Letter From the Editor

Trouble viewing email? Click here You are subscribed to this newsletter as: peterhovis@icloud.com LETTER FROM THE EDITOR   Sam Eifling Editor sam.eifling@newtimes.com Good afternoon, Peter! If you’ve noticed just one tag around the Valley, I’d be willing to bet it was the words “PENIS MAN” inked or spray-painted somewhere, or potentially everywhere. His tags make him the Rafi of vandals, a visual cue that you didn’t fall asleep at the wheel and wake up in Las Cruces. No, you’re very much in the Valley, and yes, that dilapidated fast-food joint or discarded mattress or temporary construction fence does indeed say Penis Man. You’re home. Over the years, the tagger has gone through periods of high productivity and of relative quiet. Police even caught a copycat. But the mystery endured. Who was this tagger? What drove him? And how did he choose the dopiest name in the sordid history of defacing Dumpsters? “It was just me and a friend, both alcoholics,” is how Tanner Ballengee, the man behind the tag, recently explained his origin to Benjamin Leatherman, a longtime Phoenix New Times reporter. “I had a thing where I’d call people, especially this particular friend, I’d just pick a random word and then end it with ‘boy.’ I’d be like, ‘What’s up, Worm Boy?’ Or, ‘What’s up, Dumpster Boy?’ One morning he woke up, obviously still drunk from the night before, and looked like shit. I was like, ‘Damn, what’s up, Penis Boy?’ And he looked me right in the eyes and just said, ‘Penis Man.’ It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard at that point. And that’s all I said for weeks afterwards.” If you somehow missed our cover that week, let me invite you to read the entire interview. Somehow it managed to be wry, revealing, subversive, respectful and maybe existential, at its heart. The tagger admitted that he scribbles all over the Valley partly to quell the old familiar fear that he will die and be forgotten. At least if you and your kids get a chuckle in your car as you drive past a PENIS MAN spray-painted on a vacant Circle K, he achieved a version of immortality. A tag in progress. Photo by Benjamin Leatherman. Said Ballengee: “There was one person on the internet who told me that, ‘I actually love seeing the tags and me and my kids will drive around and take turns pointing ’em out. It’s like a game for us now. My kids laugh and giggle every time I see a new one. It brings us together as a family.’ I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ It’s insane how something seemingly so childish and immature and vulgar can do things like that.” As an aside, real quick, I want to thank you for reading and supporting the sort of publication that can dedicate thousands of words to plumbing the inner life of a mysterious tagger with a lewd handle. Not many local news organizations in the country consider that sort of subject worthy of spilling so much ink. You can help us stay in the game by contributing to our end-of-the-year membership campaign, which you can find here. A few bucks will help us cover the cost of paying professionals to cover Phoenix throughout 2026. We can always use the boost because we’re chasing bigger stories than mere taggers. Benjamin originally made contact with Ballengee during the course of reporting a story about the team behind “Through Her Eyes,” the tallest mural in the state. Leila Parnian, a Scottsdale artist, hired two assistants — Danny Lorden, a.k.a. D Lord, and Shawn Forton, both imports from Maryland — to help create this 230-foot-tall showpiece on the east side of the newly opened Saiya apartment building. The downtown luxury tower has a pool on the roof. A studio apartment there will run you about $2,200, on the low end. “Through Her Eyes,” on the east side of Saiya luxury apartments. Photo by Sam Eifling. Benjamin’s reporting showed that Parnian’s assistants on the project had the sort of backgrounds that might give a person pause before signing a lease. He found that Forton in 2024 was indicted on, and subsequently received a suspended sentence for, theft and forgery charges that included allegedly forging a $15,000 check. D Lord’s Instagram presence is no more savory. Many of the artist’s posts are gleefully, frothily MAGA — posing at a Tucker Carlson rally, painting a pro-Trump version of Taylor Swift on the side of a truck, displaying a big ol’ portrait of Trump blowing a pink bubble. None of that is my cup of tea, but look, if you want to announce to the world that you enjoy the taste of boots, that’s your prerogative as an artist. Lick away. The artist’s oeuvre goes further still. D Lord also has posted works celebrating Kyle Rittenhouse, dissing Black Lives Matter, and — worst of all, in my view — painting KILL THE HOMELESS on a wall in letters so tall the artists need a ladder to top them off. Screenshot from D Lord’s Instagram account. I don’t even know how to express my full views on that piece without putting a chair through a plate-glass window. Celebrating violence is grotesque. Celebrating violence against vulnerable people is worse yet. Calling for violence against vulnerable people is just about the most odious sort of political statement a person can make — a style of politics we used to simply call “Nazism” until the current people with those politics decided that bad names hurt their feelings. As an aside, again real quick: Even O.G. Nazis knew their views weren’t exactly fit for mixed company, so they had little euphemisms they’d trot out. For their systematic extermination of people with mental illness or physical disabilities, they used the term “lebensunwertes leben,” or “life unworthy of life.” As they were ramping up toward the full-blown Holocaust, the Nazis would kill a few disabled people at a time, through means such as putting them in the back of a van and driving around with the vehicle’s exhaust piping inside. They contended this was a way to purify German society. They even held huge, conformist rallies where they got together by the thousands and celebrated these sorts of ideas, if you can imagine such a thing. Anyway, you can see D Lord’s post on Instagram here. You’ll notice someone in the comments calls out the artist. He flippantly replies: “Come put a stop to it. I'm yawning. Boring.” If you’ve been anywhere near Saiya, you know unhoused people are a constant feature of the neighborhood. The Valley is an extremely dangerous place not to have a home. Many of the nearly 10,000 people experiencing homelessness in Maricopa County are at risk of death or serious injury when the temperatures climb. It’s already a human catastrophe. We don’t need bullies calling for extra violence. And it’s a bad look for everyone in downtown Phoenix that one of our most prominent artworks is a glitzy, 20-story-tall statement work by artists who get their jollies flirting with raw cruelty. As your local newspaper, maybe we can’t put a stop to it. We don’t control the pursestrings on 400-unit apartment projects. We don’t control housing policy. Hell, we don’t even know when and where Penis Man could strike next. What we can control is how far we chase our own curiosity, and how we frame the city for our readers. Sometimes that’s riding shotgun with a guy who doodles on forgotten buildings, hoping you’ll get a smile out of his work. And sometimes that’s combing the clout-chasing social media posts of a guy who believes he has more in common with billionaires than with a person struggling to make ends meet on the streets of Phoenix. It’s a big city out there. Thanks for helping us cover it as only we can. Yours, Sam Eifling Editor-in-chief   Manage Profile | Unsubscribe To ensure you receive our emails, please add inbox@phoenixnewtimes-insider.com to your address book. You are receiving this advertisement newsletter because you have signed up on our website or at an event, participated in a promotion, or purchased a ticket to an event. Thank you for your patronage. © 2025 Phoenix New Times, LLC. All rights reserved. 1201 E. Jefferson Phoenix, AZ 85034