Bomb the City
So here's where I get to writing… 'Writing' has more than one meaning. Lately I have been thinking a lot about graffiti writing, inspired by rereading The Fortress of Solitude and re-watching Style Wars because of it. (Note: Anyone who has not seen Style Wars needs to beg, borrow or steal a copy and watch it. It ain't on Netflix, though. . . I've checked.) and because I read about Berlin being the most 'bombed' city in Europe and it made me want to add that city to the places to visit for my planned trip to Europe this summer. But yeah… I've always loved graf, noticed it, wanted to do it, tried it, failed. . . So now I just mentally catalog it. Graffiti is all around us… Well, at least here in New York, having retreated to rooftops, abandoned buildings, certain spots on the Manhattan Bridge and certain wall murals where permission has been granted… There may even be graffiti in museums somewhere, but I don't consider it authentic it if is on canvas. I don't consider it authentic if permission is granted. Some folks call it 'street art' and I think that describes it well, but also seeks to obfuscate the element of violation, of trespass, of mischief, the marking of the environment by people who have little power to change the urban landscape otherwise.
'Bombing' is another term used for graffiti writing, and 'bombing' is appropriate. It is a silent bombing that still tears up the environment and speaks to alert eyes that the hard and fast barriers of space and time that we are expected to believe in are mutable, illusory, self-fulfilling. These laws can be denied. And when I see the tags all around from the scrawls of hasty toys to the layered man-high inscrutable lettering of some neo-wild style aficionado evoking its meaning by obscuring its sense, I feel a certain glee. To some people graffiti is art and to others it is vandalism, but I have to ask, why can't it be both? Why can't art anger and destroy as it enlightens and creates? How much art does that with the same visceral and ubiquitous verve?
Bomb the City. I want Times Square's lights broken to spell unintentional words and truncated names… Tags… I want tags to be scorched onto the earth… I want graffiti to come crawling back out of the dark corners and hard to reach places. I want its crude cartoon superheroes to leap over the fences of the train yard, or better yet knock them flat and devour the dogs that run along the chain link gauntlet that acts as moat for the transit system's scattered fortresses.
'Throw-up' is another term. Some middle ground between the quick tag and the mind-blowing piece, a quick regurgitation of the tag's essence amplified by outline and fill-in. Two colors at the most… Three colors and you're getting too fancy, taking too long. Throw-ups are all over the City, bubble-letter stains of vomit issuing from the retching of youth that naturally rejects the system of laws, the recognition of property… Even when all other aspects of some writer's lifestyle buys into the culture of consumption, even when that silent revolt, rebellion is co-opted for urban fashion logos emblazoned on clothing and sneakers, there are reverberations of that bombing penetrating the culture, hoping to blow things up from the inside… Tiny controlled explosions generating profit like cultural reactors spewing radiation.
Cover the city in paint. In bright colors and in black and gray and silver, in circles and arrows like the City has become a map of itself marked with the plan for its own destruction. Once bombed trains snaked throughout New York emerging from the ground to pronounce with its rhythmic dragon roar that control was an illusion, that borders and barriers could be re-written and overwritten with a can of Krylon, with an El Marko, a Sharpie… Whatever… Destroy billboards by recreating them, subverting slogans, changing expression, covering it over with flat black matte and tracing silver stars to show us the night that skyscraper lights diminish. If only we could bomb commercials, infiltrate studios to undermine brand names with viral scribbles that reinterpret the narratives being super-imposed onto our lives from the outside, that we are told we can buy into. Cash in, honey.
Destroy all lines. You can go all-city and not emulate a king… You don't want to be the King of the Line, you don't want to be king of anything… Kings make subway lines, monuments, buildings, highways, those are the things you should be bombing, destroying, re-crafting, re-coloring, re-making. "I am concerned about idiots posing as kings / What are we to rule? I thought we're supposed to sing…" Yeah, let that Krylon can sing with color that elevates and harmonizes with that nozzle hiss, that can-shaking clank… Get to writing… Get to bombing, throwing-up, tagging… Get up with that window down whole car burners that run back-to-back… Let your name be known from Pelham Bay to Coney Isle and out to Jamaica Plains, and know that name means nothing except resistance, destruction, denial of control. I want a nightmare of color to shock the complacent and worry parents and anger authorities.
And I am not just talking about ZEPHYR or LEE or MONO, DONDI or SEEN (even though this is the best tag ever in my opinion, recognition manifest in the words "BEEN SEEN" on the side of a train) or even IZ the WIZ or any of the recognized masters of a lost age. I am talking about MADR (with his three story high paint rollered letters on the side of the wall above the New Utrecht Avenue stop on 'N' line) and ZECT and MOOSE and all the toy shit I see between the 9th ave and 36th street stops on 'D' line (and I love the comments on that page), or painted on the sides of taller residential houses that are unfortunate enough to abut some lower structure. I am talking about whoever paints those wack-ass white pac-mans just below the roof level of buildings, defying gravity to 'get up'… I want to give props to the kids who faced with modernized graffiti-proofed trains decided to steal a case of those "Hello, My name is" stickers from school or work or church or wherever, and started tagging those and sticking them all over the place. I want to credit the ingenuity of the guy who first decided homemade stencils made for quicker work in places you might not be able to get away with making the outline, doing the fill-in… And all the sticker art that is plastered on construction sites and alley walls, I admire the effort to make those glossy adhesives, even as I am suspicious of the expense… I hope those guys are somehow stealing the resources to make those things, not spending the last pennies of their bike messenger jobs, or worse yet, just tapping into their trust funds… But fuck it, I want it all out there, from the most primitive scrawl to the deepest 3D complicated shit.
Bomb the City. Tear the shit open with bubble-letter shaped wounds of blood red and gan-green and bone white, and some kind of fucked up alien blue. Do something. 'Write.' 'Writing' means to write graffiti, or at least in certain contexts it does without any doubt. No one thinks you are going to write a poem or a novel or a fucking dissertation. This here, this is the only writing I do, for what it's worth (nothing. Less than nothing) - Here, but there is also my academic writing, wherein I do my own form of academic graffiti, using footnotes for colloquial explanations, asides, tangents… I interject the personal. I try to disrupt the artificiality of academic paper with another voice I have at my disposal. A voice not unlike the one I often use to write here, a voice that can't help but be skeptical and irreverent and calls into question the whole endeavor - but it is also measured, apportioned, used with care, sometimes not used at all - And I want to let it free. Not in the body of those works, still relegated to the formality of footnotes, as I think that lends it is subversive quality, but also wildly, wantonly, attacking academia even as it takes part in its rituals. Bombing that paper with little throw-ups. Just writing.
'Bombing' is another term used for graffiti writing, and 'bombing' is appropriate. It is a silent bombing that still tears up the environment and speaks to alert eyes that the hard and fast barriers of space and time that we are expected to believe in are mutable, illusory, self-fulfilling. These laws can be denied. And when I see the tags all around from the scrawls of hasty toys to the layered man-high inscrutable lettering of some neo-wild style aficionado evoking its meaning by obscuring its sense, I feel a certain glee. To some people graffiti is art and to others it is vandalism, but I have to ask, why can't it be both? Why can't art anger and destroy as it enlightens and creates? How much art does that with the same visceral and ubiquitous verve?
Bomb the City. I want Times Square's lights broken to spell unintentional words and truncated names… Tags… I want tags to be scorched onto the earth… I want graffiti to come crawling back out of the dark corners and hard to reach places. I want its crude cartoon superheroes to leap over the fences of the train yard, or better yet knock them flat and devour the dogs that run along the chain link gauntlet that acts as moat for the transit system's scattered fortresses.
'Throw-up' is another term. Some middle ground between the quick tag and the mind-blowing piece, a quick regurgitation of the tag's essence amplified by outline and fill-in. Two colors at the most… Three colors and you're getting too fancy, taking too long. Throw-ups are all over the City, bubble-letter stains of vomit issuing from the retching of youth that naturally rejects the system of laws, the recognition of property… Even when all other aspects of some writer's lifestyle buys into the culture of consumption, even when that silent revolt, rebellion is co-opted for urban fashion logos emblazoned on clothing and sneakers, there are reverberations of that bombing penetrating the culture, hoping to blow things up from the inside… Tiny controlled explosions generating profit like cultural reactors spewing radiation.
Cover the city in paint. In bright colors and in black and gray and silver, in circles and arrows like the City has become a map of itself marked with the plan for its own destruction. Once bombed trains snaked throughout New York emerging from the ground to pronounce with its rhythmic dragon roar that control was an illusion, that borders and barriers could be re-written and overwritten with a can of Krylon, with an El Marko, a Sharpie… Whatever… Destroy billboards by recreating them, subverting slogans, changing expression, covering it over with flat black matte and tracing silver stars to show us the night that skyscraper lights diminish. If only we could bomb commercials, infiltrate studios to undermine brand names with viral scribbles that reinterpret the narratives being super-imposed onto our lives from the outside, that we are told we can buy into. Cash in, honey.
Destroy all lines. You can go all-city and not emulate a king… You don't want to be the King of the Line, you don't want to be king of anything… Kings make subway lines, monuments, buildings, highways, those are the things you should be bombing, destroying, re-crafting, re-coloring, re-making. "I am concerned about idiots posing as kings / What are we to rule? I thought we're supposed to sing…" Yeah, let that Krylon can sing with color that elevates and harmonizes with that nozzle hiss, that can-shaking clank… Get to writing… Get to bombing, throwing-up, tagging… Get up with that window down whole car burners that run back-to-back… Let your name be known from Pelham Bay to Coney Isle and out to Jamaica Plains, and know that name means nothing except resistance, destruction, denial of control. I want a nightmare of color to shock the complacent and worry parents and anger authorities.
And I am not just talking about ZEPHYR or LEE or MONO, DONDI or SEEN (even though this is the best tag ever in my opinion, recognition manifest in the words "BEEN SEEN" on the side of a train) or even IZ the WIZ or any of the recognized masters of a lost age. I am talking about MADR (with his three story high paint rollered letters on the side of the wall above the New Utrecht Avenue stop on 'N' line) and ZECT and MOOSE and all the toy shit I see between the 9th ave and 36th street stops on 'D' line (and I love the comments on that page), or painted on the sides of taller residential houses that are unfortunate enough to abut some lower structure. I am talking about whoever paints those wack-ass white pac-mans just below the roof level of buildings, defying gravity to 'get up'… I want to give props to the kids who faced with modernized graffiti-proofed trains decided to steal a case of those "Hello, My name is" stickers from school or work or church or wherever, and started tagging those and sticking them all over the place. I want to credit the ingenuity of the guy who first decided homemade stencils made for quicker work in places you might not be able to get away with making the outline, doing the fill-in… And all the sticker art that is plastered on construction sites and alley walls, I admire the effort to make those glossy adhesives, even as I am suspicious of the expense… I hope those guys are somehow stealing the resources to make those things, not spending the last pennies of their bike messenger jobs, or worse yet, just tapping into their trust funds… But fuck it, I want it all out there, from the most primitive scrawl to the deepest 3D complicated shit.
Bomb the City. Tear the shit open with bubble-letter shaped wounds of blood red and gan-green and bone white, and some kind of fucked up alien blue. Do something. 'Write.' 'Writing' means to write graffiti, or at least in certain contexts it does without any doubt. No one thinks you are going to write a poem or a novel or a fucking dissertation. This here, this is the only writing I do, for what it's worth (nothing. Less than nothing) - Here, but there is also my academic writing, wherein I do my own form of academic graffiti, using footnotes for colloquial explanations, asides, tangents… I interject the personal. I try to disrupt the artificiality of academic paper with another voice I have at my disposal. A voice not unlike the one I often use to write here, a voice that can't help but be skeptical and irreverent and calls into question the whole endeavor - but it is also measured, apportioned, used with care, sometimes not used at all - And I want to let it free. Not in the body of those works, still relegated to the formality of footnotes, as I think that lends it is subversive quality, but also wildly, wantonly, attacking academia even as it takes part in its rituals. Bombing that paper with little throw-ups. Just writing.