Tag; You’re It
January 26th, 2007 by 
Morgan J. Locke
OK, this may be too much sharing, but whatever. I’ve been pondering the phenomenon of graffiti.
I love street art. I love how it takes something kinda ugly and stupid—blank or dirty walls, sidewalks, annoying advertisements—and turns it all into something beautiful. This British artist, Paul “Moose” Curtis, is particularly interesting, because he achieves his effects by removing stuff, not by adding it. His “selective cleaning” efforts have been written up in numerous places.
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British authorities aren’t sure what to make of the artist who is creating graffiti by cleaning the grime of urban life. The Leeds City Council has been considering what to do with Moose. “I’m waiting for the kind of Monty Python court case where exhibit A is a pot of cleaning fluid and exhibit B is a pair of my old socks,” he jokes. |
I don’t live in the safest part of town—though by no means the unsafest—I live in a little middle-class neighborhood on the edge of the university’s student ghetto, not far from a massive subsidized-housing apartment complex. There’s quite a bit of gang activity in this area. A lot of tagging goes on, and the city has an aggressive graffiti removal program that entails making the kids caught tagging spend time removing graffiti by painting over it. Very Tom Sawyer-ish (though Huck Finn is more the tagging type).
Tagging is excretory. It correlates closely with gang activity and violence. Besides which, those stupid squiggles all over everything make it hard to read signs. They can be ugly as sin and annoying as hell. They promote violence. I’m not a big fan of the stuff. By and large, tagging is nothing more than pissing on bushes. Staking out territory.
But sometimes I will look at those squiggles and there’ll be something there—something that suggests more than just a pissing match. Something unique. A suggestion of artistic talent, perhaps; a sense of humor. And sometimes you get stuff like this:
I mean, my God; how can we compare this kind of thing to pissing on bushes? If this is piss, so is Beethoven’s Ninth. But street artists have to start somewhere, and it all begins with those annoying little squiggles that get in everybody’s way and annoy their peers to the point that they have knife and gun fights over it.
Most of us who aim to do something in the arts are lucky; we don’t risk bodily harm or arrest. But the thing about any kind of art is, you are taking a big risk every time you try to create it. Nobody is going to thank you for wasting their time and money—for taking up paper, or wall space, or any kind of yardage—if it’s crap. For street artists, the stakes are higher than for the rest of us, but there’s always a risk that you will crash and burn horribly in some metaphorical sense or another.
So, what you ask does this have to do with me? Good question.
About eight months ago, I quit a grueling day job, a job I’d spent six years beating myself bloody against. It took me several months just to get rested enough to be able to think. And then I picked up my book, which I’m almost done with, and workshopped it, got some excellent comments… and stalled out. I’ve been wondering if I really had anything to say that justified using up the paper and ink it’d take to print it. Wondering if I should leave the artistry for those with the stomach for it.
I never had trouble with my ego before. I’ve been writing since I was eight and could care less if anyone else thought it was crap or annoying scribbles, or whatever. I always took this fierce joy in it. No one else could take that away. What others thought didn’t matter to me. I always found time to write. Even if it was just a paragraph every day or two. I kept going. I kept faith with that part of myself.
But somehow that job really beat the shit out of me. Made me feel like just a big slab of meat. It reduced me to jelly. Didn’t matter who I was. Didn’t matter what I wanted. No room for me. Four to six hours of sleep a night, 50-70% of the time on the road, multiple bosses, demands beyond unrealistic and into the realm of sadistic…. no time for writing? Screw that; no time for my family. No time to be a human being.
I did it to myself, see. I put my own street artist in jail and threw away the key for six years. Doesn’t matter that I didn’t see any other way, that there were no other jobs and we didn’t have the money for me to make other choices. I sacrificed that part of myself to hard reality.
I’ve been trying to get over it, trying to forgive myself. I want to write this book; I love this book. It’s got artificial intelligences and programmable matter and the Martian mafia and a whole lot of people just trying to survive out on the fringes of the solar system. I just somehow need to recover my faith in myself again. Need to pick up the spray can and put on the mask and get out there on the streets, rediscover that fierce, rebellious joy. Need to believe it’s worth it to take that risk, to make that effort.
I think I’m getting there, and God, I hope so. I’m sick of carrying this big lump of frustration and anger around. Makes it hard to move as fast as I need to move, to stay ahead of my fellow meme taggers and the info cops. Heh.
Posted in Fiction, Morgan, People, Pop. Culture, Science Fiction | 
19 Comments »
January 27th, 2007 at 10:23 am
So, you’re saying your book is graffiti on the stately edifice ofSCIENCE FICTION ? What gang you hang wit’? I understand those Cyberpunks were really tough in their day but nowadays, they all seem to have leather elbow patches and big shaggy dogs.
Everything I’m writing right now is crap. I’ll restate it.
Gould’s Law: The Current Project is always crap. Ohmighod, what could I have been thinking?
January 27th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Yeah, I definitely have this spasmic urge to flush.
You know, the bitch of it is, I actually love this book — in spite of the fact that at the moment it’s crap. I think I just need to channel my inner miscreant and get it done.
January 27th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
I only work because it gives me ideas for other things to work on, that and the fact that I have bills to pay.
Seriously, though, Morgan, this is a wonderfully written essay. A hard hook of an intro with the grafitti leading us through the conflict to the reasons to perservere. Ultimately the question we all have to answer is, if you didn’t have to pay the bills would you still write/paint/whatever creative thing you do? I think you answered that question.
http://www.banksy.co.uk/
January 27th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Thanks, Doug.
The Banksy link is intriguing. What is it about? Is it a logo?
January 27th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Banksy is Banksy. Take a look.
January 27th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
Whoa — very very cool! But on the Mac, you need to go here:
http:/www.banksy.co.uk/shop/
January 27th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Morgan — You know enough of my history to know that we have big chunks of this issue in common. I still struggle with it a lot. It’s a ball of snakes.
I know the answer, and it’s simple, but it’s hard to do on a daily basis:
Quit trying to figure out the existential issues, and just write. It may suck and be completely unusable. It may be great. You simply can’t tell ahead of time.
My head gets all twisted up with issues about anxiety and failure and whether it’s worthwhile to spend my dwindling number of hours on this, and how come it can be so terrifying, and on and on.
But == when I’m actually in the process of writing, not just contemplating it, or, more accurately, letting my fear drive me crazy, it’s a helluva lot of fun.
I am a MUCH happier person when I’m writing fiction. That’s a true and primal and repeatable experience.
It’s incredibly difficult to hang on to that insight, though. Life and my own flaws get in the way constantly. Why the fuck can’t I remember it all the time?
..I know how simplistic this sounds, and it doesn’t fix anything right now.
You’ve damaged your writer pretty badly, as have I, and it’s a long road back.
But, trust me, from many years of obsessing and reading on this subject — The healing doesn’t come from figuring it all out intellectually, or even achieving innner peace or mastering the fear and avoidance.
It just comes from sitting down and writing.
No matter how bad the result sucks, you have a chance of fixing something you’ve written, and making it good, even great.
You have no chance at all if you don’t write.
Writing may or may not be worthwhile in some ultimate, provable, universal sense. But what is?
Hugs to you.
January 27th, 2007 at 10:53 pm
And, you know, some of us might be waiting for that book. Since we’ve heard a bit about it, and think it sounds really interesting.
January 27th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
Thanks, guys.
Mac, I appreciate the encouragement. You are such a gifted writer, and I know you’ve got your own tiger by the tail.
Rory, you are very wise. Just apply butt to chair, and write, is the answer.
I guess I needed a metaphor I could wrap my arms around. A shape, some kind of meaning or symbol, to contain all that fury, do something useful with it, without betraying the anger.
Graffiti artist works. It’s nigh perfect. In fact, I’ve decided Geoff, my younger main v.p. character, is a graffiti artist. I think it gives me a hook into him and his story that I didn’t have before.
January 29th, 2007 at 1:16 am
Great essay, on so many levels.
The thing about the inner miscreant (I am so stealing that for when I need to remember why I write) is that back when I was but a young thing, I lived so much more there that even when I was writing crap I didn’t care because the fun of writing was stronger than the fear of it. Now, of course, the tables have turned – or something – and I spend way too much time obsessing over my anxieties about crap and irrelevance rather than – yeah – channeling my inner miscreant.
January 29th, 2007 at 1:28 am
Thanks, Alis.
January 29th, 2007 at 3:31 am
You might need to go tag something, now, of course. For, y’know, the sake of research. I’ve a number of young, ummm, proteges that I’ve tutored in reading over the years who swear by it.
I always just hope I don’t need to go pay fines for them…
January 31st, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Morgan, I love that Geoff is a grafitti artist. I think its really important for characters to feel as if they have lives that are sort of interrupted by the book, if that makes any sense.
If you need me to, I can put you in touch with some folks who know quite a bit about LA graffiti art. Who collect it and make art themselves and know the artists.
January 31st, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Thanks, Maureen. When I get to that point, I’ll take you up on that.
February 8th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Nice article.
February 8th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Thanks, spir00.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:21 pm
Perhaps you would enjoy THE SUBCONSCIOUS ART OF GRAFFITI REMOVAL, a film by Matt McCormick, of Peripheral Produce
http://www.rodeofilmco.com/films/graffiti_removal.php
Interview here–
http://www.hybridmagazine.com/films/0302/produce.shtml
February 9th, 2007 at 1:07 am
Oooh, yum! Linky goodness. Thanks, rb.
February 26th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
[...] today since I’ve been ripping CDs so I can put the hardcopies in storage, and I found this article by Morgan J. Locke on art and the risks we take to create it via an older post at Kate [...]