Seven Red

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

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…

Last Friday I showed you NINE’s piece on the rooftop near Montrose. It turns out that this guy has been going off, stamping versions of this burner on rooftops up and down the Brown Line, essentially, as we used to say, killing the line. On Tuesday I noticed a new NINE piece just north of the Chicago and Franklin stop, and Thursday morning on the way in I noticed yet another NINE piece at Diversey. The guy’s on a crime spree. You’ll often get this in writers: bursts of activity followed by relative lulls. I think all of these went up in the last two weeks, which is a pretty productive two weeks, all things considered. There must be some study on that feeling though, where you get over on one rooftop, and then you’re just out of your mind to do another one, Rusto fiend, just crazy for it. I remember this. It’s like you don’t do anything for two months, and then you catch a fill-in on some borrowed cans, and suddenly it’s “Let’s go rack some cans we gotta go out tonight tonight!” The high is unbelievable. Nothing like it since, really (not nothing better, just nothing like it). Anyway, in recognition of some nice work, I’m doing an all NINE Graffiti Fridays today to showcase this guy’s stuff. We’ll start with the detail flick from last week.

NINE, Brown Line off Montrose

NINE, just north of Chicago and Franklin, Brown Line

NINE WRS, Brown Line off Diversey

And just for context on the Chicago and Franklin and the Diversey piece:

paint, says the sign. Well, OK. So, how would this rank on the scale of risk/reputation? Pretty high, I’d say. If we go back to the original claims in the series, they are as follows: graffiti writers write primarily for other writers, with non-writers serving as a secondary and for the most part unimportant audience; graffiti is asignifying – the tag doesn’t “mean” anything, but rather pushes and pulls categories; graffiti is a reputation economy, where writers invest risk in return for reputation – the whole set of categories runs on this engine of risk-reputation, with aesthetics being one factor, but a factor heavily affected by the risk-economic considerations (i.e., complex pieces take longer, and thus increase risk); finally, people who don’t know about graffiti tend to either aestheticize it (“I hate the chicken scratch tagging, but some of those murals are really beautiful!”) or make it into a standard political statement, a signifier (graffiti means “rebellion” or appropriates from and thus participates in mainstream cultural forms). And yes, I understand that one could read me as saying that graffiti signifies its own risk, is a trace of that risk. This is true: it’s at once a trace of the risk and independent of it, just as it’s at once completely dependent on mainstream culture (which provides the prohibition, and therefore the risk) and independent of it, in that it’s not particularly interested in speaking to mainstream culture. This is a very odd relationship that has gone more or less unstudied as a conceptual matter.

According to the economic considerations I outlined, these would rate high for three reasons: 1) they would take far more time than a simpler work; I’d estimate that each of these would take somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour. The Chicago and Franklin piece is probably the least risky from the point of view of time (30 minutes maybe), but it’s no cakewalk.  So, essentially, for thirty minutes to an hour, NINE was in the open committing what is in Illinois an ongoing felony. Think about that. Hardly any other crimes work this way, from a temporal perspective. 2) The time is one thing, the location is another. As I discussed, graffiti is about real estate. You could do an eight-hour piece in a place nobody would see it, and somebody else would get more credit for five or six quick three minute jobs in busy locations. It’s all about the risk you’re incurring. If you check the context of these, the locations are in the red zone of exposure. Rooftops are particularly tricky, because if you’re spotted, you’re pretty much caught. There’s nowhere to go. The Montrose piece is on a well-lit, very exposed rooftop directly adjacent to the platform, so, you’re pretty much out there for the taking if somebody comes up on the platform and decides to call the cops. I’d give the guy props for doing even 10 minute fill-ins in those locations, so this is above and beyond.

Finally, 3) from the point of view of aesthetics, these are very well done. The classic New York style (pre-90′s) has flat letter-interiors, clear letter outlines, and smooth curves; the depth is handled in external 3-D (either isometric or in one-point perpective). (I linked that SEEN piece in particular because it uses precisely the same opening loop as each of the NINE pieces; that feature is clearly derived from SEEN’s classical style). The post-90′s styles are much more complex, with no outline, depth indicated by realistic interior shading, “broken” and disconnected letter-forms, and two and three point perspective with varying vanishing points. These NINE pieces are hybrids, mixing the old style flat letters, where the depth mostly came from the 3-D, with the shaded interior-letter techniques that emerged in the mid-90′s. You see this most of all in the Diversey piece, where he’s working with four blue shades to give the letters a rounded interior look independent of one-point perspective exterior 3-D (in purple). Now, some of the blending is a little bit rushed and sloppy (the second N in the Diversey piece in particular), but these are rooftop burners, felony-charge burners, real graffiti, exit-value graffiti, not art murals for smiling liberals. I’ll give the guy a pass on some rushed blending. You also see the more angular cuts and broken letterforms (as I’ll show below), married with the old-style smoother curves, especially in the symmetrical loops that precede the first N’s and close the lower-case E’s. In a table of risk, then, for these reasons, this is well up there.

Graffiti Literacies

The crowd is crucial
MC’s grounds are neutral
Now that you’re here let me introduce you
Get ready
I’m hard to read like graffiti
But steady
Science I drop is real heavy
Rakim, Let the Rhythm Hit ‘Em

So I showed these to she, and she was suitably impressed (probably keying in on my excitement), but she gave me the usual “I can’t read that” line, even when I pointed out the letters. Nope, she said, I don’t see how you’re getting NINE out of that. In fact, all three pieces use the same basic outline, with some really interesting stylistic variations. But the letterforms are essentially identical. This cuts down the time it took NINE to complete these: he has a set piece that he does, and he doesn’t have to spend too much time messing around with the initial outline. Since I assumed some of you, dear readers, are in the same boat as she, I thought I’d take a minute to indicate the abstracted letterforms. So, in each of the following, I’ve reduced the image to about 75% transparency, and added a quick outline of the letterforms. You should see an uppercase N, a straight line for the I (it’s dotted in the Diversey piece), an uppercase N, and a lowercase E that overlaps with the second N. I didn’t do the Chicago and Franklin piece, but it works the same way.

Now I’ll take the images back up to 100%, but leave the rough outline:

Obviously, there’s a lot more going on in both of these than the abstracted letterforms, and I almost feel bad butchering these pieces with those, but that’s what they look like. I left out the opening loop that precedes the first N in all three pieces in order to not confuse the start point for the N’s letterform. Just as another example, if you look again at the originals without the silly “Can you see it” outlines I threw on, you’ll notice that NINE consistently breaks the E at bottom curve, using elements of a broken N to suggest the letter shape. This is good stuff. But the point here is simple: the pieces don’t lose track of the letters (the “e” is obviously the same in all three – can you see it now in the Chicago and Franklin piece?). They are legible, if you’re meant to read them. In my view, the Diversey piece is the best overall, but the Montrose piece uses really strong angles; it’s the most complex of the three. Just so I don’t come off as too much of a fanboy, I will say that NINE is just an atrocious tagger. Guy can piece, but those tags are bush league, just awful. We take it where we can get it, I guess.

But that’s all for today kiddies. Hope you enjoyed.

Spotted some new stuff on the Brown Line, so I wanted to take a little ride before it was buffed. Might get back to our series before too long.

Just east of Rockwell stop

NINE piece, Brown line rooftop near Montrose

NINE second view

NINE detail

LA County to hold taggers’ parents liable for graffiti

Parents will soon be held liable if their children are caught tagging property in Los Angeles County, according to an anti-graffiti ordinance approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors.

The ordinance will go into effect Sept. 18 and will allow the county to recover costs of removing graffiti. The county can also recoup unpaid costs by placing a lien on the property belonging to a tagger’s parent.

Awesome…

And, my favorite part:

According to the ordinance, graffiti costs more than $520 to remove, and another $665 to apprehend each culprit.

I want to see the actuarial tables for those calculations!

As I’ve already written about elsewhere, I consider the summer of 1994 something like the high water mark of my New Yawkahness. It was the summer the Rangers won the Stanley Cup, and also the summer that the “broken windows” policing of the Giuliani administration really started making itself felt in the everyday life of the Outer Boros. Around our way in Queens, we had two young ballbuster cops, named Brockman and Malone, who replaced a small middle-aged patrolman we called Officer Turtle, who used to sit down with us while we were drinking beer and ask us about the neighborhood, a real 1950′s model. As of June 1994, that was all over. Brockman and Malone handed out desk appearance tickets for just about anything, and threatened us with far worse for even minor infractions (“in the park after dark” and other such nonsense violations). They were notorious; my friend V. made a techno song about them.

This change really resulted in a kind of general euphoria, an early fin-de-siecle, wherein everything sort of felt like it was coming to an end. You also had the birth of new hip hop behind Biggie and the Wu; the soundtrack to that summer was nothing if not 36 Chambers and Ready to Die, thumping out of every car and inundating every keg party, sometimes competing with the awful “Far Behind” by Candlebox. And, of course, it culminated in Woodstock 94, a fucking mess, like a hazy question mark on the whole thing. Whenever I go home and hang out with guys I grew up with, talk always turns to that summer; it struck us all, I think, as a real transition moment, from one kind of life to the next (indeed, I never lived at home another summer after that…)

So, now, I see the buzz all over for The Wackness, a new comedy that’s doing its best to hype itself as “the new Juno.” Of course, I must add to this buzz in order to discuss it – this is the condition of speech in what a professor I know likes to call just-in-time capitalism. In any case, The Wackness is set in New York in the summer of 1994, and features the travails of a teenage drug dealer and his therapist (who he pays with pot, I take it). I guess I’m not the only one with the nostalgia. The marketing material has an obvious graffiti aesthetic (although they really could have got somebody to do some better graffiti, I think), and a top-notch soundtrack that gets a particular version of 90′s New York just about right. I guess I’ll have to see it when it comes out, but I suspect the Manhattan version of that summer (a fucking therapist?) is a bit different than what we were seeing in Queens and Brooklyn. See trailer here…

The Atlanta-Athens-Atlanta-Seattle trip went off without a hitch. I have yet to be really annoyed by the airlines. I’m more amazed at the logistics of it all, quite frankly. On Friday my co-panelist and I woke up in Athens, Georgia, drove over to a parking garage at UGA, went to the student center, did our spiel, got back in the car, drove to Hartsfield-Jackson, had a few beers, got on a plane, and in six hours we were in a bar in Seattle. I guess other people are more used to this sort of thing, but I find it amazing.

In any case, I was going to post the Top 20 RSA Presentation Mistakes, until I realized that I don’t really see many bad presentations at RSA, and I really don’t remember one. Even the ones I disagree with are at least well presented; it’s usually a case of “That project would be so much more interesting if I was doing it,” as one of my buddies and I said a lot, but that means it’s interesting and smart enough to consider doing. I was pretty happy with the show, all told.

Probably the best one I saw was my co-panelist from C&W’s presentation at RSA. His stuff is always sharp, clever, funny, and smart, and I always learn a lot about my own work by speaking with him, especially because we fundamentally disagree on pretty important perspectives (production/consumption, etc.). Luckily, I had a chance to see two of his presentations this weekend, and we also had a good talk over beers at some college bar in Athens. I also had a chance to hang out with all the old cronies in Seattle, which was fun, as always.

Our watchwords for the weekend were as follows: fastpitch softball (mmm), eggroll (don’t ask, won’t tell); cheese-grinder (youch); beshat (which is to say, Biblically); DNA (as in, “The prosecutor will tell you, ladies and gentleman of the jury, that you can put blood in a magical machine that will tell you who committed a murder!”). You may find this confusing, but I can assure you that each of these terms was repeated on the order of 500 times, to much hilarity. Good times.

Anyway, while doing the flaneur thing in Teargas City, I came across these, probably a legal wall on 2nd and probably Lenora. These are just detail shots. I’ll probably post more on Friday. Enjoy.

Gas Mask Character, HEWS, Seattle (2nd and Lenora?)

Character, SNEKE, Seattle (2nd and Lenora)

There was actually a lot of great stuff in New Orleans. Some kid EVAK basically killed the French Quarter, but unfortunately I didn’t capture much of that. Yes, I know now that I had a cellphone in my pocket the whole time, but I was in the French Quarter, and other things were occupying my mind. I did get some stuff while I was dry enough to think about it, though.

ISTO GOOSE Freight Train, New Orleans

RADID BSMZ Freight, New Orleans

DEPHO Freight, New Orleans

VENTO tag on wrecked building, off Canal Street

ASHER marker tag, in the bathroom of some damn bar or other…likely on Decatur.

I finally got a chance to catch American Gangster. I heard a lot of buzz about it when it came out, so I was expecting it to be pretty good. I really wanted to add it to Great New York City 70′s Films, put it up there with Warriors, you know. But it wasn’t. Instead, it was spotty at best, with choppy narrative, half-drawn characters, and general confusion. Not even Denzel – who I usually like (hell, I liked him in the awful Deja Vu) – or even Russell Crowe, or even a moderately killer soundtrack could save this one. What does any of this have to do with Graffiti Fridays? I’m glad I asked.

I may have been disposed early against the film because of its blatant graffiti anachronisms. They occur throughout the film, but were particularly noxious in the first few minutes, when Russel Crowe and his partner are discovering a bookie’s money in New Jersey, circa 1968. Here are some still from the offending scene:

I will tell you with full assurance that no such thing existed in 1968, period. It’s not merely that VELO, KUMA, and MEER hadn’t been born yet, although this is true in all likelihood. I don’t mean that the specific writers are anachronistic. I mean the form itself. It simply hadn’t been invented yet. There were no tag fill-ins or straight letters or throwees anywhere at all, much less on a rooftop in New Joizy. Nobody had experimented with the caps necessary to do that MEER throwee, period. It didn’t exist at the time. The form itself didn’t exist. Crowe could just as well have pulled out a cell phone and checked his email. That’s how off it is. You might as well have a Picasso hanging in the background of a Jane Austen flick. That’s how bad it is.

So, big deal, right? Wasn’t I praising Kubrick just a few posts ago for his anexact representation of Hue City in Full Metal Jacket? And really, isn’t the graffiti just serving as a signifier of urban decay here? Isn’t it just in the frame to develop that feeling of the late-1960′s and early 1970′s anomie? Yes, fine. I get it. That’s great. At the same time, I don’t see why’d you’d bother getting the cars just right, getting the clothes just right, getting the technology and phones and shoes just right, but leaving in something like that. And if you’re making the BIG movie, the putative Oscar contender, the “true story,” the secret history of New York, it’s pretty close to unforgivable. The film gets a 3 out of 10. The location scout gets a 1 out of 10.

If you want to see a bunch of writers celebrating this anachronism, go here. They also provided a more recent flick of that KUMA YOUTH rooftop: