I’m holding in my hand issue #12 of Trucker magazine (Winter 2003). Flip to page 44 and you’ll find an entire page devoted to the anti-manifesto of the Dark Movement. ("Dark Movement is more than anyone can imagine, it has no definition, rather only questions that can be asked of it…") The highlight of this jumble of napkin prose is "you be cool man-dingo" and "the soup is in the pudding."
I’m telling you all this, however, because on that very same page (44), Steve Adams (a.k.a Ogi), the self-proclaimed leader of Dark Movement, proceeds to explain his fascination with Val Kilmer. And you guessed it, there are four different photos of Val Kilmer graffiti. (Trucker magazine was a Toronto publication that I was involved with, a kinda of Vice-meets-Might that disappeared an issue later with unlucky #13.)
To be honest, Trucker ran plenty of spoofs and satirical articles. This, however, represents the founding document, such that it is, regarding the whole Val Kilmer tagging thing in Toronto. (In other words, it is the closest we might get to the truth of the matter.) In the Trucker article, the movement was so nascent that putting paper photocopies of his head on walls had yet to develop.
Unfortunately, Trucker is no longer online, but I can throw a PDF of the page in question onto biggeworld.com if anyone wants proof I’m adding signal, not more noise to l'affair Kilmer. Bored reporters looking for the final word on the Kilmer business might want to give Daniel Borins a ring. Borins was one of the members of Trucker's design team, and the co-conspirator behind the infamous Art System. Ogi/Steve Adams was tightly connected to Art System and Borins championed the Dark Movement, as its empty pomo posturing was sympatico with his particular worldview.
(And yeah, I was busy for the last many weeks with school. I still am. Sorry for the silence. But don’t worry, Russell. You’re up next in the queue.)
