Seven Red

Babygirl likes to throw her food on the floor. All the time. Everymeal. Every food. All the time.

If you can’t tell, I find this habit slightly annoying. I have tried telling her to stop, repeatedly. Unfortunately toddlers do not listen to their parents. At least mine doesn’t. So now I have decided to attempt the infamous “time out.” As soon as babygirl tosses her carefully sliced melon over her shoulder, or launches her hummus laden toast hummus-side-down on the floor, I have to unbuckle her from the highchair, take her to her room, close the door and listen to her scream for one minute, before opening the door, explaining to her why she was punished and buckling her back into her highchair to begin the process all over again. It does not work. My floors are filthy.

On the plus side, as I wrote this post babygirl stood behind me in the chair saying “Mommy, Mommy” while playing with my hair and giving me hugs. That makes up for the filthy floors. Barely.

Today I thought we’d start talking about tags. But first, a few words on form and method. Much of what I’ll say here can be considered praise, or what writers call “jocking.” We’ll save the whole discussion of the graffiti subculture’s laughable hyper-masculinity for another time. The point to make here is that jocking or being a “fan” is considered, well, distasteful. That said, I’m not really part of the culture any more, so I’ll risk it. If you want a look at how the discourse works internally, there’s really no better site than Streets are Saying Things (known as SASTER). Click on any picture with a lot of comments and you’ll enter a world that you probably wouldn’t want to inhabit for too long. (For a particularly noxious example that will also give you the real flavor of it, go to SASTER, do a search for MQ, and click on the yellow fill-in with a white outline).

Second point: my tastes were forged in the classic NYC street and highways days of the late 1980′s through mid-1990′s, so I have a prejudice towards styles and writers from that era. I’ll just own that here. The larger point goes to method, however. I’m not doing a whole lot of work trying to find the best Chicago graffiti, at least not yet. I’m just snapping pics of local stuff that I happen to come across. So when I compare that to some of the – in my opinion – great stuff that you find online (and again, mostly from my era), it’s a bit unfair, like comparing a little league player at a local ballfield to Derek Jeter. But the comparison, however unfair, may still be instructive for those who don’t know baseball, and also, one would hope, for the little leaguer. So, without further ado, I’ll provide some tags that I consider good, explain why I think so, and then show you the local stuff which is, sadly, not so good.

We’ll start with the deceptively “simple,” tags that are very legible, but nevertheless stylistically sophisticated. The first is this DERA tag, below. While seemingly made up of simple block letters, it also includes touches that distinguish it, like the extended stems on the D, E, and A, and the unequal distribution of cross-lines on the E (notice that the middle line on the E is closer to the bottom than the top line, effectively elongating the letter). The letters are more rounded and separated than in some of the tags we’ll see below, and angled slightly to the left. The DERA tag, to my mind, proves that your tags don’t have to be all crazy to be good.

Moving just a bit off the plain style, we have SP’s tag (SP ONE BFB), below. The letters remain rounded and retain a slight left angle (especially the S and B’s). However, their compression is tighter, with more overlap. This is essentially a classic graffiti style, an almost perfect tag. Notice the consistency of the S and the E in their curves and top flourishes, as well as the switch to lower case for the N (which allows for tighter spacing). Notice also the flare for the closing B in the extension of the bottom counter. This allows the BFB to frame the SP ONE above it. As an added touch, SP even placed a period after the P, so that newjack toys wouldn’t go around saying Spown. Nice.

Now we move to a somewhat different style in SPOT, below. SPOT deviates more from the plain style with the circular flourishes in the S and the T (notice their consistency as well). His letters are also taller and more straight-up-and-down. For me, the best feature of this tag is the bottom of the S. Most writers create some sharpness or angularity in the top of their S’s, leaving the bottom more curved. SPOT reverses this classical formulation, leaving the top rounded (and even exaggerating its roundness with an interior loop) while creating a hard angle in the bottom. This is almost counter-intuitive. Where writers do this, they tend to bring the bottom out much further to the right, so that the bottom of the S forms a kind of rectangle along the same line as the letters (some more angular SAINT tags did this, for instance). Here, the angle is at almost 45 degrees to the letters. It’s hard to do. Go ahead, try to imitate that S. SPOT also does a nice job of elongating the counter in the P to give the whole tag a squatter look; the center dot in the O (and that’s old school) aligns perfectly with the P counter, too. Nice touch. Now, look back at the SP ONE tag above and note the clear differences in the “SPO” height, curves, and compression.

Moving further away from squat, rounded tags, we have this OPTICK tag, below. This is also a fairly classic style, much more angular than the tags above (almost sharp in its angles, really), and with a stronger leftward tilt. I wish I had time to find a similar style with a rightward tilt, which I always considered to be a Manhattan style, but I find what I find. The effect of height is produced here by shortening the P counter, and by moving the connection point in the K higher on the stroke line. OPTICK essentially creates a taller x-space. Compare the O in OPTICK and SPOT with the short, rounded O in SP ONE.

And now for one of my all-time favorites. I’d suspect that those of you with no knowledge of graffiti would have a hard time reading the following tag, even though it’s clear as day to me. Moreover, if you could read it, you probably wouldn’t believe that someone would want to go around with all his friends calling him that. Take a gander:

This guy is, for my money, one of the top taggers, period. Just from a standpoint of technique, that’s an extremely clean marker tag with consistent thickness in its lines and a solid stroke throughout. But since you probably can’t read it, I’ve used the magic of Fireworks to separate the letters out for easier identification, here:

What do you see now with the letters separated? Hint: the first letter is a lower case “e.” That’s right, it’s EARSNOT, who for several years during the late 90′s and early 00′s was just killing Manhattan subway stations with these marker tags. He also had his share of paint tags and straight letters, particularly downtown, although those were not my favorites. So, what’s so great about EARSNOT? Highly angular, highly compressed, highly consistent, and with remarkable flourishes. The great innovation of this tag is to just bang out the E as far as possible, x-space be damned. It almost explodes at the opening, and the swirl interrupting the line only adds the this effect. Indeed, EARSNOT seems to have taken the halo that runs fairly standard in tags (you can see the halo over SP ONE and SPOT) and mashed it into the E while making it mobile. The effect adds depth to the surface, as if the swirling halo is on another plane, being dragged in by the gravitational pull of the monstrous E. And EARSNOT closes with another giant letter, the stem of the T shooting off the column, so that you have this really strong opening and closing. What’s in between works as well. Notice the sharp angles capping each letter, and notice that the angle remains more or less consistent for the A, R, S, and N. Notice also that these letters have consistency of height (clearly visible in the separated version) and compression (they overlap at about the same distance throughout). I also want to point out the N as a clear indication of strong style. It’s slight curve coming off the stem is perfectly executed, and ends in a sharp angle. This kind of letter always had a cathedral or gothic architecture type of effect for me, like pointed arch stained-glass. It’s quite beautifully done.

So, that’s the good stuff. Now on the the local stuff that I found. You’ve seen the Jeters. Here are the little leaguers.

Now, I’ve seen a lot of tags, and I hardly ever have trouble reading them, but this one is truly beyond my powers. My best guess is that it says DEVOLVES. The DE..O..ES is clearly visible, but the rest of the letters are a giant mishmash of random strokes and idiocy. The lines are terrible, it lacks all consistency in size, angle, compression, and roundness, and the technique is itself atrocious. A really disgusting effort. Compare this again with EARSNOT, above, who pulls off a wilder styled tag effectively. There is nothing to recommend DEVOLVES(?) at all, really. Somewhat better, but still hardly passable, is JULS, below:

To be fair, I’ve since seen more recent JULS tags that are much better, but it’s useful to know why this one doesn’t work. The letters are completely inconsistent in height and angle. The J is rounded and shortened by its serif, while the U, L, and S are elongated and thin. Moreover, the J is a left leaning letter, while the L is right leaning, and the U and S don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing. The placement, size, weight, angle, and roundness, then, are seemingly random with little effort put toward creating a consistent effect. The flourishes, such as the long stem on the L and the bottom curve of the S, not only don’t work, but actively counter each other, producing discordant angles to no observable effect. But you can also see why JULS got better. He (or she) understands letters, I think, but just didn’t know how to build them together. He solves some of these problems in his later work, which I hope to show, maybe next time.

So, that’s the quick run down on tags, and should give you a sense of how I’ll be discussing them going forward. Yes, I’m an awful formalist who values consistency and a unified aesthetic effect, except where deviation constitutes new subjective effects (as in EARSNOT’s tag, above). We’ll have to live with that.

Top Ten Awful Writing Habits Revealed to Me by My Own Posts

1. I use the phrases “In any case” and “Needless to say” more than any human being should.
2. I am a foul-mouthed motherfucker.
3. Could I have any more parenthetical asides?
4. The aside enclosed by dashes is even more annoying and disruptive than the parenthetical.
5. My penchant for the personal anecdote is oppressive and possibly dangerous.
6. I am a pedantic jerk when it comes to citing some study I’ve read. Like, wow.
7. I am oblivious to genre conventions; I violate all blog writing advice about consistency in theme, short paragraphs, and linking to fellow bloggers, which only displays that I either cannot negotiate the difference between very particular sorts of print conventions and blog conventions (supposing that any of this would not also be bad writing in any print genre), or that don’t have enough respect for my readers – supposing any exist – to follow them.
8. Four line compound-complex sentences are the norm.
9. My use of Capitalized Phrases to Indicate Sarcastic Proper Nouns is so Donald Barthelme and now utterly lame.
10. It is the case that I violate every rule I’ve ever taught students about using it clefts or some form of “to be” as my main verb.

It looks like the Mets took my advice to provide John Maine with some early inning runs so that he doesn’t get all twitchy when the opposing team scores some runs, as happened in the Pirates second. It was getting very close to another meltdown, but Maine reined it in, held it back, and set it loose. Good on him. Some nervous moments, especially with Philly and ATL looking good, but the Mets fireworks in the ninth made that all go away, and at least Philly drops a game in the offing. A couple of things, then:

1. Is Alou gonna hit a dinger every time Maine pitches? Is that his thing now? Because I’m all for more Maine if it means more Moises. Hell, have him start fifty next season.
2. Milledge gets the timber, Milledge starts a monumental ass-kicking rally. I’ve been skeptical of the deification of “‘Stings” on some of the Mets blogs, but the boy does seem to be the genuINE article.
3. I’m not even going to talk about middle relief. It’s an insoluble problem (although the Yankees seem to have developed a solution). If you’re good enough to go three, you’re good enough to go six, and you’re in the rotation. If you’re not good enough to go six, and you can’t overwhelm in a closing role, then you’re not good enough to go two, and they stick you in middle relief. It must be a hard life, and I don’t envy these workhorses. But, damn, does it always have to be so nerve-jangling and horrifying? This I ask you. Mets middle relief will shorten my life by ten years. This I know.

On edit: I skipped the end of the ninth to watch Top Chef, and the Bucs almost bring it all the way back. What the hell is going on? See point 3, above.

Not if I had a hundred tongues, every one shouting a different language in a different key, could I do justice to her splendid chaos. -George Warrington Steevens on Chicago, 1896

So I’ve been taking the El down to work at Unnamed Employer Institution. I almost slip and call it the subway from time to time, but much less frequently. When I first went to work at Sullivan & Cromwell, I had two coworkers who were new to New York, one from the DC area and one who had just spent a semester abroad in Paris. They kept referring to the subway as the “Metro,” and I remember that it annoyed me to no end. “I have to take the Metro to midtown,” they’d say. Oh, you mean the subway? There was history, though. One day the Paris bird (by way of Minnesota and Colby, fer chrissakes) – whose mother, incidentally, was paying for her apartment on the Upper East Side- asked where I lived, and I told her Brooklyn. She smiled this condescending little smile and said “Oh well. At least you don’t have to pay New York City taxes!” I’m not sure you could find a better way to piss off an outer boroughs New Yorker. But the point remains. I will kick myself if I call the train the subway, since it ain’t the subway. It’s the El. So…

I’ve decided that I will do my Chicago reading on the El. Since the ride to Unnamed Employer Institution is much shorter than I expected, my goal of becoming the greatest living expert on popular Chicago non-fiction has been delayed significantly. I may not reach it until 2098. Thank God for cryogenics. But nevertheless, I will soldier on. This week’s 20 minute spurt reading is Carl Smith’s The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of an American City. Smith’s what Foucault would call a guy with “dusty fingers” – a hard core archivist, discovering books that were printed and shelved, never even read before. I like a hard core archivist more than any classic type in academe, with exception, perhaps, of the guiltless scientist designing absurd “non-lethal” weapons for the military. (Foam? Really? What’s next, silly string machine guns?) You end up getting little factoids like the following, which I’ll quote at length:

In 1909, the year the Plan appeared, close to 38,000 streetlights, some 8,500 of which were powered by electricity (the rest were lit by gas), illuminated the city. Chicagoans talked on 208,000 telephones, eight times more than in 1900, and they consumed close to half a billion gallons of Lake Michigan water a day, 223 gallons for each resident. This required 11 pumping stations, the oldest of which was constructed at Chicago Avenue in 1854.

And this little tidbit:

There were 1788 Chinese in Chicago in 1910, 1713 of them male.

Details, I say! Give me details! Smith is also fond of rhetorical analysis, at least at a very rudimentary level. I suppose it is an interesting question, though, rhetorically. What are the strategies for persuading people to reshape a city? Nice little study, in any case.

Three points today.

1) I went down to Unnamed Employer Institution to get some work done in their library, and I must say, they run a nice ship. There are, of course, these moments of disorientation. I’ve been a public school kinda guy my whole life, through either necessity or accident. Public elementary schools in Queens (the Pee Esses), public junior highs, one faux public high school aspiring to 1920′s classical prep school status, with the alumni donations and all, and then one of the large public high school warehouses where a third of the student body is truant at any one time, and a good thing too, since they wouldn’t be able to fit otherwise. Then your Standard State School for college, followed by Massive Big Ten State Institution for grad school. Dang, son. Of course, Massive Big Ten State Institution is PINO (Public in Name Only), with the legislators giving just enough to run as “The Education Candidate” and justify endless yammerings about the Red Commies in the humanities departments. (Joke’s on you, red-baiting legislators! We’re actually just milquetoast careerists like yourselves!) But this private school thing is new to me. It’s a nice touch, I guess. In any case, the library was much more well stocked than I anticipated, and the whole Illinois sharing thing works great, too. It’s also damn comfortable. Moreover, the smallness of it is almost a relief after Massive Big Ten State Institution, where the crowds of students squeaking into their cell phones make a stroll through the mall sound like the Every Utterly Banal Conversations in History Piped Into your Ipod on a Perpetual Loop circle of hell. Y’know, the circle that Dante reserved for people who use Twitter? Maybe this is the right size and speed. We shall see.

2) she and I have decided that taking babygirl out to restaurants for dinner is no fun for us and no fun for others, kid friendly label be damned. babygirl does not sit still. babygirl prefers to climb on chairs, take she’s purse for a walk, tug on strange lady’s jacket, throw crackers on the floor. And scream. Heeeyyoooo! And put ice down the back of coworkers (a neat trick she taught her, using yours truly as the model). My coworkers who invited us out were very forgiving and generous, far more than I would have been, I think. It helps that babygirl is the cutest babygirl in the world, but “cute” only trumps “annoying as hell” up to a point. So we had a nice dinner with coworkers, when we weren’t extricating babygirl from an unfortunate encounter with a pepper grinder, or rescuing her from a very menacing olive oil dish. And after all that, when we finally got her to the car and started moving, coworkers called the cell (and mind you, I’m fully cognizant of the fact that I’m about to relay an Utterly Banal Conversation here, and it may even be by design) to let us know that….we forgot the damn pizza. You know, the one we couldn’t eat because of said parenting activities. Well fuck all. Anyone know a good babysitting service in Chicago?

3) Fuck you very much, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Your very liberal front license plate regulations mean that the only people sporting these things are folks for whom the term “Git R Done” serves as some kind of life mantra, and infuriating idiots who seem unaware that their state was not part of the fucking Confederacy. The secondary result of your policy is that dealers do not attach front license plate holders to front bumpers by default, which is all well and good until your residents move to Illinois, where they will have to pay ungodly sums to get some dealer to do just that. I know you’re trying to lessen the brain drain from the Commonwealth, dear legislature, but is this really the way?

Rants off.

Let us speak, therefore, of the letter… – Jacques Derrida, Differánce

I mentioned last time around that graffiti may be the twisted cousin of advertising. There’s the same push for coverage, for recognition, for repetition, for sticking power. Where the advertiser at least claims as a raison d’etre some secondary end, for the writer it is (putatively) about fame itself. It is advertising without the dollar feedback, or self-advertisement without any goal but fleeting “respect.” So, writers might make good advertisers, since they have a very good sense of audience and forum. But writers are almost implicitly fit for jobs in the visual arts, and particularly typography. To write graffiti seriously for any length of time gives one an almost mystical feel for the letter, the letter itself, the visible signifier (as the theorists used to say) in all its brute materiality. So, it may be that graffiti is “about” the signature, that it is a little piece of narcissistic property culture gone all mutant and turned against itself. It may be that graffiti is all about “fame” and the self. But if you listen to graffiti writers discuss their craft, when they’re not engaged in ridiculous bombast, or discussing various “spots,” or gossiping about who dogged whom, they generally are talking about letters: “That’s a fresh ‘A,’” they’ll say, or “How’d he do that ‘V’.”

I knew a writer in Queens who ended up going to art school. He wasn’t up a lot, and probably went bombing fairly infrequently, but he was a very good black book writer, so probably art school was best for him. He was down with STAFF crew (Styles That Are Fucking Fresh), so he knew some real bombers, but I never saw him up that much. In any case, I was seeing his sister for a little while, so I would be at his place often. During his first year in graphic design, he was working on fonts, and he showed me some of the work he was doing. It was about counter space and stems and the like, very basic stuff in typography, but still stuff most people would have to learn. We were looking over the instructions and laughing. We knew all this already. We understood fucking letters. Hell, we experimented with letters all the time. We constantly played with stuff like counter space (that’s the “holes” within letters, like the space in the middle of a lowercase “e”); we viciously critiqued throwees that were “off balance” in graffiti parlance—or what typographers, I guess, would call wobbly lettering resulting from variable x-space. He told me that three guys were completely killing the fonts class, and they were all graffiti writers. The professor even said to him, “You write graffiti, right?” He’d seen it before. As it turns out, when you spend hours a day experimenting with the letter “E,” you get a pretty good feel for how the letter works. When you physically write out your tag on paper hundreds of times, you start to see ways that letters can be transformed. Graffiti is like a hotbed of evolution for the letter.

So, prefatory to any critique of graffiti’s aesthetic (and we’ll leave its excessive or destructive practice to the side for now), you must understand basics of typography. Luckily, there was a brilliant article byJoshua Yaffa in today’s New York Times Magazine that can give you a sense of what professional typographers do. Ironically enough, the article is about highway signs—that other writing on the nation’s highways, and a bit more functional than the variety I’ll be discussing! The font used for highway signs (Highway Gothic) was apparently causing a great deal of difficulty. It was not legible at night for a whole class of drivers, and it lacked visibility and legibility from a distance. So a group of typographers and highway engineers (at Penn State! Yay!) set out to improve the signage font. The problem was identified as counter space and stem balance, and the solution was the invention of a new, more legible, font, called Clearview. I won’t go into the whole thing here, but I encourage you to read that article, since it’s a good primer for some of what Graffiti Fridays will do in terms of aesthetic critique. It’s also a totally fascinating discussion of something most of us take for granted. What I will retain here is the problem of legibility.

The general take on graffiti legibility is clear: we can’t even read that shit! In contrast to clean, legible fonts, graffiti writers are thought to produce utterly illegible letters. Indeed, it seems to be one of the goals of graffiti to destroy legibility as such. There is some truth to this, but it is overstated. It is the inexperienced writer who seeks to make his or her tag illegible. The problem is that writers’ experimentation with letters doesn’t hold legibility as a primary criterion, unlike our highway sign typographers. The goal is difference, the invention of new letter forms and connections, and this goal outweighs legibility by a long shot.

But that doesn’t mean that legibility isn’t a secondary criterion. It most certainly is. Now, Yaffa’s article posits something like a “universal” legibility (which the Clearview Font purportedly discovered, as demonstrated by its adoption in the Moscow subways as well as western Pennsylvania!). It’s a dubious notion to say the least, a bit like the “Plain English” imagined by the Securities and Exchange Commission (plain for whom?). It is true that graffiti writers don’t aim for a “universal” legibility, but they do aim for legibility among a specialized community, which is to say, other graffiti writers. Maybe graffiti is the legal jargon of letters. Where legal jargon looks “illegible” to the layperson, however, it certainly makes sense to the lawyer, and there can be good and bad legal jargon. And just as the inexperienced lawyer (or worse, the non-lawyer pretending to be a lawyer) will produce terrible legal jargon, the inexperienced writer will produce terrible letters—illegible to even experts in the specialized field. They mistake the heavy weight put on innovation with an utter abandonment of legibility. But it ain’t so. Writers care about legibility. How could you catch fame without it? But to return to the point, the vocabulary of typography actually provides a very useful way to talk about graffiti, and I’ll just provide one example here.

NEVER, REMIX, CORK (RMA Crew?)

I took this picture of a truck pretty much right outside my apartment here in Chicago. The tags and throwee are certainly legible, but they aren’t good. One clear piece of evidence that we’re dealing with very inexperienced writers: the total mess of the “R” in “RMA.” You’ll see this problem in both inexperienced writers and in general when people who know nothing about letters try to do what they (cringe-inducingly) call “bubble letters” for any kind of sign. The protest varieties tend to be particularly inept. Specifically, the “counter” in the “R” is misplaced completely.

People think all you have to do is put a “hole” in the letter to signal its identity. Fine. Most people will recognize the letter above as an “R,” I guess. But the counter (the “hole”) is not independent of the stems (or lines). It is produced by them. People forget this when they make “bubble letters” in a way they could never forget when actually writing out a letter, where the lines produce the counters automatically.

Go ahead. Pick up a pen and write an upper case “R” as you normally would. Look. There’s a hole in it! Tada! Now draw an upper case R “bubble letter” style. You probably drew the outer shape first and the counter (or “hole”) afterwards. The two activities that were once unified have been separated. For this reason, people forget that the left border of the counter is actually the right border of the stem. The left side of the “hole” should align with the vertical line of the “R,” as in the graphic above. OK. This may just be personal preference, style-wise. I concede that someone may make an “R” by combining a vertical straight line, a circle, and a diagonal line, and that in such case the counter would refer to the line of the circle rather than the stem. Great. But I don’t think that’s the case here, or the case in most counter misalignments. Most of the time, people just don’t understand the letter that they’re working with, its lines and dynamics.

This improved “R,” which I amateurishly worked up in Fireworks, aligns the counter with the vertical stroke of the “R.” So, for verdict one, NEVER, REMIX, and CORK get a thumbs down for style. Guilty of counter misalignment. We’re not even going to get into the stupidity of using a super fat cap for a throwee outline on an uneven surface, since that goes to the question of technique rather than letters, per se. But the larger point is one that will have any anthropologists among us shrugging their shoulders at is obviousness: what would appear a formless practice to outsiders is actually rigorously regimented internally. We’re going to try to get to the bottom of that internal regimentation. Graffiti may transform all sorts of things (the wall, the train, the truck, or, at its best typography–the letter!–itself), but there is no shortage of rules to it.

To all my real kids, throwin’ up the graffiti pieces… – Killah Priest on DJ Spooky’s Mex Grass remix of “Catechism”

This will be our first installment of Graffiti Fridays, in which I track down and discuss the graff that I’m finding here in Chicago. Don’t expect murals. I like tags and throwees, and I’ll leave the burners to the slumming art critics, who seem to enjoy that sort of thing. That’s one of the principles here: I’d rather spend considerable time discussing a marker tag on a newspaper stand than I would a full mural with some socially redeeming message. Social redemption ruined graffiti.

Now, I got into it on this very point with a particularly famous blogger a few years back, when I had the great honor of taking one of his graduate courses. I don’t like murals, and I don’t like the term “graffiti artists.” People who write graffiti are writers, not “artists,” and full on pieces are the least interesting aspect of graffiti. My argument was based on a very resentful, very nostalgic, and very dubious foundation of authenticity. I don’t like murals precisely because they are so easily assimilated to something like “art.” And so beginning in the 1980’s gallery shows for graffiti writers started popping up everywhere, and then the legal walls were dedicated, and everybody was happy because the kids had been given a safe outlet for their creativity. Well, fuck that. As much as polite society likes to think that graffiti is about “creativity” and “art,” graffiti is also about destruction, and there’s some beauty in that. I often say that there’s a very easy way to eliminate graffiti: make it legal. Demand for that destructive edge, that excessive and almost pointless act (the sovereign moment, in Bataille’s sense) would evaporate within three years. Murals, then—and this was my contention—weren’t (ahem) keepin’ it reeeeeaaal, authenticity-wise—and I know that’s a dumb argument, and this particularly famous blogger called me on it, and he was right. But…

You’ll get the liberal view that the “murals are very beautiful, but we really hate all those chicken scratch tags and why do they have to write on the store gates like that?”—a view that’s roughly equivalent to some liberal praising the “socially redeeming” lyrics of rap while noting that they don’t really think of the beats as music, lacking in instruments and melody as they are. Tricia Rose years ago destroyed that high-minded conceit in “Soul Sonic Forces,” an excellent chapter of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, but the blind spot on the graffiti analogue of rhythm still afflicts those commenting on the practice, for the most part. Even Joe Austin, in his otherwise masterful Taking the Trains: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City, sniffs at what he calls the street and highway era, which is to say, the era of tags and throwees that emerged after the top-to-bottom whole car became far too risky a venture for the immediate buffing policies and escalating sentences of the second Koch regime.

The tag and the throwee were always part of the game, quantity operations that involved low risk relative to a piece, but for that reason only acquired value through multiplication. If you wanted to catch fame primarily behind your tags, you better bomb a lot, son, and many did just that (JEW and REPS being two that come to mind). This is a structural necessity. Many people may remember a “beautiful mural,” but nobody will remember a lone tag. It only acquires sticking power with repetition (yes, graffiti is the twisted cousin of advertising), and repetition requires that you wreck the city. But there’s also a particular aesthetic to the tag and the throwee, and that’s what’s often missed by the mural fetishists who—truth be told—rarely understand the aesthetic of murals either. For my money, the great taggers (say, DURAN, BESTER, ENUF, CHINO) and throwee guys (COPE, SOE, CRO, SP) were doing something far more interesting than the art gallery converts: coupling a secret aesthetic with a thoroughly excessive practice. Writers know a “good” tag or throwee when they see one, but few others do. And, strangely, writers often don’t know the social upshot of their practices, though you had interesting political import emerge now and again, like when GHOST and some other RIS guys went around dogging legal murals (with the exception of RIP pieces, of course), an act I considered brilliant at the time.

Maybe I’m smuggling in authenticity through the backdoor, still trying to keep it real. Maybe I’m still engaging in what Andreas Huyssen called the romantics of marginality. Fine. At the very least, I’m not looking for the “good” in graffiti from the standpoint of the socially redeeming. We’re just talking styles and ups here. Styles and ups. Graffiti Friday, then, will be a chance to work out the aesthetics and excessive practices of writing in this town. I’ll be out looking for tags and throwees to catch a flick of and discuss. Knowledgeable observers will notice that all the writers I named here are NYC writers from a particular era. Let’s see how contemporary Chicago measures up.

I think it may be time to admit that the Braves are a better team than the Mets. It pains me, but I think it’s time. They’ve absolutely dominated the season series, and the Mets escaped a home sweep this week only through some miracle on Wednesday night. Today’s game was a disaster, featuring the second straight John Maine meltdown. Now, I like Maine, and I hope he develops into a real top-flight starter, but that boy needs to calm down. We saw him here in Chicago on Saturday, getting lit up by the Cubbies in the 3^rd for 6 runs. Today he had his mini-meltdown in the 5^th, giving up back-to-back dingers to Chipper Jones and Mark Teixeira. Now, to be fair, the Jones-Teixeira combo is no picnic for any pitcher, and may constitute the best one-two punch in the National League, but I saw the same look in Maine’s after Chipper’s blast that I saw Saturday in Chicago: flustered and demoralized. And that’s when bad stuff happens.

I’m all for fire in the belly in most sports figures. I like it when a Paul DeLuca gets sent off the field for throwing a hissy fit. I like the whole chest-thumping competitive stupidity of it. It’s like a program for getting to that base animality that’s so necessary in sports, where you’re just operating. In most cases, this is a great quality. But I hate to see it in pitchers. I hate when a pitcher slams his glove down immediately after a home run jumps off the bat. I think stoicism—a la Glavine, perhaps—is the right note for the position. And Maine doesn’t have that. He doesn’t even really have fire in the belly. He has a kind of false stoicism that’s really just stewing fear, and every once in a while it cuts the surface and you see back-to-back homers, or the mess that was Wrigley. And you can see it coming. It’s palpable. For Maine to really lift his game, to really enter the class of elite young players, he needs to get over that. He needs to run the opposite program, and perhaps it will be Glavine that can teach him how to regulate his moods.

The late inning rally was certainly exciting, and David Wright’s laser-focus is just incredible, but it’s also sign and symptom. Getting those 3 runs in the 3^rd or 4^th would have been much more useful, especially when you have a nervous guy on the mound. If anything, it put me in the mood of all those seasons when the Mats would absolutely tank a late season series against the Braves, coming up just short, just short. Again.

People’s Gas, j’accuse! J’accuse, I say. You tell us that you are for the people, right there in your name. And yet the people at this address are still taking cold showers, yes, even bathing a tiny screaming toddler in microwaved water, and all because you, People’s Gas, have hoodwinked the people with your blatant demagoguery. For shame, People’s Gas!

We are still without gas, which means we are without hot showers, stove, oven, dishwasher, and washer/dryer. Have you heard a more heart-rending tale ever? I suspect not. The Gasman came on Monday, ran a few tests, and informed us that it would be impossible to “break the seal” (and one can only wonder at the hermetic complexity of such a procedure) because one of the pipes to the burner (or something) was itself insufficiently sealed. Strangely, he suggested that a “friend” could fix it, and that friend was mysteriously in the neighborhood, a coincidence that most people would take for obvious shake-down. And with a teeth-chattering (OK, tooth-chattering) toddler toddling right there! The nerve. The landlord balked, called his plumber. The Gasman Lefteth. The plumber proceeded to apply some substance and turn the pipe once, an operation that lasted the better part of 45 seconds. But, alas. The Gasman was gone, and cannot be rescheduled until Friday. Friday! J’accuse, people’s Gas! But, O, sweet Friday. When you come I will lather up correctly under scalding waves. When you come I will pile the dishwasher high, and run it on the Heavy setting. When you come I will wash a sock, a single sock, and dry it, twice. My carbon footprint has been washed away on the shores of graft and under-scheduling, O People’s Gas, and I will reclaim it with a mighty stomp. You bastards.

But, on the upside, I have my internets up and running, so kind neighbor can snatch back his or her piece of the spectrum, and I can check my bank balance.