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nothense

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  1. Thank Christ for something like a an engaged response, first, yes, the posts i saw by grad students looking for input were at 12 oz, a cat from Harvard who has articles on Artcrimes asking about the effects of the internet on graffiti and graffiti culture, and a girl doing research about gender roles, second, you really don't have any idea at all about where I come from, where I've been, what I've done or who I've known, and can have no idea whatsoever what motivated me to begin posting here, anything that you want to posit about me---i'm an oppurtunist, codescending philanthropist, not a writer, etc--is phantasy projection and remains irrelevant to whatever exchange you might want to have, no matter how combatively, here, and no, man, its 'not my war'? and its not yours either, what, you want to co-opt the fight to reclaim public space? you think that writers are the only ones that have an investment in the social effects that graffiti works? you think that because you've been writing for however many years that you have a privledged access to some orthodox interpretation of the act? Come on, man, you know that whatever graffiti is to you, its not that for everyone, like any act of meaning production, fuck, like any act of pruduction, graffiti is a cultural phenomenon, decentralized, the result of a partcular alignment and opposition of forces and inputs beyond the scope of the individual, of the way that certain forms of information mesh and collide with each other on a large cultural scale and at the level of the individual artist, and for that reason, it is fair fucking game, its one more text that can be interpreted like anything else, and like any more conventional text, the author does not have any greater understanding of the cultural, economic, sexual or--given the general acceptence of some theory of the unconscious--even the personal forces that contribute to its pruduction, as for being an opportunist --- what? for having a conversation? what am exploiting here, man? whose getting taken advantage of? what is threatened here? is the very act of speaking about writing already taboo? is questioning meaning, motivation and consequence already to foreclose on something like the authentic aura of graffiti? I don't get it. You've seen the 'justify graffiti' thread, asking or answering the kinds of questions that have been raised here doesn't seem to be the problem, the problem as far as i can tell, seeker, has to do with style, with presentaion, and approach, that i didn't affect the right pose, didn't use the right kind of language, and that just seems like a cop out, the sign of a sham supeficiallity that your last post belies, and as for thinking that i'm doing writers a favor---man, how? i have some ideas, some feelings about graffiti that i want to involve in some kind of dialect with others, whatever i am doing here, it has far less to do with whatever i may or may not put in my thesis (after all there is more than enough material already written about graffiti to engage, i wouldn't need to 'tresspass' on this or any other site to patch together what you want to believe is my hobbled image of 'the scene') than it does with a personal interst, investment and, like you and everyone else here, a sence of community, even a virtual one, but you're right about the commodification of graffiti, or punk, or anything that was at one time thought to be subversive or dangerous or oppositional: its not dead once it hits walmart, but i wouldn't argue that it remains robust and viable in spite of its commodification, but rather that all that's happened is that its status as commodity has been made grossly explicit, what interests me is the way that graffiti even as a form popular protest (intentional or incidental) was always already commodified, from the very beginning, that it effected a feedback loop between the ubiquity of advertisement and the individual whose status as such is threatened by that force, it in many ways can be read as a sign of the effectiveness of late-stage capitalism, of the inividual perfectly merged with what in an earlier day would have been called the mode of production . . . whose war? war? with a slight shift in perspective and emphasis we can make writers the unwilling, unknowing dupes of the global capitalist monoculture their work at first seems to attack. No in this take on things, all the walmarts in world will not make graffiti obsolete, bc in this version, writers are the van guard of a new post human era in which even the living material body can only re-enact over and over again the feats and features of the commodity object. In this version writers don't get their originality re-packaged and thrown back at them, they only see their own habbits re-produced more clearly. . . and as far as i can tell its this tension between this idea and the notion of graffiti as subversive that is at the center of the hegemonic struggle for the 'meaning' of graffiti, a struggle which is going on and will go on whether you like it or not seeker, and i'm not just talking about in the academy, which is only one front, but on the streets also, and in pop-culture media and wherever, all the usual superstructural sites--- but whatever, its all just talk, right, piss off into the air if you are going to take it personally.
  2. this includes the threadstarter . . . seriously though, this is exactly on topic, from the point of view of writers, there is really no definition or analysis or theory of graff, there are as many ideas about what graf is as there are writers, but in terms of the institutions that have the power to set something like the "official" definitions of words and actions (the government, the universities, the popular media, the church etc.) graf is *being given* a meaning, from the outside, by people who don't have any experience of what it is like to write for real (just like the kid you called a poser who got an A on his paper and prob didn't know dick about graf--bc to me graf is about the risk and adventure of doing it, right, not some aesthetic value) on the one hand i am interested in this tension, and also how is gets articulated in cyberspace (it is the writers who have the money, time and resourses--such as computers, digital cameras etc--to get there stuff exposed on the web that get a sort of fame and noteriety that takes graf out of the purely local experience, and begins to take it out of the context of revolt from the margins in which it began--this is the same thing as graf in a gallery, it takes it off the streets where it expressed rage, unrest, boredom or whatever and made it a product, something people have to pay for, and thus totally taking away its power as a protest and then again i am part of this system (can't you tell) the university system, that is responsible for the re-appropriation of graffitti, but not entirely, half, maybe more, of me belongs to the steets, knows the street, and loves and fears the street, and definately does not want to loose touch with the street ("the street," it skind of a meaningless expression, but i think you know what i mean), so,whatever, i am to fuking faded to say anymoren except: ps, i know its "swallowed," big deal, glich is cool,
  3. lol, that shits funny, what gave it away? the way i fingure it graff entered academic discourse almost 20 tears ago, its not the most popular lens for social theory, but its there, right, and this, along with the inflluence of the art galleries and moveis and all other forms of mass media saturation and commodification, graf is being tamed, it seems, reigned into an always already privaized and regulated social space --- that is into the very social regions that graf seems most violently and intentionally target for disruption, jeezus, you see my dilemma here, the insoluble contradiction that i am attempting to maintain by trying to disamtle the master's house with the master's tools :crazy:
  4. to begin with, these are the points i am interested in: 1) the effects of local history on graffiti and how cyberspace (graf websites) impact local history, styles etc 2) the scocio-political impact of graffiti 3) the relationship between some forms of contemporary music (sample and loop based, hip-hop, reflexive IDM and laptop etc) and graffiti 3.5) the effects of graff on changing or emergent experiences of time and space any ideas? talk.
  5. no doubt, Hense and totem fuking dominate the atl. and Hense is up in some of the sickest spots i've ever seen, you can barely look up in that city without catching a glipse of one of of his pieces--even just a corner of one, in the distace-- peace and love to Das, risko, DOM (u'all r punk as fuk--still holiding it down on Ponce L5P?), dopez, toes, create, i miss u, out
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