Seven Red

The Mutts get trounced in the final game, while the Phillies beat up on the Nats. It’s all over. The Mutts miss the post-season. Incredible.

My hats off to the Phillies, though. They played like champions down the stretch, and I think the NL squads have something to fear growing in Philadelphia. And having lived in PA for all those years, I’m not altogether unhappy that it’s the Phils, whose fans are real baseball. At least it wasn’t friggin’ Atlanta.

Oh yeah. Go Cubs!

It actually is kinda interesting, I guess. Two teams play 161 games against all manner of opponents. Through whatever twists and turns, April through September, the thing goes this way and that, the ball goes up and comes down, slumps happen and hot streaks happen, people get traded and new faces change the way things work. All that. Six months. And it comes down to one game. The last game of the season. It really is remarkable. Old-timey baseball. Classic. Dem Brooklyn Bums as if they moved not to Los Angeles, but followed all the Brooklyn Irish and Italians to the far reaches of Queens. Total breakdown and disaster.

But still a chance. One game. One game after 161. One game and hope the other guy loses his game and then maybe you’re not a bum anymore, maybe you’re not a mutt anymore. It’s tragic and exhilarating and throbbing and alive. It’s baseball, and it’s damn near to October. Uno mas.

As you may have noticed, I’ve withheld posting on the worst late-season collapse in modern baseball, hoping against hope that the Mutts could pull out of this tailspin. It is not to be. Tonight, they handed me a fine birthday present: they lost to the Cards, the Phils beat Atlanta, and the NL East is all knotted up with three games to play. Frankly, I don’t see the Mets winning another game this season, and I see Philly taking at least two out of the three. So, as I see it now, Philly will take the NL East by two games, and the Mets will not – will NOT – make the playoffs. This is, of course, a disaster of monumental proportions, sports-wise (perspective is necessary at times like these), and Willie Randolph and Omar are probably gonzo. It’s for the best. With the raw talent on the Mets bench, nothing like this should be happening. Of course, it all comes down to pitching. I was complaining to anyone who would listen all season about middle relief, and the collapse came to fruition there.

I suspect I won’t have much Mets blogging to worry about come Saturday. This one’s over.

babygirl winking at lounger@ti

What’s up with the schnozle?

babygirl headkiss (not a variation on the band Mussolini Headkick)

Tales from Wrigley coming soon…with evidence.

There was a little boy who was misled by another little boy and this is what he said… -Slick Rick, A Children’s Story

Tell your story walkin’… – Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn

So I know I promised the second part of the longish analysis for this Friday, but too much is going on, so it will have to wait. First off, I’m busy as hell, and really don’t have the time I need to set it out. Second, the Brooklyn Famiglia – Loungerati and The Wiki Assassin — will be in town this weekend, so we’re feverishly preparing for their arrival. We’re also just excited as all git-out, since we have a babysitter for two nights, which means dinner, money-spendin’, and boozin’ like proper 20-somethings.

Yes, it’s nostalgia weekend. Shortly after 9/11, we took a trip with the Brooklyn Familia to Montreal – we are all, of course, New Yawkahs, and we were all Brooklynites at the time, but after The Great Event and Anthrax Island, it was time to take a break. Needless to say, we got drunk as hell in Canada’s sin city. That’s back when CADs were play money, and not in the least in parity with the USD. So now the Brooklyn Famiglia will be out in Chicago, and we have reservations and all manner of events planned, including Loungerati and I heading to Wrigley’s for a Cubs v. Pirates Saturday in the midst of the hottest NL Central pennant race in years. Can’t do much better than that. The real question is, will the ladies have to bail us out of Cook County for dinner Saturday?

Since we’re on the nostalgia tip, I want to take this Graffiti Friday to pay tribute to one of the great Queens bombers of yesteryear, a guy by the tag of MIRAGE. When I was coming up in the late 80′s, MIRAGE was like a hero. I was a true jocker, but I think that anyone would tell you, that if you were gonna jock somebody’s style, it may as well be MIRAGE. This is really a graffiti fable. A children’s story.

MIRAGE was famous for his footprints. We hear a lot about our “footprint” today – carbon and otherwise (Vanity Fair had a hilarious feature on reducing your “Asshole Footprint” this month that you absolutely must read). But when I was thirteen, it was all MIRAGE footprints everywhere. Yes, there were MIRAGE tags, and yes, there were MIRAGE fill-ins, straight letters, and burners, but it was still this rush to see just those MIRAGE footprints. He’d do little (and not so little) footprint fill-ins everywhere. Maybe this fable goes to the larger point. MIRAGE even moved past language, or maybe down into language. He totally got it. You don’t even need the word. Just throw up some footprints. Splat. Everywhere. MIRAGE footprints. (Isn’t this getting down to language anyway? Was it Derrida who said that language is the furrow in the earth, the footprint?).

But the best part of the MIRAGE footprints was the stories it would generate. Or rather, the footprints would hook into some already existing chemical modification, and then the stories would commence. Standing in a cold schoolyard with your boys, after midnight, passing a joint around. Yes. And somebody would say, “Those fucking footprints lead back to MIRAGE’S place, man. They lead to his house.” And then someone else would say, “That dude lives in Long Island, cuz I saw some stenciled MIRAGE footprints on the middle divider of the LIE, like by Exit 32.” And then someone else would say, “Stop fuckin’ jockin. That guy’s TMR. He lives in fucking Bayside. I saw him on Bell two days ago, you fucking jockers. But the footprints DO lead to his house. Everyone knows that.” Yes. Everyone knows that. The logic of it was crystal clear, in a smoky, EZ Wider sorta way. You turn away and see the non-writers are bored, and talking about going up to the Optimo for more whip-its. Yes. Because they’re footprints. So they must lead somewhere. Never mind the logic of graffiti itself, street rhizome breaking through in any given spot. Every signature, every footprint connected to every other. But still every signature, every footprint calling out “Track this!” And then someone said, and it wasn’t me, or at least not a me I recognize anymore, “Get off his dick. That shit don’t lead anywhere. Fucking mirage, get it? Jockers.”

MIRAGE, Straight letter with footprints, Clearview Expressway, Bayside (late 80′s)

MIRAGE Detail, Footprints (highlighted on right)

And this is the way I have to end this story: MIRAGE died in the late 1980′s, and the piece above stood unmarred on the Clearview for years afterwards, no mean feat, since that was precious graffiti real estate, and the picture here does no justice to the sheer size of that thing. It’s likely larger in my memory. Jocker. In any case, it became a marker in northern Queens. You’d say “We hit the Clearview across from The Mirage.” A couple of highway jams reached this status. There was an OCEAN HUSH just over the Whitestone Bridge in the Bronx that was similarly iconic, and the SUPERSTAR SAINT taking up an entire underpass on the BQE (Just Plain Fuckin’ Nuts). But the MIRAGE is still the one that everyone remembers. Fucking jockers. Only The City would buff something as great as that Clearview straight letter. I was primed long before I read Pierre Clastres for that simple concept: Society against the fucking State…

Today’s discovery: I gauge my daily curmudgeon-level by the relative intensity of my refusal to use Starbucks’ size designations. Grande this, bastards.

Just own them. All season long. Shea, Philly, wherever. It’s ridiculous.

At this point, even with just 15 games left, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Phillies won the division. Awful and unwatchable stuff.

Keeping myself occupied…

Forget Brick. While the high school noir thing was clever and engaging for about 45 minutes, it soon started to drag, and then drag some more. If I wanted to “dangle,” I would go watch Miller’s Crossing, which at least has the value of Gabriel Byrne dead-panning “Don’t get hysterical” to a thoroughly disinterested Marcia Gay Harden, perhaps the most overlooked film one-liner in the last twenty years. No, if you really want to see former Third Rock child alien Joseph Gordon-Levitt knocking out a smart role in a well-written film, go see The Lookout. Gordon-Levitt must have a keen sense of script, in any case. Even if Brick was ultimately over-the-top, it was a smart and original take on its genre, and so is The Lookout.

Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt, a former high school star hockey player living with a brain injury. We first find him driving at night on a Kansas rural road with his girlfriend and two others. He kills the headlights on the darkened road to show off the spectacle of mating fireflies, and, well, there you have your brain injury . What follows can be seen as your standard Regular-Guy-Pushed-To-the-Limit fare, with the usual criminal elements forcing the protagonist to examine his own code and become-criminal, a popular thriller theme from Deliverance to the surprisingly engaging Derailed.

Struggling with his brain injury and taken for a pitiful dimwit behind it, Pratt works as a night janitor at a farmer’s bank. He shares an apartment with another disabled adult, the loud-mouthed but street smart Lewis (Jeff Daniels in an Oscar-worthy performance), who was purportedly blinded by meth lab fumes “before meth was trendy.” Pratt takes day-time rehab courses, and writes in a small notebook as an aid to short term memory. Of course, the combination of his damaged memory and his inability to censor himself means that he leads a painful and lonely life, condescended to his by successful family, and sitting alone at the bar after his shift, drinking non-alcoholic beer and striking out with women. More unfortunately for Pratt, his long-term memory is not in the least bit affected, so he spends much of his time reliving his pre-injury glory, while drowning in guilt over the accident, which killed his two friends and caused his former girlfriend, who he virtually stalks throughout the film, to lose a leg. A sad existence, in other words. But people have designs on him.

Specifically, a pack of thieves led by villain probably not named Gary Spargo have been casing banks, looking for a big score. They want to hit a vault when the large cash reserves come in for the planting season loans, and Spargo is well aware of Chris’ past and disability. Spargo is played masterfully by Matthew Goode, a performance that is all the more astounding when we learn that Goode also played Scarlet Johannsen’s hapless fiance in Match Point. It may be that American Lowlife is a type played particularly well by Brits – from Gary Oldman’s hilarious Drexl Spivey in True Romance to Idris Elba’s jaw-dropping work as The Wire‘s Stringer Bell – but Goode’s transformation from snooty British tennis aristocrat to charming Kansas faux populist sociopath is truly remarkable. I’m scared to see his upcoming work in Brideshead Revisited! The gang lures sad sack Pratt in with sex and companionship, but inevitably turns matters to the impending heist. Of course, the best laid plans will go awry (the actual process of the plan unraveling is detailed, nuanced, and well-constructed, which is to say, writer and director Scott Frank doesn’t take the audience for fools), and Pratt has to face his own capacities in dealing with unfolding chaos.

This is all fairly standard as far as the genre goes. The two interesting elements that add to the film, I think, are the role of disability and the role of writing. These elements are woven together nicely through Pratt’s specific brain-injury consequence: he is unable to sequence. Essentially, his capacity to narrate events is limited; we find him at the outset struggling to write a simple narrative of his usual routine. There’s something very moving about this scene, which cuts in his day with the writing of his day, so we see him shaving, then erasing what is presumably a “non-sequential” detail: that he often cries without knowing why. Throughout the film, he retells the narrative, starting again and again with I wake up. I suspect that this theme of waking up (repeated by Lewis) would annoy disability activists, since there is the hint in there that the disability is like a nightmare: Pratt’s wish – and isn’t this the abled culture’s version of disability – is to wake up from this bad dream of irreparable injury. I wake up, and I am normal again. But it’s the story that he struggles with, the act of story-telling smashed by the injury to his sequencing functions, and it is pulled off cinematically without the formal gadgetry of, say, Memento.

Indeed, The Lookout is a much more sober reflection on the relationship between narrative, film, and the structures of the brain than Memento. And it’s more touching, if I can use such a naive term. In any case, these relationships are not merely a facade added on to the substructure of the crime thriller, but actually drive the events in a variety of interesting ways. I don’t think the marketing did justice to how good a film this is. The catch line in the commercials was Spargo’s insistence that “whoever has the money has the power.” This is almost trite in comparison to the film’s more complex themes. The catch phrase might have been the little heuristic device that Lewis provides to Pratt when they discuss his problems of sequencing: Start at the end and write backwards. This sort of teleological approach has always been the problem of narrative theory, but it provides the film with its curious twist, a twist that doesn’t so much wow you as stick with you after the credits fade. If Memento‘s narrative pyrotechnics left audiences wondering what the real narrative may have been, The Lookout‘s more cautious approach seems to twist narrative itself.

I’m departing from my purpose of merely discussing styles and ups quite a bit here, but I should respond to some objections and set out the stakes more clearly. I can’t very well fault what I’ve called a “liberal” view of graffiti in the abusive and somewhat offhand way that I’ve done so in previous editions without expecting a response, and thereby being called on to respond. As such, I’d like to set out a few concepts here that might clarify the questions I’m tossing around. That is the hope, at least. So this will be a departure in both tone and content from previous editions. I’ll proceed in three parts: first, I’ll lay out the categories of exit, voice, and loyalty. Then I’ll respond to Cintron’s chapter with these concepts in mind. Finally, I’ll explain why I think they’re important for understanding tag graffiti. In order to conserve my own time, and give you a break, I’ll post only the first part this Friday, with parts 2 and 3 appearing next week.

1. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in an Immanent Field

I draw the concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty, of course, from economist Albert O. Hirschman’s 1970 treatise of that title (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States). Hirschman is working out a theory of response, and ways of gauging response in changing (specifically, “declining”) organizations, taken broadly. I’m going to bastardize the concepts considerably here, so apologies to the economists.

Loyalty—Think of loyalty as brand loyalty, or commitment to a firm or political party. If a particular firm is in decline, some members stay attached to it to the bitter end (the Bush 29%, for example, a seemingly unbreakable margin of loyalty). While the proportion of loyalty in a particular situation is important to Hirschman, he’s more concerned with the other two categories.

Voice—Voice can be equated roughly with “resistance” or “dissent.” This goes for commodities as well as for firms and “states.” When employees sense that a firm is in decline, they can stick with the firm and “voice” their dissent with respect to its direction. If a commodity experiences a reduction in quality, consumers can “write in” or complain to the firm. The entirety of protest rhetorics can be viewed as a “voice” operation. Stop the war. I’ll expand this concept here to include “self-expression,” where one develops a voice in relation to the social whole.

Exit—From an economist’s standpoint, this is not a particularly tricky category: consumers experience the decrease in quality, and simply take their business elsewhere. Or, employees notice the decline in a firm, and leave rather than attempting to change the tendency. In states, exit can purportedly be seen in generalized apathy (Baudrillard’s silent majority, the black hole of politics), or in emigration/desertion (Hardt and Negri’s hobby horse).

Indeed, it’s no mistake that Hirschman’s work in economics emerges at the same time as the categories of the “social” worker and political “exodus” are establishing themselves in the Italian Operaio and Autonomist movements, or when the “solution” of the commune is at its height in Western countries. Exit is precisely the problem of global capitalism, precisely the problem of the “real subsumption of labor under capitalism.” If capitalism is no longer operating in relation to an “outside,” if it covers and shapes the whole social field, what can the category of exit mean in practice? On this thorny question, we see even Hardt and Negri’s remarkable work snagged: how do we posit immanence at the same time that we propose exodus? For Hardt and Negri, Empire serves as the immanent field (real subsumption) out of which a multitude emerges, but the paeans to the “deserter” may leave us wondering where (to put it spatially) one deserts to, and the multitude is often strangely positioned “against Empire.” Call this the emigration problem of voice. Indeed, this question was even keenly felt by William Whyte in The Organization Man, who perhaps put it most simply when he noted that the employee may tell his boss to go to hell (voice), and quit in dramatic fashion (exit), but he’s always going to have a new boss. Similarly, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over “co-optation” grinds against this very problem, where not only is it the case that every “exit” is cycled back into production, but exit itself (and voice, for that matter) becomes a species of loyalty in that it is an engine of production/innovation. Call this the open source problem of loyalty.

In my own field of composition theory, these problems  came to a head in several debates of the 1980′s, specifically those between David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow (an insight I’ll attribute to my friend expat of Scooter Nation). To simplify considerably, is it the job of writing instructors to enable students to develop their own voice in relation to institutions(Elbow), or to develop a kind of loyalty by adjusting to institutional conventions (Bartholomae)? These questions had been brewing throughout the structural adjustment period of the 1970′s, and  explode, perhaps predictably, just as the institutions and modes of (economic) being typical of globalization are hardening through the 1980′s. The crisis of the privatized individual in the disintegrating institutional setting can be glimpsed as a faint ghost haunting these debates. Where voice and loyalty come to dominate the scene of writing, we can see the disappearance of that other category. The only position composition couldn’t take was out.

Perhaps the smartest work on this problem comes from Hakim Bey, in his notion of a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). Bey posits the “end” of the pirate utopia, those spaces like the hidden Caribbean coves of the 17th and 18th century that were both literally and figuratively unmapped by political power (though not, obviously, by power relations themselves, and we should keep this distinction in mind), and thereby constituted an “outside” to it. As the world is fully mapped (real subsumption, the field of immanence) the spaces of exit disappear, and their function is transferred into a temporal domain. So you have these temporary emergences of something like exit that can be lived, but rest assured that they will always be reterritorialized by mafia capitalism. Every time I try to get out, in other words, they pull me back in. (Indeed, the disappearance of the mafia itself—to digress significantly but not fully—can be read as a symptom of real subsumption, where the mafia codes constituted a residual and unacceptable pre-capitalist social formation.)

I’ve already gone too long on this, but here’s the point. The practical problem of exit in an immanent field results in a domination of the field (theoretically) by loyalty and voice. Put another way, all activities come to appear as loyalty or voice, reproduction or protest. There is no margin for exit. And while liberals, leftists, progressives, and—for that matter—thinking people of all stripes heap well-deserved disdain on Bush’s “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” rhetoric, there is a way in which Bush is quite right: he’s boiled down into a sound bite the analytical foundation of real subsumption, however contemporary social theory tends to complicate loyalty and voice by mixing their proportions. Indeed, the situation could appear even worse, since from a perspective of capitalism (and this administration’s political power!) the slogan actually works more aggressively as “Even (and especially) if you’re against us, you’re with us.” The consequence for theory is that every social emergence is read back against its “relationship” to political power. Where file sharing emerges as a practice, it is immediately related back to authorship and the copyright regime. Where graffiti emerges as a practice, it is immediately read back against ownership and public space. Indeed, to do otherwise now takes on the appearance of either quixotic irrelevance, or romanticized striving after an in-itself divorced from social context, as if it is a condition of real subsumption that everything be “contextualized,” where contextualization is most often merely a pretext for sealing off the exit door. Every time I try to get out, they contextualize me back in.

I should say, of course, that there is nothing wrong with contextualizing. I’ve done quite a bit of it here, as the contradiction-mongers may point out. And, yes, far too many populations experience something like “real” exit against their will. You want “exit,” people will say, you can go down to the favelas surrounding Rio, or any city of the global South, and plenty of the North besides, and you can find all the exit you’ll ever want, but you may not find the “pirate utopia” you’re seeking. These are fair objections, though the second confuses a limited access to resources with exclusion from an immanent order, as if that order weren’t precisely about actualizing the such limitations – as if the people of the favelas and shanty-towns weren’t the most stitched into the domain of capitalism precisely in their seeming exclusion from the circuits of capital. Fair objections, however.

While I will not answer them directly, I hope it’s obvious by now that I’m not saying “exit” is necessarily good. I’m not seeking a pirate utopia (or atopia, which is perhaps the more accurate term given the condition of immanence). Rather, I think we need to experiment with analyzing exit, or even to invent ways of thinking in terms of exit. The TAZ is just such an attempt, though it remains wedded (perhaps inevitablely) to a soft version of voice. Like any experiment or invention, these ways may be failures, or even dangerous, or even – if we’re lucky – useless (isn’t the useless a kind of exit all its own these days?), but that’s the task I’ve set myself to. In Cintron (Part 2), we see an interesting mixture of voice and loyalty—far more interesting than most analyses. But the conceptual apparatus absolutely rejects exit, for reasons I’ll explain. Moreover, I will not claim (in Part 3) that graffiti is solely an “exit.” Its proportions of loyalty (signature), exit (event), and voice (context) are obviously very complicated, and I want to work those out in some detail. But I want to insist that we at least pretend to think graffiti as exit, that we act as if exit could be a way of thinking immanence. At this point, however, the 45 minutes I allotted for this post is finis, so I will have to exit, stage left. To other work, of course…

Saturday Addendum: she has quite correctly accused me of a bait and switch, luring in unsuspecting readers with promises of graffiti analysis, only to revert back to pompous theorizing. Worse, she’s suggested that I am attempting to emulate a Particularly Famous Blogger, something I wouldn’t want to do (because I could not do). To remedy this disgraceful situation, I am providing some new pics here that will at least allow me to pretend that I haven’t strayed too far from the goals set out for the series.

Our friend VEGAN at it again, corner of Kingsbury and North

BEGOE rooftop, Red/Brown line southbound side, between Fullerton and Belmont

TMC Rooftop, Red/Brown line between Fullerton and Belmont (new stuff)

PANDA ROK, off Red/Brown line at Belmont. Bang it out, kid.