Seven Red

Just a short post today on one of the better graffiti coffee table books I’ve come across, James Murray and Karla Murray’s Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC. The graffiti coffee table books all stem, I guess, from Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper’s Subway Art and Spraycan Art, books we used to pass around in high school; we’d study them like little glossy bibles, biting letters from all the great 70′s and early 80′s cats. You learn graffiti by copying, by imitation, and, since it’s the imitation of a signature, by forgery. If you had any love for the culture, your copy of Subway Art would be marked up with tags in pretty much all the margins and white space.

The genre is actually quite consistent. In any of these books you’ll get excellent art shots of extant murals (pieces), together with “explanation” text about the culture of graffiti and a healthy set of quotations from graffiti writers themselves. Since they are art books, they focus almost exclusively on murals. So pretty, with all the colors and whatnot. Broken Windows is interesting because it at least addresses tags and throwees in the text, but its images remain exclusively focused on the mural. I can’t really blame them: murals are the economically viable version of the thing, the “artistic” and stylistically complex works that non-writers can appreciate, even if they have difficulty understanding their complexity. Tags and throwees are, as I argued early in our series, mainly for writers themselves.

In terms of text, the book also includes an excellent discussion of the conflict between those who do legal walls and what I would call the graffiti purists (I think I’m a bit of a purist myself on this question) , even locating risk as one of the main criteria invoked by the purist camp to beat up on the legal wall business (Another, more pragmatic, criterion is the fact that the NYC Vandal Squad now goes around arresting people while they’re doing legal walls, which is dirty pool, at best). Even a cursory examination of the explanatory text will, in fact, show that most of the arguments I’ve been making here are fairly conventional within graffiti communities. It’s a good book for understanding the development and culture of graffiti in New York.

The main downside of these books is that the authors/editors are usually not writers themselves, so they rely on writers for a lot of guidance. As a result, they usually end up working with some crew, and therefore get a very limited perspective on the entire scene, sort of like a book that claims to be about 70′s punk focusing mostly on The Dead Boys and their friends to the exclusion of the rest of the New York scene. This happens in almost every one I’ve seen. Even a book like The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium (by an actual writer) succumbs to this limitation to some extent, although it’s much better than others at avoiding the narrow view. I guess every group on the scene has to produce its own books, or hook in some slumming author/editors.

In terms of the actual images, the exclusive focus on murals is a bit annoying to me, but it’s made up for in spades by the sheer goddamn freshness the actual murals they DO get. I don’t dislike burners. I actually love them, and I understand what goes into doing even relatively simple ones. I can also pretty much date a mural by its style, at least roughly. Back in my day, almost nobody did these excellent perspective pieces that really emerged in the mid-to-late-nineties. If you did a piece, it had an outline, and the 3-D work was usually isometric, or incorporated some minimal distorted vanishing point. The stuff that started appearing in the nineties has no outline at all: you see the borders of the letters by their shading, and the 3-D stuff is really complex and perfectly rendered 2 point and even 3 point perspective with various ground and horizon lines. Just amazing shit, the difference between medieval and renaissance portraiture in terms of technical sophistication – and that in the space of a decade or so. One of the writers quoted in the book complains that now all these art school kids are doing these burners; “you don’t learn graffiti in school,” he grumbles. I’m certainly the last person who should be criticizing another writer for a sad kind of authenticity argument (this whole Graffiti Fridays series being a sad kind of authenticity argument…), but that smells a bit like sour grapes. The murals in Broken Windows are amazing. If you’re looking for both a fairly accurate portrayal of graffiti culture in NYC, and some excellent art shots that show you contemporary burner styles, it’s a pretty good place to start. If you’re looking for that book on tags and throwees and those other exit value works, there isn’t one. We have to do that work on the blogs…

Can I just say that I loooooove The Wire, like, love love love it. The season – sadly, the final season – promises to be as complex and interesting as ever. It’s the only television show I’ve ever watched that makes me sad when there are only 10 minutes left in the episode. I think I was in a funk for days after Stringer Bell got got. I don’t know how I’ll handle the end of the series…

The Wire is also – ahem – one particular politico’s favorite show. Needless to say, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania thinks West Baltimore is a suburb of Dallas.

EDWARDS: Yargh. They’re up there sittin’ on all that gold, throwin’ the piss down on us in bucketfuls. Let’s go up there and git ‘em!

CLINTON: NCLB. Bad! Oh, and another thing: War in Iraq. Bad! I almost forgot. Troops. Good. Oh, did I mention health insurance? Good, right? I almost forgot what I believe. I believe in good things. Oh, and we should improve the highways. I almost forgot that one.

HUCKABEE: What’s behind me is in front of me and all the people who came before us are behind us and we love those in front and behind and especially behind and the others that came before came ahead and behind.

ROMNEY: Pfffffffft!

OBAMA: We’re gonna come at ‘em from the right. We’re gonna come at em from the left. We’re gonna come at ‘em from the middle. Because hope is what built this nation; hope is what keeps us together, hope is what makes the world go round, hope is the ultimate aphrodisiac, hope is what taught me anaphora – imagine it, the son of a Kenyan and a Kansan learning ancient Greek rhetorical tactics, imagine it, using anaphora in Chicago, in Des Moines, in Washington, using anaphora in the pool halls and beer halls and government halls all over this great state, using anaphora at the podiums and stadiums and arboretums of America. Thank you Iowa!

When I was very young, maybe 10 or 11, I took Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter out of the local branch of the New York City Public Library. My mother, who accompanied us to the library on Union Street once a week or so, raised an eyebrow, but I think she was glad that my interests had turned to grown up books, and so she let it go. That book scared the crap out of me. I read it deep into the night – mostly because I couldn’t sleep, given that the Manson family was probably creepy crawling our Queens apartment, ready to strike with the knives and strange rantings. Since then, I’ve had one of the typical white male American fascination with serial killers and law-breakers; it competes with the white male fascination with military history, a bizarre duo that fills up so much floor space in your average bookstore that you cannot avoid it. The TV murder show and military history industry is only an intensification of the phenomenon. There is certainly a study to be done of these twin obsessions: the economics and psychology of these gendered reading practices. (Maybe a mix between Klaus Theweleit’s excellent Male Fantasies and Penley’s work on Trek fandom.)

In any case, this fascination, born in Mansonia, led me some time during my teenage years to the Zodiac killer, who stalked the Bay Area in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s (that’s how these people talk: “stalked the Bay Area”). The Zodiac case, of course, is particularly famous because nobody was ever caught for those killings. Like all unsolved crimes (think Jack the Ripper), it has spawned a massive community of theorizers, who obsess about the case and know details down to the fine grain. These people are amateur researchers, experts without credentials, and they are legion on the Internet. So, from time to time I would revisit their theories, usually as a guilty pleasure. I’ve also read Robert Graysmith’s books on the case, Graysmith being the most successful of the Zodiac chroniclers, and therefore generally despised as a patsy and sell-out by the theorizers. That’s the way these things go. But my experience with the case made the release of David Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac very exciting to me, above and beyond the inclusion of my man-crush Mark Ruffalo in the film.

Fincher’s film has – appropriately, I think – garnered much critical praise, and it has appeared on many of the “2007′s Best Films” lists as your “Hollywood Sleeper.” You go in expecting a film about the Zodiac case, and for the most part you get that, but Zodiac is also, weirdly and movingly, about writing itself. The film is less about the Zodiac murders than it is about the texts that accumulated around the murders, including the various writings of the Zodiac killer himself, but mostly the writing of Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal). It’s often listed as a film about obsession (Graysmith’s obsession with the case, which ends up wrecking his marriage and generally taking over his life). But the obsession is a writing obsession: the big research project, the single-minded focus on the minutiae of research. The murders, and even the murderer, become less important than the form of attraction to the event (perhaps even fidelity, in Badiou’s sense). What’s ultimately disturbing about it, for me, is that the image of Graysmith – his life consumed by the obsession – is in some sense our model of the ideal researcher, what many of us would like our students to be when they write, or what we would like to be when we write, at least as an ideal case. And it’s a terrifying spectacle – more dreadful, the film seems to argue, than the murders themselves.