Seven Red

Oh, it’s that time again. Insomniac rambling about daily life and such. Meaningless reports: nostalgia for the always incomplete end of bureaucratic culture. There’s still something vaguely sexy about the forgotten colonial outpost, and the dedicated functionary who sends in the dispatches, despite the fact that nobody’s reading them, and that the surveillance has lost all utility. Hmmm. The horror of banality. So here we go.

1. The kids are asleep. I’ve been saying that a lot, even when they aren’t, or not really. It has a nice ring to it. The kids are asleep. Variations: The kids are sleeping. Kids? Asleep.  …and a couple of kids of course. Them’s some sleeping kids. You might have fooled the Philadelphia, and joshed the Joliet, but you never did the Kenosha kid(s are sleeping). Are the kids asleep? Yup, they are.  It’s fun to say. Try it. The kids are asleep. On account of there’s two of them. Kids. Asleep.

2. Kids These Days – Two flicks I liked recently, with the usual proviso that “recently” for us means months or even a year old for normal people who can go to movies in actual theaters. First, Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s continuing exploration and twisting of the American high school film. A clear follow-up to Elephant, even if not in the trilogy, complete with the continuous following shots of teenage boys walking. I noted this feature of Elephant in a discussion with Chuck from Austin once, and he made a good point: the frustration and boredom the viewer feels at the seemingly aimless, though clearly purposive walks mimics the boredom and aimless directionality of the American teenage experience itself. Elephant opens with what feels like a 10 minute sequence of the following shot; it feels like ten minutes, in the same way the last two minutes of sophomore level math felt like ten minutes, so you’re back there while watching the film, in the pointlessness of the educational system that you already know, by tenth grade, is cracked and broken. That it gets shot up or otherwise cut in half then seems like an afterthought, or at least something happening. If anything, Paranoid Park is even less moralistic and sentimental than Elephant (or Milk for that matter), and certainly seems less interested in pointing up some lesson about youth culture. Yes, it’s fucked like everything else. The film is also, maybe in the same way as The Lookout, about writing. I could see how various expressivist teachers would love this sort of thing, even if it leaves off ambiguously, to the extent that the main character has to write himself a meaning for a meaningless act. Maybe that’s high school, too. Second film, the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In. For some reason, the version I got was dubbed rather than subtitled (truly the sign of a shitty distribution agreement), so some of the acting seemed off, but it maintained itself despite this thoughtless crime. Plot: Oskar, a weird little Swedish boy is bullied at school until he meets his new neighbor, a little girl vampire named Eli. The film is then their story. I’m not usually into horror or vampire films, but this one did good. It’s more a sweet little tale with the occasional and very subtle special effects. In one scene, for instance, the little girl scampers up the side of a hospital building seeking her guardian, a man who keeps her in blood through various murders until he screws up for the last time. Her insect-like climbing is a background effect, made more effective for being almost out of sight. Even the one real attack scene has a novel element, as the little girl clutches her victim like a child would, which suddenly seems eerily animalistic. It’s well done. These are both small films, mostly about people, with the sudden and nearly antiseptic introduction of gore.  Better, then, for being small. Of course, we get the sense that Eli’s previous guardian, who came to such a grotesque end in what seems to be his mid-fifties, was the last Oskar, perhaps engaged when he was himself a sweet and bullied little boy, and so the sweetness of the movie leaves off with this disastrous implication. Better, then, for cutting the saccharine with the ultimately dark suggestion. We also saw Frost/Nixon, which is engaging, if a little Karate-Kiddish. The Karate Kids are asleep.

3. Trips and Events – Our big summer trip will be to….State College, Pennsylvania. Oy. Some people go to Paris, etc. I’m going for some workshop that I applied for, while she and the kids are coming along because we know people there, etc. I wouldn’t call it a vacation destination, but it’s pleasant enough in the summer. So we’re probably going to drive out, and we’ll try to then make our way to upstate NY, maybe, but even that sounds dicey. That’s our vacation, essentially: one night in Ohio and a few in Happy Valley. I would have also gone to Montreal this summer for the ISHR conference, but I received notification that my paper was accepted in…April! Everybody else I know received acceptances in friggin’ November. And I’m fine taking the second cut after somebody else no doubt dropped, but I had just assumed that the non-notification was a rejection, not some limbo state waiting list sorta thing. So I’m not going. I have too much other stuff to finish up now to rev up that research bit again for these people who kept me dangling. It seems like an odd way to run things up there. Finally, if our last Big Night Out was kind of a catastrophe, our next promises, I hope, to be better. We’re going to pay ridiculous fees for some professional nanny-type to watch Ellie and Rafe, and we’re going to see Leonard Cohen at the Chicago Theater May 5. Just rah. Can’t wait.

So back to the colonial outpost, and the proverbial forgotten functionary. There’s always a strange local fever spreading mysteriously across the outpost in these things, and no less so now. Isn’t there a strange moment in every one of these plague panics (swine flu) when you think, just for a second, that you really should be scared, even though any disruption would be an inconvenience or worse? It’s like the first few pages of Camus when the rats start to come out of the sewers to die, or the first few pages of And The Band Played On, with the Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii popping up all over the place – and you’re gonna be the one who is both alarmed, but much too jaded to act on it?  Maybe my usual disdain for being affected by media outbreaks is being blocked by the fact that the kids – these two kids – are asleep…

So she  is on maternity leave, and I’m just loving it. Be aware that she’s bored stiff, despite a (fingers crossed) very non-colicky baby. Everybody told us with Ellie that her non-stop screaming was very much out of the normal range, and I think we knew that implicitly, but when you have no measure for comparison, the whole claim seems somewhat unreal. But this baby might be on the other end of the range; he seems to fuss in minor ways and eat constantly one day, and sleep all the next. I think it’s an eating-growing-eating-growing thing, but what do I know, really? Answer: not much.

But back to maternity leave. Thanks to the good people at Giant Foreign Financial Institution, she gets three months leave. But what do you do to eat up the time? Ellie’s in daycare all day, and once you get them in a daycare here at a particular clip, it’s foolish to try to move them back to part time. I go in every day on my usual 8-4 schedule, though I’ve been coming home a bit earlier than usual since the kid was born (ah, academic schedules…how anyone complains about a job where you can just pick up and leave when you want is still beyond me). But still: that’s a lot of hours, and that dude from The Big Bang Theory can only be on The View so often. So she‘s taken to making some food. I likes it.

To be clear, I do the dinner cooking in the family. Always have. I think we’ve gone weeks at some points during which she never cooked one meal. This is a great deal for me, since I like cooking, and yet I can still pretend it is a household chore. The problem does not escape she‘s attention. Versed in all the feminist arguments about unequal household labor, she consistently points out that traditionally male household labor can often double as a hobby (home repairs and the like), while traditionally female household labor could never be mistaken for hobby (just don’t tell the Bathroom Cleaning Club of Vancouver). I’m like the guy who argues that he shouldn’t have to clean up after the barbecue because he “manned the grill.” So my feeble attempts to suggest that we share the household labor equally because I cook does not fly even as a theoretical matter. (I think it’s also a case of tolerance for general disorder, or household entropy, where my cycle is about two weeks, while she‘s cycle is about 8-12 hours.) But now there’s more encroachment on my already weak case, as she gets more and more into doing the cooking. I’d say cooking every night buys me out of maybe two loads of laundry, in the Family Labor Exchange Guilt System. And I feel like I’m losing a load in the bargain, especially if this whole cooking thing sticks, and perhaps even drifting toward mopping the kitchen floor territory, ledger-sheet-wise.

But the upside, despite the looming threat of all natural all purpose cleaners in my future, is that she actually makes good goddamn food. I make good food. I’m a good recipe cook. I’m not very creative in my cooking, I don’t think, but if you give me a decently constructed recipe, I can make something really good. And because I’ve been at it for awhile, I’m more comfortable, and for even some complex meals that I’ve done several time, I even understand the theory (I guess you’d call it), so I can do those without checking the recipe and make some variations. Blah blah blah. I’m still talking about me, when this is a post about she’s cooking! Do I ever shut up? In any case, the larger point is that I’ve been coming home to really good meals and other foodstuffs, which seems like a definite benefit attached to this whole baby thing. So I took the following pictures, which she calls my “documenting of her domesticity.” We’re only two weeks into this thing and she’s going all Germaine Greer on me.  Anyway, it’s nice when you show up and find

Butternut Squash Risotto

fresh baked Banana Bread

Chekhov famously stated that if you introduce a gun in Act One, it must go off by Act Three. Similarly, if any non-extra woman in a sitcom or movie is seen to be preggo, she must deliver the baby before the close of the action, and preferably in some public spectacle, complete with an approving Greek chorus of onlookers, and either hissed curses or a hard squeezing of the testicles for the father. This is your fault! So, yes, a cinematic cliché. Now, you’ve all seen such scenes, maybe a hundred times. Us too. But it turns out that you can watch the proverbial taxi cab or elevator delivery a thousand times and never be quite prepared for it.

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Just pics for this edition.

RARE and ANIMAL, near Montrose

XMEN, near Irving Park

The rampage continues: NINE burner off the Paulina stop

CMW piece with character, between Southport and Belmont

NINE burner on Diversey: they buff it, and he comes back and hits it again; this guy is off the chain.

MUL KOAL, on Lincoln just before Fullerton stop

I was coming home on the train today, re-reading Paul Willis’ classic study and analysis Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. I first read the book somewhat badly as an undergraduate, and then again maybe my second semester in graduate school. In the graduate school version, I remember reading Willis, Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress all together, probably all in the same week. Willis’ significantly gloomier version of things just resonated with me more than the others, probably because his ethnography bore significant resemblance to my own memories of high school, though Willis’ study takes place in early 1970′s industrial England. In any case, I’m re-reading the book for a project I’m working on, and it’s as good and funny and cogent as I remember, and maybe as gloomy. This time I actually bought a used copy.

So I get on the train, and I’m surrounded by a bunch of young CTA workers who are clowning around and generally trying to get through their day. They’re standing around cracking on each other, telling each other in exaggerated voices that they’re “blocking the patrons” with their equipment. They have canvas bags filled with florescent orange flags and various tools.

“Get out the way! Can’t you see that lady’s tryin’ to get off the train!”

“You need to move, young man! Those reserved for senior citizens. Patrons.” They’re punching each other, laughing.

Then two more get on at Southport station, and these guys are the real clowns.

“Hey,” says the guy sitting next to me, playing the boss, to one of the new arrivals, “I know you weren’t posted to Southport, so I don’t know how you gettin’ on there.”

“Oh,” says one of the new guys, “I was over at Wrigley.” They all laugh.

“Oh, OK,” says the Boss. “At Wrigley. Drinkin’, too, prolly.”

“Oh, no sir. I’m a dedicated employee. I would never be off drinking at Wrigley when the CTA needs me. But I shouldn’t uh had that sixth.” They all laugh.

“Mmmm hmmm,” says the Boss.

It goes on like this for some time, until I’m one of the few left on the train with these guys. They’re all loud and carrying on. Then, suddenly, the Boss says, very officially, “Will y’all quiet down? Can’t you see this gentleman here is reading?” That would be me. This gentleman.

“Oh, he’s studyin’ for a test! Stop messin’ him up!”

“You gonna quiz him?”

I look up and smile. Alright. You got me. I get it.

“He fail that quiz he gonna end up workin’ the CTA,” says one of the clowns. “You better let him read.”

They’re all laughing their asses off. I’m smiling. OK, guys. I get it.

Now, stuff that’s ironic. I was reading the following paragraph as all this was going on:

Some of the non-conformist group in the grammar school are, in fact, from working class families. Despite even their origins and anti-school attitude, the lack of a dominant working class ethos within their school culture profoundly separates their experience from ‘the lads.’ It can also lead to artificial attempts to demonstrate solidarity on the street and with street contacts. That the working class cultural forms of school opposition are creative, specific, borne and reproduced by particular individuals and groups from afresh and in particular contexts – though always within a class mode – is shown by the cultural awkwardness and separation of such lads. The lack of the collective school based and generated form of the class culture, even despite a working class background and an inclination to oppositional values, considerably weakens their working class identity (58).

Sometimes, it doesn’t matter if you get it.

babyboy arrived April 10, three days ahead of schedule. Much drama was involved, which I’ll have to get into later. In any case, Raffaele Francis (we’ll call him Rafe) joined us, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. she and Rafe are recuperating at the hospital, and I’m about ready to pass out, so I’ll just leave you with a first pic. Needless to say, more to come, plus the very interesting story about how we didn’t quite make it to the hospital. Yeesh!

The last post deals with one high tech means for killing graffiti culture, the Wii spraypaint controller. It’s fitting that the very next day I should hear of another. NPR’s All Things Considered had a story titled “Cities Rely on High-Tech Method to Stop Graffiti” (you can listen here) on some new high tech sensor that nabs those little tagging punks in the act, son. In the last post, I mentioned in an off-hand way that the human sense organs could detect the chemical make-up of even different colors of spray paint, given enough exposure. Apparently, this newfangled graffiti bustin’ implement works the same way, detecting the chemical trace of aerosol paint, and immediately alerting cops to the location of spraying. The story is very hush hush about how the thing actually works, no doubt because there are easy work-arounds, or because the sensor is too expensive for widespread deployment, or because they generally want to create a panoptic effect of some kind by implying its presence, or (likely) a combination of these reasons. The sensor, in any case, is the flip-side of the dual control strategy, where one side brings graffiti into the fold by aestheticizing it, while the other side brings it into the fold through legal controls, even including chemical detection. And indeed, the interview (I think with Melissa Block) plays out the dynamic I’ve been describing here fairly well. After a discussion of the cost of graffiti on communities followed by an elusive description of the technology, you get to the real meat of it. Block, playing out the liberal line, at some point asks, “Do you think there’s any artistic merit to what they do?” This is the rescue operation on the poor inner city kids with no legitimate “creative outlet.” It’s the moment of aestheticization that separates graffiti (for good reason) from other forms of “vandalism.”

But the police chief she’s interviewing, named Manny Solano, actually knows what he’s talking about. His answer goes something like this: “Listen, sure there’s artistic merit, and we’ve put up ‘free walls’ for them to do their murals on, but they just don’t take to it. And if you actually talk to the graffiti writers, they seem to hate the free legal walls. The murals are very beautiful, some of them, but these kids don’t want to do the legal pieces. They want the adrenaline rush.” It’s pretty clear, in other words, that Solano actually listens to writers, like any good cop, and hears what they’re saying . Now, I think this easy answer about “adrenaline” is probably right, and certainly works with the argument I’ve been making here, but it is itself too isolated, too medicalized, as if the whole complex economy boils down that. Adrenaline is an effect rather than a cause; it explains little on its own. But it’s a hundred times more correct than this business of the legal walls and creative outlets.  In any case, if you want a better sense of how this stuff actually works, listen to Solano’s response. He’s dead on accurate, and demonstrates real knowledge of the culture.

Thanks to Unnamed Work Colleague for this video, which displays a Nintendo Wii controller turned into a can of spraypaint:

A few thoughts on this technology. While I think stuff like this is really cool from a technological perspective, and I think bagging on virtual toys for not being “real” just ends up resentful and silly, I do think this version of graffiti reinforces the point I’ve been making here: graffiti is most comfortable to people when it is aestheticized and therefore removed from the realm of social conflict. On the face of it, this should be a fairly obvious point: a dominant culture would prefer if graffiti writers engaged in legal, “beautiful artwork” rather than mucking up the public surfaces. Right. Duh. But the stakes of it, as I’ve said here before, have everything to do with the exit value of graffiti as a non-signifying sign. It’s not just vandalism. It’s a signature system (with all that implies for identity and control) that operates in a completely opaque alternative economy. That graffiti communities also have well-developed aesthetic systems and values only complicates the problem, since the aesthetics – especially where they don’t jibe with dominant aesthetics (i.e., the tag rather than the mural) – further emphasizes the non-familiarity of the practices. Conversely, aesthetics then becomes the vehicle to normalize graffiti practices and include them within a framework of dominant cultural understanding. The graffiti mural – and especially the legal mural (at the community center or similar authorized location) – eliminates exit, makes graffiti familiar, domesticates it: Oh, those kids do some beautiful artwork…I just hate when they write that chicken-scratch on the store gates. As soon as you hear that, you’re dealing with somebody who doesn’t get it, at all.

So, how might that relate to our Wii controller here. As I said, it’s trivial to note that a virtual activity is not the same as a real activity. Wii tennis is not tennis. We all know this, and repeating it is not particularly interesting. It’s easy enough, in other words, to bemoan the loss of materiality involved in such virtualizations, and no small number of “philosophers of technology” had made tenure braying the same argument. Yes, when you’re writing graffiti the weather counts, the wind counts, the surface counts, the way you’re balanced on a two foot ledge with a fifty foot drop beneath you counts, your caps clog, your paint freezes, and your finger gets numb, and you can smell, yes smell, the colors. (Some guys in college tested me on this claim. They sprayed one of three colors, I think they were Cherry Red, True Blue, and Ultra Flat Black Krylons, the test being whether I could identify the color based on the smell. Of course I did; I can identify the scent of Ultra Flat Black at 50 yards). So, yes, materiality counts, but that’s not really the issue. For the Wii controller, it’s the specific mode of deviating or abstracting from the “real” or material activity that’s important. The spraypaint controller implies that graffiti is merely the act of using spraypaint on a wall or surface, as if that act can be isolated from all the social forces that actually shape graffiti practices. That is, it reduces the activity to an aesthetic operation. I’d suggest that this virtualization is, in fact, very different from the one that occurs when baseball or tennis are translated into Wii. In the case of the Wii spraypaint, the technology actually removes the key elements that function as value within graffiti cultures, with the primary element being risk. Graffiti practices mean nothing if they are separated from the cultural value of risk that drives the whole graffiti enterprise. In this sense, the technology perfectly mirrors the dominant cultural response toward graffiti, when its not simply raging and throwing kids in jail. That is, it strips the practices of the one thing that makes them socially interesting.

One final note: I said earlier that I think this thing is cool, and I do. I have no doubt that it will spur many creative uses, and I suspect graffiti writers may even use it for new and unforeseen things. As I noted in this post, graffiti is best when its transforming itself, and so is technology. It’s not a question of being a purist. More connections, then, more! But it’s also useful to be very specific about how and what transformations take place, and what they do. So…

One big announcement in Seven Red Land. The Brooklyn Famiglia has expanded by two, as my brother and his wife had their twin girls last night at around 11 EDT. I like that the twins were born on 4-4. Kinda fitting. Ellie, for her part, saw pictures of the twins and said, “We have to go on an airplane!” Don’t worry, sweetheart, you’re gonna have one version of this thing within the next week or so. We do miss being in NYC for this sort of thing, of course, but we’ll try to get back to see the girls soon.

In the meanwhile, more pics of Ellie for Granny.

This is the “Che Faccia” pic. My father was (and probably still is) a big fan of this phrase, which translates as “What a face!” But it really means more than that; I can’t quite convey it. He was also a fan of “che faccia di criminale,” which means “This person has a face like a criminal.” Needless to say, his expression was fairly predictably indexed to various southern Italians in the neighborhood. It took me a long time to notice that it was some holdover Lombroso-ism, as well as the prejudice against southern Italians that were part and parcel of my father’s upbringing in Milano and Genova. Ah well. I still kinda liked when he said it. We always used to laugh.

Conversation with Ellie, while giving her a bath

Ellie (reaching into topspun’s sweatshirt pocket): Daddy, what’s that box in your pocket?
topspun: It’s nothing. It’s daddy stuff. [It's a pack of cigarettes]
Ellie: So, it’s not nothing.
topspun: No. It’s something.
Ellie: So what is it.
topspun: It’s a bad thing just for grown-ups.
Ellie: You use it when you go outside, right? You put it in your mouth and blow through them?
topspun: Yes, that’s right. But it’s bad.
Ellie: When I grow up, I want to have those in my pocket, too.
topspun: No you won’t. I’m going to stop, and you’re not going to start. They’re bad.
Ellie: Then why do you do it.
topspun: I don’t know.
Ellie: You didn’t have those when you were a little kid, did you?
topspun: No. But my Daddy, your Nonno, had them.
Ellie: Hmmm.
topspun: But I’m going to stop, and then I won’t have them any more.
Ellie: Well, if you stop, then I’ll never even touch them! Even when I’m a grown-up!
topspun: Hmmm. [realizing he's just been played by a three-year old...]

She’s getting craftier…