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).

I swore I’d never post about the weather. Swore it. Granted, my long-winded ruminations on mediocre Jodie Foster flicks aren’t exactly burning up the Internets, but the weather? No!

But this is really getting out of hand. It doesn’t end. There’s no let up. I counted eight consecutive days that I had to wipe the car down in the morning before bringing babygirl to daycare. This morning, I looked out the window, saw that the car was clear, and just about had a fainting spell. Thirty five degrees? Where’s my sun block? I heard some scuttlebutt that it was 70 degrees in New York a few days ago. Meanwhile, when we get up at 6 am, it’s always “The temperature is -2 at O’Hare, and that’ll feel like -18 with the windchill.” I don’t even bother with the “Did she say minus?” anymore.

Then it went from bad to worse. she says that I always complain about the weather in the winter, but I never remember until the next winter. Then I do this whole “It’s not so bad” thing for a couple of weeks until I start complaining again. That’s probably true. I don’t remember. But the other day I truly lost my shit. Once again, I had to wade through a river of slush to wipe the car down again. There’s a vague qualitative difference between “wiping down” and “digging out.” This particular morning was still on the wipe down side of that line, but just barely. So I open up the car, start the engine and get the rear window burners going, then get to wiping. It’s a solitary task, because she stays upstairs trying to pile 30 layers of clothes on babygirl while I’m doing this. A lot goes through your mind when you when you’re brushing snow off a car in the dim morning light. A man could go mad out in that cold, alone.  So, like, anyway, I finally get done, and hop in the car. What? It was so cold that the inside of the windshield was frozen over. I start scraping away with the scraper, creating enough chips of ice on the dashboard to make a giant fucking sno-cone, but the inside of a windshield isn’t built like the outside, so scraping doesn’t really work that well. Just then, she arrives to strap in babygirl, and I am losing it. I start driving off even though I can’t really see out of the front windshield. I’m cursing up a storm, and babygirl is going “Daddy? Daddy?” What a commotion! I’m a horrible person.

Random babygirl pic to soften effect of insane weather rant.

I used to think that these people who would claim to get depressed in the winter were just weak. But I think it’s real now. I’m either lethargic or shaking my fist at the sky – and not just metaphorically. It was cold in Pennsylvania, sure. And I grew up in New York, which isn’t exactly a tropical paradise from October to March. Yeah. But there are breaks. Winter comes in waves. You have a bad spell for a few days, then it gets reasonable again. Here, it is relentless. If you get a break, it lasts a few morning hours. Two weeks ago, it got up to 45, then the temperature dropped 10 degrees in four minutes. What the fuck is that? It takes me half an hour to get a beer cold in the freezer. By the time I left my class at 9pm, it was 10 degrees with blustery little blades of snow and ice whipping around the El platform generally, and with a seemingly malicious intensity around the exposed areas of my face. I see how it is now. Apart from the white noise in my line of vision, I remember only a jaw-clenching rage. I’m mad at the weather, which is pretty weird and pathetic, you ask me. But it doesn’t stop.

I know. Stop complaining. Buck up. There you are up in your beautiful city whining about some cold and snow. But, Jeez-us. Make it stop for two-day stretch.

OK. I know this isn’t really what Burke means by identification, but I could think of no more sizzling a headline than one that suggest scientists have confirmed, through rigorous experimentation, a theory of persuasion Kenneth Burke put forth more than half a century ago. Can you feel your skin tingling?

An article in yesterday’s Science Times, aptly titled You Remind Me of Me, describes a series of studies that sought to test the persuasive effects of mimicry. We learn that, for example “[p]sychologists have been studying the art of persuasion for nearly a century.” Well, I’m glad someone’s on that project for nearly a century. I hear other people have been at it for 2,400 years, but I guess they don’t rate for the Science Times! In any case, the major upshot is that our diligent psychologists have “found that immediate social bonding between strangers is highly dependent on mimicry, a synchronized and usually unconscious give and take of words and gestures that creates a current of good will between two people.” Wow. Who knew?

More interesting is that such imitation effects are produced through distinctly physical sorts of mimicry:

In a recent experiment, Rick van Baaren, a psychologist at Nijmegen University in the Netherlands, had student participants go to a lab and give their opinions about a series of advertisements. A member of his research team mimicked half the participants while they spoke, roughly mirroring the posture and the position of their arms and legs, taking care not to be too obvious.

Minutes later, the experimenter dropped six pens on the floor, making it look like an accident.

In several versions of this simple sequence, participants who had been mimicked were two to three times as likely to pick up the pens as those who had not.

And this:

The technique involved mirroring a person’s posture and movements, with a one- to two-second delay. If he crosses his legs, then wait two seconds and do the same, with opposite legs. If she touches her face, wait a beat or two and do that. If he drums his fingers or taps a toe, wait again and do something similar.

All this has, of course, been well-known to people who study the language of persuasion for quite some time, but I think we are only recently getting to the physical processes that work in language itself. As the article notes, “Rhythm counts.” One, two, three, four. A University of Chicago neuroscientist puts it this way: “When you’re being mimicked in a good way, it communicates a kind of pleasure, a social high you’re getting from the other person, and I suspect it activates the areas of the brain involved in sensing reward.” I remain suspicious of these quick evolutionary explanations involving the “regions of the brain” and especially “sensing reward,” which strikes me as the continued bizarre insertion of exchange logics into brain function. They can’t help but locate the social within the individual, but I think the focus on pleasure is probably close. The point would be to think pleasure neither in a reward structure nor as an individual effect, but as a social phenomenon. Your pleasure center isn’t in your brain, but in your brain’s connectivity to other brains and things: the brain-Twinkie complex, which of course includes the sugar refinery and capitalism. Yum yum. We’re not close to that yet in psychology (except, perhaps, in works like those of Merlin Donald), but it’s also why rhetoricians don’t rate for the Science Times.

As with any discussion of persuasion, the Times reverts back to the that bad old fear of being touched, closing the article with standard disclaimers about all that bad bad bad manipulative persuasion. Scary. We learn that the force of mimicry can be misused, and that “[e]veryone has the right to be charmed but not seduced.” So, in a sense, we end where we really began:

“Stop copying me!”

“Stop copying me.”

“Stop it!”

Stop it…

Willy The Cat

Some people have the privilege of overhearing the plans and trials of the animals they co-habitate with. We are not so lucky. Willy the Cat plots his crimes secretly, as here.

At dusk, while we were all stretched along the canal bank eating dinner, two Marine gunships came down on us and began strafing us, sending burning tracers up along the canal, and we ran for cover, more surprised than scared. “Way to go, motherfucker, way to pinpoint the fuckin’ enemy,” one of the grunts said, and he set up his M-60 machine gun in case they came back. “I don’t guess we gotta take that shit,” he said. -Michael Herr, Dispatches

While popular history generally locates the shock of the Tet Offensive in Saigon – where the American Embassy compound was breached and where Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executed an NLF soldier in front of American news cameras – some of the most vicious fighting was going on to the north, in Hue. There, Marine 1/5 and 2/5, along with the Cavalry and ARVN units, battled PAVN regulars for a major Vietnamese city. The siege of the Citadel of Hue lasted most of the month of February, and was beamed into American living rooms in all its horror.

We get the narrative version of the Battle of Hue in Stanley Kubrik’s Full Metal Jacket. In the Vietnam portion of the film, the action follows the Marines of Hotel Two Five (H Company, Second Battalion Fifth Marine Regiment), and a Stars and Stripes journalist and photographer who have joined them from Da Nang. Michael Herr, who I’ve been quoting in this segment, wrote much of the dialogue for FMJ, and a lot of it comes straight out of Dispatches. Herr also wrote Willard’s voice over in Apocalypse Now: “Never get off the boat. Absolutely goddamn right.”

Kubrik’s film often gets flak from veterans groups because the setting looks nothing like Hue. Indeed it doesn’t. Kubrik filmed it in the same bombed out apartment complexes where he filmed A Clockwork Orange. In England. (In a strange connection, she‘s English cousins actually run the company that provided the palm trees for FMJ. The company provides flora and fauna for English films; they also did all the floral arrangements for Four Weddings and a Funeral.) I actually like Kubrik’s decision, and its devious anti-naturalist wink. It doesn’t matter what Hue really looked like, Kubrik seems to be saying. From the point of view of the American military, the whole war was like World War II redux, so why not make the Hue look like a bombed out European city? Anexact representations are usually more telling – yet more evidence of Kubrik’s genius.

I might have to get back to naturalism some time soon. I love The Wire, but I do find it disturbing that people praise it for being so “realistic.” When did we all turn into Emile Friggin’ Zola again?

In any case , if we want to go from the anexact to whatever shadow of the Real that combat photography allows us to hold on to, Hue is the place. The pictures that came out of the three week battle were virtually uncensored, and raw as can be. The following image – taken by Stars and Stripes photographer John Olson, is perhaps one of the most famous pictures of the war. Depicting wounded Marines being brought back from the battle line down a street dubbed “Rocket Alley,” the image ran as a giant two page spread in Life Magazine in late February, 1968. Click the pictutre for the larger image to get the full effect.

Wounded from C and D Company, First Battalion Fifth Marine Regiment being evacuated from the Citadel, 15 February, 1968.

One more from Herr:

“It was at this point that I began to recognize almost every casualty, remember conversations we’d had days or even hours earlier, and that’s when I left, riding a medevac with a lieutenant who was covered with blood-soaked bandages. He’d been hit in both legs, both arms, the chest and head, his ears and eyes were full of caked blood, and he asked a photographer in the chopper to get a picture of him like this to send to his wife.” -Michael Herr, Dispatches

I remain fascinated by the unintended consequences of policy decisions. A few weeks ago we watched some really boring Jennifer Lopez film about the murders in the maquiladora trade zones. Since NAFTA went into effect, as is well known, huge manufacturing operations have opened up on the US-Mexico border. This is no surprise: labor is cheaper and, with no tariffs, importing goods is not prohibitive. But as the debates over NAFTA raged, nobody predicted that these zones would turn into murder factories, where hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of young women drawn to the factory wages would be killed; they are rootless, alone, and vulnerable. The trade zones turn into an ideal hunting ground; NAFTA essentially created an environment that is extremely friendly to the predator. Granted, people might have seen this coming, but nobody really did. Nobody got up on the floor of the Congress and predicted such a thing. You have a policy decision that utterly transformed the ecology of a region – and not just the physical ecology, but the psychological ecology as well.

On a somewhat lighter note, we have the smoking ban in bars. I’m a smoker, but I really have no objection to the smoking ban. I don’t smoke in my house, and I really don’t smoke indoors at all anymore. One professor I know – a smoker – joked about the smoking ban as follows: “Yeah, that’s what you want. A bunch of drunks out on the street at 3 o’clock in the afternoon or 3 o’clock in the morning.” The bar, it seemed to be the point, serves a very specific ecological purpose in social space: it isolates certain elements, keeps them out of sight. But the ban goes beyond that.

A few weeks ago, I was at The Grafton Pub, probably as close to a good local that I have now, even though I very rarely go to bars anymore. As I was heading out to smoke – not grumpily – on one of the coldest nights of the year, I noticed a group at another table, maybe five adults and an infant, a small infant, maybe eight weeks old. It struck me. The smoking ban – which went into effect here on January 1 – allows this child to be in the bar. These parents would never bring the kid to a smoky bar. This is a policy effect, the creation of a new bar ecology.

In New York, the bar ecology has already been in effect for quite awhile. It is even more noticeable, because bars stay open until 4 am, and bars are usually not that far removed from residential spaces (which is to say, plenty of people live directly above a bar). A few years ago, I was out smoking with some people around 3 am, and somebody living upstairs trued to dump water on us from a window. I can’t say I blame the person: we were drunk and loud directly below their window on a weeknight. Not so good. The other big conflict is developing around the stroller set, as described in this great read appearing in today’s New York Times Style Section (“Look Who’s Getting Rolled Out Of the Bar“). I especially love this article because it is about our old neighborhood in Brooklyn. Apparently, some bars are banning strollers, and enforcing the “21 and over rule,” but not for fake ID 19 year-olds. They don’t want people bringing their kids to the bar.

Some bars, on the other hand, encourage the kids in the bar, like The Gate – my favorite bar in New York City, and my old local when we lived on 5th Avenue. The Gate is a pub-style bar with a great outdoor space and a cozy little fireplace (or maybe it was a wood-burning stove). When we were living in Brooklyn, you could find us there on most Sunday afternoons, either snuggled up with a few pints on a wintry day or lounging out on the patio playing dominoes during the summer and spring. Needless to say, they carried Jever, and so I was rarely happier than I was hanging out with good friends at The Gate. My brother and I also used to go there for baseball games. He’d call me up around 6:30 and just say “Gate?” Ayup. WE watched some classic games in that bar. This was, of course, before the smoking ban, but The Gate even then was fairly open to kids. I remember many parent bringing even small infants there, even though smoking was allowed. So I wasn’t surprised to see this in the article:

Dawn D’Arcy, the manager of the Gate, a bar in Park Slope that routinely sees groups of parents and children drop by during the afternoon, agreed, saying that the Gate was “modeled on an Irish pub.”

“This is a place where people bring dogs in, this is a ‘local,’ ” she said. “Families are a part of that.”

Ah, Brooklyn. But to get back to the point, can you imagine a city council member getting up and arguing that the smoking ban is going to cause conflict between stroller roller bar patrons and people opposed to kids in the bar, that it will force bar owners to ban strollers? It would be a hilarious argument, for sure. When we teach policy arguments, we struggle mightily enough to get our students to anticipate even the obvious negative consequences. They tend to focus on the good, which is fair enough, but they often do so to the exclusion of the manifest downsides to any policy change. But it is perhaps more interesting to try to anticipate the outlandish, the bizarre consequences, something that seems a million miles away from the standard positions in the debate. But this would require not linear policy thought – a thought that derives consequences from the current state of things, but a more ecological thought, and that’s much tougher.

What new forces might emerge in that ecology? Dead women and strollers in bars.

A few weeks ago I posted a short review of the awful Kevin Bacon flick Death Sentence, an insipid and poorly constructed little revenge drama. I received this response, from points unknown:

So 7 Red prefers Zodiac’s celebration of due process and The Wire’s attention to bureaucratic and historical baggage to the rejuvenated revenge fantasies offered by Kevin Bacon and Jodi Foster? Take THAT, liberal media!

The point—and I’m guessing here—is that I am some sort of dupe for the fetishes of liberalism, because I like the “celebration of due process” in Zodiac (a more bizarre characterization of the film I cannot imagine), and the “bureaucratic and historical baggage” of The Wire (I’m still trying to figure out what this one means), while I bash and bash and bash the “rejuvenated” revenge fantasies (was the genre ever stagnant?) that cropped up in the cinema last year.

Never mind that all of these productions emanate from the same supposed liberal media. Never mind that labeling Death Sentence and The Brave One a rejuvenation of the revenge fantasy, a rejuvenation that indicates some larger post 9/11 cultural phenomenon, likely began in that rattrap of due-process lovin’ and bureaucratic-historical valorizin’ known as the New York Times itself. And never mind that the responder probably had tongue firmly in cheek: I can’t imagine that people I don’t know read this blog, and I’m well convinced that I don’t know anybody who would use the phrase “liberal media” unironically. Never mind all that. I’m willing to play the believing game on this one and take it as a serious critique. The initial problem for the argument was that I hadn’t seen The Brave One (or commented on it), so I couldn’t be sure if I was truly getting all gaga over due process and bureaucratic historical baggage thanks to the predatory propagandizing for 1970’s liberal values that so clearly characterizes our contemporary media phylum.

So when The Brave One became available through pay-per-view, I knew I had to check it out, if only to test my core liberal value of letting brutal criminals off the hizzook (because of history, you know?). And I don’t agree at all. I think The Brave One is a smart and remarkable film, even if I’m not jumping on the metaphorical troop transport or reviewing Charles Bronson’s collected works on urban renewal just yet. It’s remarkable for two reasons. First, it’s a gripping study of perception, and particularly auditory perception, a strange move for a film. Second, it doesn’t really seem to be about revenge so much as it is about transformation, and what happens when the euphoria of a transformative process crashes back down into a new routine.

Foster plays Erica Baine, a radio host for a poetic and nostalgic show about the way New York is changing. She walks around the city with a giant microphone taping the sounds of trains running overhead and Latino teenagers playing handball, that most New York of New York games, then goes into the radio station and waxes eloquent about Edgar Allen Poe and monkeys at the slips of the old South Street Seaport. Will we lose the old New York? Will it just be a memory that we hold in our limbs? That sort of thing. Her nostalgia for the old New York might be one of her liberal credentials; her goofy Capri pants and bike messenger bag another; her distinctly white wine sipping artist friend essentially seals the deal. She’s living in a fantasy world.

To be brief on plot, Baine is engaged to doctor and decidedly non-white David Kirmani, played by Lost eye-candy Naveen Andrews. Kirmani and Baine are brutally attacked by a gang of muggers in Central Park, with Kirmani beaten to death and Baine just barely pulling through. She then has the bad luck to witness another murder, a domestic killing in a bodega, but this time she’s prepared: packing an illegal gun (she couldn’t hack the 30-day waiting period), she shoots the killer through a juice bottle. Presumably finding this version more pleasurable than waiting on the desk jockey cops to solve Kirmani’s murder, she sets out on a vigilante quest, blasting various wrongdoers with Bernie Goetz style eloquence as she is inexorably drawn toward the final confrontation with Kirmani’s psychotic killers.

Mixed up in her murder spree is Detective Mercer, played by the decidedly non-white Terrence Howard. (Indeed, the film gets around the very convincing charges of racism lodged against earlier vigilante flicks by making damn sure that virtually everyone in the film who is not Jodie Foster is also not white like Jodie Foster; Death Sentence gets around the same problem by making the criminal gang rather preposterously multicultural). A secret listener of Baine’s show, Mercer appears to have some role in every murder investigation in the City of New York, not least being the one involving this new vigilante who has the notorious New York tabloids all abuzz. Needless to say, he develops a relationship with Baine, thinking at first that it is about interviewing him for his favorite radio show, then befriending her, and finally, slowly, coming to an awareness about her possible activities. If there’s an ethical component to the film, it has nothing to do with Foster’s character. The subject of the ethical quandary is good cop Detective Mercer, who has asked himself since his beat days whether he would have the fortitude to “arrest somebody he knows well,” like a best friend. His answer heretofore has been a resounding yes—he’s a man of the Law, you see, and the Law doesn’t distinguish between the friend and the stranger—but events will test that. Howard is once again sterling in his performance; few can play the move from naivety to revelation very subtly, but Howard pulls off the “AHA!” in small, poignant increments without making it ridiculous.

THE SOUND OF THE DISASTER

The plot is organized around a series of audible events at the same time that it moves toward the visible. Baine is insistent that her show is a radio show; early on we see her refusing requests to meet with the people from Bravo for a television version. There’s something about the sound of a city that fascinates her; she goes home and listens to her sound recordings of mundane events around the city. Later, she will record her vigilante slayings and listen to those, too. Just before the fatal mugging that sets the story in motion, we get two sound events. The dog, who has run into one of those menacing Central Park tunnels, has stopped its barking, the negative event. Then we get the money shot: we hear the sound of a plane flying low over Manhattan, a sound that faintly colors Baine and Kirmani’s dialogue about their future together. I guess we can’t accuse Neil Jordan of being particularly subtle, but it certainly injects the requisite foreboding into the scene. Significantly (I guess), the thugs have brought along their video camera for the attack; as with al Qaeda, the violence is not real if it’s not captured in its visual horror.

Sound also plays a role in the other death scenes. In the bodega, Baine is given away when her cell phone starts ringing. The murderer searches the aisles for her, whispering “I can hear you breathing” just before he catches one in the throat. On the subway, two thugs rob a stoner boy who’s listening to his iPod. “Whatchoo listenin’ to?” one says. The stoner is predictably unaware of his surroundings until they pull his iPod away and start smacking him up. “Radiohead,” he responds meekly. When they approach Baine they ask, mockingly, “You got some Radiohead for me, too?” Get it? Radio head? You can guess the next sound you hear after that. The sound events pile up: the clicking locks of a car door that signal a threat, the dinging of an elevator that drives Mercer’s epiphany, the ringing cell phone that identifies a killer’s girlfriend. It’s all juxtaposed against visual perception, which is at once too raw, too flawed, and too obviously mediated. The stoner boy’s description of Baine for a police sketch artist ends up looking like Jennifer Aniston. But sound, you see, is real. And it’s the video of the mugging, of Kirmani’s murder – conveyed, tellingly, as a cell phone message attachment – that sets off the closing action.

Apart from the sheer cleverness of it, I’m not quite sure what to make of the film’s commitment to sound. If these “revenge dramas,” which seem to have very little to do with actual street crime, inevitably refer us to 9/11, it may signal the failure of the visual. What I got from being in Lower Manhattan that morning (apart from constant, intractable anger and an utter incapacity to act) was the sound of the disaster, a sound that I haven’t heard replicated in any recording. But I know what Foster’s character is doing when she listens to the recordings of New York, and then of her revenge killings. She’s listening for that sound. And it’s not there. If there was something shocking about the event – in Benjamin’s sense – it wasn’t the visual; if there was some aesthetic sublimity to it – in the Kantian sense – it wasn’t the video. This is a strange argument to come from a filmmaker. Perhaps we’ve had our fill of the visual; perhaps it’s too easy.

Or, alternatively, it may be that the commitment to sound is the ultimate form of Baine’s nostalgia. And this would be not just nostalgia as the waning of the sound era, the vinyl heads and radio heads, but nostalgia for the moment. Where the video seems to bring it back complete, the sound always comes up missing something, and what is missing serves as the basis for that nostalgia. Sound is that which cannot – for all our digital accuracy – be mechanically reproduced. Once Baine gets the cell phone video of the mugging, the sound events end; if she’s been transformed into something else, it is not the brave one, but the deaf one. The film is done with sound, with the authentic relation to the event. But maybe it’s not so easy.

At the very least, Neil Jordan’s attention to the sounds of the city signals an expansion or difference of perception. You’re forced to pay attention to the sounds of the film; the sheer prevalence of sound events produces a listening subject in the viewer. You could read this, at worst, as the very conservative notion of increased awareness, where the expanded field of perception relative to the film represents our supposedly expanded perception relative to the terrorist threat. Put another way, The Brave One replays in cinematic form the transformation of perception required to handle terrorism. We’re now on the lookout for the proverbial “Arab crop duster,” a perception that would have been impossible before. The threat is now on our cultural radar, beeping, beeping. Can you hear it? That’s certainly one way to see it. But Baine’s transformation seems to follow a different trajectory: she begins as a sound freak, and progressively shuts out sound in favor of vision. If anything, her transformation is about a subtraction from the perceptual field, not an addition. In this way, the trajectory of the character is in conflict with the trajectory of the viewer. Indeed, the final scene of the film literally makes no sense for any viewer who has become accustomed to the logic of sound. It presupposes a world in which the entire city, or at least one particular housing project, cannot hear anything. The film’s concluding scene falls apart if sound constitutes evidence.

THE STRANGER

Like Death Sentence and other films in the genre, then, The Brave One is about transformation. Conservatives may see this positively: the soft bourgeois tendencies of the American polity were transformed by 9/11; the whole society is now the liberal who has become conservative after being mugged. This is presumably why people who have been duped by the “liberal media” would dislike the “rejuvenated” revenge fantasy genre; they want to hold on to the “celebration of due process” and “bureaucratic and (notably) historical baggage” of the pre-mugging liberal culture. They want to reject the transformation.

The Brave One certainly plays up the theme of transformation. Visually, Foster changes from a kind of hipster casualness to action hero hard core. If we’re too dumb to notice that her leather jacket is straight out of Death Wish 3, Neil Jordan makes good and sure that we do by having Mercer comment on it. But the real trope of transformation comes through Foster’s voice over, presumably a set of notes for Baine’s radio show. And the key trope there is the presence of the Stranger. Baine notes after her subway vigilantism that a Stranger is now growing in her body, using its limbs, its mouth. This is a classic trope of becoming, the liminal space, the transition phase. And Jordan plays it just right; it is, in the trajectory of the film, the sequence of delirious pleasure, the highest energy and maximum euphoria. The build-up around each set of doomed villains is increasingly laughable, their one-dimensionality as Despicable Predators increasingly satisfying. Baine’s subjectivity is displaced, her control over those limbs very tenuous. The viewer, like Baine, experiences a certain ecstasy – not outside the body, but within.

The traditional revenge drama manages to hold this ecstatic position through the film and even close with it. The final satisfaction still reels with it; it’s why there can be a Death Wish 2. Both Death Sentence and The Brave One, on the other hand, close very differently. The transition phase, at the end of each film, is complete, the affect exhausted. Baine ends the film by noting that (and I’m paraphrasing here) “You can never go back. The Stranger is all that’s there now.” As a critique of liberal nostalgia for the pre-mugging days, this is about as compact and essential as it comes. But it also signals the exhaustion of that affective energy that accompanied the transformation. The film manages to work that let down even into the vigilante killings themselves. The villains never really get the sense of awareness that they’re being punished. When Baine encounters one of the original muggers in a housing project, he asks whether she wants drugs. She says “I want my dog back,” and immediately shoots him. But it’s unsatisfying because we never get the moment of recognition, his awareness that he is being killed for a specific reason, as revenge for the Kirmani slaying. Death Sentence gives us that in bucketfuls; The Brave One is better because it short-circuits the rites of recognition so central to the revenge genre. It’s all too quick. And the let down is distinct.

The let down is all that’s there now. If these films register anything about the culture, it is not the ethical question of revenge (right or wrong, etc.), but the exhaustion that follows transformation, the dead zone of becoming. Death Sentence does this too, but not nearly as well. That’s where they’re historically situated, in any case. Both films come far too late after 9/11 to constitute responses to that event. Rather, they are responses to the affective energy that marked the response to that event, an unsustainable energy, and its bitter waning as the cultural revenge dramas in Iraq and Afghanistan wear on and on and on. Response to a response, the reterritorialization that followed the euphoric line of flight, or the depression of the dialectic that now seems frozen.

The Stranger is all there is now. Yes. Absolutely. A better comment on the contemporary American scene would be hard to produce. But that’s a moment of exhaustion, not rejuvenation. One might even say that these films are not revenge fantasies at all; the revenge is past, the fantasy lived out already, finished. They’re more about what happens when your fantasy becomes reality, and the crushing affective collapse of that.

The big political to-do on the graf circuit the last couple of weeks involves – yup, you guessed it! – iced tea. Not Ice-T of Cop Killah and, er, Law and Order fame, but the Arizona brand variety you pick up in your local bodega after puffin’ a fatty, or by the gross at Sam’s Club. It seems Arizona Ice Tea was hawking one of their super caffeinated high energy drinks under a graffiti label, dubbing it All City and rockin some styles of dubious provenance on the can, thusly:

If you can’t get your rush quotient rocking a fill in at a busy intersection, just stop by your local 7-11 for some All City, kid. Predictably enough, monumental dumbfuck and well-known graffiti fightin’ Queens politician Peter Vallone called a press conference to condemn this outrage, blabbering on inanely about the general destruction of values and likening this almost insipid marketing gimmick to public praise for strong-arm robbery. Writers have been giving Vallone the business for years, so I’m pretty sure his current demagoguery doesn’t have him worried about losing the blackbook vote. But he may get a couple of free opposition advertisements like this one:

FUCK VALLONE

I’m not sure if it helps or hurts.

But back to the Midway, with some new work from the Brown Line. I snapped these from the Montrose platform. The paint is still wet on these bad boys; I think they went up last Sunday or Monday.

RESO, TESE, JOSK, THAZR (TCK, CMW): Rooftop, off Montrose Platform, Brown line (click for larger view)

Here are a couple of “detailed” shots of the same; the JOSK duster is my favorite of the bunch, style-wise, so I’ll lead with it:

Nice tag, a little too ambitious with the letters for THAZR CMW:

I’m lukewarm on TESE; nice “T,” but the rest is a little boxy and spotty.

Finally, an RE1 from RESO TCK. Somebody teach this boy how to tag. I nominate JOSK, who clearly knows what he’s doing:

That’s all for this week. Next week, I’ll reveal my prototype for Armed Robbery Flakes, a new product line I’m pitching for General Mills.

Saigon in the Emergency

After enough time had passed and memory receded and settled, the name itself became a prayer, coded like all prayer to go past the extremes of petition and gratitude: Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, say again, until the word lost all its old load of pain, pleasure, horror, guilt, nostalgia. Then and there, everyone was just trying to get through it, existential crunch, no atheists in foxholes like you wouldn’t believe. Even bitter refracted faith was better than none at all, like the black Marine I’d heard about during heavy shelling at Con Thien who said “Don’t worry, baby, God’ll think of something.” – Michael Herr, Dispatches

…you enter the winter. – Wu Tang Clan, Protect Ya Neck

It snowed here in Chicago last night. A lot. I went out this morning to “brush” the car down, and realized that I really had to “dig the car out,” a different sort of procedure altogether. Some slipping and sliding, but not too bad. A little tired of writing, I decided to take a stroll, only to see this recent work a few blocks away:

PR ONE and PG13, Lawrence, between Western and Rockwell

These cats hit this wall maybe two nights ago, in the deadly cold. There’s actually been quite a bit of new stuff all around, and especially on the Brown/Red, which has several new rooftop jobs from Belmont south to the Loop. I will try to take a graffiti train ride for those some time this week. Why so much? she asked me this very question on the way back from downtown the other day. “There’s bound to be more now,” I said, thinking it obvious. “Why?” I shrugged, “It’s winter.” she looked at me with that look you give everyone who’s just uttered a non sequitur, and I realized that – for her, anyway – I had. But this put me in the mind of explaining some of the more material aspects of graffiti, where I’ve been pretty high-flown thus far, when I’m not making dubious aesthetic claims. So this edition is about trudging through the slush, and the feel of wet and cold on your feet.

Pragmatically, it’s easier to bomb during the winter, or at least it was. Why? First, and most obviously, there are fewer people out and about, which means fewer pesky civilians playing neighborhood watch. Second, because you can fit a ton of spray paint undetected in a fat coat. Consider the 16-17 year old writer. What does he or she do at night? Usually, he hangs out at a park or schoolyard or corner, or maybe one of his friends has an apartment or basement where they can chill. Maybe one friend drives around and you stop at a bunch of different parks, schoolyards, or corners. You’re not really going to bars, except maybe an occasional one that has very loose carding policies, and even then, you probably don’t have a whole lot of cash for that. Generally, you’re out on the street.

In the late 80′s and early 90′s in New York, you weren’t really going around with a backpack. A kid with a backpack outside of school hours just screamed “burglary tool,” “drugs,” “gun,” or “graffiti instrument” to any cop passing by. Plus, you’d just look like a douchebag. We can thank the early 90′s raver kids (who introduced douchebaggery as a fashion philosophy) for getting us over that hump, I guess. Hello Kitty bags and platform Pumas, ugh. Point being, unless you were going for a very deliberate mission, you simply didn’t have a whole lot of places to conceal spray paint during the summer. Moreover, if you’re hanging out in the summer, it’s more comfortable to be in one place and there are more people out. Who wants to sit in a park in New York or Chicago in January? (Yes, my take is geographically specific; these are local conditions). You’re going to tend to be either inside, or outside and moving. And if you have a couple of cans with you, and you’re outside and moving, well…

I heard several arguments against this version break out among a group of writers in the early 90′s. One guy said he tended to bomb more in the summer and especially the fall, and his arguments were based on material conditions: “Do you wanna get chased in the fuckin’ winter? Do you want to try to climb rooftops in the fuckin’ winter? And shit is wet anyway.” You can’t bomb in the rain; the paint won’t stick. Snow, too. And finally, the killer argument: “And you know the motherfuckin’ cans freeze.” Everyone nodded. That’s true. You don’t generally use the factory cap that came with the spray paint, but when you introduce a new cap, and the paint is cold, it can tend to clog up, and the can is then worthless. As for the big coat argument? “Fuck all that. I throw cans in a duffel bag. Cops wanna stop me, I’ll take the summons.” Back then, you’d get a desk appearance ticket for graffiti instrument. Now I think it’s a felony.

SARS and a partner, rooftop off the Brown Line, northeast of Belmont

He did get trumped on one material factor, though. Somebody just said “Gloves, man,” and everybody had to agree. The local cops used to come around like “Let me see your hands.” When you use spray paint, you get small dots of paint all over your fingers and nails, blowback. You also get a couple of pretty solid paint stains on your index finger, especially if you’re switching out caps. Pretty obvious in the summer; a little harder to detect when you have gloves. (Many guys would wear plastic gloves if they were going on a major bomb, lifted, of course, from the local deli where somebody worked).

But it seems like it would also be much easier now to do the sort of things we did then. First, cops don’t blink at a kid walking around with a backpack at two in the morning. It’s practically standard. More importantly, these cats have something we never had: cell phones. Back then, if you wanted to hit the highway, you’d just do it. If a cop pulled up, you jetted. If you got caught, they’d give you a little beating and stick you in Central Booking. It wasn’t really that complicated. Now, they can post people a half mile down in either direction and give you a heads up if a marked car is coming. That’s fucking crazy to me. Same goes for rooftops, tunnels, hell, even street bombing. Of course, I doubt people do this, but they could.

I suppose it might take some of the fun out of it.