Tomorrow

 

Seminar on Street Art 12: Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be when we have the conversation we always have. Who knows where it might go next. Words freely flow, stack up, bounce back and forth, gyrate and joke, like graffiti on that fence, as we drive past. Unspoken then, lulls. Rarely does it occur to us talking we traverse directions between inferno and paradiso. Or that our presence together counters illusions like the news cycle, movie nostalgia, the metaverse. Tomorrow we shall find still the names of mercy and charity, humility and poverty. Our walls meanwhile may be blazoned with anonymous extravagance, names larger than billboards and weirder than jargon. While here and there could remain small stickers of hope, a shattered psalm on a signpost, handwritten ha-ha ho-ho protests. The indecipherable hieroglyphs shape the time, shake with faith. Unspoken then, lulls. Tomorrow there may be no telling the changes in store. That which was lost inside badgers’ nondescript dwellings will be painted seven-feet tall across walls for all to witness. That which was an invisible thought will be advanced a hundredfold, signs of existence reified in every unforeseen direction. That which was secret will be a blatant blast. The illiterate will write in innumerable tongues, the speechless sign ownership of their birth city in eloquent personal calligraphy. Tomorrow will not be so bad. Yellow leaves will settle on the ground with today’s windfall. City skyline will be gleaming at every changing facet. Our voices as we enter the room will speak normal reassuring words, practical as can be. Our daily bread is stored where we can find it, thankfully. The conversation will happily contradict whatever the radio calls news. Even the weather is open to mild refutation. Unspoken then, lulls. Tomorrow won’t be quite what we imagined, bolstered as we are by ambition and desire. Trespassers will evade prosecution, maybe. If they asked for words, would they be given stony silence? Was there a thought that because they were silenced, they would not speak? Here at ground zero, all grass and daisies again, they will have staved off the evil hour by inscribing with cans and brushes their inimitable name. Their heroic moment joins the other names in a communion of the dispossessed. The streets of a hundred names blossom towards Spring. Tomorrow will be an adventure called home.  

 

Bronze

 

Seminar on Street Art 10: Bronze.

 

Liquefaction of bucketed colour turns the heads.

Brainiacs climb someone’s walls to apply a distant blue.

Consonantal collapse and revive extends a rough-hued gracious hand. 

And codebreakers abandon the hidden clues, return to reality daily.

 

Bituminous air mixes with gold spraycan afterglow.

Coronavirus calligrams by graf kings are coronated.

Hardedge armoured vowels submerge softest brickwork tones.

And deaths heads grin where contortion alphabets smile.

 

Tenements overpriced underutilised wear vagrant monograms.

Stoked on weed and horse, the signatories steal through the night.

Monuments more lasting than bronze are their bluffs.

And they replicate pyramids midst their high-density hieroglyphs.

 

Eating rains, unfailing hail, wild west winds are for another day.

Here one-word odes exist extant against the everest of forever.

Here anonymous performers delineate silent their present location.

And here behind supermarkets, on railway fences, their red flowers.

 

Little magazines bequeath the decades with numbered numbers.

Handwritten epistolary epics lend lustrous sentiment to a shoebox.

The hand that signed the paper got off lightly.

And likewise these walls face the music of passing traffic.

 

Such personal esperanto surpasses reviews. 

Such broken english breaks open fractal figures of everyday tongues.

Humble green, writhing green, urbane green glut the 2-D parades.

And speak unto one another whom no one sights by daylight.

 

Grandiloquent their names reminiscent of bagpipes and trumpets.

Disarming their claims to a corner of a foreign field forever.

Disconcerting their aims, the one from the other, still altogether.

And yet yes their name awhile is now, their badge the latest news.

 

Super the moon everywhere white or new as shades broad casting.

There again where they round the corner to furtive rendezvous.

There again blasting letters lasting, the olympic race for bronze.

Where glorious testaments rest unique in splendour for the days.

 

Autograph

 

Seminar on Street Art 9: Autograph. All the very best! [Signed] Indecipherable Hieroglyphic. Such are the squiggles inside childhood autograph books. Autographs were the proof you were in the presence of greatness. They were your brush with immortality. They were the sign that such greatness existed. Only time and maturity changed the meaning of the ballpoint loops and dashes of Indecipherable Hieroglyphic. What a guy! That highflying footballer eventually retired to run the pub in his home town. That TV celebrity survives in their funny stock phrase, all in the moment, all in the timing. She was a trick! That opinionated politician visiting your school was voted out: autographs come to commemorate landslides. Autographs of your schoolfriends take on other, more personal meanings. The earnest copperplate denotes a focussed mind. The autograph with final fantastic flourishes wishes to entertain. The business-like lettering of honest endeavour vies with the jagged stuttering of could do better. Where are they now? Now you have only their names. Autographs clearer than their schoolyard faces in your memory. Time to turn the page. These signs of connection, fleeting as may be, are the beginning of a lifetime’s notice. Forms, you sign them with Date, Name, and then quizzically, Signature. As if your autograph were expected to be a different design, by nature and norm, to your Name filled out in full. That the two would be identically written is unlikely, in a society like yours. Your name must be clear and rigid as Times New Roman; your signature may be all over the place. You’ve always signed it that way. Only connect. This expectation of uniqueness motivates behaviour, from approval of deals to last wills and testaments, and signed first editions. And translates with ease to street autographs, seven-feet high embellishments emphatically self-assertive, and utterly unique in their own terms. They gleam in the sun, even after the paint’s dried. X, but then some. Your average street artist has, first and last, their name, an autograph practised over and over, in-your-face or inscrutable, being for the benefit of Mr Site, a landmark that must be theirs, if only for one day. Autographing the city, they lay claim to its identity, set out their pathways through the maze, strike a deal. Not that this autograph matches their real-life Name. It is a signature ‘innominato’, unnamed ones who inscribe their glorious autograph upon the walls for reasons known best to themselves. Reasons, innumerable as the ways of fortune that they must respond to. ‘Innominata’, perchance?  Almost certainly. All the very best! [Signed] Indecipherable Hieroglyphic.     

 

Eater

 

Seminar on Street Art 8: Eater. Graffiti eaters need to get food on the table, like everyone else, their hours are long, their locations change daily. Luckily, they have a constant source of work. The paint drippers far outstrip the paint strippers, numerically, outwitting all manner of detection. There will always be a livelihood for graffiti eaters while muralists persist and badgers insist. Some say it’s a toxic culture for graffiti eaters, the air laden with leaden fumes, their skin exposed to the constant tinge of poison. Their company motto, though, is a serious commitment, almost a commandment: you want it off, we’ll get it off - the graffiti eaters. They will not desist. They bear down on luckless wall scrawl. They turn flowery daytime expression back into a nighttime of uniform grey, starless and reliably blank. Secrets, coded but out in the open for all to share, return to the unknown, unspoken. Retail outlets breathe a sigh of gratitude, assured that only their name defines the streetscape and fills the skyline. Shopping centres feel clean again, free of the linguistic detritus that dirties their outward esteem. Banks can count on keeping up appearances, no more sloppy consonants spoiling the view, lowering the tone and the rigorous property values. Councils may boast of tidy minds in a tidy town, rid of the vulgar splurges overwhelming other less attentive neighbourhoods. Owners protect their assets from the desperate signs of the dispossessed, at least for the time being. Graffiti eaters promise that whatever the surface, brickwork with rising damp, concrete with accretions, timber with root rot, their devouring techniques should leave no trace of the event ever happening. Ever. Which raises the matter, what is the event? Is it not true to say that for every textual mural event there is an immemorial removal event? For each personal autograph event left overnight for daylight sightseers, there is an equal and opposite autograph erasure event performed in daylight, leaving the innocent surface once more stark staring bible black, again? Which, in turn, raises the question, what is ever? Graffiti eaters assure their clientele that their work deters the artists from ever returning to that favoured location again. An assurance that may be music to the owners’ ears and money in the till for graffiti eaters, but as likely to be the making of a clean canvas for the Rothkos of the outdoor vowel, the poets of never say never. O where will it all end, as one event leads to another event leads to another, down to the last syllable of recorded time, along warehouse frontages rife in new estates, down under bridges where the Merri river flows by, almost everywhere. Making a meal of it.             

 

 

Iconic

 

Six recent updates (read, further adventures) of the iconic word, Iconic. 1. ‘The football finals are upon us and what better way to get there than on one of our iconic trams.’ Intercom announcement at Town Hall tram-stop, Collins Street. Their livery wants to tell us how very new they are and that they were made (read, assembled) in Melbourne. Football finals are always iconic. Travelling by tram is special when imbued with iconicalness. 2. ‘Microsoft is ninja-killing yet another iconic Windows app this year. Microsoft is apparently keen to cut its popular legacy Windows applications with storied histories. Following the official deprecation of WordPad, another app is now heading to the chopping block by the end of this year and will no longer be supported with updates. We’re talking about Paint 3D, the revised version of Microsoft Paint that’s been available since 2016.’ PCWorld online, 12 August 2024. “Storied histories”, of eight years or any length (it seems), are potentially iconic. Whether the apps were iconic at the time, or will be in the future, is not asked. It is enough for ‘iconic’ to act as an intensifier in the here and now, to bolster Paint 3D’s all too brief status in the “storied” silicon race. “Official deprecation” fast-tracks iconicity. 3. ‘World of the Book 2024. Explore the rare, the sacred and the iconic in this one-of-a-kind exhibition’. State Library of Victoria promotion, where iconic is different from sacred. Sacred is not the same as iconic. What is rare that is also iconic? Much? To be iconic is to be “one-of-a-kind”. 4. ‘Nicole Kidman just brought back her iconic ‘90’s red curls.’ InStyle magazine, online. Such curls remind us, we’re told, of Moulin Rouge. Is Moulin Rouge iconic? It doesn’t say. Quote: “The actor ditched her blonde in favour of the classic look … her hair in beachy waves in a long, messy lob.” Beachy, is that even a word? Hair of any length may be iconic. 5. ‘Iconic Fitzroy Corner’. For Sale sign, corner Gertrude and Brunswick Streets. No buyers for this house after several months. Before then the building was used for offices. The adjective is a selling device: follow the money with ‘iconic’. Opposite the Champion Hotel corner, famous for Saturday night brawling before being turned into a post office, then a gentrified carpet shop. Does anyone call the Champion Hotel iconic? Did anyone, ever? 6. ‘The 100 most iconic guitars of all time.’ Billboard headline. That’s a lot of iconic guitars in the one place. Should there be a cap on things iconic? After 10 or so don’t the guitars start losing their iconeletricity? How iconic is Guitar 50, say, compared with Guitar 5, for example? Slightly iconic? Moderately? Such lists have the irritating habit of starting at 100, which means minutes of scrolling with index finger to reach the actual really mostest iconic guitars. Anyway, what’s the criteria? How can they tell, iconicest? Variant spelling; iconickest.