Happy New Year!

Hey, how it's going? Is lucky 13 treating you well? Does it feel like it was just days ago that you were furiously, frantically, desperately trying to piece together out the final shards of an unwieldy opus, all while simultaneously working full time, shopping for the perfect presents for your family and trying to be what passes for social? No? Oh, that must be just be me.

And how about the guns? I can't be the only one who was so enraged by the mass shooting in Newtown as to be driven to distraction, unable to focus on much else. Am I right? I mean, who gives a shit about graffiti when people are DYING?!?

Ah, who am I kidding? I still care. I have to. It still brightens my day to see this sort of thing on the random street, as I did this afternoon on Amsterdam and 58th Street. And this is a blog about graffiti and street art, not the plagues guns. There will be plenty of time to get into that shit show. Must. Stay. Focused... 

I  saw this truck on 57th Street, near my office, waiting for a light, and although it drove off before I could get close enough to get a picture, I found it parked a few minutes later. Call it a small triumph for unpredictability.

So the thesis is done. Not DONE, of course, as that will happen at the end of spring, when I submit it to the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, for official approval. But the first complete draft of "New York City Graffiti Murals: Signs of Hope, Marks of Distinction," as I've called it, is in the can, at a whopping 20 chapters, two appendices, 150 pages, 39,184 words and 65 images. It is..well, it's a lot. As I tweeted back on December 19th, the last day of the semester, "That's right bitches, I wrote a book."

After three or so years, I definitely felt triumphant as I watched three copies of the thesis spurt from the copier at Kinko's—one for my adviser, one for my second reader, and one for myself. But holy hell, was it a relief too. For starters, Word turned out to be a much worse program to embed images into than I ever imagined, and since I under-estimated how long it would take to curate all the images I wanted to use, that last week was excruciating.

How screwed up is this document? Well, when I open it at work, Word freaks out and starts adding pages, by the THOUSANDS. Every time I tried to open it, it would get caught in this loop of adding pages, and if I let it go, it would reach 10,000 before I force quit the program. Thank god it's just fine on my home laptop.

But it's all worth it. When my adviser weighed in on it on January 3, she had this to say:

"Congrats and bravo on producing a terrific thesis. It represents a tremendous outreach effort and really brings together an enormous number of case studies and important materials. It really turned out wonderfully"

WOO HOO!

So we're entering in the final lap now. I still haven't heard from my second reader yet, but one thing I do need to do is (surprise, surprise) introduce more theory into the text. A running theme for this entire project could easily be summed up simply as MORE THEORY.

For instance, there this is, from Halsey and Young:

The writer who repeatedly tags a wall that is consistently painted ‘clean’ by the authorities knows that there is a better than even chance that a roller brush will eventually be used to bring the wall up to pristine condition. The same writer knows that he has helped turn a porous surface into a non-porous canvas. The latter is one this body can connect with in a more visually affective way.

And then this, from Kramer:

The presence or absence of graffiti determines the social, cultural and economic composition of the city. If the city allows graffiti, then surely “urban decay” will surely follow. If the city does not allow graffiti, then a condition of “urban vitality” will follow. That is, when the city fights graffiti, businesses will come to the city and tourism will boom. This will, in turn, create jobs and increase the tax base. All the residents of the city will benefit from such arrangements.

Both of these are quotes that I cite in chapter five, which highlights the interdisciplinary aspects of my research. I know that in my case studies, these strains of thought come through in my descriptions of how the graffiti murals came to be. But years of toiling in a newspaper newsroom trained me to say as much as possible in as few words as possible, which in this case is the opposite of what is required for  I need to be more explicit and weave references to these folks directly into the text. Oh, and make my conclusion a good three or four pages longer.

So I've got my work cut out for me, especially since I really want to ultimately want to turn this into an online project, and maybe even get it published somewhere in print form. It'd be nice to see this in a form more becoming than 8.5x11 pages with binder clips, you know?

In the mean time, there will be visits to places like Five Points Bushwick:

Greenpoint:
 

And good old Gowanus:

Cheers!
PV

Thinking of Red Hook

Today is one of those days where the entire day has been one giant distraction. How is Sandy affecting Connecticut? Long Island? Lower Manhattan? Coney Island? The ENTIRE FREAKIN East Coast? Oh, and the election that will decide the leader of the free world in all of eight stinkin days.

When faced with the kind of utter madness that is a hurricane like Sandy, when it's possible to spend the entire day cooped up in an apartment, alternating between caring for an infant and gawking at images of cranes dangling precariously from buildings....

Ah yes, in case you couldn't tell, this was written on Tuesday, when we were just waking up to discover that New York City and most of the coast along the Northeast had been turned upside down and shaken vigorously, like one of those cheesy snow globes you see in gift shops. And befitting that day, I got two paragraphs finished before getting utterly and hopelessly distracted.

Superstorm Sandy caught my attention for many reasons, and I'm still grieving for all that was lost in her vicious maw. But the neighborhood of Red Hook was of particular interest to me, partly because of its rich maritime history, (See here for a fascinating description of Fort Defiance, which was based there), but also because, in spite of its secluded geography, it has an impressive collection of street art. It also has, or rather had, an eclectic mix of bars and restaurants, many of which are now in peril.

A few years ago, Red Hook was actually being marketed as some sort of second coming of Williamsburg, the "NEXT BIG THING," but of course, with no subway to speak of and only one bus to ferry you across the Brooklyn Queens Expressway into the rest of Brooklyn, it was never going to happen. And now that Sandy has exposed how vulnerable the place is to wholesale inundation by the Atlantic Ocean, it's future is definitely up in the air.

I still love it though, and am hoping it recovers. Here are just a few street art-related reasons why:


UFO,  on Otsego Street right by Ikea


Great White Shark on ">Van Brunt Street 


Over/Under on Coffey Street You'll notice it doesn't show up on Google Street View yet; it's fairly new.

  Swoon on Pioneer Street This one is so new, the entire lot looks different on street view.

Tons more pics are living over at Flickr, along with, I'm sorry to report, several pictures of the damage inflicted on the neighborhood. Hang in there Red Hook. I'm pulling for you.

-PV