Socal Freight Benching

For most people having to wait at a railroad crossing for a long freight train to roll by seems like an eternity and a giant waste of time. Those people can't wait for a bridge to be built so that they can just get where they are going as quickly as they can without having to wait on some train to roll through at 15 MPH. They've got stuff to do!Myself, and thousands of other people around the world take this intrusion into our personal time as an opportunity to witness one of the greatest traveling art shows known to man.Thousands of artworks, created by amateurs and professional artists' alike roll from city to city across our entire continent.From USA & Canada to Mexico. From the East Coast to West Coast these rolling artworks come to us, instead of the other way round'. Stand by the tracks for hours like a lot of us do and witness the amazing things you'll see rolling by anywhere between 5 MPH and 50 MPH.These pieces are, however, temporary. They are constantly being painted over by other writers, or the cars are scrapped. Preserving these pieces is an important undertaking that thousands of people are working on daily. This is my little contribution to the preservation of this rich history.

Every time I come home from a bench session the first thing I do as I'm dumping flicks off of memory cards onto the computer is a little write-up of how my day went. I try to note the things I saw, observations, the weather, and anything else I think might be interesting for people to read when I post my photos online. I also try to add things that family members might be interested in reading one day, years from now, that will give them some insight about me. It's just a nice way to remember the day out. These write-ups began as a few sentences, then a few paragraphs, and have grown into more detailed write-ups over the last few years.I have stories. Some are un-eventful, some are fun, and some I look back on and wonder what the hell I was doing out there. This is the reason for this, my second book. I want to share some of these stories from a bencher's perspective. It's the only perspective I have.

Preservation of graffiti is important. What other art form do you know of that is under constant threat of being painted over either by the city or another artist? Walls get painted over, trains get painted, cleaned or scrapped daily. If you walked into a museum or found some cave paintings and knew that the art you were seeing might disappear tomorrow, would you take photos?I'm sure your answer would be yes. Graffiti is art, and it shouldn't be treated any differently.My goal for these books is not to preserve every piece of graffiti I see, although I try, but to inspire others to also preserve what they see. Not only to preserve what you see now, but to be able to look back at different styles through time. Graffiti is an ever changing art form, and styles come and go.

As dazzling as the art it celebrates, this volume is packed with 1,000 full-color illustrations and features in-depth interviews with more than 125 train artists and "writers" to provide unprecedented perspective into graffiti.

Every bodybuilding fan knows about the "Golden Age" of the sport. But, there is a forgotten legend from that fabled time. An OG of street and stage, Craig Monson outweighed Arnold by 40 pounds, dwarfed Lee Haney and had superior aesthetics. A mass-monster with Michelangelo-like symmetry, Monson was that rare mixture of form and functional strength. Now his story AND his workouts can be told, shared, and understood. Born in the Jim Crow South, Craig was taken by his mother on a Greyhound bus exodus to the land of sun-kissed beaches and Hollywood dreams. A world away from the Pacific Ocean, Craig came of age in Los Angeles' inner city. In this urban environment, Monson found street heroes and became one himself by founding the notorious gang "The Avenues" (a forerunner to the infamous Crip gang). Realities of life in South Central Los Angeles eventually landed Craig in some of the most feared penitentiaries. Inside of the system, Monson built his body into a mountain of muscle and, upon his release, set his sights on bodybuilding glory. Training across the Southland and putting on spectacles of strength at the renowned Muscle Beach, Craig became the biggest and strongest bodybuilder of the 1980s. Learn about his mythic journey from urban streets to the bodybuilding stage! Follow the exact training programs utilized by the legendary Craig Monson!