Seven Red

1) When you fuck up the opening of a Cling Wrap box, you have to live with that fuck up for two months. When you fuck it up three consecutive times, it follows that you have six months of Cling Wrap hell on your hands. How does this happen? You know that last bit of Cling Wrap is limp, and goes nowhere, so you’re smart enough to anticipate and buy some Cling Wrap at the store, probably opting for the Glad brand because you watch Top Chef, even though the store brand does exactly the same thing, there being only one way of making Cling Wrap, really, even if it’s called Stick-To Plastic Wrap, or whatever. But you reach the end of that old Cling Wrap, and pump your fist triumphantly because you knew enough to anticipate, but then you’re all excited and the damn packaging doesn’t tell you fuck all about how to open it, so you start pulling on tabs and other loose cardboard, only to realize that you’ve fucked up the opening of the Cling Wrap box yet again. They should have a big goddamn red star on the packaging warning you not to fuck up the opening of the Cling Wrap. This is basic technical writing that any sophomore would be able to tell you.

2) The best two moments on Girl Talk’s All Day are Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Shimmy Shimmy Ya over Radiohead’s Creep (roughly 20:30-21:45) and Fabolous’ (Holla Back) Young’n over INXS’s I Need You Tonight (28:45-29:40). There are a lot of other good moments, but these are the most surprising and well-executed, I think. Ending with Imagine was, however, lame. I mean that in the most high-schoolish way. At some point, I’m going to have to admit that my preference for East Coast and specifically New York hip hop over all other varieties is mere provincialism.Two points here: a) An easy experiment: Put any “old school” hip hop song (defined here, as something produced between 1987 and 1995) up on YouTube. Let’s say, EPMD’s Crossover, for example. Within two days, you will get a comment stating that EPMD was a’ight, but Li’l Wayne is a better lyricist, followed by about 300 comments stating that Li’l Wayne is total shit, and commercialized crap, and can’t even hold a candle to the lyrics of X Old School hip hop, in this case Parrish Smith and Erick Sermon. In the first place, this is strictly speaking true: EPMD is objectively better than Li’l Wayne. But the real issue is that hip hop spoke to these commenters more when they were 15 or 16 or 20, back in 1992. Today’s hip hop doesn’t speak to me not because it’s bad (I really wouldn’t know), but because I’m not hanging out in parks, drinking beer, a twenty sack in one pocket and a can of Rusto in my coat, NYPD rolling by slow with the dash flashlight, EPMD banging out of somebody’s trunk. Funk mode, yeah kid, that’s how the squad rolls. Maybe Li’l Wayne would be just as good if that’s what I was doing now. Instead, I get a small rush from having correctly timed the running out of Cling Wrap. b) And on a related note, whenever I see something advertised at the supermarket as 2 for $5, I secretly mouth the dialogue intro to Wu Tang’s C.R.E.A.M. It’s an embarrassing admission, but that’s what blogs are for.

3) Political Axiom: Talking to the public about deficit spending during the middle of the holiday season is inherently stupid. Deficits only make sense in January.

In our last episode, we saw a quick AMUSE tag on Lincoln. A few days later I saw this, a little further up Lincoln, by Ainsle:

AMUSE, Truck throwee, Lincoln and Ainsle

In this context, I don’t want to talk about styles or ups, but literacies. It strikes me that a non-writer would have a hard time connecting this throwee with the tag we saw earlier, or identifying it as the work of the same writer. But I saw it immediately. So, what literacies are necessary to draw that connection?

First, you have to see both, as a pure matter of attention. In urban settings, graffiti is such an element of the built environment that it can simply elude attention. As we pulled up to this intersection, it would be very easy for she simply not to see this truck; it doesn’t hit the attention threshold. I covered this point a bit earlier in the series, when discussing BESTER’s tag on the Happy Land Social Club. Graffiti writers develop different attention mechanisms to their environment. Not better, of course. People who are very into cars have different attention mechanisms, as do people who are into fashion or food (attention is always intentional in this sense). But the first thing you need to draw the connection is a different attention pattern—you have to first notice the marks at all. Second, you need a capacity to read the letters as letters. In the case of the AMUSE tag, it’s probably easier to read the letters as letters, which is to say, to recognize the A, the M, the U, etc. In the case of this throwee, it’s likely more difficult to recognize the A and the M, as they’re more stylized. So, these are the obvious points: you’d have to first notice them at all, then you’d have to be able to read the letters. But you’d still, at that point, be left with AMUSE on the one hand, and AM (really am, since the A is lowercase on the truck) on the other.

In order to move on from that point, you’d need to know a variety of conventions that are manifested here. First, you’d need to know that writers often abbreviate their tags for different kinds of purposes, especially if their tags are longer. In this case, a simple AM fits better on the back of the truck than would a full “AMUSE.” Second, you’d have to know that writers often include a number after their tags, and usually the number “1” to indicate that they are the first person with this tag. So, you will often see things like KREL1, or KREL ONE, or KREL ONEZ, or KREL UNO, and other variations. (This convention, in fact, leads to other transformations, such as writers using other numbers, even if they don’t signify that there have been previous writers with the same tag; in other words, the higher number just looks or sounds interesting, but has no ordinal meaning, like, say, KREL5, where there weren’t four previous KRELs). In AMUSE’s case, he uses a Roman numeral one (an uppercase “i” flanked by dots) that appears underneath the tag: AMUSE I. Third, you’d have to know that one of the ways writers stylize letters is to use symbols and other variations to indicate the interior space in the letterform (what typographers call the “counter”). In this case, AMUSE used the same Roman numeral one as the counter for his lowercase “a.” You can see it inside the round area of the first letter (if you can see the first letter!).

So, summarizing this literacy, you have to notice it, recognize the letters, and understand at least these three conventions (abbreviation, numeration, stylization). What strikes me here, as in all literacies, is how instantaneous it is if you have these forms, and how inscrutable it is if you don’t. It probably took me less than a second to process all this in real time: as soon as I saw this throwee, I thought, “Hey, there’s that kid AMUSE again…I just put one of his tags on the blog.”  No lag time.

Of course, this is a well-understood and now nearly trivial point when it comes to literacies. There are a multitude of informal literacies that everybody walks around with, and these are, at some level, a material politics. Our multiple literacies, to put it another way, are precisely the unpredictable factors that allow us to maintain difference in a common space (or time)—we switch on and off from seeing (or hearing, or other modes of perception and thought) that common world and what could be called that exit world, and the character of those switches both speaks to and intensifies our various investments. We already know this for language literacies (say, code switching and the like—which also shows us that the “common” and the “exit” worlds are relative, like figure and ground), but it’s really a useful framework for me when I expand it beyond language. This may be the more generous reading that I didn’t give Cintron’s work on gang graffiti the first time out, though I still have a problem with thinking that “translation” of these literacies is politically innocent. When I do it here, as above, the point is rather to demonstrate that the perception itself can’t be translated as perception, even if its features can be explained (in a linguistic mode, the studium).

So, why all this painful blathering? When I presented a very abbreviated version of the Graffiti Fridays series as a conference talk some month ago, I got the usual and predictable responses: isn’t it really about a politics I’d be able to recognize (i.e., a “protest” against gentrification, and similar urban concerns), and wouldn’t it be better and even more political in a museum, where people would have to confront its strangeness and account for it (by understanding it)? It was interesting to me that both these objections came from people who kinda proudly wear a “left radical” tag on their sleeves. No, I said. Those are both modes of normalizing this practice—as I’ve said here numerous times: politicizing and aestheticizing. Of course, what I really mean (at least in part) is that both are modes of erasing or devaluing the political and aesthetic investments inherent in those exit literacies. What both desire is for that exit literacy to become common.

I’m coining it! I did a Google search for “contripreneur,” and got this:

Bupkiss. So it’s mine. As you know, I intensely dislike the term “prosumer,” largely because I think it obscures more than it reveals. The actual term for the activity supposedly taken up by the prosumer should be, in my view, the “contripreneur,” an admittedly tongue-in-cheek combination of the contributor and the entrepreneur. (I don’t think it’s any more etymologically senseless than “prosumer,” in any case). And I want to use it to describe a whole set of activities, ranging from micro-finance and the kind of entrepreneurial charity work described recently by Nicholas Kristoff, the more modest contripreneurial activities, like designing tee shirts for Threadless to uploading YouTube videos and the like. Put another way, I want the term to have a broader extension than the “prosumer” because I’m attempting to link prosumer activities to a series of other activities, including, I should note, the way we contribute to our retirement plans and the like, which are mostly now “defined contribution plans” as opposed to the defined benefits plans of the old economy. But for now, I’ll just be staking that information claim, and we’ll see how fast Google’s little bots find my frequent mention of the contripreneur in this blog post titled The Contripreneur. Did I mention the contripreneur?

Apart from assaying my Googlexistence, I’m going to use this term as a jumping off point for getting back into the whole discussion of contribution that I brought up in the Three Dogmas of User-Centeredness post (which has, oddly enough, become a favorite of Israeli spammers), and continued in a few other posts. And I’ll try to do that through several readings of Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, which posits a “Contribution Economy” as an escape route from the crisis of contemporary capital. So, more on Stiegler as I get to it.

Here’s one from American Slang, which will probably have to compete for my top ten records of the year. (Isn’t December the time for Top Tens?). The Gaslight Anthem is, to my mind, this really interesting phenomenon, since their overriding theme seems to be the overt nostalgia for some working class youth, but it meshes perfectly with nostalgia for something like a collapsing industrial society. Indeed, Arcade Fire talks the talk on this, but The Gaslight Anthem really works it in formally, a kind of yearning for Springsteen’s 70′s, and their links with Springsteen are, of course, well-known by now (I think there’s probably something wrong with people who don’t like “The ’59 Sound” the first time they hear it). I guess the whole nostalgia thing is strange cuz these dudes are in their twenties.

Digression: This reminds me that I really want to pick up Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 70′s and the Last Days of the Working Class, which I was tempted to just buy and read the other day (along with Francois Dosse’s mammoth biography of Deleuze and Guattari – I really liked Dosse’s History of Structuralism). Then I thought, why buy either of these when certain blog readers might be agonizing again over what in the world to get me for Christmas, and not wanting me to look at the book they’ve presented me, only to have me say “You really have no idea what I do, right?” See? I make things easy.

Anyway, here’s “Orphans” from American Slang, followed by “Boxer” at Bonnaroo

Two good tags I managed to catch today with my trusty (if low-res) cell. First, a nice fat NEKST tag on the back of a truck in front of me on Lincoln. Here it is:

There’s a guy in Philadelphia who writes NEKST; he and SKREW just do these incredible blockbusters and rollers all over the walls and factories surrounding the rail lines on the southbound approaches to 30th Street station, just tremendous stuff. I don’t think this is the same NEKST. But let me tell you why this is good. First, at the level of technique. Whether by accident or design, the letters are fatter toward the top, and tapered down to almost nothing on the bottom. You can see this effect especially in the N and the T, but it applies to all the letters. By accident: maybe the dude is just short, and couldn’t reach the top of the truck. In that case, what would happen is that he’d have the cleanest lines where he could hold the can closest to the surface, and the most dispersed lines where he couldn’t. So, as he’s tilting the can upward to reach the top of the truck, he’d have a more dispersed line, like we see in the first stem of the N: thin and condensed at the bottom, wide and dispersed at the top. But I think there was also design here, since the stem of the T really goes down to a fine point relative to the what would be the “natural” width of the cap, or what you would get holding it about 6-8 inches from the surface, maybe four fingers (it’s a nice fat cap). So, in order to pull off this design, he’d have the be moving the can in three dimensions. For the stem of the T, he’d be moving it down horizontally, while at the same time moving it inward toward the surface. It’s not easy to pull off, especially on the curves like the bottom of the E and the S. It’s nicely done. I should also note that it’s not easy to get that close to a truck surface without producing a few drips (in fact, there were a few drips at the bottom of the T and K). Take any sprayable liquid and place the can really close to a surface, then make a simple line. Because the spray is hitting the surface at a really condensed rate, it’ll drip, especially at the beginning and end of the line (where you’re moving your hand the slowest). It takes real skill to avoid that, and even more skill on a metal surface, where the spray won’t catch as easily. This is one of the reasons the guys that really used to do intricate shit on the trains always had a bit of disdain for highway graffiti and wall murals: they’re easier as a matter of technique, because that close spray sticks to a wall easier than it does to a metal train. It’s really the third term that’s added to styles and ups: can control (or paint control). It takes skill.

I also like the style here. I’m not crazy about Chicago tag styles. This looks much more east coast: clean block letters; the S is perfect really. They were really perfecting this particular style in Corona, Queens and Lower Manhattan in the late 1980’s. It’s also reminiscent of a technique pretty much invented by JEW, a Bronx guy, which I already discussed here. Maybe this is our guy from Philly after all.

Second, AMUSE, on Lincoln near Wilson:

I won’t bore you with the aesthetic details here. This is just good. I like the consistency of the elongated letters, the shape of the E, the asymmetry of the A and E, the whole thing. Plus, this is just straight street bombing. Dude had a can, climbed halfway up a fence, caught a tag where you can see it. That’s just the post-train era in its purest form. We can like it, or not like it, or not care. We can invent all kinds of meaning for it. But that’s the practice.

Til nekst time.