Seven Red

“On and on and on
How the alphabet boys carry on…”
- The Gaslight Anthem, Orphans

Just some flicks today of a recent rooftop by HERTS, OMENS, and, of course, NOTEEF. I should note that about half the local hits on this blog come from people looking up some combination of “NOTEEF” and “graffiti” and “Chicago” on Google, and finding the previous image I put up of a Brown Line rooftop. So here’s to driving traffic this way. I’m also unclear on the relationship between “HERTS, ROGER, and SNACKI/SNACK ATTACK, who all seem to be the same person to me, but maybe it’s different people. In any case, SNACKI is hilariously famous round these parts for these kinda awesome faces he does everywhere. He even got the attention of the New York Times, which of course sent a reporter to track him down. She does, only to realize it’s not the Jean Michel Basquiat (or fake ass banksy) interview she’s been dreaming about, but rather an interview with an actual, y’know, graffiti writer. The stark difference between his description of his own work and the overblown nonsense of every non-writer’s favorite “street artist” (i.e., fucking fake ass banksy) is just about perfect:

Soon, he was talking about graffiti the way some people talk about coffee. Or crystal meth. “It’s an addiction, honestly,” he said. “And like any other addiction, everyone starts for a different reason. At this point in my life I couldn’t imagine not doing it.”

But why graffiti? Why create art that is, by definition, impermanent? Not to mention illegal?

“When you put a gallery show together,” he said, “it’s only going to attract a certain crowd. If I paint a billboard that you can see from I-94, Amtrak and Damen, it’s going to hit a lot more people than just some college hipsters or some 40-year-old art collectors.” [MY NOTE: Amen, brotha.]

Much to my disappointment, snacki did not seem to be a lunatic genius. Very bright and slightly squirrelly maybe — but utterly lacking the self-importance I’d assigned to him from afar.

“At the end of the day,” snacki said, “writing graffiti is just acting like a little kid, and running around and having fun. It’s about not taking myself seriously.”

Wise words. If only he’d shared them with me back in December.

She wishes he could have said them back in December so that she wouldn’t have had to waste her time with the interview! Well, looks like she got took, too. So, the HERTS, I think, is this SNACKI, but I may be wrong. You might notice that GRAM, another guy who hangs with these cats, and “SNAX” are listed in NOTEEF’s fill-in (in the “N”), so maybe HERTS isn’t SNACKI. There is, however, a HERTS fill-in with one of those SNACKI faces on a garage near Diversey, so I’m just confused. In any case, enjoy.

HERTS, OMENS, and NOTEEF KWT 2NR. fill-ins, rooftop, Brown Line at Western

NOTEEF, since the one above cut him off. Brown Line at Western

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.

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.

The big story in Chicago this week—apart from the fact that Illinois Democrats elected for Lieutenant Governor a pawnbroker who once held a knife to his girlfriend (who happened to be a masseuse/prostitute, and by “once,” I mean five years ago)—is the major service cut for the CTA. Buses, trains, everything will have fewer runs, and therefore more time between runs, and the whole machinery of public transportation will therefore be more crowded. A thousand CTA workers lost their jobs. This all went into effect yesterday. So I get on the train this morning at around 7:20, and see this. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a live paint tag on the inside of a running train, but I’d guess twenty years. It’s like that “Life After People” show, where everything collapses in 36 hours. Tuesday morning, the second day of the service cuts, and they’re running rush hour trains with effin’ paint tags on the inside doors? Is it gonna be a free-for-all?

MEALZ, Brown Line

Oh, and it appears that my obnoxious chuckling over southern snowstorms has come back at me, as we’ve doubled the season total in like the last six hours.

Nothing too exciting today. Just a collection of recent-ish stuff on and around the Brown Line. Enjoy.

CHILE and TYPE, Brown Line between Diversey and Fullerton

TYPE XMEN Detail

CHILE Detail

ROGUE (under the El tracks, near Fullerton)

ROGER/ Snack Attack faces, on Lincoln near Addison

Crazy NINE hits the Montrose rooftop, again.

Looks like NINE is at it again, hitting the Montrose rooftop for what must be the fourth or fifth time this year. This time he’s using a completely new style, which is a relief, since the old one was getting a little stale. I’ll have to get more pics, since the Brown Line rooftops are getting just infected; must be the recession.

NINE H20, Brown Line off Montrose

NINE detail: SPRAY IT, DON’T SAY IT. (Couldn’t agree more…)

So she shows me a copy of Time Out Chicago that features the web site bombchicago, billed as “perhaps the only website dedicated to documenting the local street-art scene.” Er, excuse me. Of course, my readers well know that I don’t document so-called “street art;” I document graffiti. So I guess that’s semi-accurate. The proprietor of the site, operating in full resentment mode, gets all pissed off that the state thought doing business as “Bomb Chicago” was in poor taste, and he says the following:

The graffiti artists that [the site is] following encounter the same attitude. They’re fighting censorship, and we’re documenting their process. In doing that, we became a victim of the same censorship.

I never met a graffiti writer in my life who was “battling censorship,” but then, they didn’t go around calling themselves “street artists” either, so there it is. But she pointed out the funny part of the article:

Last week, we followed up with the DBS, explaining Lee’s situation and asking if it was aware that bomb is a graffiti term. “Until you said what you said, I didn’t know what it was,” said Marilyn, a communications supervisor who didn’t give her last name. She explained that the process of determining whether an assumed name qualifies as offensive is subjective. “The final determination is made by our specialists,” she said. “It’s up to, basically, the office.”

So we asked Marilyn to reconsider Bomb Chicago. She put us on hold, talked for several minutes to her supervisor, Robert Durchholz, then got back on the line: “He doesn’t see any reason it shouldn’t go through,” she reported. “He said it’s not really distasteful.”

So for all Lee’s sniffiness about “censorship,” it turns out that the state bureaucrats really don’t give a flying fuck about “street art,” and figure it’s A-OK if it’s only about, like, bombing and not, you know, bombing. I should note here that any graffiti can be prosecuted as a felony in the State of Illinois. In any case, here are some felonies, since I’m not really “dedicated to documenting the local street art scene.” Harrumph.

NOTEEF fill-in, off Diversey stop, Brown Line, August 2009.

TYPER, XMEN Crew, Off Diversey stop, Brown Line, August 2009.

DEK fill-in, off the BQE, Brooklyn, August 2009.

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.

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…

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.