Seven Red

One of my students is a big 80′s-head (I know…). I guess it’s a bit like being a hippie chick when I was in school. In any case, I’m now viral marketing Control, the new film about the life of Ian Curtis (as if 24 Hour Party People wasn’t enough!).

Here’s the trailer, which looks interesting at least:

OK. I’ll admit it. I literally teared up, lip quivering and all, at the end of Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I finished yesterday after clutching it as train reading for about two weeks. Then again, I literally teared up, lip quivering and all, at the end of Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, my train reading for the previous two weeks. she tells me that I probably won’t cry like a baby at the end of Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, but I think she underestimates my capacity to be affected. I remember reading a line in Gravity’s Rainbow when Enzian gives a light to his Russian brother – neither aware that they have the same father – and Pynchon goes into some melodramatic contemplation of all the times two brothers, unknown to each other, must have exchanged such small cordialities; I damn near lost it on the 7 line for that one.

That admission out of the way, I want to quote a passage from Kavalier and Clay that may relate to some of what I’ve been saying about exit here (or show it up for the aesthetic and apolitical fluff that some may already think it is). It’s a bit long, but worth it. If you’ve read K & C, you know that the novel revolves around a comic book character called “The Escapist,” one of whose creators is a Czech Jew trained in the escape artist trade. Here’s the passage, which I’ll quote without commentary, if only to shield myself from comparisons to Chabon’s prose:

He thought of the boxes of comics that he had accumulated, upstairs, in the two small rooms where, for five years, he had crouched in the false bottom of the life from which Tommy had freed him, and then, in turn, of the thousands upon thousands of little boxes, stacked neatly on sheets of Bristol board or piled in rows across the ragged pages of comic books, that he and Sammy had filled over the past dozen years: boxes brimming with raw materials, the bits of rubbish from which they had, each in his own way, attempted to fashion their various golems. In literature and folklore, the significance and the fascination of golems – from Rabbi Loew’s to Victor von Frankenstein’s – lay in their soullessness, in their tireless inhuman strength, in their metaphorical association with overweening human ambition, and in the frightening ease with which they passed beyond the control of their horrified and admiring creators. But it seemed to Joe that none of these – Faustian hubris, least of all – were among the true reasons that impelled men, time after time, to hazard the making of golems. The shaping of a golem, to him, was a gesture of hope, offered against hope, in a time of desperation. It was the expression of a yearning that a few magic words and an artful hand might produce something – one poor, dumb, powerful thing – exempt from the crushing strictures, from the ills, cruelties, and inevitable failures of the greater Creation. It was the voicing of a vain wish, when you got down to it, to escape. To slip, like the Escapist, free of the entangling chain of reality and straitjacket of physical laws. Harry Houdini had roamed the Palladiums and Hippodromes of the world encumbered by an entire cargo-hold of crates and boxes, stuffed with chains, iron hardware, brightly painted flats and hokum, animated all the while by only this same desire, never fulfilled: truly to escape, if only for an instant; to poke his head through the borders of this world, with its harsh physics, into the myterious sporot world that lay beyond. The newspaper articles that Joe had read about the upcoming Senate investigation into comic books always cited “escapism” among the litany of injurious consequences of their reading, and dwelled on the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life. (582)

So on Saturday we went down to the Field Museum to see the MAPS exhibit. The Field Museum, for those who don’t know, is about the coolest place on earth, with all kinds of really interesting exhibits. They have an exhibit called Evolving Planet which sticks it to the fundies at the outset: you enter the exhibit to a snarky little definition of what a “theory” is for most people in everyday conversation and what a “theory” is as a term of art in the sciences. It’s not subtle. The temporary exhibit on Darwin is just salt in the wounds at that point. They also manage to put on exhibits about the pre-Columbian Americas and contemporary Africa that really push hard to avoid the usual curatorial condescension, although I suspect that’s the dominant mode in the museum biz these days (The demise of Orientalia?). Now, the museum of course succumbs to all the usual critiques about fetishizing both nature and culture, sure, and I’m confident that there is some critical theorist of museum history out there who would tell me exactly how that is, but – dammit, kids – sometimes I just want to turn it off and be that subject who gazes up in wonder, which is to say, a kid.

So, MAPS: Finding Our Place in the World. The exhibit itself is only one part of a seemingly city-wide cultural event that will last for several months. There are all kinds of lectures and activities spread throughout town at various venues. But the exhibit at the Field serves as a locus for all these events, so we wanted to get in and see the show.  I was especially excited about it and started paying attention to the ads for it in early September. I’ve been interested in maps for a while, and more so now with these network maps that are damn near unreadable, but visually arresting. This quarter – now nearly over – I started my tech writing class with a discussion of  subway maps based on a rejected redesign proposal for the New York City subway (a subject near and dear to me, as other material on this blog should suggest).

The question here is simple: should a subway map be “geographically accurate” or distorted but internally consistent? There are good answers on both sides, most of which come down to the way the map will be used. Since, however, there are many kinds of users (a mass transit system being an essentially variable sort of machine), simple answers are difficult to come by. (Graffiti writers, of course, have a secret subway map – usually maintained by lore and existing only in their heads – that looks much more like the engineering drawings or MTA map of the New York City subways, with special notations for where the lay-ups are, and which tunnels are safe to walk, but that’s for another day.) In any case, this is just a small example of the complexity of mapping and why I’m interested in it, building up a bit of tension for our eventual trip to the museum.

So we arrive at the museum excited. We took a stroll through the Ancient Americas exhibit, which was really amazing. babygirl ran like hell among the Aztec and Maya, ran laps around the Northwestern totem polls, marveled at various clothing of the Inuit. Then we got our tickets ready ($24 for the two of us plus babygirl) and hit MAPS. Barred at the door! What? Apparently, we couldn’t take a stroller into the exhibit, since it was a bit too “cramped.” We were pointed to a “stroller staging area” where five or six strollers sat idle, baby paraphernalia spilling out of their various compartments. Now, some toddlers may be ready to do a walkthrough of a crowded museum exhibit that allows both their parents and the people around them to enjoy and take in the material. babygirl is not one of these toddlers. So we had to rush through the exhibit, and we really didn’t get to see any of it. she was pissed. We could have been told at any point in the process that strollers were prohibited. Perhaps at the gate where we bought our tickets very obviously wheeling a toddler in a stroller?  Perhaps in the promotional material? I dunno. I know I sound like a complaint-nik, but jeez. Is it that hard? No strollers? So, we saw MAPS, but we didn’t really see MAPS.

I do hope I get a chance to visit again before the exhibit closes shop. I guess I’ll have to go alone, since if we bothy go, we’ll have to bring babygirl, and MAPS aren’t toddler friendly. What I did see of the exhibit was just great, which made it all the more disappointing. Later we were in a grocery store and babygirl started her whining-running-screaming-running thing again. I realized that I wasn’t a grown-up anymore, and that you are only as old as the least adaptable member of your group.

No long disputations today. JUst FACT and JARE.

FACT, Clybourn near North

JARE X-MEN Crew, Clybourn near North

X-MEN seems to be a big crew here. These cats are especially good at killing billboards. They have a full billboard cover over on Fullerton by the highway; I might have to hoof it over there to catch a flick for you, dear readers. The FACT throwee isn’t great, but it’s pretty good. Notice that FACT aims for consistent shapes in the F, A, and C, and that he tries to comport the bottom ends of the F and the T. The T bottom actually reminds me of TRAP’s old T’s, which he used to slap all over Central Queens and North Brooklyn in the late-1980′s:

I’m not crazy about JARE’s style, but I’ll always admire a nice clean fill in like these two. It’s also near a pretty busy spot (North and Clybourn being a big shopping district), so it’s a nice up as well.

Until next week…

So the other day I saw Common on TV here talking about his latest single. He was trying to justify it, and noted that hip hop is not about love songs. Of course, there’s a long history of hip hop trying to distinguish itself from soul, R&B, and the blues more generally, and one of the distinguishing features is the abandonment of the love song. Chuck D famously noted to R & B DJ’s that “your general subject, love, is minimal: it’s sex for profit” (Public Enemy, “Caught, Can I Get a Witness). Similarly, Ice Cube derided the state of black radio in the early nineties – with its almost ostensibly inordinate devotion to R & B and soul love songs – and positioned these directly against the “reality” that rappers were discussing:

Tune in to the radio, listen for a minute
Yo G stick a fuckin tape in it
Cuz all the radio do is gangle
That R & B love triangle
And when you’re out there kickin it with the brothas
You don’t care about lovers
You wanna hear a young nigga on the mic going buckwild
Throwin and flowin and showin new styles (Ice Cube, “Turn off the Radio”)

That song also has the great lines “No it’s not a threat but a promise/ I’m as/ crazy as they come see/ Mama didn’t love me.” And thereby the circle is closed. So Common seems to be right. At the same time, I think there are some interesting love songs where hip hop writers weren’t so concerned about distinguishing themselves from soul and R & B. Here are two of my favorites, though the first is a “love song” only in the ways many blues numbers are love songs, while the second mimics and repeats a number of soul tropes (it could as easily be Barry White as Rakim). I’d be curious to hear about others.

(Mos Def, “Ms. Fat Booty”)

(Erik B. and Rakim “What’s on Your Mind”) – No Video, but you can’t miss the great lines “I saw her on the subway on my way to Brooklyn/ “Hello good lookin’, is this seat tooken?”