Seven Red

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:

Mad brothers know his name
So he thinks he got a little fame
From the stick-up game
- Gangstarr, Just to Get a Rep

Early in our series, I set out a table of risk according to which graffiti is evaluated. At the top of the table are illegal pieces, which assume the most risk because they take the longest. (They could be as risky as less time-consuming works depending on location; in graffiti as in real estate, it’s location location location: not just time, but the valence of place.) At the bottom of the table is the sticker, which assumes the least risk, at least according to the time criterion, since it takes just seconds to apply, and you can generally do so without being noticed, even in the the middle of the day. For the next couple of weeks, I want to work through that table; we’ll start today with the least risky, the sticker, and progress upwards.

Stickers are extremely versatile, since you can do just about anything on them, and it’s easy to place them. Many new writers will start with the sticker as they’re getting their bearings in the game. But old hands will still do stickers; they’re just another piece in the repertoire. Because the risk is so low, you generally can’t get fame on stickers alone (we’ll see a partial exception below), but if the goal is ups, stickers can be another means to that end.

Writers usually look for semi-permanent stickers. They should be hard to peel off. People used to use those “Hello, my name is…” stickers, or the post office stickers for Priority Mail, although these can be a little hacky, since the form still shows through. Both have the value of being easily boostible or, in the second case, free, although I’m sure there must be some statute against using the post office stickers for non-official purposes. They both also stick like crazy, though apparently not to fabric! More complex sticker operations involve wheatpaste postering. The main advantage of all stickers is that you have plenty of time to create them. You can do pretty intricate things with stickers, but I always preferred the ones that kept it simple: a tag or a simple throwee. Despite the “permanent” stickiness, they’re going to fade in the rain and probably peel off fairly soon, so wasting a lot of time with stickers doesn’t seem very useful. So, on to some examples of stickers. The first two are tag stickers, the flicks taken on Fullerton here in Chicago:

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