You don’t get in there without a written pass from Hezbollah, so I showed up with my portfolio of graffiti from Iraq and Palestine, to ask if they would like me to do something. As soon as I got in there I felt like I’d got no right to paint where there may well still be dead people yet to be uncovered. “Only if they invite me to,” I told the girl who translated for me. Which they did. Even offered to pay for my materials. A month of wholesale devastation has galvanized the spirit of these people more than I would have believed possible. I’m told that after each nightly bombing run, those families who came out of hiding in the morning to pick through the rubble of their homes, were singing. Now everyone’s wearing hats that say “The Divine Victory”. They told me that they wanted something happy to reflect this, and pretty much instructed me to start right away (not much pressure then). 3 nearly sleepless nights later I returned and spent 4 hours climbing around like a monkey with the stencils I’d made. On the first roof I climbed on I found an Iranian rifle lying in the dust and rubble, which I handed down to the rather sheepish onlookers (who, it has to be said, were conducting an otherwise amzingly efficient clean-up operation). At the end I was so covered in dust and sweat I looked like I'd spent a month at the front line myself. They nicknamed me Spiderman and seemed fairly pleased.
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