Soldiers and Suits Follow-up

My earlier post, on the increasingly present soldier and suit motif, prompted three unsolicited reactions:

• My lovely and talented wife liked it, but wished the post had a more pronounced critical perspective.
  
• An old friend from high school wrote from Cincinatti to say that she found the mural particularly interesting, and that she wished there were more of that sort of thing near her.
• As I mentioned in my last post, another friend responded by requesting more photos of shrubs.

Three unsolicited comments is something of a highwater mark for feedback around here, and for this and other reasons the soldiers and suits have stayed on my mind. Imagine my surprise then, as I walked by the Grand Lake Theatre today and ran into life-sized cutouts of the soldier and suit figures from that mural.


The cut outs were place there by Matt Reynoso, the artist responsible for the mural, who indicated that he'd been placing the soldiers in local cafes, including Arizmendi in Emeryville.

Matt's looking for sympathetic walls to place more murals on. If you have any leads send them his way.

Where are the shrubs?

Received an IM from a friend yesterday who expressed a longing for posts on, as he put it, "...paint choices and shrubbery and stuff". Paint choices are on hold for the time being, but as luck would have it, I did snap pictures of shrubs the other night. I was attempting to capture for posterity what I've described elsewhere as the "slow erratic descent of snow flakes" in our backyard.



As folks with lots of interests, it's difficult to maintain the separation of church and state - where church is our house, and state is the larger world. A. posts on everything from Jazz to TV commercials over at Tear In the Buttonhole. In addition to the more observantly critical stuff I've been posting here, I also sound my food yawp over at The Happy Consumptive.

I imagine each of these sites with a distinct --if modest-- following of colleagues, family, friends, and internet wanderers. Even with our own relatively small media empire, it can be difficult to post regularly. This will keep us, for the time being, a three blog family.

Soldiers and Suits

A couple of days before I started gathering images for my post on the geo-political nuances of the housing market, we noticed a building in West Oakland covered with stenciled images of business men and soldiers. The business men carried brief cases, the soldiers had a shilouette that was distinctly modern. I understood this to be a comment on the location of lethality and agency in our culture. I even felt vaguely guilty about appreciating it. It seemed anti-corporate in a way that wasn't —on some level— ironic.


A counter example might be the comic strip Get Your War On. To some extent, Get Your War On capitalizes on a technique popularized in Red Meat. Each strip relies on stereotypically representative characters, who say unexpected things.

In the absence of spirited dialog, juxtaposed images of business men in suits and soldiers in fatigues can only transcend their status as stereotypical representations through sheer repetition and our very specific socio-political context.

Something about the mural also reminded me of figures we'd seen at a war protest. A group of performance artists were walking through the crowds of people heading up Market Street in San Francisco. Dressed in suits and covered in fake blood. They were acting the part of television reporters - present, commenting, but not participating.


The visual register of the mural was evoked directly by a New York Times article entitled Death Wears a Crisp Black Suit (Requires Times Select). The article makes the point that one thing war might be good for is "making artists directly address political issues of their day."


Of course the iconography of privilege and the iconography of war have been closely associated for thousands of years. Suits have long since displaced more elaborate indicators of political power. These depictions though seem to have more to do with a very specific notion of enfranchisement than than they do privilege.

A Partial Triumph

As a long time fan of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, I am familiar with the concept of the reality distortion field. The uncanny ability that S.Jobs has to make merely incremental improvements seem profound, is legend among Mac cultists.

I believe that our home exists within a similar field for our friends, who have been so genuinely happy for us that they have been able to overlook the fact that most of the front of it was covered in white paint, some more of it covered in blue. We believe that the paint was so unsightly, that the fact of it contributed directly to our actually being able to purchase the house.

With plans shaping up for our garden out front, and March closing in fast, we knew that we'd have to remove the paint before we put anything in the soil. So, we hit craigslist and cross-referenced the UC Berkeley Parents Network and found someone to remove the paint.

When we told friends that we had someone coming by to remove the paint, most of them indicated that they hadn't noticed the paint. One repeated the peculiar locution that she just thought that we had bought a house. I've always associated this sort of seemingly judgement-free observation with a certain midwest-flavored practicality. Compare then with Kewler Truong, of KB Jet Care, who during the three visits it took him to make serious headway against the paint, expressed profound incredulity that anyone would do such a thing.

We still have a ways to go. There are a few patches of brick that are still more white than not. The paint removal will also necessitate some mortar restoral. I found one chunk of mortar more than twenty feet away from the house. So far, the neighbors have been blessedly mum, though the owner of a gold Volvo hasn't parked in front of our house for a few days.