The Nasty Terrible T-Kid 170 - Nick Torgoff

The Nasty Terrible T-Kid 170 is the life story of graffiti writer T-Kid 170 from gang member to style mentor for urban youth--the uncensored Bronx hip hop story. At the age of sixteen, Julius Cavero was hit three times in a gang shoot-out in a park. Left there almost dead, he survived after weeks in a hospital emergency unit. With little else to do in the hospital, he drew endlessly, and it was there that he chose to become T-Kid 170--T for the tall and skinny look he had, and Kid just because that's what so many people called him. He had given up his gang life to focus on art. Few artists today can tell a tale like T-Kid's--a ghetto childhood, gangbanging, and daring feasts of graffiti. Too many of the others who were there left their lives or their art behind, but T-Kid, who won fame early on, lived to tell the tale and withstood his test of time. The Nasty Terrible T-Kid 170 retraces his life from the early 1960s to 2005 through his written accounts and artwork, including images of painted trains, walls, canvases, drawings, and sketches produced over the last thirty years. A journey through a life, an era, and the South Bronx, the book displays T-Kid's contributions to the graffiti movement and his role in the difficult and chaotic origins of hip hop.