164 pages Edited by Rime 24.8 x 19.1 cm Language: English Paperback Publisher: Beyond the Streets 2025
Joseph Tierney has been signing walls as RIME — or Jersey Joe — long enough to have become one of the names the outside world reaches for when it wants graffiti without asking permission: in 2015 he took Moschino and Jeremy Scott to court after a mural he'd painted in Detroit for The Seventh Letter turned up on a gown Katy Perry wore to the Met Gala. The case settled a year later, and it remains one of the rare moments a writer forced the question of who owns a piece painted on a wall.
Direction Diary Volume 1 is the opposite end of that hand. It reproduces a sketchbook unedited, drawn entirely in pen and filled nomadically across the United States — road trips, ceremonies, long stretches of driving. Letters slide into faces, faces into loose text, and the whole thing reads less as an artbook than as thinking made visible: what a writer draws when nobody is going to photograph it. For anyone who knows RIME's hyper-controlled, cartoon-fed productions, this is where they come from.
