Seven Red

On Saturday we took a trip down to the Taste of Lincoln Avenue festival. Luckily, we ate before we left, so there was nothing much to do but drink beer and bump into too-rich twenty-somethings. Oh, and the Kids Carnival.

  she and Ellie have quite the conversation on the El.

  But Ellie wasn’t really happy until she got to go down the giant slides.

   But that wore her out, which of course meant it was time for…more beer!

  This is the part of the story where the kids are asleep so I’m standing around drinking beer.

Then back on the train, Rafe in tow.

One of my colleagues sent me this link, which describes the work of “street artist” Jesse Graves, who uses mud and stencils for his “graffiti,” his reasoning being that “it wouldn’t make sense to use spray paint, because it’s a toxic substance.” Graves thus goes around putting up political messages (Stop Torture in Illinois, or Reduce, Reuse, Compost); not surprisingly, when Graves brought his act to Chicago and “volunteers fanned out across the city…[n]one were arrested or spoken to sharply.”

I want to discuss this briefly because it goes to some of the points I’ve been making here. As attentive readers well know, this sort of thing does not fly with me at all. Here’s Graves hitting all the points that I generally dislike:

“I’m trying to break down the negative connotations that people have with graffiti,” he says.  “A lot of people think that graffiti is about damaging property and it’s a destructive act.  I see what I’m doing as street art, it’s about getting a message out there, and also about beautifying a space.  I don’t want to look at an ugly gray wall in a place that I walk by every day.  I’d rather look at something I consider beautiful.”

Graffiti as “art,” graffiti as “getting a message out there, “graffiti as aestheticized.” Yuck, yuck, and yuck. Once again, this is a pretty clear demonstration of how graffiti culture gets normalized for standard consumption. But you start to see the outlines of the transformation, and can therefore note the problem of street graffiti through the negative definition. Both the normalized version and the pathologized version have an aesthetic component, but in the normalized version, aesthetics takes the lead. We’ve already covered that at some length. What’s interesting here is that you see the real transformation of pure asignifying risk economy (street graffiti) into something like a standard politics of representation (normalized graffiti with a “message”). If graffiti is normalized, it is along these two dimensions: the aesthetic aspect is heightened, while asignifying practices (the tag) are reduced to representative messages (Stop Torture!). The twist here is that the medium coincides with the message, so to speak.

Is that an improvement? Sure, I guess. I said I dislike calling this stuff graffiti, but I don’t dislike what Graves is doing. It’s both interesting and not interesting at precisely the point where the medium (mud) itself takes over the evacuation of risk from the practice. Nicolas Lampert, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who “follows street art very closely” says that “City governments don’t know how to respond” to the mud stencils, since they would ostensibly wash off some surfaces in the rain, etc. On the one hand, this is a transformation of the formal aspects of graffiti that I discussed in terms of REVS iron-worked tags. So, great. And, as a result, Graves establishes some liminal zone that’s seemingly outside the reach of current law. Also great. But what seems most like an escape trajectory on both materials and legal controls might also be where the practice most obviously departs from risk. At the level of the materials and the medium. It’s farthest from a line of flight precisely where it institutes one.  Graves’ work escapes from the toxicity and supposed negativity of street graffiti (it’s always only negative from the viewpoint of property, of capital), but in doing so, loses the element of exit within those practices. This may be good or bad. And maybe I’m just a purist on these matters (and I’m definitely a spray paint and technique purist, and I hate fucking stencils). It’s interesting, but I’ll still take the 15 year old tagger kid over this any day of the week.

We just moved to a new place, and I more or less moved half our stuff myself in order to reduce the moving costs. But that’s not cost free, either physically or in terms of opportunity costs. In any case, one of the costs has been the continued neglect of this here blog. I’ve found it’s hard to blog when you’re carrying boxes of books down three flights of stairs. Harder when you’ve done that all day. Now that we’re set up, I wanted to add this random post to convince myself that I am still adding posts, and that I haven’t given up on this blog in the same way I’ve given up on the Mets’ season (you’ll notice the really severe slide started as soon as I put up a Mets blog post, by the way). Meh.

So,

A. The Wisdom of she – Only people who understand percentage get rich. Very few people understand – really understand – percentage.

B. Soundtrack for the Moon Landing, 40 Years Later – NPR was having a moongasm today. I think one of the big breaks between my generation and my parents’ generation is general feeling about the moon landing. Put plainly, we really don’t care all that much. But hearing the ecstatic recitations on NPR today, I was struck by how much some previous generation does care, and does still get worked up about the whole thing. The moon! I mean, can you imagine? So, a top five songs for the moon-landing-iversary? Suggest other, dear Reader:

5. David Bowie, A Space Oddity (obviously, but for something new, try Natalie Merchant’s cover on the Live at the Neil Simon Theater album)

4. Peter Schilling, Major Tom

3. R.E.M., Man on the Moon (double obviously)

2. Modest Mouse, 3rd Planet (from “The Moon and Antarctica” album – and you could take the whole album, for that matter)

1. Billy Bragg, The Space Race is Over

The #1 jam is the transitional moment – the confused space between those who care and those who don’t care:

My son and I sat beneath the great night sky
Gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo
He says, “Why did they ever go?”
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don’t offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cuz where in the hell’s that at?
Now that the space race is over
It’s been and it’s gone
I’ll never get out of my room
Now that the space race is over
I can’t help but feel that we’re all just going nowhere

The Billy Bragg song really captures it for me, and has for awhile. The space race is over. This was the second theme on the radio today: nobody cares. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s the end of the outside signaled of course by Derrida (il n’y pas hors-texte), and worked into a geopolitical register by Hardt and Negri. Empire is the end of the space race, the impossibility of exit, in its traditional, spatial sense, anyway (it’s no mistake that its cover features a shot of the Earth from space). That’s already what the sad contrivance of Billy Bragg’s lament names, though in this very specific way:the problematic of immanence. And the moon landing would serve to date the demise of exit fairly well, and would be in line with other datings of the so-called postmodern (Jameson’s abandonment of the gold standard comes close enough).

But maybe push it back a bit. Just before we moved out, exited, our old place, we saw Revolutionary Road, several months late, as per usual. It’s really of a piece with all the great exit literature of the period, and it all spells a similar desire struggling with the immanence of capitalist society. From The Organization Man to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit to The Lonely Crowd, these are 50’s narratives of exit, or confronting the problem of exit’s demise. In Revolutionary Road, “Paris” may as well be the moon – it serves the same function as the moon serves for Billy Bragg. Of course, the 1950’s version is now clearly lunacy, but it culminates in the space race in the first place.  But the shift to “don’t care” really shows the new phase of the transition, one in which the anxiety about spatial exit has been eliminated; the moon landing fails to register after the baby boomers because Empire is already consolidated spatially. (A few years ago I heard an interview with Billy Bragg while we were driving in the car; my mother-in-law, a mathematician, was in the back seat. Bragg made a much more forceful case, recalling how shocking it was that mathematics could do that, could make one get to the moon. Three huzzahs from the back seat. His English accent helped too, I expect. I think this is right, and part of what he wants to say). So Billy Bragg’s quite right in a number of way, but chiefly this: where in the hell’s that at? The old labor philosophy – trained in the spatial logic of the line and the factory gate – can only ask this question. And gaze up in wonder.

But this is really the anthem for a labor movement that’s utterly finished.

How I know I’m getting old:

1. I see that Bravo has a show called NYC Prep, which follows the travails of Manhattan prep school students, a la the Real Housewives franchise. I may be confused about the way these shows gain an audience, but it seems like their only purpose is to stir up class resentment. (The utterly despicable and tedious Miami Social would be the ultimate in nauseating behavior).  That would be, of course, fine by me, but the right seems to understand far better than the “liberals” how to leverage that resentment politically, so it’s more or less a wash.  So she has NYC Prep on for ten minutes or so, during which time I grow increasingly disgusted, until I realize that I’ve hated these fuckers for twenty years. Since before they were even born.
2. Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick” is now apparently being used to peddle Tide laundry detergent. We be to crap what key be to lock.

I received a nice present from Ellie yesterday. Trying to get Rafe to go to sleep, I left a book on the table; it had about thirty flag stickers identifying relevant passages. When I came back with a still-crying Rafe, Ellie handed me the flag stickers in a bunch, removed from the pages. “Here, Daddy,” she said. “I think you need these.”

Why, thank you, sweetie. That shouldn’t be hard to reconstruct!

Note to self: don’t leave books unattended.