Seven Red

It’s baseball season again. And we’re starting like we went out.

Johan Santana – the insane off-season pick-up – got lit up early, giving up a 3 run dinger to Juan Gonzalez in the second. Dang. I have to start paying attention again. It’s not like I just dropped some cash on MLB TV so I could watch the games on my laptop or anything, uh, I mean, that would be crazy, right?

Look for the baseball links to reappear.

Mad brothers know his name
So he thinks he got a little fame
From the stick-up game
- Gangstarr, Just to Get a Rep

Early in our series, I set out a table of risk according to which graffiti is evaluated. At the top of the table are illegal pieces, which assume the most risk because they take the longest. (They could be as risky as less time-consuming works depending on location; in graffiti as in real estate, it’s location location location: not just time, but the valence of place.) At the bottom of the table is the sticker, which assumes the least risk, at least according to the time criterion, since it takes just seconds to apply, and you can generally do so without being noticed, even in the the middle of the day. For the next couple of weeks, I want to work through that table; we’ll start today with the least risky, the sticker, and progress upwards.

Stickers are extremely versatile, since you can do just about anything on them, and it’s easy to place them. Many new writers will start with the sticker as they’re getting their bearings in the game. But old hands will still do stickers; they’re just another piece in the repertoire. Because the risk is so low, you generally can’t get fame on stickers alone (we’ll see a partial exception below), but if the goal is ups, stickers can be another means to that end.

Writers usually look for semi-permanent stickers. They should be hard to peel off. People used to use those “Hello, my name is…” stickers, or the post office stickers for Priority Mail, although these can be a little hacky, since the form still shows through. Both have the value of being easily boostible or, in the second case, free, although I’m sure there must be some statute against using the post office stickers for non-official purposes. They both also stick like crazy, though apparently not to fabric! More complex sticker operations involve wheatpaste postering. The main advantage of all stickers is that you have plenty of time to create them. You can do pretty intricate things with stickers, but I always preferred the ones that kept it simple: a tag or a simple throwee. Despite the “permanent” stickiness, they’re going to fade in the rain and probably peel off fairly soon, so wasting a lot of time with stickers doesn’t seem very useful. So, on to some examples of stickers. The first two are tag stickers, the flicks taken on Fullerton here in Chicago:

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We finally got a chance on Monday to check out Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck’s homage (again) to Red Sox Land. I have to admit, after seeing little brother Casey in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and now in Gone Baby Gone, I’m taken by his talent. The guy can act. I suspect that this film was a lot more subtle in the initial cut, then the marketing people got their hands on it and screamed that the dumb viewers would not understand the connections, so Affleck (Ben, that is) was forced to insert all kinds of reminders to help the audience follow the thread. It kind of ruins the film. You’re constantly asked to remember some event that you witnessed 25 minutes prior, the suggestion being that you’re too fucking stupid to put it together yourself. If you had been paying attention, you would know that… It’s so heavy-handed – particularly as the final sequence of the film unfolds – that you want to scream at the screen “I know! I know!” It’s like when they remind you every friggin’ time that the guacamole is extra at Qdoba. Or, you know, it’s like something.

It’s hard to discuss the movie without giving away the ending, so I’ll keep my points here at a very general level. And at the very very general level, you get the ethical “choice” – the moment of decision. In this way, Gone Baby Gone is very much in the same vein as some of the other films I’ve discussed here, particularly those in the revenge genre, which constantly ask the viewers to revisit their ethical commitments and compare them to the Law. One could throw in the spate of other films that ask characters (and, by extension, the audience) to review their ethical inventory, and especially those that take a liberal stance on the War, like the painfully predictable torture film Rendition. It’s no mistake that such matters would arise alongside the War on Terror, or that cultural production would be so imbued with the whole thing. In Gone Baby Gone the choice is stark and clear, and constitutes the whole rationale for the film. The film doesn’t ask the audience to feel so much as to choose. It may even be that the audience is asked to disagree vehemently with the choice made by Affleck’s character. As I said, I’ll stay out of the details of this choice, but it does seem like an awful lot of labor we’re doing now at the movies, turning over these ethical conundrums that follow one another like catechism drills.

And it put me in the mind of Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous essay on the culture industry, which I read from time to time when I’m feeling particularly cynical and need a good laugh (it’s an hilarious essay, and I think deliberately so, despite what people may tell you). In the culture industry A&H were analyzing during the 1940’s, we still had the censors and a fairly uniform studio system that ran on monotonous formulas. Whether things are different today is a subject for  debate, of course. At the very least, the official censorship of film has been distributed to some kind of market function. But I wonder whether the ethical labor we’re asked to perform isn’t just as tedious as the moral dictums churned out by the culture industry of 1940’s Hollywood. Moreover, at a formal level, I wonder whether these films don’t demonstrate more strongly than ever some of the observations A&H made then. It seems to me that Gone Baby Gone, The Brave One, and Rendition, for all their seeming differences, are actually very similar both in their formal structure and in terms of what they ask the audience to contemplate. In effect, they imply and invoke an audience that is capable of the ethical choice; they create and bank on precisely that version of subjectivity. So one may be the darling of the liberal left and one the rallying cry of the conservative right, but these turn out to be slight differences.

This is a tough situation. What should I do? What is right?

What’s more important than how you answer the question, for these films, is the form of the question itself, your capacity to ask it. Which is good, right? We like the ethical question, right? I’m not so sure. At a minimum, the rapid and widespread emergence of what I’ll call the ethical culture industry should make us all a bit suspicious.

Another interesting read on the Awakening Movement in Iraq, this time from legendary war correspondent Chris Hedges. Hedges wrote the must-read book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. I saw him speak a few years back at previous Unnamed Institution, and his description of the exhilarating emptiness of the firefights he experienced in Central America during the wars there sticks with me. Today, like most other commentators who haven’t completely swallowed the Petraeus Magic Pill, he’s focused keenly on the sahwas – the Sunni Awakening Movement that is, as I’ve said here, the fundamental kickback at the heart of the “Surge.” A snippet:

The United States cut a deal with its Sunni Arab enemies. It would pay the former insurgents. It would allow them to arm and form military units and give them control of their ethnic enclaves. The Sunni Arabs, in exchange, would halt attacks on U.S. troops. The Sunni Arabs agreed.

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Following up on graffiti energy drinks and Delft China, it’s not all bad.

We can shake our fists at the sky over the “co-opting” forces of capital, etc., but these forms of refusal never get much mileage, in my view. Soon the fist-waving itself becomes profitable, and we’re meta-waving, and on and on. But we also see that other things can happen. Sunday’s New York Times Magazine will feature a story on KR ONE, an old school graffiti guy from Queens who mixed his own silver ink for marker tags. He now sells that ink (Krink, or KR – ink) to high end designers and other artists.

I have a hard time getting bent about such transformations: graffiti allowed the guy to invent something. Indeed, that might be graffiti’s most interesting aspect. It shows us an entire subculture developing previously inconceivable or barely conceivable problems and trying to solve them. Maybe more on this theme later. That said, I love this sentence from the article:

Growing up in Queens in the 1980s, Costello was exposed to an earlier iteration of graffiti. This was back when a lot more people called it rank vandalism, and “street art” had yet to become a tactic used to market cars and electronics — or a look mimicked by tony fashion designers.

Ain’t that the truth.

There’s an amazing article in Rolling Stone, the most detailed account of the Sunni Awakening Movement in Iraq that I’ve seen. Rolling Stone’s articles lately have really been at the top of the batch for me. Mike Taibbi’s political reporting from the campaign trail is great snark with political smarts. His various fights with conservative dickheads on Real Time are similarly amusing. This Nir Rosen piece on the Awakening Movement, “The Myth of the Surge,” will likely find its place in the required reading historians will use to evaluate the Iraq catastrophe some years hence. Some snippets:

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq’s central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or “the Awakening.”

[...]

The American forces responsible for overseeing “volunteer” militias like Osama’s have no illusions about their loyalty. “The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama’s territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to “make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight.

This massive buyoff is the “Awakening Movement,” period. Now, I’m not against buying people off to stop with the car bombs and the IEDs and whatnot. I’m the kind of guy who thinks you can solve problems with money (like, say, public education). The rather drastic decline in violence from apocalyptic to merely grossly intolerable levels in Iraq shows that you can. It’s just that money tends to cause new problems, and is not, perhaps, the best way to build relationships of trust. So, if we believe that the “Surge” was directly responsible ofr the decline in violence, we end up with one policy. But that might have nothing to do with what’s actually going on. If we consider the “Awakening Movement” to be some movement constituted by national pride and the desire to end the power struggle, we’re going to end up with a very sorry policy indeed.

There’s enough Sahwa to go around these days.

Money’s another story. So the real question is simple: Will we have a dedicated line in the federal budget paying off – er, funding – the Awakening Movement in perpetuity? Because that seems to be the only way to prevent the Awoken from slipping back into the nightmare.

Graffiti isn’t corporate so it gets no respect
Hasn’t made a billion dollars for some corporation yet, so…
-KRS ONE, “Out for Fame”

As if graffiti energy drinks weren’t bad enough, we now have this, sent by our friend Sparky of scooter nation:

Delft China, “New York Style”

I agree with Sparky that this whole thing is hilarious, and maybe even transcends the hipster silliness that very obviously motivates the whole juxtaposition. That said, the SWELLS tag is just awful; if they really were serious about this, they would have gotten a good tagger to to rock the Delft. It’s claiming to be New York style, but I never heard of this kid, and that shit wouldn’t pass the New Jack test in any borough but Staten Island. Maybe some old-timer from before my time, but I doubt it. One thing is certain: KRS’s 1990’s proclamation on graffiti’s deficit of profitability is as dead as Clintonism. Once folks start making tongue-in-cheek Delft China out of your subculture, it’s time to turn it into something else.

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Thank you. Thank you for working 12 hrs a day. Thank you for letting us know how long it is to the junction and where are the flashing reds. Thank you for keeping track of how many cars have been swallowed by that giant pothole on the Edens. Thank you for the very specific way you say “you’re welcome” to Lisa Labuz or Melba Lara at the end of your reports.

I wonder what you would think if you knew that your name has become a mantra in our house. Every time you are announced, babygirl and I look at each other and say “Abby Ryan”, “Abby Ryan”, (growling now) “Abbbbby Rrrryan“. If babygirl starts to fuss in the car we calm her down with a rousing chorus of “Abby Ryan”. When topspun starts to give into his road rage I remind him he doesn’t want to end up on Abby Ryan. When I am looking for a little bit of familiarity in this city where I know so few people I turn to Abby Ryan.

So, if you ever check yourself out on “the google” and manage to wade through the pages of links to this small blog, please know that in sevenred’s house you’re beloved.

Am I going to break down and buy the Vampire Weekend album? My initial impression is that it’s so cloyingly lightweight that I will barely be able to tolerate it. This is a wine that needs to age a few years, it seems to me.

The other day on Sound Opinions, the guys were discussing the Juno soundtrack, and playing selections. I think they played Kimya Dawson’s “Loose Lips.” she and I were eating lunch and we were like oh fucking eyeroll. What is this hipster nonsense? “Now the Sound Opinion guys are gonna tell us how great this crap is,” I said. Refreshingly, no. As soon as the clip ended, they launched about the same critique, not just at the song (how can you listen to a whole album of that?), but also at Juno itself: “I’m perplexed by the massive fuss over something with such middling artistic merit,” says my new Sound Opinions hero, paraphrased. He was previously on my s-list for calling TV on the Radio the most overrated band of the 00’s, which made me feel distinctively uncool, as music critics are wont to do. Now, of course, we haven’t seen Juno, so maybe it is just wow super awesome or something, but the people falling all over themselves about it strike me as comical themselves. And note to haters: I fucking hated Rushmore, which was borderline unwatchable.

What does this have to do with whether I buy Vampire Weekend? Not much, really, other than that I hear the same ebullient praise coming from the same quarters: if you liked this cloying Kimya Dawson shit, you’ll just love…

I dunno.

The day feels so tired from the lead in the air and the fire in the skies…

Thank whatever you hold holy that I wasn’t feeling Big in Japan just about now. There’s nothing quite like pointless faux-political 80’s German lyrics in English, but I’ll kick off the Summer-themed song series in order to throw off this winter funk. Oh, wait. I just picked depresso-Alphaville Cold War profundity. Dang. Well, it says “summer,” and that’s good enough for me. Suggestions welcome.