On the way to the studio I was singing La la la la la down the hill untill I came to the Muslim school and the ladys in the burkas… so I kept the toon but switched the words to Allah allah allah (I think I was humming the Marriage of Figaro, or something) and I was transported in a moment of Middle Eastern mood when suddenly an enormous Hummer passed like punctuation. It was all tricked out with chrome instead of armor, but it seemed like a sign. I crossed the canal pondering cars as cocks and hidden women and ass holes and gas guzzlers and sex and cigarettes propped out of car windows at the end of crooked elbows waiting for the red light on Metropolitan Avenue.

It was one of those days where I must have been wearing a friendly face. A electrically disheveled man staggered towards me in the subway station. He seemed strung out on glue and thorazine, or maybe it was just smack. He held a wad of cash in one hand and with the other he thrust a small electronic device at me.

“What does this mean?” he asked me.

I took the device in my hand and I have no idea what it was – smaller than a beeper/bigger than a watch. I think the word “security” was written on it and it had an LCD screen showing a series of numbers (or one very large one): 478945203

“I have no idea,” I told him.

He looked at me with a sort of surprised shock, like he couldn’t believe that I didn’t know what it meant either. Then he got a sort of self satisfied expression on his face, like maybe he wasn’t so crazy after all.

But he was pretty fucking crazy, or high, or something and he stumbled off down the platform with his untied shoes and his hand full of money and his other hand full of electric mystery.

Then on the way home, his female doppleganger walked up to me and asked, “Does this train go to Claxton Ave, or something like that?”

“Or something like what?”

“I can never prounounce it right,” she said.

So we walked over to the map and I read off the names and it was Classon Ave she was looking for and she never could pronounce it right she told me. That wasn’t so crazy, but when we sat down on the bench she put on her headphones and gave me a fractured concert: “Oooh baby…the one…now do it….all night…get up… no one like you…yes!” top of her voice every third word of some half Spanish song. So you sometimes have to love the subway and this painting seems to be about those faces and kids and fashions and all you see underground.

Image search collage for Clichy-Sous-Bois.