So we went to the Aragon to see The National, Wye Oak, and – one of our favorites – Local Natives on Tuesday. The whole thing was incredible, but really, Local Natives just tore up the house. Here’s a sample of the show. I’d have to say that 12:00-on really blew everyone away. It was one of those weird live music experiences where everyone around you is either going crazy or looking around at each other thinking “Am I really seeing this?” When the bass player started banging on the drum set from the other side (at about 12:55) everyone in the place just went nuts. Now, we’ve had Local Natives’ album (Gorilla Manor) since just after it came out, and it’s been a staple in our house. The kids know it, and Ellie sings “Airplanes” (4:50-8:30) when it comes on. But the rendition of Sun Hands here really had me looking at it in a completely different way. Great stuff.
While I sometimes find Cenk’s commentary a little much, I will admit to loving his comment on capitalist shill Erin Burnett’s summary of the Occupy Wall Street protests. I suppose I’ve already made the utter disdain I feel for the financial and business “news” operation very clear in this post, but Burnett really is one of the worst of the worst, and she’s now been given an even bigger stage than her usual and ludicrous CEO-fawning nonsense on CNBC. It’s an amusing takedown, including the closing line, “Do your job.” As most people looking at this might note, however, Burnett is doing her job, her job being to shill nonstop for corporate thieves as they rob the treasury and suck every dime they can from any program or person they come across.
One of the funnier moments is, to my mind, the comparison of the supposedly weirdo “hippies” of Occupy Wall Street with the truly bizarre get-ups of the Tea Party nuts. I mean, really. What is weirder: the dreads and bongos and nose-rings, or people donning tri-corner hats and Colonial bonnets and carrying around muzzle-loader muskets while hanging bags of tea from their clothing? That’s not fucking weird? At least the “hippies,” for the most part, actually dress like that in their regular lives, perhaps the zombie drummer and Uncle Samta Claus excluded.
It’s often been said of The Wire that each season addresses and interrogates a different institution, and the relationships that institution produces. So, when we watch The Wire, we get analyses of the police, of journalism, of education, of unions, etc. What should be noted is that these analyses are what the social theorists call “synchronic,” which is to say, they are snapshots of a a specific time rather than an analysis of development, or becoming (that is, “diachronic” analysis). In Breaking Bad, a show that, to my mind, can hold its own next to The Wire, what we find is a diachronic analysis, and maybe even a homily. The point is already implicit in the title. “Breaking Bad,” is all about becoming, of turning from one thing into another. I won’t replay the plot here, other than to say that the premise of the show has high school chemistry teacher (though we learn that his job is a step down from his PhD in chemistry) Walter White, who, upon learning that he has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, begins cooking methamphetamine with one of his former students, a junky and apparent lowlife named Jesse Pinkman, in order to accumulate some capital for his family, given his imminent demise. During the first season, Pinkman wonders why a square like White would “break bad” at this particular moment. The New York Times has, of course, picked up on this, wondering not only at the slim popularity of the show – set in New Mexico – on the culturally dominant coasts, but also at the transformation of Walter White, the lead character (I would argue Pinkman is a co-lead, though Brian Cranston has picked up more Emmy’s). How can you have a lead character of a show that changes so much?
What I’d like to suggest here is that the diachronic nature of the show is also concerned with larger historical transitions. Breaking Bad is a television show that concerns itself with modes of production. Alright, I’ll first admit it. This may be a case of simply finding the stuff that you’re interested in. I’ve been rather immersed of late in the massive literature on the transition debates in Marxist historiography. I’m talking Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, the transition debates that emerged in Science & Society between Dobbs and Paul Sweezy in the 1950′s, the resurgence of those debates in the 1970′s and 1980′s, the twists thrown in by Wallerstein’s world system theory, and its modifications by Gunder Frank and the like. Yes, I’m all about transition, mode of production, and craft right now. That said, I think a case can be made that the shifts in modes of production are a central element in Breaking Bad‘s plotting. If The Wire arranged its seasons according to its concern with institutions in a synchronic way, Breaking Bad arranges its seasons according to its concern with the development of modes of production over time.
Season 1: Craft Production – Season 1 explores the craft mode of production, where the expert craftsman possessing esoteric knowledge makes the product in an ad hoc but knowledgeable manner. The labor relations of the craft mode of production are also on display, as Jesse essentially enters into an apprenticeship in crystal meth production. If Season 1 explores anything, it is the Master-Apprentice relationship (the chemic al bromance, as it were) between Walter and Jesse. We see this develop throughout their relationship, but particularly in Jesse’s struggle with his subordinate role in the production process, coupled with his increasing awareness that the quality of the product is both important (he discards a batch of otherwise passable meth) and grounded in an esoteric knowledge that he does not possess. The following compilation, in addition to using one of the better soundtrack songs from Season 1, also really demonstrates the show’s visual obsession with the production process:
Season 2: Small-scale Industry – In Season 2, Walter and Jesse’s craft operation is transformed to a small scale industry, as they produce the crystal at much higher levels of output, beginning to standardize their process. That they are transitioning from a craft mode of production to an industrial mode is especially clear through the relationship with Gustavo Fring, the merchant-distributor, who demands ever larger quantities of their product. Walter and Jesse ramp up production in a standardized way – no longer bickering about roles within the production space, and assisted in their productive procedures by investment in constant capital (i.e., when Walt sends Jesse out for the new equipment to run the crystal production efficiently). We also see the transition moment where the craft producer becomes so invested in distribution (which is to say, the circulation of commodities) that he starts to control that space, as with the guild-based restrictions on first-priority sales in the medieval town. This development is nowhere more clear than in what has become, perhaps, the classic scene of the series: Walter White recognizing the emerging craft production of a possible competitor, and addressing it with prohibitions to trade, the “Stay out of my Territory” moment that, as an added bonus, plays against my favorite TV on the Radio song:
Season 3: Large-scale industry – Walter and Jesse have been completely integrated into the factory/monopoly capital mode of production. Through their relationship with the merchant-distributor Gustavo Fring , they’ve been turned into employees of his large-scale distribution operation. They now produce meth not in their RV, but in a shimmering, automated, and scientifically advanced factory system. The labor relationships represented here are straight out of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital. Fring’s goal is to identify and extract a standardized production process to such an extent that any individual producer (that is, Walter and Jesse) becomes expendable. The entire plot of Season 3 turns on this expropriation of craft knowledge from the direct producer to an abstracted form that can be filled by anyone. This is the role of Gale Boetticher, the lab assistant brought in by Fring to replace and displace the Master-Apprentice relationship between Walter and Jesse with an abstract labor relationship. Walter recognizes this function for Gale early on, succumbs to it eventually as Jesse spins out of control, but ultimately uses Fring’s desired proletarianization to his advantage in the gripping season finale. In Season 3, we enter the era of monopoly capitalism.
So, Season 4? We already have hints of where the new season will go. Skyler – Walter’s wife – is a “bookkeeper,” essentially an accountant (although bookkeeping, as the “craft” form of accountancy, is probably significant, and may be laying the groundwork for more formalized relationships in Season 5). She has come around to the idea that Walter’s meth production is a going concern, and she has signaled that she wants to take on the task of figuring out how to launder the money effectively, a job previously done in an ad hoc manner by the hilarious corrupt lawyer Saul Goodman (who is really, we learn, Irish). If I were to predict the trajectory, I’d say that Season 4 will be devoted in some measure to the emergence of finance capital, which is to say, to the shift from direct production to abstract circulation of capital. The real question will be whether Vince Gilligan can pull off this new season in a non-nostalgic way. Will Walt simply hold on to his esoteric knowledge, despite its expropriation, or will a new vision of craft emerge that’s more than simple nostalgia for the old craft ethos. This new vision of craft emerging within the dominance of finance capital is, I think, the engine runs many of the questions of culture and production today, from the emergence of various craft food and drink movements to the teevee representations of labor as craft production contests paired with a healthy dose of entrepreneurship. So, I think this is an important question for all of us (it’s also why I think Breaking Bad is exploring questions that perhaps even exceed the policy concerns explored in The Wire). As is almost painfully clear throughout, Walter’s cancer is a metaphor – but it may operate metaphorically in a number of ways. Accumulation, for instance. More on this as we watch Season 4 together.
So, this post kicks off two new themes for the summer: Craft Summer and Breaking Bad Summer. I want to look more closely at the question of craft production, specifically as it reemerges as a kind of cultural ideal within the overall dynamics of finance capital. But I also just love Breaking bad, as you can probably tell. So I want to write about Breaking Bad. These two things should keep us populated through the summer.
“On and on and on How the alphabet boys carry on…”
- The Gaslight Anthem, Orphans
Just some flicks today of a recent rooftop by HERTS, OMENS, and, of course, NOTEEF. I should note that about half the local hits on this blog come from people looking up some combination of “NOTEEF” and “graffiti” and “Chicago” on Google, and finding the previous image I put up of a Brown Line rooftop. So here’s to driving traffic this way. I’m also unclear on the relationship between “HERTS, ROGER, and SNACKI/SNACK ATTACK, who all seem to be the same person to me, but maybe it’s different people. In any case, SNACKI is hilariously famous round these parts for these kinda awesome faces he does everywhere. He even got the attention of the New York Times, which of course sent a reporter to track him down. She does, only to realize it’s not the Jean Michel Basquiat (or fake ass banksy) interview she’s been dreaming about, but rather an interview with an actual, y’know, graffiti writer. The stark difference between his description of his own work and the overblown nonsense of every non-writer’s favorite “street artist” (i.e., fucking fake ass banksy) is just about perfect:
Soon, he was talking about graffiti the way some people talk about coffee. Or crystal meth. “It’s an addiction, honestly,” he said. “And like any other addiction, everyone starts for a different reason. At this point in my life I couldn’t imagine not doing it.”
But why graffiti? Why create art that is, by definition, impermanent? Not to mention illegal?
“When you put a gallery show together,” he said, “it’s only going to attract a certain crowd. If I paint a billboard that you can see from I-94, Amtrak and Damen, it’s going to hit a lot more people than just some college hipsters or some 40-year-old art collectors.” [MY NOTE: Amen, brotha.]
Much to my disappointment, snacki did not seem to be a lunatic genius. Very bright and slightly squirrelly maybe — but utterly lacking the self-importance I’d assigned to him from afar.
“At the end of the day,” snacki said, “writing graffiti is just acting like a little kid, and running around and having fun. It’s about not taking myself seriously.”
Wise words. If only he’d shared them with me back in December.
She wishes he could have said them back in December so that she wouldn’t have had to waste her time with the interview! Well, looks like she got took, too. So, the HERTS, I think, is this SNACKI, but I may be wrong. You might notice that GRAM, another guy who hangs with these cats, and “SNAX” are listed in NOTEEF’s fill-in (in the “N”), so maybe HERTS isn’t SNACKI. There is, however, a HERTS fill-in with one of those SNACKI faces on a garage near Diversey, so I’m just confused. In any case, enjoy.
HERTS, OMENS, and NOTEEF KWT 2NR. fill-ins, rooftop, Brown Line at Western
NOTEEF, since the one above cut him off. Brown Line at Western
1) When you fuck up the opening of a Cling Wrap box, you have to live with that fuck up for two months. When you fuck it up three consecutive times, it follows that you have six months of Cling Wrap hell on your hands. How does this happen? You know that last bit of Cling Wrap is limp, and goes nowhere, so you’re smart enough to anticipate and buy some Cling Wrap at the store, probably opting for the Glad brand because you watch Top Chef, even though the store brand does exactly the same thing, there being only one way of making Cling Wrap, really, even if it’s called Stick-To Plastic Wrap, or whatever. But you reach the end of that old Cling Wrap, and pump your fist triumphantly because you knew enough to anticipate, but then you’re all excited and the damn packaging doesn’t tell you fuck all about how to open it, so you start pulling on tabs and other loose cardboard, only to realize that you’ve fucked up the opening of the Cling Wrap box yet again. They should have a big goddamn red star on the packaging warning you not to fuck up the opening of the Cling Wrap. This is basic technical writing that any sophomore would be able to tell you.
2) The best two moments on Girl Talk’s All Day are Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Shimmy Shimmy Ya over Radiohead’s Creep (roughly 20:30-21:45) and Fabolous’ (Holla Back) Young’n over INXS’s I Need You Tonight (28:45-29:40). There are a lot of other good moments, but these are the most surprising and well-executed, I think. Ending with Imagine was, however, lame. I mean that in the most high-schoolish way. At some point, I’m going to have to admit that my preference for East Coast and specifically New York hip hop over all other varieties is mere provincialism.Two points here: a) An easy experiment: Put any “old school” hip hop song (defined here, as something produced between 1987 and 1995) up on YouTube. Let’s say, EPMD’s Crossover, for example. Within two days, you will get a comment stating that EPMD was a’ight, but Li’l Wayne is a better lyricist, followed by about 300 comments stating that Li’l Wayne is total shit, and commercialized crap, and can’t even hold a candle to the lyrics of X Old School hip hop, in this case Parrish Smith and Erick Sermon. In the first place, this is strictly speaking true: EPMD is objectively better than Li’l Wayne. But the real issue is that hip hop spoke to these commenters more when they were 15 or 16 or 20, back in 1992. Today’s hip hop doesn’t speak to me not because it’s bad (I really wouldn’t know), but because I’m not hanging out in parks, drinking beer, a twenty sack in one pocket and a can of Rusto in my coat, NYPD rolling by slow with the dash flashlight, EPMD banging out of somebody’s trunk. Funk mode, yeah kid, that’s how the squad rolls. Maybe Li’l Wayne would be just as good if that’s what I was doing now. Instead, I get a small rush from having correctly timed the running out of Cling Wrap. b) And on a related note, whenever I see something advertised at the supermarket as 2 for $5, I secretly mouth the dialogue intro to Wu Tang’s C.R.E.A.M. It’s an embarrassing admission, but that’s what blogs are for.
3) Political Axiom: Talking to the public about deficit spending during the middle of the holiday season is inherently stupid. Deficits only make sense in January.
In our last episode, we saw a quick AMUSE tag on Lincoln. A few days later I saw this, a little further up Lincoln, by Ainsle:
AMUSE, Truck throwee, Lincoln and Ainsle
In this context, I don’t want to talk about styles or ups, but literacies. It strikes me that a non-writer would have a hard time connecting this throwee with the tag we saw earlier, or identifying it as the work of the same writer. But I saw it immediately. So, what literacies are necessary to draw that connection?
First, you have to see both, as a pure matter of attention. In urban settings, graffiti is such an element of the built environment that it can simply elude attention. As we pulled up to this intersection, it would be very easy for she simply not to see this truck; it doesn’t hit the attention threshold. I covered this point a bit earlier in the series, when discussing BESTER’s tag on the Happy Land Social Club. Graffiti writers develop different attention mechanisms to their environment. Not better, of course. People who are very into cars have different attention mechanisms, as do people who are into fashion or food (attention is always intentional in this sense). But the first thing you need to draw the connection is a different attention pattern—you have to first notice the marks at all. Second, you need a capacity to read the letters as letters. In the case of the AMUSE tag, it’s probably easier to read the letters as letters, which is to say, to recognize the A, the M, the U, etc. In the case of this throwee, it’s likely more difficult to recognize the A and the M, as they’re more stylized. So, these are the obvious points: you’d have to first notice them at all, then you’d have to be able to read the letters. But you’d still, at that point, be left with AMUSE on the one hand, and AM (really am, since the A is lowercase on the truck) on the other.
In order to move on from that point, you’d need to know a variety of conventions that are manifested here. First, you’d need to know that writers often abbreviate their tags for different kinds of purposes, especially if their tags are longer. In this case, a simple AM fits better on the back of the truck than would a full “AMUSE.” Second, you’d have to know that writers often include a number after their tags, and usually the number “1” to indicate that they are the first person with this tag. So, you will often see things like KREL1, or KREL ONE, or KREL ONEZ, or KREL UNO, and other variations. (This convention, in fact, leads to other transformations, such as writers using other numbers, even if they don’t signify that there have been previous writers with the same tag; in other words, the higher number just looks or sounds interesting, but has no ordinal meaning, like, say, KREL5, where there weren’t four previous KRELs). In AMUSE’s case, he uses a Roman numeral one (an uppercase “i” flanked by dots) that appears underneath the tag: AMUSE I. Third, you’d have to know that one of the ways writers stylize letters is to use symbols and other variations to indicate the interior space in the letterform (what typographers call the “counter”). In this case, AMUSE used the same Roman numeral one as the counter for his lowercase “a.” You can see it inside the round area of the first letter (if you can see the first letter!).
So, summarizing this literacy, you have to notice it, recognize the letters, and understand at least these three conventions (abbreviation, numeration, stylization). What strikes me here, as in all literacies, is how instantaneous it is if you have these forms, and how inscrutable it is if you don’t. It probably took me less than a second to process all this in real time: as soon as I saw this throwee, I thought, “Hey, there’s that kid AMUSE again…I just put one of his tags on the blog.” No lag time.
Of course, this is a well-understood and now nearly trivial point when it comes to literacies. There are a multitude of informal literacies that everybody walks around with, and these are, at some level, a material politics. Our multiple literacies, to put it another way, are precisely the unpredictable factors that allow us to maintain difference in a common space (or time)—we switch on and off from seeing (or hearing, or other modes of perception and thought) that common world and what could be called that exit world, and the character of those switches both speaks to and intensifies our various investments. We already know this for language literacies (say, code switching and the like—which also shows us that the “common” and the “exit” worlds are relative, like figure and ground), but it’s really a useful framework for me when I expand it beyond language. This may be the more generous reading that I didn’t give Cintron’s work on gang graffiti the first time out, though I still have a problem with thinking that “translation” of these literacies is politically innocent. When I do it here, as above, the point is rather to demonstrate that the perception itself can’t be translated as perception, even if its features can be explained (in a linguistic mode, the studium).
So, why all this painful blathering? When I presented a very abbreviated version of the Graffiti Fridays series as a conference talk some month ago, I got the usual and predictable responses: isn’t it really about a politics I’d be able to recognize (i.e., a “protest” against gentrification, and similar urban concerns), and wouldn’t it be better and even more political in a museum, where people would have to confront its strangeness and account for it (by understanding it)? It was interesting to me that both these objections came from people who kinda proudly wear a “left radical” tag on their sleeves. No, I said. Those are both modes of normalizing this practice—as I’ve said here numerous times: politicizing and aestheticizing. Of course, what I really mean (at least in part) is that both are modes of erasing or devaluing the political and aesthetic investments inherent in those exit literacies. What both desire is for that exit literacy to become common.
I’m coining it! I did a Google search for “contripreneur,” and got this:
Bupkiss. So it’s mine. As you know, I intensely dislike the term “prosumer,” largely because I think it obscures more than it reveals. The actual term for the activity supposedly taken up by the prosumer should be, in my view, the “contripreneur,” an admittedly tongue-in-cheek combination of the contributor and the entrepreneur. (I don’t think it’s any more etymologically senseless than “prosumer,” in any case). And I want to use it to describe a whole set of activities, ranging from micro-finance and the kind of entrepreneurial charity work described recently by Nicholas Kristoff, the more modest contripreneurial activities, like designing tee shirts for Threadless to uploading YouTube videos and the like. Put another way, I want the term to have a broader extension than the “prosumer” because I’m attempting to link prosumer activities to a series of other activities, including, I should note, the way we contribute to our retirement plans and the like, which are mostly now “defined contribution plans” as opposed to the defined benefits plans of the old economy. But for now, I’ll just be staking that information claim, and we’ll see how fast Google’s little bots find my frequent mention of the contripreneur in this blog post titled The Contripreneur. Did I mention the contripreneur?
Apart from assaying my Googlexistence, I’m going to use this term as a jumping off point for getting back into the whole discussion of contribution that I brought up in the Three Dogmas of User-Centeredness post (which has, oddly enough, become a favorite of Israeli spammers), and continued in a few other posts. And I’ll try to do that through several readings of Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, which posits a “Contribution Economy” as an escape route from the crisis of contemporary capital. So, more on Stiegler as I get to it.
Here’s one from American Slang, which will probably have to compete for my top ten records of the year. (Isn’t December the time for Top Tens?). The Gaslight Anthem is, to my mind, this really interesting phenomenon, since their overriding theme seems to be the overt nostalgia for some working class youth, but it meshes perfectly with nostalgia for something like a collapsing industrial society. Indeed, Arcade Fire talks the talk on this, but The Gaslight Anthem really works it in formally, a kind of yearning for Springsteen’s 70′s, and their links with Springsteen are, of course, well-known by now (I think there’s probably something wrong with people who don’t like “The ’59 Sound” the first time they hear it). I guess the whole nostalgia thing is strange cuz these dudes are in their twenties.
Digression: This reminds me that I really want to pick up Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 70′s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which I was tempted to just buy and read the other day (along with Francois Dosse’s mammoth biography of Deleuze and Guattari – I really liked Dosse’s History of Structuralism). Then I thought, why buy either of these when certain blog readers might be agonizing again over what in the world to get me for Christmas, and not wanting me to look at the book they’ve presented me, only to have me say “You really have no idea what I do, right?” See? I make things easy.
Anyway, here’s “Orphans” from American Slang, followed by “Boxer” at Bonnaroo
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