So what got you into graffiti, since that was your first step into the graphics world?

I was just kind of in the right place at the right time. The neighborhood I grew up in was like the place where graffiti was growing all around me. On Broadway was where the most exciting shit was being done. Obviously it was before it was recognized as an art form. It wasn't really self-conscious, but more what was going on in the community. As far as influences in graffiti, I have to say Stay High and Jester...(etc.) I just saw something exciting going around me that I had to be down with. The very first things like Snake One and Stay High, I saw riding the trains, as a kid when the very first stuff was being done. I was just wide open. Even before that, before the graffiti, I loved trains. I remember when I was young, I would drag my mother to the front car and would look out the window going through the tunnel. Anything with wheels was cool! But it seemed like I had a romance with the trains even before graffiti.
To me, anybody who tries to tell the history of graffiti, is a liar! Because there is no one history of graffiti. It depends what borough you lived in, what year you where born in, what lines you rode. Graffiti is so personal in that way. The best you will ever get is a personal history of graffiti.

Were you actually into drawing and art before?

As far as can I look back, I was always involved with visual forms. Even as a kid back in school, the drawing and painting classes were the ones that really turned me on. I had an uncle who had a phat Pop Art collection, who was like down with Warhol, Lichtenstein, the real Sixties shit! I remember going to his house when I was only maybe eight. I can still picture myself standing in front of a soup can (Cambell's Soup theme by Andy Warhol), thinking that's art, that's dope. Pop Art seemed like some other shit, like untraditional, and was my first big inspiration. Somehow that molded me for writing, I would go home and start imitating what I had seen. Today I'm not really into working by blending colors together. I think that my palette comes from Pop Art. I don't really like to call on one influence. As a painter you basically have to pick your style. Your career is a commitment to your style. You develop it over time and try and get better at it. I felt that that was too narrow. I have too many styles and influences I like to do. Being a graphic artist, you are more free artistically in the way that each piece is its own piece. So whether doing an album cover or a piece for yourself, you can pick what style you want to use. If you commit to that style for one piece and do that style successfully, it works for that piece and it's like closed. You solved that problem, and you can say, that's Industrial. If you're a painter and you change styles after a year, people say, wait a minute, what was that all about, if you are doing this. It has to be more of a progression, whereas as a graphic designer you are free to be schizophrenic. If there's anything I try to do now with the designs and graphic art, it is to free myself to do many different styles at the same time.

So where did you get your name Haze from?

I got my name kicking my brains out on acid, listening to Jimmy Hendrix Are You Experienced's Purple Haze in 1972. I remember I stayed up all night and I did my first Haze piece with like tiger stripes. I was down with Hendrix and all that psychedelic shit before Hip Hop came along.

Which crews did you hang out with back then?

Originally it was the Soul Artists in the early Seventies. One of the first crews on the East Side, with guys like Ali (RIP), who later on got back together in 1979 to try to give direction to graffiti as an art form. They held meetings every Monday night up on 106th street. People would come from all over the city, that's where we met Keith Haring, who introduced us to the downtown art scene. Fab 5 Freddy from Brooklyn, Lee would come there... The Soul Artists were important in the end of the Sixties-early Eighties. But as far as true bombing, it was RTW (Rolling Thunder Writers) with Quik and myself. As a kid I was vice president of the Rebels, another early crew.

So how did you get that "swing" in the way you wrote your name Haze?

In the early days I wrote Se3, more than I wrote Haze. You can't really even read that tag. It was like hard core Broadway style, that's almost closer to Chicano gang style now. Really sharp, tall letter forms. Something sort of like that (he says as he grabs a marker and tags up a sheet of paper to illustrate exactly what he is talking about). It wasn't even meant to be readable by everyday people. They had only one clue of who's name it was, the style of the signature itself. I always wrote Haze, but I really bombed, with Se3. In the Eighties, I started writing Haze more, cuz nobody could remember a name like Se3.

What does graffiti represent for you?

Graffiti is probably first about style. I think that a lot of people get caught up in the meaning of graffiti; I don't think graffiti was originally meant to mean anything. Graffiti gives you a voice and once you got that voice, you develop the style of your voice. It's only later that people learned or tried to say something with that voice. In the beginning the name was it. It was all about shouting, you wanted your name to be heard, you know? But it was also about, fuck the system! In your face, whether you like it or not! Graffiti was definitely rebellion. Now it can mean so many things, people get the idea of graffiti as art, it's a bit corrupted now. See, it's very tricky to call graffiti art because it was born to operate outside the system, and art has a system. So when you put graffiti in a gallery, you are taking an outsider and putting it inside. It's like putting an animal in a cage. You can look at the animal, it's there, everybody knows where to find the animal, you can go to the zoo to see it, but the animal is not threatening anymore. You robbed the animal of its power! It was going to take away some of the control people had in the art world, because it was something else going on. So the way for the art world to control something on the outside was to bring it in. It's the domestication of a beast. There is a lot of politics to this. If you say to somebody: If you write your name on a wall, you're an artist. It's true, that's what I like about Pop Art, everything is art. A door is art, a soup can is art, your belt buckle is art. Anything you want to be art is art to you. So if you write your name on a wall, that is art, your art. It doesn't make it important, it can just be masturbating. It can be all style, no meaning, beautiful dope graffiti just for you, or your boys, or anybody in the world, it doesn't matter. It wasn't meant to be for everybody, it was meant to be for you first, and the graffiti community. Graffiti is ego and can be artistic masturbation.

What is your definition of the word graffiti?

Graffiti is illegal by nature, there is really no such thing as legal graffiti. There was a show in like 1981 called Beyond Words. That show was graffiti-rooted, based on and inspired by it. Now that's beautiful. You say my style comes from graffiti, my passion or my work comes from graffiti, so many things can come from graffiti as an inspiration. Graffiti is about painting with spraycans and all that, but to me it was more about graphic designs then actual painting. It's the love of the written word, and how far can you push the style of letters. What I do as a graphic artist with the name in logos, is in essence the same as what I did as a graffiti writer. I paint in situations that are exciting to me, but there are people whose life is paint. To me those are the painters. My life is more ink and lines, even though I can paint and handle a fat cap as well as anybody else.

What's the politics of your bizness?

In the big sense, your politics are what you do. You are what you do. You represent the choices you have made in your life. With the clothing company, we choosed to do a bizness that's involved with the culture and with people. That's our politics. Some people work for a company and come home and do something different for themselves. You are not the politics of your boss, you represent yourself in other ways. There is no difference in my life in between what I do to earn a living and what I do personally and believe in. That' s personally wy we started this company. We never aimed to blow up and become a commercial company, we just tried to build a reputation in doing quality designs and quality clothing. The idea is to develop the respect of people by not selling out and by controlling our image and who deals with it. By wearing somebodies clothing you join in with their politics. We don't want to be trendy, we just want to be on point every year.