The Game of the Name

...Of course, he cannot resist dragging in his own "ghetto" beginnings—dwelling knowledgeably on slum walls saturated with the smell of cooking, and musing on "the dark pits in the plaster speaking of the very acne of apartment house poverty...

...Exposure, especially via television and magazines, may also have helped, since nothing shrivels spontaneity faster than media burn...

...Many of his postulations are worthy of being followed up, but he is too Olympian, too fuddled or else just too plain lazy to do so— besides it's not analysis he's being paid for...

...The whole point of this extraordinary public experience was the jolt of its luridness in bleak, official surroundings...

...Color was rioting in the catacombs...

...Creative vandalism could be the seepage through society of Jackson Pollock and/or the conceptual drive to replace art with pure ego...

...Mailer is hardly the person to discuss whether or not the phenomenon was art—an impossible enough assignment for someone with taste or knowledge or both...

...they seemed to be tunneling under the very fabric of the work ethic...

...But instead of treating the subject on its own terms, the photographers institutionalize it by relating it cozily to modern art...

...Predictably, Mailer tries to dodge this issue by giving his protagonists, with their "lean ghetto bodies," the old Noble Savage treatment...

...Inverting the pathetic fallacy, he not only likens society and art to plant life, he also equates urban man warped by artificial surroundings to his prehistoric ancestor living in symbiosis with nature...

...They discuss their mission with all the weighty morony a sportscaster can bring to autopsies of The Game...

...Over what Mailer calls "ghetto languor," one of them warns that his slow and sinuous movements must indeed be watched, "because," he says, "when I move fast, you got to watch out...

...A forefather of the New Journalism, he has been consumed by it...

...It processes an important, possibly sinister, social event into another piece of radical chic...

...Here, it softens the lividity of white lavatory tile into subtle ochers, and through its agency the paint of tenements turns as rich as stained glass...

...Or of a train looming slowly out of the black tunnel into a station, its impassive driver garlanded by absurdity...

...However rich the racial memories buried in the "unfed brains" of these adolescents, they certainly look 100 per cent New York City born and raised...

...Stealing these materials from store displays, they spent whole nights in the train yards working on the intricate decorations, often operating in teams and standing on each other's shoulders where necessary...

...One remembers how he extricated the pariah-gladiator Sonny Liston from the grasp of sports-writers and showed him as a believable human being of some stature and with interesting peculiarities...

...With majestic prodigality, Mailer formulates theories and then rejects them...

...Most of the piece is devoted to deliberations on whence and whither graffiti, and the same for art and civilization...

...Even garbage becomes picturesque...

...Ah, the rich vitality of it all...

...This collection of succulent photographs by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar surveys trains, stations and assorted outdoor surfaces embellished by the graffitists...

...Swollen with narcissism, he can't get a professional fight anymore—not even with Women's Lib...

...It's like having to attend a dinner where for every pellet of protein a ton of carbohydrates must be ingested...

...Nevertheless, we do find scraps of nourishment here and there...

...the visceral feelings of both elation and violation it aroused...

...Like most publishing wheezes, The Faith of Graffiti is a magazine article with delusions of grandeur...

...With shopkeepers removing "live" cans of paint from display, the source of materials was blocked, and news of two accidents—one of them fatal—involving graffitists-in-action provided additional discouragement...

...Civilization has become, he says, "plastic above and dynamite below...

...If plants can communicate "telepathetically" with one another, concludes Mailer, so can society despite its stratification...

...Eventually he settles on his weakest hypothesis, which is based on scientific experiments to determine the capacity of plants to "feel...

...But the main trouble with Mailer is that he is so difficult to read...

...When caught, the offenders were put to cleaning the cars...

...Yet like chains of giant carnival bumper cars with playful Loony Tune exteriors, they were the ultimate mockery of commerce and made the passengers look beleaguered and pathetic...

...Yet it is much more embarrassing to watch him shedding crocodile tears over the "Vietnamiza-tion" that overtook graffiti (how vulgar can one get...

...For those who like his kind of thing, it's doubtless fun to swing along with the melody and not worry about the words...

...It is very unjust, for no one could deny that Mailer embodies his time and is the representative, if unelect-ed, of millions who would be like him...

...Then something went terribly wrong with the Harvard man who was capable of perceiving a larger reality...

...For one thing, it is revealing to see how euphemism has spread to the slums—e.g., to steal a can of paint is to "invent" it...

...Indeed, this defacement of New York, squirming with conceited flourishes that proclaimed the youth and semi-literacy of the scribes, was a dissenting statement more heartfelt and eloquent in its immediacy than any made by the avant-garde...

...Evidently Mailer's research wasn't too extensive either, since he gives us only a couple of encounters with seminal graffitists, a round with wasp Lindsay, and a visit to the Museum of Modern Art...

...Fortunately, no one thought to use that as a caption to any of the group portraits in the book...

...Literary or otherwise, the spectacle of a million-dollar celebrity on a slumming binge is always rough on the bystanders...

...De rigeur as a "ghetto" background now is, Mailer's bicultural stance makes one wistful for the old days when successful climbers changed their names and tried to forget...

...Still, the limitations of color photography can't be held responsible for the cover of this large and lush production, which features a graffiti specimen of absolutely no interest whatsoever, except that its spidery red and blue letters on a dark green ground could seem significant to art education veterans for vaguely recalling the work of Joan Miro...

...Abetted by the mystifying rules of photographic printing, whereby color must always be "warm," the medium invariably produces dishonest results that we have come to enjoy, like candy...

...Mailer presents defacement as a purely Puerto Rican manifestation and makes much of its being an instinctual attempt "to save the sensuousness flesh of their inheritance from a macadamization of the psyche...

...Decay is dappled with sunlight, never with ordure...

...Engorged with self-importance, the young actors play their parts to the hilt, knowing an audience when they see one...

...But the reviewer feels obliged to search for communicable points...

...Then again it could be a revolt against the soullessness of modern architecture, a form of repression that, as he rightly notes, increases in direct ratio to the violence it seeks to contain...

...When one of them reveals that "The Name is the faith of graffiti," he stops Mailer dead in his tracks, wondering if the kid "knew what he had said...

...It hasn't yet disappeared, but its decline is very apparent and may be partly attributed to the frantic efforts of city officials...

...But with the advent of graffiti everything changed...

...Each refers to his pseudonym as "The Name," and laying it on a surface is "hitting The Name...

...Out goes the camera into the stews and back come splendid visions of striated textures...

...For another, the luminaries of graffiti are unbelievably portentous...

...Trains emblazoned with balloons, stars and stripes of all colors injected a cackling hilarity into the ritual of rush-hour suffering...

...It must have been galling to have to go all the way to the South Bronx to find so pithy a summation of his own philosophy...

...And I would have thought their work more informed by comics and television than by tropical rain forests...

...This is the kind of gush for which the Lady Writer used to be excoriated, and it's not helped by sentences as long as paragraphs, un-corseted by punctuation...

...By the time the newspapers began looking into the matter, it was obvious that the subways had been taken over by the cream of the public schools, equipped with magic markers and spray cans...

...The textual centerfold marks another spiral in the tailspin of Norman Mailer, whose second career as a journalist is a minor tragedy in the light of its auspicious beginnings...

...They still pulled into the stations, disgorging and taking on riders as usual...

...As with schools of art and design, the defacement movement had its phases: these fell roughly into archaic, classical, and manic or rococo...

...and identifying with the gallant little warriors who attacked the system he himself has so conspicuously embraced...

...It being time now to wrap up the event, Praeger has wheeled on The Faith of Graffiti (98 pp., cloth $14.95, paper $7.95...

...It is inconceivable that such gifted photo-journalists could have failed to get a shot of, for instance, a decorated train hurtling along the express track of a local station, its sides "pleated" by the dark stanchions...

...Both of them drew on the walls, ergo civilization has come full circle...

...Security at the yards was tightened, and transit police were mobilized to search young suspects bringing packages into the subways, especially at uptown stops...

...On the whole, the pictures capture neither the panache of vandalism nor its tawdriness...

...Their hegemony lasted about three years...