Writing the Sky

Helicopters do not hover. They might drone, they might buzz, but they do not hover. They circle, they pass over, but they do not hover. There's something unexpectedly loud about their presence, a kind of persistent thump. Where airplanes tend to startle, helicopters nag.

I had been cleaning the apartment yesterday afternoon when the noise of a helicopter came in through the opened windows. Stepping out onto our back stoop, I watched it circle tightly, almost directly overhead. We've watched helicopters circle the neighborhood before - most recently, Friday night, a stabbing searchlight - but this was the closest they've come to our particular apartment. Curious, I shut the back door and wandered out through the front. Parked at our corner were two LAPD black and whites, at an angle to the street. A roughly shaven cop told me to go back inside. Not being used to being addressed so directly, I did.

Again, though we've seen police in our neighborhood before, this was the first time I'd seen a pair of cars parked at the corner. But by the time I'd stepped back inside and around to the french doors that open onto our front patio, the cars were gone. Traffic passed through the intersection, and mothers walked their kids home from school. As suddenly as the whole scene had started up, it had ended, just out of view.

I stopped one of my neighbors in the hall a couple of minutes later. Car robbery, he said, someone's BMW had been stolen before being hemmed in by a pack of police cars at 1st and Edgemont. So that was the helicopter?, I asked. Yeah, he replied, there were a whole bunch of police right out there, gesturing to the back of our building.

Oh.

Los Angeles life indeed. What was in some ways even more striking, however, was walking around the block a half hour later. There was a Korean man with two large digital cameras taking photos, two men and a woman talking over the bed of a well-worn pick-up truck, cars wilting in the heat of late summer, but nothing to suggest that there had ever been a moment of violence on that corner beside our place. In the grand scheme of things, today's excitement was barely a moment; as far as police incidents ago, it'll barely merit a dot on the LAPD's crime map before falling by the wayside.

And at the risk of making a metaphor of something that is very much a material fact (stolen car, the police with weapons drawn, a man being pulled from the car, his shirt wet with sweat, in the back of my mind the recent news from Inglewood), it suggests an interesting issue of memory and memorial. While the LAPD's maps are a kind of spatialized memory (maps as memory rendered in space), there's something constantly renewed in them, a kind of incessant falling forward. As they are used, they have a maximum temporal frame of a week; and while one might search for any week, there is, at most, only a seven-day's range of events. What happens to either end is simply a remembering for which there is no space; quoting psychoanalysis, remembering is always foreclosed.

That discussion of memory - so common here, though I suppose not recently - also suggests something about the tags that go up in the neighborhood. And again, risking a kind of metaphorical reading, I wonder at the way in which tags (XV3 goes up a lot here; on the sidewalk a block down, a faded 18th Street; in truth, not a part of our lives, but it is a presence; I don't know how to read the 13 that went up the other night, maybe this) are a way of making things remembered. The other night, a tag went up on the low wall of the apartment building across the street. The very next morning, a yellow paint-spattered truck pulled up; two men stepped out and smeared a thick grey paint over the wall. Having finished that act of erasure, they drove away. Yesterday, walking home, I noticed a long white wall down the street from us. The sidewalk splattered with paint applied and re-applied; the white wall had the thick texture that comes with many coats of paint. This afternoon, I saw it had been hit again.

I've been reading recently about a graffiti piece going back up a couple of blocks from our place. An old piece had been painted over, but something new went up. It's beautiful work, and it really shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath as the tags that go up in near our place. That said, I wonder if something connects the two, how marking a wall, as an act of inscription, might be a way of making space for memory in the city. After all, driving is such a phantom act in the city, an act of artifice. Tagging and graffiti might both be an attempt to do a similar thing: To mark a presence, a kind of present.

Thinking a moment longer about inscription, two current shows at LACMA suggest something similar. I don't have either artist's name at hand, but one set of photos shows up in the current show that LACMA is presenting on post-Chicano art. The photographer took a haunting set of photos of Laundromats at night; what I found particularly compelling about her images was the way in which they picked up on the etchings and tracings of old tags on the window. The other photographer - whose work tended far more towards being problematically aestheticized - had a series of portraits staged, often with light falling through windows pitted and marked by etchings and never-fully erased tags. In both cases, it was the image of tagging on the window that struck me. If windows have a kind of claim to transparency (the notion of art as a window onto the world), the act of tagging and its half-erasures thickens the window, renders it not so much opaque as obscure, in the sense of something made unclear. That is, of course, a slightly literal definition of obscure and a correspondingly figurative reading of tagging on glass windows, but it is, for me suggestive.

In even more broad terms, thinking about the ways in which this city makes itself writable: If blank white walls are a kind of invitation to tag, then the landscaping - vines planted, trained to wend their way up textured concrete - on the side of the additions to the 405 are designed both to naturalize the freeway as an object of vision and to frustrate its own position as blank canvas.

Having begun with the thump of a helicopter overhead, I've come somewhere entirely different, though perhaps not as much removed as one might think. Just the other day, we were leaving the apartment when we saw a line of planes leaving writing in the sky.

Comments

Jordan M said…
A tag of a different sort:

http://tinyurl.com/5pnybt

Have not seen it in person but a friend who has says it's on a hardly noticeable, unremarkable street and few people really pay attention to it, as if it were just a sign or remark left on the wall and not the spot of a major world event.

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