Seven Red

This morning I had to go down to the Loop for an Unnamed Employer Institution book club. I sign up for these things – God knows why – usually under the belief that I can make it optional if I want to. Then an assistant dean places it in your Outlook calendar, and the options dry up. This year, UEI picked Native Son as the book club reading. I read it in high school, but that was 16+ years ago, so here I am reading 430 pages of Wright again (you can start to see where my previous comments about naturalism in The Wire come from), and feeling very much like I’m in high school again, what with the pressure and all.

I also feared that the reading group would be something like the Jane Austen Book Club from the film of the same name. It wasn’t; it was actually very pleasant and I met some nice people, which is good. If it was like the Jane Austen Book Club, I was the Emily Blunt character Prudie Drummond, pretentiously flaunting my extensive training in literary evaluation. The question is “Why is he named Bigger?” and I’m all like “in the historical trajectory of the African American literary tradition, blah blah blah.” As I said last post, I’m a horrible person.

Now, as a reader, you’re probably asking yourself, “Why am I reading about the fucking Jane Austen Book Club on Graffiti Friday?” It’s because in Seven Red land I am the King of the Slow Wind-Up and Minister General of Pointless Digression, and you’re just going to have to eat that. It’s why my sentences often start with “anyway,” and “point being,” and other devices meant to get me back to what I was talking about again. What was I talking about again? Oh yes, Graffiti train ride.

Since I was gonna be down in the Loop, I brought along my trusty new camera to snap a few flick for you. The kiddies are going absolutely apeshit on the Brown Line. There’s so much new stuff that it’s hard to document it all. Plus, for some of it, the train moves too fast, so it’s hard to snap unless you’re anticipating, and even then, the shutter delay often foils my efforts. Our man TEZE from last week’s edition, for example, has a nice multiple-landing fire escape fill-in between the Sheridan and Chicago stops, but all I got was a blur. There’s a great little “JAM MASTER CREW” straight letter between Wellington and Fullerton, but I’ve missed it in three attempts, since the train flies between those stops. I did manage to get the two shots below, but as you can see, they are real action shots rather than framed shots of the works themselves. To tell you the truth, I like this better. It gives you a better sense of how these pieces stand in an environment. Graffiti photography has long been suspicious of throwing an “art” frame around graffiti pieces, since real graffiti (authenticity fetish alert!!!) doesn’t exist that way. It’s part of the lived environment, so why am I looking at an isolated, framed “art work.” Blech.

T hat’s the high flown theoretical attempt to salvage some of the weaker shots. The material reason is different: I don’t feel like jumping off the platform and walking the tracks between Wellington and Fullerton (as I would have done 16+ years ago, when I first read Native Son), largely because I’d prefer not to get caught out there and spend the night in Cook County behind a photography project. As a result, you’ll get blurry pictures and explanations of framing, while I’ll miss a lot of the good stuff on the rooftops. I told you about the slow wind-up! But here are our shots for today.

In shot one, you can see a JARE and FACT rooftop about a block off the line. We’ve already seen JARE and FACT in a previous edition of Graffiti Fridays; these kids bomb, yo. I’m still not that crazy about JARE’s style, but I respect the ups. They smack fill-ins in crazy spots, and they tag prolifically. Thumbs up. In the second shot, you see a crew fill-in for ILL STYLE KINGS (ISK Crew, looks like BAYER, POVE, MIME, and REPOE). I’m not crazy about the letters, but the colors are good, and I dig the baby blue second outline. These guys are writers; they can tag (the BAYER tag is pretty goddamn good).

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