoned, for their "antisocial expressionism," as powerHouse calls it. Books like this will push that steamroller further down the hill, and there's nothing that Mike Bloomberg, George Pataki, Rudy Giuliani or anyone else can do about it. If they're pissed off at graffiti artists, wait until they get a load of the Bush-Cheney orgy in Larry Fink's "Forbidden Pictures." You've gotta give it up to powerHouse, man -- when they swing, they swing for the rafters.

"Peace Signs: The Anti-War Movement Illustrated"
Edited by James Mann
Foreword by Howard Zinn
208 pages
Edition Olms
 Order from Powells.com

While we're on the outsider-art tip, let's consider this visual tome of sorts from Edition Olms, a not-so-indie publisher of photography collections on subjects as diverse as the Beatles and chess champion Gary Kasparov. My buddies at the late, great indie bookstore Midnight Special -- Da Lord rest its noncomformist soul -- first turned me on to "Peace Signs," a sobering but hilarious collection of recent antiwar posters, after finding one particularly uproarious collage showing Bush and Saddam holding each other's johnsons above the word "Peace" in all caps. Who knows why they thought of me when they saw that, but I'm glad they did, because "Peace Signs" is a one of the most potent documents on our recent Misadventure in Mesopotamia that I've come across.

The anthology is roughly divided into seven sections that dictate the poster content by theme; "Collateral Damage" focuses on the invisible casualties of war, "No Blood for Oil" features different works with the same slogan, and so on. There is also the requisite Howard Zinn reality check -- "No image of war, however shocking, can match the reality" -- and a short history of antiwar art's history, courtesy of Nicholas Lampert, that situates the work of "Peace Signs" within the same matrix populated by Picasso's "Guernica" and Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings. The posters themselves are something to behold, a pop-culture train-wreck of Robbie Conal, Soviet propaganda, "Yellow Submarine," Mathew Brady, Fox News cheerleading and more, mashed and distilled into some eye-opening numbers.

Like Art Spiegelman's "Roll Up Your Sleeves, America," featuring a dashing Uncle Sam injecting a gas pump into his forearm. Or Michael Dickinson's hilarious collages, including a Bush-bin Laden-Blair revision of the classic "American Gothic." Or "The Estrogen Bomb," an anti-testosterone salvo from feminist badasses the Guerilla Girls, the sharp wits behind take-back-the-arts releases like "The Guerilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art" and "Bitches, Bimbos and Ballbreakers: The Guerilla Girls' Illustrated Guide to Female Stereotypes." Although there are some openly sentimental works involved, "Peace Signs" never gets bogged down in the type of "pessimism" that right-wingers love to tar liberals with. As an exercise in sheer creativity and political will, it's an unparalleled good time about a FUBAR excursion.

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