Seven Red

It is perhaps at this juncture that the question “What does it mean?” begins to be heard, and that problems of exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy. The emperor, the god – what did he mean? In place of segments of the chain that are always detachable, a detached partial object on which the whole chain depends; in place of a polyvocal graphism flush with the real, a biunivocalization forming a transcendent dimension that gives rise to linearity; in place of nonsignifying signs that compose networks of a territorial chain, a despotic signifier from which all the signs uniformly flow in a deterritorialized flow of writing. Men have even been seen drinking this flow. – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

Ok, kiddies. It’s time for another edition. I’ll keep the extended discussion short this time, since one of my many readers has already accused me of angling to write a book. It would be a terrible book, given what we already have. Or it would be a textbook, which might actually be a funny idea as a novelty item, or as a book inside a book, like a character in a novel is writing a graffiti textbook and encountering all kinds of resistance from various parties. Would have to be a fringe character, comic relief sort of diversion. In any case, I’ll tone down the high falutin (sp?) angle, which is likely just gibberish anyway.

Today I just want to show off some pics I took in Lincoln Park (arguably not the “worst” neighborhood in the city). I’ve started scoping out spots off the Brown Line, and there’s actually some good stuff. If you remember our friend JULS from the first edition, I have some news. He and another cat hit some rooftops on the Brown last Friday. At some point, I’m going to have to do the graffiti train tour, getting off at some stops and maybe getting a bit closer to the stuff on the ground. There’s some good stuff on the Metra tracks, too. In any case, JULS also bombs with NAME, a funny tag to start out – it has a kind of GNU’s Not Unix recursivity. At least his tag isn’t TAG (more than a few imbeciles have thought of that one), but NAME is close enough. So tonight I want to talk a bit about tags, not as styles or ups, but as signatures. If this were our textbook, we’d call this chapter “How to Choose your Tag.”

First a few flicks taken on a Saturday stroll in Lincoln Park:

First off we have ONION, on a dumpster beneath the Fullerton El. This guy knows how to write, for sure, sporting an old school plain style with a nice variation on the I. Next, as promised, is VEGAN:

Last week I called VEGAN the marker tag king of the north side. This kid has ups. Now, I don’t think this is one of his best tags, and might be a bit older, but he still has a sense of how to connect and move letters. In this case, he went with a cursive style – not great, but it actually works with the letters really nicely (VEGAS did something similar). And finally, the best straight tag I’ve seen so far, NEGROE:

This is definitely reminiscent of a New York outer boros style circa 1991 or so. I’m not crazy about the “R,” which is way overdone given its location in the tag, and NEGROE gets a bit too swirly with the closing “E,” but the initial lower case “N” is an interesting move given the capitalization throughout, and I like that the “O” loops back into itself, forming a consistent line with the stems and serifs for the E, G, and R. That’s a smart variation on the “O,” I think.

But, of course, we’re not really talking about form this week so much as tag selection. I mean ONION, VEGAN, and NEGROE? Of course, you’re thinking that my standard bearer for good tagging was EARSNOT, so what’s so weird about these. Nothing, really. I actually like them as tags. They’re real words, rather than some strangely spelled pseudo-word, and they’re completely original. NEGROE, in fact, reminds me of one of the great Bronx writers from back when, JEW:

As you can see (I hope), this guy could tag. Notice the flair on the J and the perfection of consistent angles through the E and W. That’s just about perfect, as a tag. Here’s another:

JEW used to write with a bunch of Bronx guys that went by the name BT (Bronx Team, Bronx Taggers), like BESTER (about whom more in addendum) and LOUIE167 (HR Crew). At a certain point, JEW started doing these really great tags with ultra fat caps – caps that people normally use just for filling in. You can see the effect taking shape at the top of his first tag above, as the line widens towards the top of the letters. These tags were just great – stylish and original in technique. Now, of course you’d expect that anyone writing JEW would be Jewish, but it turns out that JEW was Latino Puerto Rican and African American – not Jewish at all. Needless to say, this quickly became a talking point about JEW’s work in the perpetual race war that was late-1980′s New York City. “JEW,” people would say, “That motherfucker’s funny, being black and all.” Point being, whether VEGAN’s a vegan, whether NEGROE is African American, or whether ONION is, well, an onion or onion-farmer, or lover of onions, is utterly immaterial. What does your tag mean? is always the stupidest question one can ask. There are, of course, always the people who get their tags from their initials, or from some childhood nickname, or from some quality they have (how many giant TINY’s do we have to meet before the joke gets old?), but the best tags lose all designation and begin to circulate merely as themselves: EARSNOT, VEEFER, GIZ, SOE. Perhaps the repetitive character of graffiti produces that repetition effect, where you repeat a word until it starts to sound strange, and loses its meaning. If I was to venture yet another tedious theoretical stab at the thing, I might say that graffiti is a strange re-emergence of something like a primitive social machine: inscription on the body of capital, undermining the signature from within its logics. But I promised to be brief, a promise I have already broken.

But this, I think, is the lesson in choosing a tag. Any writer who tries to explain his or her tag through some narrative probably has it all wrong, or is not really a writer. Any writer who starts to explain to you what his tag means is missing something important about writing. This is why TURK 182! is the dumbest graffiti movie of all time; the tag is the meaning that drives the whole narrative – one only need decipher it to track down the writer. It’s precisely what you get when liberals misconstrue graffiti as meaningful protest. (Incidentally, someone asked me the other day whether I liked V for Vendetta, perhaps the dumbest movie made in the last ten years. I liked it better the first time I saw it, I said, when it was called TURK 182.) So, when looking for a tag, lose the damn meaning. Let the letters – the word – become something else: EARSNOT. Nietzsche, at the end of his life, suffering from syphilitic dementia, said “I am a beast, a negro.” This is often mistaken for Nietzsche’s racism, when it can be read as quite the opposite. Ever aphoristic, Nietzsche can be read (as many do read him) as saying “I am becoming something else, something other than what I am…” Maybe writing does the same: I am an ONION, a GIZ, a JEW, a NEGROE…

Addendum: Last week I listed three ways a writer could become famous that were not related to pure repetition: the multiple, the original, and the Just Plain Fucking Crazy. JEW reminded me of BESTER here, and that let me recall another way: the fortuitous event. Now, this is really a bit of a stretch, since BESTER was basically all city by bombing. In other words, he was quite well known through sheer repetition, but BESTER is also famous for having one of the most televised tags in history, all by accident. In March 1990, a Cuban refugee set fire to the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, killing 87 people. This was one of the great tragedies of the last 25 years in New York, and it got massive news coverage. Nobody living in New York at the time could have missed it; it was everywhere, for weeks, and even months.

Of course, writers were just as shocked as everyone else, though they tend to be a cynical bunch. But the Happy Land fire also had them talking with some envy about BESTER, who fortuitously had a tag…smack on the front of the Happy Land Social Club building. So, essentially, BESTER was getting television time every day for months, as the news anchors stood in front of the Happy Land Social Club filing their reports. New Yorkers saw the tragedy as the backdrop. Writers saw a fat chrome BESTER tag jack in the middle of it all. For months, all you heard was “Fuckin’ BESTER probably burned that shit down himself!” Fame, kid. Yes. A strange breed. Here’s the difference between what a regular person sees and what a writer sees:

Normal Person

Writer’s View

Normal Person

Writer…Like I said, strange breed

Jeez. I knew my “It ain’t Tautology til it’s Over” post was flying in the face of all common sense on jinxing the season, but this is ridiculous. I noted that barring a sweep by the Phillies and a sweep by the Braves, the Mets may have it sown up. Since that post, they’ve lost 5 straight, getting swept by the Phils, who are back to within two games of first. Moreover, I have been wishing a monumental late season collapse on the Bosox. While they did meet their own broom at the hands of the Yanks, it looks like a monumental late season collapse on the part of the Mets. Terrible. I’m already hearing it Facebook-wise from the damn Phillies fans, who are perfectly in the right to mock these latest events mercilessly. I think Willie’s job depends on pulling out of this tailspin but quick.

I miss Wegmans so much I cried in the supermarket today. I don’t know if it’s living in a city or just a general mid-western trait, but every super market I’ve been to so far sucks ass.  If anyone knows where I can get bulk muesli or some Soy-Boy baked tofu, please let me know.

Today was a beautiful day in Chicago. 80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Since it has been raining for about a, um, month, I took babygirl outside (ga-Gaaaaaah) for a walk (a-wah, a-wah) four times today.

Once to get breakfast. In which I struggle 2 bagels, 2 large cups of HOT coffee, a 13 lb stoller and a 24 lb babygirl down 2 1/2 blocks then up 2 flights of stairs.

Once to the playground. In which I make tentative conversations with three other mothers as we watch our daughters approach and retreat. They don’t really play with each other as much as near each other.

Once to get ice-cream. In which I, well, get ice-cream. Babygirl plays at the fountain until she poops.

And then finally for dinner. In which Topspun, babygirl and I have a lovely dinner at the neighborhood grill. Babygirl is adorable and the food is delicious.

It’s a good thing we live on the third floor after all that food. It’s a good thing I’m going back to work, or I’d spend all our money.

I’m hesitant to start counting chickens with thirty-four games left for the Metropolitans, including back-to-back series with the Phils and Braves, but the seven game deficit – barring some kind of sweep-sweep – would seem difficult to overcome at this point in the season. The last ten-games have been devastating for the Phils/Braves effort to up-end the NL East leaders, with the Mets going 7-3 while both contenders went 3-7. Not exactly an awe-inspiring stretch run. Moreover, the Mets bats have seemed to make up for the sorry state of middle relief (and some starters), so the collapse of Mets pitching and the consequences thereof – which seems to be becoming an August-September leitmotif in Flushing – may be overstated. I’ll withhold judgment at this point, knowing full well the devastating effect of the jinx, but I have to think that if the Mets even split each series, we’re very close to seeing a second straight NL East title. Despite the comparative nay-saying by all commentators (“This Mets team isn’t as good as last year’s,” etc.), Omar has actually assembled a pretty impressive squad. Things will be much more clear by the end of the week.

On a related note, the schedule imbalance of the last week has pretty much shut the door on the Yankees. While 7 games might be hard to overcome for the Braves and Phils, 6.5  will be impossible to overcome against this Red Sox team. Print the hats and pennants. It’s time to start counting down the Magic Number in Fenway. It’s over.

Yesterday we tried to go to Whole Foods Flavor Fest in Jonquil Park. Unfortunately, the rains of the last few days had made the ground very wet, so combine that with the booth set-up and thousands of people traipsing through, and you get the Whole Foods Mud Fest in Jonquil Park. I’m a little embarrassed (but not really) to have gone to Woodstock 94, which is at least less embarrassing than Woodstock 99. Ninety four was the scene of the Green Day mud-slinging video, if you remember – a rainy, pissy, mud-soaked extravaganza, if a gigantic vector for the spread of hepatitis C can be considered an extravanganza. If the music and chemical modification wasn’t so good (Droppin’ science like Galileo…dropped an orange…*), it would have been an absolute three-day nightmare. So I knows me some mud.

This wasn’t as bad, but we took one look at the people coming out of the park with mud three inches deep on their feet and decided that sandals and stroller would not be a good idea.Instead, we just took a stroll around the Lincoln Park neighborhood (it’s like Ramadi, I hear…), checking out stores and stopping in for tapas and some red sangria. Sunshine and chemical modification. babygirl got her first taste of tapas, including ham and cheese croquettas (yum yums), onion and potato omelette (boo!), and meatballs in sauce (eh…). If you think I was giving up even one bite of my chorizo, you got it twisted, kid.

Since we were doing some sight-seeing, here’s the Original Gangsta shot of the Biograph theater, where John Dillinger bought it. I love the scene, I think it’s in Pynchon, that has the crowds in Chicago massing to dip their hankerchiefs in Dillinger’s blood (dip a napkin in his sacred blood…and bequeath it as a rich legacy unto their issue…). The scene yesterday, somewhat different, led me to wonder whether there is any greater indignity than having your spot in history supplanted by a fucking Qdoba.

* No, the Beastie Boys weren’t there. I was referring to the chemical modification part…On the other hand, despite the presence of the Red Hot Chile Peppers, Metallica, and Green Day, the best live show of Woodstock 94 was definitely Cypress Hills’ set early on the Friday afternoon, although my estimation may have to do with the onset of said chemical modification, a theme here. I know what all the purists say about commodification, but I gotta tell you, once the fences came down on that Saturday morning, Woodstock 94 was as close to Temporary Autonomous Zone as I think I’ll ever get.

And here’s a bonus track that I came across searching for the above. I just love it for the crowd movements, which is my thing, I guess…

It ain’t easy bein’ greazy, in this world full of cleanliness and, you know, all that other madness. – Method Man

Today I was going to discuss some good tags I’ve seen here in Chicago, but I forgot the damn camera at home, so we’ll have to save that discussion for next week. Specifically, I was going to talk about NEGROE and VEGAN, both of whom are interesting in their own right. VEGAN, incidentally, seems to be the marker tag king of the north side. His stuff is not only stylistically sophisticated, but also everywhere. So, rather than waste the week, I’ll take this opportunity to talk about ups. As I said in the first installment, I’ll be talking primarily about styles and ups. This breaks the discussion down into something like an aesthetic category and an economic category, where the first can be described in terms of typography and other factors, while the second can be described in terms of proliferation. So for this installment, I want to talk about proliferation: getting up.

Understanding graffiti means understanding a complex prestige economy, with graffiti writers competing for the esteem of other writers, even if that respect is given grudgingly (i.e., “That’s kids a dick, but he’s up.”). Being up means that you bomb a lot, that your shit is everywhere, that you’re “all city.” The object of the game, to put it another way, is fame, respect, prestige. Ghetto Superstar. You walk in the room and people are like, damn, there go X. OK, that’s a bit much, but you get the idea. The problem is in identifying what gets you there. What are the evaluative criteria for ups?

Before we get to that, I want to return to something I mentioned earlier: the necessary illegality of graffiti. If graffiti wasn’t illegal, it wouldn’t have the same cachet in youth communities, and not only because it would no longer be a case of sticking it to the Man, or anything like that. If the chief end of graffiti is prestige, the chief engine is risk, and illegality constitutes the risk. Put plainly, the graffiti economy works very much like the bond market: the more risk, the more return on investment.

The principle of risk, in fact, dictates almost every aspect of graffiti ethics. Just as an example, take ragging. Ragging involves “going over” or otherwise defacing someone else’s work, and it is a severe breach (yes, the subculture is not without irony). Popular culture has assimilated the idea that “crossing somebody out” is a graffiti no-no, but the story is, in fact, much more complex. You can put a paint tag over a marker tag, for instance, without causing beef. Or, you can put a throwie over a paint tag, a fill-in over an outline, a straight-letter over a fill-in, or a burner over a straight letter. But you can’t do any of these in reverse or at the same level. A fill-in over a fill-in is instant beef: ragging. A paint tag over a straight letter? Be prepared to throw hands, son. Or, as we used to put it: settle your business on the walls and on the street (i.e., your own work will now be targeted, and if you meet up, it’s going to be a fight). But what organizes this hierarchy? Risk. The entire hierarchy of acceptable covering is organized by the time (and therefore exposure to arrest) it takes to finish the work. It only takes 5 seconds to cop a tag; it can take up to 2 minutes to complete a moderately sized throwie. Very obviously, the person exposing himself to danger for 2 minutes deserves more respect than the person exposing himself to danger for 5 seconds. It can take several hours to do a burner, so that’s the top of the exposure hierarchy, aesthetics aside. That’s how the whole thing works, when we leave out the aesthetics of it. (Like all economic models, this one is highly artificial: the aesthetics can never really be separated). You should start to see why the legal wall doesn’t get you nearly as much respect as the illegal wall: there is no risk at the legal wall at all. Indeed, one of the problems of legal graffiti is that it undermines this very principle of risk, fixating, instead, on the object. Graffiti – the illegal kind – is a lived process, a lived adventure. It is the difference between a dead work of art on a wall and life itself as a work of art.

I’ve talked about risk primarily as the risk of arrest. I’d say this is the primary force that runs the engine. But there are also other risks. Obviously, time of exposure varies according to location: a straight letter in an abandoned factory district is not as risky as a fill-in at a major intersection. Location plays another role related to risk as well: you get respect by hitting particularly dangerous locations (water towers, trestle overpasses, and generally any place that you can fall off of and die.). I once saw a video in which GIZ jumped on to the tracks to hit a train that had just pulled into the station. That was fucking nuts: out the train went, running graff in this day and age!

So, why are ups important? The more ups you have, 1) the more you are likely to be seen (that’s the obvious point – the dead art object), but also, 2) the more risk you have taken on (life as a work of art). This is the underbelly of the prestige economy, and why the liberals are wrong when they try to restrict graffiti to “art,” or even “protest.” Graffiti is – in part, of course – about exposing the self to risk. The signature is merely an index or after-effect of that exposure. Every graffiti writer has this story: “So I was out bombing with so-and-so, and we were filling in on that fat spot over on X street. Bloop bloop. It’s the sound of the beast. We jet, and they gave chase. Hopped some fences, ended up down on the tracks, fat fucker didn’t want to jump the fences. Badow! Guess who ain’t goin’ to Central tonight? And you know I went back and finished that fill-in, son. Only to find so-and-so already at it!” Translation: they were in the middle of bombing, the cops came, they ran, they escaped, and then they went back to finish. Just as the half-completed work of graffiti tells you somebody got chased or caught, the finished work tells you they survived. And it’s that margin of survival that’s important.

(The one exception I heard about: A buddy and I bumped into a writer named FEW. I think he hung out with DASH and SPONE. Ridgewood kid, if I remember. He told us that he was once hitting a rooftop over in Long Island City – only one way up and down. In the middle of their fill-ins a couple of plainclothes pulled up below and shouted at them to come on down. They knew they were going to be arrested anyway, so they finished their outlines before coming down. Of course, that could be a bullshit story. It’s just the kind of bullshit story a writer would tell.)

So, with an understanding of the risk engine, I want to show you the primary ways writers go about getting ups: repetition and the singular work.

Repetition

Repetition means just that: you are a prolific writer. You expose yourself to risk constantly, in many settings and under many conditions. Note the following collection of COPE throwie’s found at Insane Fame:

(Click image for large view)

Each of those constitute a substantial risk, and I only took a small selection of the small selection of COPE’s larger body of work. When you have ups like that, you’re just badass. Again, check out the small selection of work by CRO and CHINO, also from Insane Fame:

(Click image for large view)

Two points here: You should notice that the same style or shape repeats across instances. This is the sense in which graffiti is truly a signature. Everyone can recognize CRO’s distinctive throwies, CHINO’s well-known tags, or COPE’s famous throwie-straight. The repetition is important. But you also must vary, as is better seen in CRO’s various styles than in COPE’s uniform work. Second, you can see the the differences in settings. It’s not enough to just bomb your own neighborhood and the surroundings. You have to venture out to all spots and all boroughs. Obviously, doing so increases your exposure in terms of visibility, but it also increases your risk quotient, since you are in an unfamiliar area, and you might face not just cops, but the various locals there, who may be, er, unfriendly…Life as a work of art isn’t always pretty.

Singularity

The other key to getting ups – getting noticed – is the unusual or original piece, location, act, etc. If COPE gets fame through proliferation, others can achieve a margin of fame by doing something unique. It’s the kind of thing people see and say, “that’s fucking nuts” (in which case it is a wow moment for the audience), or, “that’s a good idea.” It is the graffiti version of having an Idea, or changing up the game. I want to provide a few examples to give you a sense of it. Once again, these images can be found along with many others at Insane Fame. Please visit them and check it out.

a) The Multiple (Image from Streets are Saying Things) – In the flick below, we have a very simple version of multiple fill-ins in one location, in this case by DUEL and JA, both of whom are proliferation writers as well. They jumped down off the platform to do this, so it’s even more risky. It’s risky enough to do ONE duster off the platform (a duster is a light coat for the fill-in, when you’re short on time). But the genius, the ultimate Fuck You, consists in doing something so risky and staying down there so goddamn long. Not for nothing, but I also wonder about the mechanics of this. Assuming that they were both filling in at the same time, I would think that they’d get in each other’s way?

(Click image for larger view)

b) Nice Thought! – In the following case, DARKS comes up with a nice idea, hitting a letter on each platform of an external stairwell. The value here is in the unusual arrangement and size. You can see this fucker from far away. Good Idea! Of course, this isn’t the first time such a thing was done, but it’s certainly a strong execution of the concept:

(Click image for larger view)

c) Just Plain Fucking Crazy – The JPFC category is quite large. You’d expect it to be given our discussion of risk above. It contains everything from people hanging off highway overpasses to huge tags on the front of police stations. Indeed, the threshold for nuts is somewhat skewed in graffiti cultures (given that anyone’s doing any of this in the first place). The best time for highway graffiti used to be around 9 o’clock, when the visibility was a bit off, but there were enough cars so that they couldn’t screech to a stop. So, essentially, you could be just off the shoulder with cars whizzing by at 70 mph about four feet behind you. And you largely have to ignore them. That’s standard fare. So, getting to Just Plain Fucking Crazy takes a bit of talent. For my money, one of the funniest cases of JPFC is the following image. Take a look:

(Click on image for larger view – MUST SEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!)

What you’re looking at here is a series of lower case e’s stretching around a large, brand new supermarket in the Bronx, the work of a writer called CHEEZ. In fact, you’re looking at a very partial view of what he did: the CHEEEEEEEZ stretches all the way around the entire supermarket, 300 feet in total. As a stylistic matter, the work is derivative, but as a matter of sheer balls, it’s close to the top of the charts. CHEEZ was apparently caught after the fact for this action (snitches everywhere), but damn is that fucking nuts. But to return to our risk category: imagine how long it must have taken to do this. I’m just glad he didn’t have it in his mind to do a fill-in!

So, that’s the round-up for today. Now you should be clear on styles and ups 101. The important thing to remember is that the two are fundamentally inextricable for graffiti culture. For this reason, graffiti as “art” gets it wrong. I’ve inveighed against “muralism,” but I really have nothing against the mural. I even like it. I like a well done legal wall, even. But the legal wall does something very insidious, as a theoretical matter. It separates styles from ups. Put another way, the legal wall takes the living process out of graffiti, focusing attention on the “end product.” It views the end product as comparable to something like gallery art, an object to be contemplated (and commodified, or “monetized,” as the wankers put it). Of course, artists throughout the 20th century have been working against this conception of art. They’ve been trying to insert process into the work of art rather than merely displaying it as an alienated product (a consumption good). One of the interesting features of graffiti is that process is included in the work as a matter of course. Because of the prohibition and graffiti’s unstable relation to property, the process is almost primary. Graffiti writers don’t have to invent aesthetic methods of including process into the work, like avant garde artists have done since the emergence of modernism (hell, a good deal of Renaissance painting does the same). Writing graffiti is that process itself – a very specific process that organizes an underground prestige economy around principles of risk. With that develops an entire ethic of risk, and an art of the self, or life as a work of art. Since I was myself fixated on a kind of formalism last week, I wanted to really emphasize this point this week (and thanks to Booga Face for the reminder on that).

When I say that social redemption ruined graffiti, I mean precisely this. Graffiti is redeemed socially in one of two ways: it is either restricted to the alienated end-product (as art), or it is transformed into an alienated protest of an underclass (resentiment, in Nietzsche’s terminology). The dichotomy with protest is brought out nicely in the film Bomb the System. The protagonist, a writer, falls in love with an anarchist lefty who does protest stencils on sidewalks. She encourages him to turn his talent to something productive, like what she does. Something meaningful. She is completely mystified by the ostensibly apolitical character of his writing: it is never oppositional enough with respect to content. (The film makes too much of graffiti as “protest” overall, but the particular dichotomy between the writers and the anarchist girl is well-constructed.) Both operations transform graffiti into something acceptable and familiar. The first legitimizes graffiti by placing it in the category of art. The second legitimizes graffiti by placing it into the category of protest. In both cases, something is amputated from the living practice of graffiti: its necessary illegitimacy. What can never be redeemed socially, what can never be folded into an acceptable set of practices, is graffiti as the living process of a risk economy – precisely because that risk is constituted in graffiti’s “anti-societal” elements, and precisely because those elements are essential (in the classical sense) to the operation of graffiti. All attempts to “legitimize” graffiti crash against this barrier: graffiti as a living practice is illegitimate by definition.

In any case, I think we’ve covered enough theoretical foundations. Next week, I promise to show you some Chicago graffiti.

babygirl is under the impression that the ceiling fan lamp is God. In fact, babygirl points at any overhead light source and intones, very seriously, “Gaw.” We first noticed this when we were back in Pennsylvania, reading the masterwork Spot Goes to the Beach (in which our hero, well, goes to the beach with a monkey and a hippo, and has many adventures). So, you read Spot and ask babygirl to identify various items on the page.

“What’s this?”

“Baw!” (ball)

“How about this?”

“Daw!” (dog)

“What about this one?”

“Bow!” (boat)

Pointing at the sun, “And what’s this?”

“Gaw!”

The what now? Is babygirl saying God? The first time babygirl did this, she called me in, saying “I’m really alarmed. babygirl’s calling the sun ‘God.’” Hmm, I say. I wonder what they’re teaching her at that daycare. You see, babygirl, despite being born to a couple of raging atheists, went to an uber-Christian daycare center. When we went looking for daycare, it was the cheapest and the closest to our home. And there were tons of kids there, so we figured it can’t be bad. And it was clean, and the people were really nice, and the credentials were good and all that. Did I mention that it was the cheapest? The one concern we had was that the center was located physically in a fundamentalist church.

We ain’t church folk. I mean, seriously. I don’t even know what it would be like to go to a church (or any religious institution) once a week ever. I can’t even imagine it. Now, I backed off my “angry college student atheism” long ago. That’s the kind where you’re constantly trying to provoke religious people so that you can get into an argument with them. I realized that this was a waste of time, but more importantly, I realized that I truly do not care what they think, as long as they’re not bothering me about it. In “angry college student atheism” (a species of “sophomoric college student theory guy”), you feel oppressed. In my more laid back version (and hell, I’d even get behind some version of a secular Gaia principle or even Buddhism, if it came down to it), I find these belief systems more amusing than anything else. Call it religious libertarianism. I’m sure I’ll get angry again when they try to get babygirl to pray to Sweet Jesus in the public schools, but for now, I have no enthusiasm for religious confrontation.

But this daycare in the church thing did raise some issues, not least because it was one of those fundie churches, or so it seemed to me. If I do have a religious heritage, it’s old school urban immigrant Catholic, which always struck me as at least pragmatic. Plus, there’s booze. These protestants with their body-is-a-temple prudery annoy me more than the drunk old Irish priest, who always seemed to be just kinda phoning it in, which anyone with any sense can get behind. Truth be told, I don’t even trust these new-fangled suburban Catholics, who seem like a strange variety of Protestant fundamentalists all their own (I won’t even get into the weirdo Latin mass characters). But, point being, the daycare was in a church, and a fundie church at that, so we were a bit nervous. When we asked about the affiliation with the church, we were told that there was a strict division between the church activities and the daycare activities. OK. That’s settled. It turns out that we were reading “division” somewhat more metaphorically than intended. Where we thought the director meant an organizational division, she just meant that they locked the connecting door. She quite literally held the keys to the kingdom, apparently. Damn Protestant literalism! So there was babygirl, going to daycare with the Noah story and all these Bible toys. she had to pinch me every time I jokingly whistled “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world…” when I walked into the place. But again. Laid-back atheism. Besides, babygirl is only a babygirl, so let them proselytize! Whatever, right?

“And what’s this one?”

“Gaw!”

No doubt, we shall soon teach babygirl that the ceiling fan lamp isn’t the creator of all things seen and unseen. And, indeed, the people at the fundie daycare were quite wonderful, and we know she learned so much from them. We actually ended up loving the fundie daycare, and the people there, as did babygirl. And, for a final positive note, it may just be that babygirl is a wonderful materialist. she posits that the fundie daycare people showed her one of those absurd images with light breaking through clouds and taught her that that was God. So babygirl performed the remarkable abstraction: light source from above = Gaw. So, I expect, when faced with one of those very grungy, very dark noir scenes in which the naked lightbulb dangles from a stripped wire in the filthy, neon-strobed hotel, babygirl would point to that lightbulb and intone, very seriously, “Gaw!” Maybe there’s something to that Protestant literalism after all. I can live with that…

It’s pouring rain here in Chicago, which means that the tarp is on at Wrigley, and Sunday Night baseball looks doomed on ESPN. But it’s been a good weekend. I have to admit that I was so enraged after the Mets blew the big lead in Pittsburgh – unlike some more insightful Mets bloggers, who correctly diagnosed it as no big deal – that I was nearly put off Mets blogging for the season. It just felt like one of those deflating moments. Earlier this year, the Mets blew a lead against Philly at home, and it sent the team into a three week tailspin. This Pittsburgh thing had all the hallmarks of the same, and maybe I was getting a little twitchy this time.

But then the Flushing Crew (what what? Flushing High School 1992, kid) crashed into the hapless Nats, and all’s right with the world. The sweep of the DCer’s, accomplished with crushing offense and some remarkable defense, put things to right again. The Braves were at a bit of a schedule disadvantage, facing the red hot D-backs, and they faded, though not completely (as would have been the case, I think, if they lost today). Moreover, the Bucko’s just about lit up the Phillies, who dropped to 5 back. Grok this: the Mets have a bigger lead over their next closest division rival than the league leading Bosox. More on that in a second. In fact, the Mets have the biggest lead of any 1st place team in baseball, as of tonight. Let’s hope they can hold on. The Mets also showed off their deadly road stuff once again, which is heartening with a nasty West Coast trip looming, against teams just a wee bit tougher than the Bucs and Nats. (On edit: My bad…Westies will be playing at Shea. Still wanted a reason to mention the best road record in the NL, though…)

But to return to the Pirates. The Met game had ended, so I turned on the audio and gamecast for the PA cross-state rivalry. This was at the beginning of the 7th, Buc’s frame. The Phils were up 4-0, so I chalked it up as a Phillies’ win, no gain no loss, standings-wise. Then the Bucs just opened up. Single, walk, single, double, double, double, single, bang bang bang bang bang. It was a bloodbath. Three Phillies relievers got lit up, one after the other. When the last out was called for the bottom of the 7th, it was suddenly 7-4 Pirates. Just ugly for the Philly boys. And, while I may have been wrong in dating the Mets’ doom to a late-inning rally in Pittsburgh, I had that feeling again here for the Phils. Maybe I’ll be wrong again. But to get lit up like that with a 4 run lead and the division leader’s double-ya just flashing on the big board? That’s gotta hurt.

And now for my Paradoxical Yankee Lovin’ Moment. As readers of this blog know, I really, really, really want to see the Red Sox Nation eat shit this year. I am so sick of these fuckers that I can barely see straight when one of them comes strutting in with the damn Youkilis shirt. So, I’ve thrown in with the Yanks attempt to win the AL East. I know, I know. But the sweet, sweet vision of the Nation having to eat the greatest regular season comeback in baseball history would finally overwhelm their endless yap about the greatest playoff comeback in history, a la 04. It would be the 04 AL Championship series played out in slow motion, and in reverse. As Walter E. Kurtz says in Apocalypse Now, “that’s my dream…it’s my nightmare.” So today the Sox lost and the Yanks won, bringing the lead down to 4 games. Of course, the Yanks now go west to face the Halo’s, while the Sox get a vacation in Tampa. But still. We can dream of a befuddled and stunned Nation, the greatest late-season choke in history, can’t we?

We just watched the Shia LeBeouf vehicle, Disturbia, so I want to say a few words about that. Usually, I wouldn’t comment on just another teen thriller, but, of course, Disturbia is based on Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window, and I have my own ideas for how Rear Window should be remade. That should be coming to theaters some time in 2014, when I get my shit together. My version will win an Oscar. But when I first saw a commercial for Disturbia, I was pissed, although I knew implicitly that they would fuck it up. They did. But not as badly as I expected. LeBeouf (Kale) can’t hold a candle to Jimmy Stewart as freelance photographer L.B. Jeffries, but it doesn’t appear that anyone was really asking him to. And poor Sarah Roemer (Ashley) is asked to fill the giant role of Grace Kelly. She makes up in nasty hotness what she lacks in Kelly’s star quality, although one is forced to wonder from time to time why a 26 year old model is living with her parents in Disturbia (she was “forcibly relocated” from “the City,” apparently) . But before I get into my main point on the remake, a few views from our own rear window (or, rather, porch) here in Chi-town:

Facing northwest, Sevenred’s rear view

Sevenred’s rear view facing due west

I think I could really get some good snooping done given this configuration, supposing I had some accident that immobilized me for some duration. That’s the first feint in Disturbia. The film moves you to a horrendous car accident in which the protagonist’s father – an utterly likable fellow who we don’t know long enough to care about – is, well, killed. Kale comes out of the car limping, so there’s your big immobilization move, right? Wrongo. This is, after all, a teen movie, so our hero has to be a male fantasy. He’s “non-comformist,” tough, cool, funny, smart, etc. Think Will Hunting (the ultimate male fantasy figure) without the Southie grit. The car accident only provides emotional justification for Kale’s criminality. He cold-cocks his Spanish teacher, earning him….tada!…house arrest. So, where Jeffries’s immobility is produced by an actual car crash (and Hitchcock is subtle here, showing the viewer only the still photo of a flipping race car, from which the viewer must deduce that photographer Jeffries took that prize winning shot, and that nobody taking such a shot would be uninjured, therefore…), Kale’s immobility is not physical but juridical. Where Stewart’s immobility is signaled by his visibly encasted leg, Kale’s immobility is tied up in his court-ordered ankle bracelet. Thus begins the first in the series of “updates” for Rear Window.

It’s an interesting move, to be sure. One of the smartest devices of the film is the makeshift “fence” that Kale constructs to reveal his electronic borders. He cannot see where his ankle bracelet will “go red,” thus summoning the police, so he builds a fence of garden tools and rope, walking his electronic borders to discover the device’s coverage area. The film is fascinated with the notion of electronic information, the infosphere. There’s a scene in which the kids coordinate their surveillance of the Bad Guy through cell phones, which would surely make Howard Rheingold pump up his chest with glee. The various surveillance activities are accomplished with cell phones, video recorders, computers, etc. There’s prominent product placement for iPods and iTunes. Kids these days! So connected. There’s also something to be said for the removal of rear window from the city into a suburban milieu. In Hitchcock, voyeurism was something like the flip-side of community – the community that the globe-trotting Jeffries has been neglecting before being forced to connect through his accident; in Disturbia, it is an intensification of boredom, and little more, with only the merest suggestion that online games and cable television constructed a false community for Kale.

But these updates fall flat, since the film retains the essential premise of Hitchcock’s version: immobility is the primary problem of society. Hitchcock’s film is about speed – or, rather, about mobility and immobility. Jeffries problem is that he’s stuck. He’s used to mobility and speed, but he’s trapped in a particular kind of immobility – the physical immobility of his broken leg puts him in the apartment in the first place. It’s no accident that Jeffries injury was caused by a race car, in other words. We’re meant to juxtapose its speed with the slowness to which it has consigned Jeffries. It’s also no accident that Jeffries is a photographer, one who “freezes” time, one who brings motion to a standstill in the still picture. Hitchcock made motion pictures, not still ones. The figure of Jeffries is the figure of immobility itself. And, essentially, Hitchcock is heralding the close of a society of immobility. The problem many of us have now is not immobility, but too much mobility. The problem is not slowness, but speed. In this sense, Disturbia gets its update completely wrong; it’s still stuck on immobility. And it can update the gadgets of surveillance all it wants. That still misses the point.

So, how would I remake Rear Window given this set of problems? I would still want the voyeuristic aspect, but I’d want to speed it up. The Jeffries character would be played by a woman, maybe Audrey Tatou of Amelie and A Very Long Engagement fame (and, of course and unfortunately, The Davinci Code). She would not be a still photographer, but some kind of videographer, experienced in the quick cut, the form of vision built on the half-second image spliced together with other half-second images, the aesthetic of the film trailer (was it Jameson who said you only have to watch the trailers today?). And rather than place her in an apartment, utterly immobile, I would place her on a moving elevated train. So, she doesn’t witness what she takes to be a murder in her own back courtyard, out of her rear window, but rather sees it in an apartment window visible from an elevated subway car. This presents her with a particular problem. In order to investigate the supposed crime, she would have to ride the train past the window, again and again and again, getting only five to ten second views of her suspect each time, supposing that he happens to be home when the train rolls past. Her problem is not immobility, but too much mobility.

At the very least, this scenario provides us with a good cinematic scream moment. In Rear Window, the suspense is elevated when Bad Guy Thorwald (played by later super lawyer Raymond Burr) notices that Jeffries has been spying on him. You see him peer out his window back at Jeffries, and the effect is menacing. How much more chilling would the effect be in the remake? Time and time and time again, our heroine rolls past the window on the train, getting little glimpses of her suspect’s life. She’s moving too fast. This is the best she can do. Sometimes he’s there. Sometimes he’s not. The audience is lulled by the repetition. And then the fifteenth, twentieth, or fortieth time she rolls by, she gets ready for her five second glimpse, and the man is standing at his window, staring out, into the train, directly at her. Needless to say, there’s no good reason for the killer to have noticed such surveillance; his sudden awareness of it would be a species of magical realism (Disturbia at least gestures in this direction, since the Bad Guy purportedly understands that he’s under surveillance by the kids, but we never really get an explanation about how that is).

That said, Disturbia’s exploration of immobility can be interesting in its transformation of the broken leg into the ankle bracelet. Deleuze famously notes the emergence of control societies, with the attendant breakdown of the old disciplinary institutions. So, where the prison and the hospital used to play particular roles, we now see more supple forms, like home health care and house arrest. And the curious scene in which Kale stakes out his limits of movement within electronic space, in the regime of electronic control, can do some work. Where Stewart’s immobility is manifest, and resides in his broken body, Kale’s immobility is outside of him, a fact that the film inelegantly reinforces by showing us that his ankle bracelet constantly itches, like a cast, but also like an external irritant. Moreover, his limits of movements have to be discovered. Kale doesn’t know where his little box made of ticky-tacky ends: only an exploration (by legwork, as it were, or anklework) will establish its contours. If the writers of Disturbia retain the notion of immobility from Hitchcock (to the detriment of the remake), they at least attempt to rethink what constitutes immobility today.