Comments for Seven Red

Comment on Graffiti Fridays: How Many Texts? by topspun

topspun — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:13:22 +0000

OMNI: Ha! on the files. I don’t even want to know what they have…

1982 is a little before my time (more late 80′s-mid 90′s), so you must have tons to say, but yeah. Stories for friends, not web sites, right? Reminisce quite a bit when I get a chance to be back in Queens. Anyway, take care.

Comment on Graffiti Fridays: How Many Texts? by omni

omni — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:29:22 +0000

It was a long time 1982 on. But it doesn’t feel like it when I talk to everyone.
I have allot to say. But I’ll sum my thoughts with: enjoyed your article. I’ll stay tuned.

Oh yea, i remember being at elmhurst hospital and a detective knew me, I didn’t know him. Anyway, gotta check them NYPD Files.

OMNI KAC

Comment on Graffiti Fridays: How Many Texts? by topspun

topspun — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 17:39:35 +0000

Hey OMNI. You say “Also, KAC is a family.’Gang’- maybe by definition but not by practicality.” I agree with that completely, and I think it applies to most of the crews I was familiar with growing up. Whatever the NYPD had on file, it was really just a question of hanging out with and supporting the kids you grew up with, or kids that hung out in such-and-such a park or parking lot where we all spent most of our teen years. I think you’re spot on, and it’s what makes tag graffiti different from the kind of gang graffiti being discussed in the book I was referring to.

By the way, this post gets the most hits and traffic of any post I’ve written in this space, and they’re almost all hits from people in the NY area looking up “TMR Bayside” and “KAC Fresh Meadows” on Google, which is, I guess, pretty funny, all things considered. Feels like a long time ago when all that mess was going on, no? But now you have a lot of 30 and even 40 something year old guys checking out their old families through Google searches. Cheers, man.

Comment on Graffiti Fridays: How Many Texts? by omni kac

omni kac — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:40:23 +0000

I am not familiar with this article you critiqued. considering this sad written in 2007 you might not care but I am familiar with Fresh Meadows KAC.

There’s an interesting comment about what multicultural class is to whites cause my contrary redponse is why did non-whites learn so about caucasion history without acknowledge of American history that would include the non- whites who built America.

Also, KAC is a family.’Gang’- maybe by definition but not by practicality. What I am saying is when you live, establish a name and rep and associate those action to your tag name, where you live and you sets you apart from others; and you are still an individual within KAC (your group). So for me the language of reality seem alien. ie. a lot of big words, well placed, and left me questioning the purpose of the critic, how in touch the reader was or was it a rhetorical, theoretical philosopher. which is cool if you browsing through conceptions. I just saying, in that vane, I was left intransatively scratching my head, like really.

OMNI KAC

Comment on Social Media and the Art of Catching Up by topspun

topspun — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:45:34 +0000

A couple of points. First, yes, updates can make more stories available. Just as a quick example, somebody else I knew from Giant University Town asked me what was going on with the gangstas next door, which he would have known nothing about had it not been for reading my status updates. So, you get this set of topics that might lead to new stories that would seem otherwise unavailable. But I think gauging relevance is a kind of art you learn in a storytelling culture, and this would tend to automate that art. How might I slide the story of the gangstas next door into the regular flow of conversation? How might I judge its appropriateness? This sort of thing took some acuity and an intuitive feel for conversational dynamics. Here, everything is set out in advance. Maybe that’s good; maybe it’s bad. I wouldn’t make a biological claim, but might this automation not relate to the other issue you brought up? You’re quite right that the person reciting the already-known has in some sense misjudged my prior knowledge; you’re also quite right that evaluating prior knowledge is inherent in any storytelling situation (which is to say, in rhetorical situations more generally). But it seems like it’s precisely this capacity that gets scrambled. Now certainly, I’m not arguing that there’s been some fundamental transformation in the way we catch up. I’m saying the situation slides a bit to one side or the other of a spectrum. We’ll no doubt catch up to it, so to speak, and a whole new set of skills, a new way of gauging dynamics, will develop. I just feel like I’m bumping against the judgment SNAFU’s more than I have in the past; it seems like a ripe phenomenon for study. But two cheers for anecdotal evidence, I guess.

Great response, in any case!

Comment on Social Media and the Art of Catching Up by Matt

Matt — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 18:51:07 +0000

I’ll have to look up Thompson, he sounds fascinating.

I wonder if maybe this negative effect of proprioception isn’t more specific than you make out here? What I mean is: the reason storytelling would suffer in the case you describe is, in part, because your friend doesn’t know to what extent you are aware of his status posts. The tailoring of a story to the prior knowledge of the audience is pretty much always a given, right? If I think you might have already heard about a given event, I’ll check with you at the outset, maybe gloss over some details depending on your reaction, etc. In this case, the problem is just that a) your relationship with the speaker is such that your knowledge of his status updates is in question (he doesn’t know how much you know), and b) social media make it so that the audience can know a lot more than you might give them credit for.

On a practical sidenote, I have been wondering about page-view tracking on Facebook pages, and the question of how readership of social media might be tracked… not that I’m advocating a further ramping-up of surveillance culture, but I’d be surprised if people weren’t working on a popularized method for seeing who looks at your profile…

Isn’t there a flip side to this problem, the benefit that you are supplied with a ready-made set of topics to discuss, topics that you know will be relevant to your audient? If you’re looking for something to talk about with this guy, and it hasn’t come up yet, you have Korean cooking to fall back on. The question becomes, then: do the micro-updates spoil the experience of a more in-depth discussion of the topic, or can they also spark a conversation that might not have otherwise happened? If knowing that he is cooking Korean dishes regularly ruins the narrative, was there maybe not a lot to the narrative in the first place?

I saw an interesting paper at Cs on the spoiler as a genre of writing, and specifically a genre with a particular and peculiar relationship to kairos (the panel was on kairos more broadly). This seems like a related, but different, topic: how do these small windows into experience related to a longer narrative about said experience? I wonder too if the sheer proliferation of updates is the problem: if you were still living in [graduate school town], you might have heard through the grapevine that X or Y happened. You probably wouldn’t hear about it over and over again, though, in the way that status updates involve a kind of repetition of topic…

I am, I suppose, rambling. Interesting stuff, though!
-m

Comment on Graffiti Fridays: Stick-Up Kids is Out To Tax* by chicago

chicago — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:36:57 +0000

lmao at the OMENS stickers in Chicago.

theres a guy from gary,indiana that goes by OMEN
and hes ALWAYS up here so i thnk hes earned that name here.

he wouldnt be to happy if he know some wack handstyle lookin fuck was biting his shit on fullerton

Comment on Lookin’ at the Front Door by steventhomas

steventhomas — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:32:58 +0000

I really liked this post, and wanted to say something smart in response, but I don’t have anything and haven’t had time to read all the stuff you’re talking about.

But I recently implied a somewhat indirectly related comment here:
http://engl243.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/taxes-a-psychoanalysis/

Comment on Lemonade Mix by topspun

topspun — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:24:56 +0000

Well, I’ll start you off:

1. The National, Fake Empire (“put a little something in our lemonade, and take it with us…”

2. GangStarr, DWYCK (“Lemonade was a popular drink and it still is/ I get more props and stunts than Bruce Willis”)

3. Marcy Playground, Sex and Candy (“And there she was, in platform double-suede/ Yeah there she was, like disco lemonade…”)

Comment on Lemonade Mix by steventhomas

steventhomas — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:57:05 +0000

I can’t think of anything. It seems like there should be a Beat Happening song, since they sing about things like apple pie, baked alaskas, etc., but I can’t think of any song that mentions lemonade.