The Austin Chronicle

Review of Street Posters & Ballads

Fall 1998

It's a bit embarrassing to say that Street Posters & Ballads by Eric Drooker (Seven Stories Press) is a testament to fighting the good fight, because his art is more hard-edged than that feel-good statement implies. In an afterward to the book, Allen Ginsberg relates his history with Drooker, who illustrated Ginsberg's poem The Lion For Real: "I first glimpsed Eric Drooker's odd name on posters pasted on fire-alarm sides, construction walls checkered with advertisements, & lamppost junction boxes in the vortex or Lower East Side Avenues leading to Tompkins Square Park, where radical social dislocation mixed homeless plastic tents with Wigstock transvestite dress-up anniversaries." That's the origin of Drooker's block print art, which depicts police brutality and racial injustice, but not without heart. One non-political story, The Fall, tells the tale of Douglas Winchester, "legendary throughout Brooklyn for his irreverent attitude & wild behavior," who takes his bulldog Mugsy everywhere with him, even after Mugsy falls through a crack in the Brooklyn Bridge and dies. Winchester somehow retrieves Mugsy and takes him to a party that night "tearfully lamenting" Mugsy's death but all the while "using the dog's body as a theatrical prop." At the end of The Fall, Winchester himself dies due to falling out a window. The horrors of hell indeed.