Art BY ANGELA MATUA tagging ASTORIA NATIVE WILL RELEASE ART BOOK SHOWCASING HIS DECADES-LONG GRAFFITI CAREER Louie Gasparro first fell in love with graffiti when he was 9 years old. The Astoria native was attending a Yankees game in 1974 at Shea Stadium while Yankees Stadium was being renovated and saw his first piece scrawled on a wall. “When I saw graffiti going to a Yankee game I was like, ‘What is that?’ Gasparro said. “I was 9 years old and my brother was like, ‘It’s a bunch of punks with spray paint.’ And then I became one of them.” Gasparro officially started doing graffiti when he was 11, tagging subway tunnels and train yards in Astoria, Ridgewood and the Bronx with his tag KR. ONE. Though graffiti was and still is considered a form of vandalism by some, Gasparro said he and his friends viewed it as a sport. “It was a very expressive thing for me because we were competing with guys from all over the city on who could be better at this underground thing that really nobody knew about,” Gasparro said. He describes his work as “pop eye meets Black Sabbath meets Led Zeppelin meets graffiti.” Gasparro has also toured the country and the world as a drummer with popular bands including hard rock/punk band Murphy’s Law, hip-hop/ rock group Lordz of Brooklyn and Blitzpeer. He credits Astoria with influencing his art in several ways: he saw graffiti on the elevated trains running near his house on Broadway and 31st Street; he watched bands play, including
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