The AVA

The summer of 2004, I came back from about 9 months living in California. It was weird - it felt kind of strange to hang out with my friends from high school, all of whom had just spent their first year at college, while I had been taking a year off. So I ended up re-kindling my friendship with Eric, who I had gone to elementary school with, and who now attended BU. Also when I got back Willie was all about riding bikes, which I was too. I had spent tons of time in Cali on my bike, getting lost, looking at maps, and figuring out how to get home and how different parts of the bay were connected. When I came back to Boston, my time away really made me want to figure out my home city. I knew lots of different parts of it, but not really how everything connected. So me and Willie started riding bikes all day and night with Eric and his friends that stayed in Boston for the summer. We spent a lot of time exploring, going to parties, drinking, smoking weed, and some petty vandalism and art crimes. We decided that our bike gang (which is what we would yell at people as we rode by - "BIKE GANG!") needed a name. Willie came up with the one that stuck; the Allied Villains of the Apocalypse. Evil, comic book style, we liked it. I made a couple of stencils of this logo, one out of weird roofing material, which I had been told was good for making stencils because you could just stick it right to the wall you wanted to paint on, or roll it up to carry it around. Mostly it just seemed to get sticky or brittle and fall apart. But one night in Eric's parents back patio, we spray painted a bunch of t-shirts and capes. We got dressed up in crazy costumes, and the AVA had an appearance at the next critical mass. The spray paint gives this tee a cool texture, and the logo is off center so it kind of wraps around one side. I think the way the paint stuck to the shirt warped its shape. The hot green has slowly been crumbling off, but it still looks great with the ghosty white shadow.

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