Thoughts, musings and ramblings

Been too long. Wish I could say I have a lot to catch up on, but the truth is things have slowed considerably on the thesis. Urban political processes, the class I’m enrolled in for the spring, is sapping all of my time, including the time I thought I’d be using to edit my thesis. And in any case, do you really want to read about how I’m editing? Show of hands? Anyone? You in the back there? No? Ok, didn’t think so.

I will volunteer this though. Even though I’m done with researching the thesis, I still get a kick out of discovering new things that could be incorporated into it. It's hard to break a habit, you know? To wit, a recent piece by Reason Magazine titled How Graffiti Empowers Big Government.

The takeaway, as depressing as it is, goes something like this: As long as people promote and disseminate graffiti in public spaces, government will find a way to clamp down, in ways that increasingly become more oppressive and less forgiving. As the writer accurately notes, "Few $17 billion industries strive to get smaller."

It's a an occasionally funny read, and even I chuckled when I read "Indeed, perhaps because so much of it is done in the dark, under difficult conditions, quality control is a particular challenge for graffiti—it has probably unleashed more bad art on America than open-mike poetry slams, every incarnation of The Gong Show, and the NEA combined."

Indeed, a lot of graffiti is crap. I totally understand why one would want to erase it. Would I be fine in a world where there were NO "abatement," as they prefer to call buffing? Eh, probably not. For starters, I've seen pictures from back in the day where entire windows of trains were blotted out. Not cool kiddos.

But then we get this:

"So while graffiti advocates present graffiti as a liberating force that allows individuals and communities to reclaim public space, graffiti has also given local governments a pretext to expand their coercive powers."

I feel like this is one of those straw man arguments. For starters, um, 9/11? Was it kids with spray cans who drove the government to pass the Patriot Act and expand its powers to spy on Americans all the time in every way technologically thinkable? Let's keep this in context here.

And who does this guy think really believes that all graffiti contributes to "reclaiming public space?" Is the kid who did this to my front door reclaiming the public space that is my doorstep?


I suppose you could argue he is, and maybe three or four militant anarchists would agree with you. But honestly, it's not as if it's some big loss if it just goes away. Our door is an unobtrusive, if dingy thing to see. The tag is really no more significant in the grand scheme of things than the random shoe soles or the empty 40 that also happened to be there one morning. I feel quite indifferent to it. Ok, maybe I hope Dinker will get off his ass and do something more creative before he gets caught by the po-po and booked. That's really it though.

Rather than get caught up in the endless "Is it good/Is it bad?" argument, I'd really prefer it if more people paid attention to the ways that artists can look at "blank" surfaces and see so much more. In Halsey and Young’s Our Desires are Ungovernable’: Writing Graffiti in Urban Space, they note:

"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."

You may be wondering, what the hell does it mean for a body to connect in a more visually affective way? For an example, check out this:


I found this via Vandalog, and I adore it. It's like taking the old writing of "Wash Me!" on the back of a dusty car and jacking it up a thousand times. The fact that it requires nothing more than a rag and water strikes me as brilliant, and illustrates such a fascinating flipping of power. To the extent that changing the appearance of a space is about exercising power, this is the opposite of the norm: Instead of "Clean surface owned by actor A. is rendered unclean by actor B.," you get well, you've watched the video, so you know.

I wonder, how does this fit within the realm of the story in Reason? Is turning the government's neglect (in this case soot) into art some sort of provocation on the level of my buddy Dinker? Or is it possible that it is, in fact, an example of how art will make itself felt in public, no matter what? I don't know what Alexandre Orion is doing these days, but I hope the folks in Sao Paulo are smart enough to harness his creativity. Cause damn, those skulls are cool!
-PV

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

Surprises, wanted and not

I went for a long run through Red Hook on Sunday. It’s a meandering route that I’ve made my go-to for longer runs. I like it because it’s relatively desolate and therefore easy to navigate, and also because well, I’ve just gotten used to it. I’m familiar with it. As I’ve documented before, it’s the site of some really cool street art, so some of the familiarity stems from specific landmarks that I like to check up on from time to time. After all, this is a most fleeting, form of expression; here today, gone within  a day or a week.

Some of my journey is along the lines of ‘Cool, the Swoon is still there. Ah, another wacky wheat paste has joined collection of marks on that derelict, collapsing apartment building. Rats, the shark painting is gone, but now there’s some sort of portrait of a woman in its place. And oh, hey, how have I missed all this time this kick ass carving into the sidewalk of a shadow of a tree nearby?!? (Sorry, no pics yet)

That, my friends is the essence of living to me. I have found that I have such a short attention span, that I crave the random surprises that pop up from time to time, even in places that I think I know so well. It's like walking through an endless field of green grass blades and suddenly stumbling on a bright yellow dandelion.

[Spoiler Alert: I'm tacking into something very different now, but will return to this in time]

But not all surprises are good ones. When it comes to some situations, I'm very grateful that I already know the answers. For instance, I am 99 percent certain that on any given day, no one around me has the ability to kill me without some serious effort on their part. They may be carrying the occasional knife, but I know they’re not armed with a firearm that is capable of ending my life or anyone I love with the simple squeeze of a trigger.
 

And yet…

After 27 people, including 20 small children, were massacred in Newtown on Friday, I have to wonder. Maybe there really are more people out there with arsenals stored in their basements, just waiting for the moment when civilization collapses, or some synapse in their head snaps. After all, Newtown is less than two hours away from here, and much closer to my home town, where a great number of people I treasure reside.

So what’s to be done then? The answer, it has been suggested in some quarters, is for folks like myself to be armed. After all, if I am armed, then it goes to reason that no one else who is armed will peg me as a target. Might makes right, an eye for an eye, and all that, right? And just five years ago, the Supreme Court cleared the way for me to own my very own gun, should I really want one.

Now, I could prattle on forever about gun control, mental health, the second amendment and the unique way that violence is enshrined in American culture. Indeed, all the above subjects have been rattling around in my head to the point of distraction ever since those poor people were mowed down in a hail of bullets. Save for a few token posts, I’ve even refrained from social media since then, as I felt no response could possibly due justice to the grief, confusion, rage and helplessness I’ve felt since then. Were it possible to translate all those thoughts into words on a screen, it might be….let’s just say it would not be pretty.

In any case, many others have already spoken so eloquently on the issue. I think of Nicholas Kristof, Gary Wills, Fordham's Saul Cornell, and of course my cousin Mary Beth.

But hey, just for shits and giggles, let's go in the opposite direction of the gun control crowd. Instead of limiting the purchase of AR-15’s and the kinds of high capacity clips that make slaughtering babies as simple as turning on a light switch, let’s suppose we even the score. Let's assume that the proper way to protect  children in schools is to give everyone in the vicinity permission to carry lethal weapons, preferably fully loaded, and holstered for quick access. No one ever will talk back to Ms. Jones again, right?

Fast forward to 2017. We’re there now. Every teacher has a pistol and knows how to use it. Presumably they’ve been given a break on the cost of buying it and ammunition, as well as the training they would need, because we all know what teacher’s salaries are like, right? Then what? I suppose the logic is supposed to work like this: The Newtown fuckwad-shithead-asshat-douchenozzle, having decided he’s going to kill someone, realizes that since he can’t kill many people at the school, he should kill elsewhere. Victory! Or not, since there’s still the town library. And the park. And the mall. And the town hall. And any public space, really!

'Ah, but Patrick,' I hear myself saying, 'You missed the point here. Once the teachers are armed, then it stands to reason that everyone would be armed. You, me, your sister, that guy who lives down the block, the gas station attendant, you name it. The way this sort of system would work would be if it were some sort of cold war—You don’t shoot me, because someone around me might shoot you.

I think the Cold War analogy is a great one, because we basically bankrupted the Soviet Union by forcing them to devote more and more resources toward weapons, until they could deploy no more. And so too, would we be sucked into a black hole of ever increasing expenditures to protect ourselves. After all, there are guns, and then there are GUNS, like the aforementioned AR-15. I don’t pretend to be an expert in fire arms, but I do know that some of them shoot faster, some of them shoot more accurately, and some of them shoot bullets that are much more efficient at ripping flesh to shreds. Newtown fuckface exterminated 27 out of the 29 people he shot, so if nothing else, he was a great example of efficiency. If you were a teacher determined to protect yourself and your students, you’d have to take time out of your day mapping your lesson plan for the ABC’s to figure out how you’d counter that.

But then again, maybe not, because as we know from the shit stain who pulled a similar stunt during a movie in Colorado, when you embark on a killing spree in the U.S., the hot new accessory is body armor. You too can be a one man Swat team now. The best offense is a good defense, amIright?

But back to the element of surprise. Of all the things you can do to maximize an all American slaughter, making the first move is key. That’s why even the stories you read about armed citizens thwarting mass shootings usually feature the slaughter of five or six poor slobs. If you’ve got the initiative, the NRA will make sure you can get the tools you need to make the first strike. I thought of this the other day when I guy was executed in broad daylight a block from my office with just one well-placed bullet to the back of his head, but thanks to Newtown, we now know just how much killing you can do if you put your mind to it. Given the kind of fire power he had at his disposal, who CARES if the teachers had been armed? They probably wouldn’t have A. Expected to be ambushed by a lunatic. B. Had time to react to his fussillade. Or C. Been able to go toe to toe with his firepower. Who knows, maybe one of them might have missed and shot a 6 year old instead…

The best offense is ALL defense, which to me means making it as hard as possible for anyone to mount an attack in the first place. If we can’t be sure deep down that we're safe, we will be forced to either turn this country into a literal police state, with armed guards stationed at every single public space in the land, or we'll will have to take up arms ourselves, and assume everyone else around has too.

So forget marveling at the newest graffiti production, wheat paste or sticker that has sprung up in a forgotten corner of my borough; I will be too damn busy worrying if the asshole I just bumped into on the subway is a mortal threat. Or worse yet, some other asshole is going to get the hairy eyeball from another jerk, exchange words, and let the bullets fly while I’m standing in the middle.

It already happens in places like the South Bronx, despite heroic efforts by the NYPD to stop it. And now it’s happened in Newtown, and five days later, I still feel waves of sadness role over me when I think of those poor women and children, ripped out of this life in as viciously a manner possible. I can do nothing to grant them a reprieve from the evil that befell them, but I hope to god I can help stop this escalation of death that is gripping us, and pummel this notion that violence can defeat violence back into whatever wretched place it came from.

I want my surprises to be good ones.

A word about context

A couple of days ago, the weirdest thing happened. I more of less finished the theis. Well, sort of. Although I still had to write a table of contents, a title page, and some acknowledgements I'd like thank um, Jesus, etc....), when I finished the chapter about the owner of a building in Gowanus, the heavy lifting was done. Kick ass!

Now, it's sort of a slog. First up, combine the different chapters into one document. One chapter, about Five Pointz, has pictures already, but the rest of the thesis does not. Still, it weighs in at 138 pages. Basically, I feel like I've run a third marathon with this puppy. Maybe this is mile 22 or so?

Next, re-reading the entire thing AGAIN. For some of the earlier chapters, this is probably the tenth time I've read them, since many started life as papers for classes I took as part of my masters' program. That's one of the nice things about this Urban Studies program—professors try to help you work your thesis into their classes whenever possible.

Anyway, I've now re-read and rejiggered the first nine chapters, or 43 pages, and I hope to be done with that, and picture selection, by December 12, so I can turn in the whole shebang by the 19th. Oh yes, this motherfucker will happen.

Now, about the "context" that I mention in the title. Perusing Wooster Collective a couple days ago, I ran into this. Wooster Collective is updated pretty infrequently, but every once in awhile, they really clear the air. This is a post about Banksy, who is arguably the most famous street artist around, and while I am writing about authorized graffiti murals, and not (mostly often) unauthorized street art, both phenomenon are weakened considerably when they are taken out of the contex in which they were created. The chap over at Vandalog likens it to telling a joke with just the punch line, and nothing else.

As chance would have it, I make a similar argument in my paper, by quoting from Walter Benjamin's  The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, which he wrote in 1939. To wit:

"The uniqueness of the work of art is identical to its embedded-ness in the context of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. What was equally evident to both was its uniqueness, its aura."

I delve into this quote a lot in my thesis, but the basic premise is that graffiti murals can't be anywhere BUT the street, because of their connection to the gritty reality that the street embodies. Likewise, if you only look at a piece like this: 
 



You will not understand that it is embedded in a scene like this:


Or this:



Or that another part of this scene is this:



Mmmmm, rotten produce....

These are a from my visit to Hunt's Point in the Bronx, the home of the TATs Cru, and they'll be a part of chapter ten of what will come to be known as either "New York City Graffiti Murals: Signs of Hope," "New York City Graffiti Murals: Marks of Distinction," or something else if inspiration strikes me.

The Outliers

Coming down to the wire. Finished the chapter on the "Graffiti Free New York" program, and begun the final chapter, which is a bit about a building owner in Gowanus who's chosen to have his building buffed by the city, and isn't quite keen on getting a mural done. Instead, he's quite happy with this:

Sexy, right?  You just have to love the way they've barely even bothered to use matching paint to buff the graffiti that was there. Why, it's kind of an abstract block piece, don't you think?

Now, contrast this with another picture, which I also took in Gowanus a few years back:

Now that's what I'm talking about!

Now, the funny thing about graffiti that I've discovered as I've worked on this thesis is that although this last image is kind of what I always envisioned it to be, and what I've always thought would be awesome to have more of, there are lots of variations to the form.

Some of which go beyond mere color, shade and form (or lack thereof) and enter the realm of droll, on the one hand, and um, let's just say, "provocative" on the other. I've never seen in person the work of two artists in particular who represent these two poles, but I've learned a lot about them, from reading sites like Vandalog, Animal, Streetsy, Wooster Collective, The Street Spot and Brookyn Street Art.  Think of them as the outliers, commenting in a sort of meta way on graffiti and street art as a whole

First up is Mobstr

< And

The second image is a cheeky critique of street art in general, but it's the first one that I really like. It's the kind of pithy attitude that I wish I saw more of when it comes to buildings like my friend's up in Gowanus there, with his cornucopia of gray. Plan and simple: A building may look like shit with messy tags all over the place, but it looks just as crappy with a bunch of just as sloppy splotches of paint.

How big a deal can a guy be who seems to be known mostly for pithy sayings written in block letters? Well, as it turns out, big enough to be invited to participate in an art festival in England. The piece he did is very insider-y, to be sure, but just you gotta love that second one, the rain cloud piece, for its site specificity.

Then there's, Lush. Pretty much everything this guy does is NSFW. We're talking Hustler level pornography. Some of what he (I assume it's a he; he's always behind a mask) does is commentary that's obviously only meant for online consumption, like this. (I'm linking instead of embedding, so you can't blame me if you click on it at work and get in trouble).

And there's stuff like this. That's actually some of his tamer stuff; if you have a lot of time to waste, flip through his Flickr stream for some seriously weird, mostly misogynistic crap. The folks at Vandalog, where I first discovered him, seem to be mostly bemused by his shtick, and it's pretty clear that he sees himself as something of a provocateur. For some reason, I imagine he digs the Insane Clown Posse and Human Centipede movies.

So there ya go. Two thoroughly different takes on this whole "I'm gonna write some crap on a wall" concept. You can probably guess which one I prefer.

Cheers!

a blink of an eye later

Yeesh. Was it only two weeks ago I was kvetching about Red Hook? Forget the schedule, the schedule's all been shot to hell. Part of the reason is I used up a lot of time to work on what ended up being an 11-page paper on Five Pointz, and part of the reason was, well, life has been getting in the way.

At least on the former aspect, I've got a bonus chapter for my thesis that I never thought I'd be able to add. And today I finished a chapter on the Department of Transportations' Urban Arts Program and Groundswell Mural Arts Program, which is similar to the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. Neither facilitates the creation of graffiti murals per se, but they do some really neat stuff on both public and private land around New York City, and Groundswell, I feel, could be a great clearinghouse for artists available for mural work.

I'll get into this a little more soon, but right now I'm about to pass out. So in the meantime, here's one of their most recent murals, a few blocks away from my house, on the side of a jail:

More soon. I promise. Sleep, now.....

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