Seven Red

OK, not Goethe, but F&N Matt of Former Graduate Education Institution sent me the following images of graffiti in Roma, so I thought I’d post them here. A few notes first.

1. Global Diffusion – I still think it’s curious that graffiti would have caught on. As we know, it’s a global phenomenon, but isn’t that strange. So, coming out of New York in the 1970′s, you get three distinct phenomena that basically cover the globe in about 30 years: economic neoliberalism / financialization, hip hop culture, and street graffiti. And you get the sense that these are all connected in some way, whether it be through the transformations in language and public space or other vectors.

2. On Trains – I’m always amazed to see operating commuter train lines with graffiti on them. In the US, various transportation and security agencies have already solved the problem of keeping the trains clean, so you almost never see these trains leave a yard like this. Maybe freight trains, which nobody cares about anyway, but not commuter lines. So to see stuff dated “09″ from Rome is still kind of jarring and funny; these trains aren’t just hit, they’re killed. I remember being on a train going from Brooklyn to Manhattan – maybe the old B line, since I was probably coming back from Borough Park. It stopped for a while in the tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan (did the B take a tunnel? I don’t remember), and when it came out on the other side, the conductor sent us all off the train. While it was stopped in the tunnel, some writers had killed it front to back with quick outlines; there was nothing on it when I got on at Fort Hamilton Parkway. A pretty ballsy move, all told. But they were sending it back to the yard immediately. The MTA wouldn’t let the train run for even one stop looking like that, and they’d toss out all the riders to get it buffed. And this was back in ’93 or ’94. So to see these running is still amazing. Trains haven’t run with graffiti on the New York subway for twenty years already.

Anyway, thanks to Matt for the flicks. And feel free to send your own – with one proviso. Don’t send me any of that Banksy stencil shit from London (which people seem to think I’d enjoy), or any other “politically transgressive street art,” or whatever the eff they’re calling it. As you well know, I don’t care about it, and I won’t post it.

NEUTRO and THE, Rome, Italy

KO duster, Rome, Italy – I like this one especially, because KO either got chased off and perhaps caught, or he was rocking these quick fill-ins on an operating train (i.e., when the train was in service). As you can see from the quick black of the fill color, he did these in a big rush. This is what we call a duster. But you’ll also notice that he didn’t have time to complete the outline on the second fill in: he left the “O” without an outline, and you can see how the outline trails off and gets shakey at the bottom of the second “K.” There are only two reasons why you will see an incomplete outline: either the writer had to move, or the surface did. I think our friend KO here got a little greedy, and tried to do two quick fills when he probably only had time to do one. Given the rushed character of the fill-in and the way the second K gets shaky at the bottom, I think he jumped on the tracks and did these fills while the train was stopped at a station. KO also missed his outline target on the first K. He couldn’t finish because the train was pulling out. Which is a big thumbs up for fucking nuts, of course.

THE, Rome, Italy

Until next time…

Q: And because both cars were made by GM, were they both available in metallic mint green paint?
A: They wuh!

The bloglect has become atrocious. Ah, what can one do? In my defense, it is the usual very hectic close of an academic year (yes, early May people, we’re still going here), and that comes with a fairly predictable set of distractions. Primarily, you get many students who have been – let us say – otherwise lax in their efforts suddenly showing up at office hours like “What do I need to do in this course?” They seem at times unaware that the assignment sheets, syllabus, and course calendar have been posted on the course content management system, which they can access from the comfort of their own Dorito-strewn apartments. They also seem unaware that there is a course content management system, which is exceedingly strange, since that’s where all  the course readings are, too. You also have the more interesting problem of wrapping up everything for the year and getting set up for the real work of writing during the summer, which you will no doubt do ten hours a day, just as you planned. Third, you get this weird service ramp up as all the outlandish projects promised by various committees in January suddenly face the uncomfortable necessity of delivering up some, well, deliverables; since you’re at the close of the year, you also get all kinds of events that require attendance, because every level of committee is trying to mop up before everyone disappears. Where these people supposedly go in the summer I can’t imagine, but there does seem to be the sense of “You better do such-and-such now, because nobody’s going to lift a finger again until September.” I mean, huh? Finally, and more locally, we had a pretty egregious tenure denial within my small Home Unit at Unnamed Employer Institution, so that’s taken up much mental, emotional, and physical energy. Sometimes the banal really is evil.

So, first and foremost, I was getting so disgusted with the last design that I decided to run through a redesign, which you’re looking at here. I just wanted something plain and airy, like a light salad at lunch, so you’ll have to tell me if I succeeded. This summer, I’ll likely do a ground up redesign of this site and another one (about which more later), really starting from blank pages and coding up the XHTML, CSS, and PHP from scratch. This current design is version four of what was once the WordPress Palam theme, mixed with parts of the first theme I used. It still has some of the basic CSS, but I’ve made so many modifications that it really is removed from the original theme.

I like coding. I wouldn’t say I’m very good at it, but I do like it. I don’t even check any WYSIWYG portions anymore. I just hand code and test out on my local server. When I first started my diss, I used to scoff at these programmers who always talked about coding all night and just being in a zone with it, but I definitely got that after I started doing it myself. It’s just more results-effective, if I may coin what sounds like a typical management term, than other kinds of writing you do in my profession: change a line of code, run it, and ta-da, it works, and you solved a problem! I can see why that’s attractive. In any case, for this theme, I kept the basic structure and appearance, mainly switching out the images. This was much easier now that I’ve received – and it’s like a dream – my deeply discounted copy of Adobe’s CS4 Design Premium. I heart it like I haven’t hearted a product for years. For the next redesign, since I’ll be building the template from scratch, you’ll likely see more more in the way of changes, since I want to evaluate every element. But now that I have my summer lunch salad of a design, that probably won’t happen for a while.

But back to work. I have a pile of usability test reports with my name on them. No, literally. They have my name on them.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. – Jean Baudrillard

How could we have all been so blind? Keith, one of the FBI agents, summed everything up very simply: “I’ve never seen a place like this,” he told me. “You were all living in Disneyland!” - Eleanor Squillari, Bernard Madoff’s secretary, in June’s Vanity Fair

In my ongoing morbid curiosity about my former employer, Bernard Madoff, I read the recent Vanity Fair article by Marc Seal, “Bernie Madoff’s Private World.” It’s the companion piece to the April article also written by Seal. The June article, however, is essentially co-written by Madoff’s long-time secretary, Eleanor Squillari, so you really get an insider’s look at the operations over there. Now, you may know that I’ve been basing all my Madoff posts since Bernie got arrested on this post, which I wrote long before any of this mess hit the fan.  Of course, since then I’ve learned that I worked in the heart of the Madoff fraud, probably sending out fraudulent statements to clients/victims. The Vanity Fair article adds another dimension to that, and some – to me – jaw-dropping updates. The article is written in the first-person from the perspective of Squillari, Bernie’s secretary. Here, then, are the relevant portions:

The 17th floor was a different world from where we worked. Whereas the upper two floors were modern, with everything state-of-the-art, on 17 the corporate image didn’t seem to matter. The desks were close together, the computers were antiquated, and the printers were old ink-jet jobs, not the laser printers we had in our offices [tpspn: it's funny that I remembered the main printer in exactly this way, that it impressed itself so clearly on my memory]. …

The two people who ran the floor, Frank DiPascali and Annette Bongiorno, had once lived next door to each other, in Queens. Annette handled Bernie’s seasoned clients and managed her staff on 17. Short, tough, and overweight, she was rigid and guarded at work. [tpspn: compare my description of her in the original post as "She was a completely round woman, maybe 4 foot 8, implausibly round like a circle drawn perfectly by hand. She was an Italian from Brooklyn who had started off as the founder of the firm’s secretary 25 years before, when it was a very small operation indeed. She’d then made the inevitable ascent to office manager and then operations manager, largely behind her tyrannical personality. Some of the impeccably educated full-timers noted bitterly that she’d never been to college. I saw her make at least three of these people cry in the eight weeks I was there."]…[M]uch of her wealth had to have come from Bernie, whom she had worked for since he started his business, in the 1960′s.

Annette’s staff of six were mostly low-level, clerical women, many of them working mothers, who probably made no more than $40,000 a year. They were young and naive, with no background in finance, so they weren’t able to connect the dots. Annette allegedly instructed them to generate tickets showing trades that had never been made, at least two of them reportedly told prosecutors, and they simply did as they were told (Bongiorno has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

I knew these women. Two of them, Winnie Jackson and Semone Anderson, would come up to 19 every day to deliver figures. Whenever I went downstairs, they were always busy doing paperwork while Annette watched them like a hawk. Once, I remember Annette had the phones removed from her employees’ desks after she became concerned that they were making personal calls. She treated them like children. …

In Annette Bongiorno’s area, located across the floor from Frank, were Winnie and Semone and four other women. Every day I would receive a report with all of the figures from Winnie or Semone and another report of wire transfers from the cage.

This is amazing to me because it’s just as I remember it. But more than that. I closed my other piece with the following:

I never really quit that job. I just called the temp agency one Monday and said I wouldn’t do it anymore. The woman at the agency was really upset, since the firm had apparently started speaking to her about hiring me full time, a revelation so absurd that it simply floored me. They hired Tasha instead.

Now here’s the jaw-dropping part. Temp #1, or “Tasha,” in my previous post is Semone Anderson from the Vanity Fair story. She started the same day I did, and they were set, according to the temp agency, to offer me the position that she eventually took. This is curious to me. I get in there and last about 8 weeks before the mind-numbingness of it all finally kicks in, and I just drop it, the whole job. Here’s how that really happened. I was up in Binghamton for the weekend visiting she, who was still in college at the time. I was supposed to take a bus home on Sunday night, but I just said fuck it. We even got to the actual bus station before I decided to stay another day or two. What about Madoff? she asked me. Fuck ‘em, I said. I’ll find something else. I remember calling the agency early Monday morning and telling the rep, who was notably upset, first because I was bailing on a perfectly good revenue stream for the agency (I believe it was called Cross Temps) for no apparent reason, and second because they get some payoff if you’re hired full time. I turned to she when I got off the phone: “I think she’s pissed,” I laughed. Well, they got the payoff for Tasha/Semone. What’s incredible to me is that she stayed there for the remaining damn near 13 years, and is so inextricably mixed up in this now world famous and historical Ponzi scheme that her name is appearing in Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal! For a job that I fairly casually discarded on a whim, and pretty much left behind without ever looking back.

It’s an odd thing to think about, I guess. But it also goes to two points. First, these finance jobs are the route to some kind of bourgeois life for many working class people in urban areas. Tasha/Semone started at Madoff by stapling and folding on the same slushy January day that I did. Thirteen years. It was her career, and would have gone on in that manner no doubt for as long as they’d pay her. Indeed, Madoff himself and DiPascali and Bongiorno (the latter two haven’t been charged with anything, of course – though this shocks me) all have fairly modest upbringings, like all the fraudsters in the last few financial debacles. (I also sense a pattern that might explain why they were going to offer me that job, even though I openly considered it beneath me, as arrogant as I was: the qualifying characteristics for taking care of business on the 17th floor seem to be 1) Queens, and 2) a distinctly Italianate name. And in finance, a double major in history and English might as well be “no college.”). But the second point sort of derives from the first. Certainly, this Madoff fraud is outrageous and historical in scope. But it’s Disneyland, see? But maybe with a twist: Madoff is presented as real in order to make us believe that the rest of the mess on Wall Street is imaginary. It functions as the displacement for the whole Madoffian financial system, in much the same way that my colleague over there  in Japan right now sees the swine flu as a metonymic displacement of globalization anxieties. We’re crazy about Bernie, to put it another way, because we all work for Bernie. And it goes without saying, I should add, that we all have our money with him.

In perhaps the best graffiti story of the year, genius Chicago Alderman James Balcer called up the Department of Streets and Sanitation to have an unsightly graffiti mural removed. This mural was even more outrageous for being mysteriously signifying: it portrayed the system of cameras being installed all around the city in a somewhat less than positive light, and the CPD along with them. The Alderman, annoyed by this urban blight and double-outraged by the insult cast by these vandals at the police department, made the call, and out came the Graffiti Blasters program with their buckets of dark brown paint to beautify the Bridgeport neighborhood. There’s just one problem: it was a completely legal painting. From the Chicago Public Radio story:

Villa did the work as part of a local art festival. The mural itself was on private property, on a wall owned by the mother of a festival organizer. Villa says several Chicago Police officers approached him about the work while he painted. He thinks they may have been offended but he says the painting doesn’t have an anti-police message.

Oops.

Now the Alderman is stuttering and stammering about having received complaints and the like. What a buffoon. I don’t, however, buy the story that the Alderman was trying to “censor” a message. Rather, the thing just looks like street graffiti because it has the same aesthetic, and it was clearly done with spray paint. So you get this whole jumping-the-gun complex based almost solely on appearance. But consider the default: the city doesn’t even enquire about the ownership of the wall itself, the property! They just go ahead and paint over it. So you get this hilarious reversal whereby the Chicago Alderman and the Graffiti Blaster task force of the Department of Streets and Sanitation is actually vandalizing the property by painting over the graffiti! Shouldn’t somebody arrest the Alderman for criminal conspiracy of some sort? Wasn’t the Alderman damaging somebody’s property for the sake of some aesthetic sensibility?

The Peaceful Neighborhood (from the Chicago Public Radio blog)

The Despicable Vandalism!

I want to file this under “Shit that Makes Graffiti Writers Laugh.” My favorite line from the radio story? “What the mural is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess.” Heh heh heh. That’s the cherry on top.

Bloglect. Been busy here with a million different things. she tells me that they don’t pay me like a lawyer, so I shouldn’t be working until 2:30 every morning, then getting up at 6:30. But she knows I secretly like to, and I can’t really sleep anyway. But since the bloglect has been going on pretty long now, I thought I’d just update with some random stuff.

I stumbled out of bed; I got ready for the struggle
I smoked a cigarette, and I tightened up my gut
I said “This can’t be me, must be my double.”
And I can’t forget, but I don’t remember what…
-Leonard Cohen, I Can’t Forget

On Tuesday we trekked down to the Chicago Theater for our Big Night Out, and this time it went perfectly. The sitter got here at 6:30 or so, and we drove into the Loop. There wasn’t a spot of inbound traffic on Lakeshore Drive, and then we actually got a free parking spot on LaSalle. And then there was the show itself. Wow. I guess it helps if you are an uber-devoted Leonard Cohen fan (are there any non-zealot Cohen fans?), but I think even the uninitiated would have appreciated the artistry of the show. It was just beautiful and wonderful, and, as she said somewhere, made you forget your cynicism for just a little while. I was particularly drawn to Dino Soldo, who played, as Cohen said, “all the instruments of wind.” It was kind of a bonus that he was a little bit hip hop, rockin’ the Kangol and banging it out to Take this Waltz like it was thumping in a club. The guy had stage presence, for sure. I also liked that they played a few songs from Cohen’s 2001 album Ten New Songs, which I consider one of the great unappreciated albums of the decade, and underappreciated within Cohen’s corpus (it’s hard to compete with I’m Your Man, sure). It was just a perfect evening. And three hours. You felt like you got your money’s worth and then some. Hell, I left wanting to pay more. I would show the DVD that they’re selling of the London live show as an example of creating ethos. You can’t but be drawn to this kind of funny, humble and graceful, yet remarkable performance. Easily in the top ten live shows I’ve seen. Top five. Of course, I’m a zealot.

One of the great things about this concert, we noticed, is that nobody quite knew how to dress for it. Or, to put it another way, the variety in dress was just off the charts. You had people there looking like they were going to opera, and people there who look like they just stumbled out of a Virginia Beach knock-off of Margaritaville. It was pretty hilarious. I was also reminded of this line from Simon Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music: “I sometimes suspect that it is at such sit-down shows – for Leonard Cohen, say, or the Cure, or P.J. Harvey – that one best gets a sense of what the mid-nineteenth century battles over classical concert behavior were like, as the listening and the dancing sections of the crowd get equally annoyed with each other, and as the attendants struggle to keep everyone seated” (125). He can pretty much scratch Leonard Coehn off that list.

But graceful and humble is not me. Here is a snippet, pretty close to direct quotes, of a conversation we were having today. The subject: should we seriously look into this condo in a borderline dicey neighborhood. The issue is, of course, not the neighborhood itself but the schools. When they require uniforms in elementary schools to discourage gang activity (yes, elementary schools), it’s a bit much, even for me. So, I say, “yes, well, we’d then have to roll the dice on these application-only public schools.”

she: Or we might have to face up to sending them to private school.
topspun (who walks around saying things like “I went to New York City Public Schools, public university, all the way through…ain’t a damn thing wrong with public schools”): Fuck it. I’ll drive ‘em down here to Saint Matthias and hand ‘em over to the goddamn nuns.
she: …
topspun: They’re like Polish over here, y’know? That’s good Catholic.
she: So it has to be like ethnic Catholic?
topspun: Of course.
she (laughing): It can’t be American Catholics?
topspun: American Catholics are like fucking Protestants.
she: Heh.

Mind you, I grew up in a neighborhood where everyone knew the parish borders down to the street level, as in “You live on the other side of 26th Avenue: that’s Saint Luke’s.” But it was still largely immigrant or first generation Catholics: Italian, Irish, Croatians, etc. And I’ve got it into my head that this is reasonable Catholicism, where nobody really cares that much about the performance; the church is a place to get your bearings rather than run your life. Plus, there’s booze. Of course there’s still the guilt and all that, but it’s really paganism with some moral structure thrown on for show. I’m not talking about the 60′s and 70′s Catholicism, with the hippies playing the guitar in church and all that. Saw that whole bit a little in college, and I was like “No thank you.” But neither is it this totally weirdo suburban American Catholicism. When we lived in State College, I saw a Catholicism I was totally unfamiliar with. The whole practice resembled one of these evangelical  churches, and the people were real zealots, all hyper-conservative politically and just deadly serious about the teachings. It was unnerving. Needless to say, she and I are both atheists, but if we have to pack the kids off to a Catholic school, it would have to be the kind that includes the wink and nod.

Back to grading. Oh, and we’re on the quarter system, so I still have 4 weeks of class left. It hurts at this time of year. But then again…