At Home with Cristy Road Posted on October 23, 2009 by Michelle Tea
Drinking the most anemic, milked-down coffee at a breakfast joint in Providence, Rhode Island, I so wish I was back in Cristy Road’s lightless, ornamented punk rock palace. The walls are covered, like totally covered, with Cristy’s illustrations, inky and graphic and punk and female, girls breaking down or falling in love or both at the same time while crowd surfing with octopus at a punk show. Cristy is often asked to create art for the bands and businesses who, at a glance, know they share the same political aesthetic as Cristy. She did the T-Shirts for the feminist book store Women and Children First in Chicago, she did the cover of the 3-wave feminist anthology We Don’t Need Another Wave, she made Sister Spit’s 2009 graphics and she created an awesome burning cop car for a show about queer street protest I curated this summer. The cop car was blown up and submitted to the art director of the Green Day musical happening in Berkeley, who was soliciting art to plaster across the stage’s backdrop. This is super perfect for Cristy because her name was lifted from the lyrics of a Green Day song and she is so obsessed with the band her first artistic offering was Greenzine, a true fan-zine, and her current work in progress is an illustrated novel about her love for the band. After the publication of her last illustrated punk rock roman a clef, Bad Habits, Green Day’s Billy Joe sent Cristy a hand-written fan letter, calling her a miracle. The real Christie Road is a street in the East Bay, with a sign that is regularly stolen by mad Green Day fans. Cristy has one hung above her work station. She told me they’re really hard to steal now cause the workers hang it way high, out of the reach of thieving Green day fanatics.
Cristy Road's Christie Rd.
The rest of the room half-plastered in Cristy’s artwork is wallpapered with various posters of glamorous women, mostly Madonna, as Cristy’s roommates are a gaggle of punked-out fags not too punk to love Madonna. They are, after all, drag queens as well as punks and on my visit one, a fashion designer, was holding white denim vest tricked-out crusty-style in patches and studs, under the kitchen sink, dying it sepia with tea. The other were sprawled in the cavernous living room, stoned and eating coffee cake and giving themselves clay masks and watching The Golden Girls amidst the decor – a live iguana, clown dolls, a crazy mannequin named Pompeii, a gun vase stuffed with glittery fake flowers. Diana Ross posters hang on walls, Hole, too. Perpetually exhausted as the endless tour rolls into its seventh week, I had tugged my luggage through the Hasidic Brooklyn neighborhood Cristy lives in, and she rewarded me by making me a giant cup of Cuban style coffee like her grandmother makes, in a metal espresso pot thick with sugar and cream. Even though this tour has given me a caffeine tolerance that has rendered Red Bull useless, I sip the Cuban coffee respectfully, knowing that it has the power to Fuck Me Up.
Cristy Road's art on Cristy Road's walls.
