“COUNT ON AMERICA”

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This is Phase II.  

Before it was just the garbage cans back here, a couple of beat up parked cars, long-term parking, until someone gets gas money or a new tire kind of parking.  That was Phase I.  

This is Phase II:  Street talent takes the wall; maybe they got paid for this one.  They should’ve got paid for this one.  Here’s the whole thing:

Phase II is when the functions don’t change:  still garbage pick up here, still parking (better cars now).  Here’s Phase II Context:

This is a full service lost corner of the Uptown neighborhood.  Once and still somewhat a gateway neighborhood in Chicago, American Indians, Appalachian working poor.  A lot of life packed into a solid neighborhood not far from the lake.  

Come back in 6 months and this little patch might be Phase III.  They’ll want to keep it for the “urban grit” that can add an extra $100K to a condo’s asking.  But it will be clean grit.  There might be planters among the dumpsters to show someone’s in control, don’t cross them.  If there are cars parked they’ll cost as much as some of those Phase I-II apartments in the background (see above).  

But that’s Phase III and if it wants to happen to Uptown it hasn’t yet.  Let’s watch this neighborhood survive.  Phase II is plenty good.

OFF BALANCE

nan turpin photographs PARIS STREET MARKET MAUBERT

This morning in the market might be the day or it might not.  But it will happen.  Every other day  you reached for your big frisee lettuce or 3-lemon handful, trying to think of the nice salad for dinner but thinking instead of the graffiti on the marchand’s truck behind all the lovely vegetables.  Is there more paint than last Wednesday?  The same?  A little displeasure, a bit of malaise; we’ve  given up covering it up.  We are living with the graffiti; not liking but living with it.   But doesn’t that time come, aware or unaware of it, time comes when you actually like the scribbles, scrawls, painted screams.  Yes, you think you like it.  It makes more to look at, think about.  It gives you night time in the morning, leaping silhouettes leaving steams of color behind them, cities, objects transformed while we sleep and dream of vast lettuce beds.  Yes, you think you like it.  Yes, I’m probably fine with this, yes, I might miss it if it disappeared, this layer of someone else’s signs, meaningless, meaningful, I don’t know what it means but it’s there, it’s part of any city’s atmosphere, another layer to peer through to see where we’re going.

Is this what it’s like then, the precise moment of historical change?

ANOTHER LOVE LETTER rue VERNEUIL

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Dear Serge…

Welcome back, always pleased to see you!  We can’t seem to leave Paris in this start to 2014 and we want to continue thinking of the city as text.  Most of our cities are glazed with a layer of graffiti, a coat of confusion over every attempt to create urban order.  We are so accustomed to graffiti it has become nearly another building material to our eyes.  Night painters are sometimes despicable sometimes -grudgingly-admirable, from the quality and boldness or mediocrity of the work they appear to be a very mixed population.  But there’s a place in Paris, one of the truly “good addresses” in the rue Verneuil in the Seventh, where the graffiti seems to come from  common emotions loss, longing, admiration, a never ending bereavement.  The place, not unlike Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere Lachaise Cemeterey, has become a Parisian, and international site of pilgrimage.  It is the little townhouse that Serge Gainsbourg shared with Jane Birkin.  One day it might become a museum and while we wait travelers, whether from down the street or across the world, continue to make it the place they show that some art and some rebellions endure.  Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991, not such a long time ago by “immortal art” standards but to those many who loved his work and by his death felt the great tenderness that strangers might feel for strangers, Serge has been away for infinite time and in his absence a world is made smaller.  This photograph is the wall in front of the house.  The central figure, in a corner in blue pochoir stencil print is Serge at his coolest- heroic.  No matter how many leave their marks the figure has remained undisturbed.   Much graffiti is a literal layer of text over the city now and much of it remains  obscure text that communicates secretly to a very few.  The markings rue Verneuil are city text for a world of comprehension.  More than any great museum the Serge wall gives this comfort that somethings do survive.  We cannot get him out of our heads, Gainsbourg’s music and his tender disdain for a world that loved him when it should not.

FOR MORE SERGE GAINSBOURG:  This Vanity Fair story is as good as anything and it begins with an interview in the rue de Verneuil house that Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin shared.  But look for more links on Serge and his career and listen to his songs on youtube if your discotheque is not already full of his collected works!  His French songs are often infused with the outlaw side of American culture.

<http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/11/gainsbourg200711&gt;

PARTY LIKE IT’S PARIS 2014!

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Urban State of Mind

As great cities are besieged by great wealth but we can still find other voices have a clearer idea of what it is they want to say and they make themselves “heard” above the din of cashflow.  These zebras didn’t make it into town on their own.  They’ve cavorted on this odd bit of wall in Paris for a few years now.  So far they remain unmolested.  Ask them about “career path” or about getting the “right” degrees at the right Grande Ecole.  Message to world beaters of today who want the kind of success that gets you 100 square metres in this neighborhood, the Fifth:  no need to beat the world.  Just climb on and dance with these striped party animals and then go up those steps to your bike and ride off home.  What’s not to like about that?  

BACK DOOR BLUE LINE

SECRET SIGHTSEEING
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Big cities have a secret side you can only see from the elevated train. 

From the elevated, even lively neighborhoods look generally extinguished.   Before there was a carbon footprint, when people turned out the lights because money didn’t grow on trees, Chicago kept the back of its house dark.  From our nighttime El cars the occasional kitchen light or frosted glass of a bathroom window was precious.  Once in a hundred commutes you could see someone in a kitchen talking to someone else you couldn’t see. 

These were the generous windows, shades up for fast moving strangers to look in at.  The Brown Line wasn’t bad for a glimpse, the Red Line was pretty good and the Blue Line very good.   If the light was on in the back it was always a golden glow, never television blue.

RED DOOR BLUE LINE
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By day we could see the hidden world of back porches. It was a troglodyte world back there, as if people had dug their homes into the wall of clatter the trains made.  There were green plants in pots, random gardens with no thought to landscaping.  These were mercy gardens, where poorly performing houseplants came to take their chance with the weather; no one responsible and no one to care if they lived or died.   

These days, if there’s a back porch garden it can be somewhat elaborate, make a design statement, suggest successful occupants inside and generally maximize the public relations potential of every bit of that house.

Just before the times turned desperate, new condo developments one after another appeared along the elevated tracks.  These were the condos from another planet, costing more than anyone in those neighborhoods ever thought was possible.  Many of the new condo buildings turned a blind wall to the alley and the El tracks – no windows at all.  Part of what they sold was the fantasy that this El track condo was a country house.  Listen…you can hear the birds.  But up in the trains that quickly came and went, we knew better.  And as the new condos and their blank walls multiplied, we saw bigger and bolder graffiti on them. 

But there are still miles of old blocks, old buildings with back walls clotted with fire escapes, old electric lines, and inexplicable bits of once functional metal work held together with weld upon weld.   The Blue Line comes to mind in the neighborhoods south of Damen, there’s a trail of art out of sight of everyone else in Chicago except the ones who ride those trains.  Sometimes it reminds riders there are oddly useful businesses along this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue. 

Sometimes backdoor art just raises questions that someone needed to ask.  Like this one:  How can you be sure the astronaut doesn’t live in this apartment? 

That’s why we live in our cities.  We don’t want to forget these big questions.