If You Can’t Beat Them, Allow Them to Redecorate Your Apartment

Graffiti apologist Hugo Martinez is having his apartment redecorated by graffitists:

This year, at least since late January, he’s been living amid graffiti designed to be part of a studio apartment that has been spruced up by two Dutch designers (who call themselves Kaptein Roodnat) and decorated by 13 graffitists. The graffitists range in age from 19 to 48, Mr. Martinez said, “and what links them is the clarity of their vision and the fact that they’ve all passed the threshold of criminality.”

Some, he said, have been arrested as many as 30 times, for everything from vandalism – for their graffiti – to selling crack.

The apartment decoration is part art prank, part reality show – there are plans for a Webcam – and part public service. Mr. Martinez would like to see city housing agencies deploy similar decorative strategies in their buildings – not that he’ll be knocking on any doors, mind you.

“I just put stuff out there,” he said. “I’m not going to call the mayor and beg.” “The Project in the Projects,” as this dressed-up apartment is called, is the ultimate act of graffiti. By painting and altering the regulation colors of an apartment in a 1960’s-era low-income housing project, Mr. Martinez’s team has done what graffitists the world over do – which is to mark up private property. Whether the result is enhancement or defacement is up to the beholder.

So what does it look like? From the slide show, it looks like someone basically tagged his refrigerator. But the Times finds a curiously post-modern parallel — Pottery Barn:

Inside this apartment, grim references become festive. There’s police-style tape laid down in a kind of mod plaid on the floor, and yellow utility lights strung from the ceiling – one assumes in an attempt to “quote” from the environment of your basic graffitist. In other words, here are things you’d find in a subway, or a crime scene. The effect is both colorful and goofy, like the rooms in Pottery Barn’s teen catalog.

Instead of shades, rolls of paper hang from dowels over the window and are decorated by a few graffitists. Others have made plexiglass boxes that can be stacked and used as a headboard for the bed, as supports for the bed and desk, and, when covered with a pistachio-colored square of foam, remarkably comfortable seating. One graffitist, Nato, filled plexiglass boxes with old spray cans gathered from the subway tracks, like a time capsule of his art – making it seem distant, almost forgotten. You can see the old Rustoleum cans – the 70’s-era paint of choice, Mr. Martinez said – and American Accent cans, a 90’s brand.

But since the proof is in the smooth, glossy rust-proof finish, that existential question of all art eventually nagged at Martinez:

Mr. Martinez said he’d awakened that morning worrying “that none of this was any good.”

In the end, he decided it was good. Which is why soon many of us will have graffitists redecorate our homes — and then graffitists will either have to discover new avenues of self-expression or be forced to give away their craft for free. I feel an Ayn Rand novel coming on.

Mayor Mike: Rockin’ the Mic Left and Right

The Mayor’s kitchen cabinet in full gear, someone remembered the Bears’ Super Bowl Shuffle and lo and behold, a rap penned in honor of Mayor Bloomberg emerged:

“Mayor Mike’s Rockin”
BY ALISTAIR (CHARLIE BIGGS) SEALY
and LENNY (MR. L) MOORE

Who’s running the city an’ making it airtight?

I can tell you that nobody cares like Mayor Mike

Make your own way, go against that grain

It takes an independent mind to wanna change this game …

For people who thought he was keepin’ his dough

Saved the Harlem Dance Theatre when it needed him most …

The Board of Ed failed, that remains a true thing

Some are scared to change the way we do things

Mayor Mike is gettin’ with the times

Leaders should be independently inclined

City . . . airtight . . . can’t breathe . . . help!

The forgotten final verse (with apologies to Jim McMahon):

I am the funky mayor, known as Bloomberg.
They call me hizzoner, and I’ve got to return.
My funky kitchen cabinet gets into the mix
‘Cause they know I can’t dance, but that I can take the six.
Olympic Committee, I like to tease.
Board of Ed, I make them say please.
Anything about the Jets, any foolish kerfuffle
Is quickly forgotten after the Funky Mike Shuffle.

Man Dates

Jennifer 8. Lee investigates the notion that men going out to dinner with each other are secretly homosexual:

The delicate posturing began with the phone call.

The proposal was that two buddies back in New York City for a holiday break in December meet to visit the Museum of Modern Art after its major renovation.

“He explicitly said, ‘I know this is kind of weird, but we should probably go,'” said Matthew Speiser, 25, recalling his conversation with John Putman, 28, a former classmate from Williams College.

The weirdness was apparent once they reached the museum, where they semi-avoided each other as they made their way through the galleries and eschewed any public displays of connoisseurship. “We definitely went out of our way to look at things separately,” recalled Mr. Speiser, who has had art-history classes in his time.

“We shuffled. We probably both pretended to know less about the art than we did.”

Eager to cut the tension following what they perceived to be a slightly unmanly excursion – two guys looking at art together – they headed directly to a bar. “We couldn’t stop talking about the fact that it was ridiculous we had spent the whole day together one on one,” said Mr. Speiser, who is straight, as is Mr. Putman. “We were purging ourselves of insecurity.”

Anyone who finds a date with a potential romantic partner to be a minefield of unspoken rules should consider the man date, a rendezvous between two straight men that is even more socially perilous.

. . .

Although “man date” is a coinage invented for this article, appearing nowhere in the literature of male bonding (or of homosexual panic), the 30 to 40 straight men interviewed, from their 20’s to their 50’s, living in cities across the country, instantly recognized the peculiar ritual even if they had not consciously examined its dos and don’ts. Depending on the activity and on the two men involved, an undercurrent of homoeroticism that may be present determines what feels comfortable or not on a man date, as Mr. Speiser and Mr. Putman discovered in their squeamishness at the Modern.

Both Sex and the City and Seinfeld are long gone but it’s not too late to coin glib terms for New York City culturo-athropological phenomena:

Simply defined a man date is two heterosexual men socializing without the crutch of business or sports. It is two guys meeting for the kind of outing a straight man might reasonably arrange with a woman. Dining together across a table without the aid of a television is a man date; eating at a bar is not. Taking a walk in the park together is a man date; going for a jog is not. Attending the movie “Friday Night Lights” is a man date, but going to see the Jets play is definitely not.

“Sideways,” the Oscar-winning film about two buddies touring the central California wine country on the eve of the wedding of one of them, is one long and boozy man date.

She of course conveniently forgets that the technical term for two or more men being out “on the eve of one’s wedding” is “bachelor party.” Nothing to see here, move on: Gentlemen, rest assured, your manhood is intact.

Loser Chic

The Daily News’ Michael Malone notes that the still-winless Mets have no bar to call their own:

Whether it’s dinner and drinks at Mickey Mantle’s or a cold Bud up at the Yankee Tavern, there’s no shortage of Yankee-friendly bars in the city. But you’ll have an easier time finding a cap to fit Mr. Met than finding a Mets bar in this town.

Meanwhile, the New York Press’ C.J. Sullivan argues (persuasively) that the hapless Mets embody the spirit of New York City more than the Yankees:

The Mets are more like New York because Shea Stadium—the house the Mets built badly—is a mess in constant need of repair, much like most city apartments. Even the bathroom plumbing is decrepit. The workers are rude. The Mets also have bad season after bad season, losing more than they win, just like most of us. When was the last time you won anything?

The Yankees, on the other hand, are like a small leafy town in the far reaches of Connecticut. They have all this faux history and myth and ghosts that haunt the stadium. If M. Night Shyamalan made a film about the Yankees and their Babe Ruth/Lou Gehrig/Mickey Mantle/Thurman Munson legends, the lead character would be some spoiled kid from Westchester, sitting in his box seat telling his father, “I see dead Yankees . . .”

Tabloid Wars

One of the more amusing things you see are the daily snipes the two big tabloids take at each other — not always amusing enough to point out, but amusing nonetheless. So here’s a good New Yorker piece on the recent (Drudgetastic) kerfuffle between the Daily News and the Post:

No longer can it be said that the News, traditionally the more restrained of the city’s rival tabloids, lacks a fighting spirit. The paper, reeling (or so said the Post, many times) from a lotto-game debacle that awarded cash prizes to thousands of readers by mistake, stepped up last Monday and finally played Hatfield to the Post’s McCoy. First, the News touted its own success—“daily newsad sales hit record high”—while also noting the “sorry picture of the shrinking business prospects of the New York Post.” Then, over the next several days, it ran a series of articles exposing an apparent “dump-and-pump” scheme at the Post, a “frantic, desperate effort” to boost circulation through bulk sales. The News, of course, has the higher circulation of the two.

. . .

Meanwhile, back from vacation, Mort Zuckerman reported with pleasure that the attention seemed to be increasing Scratch n’ Match participation. He also said that the News’ dump-and-pump story, which referred to “bloody shrapnel from publisher Lachlan Murdoch’s carpet-bombing propaganda machine,” was not retaliatory. “That wasn’t a response, obviously, to this latest—what my grandfather would have called mishegoss, which is a Yiddish word for craziness,” he said. “Who was that sociologist at Columbia—Robert Merton?—who said that every group has a reference group? Our reference group is not the Post—it is our readers.”

Up at Post headquarters, Lachlan Murdoch tried to play nice. “We don’t really think about the Daily News that much,” he said. But when he learned that a reporter had spoken with Zuckerman he asked, “How were the Galápagos?” He referred repeatedly to “Scratch n’ Stiff,” without winking or smiling, and accused the News, on the issue of bulk orders, of being a “pot calling the kettle black,” since the News sells a lot of bulk copies, too.

Col Allan, the editor, arrived, complaining about the “hypocrisy of these people,” and seemed more eager for a scrap. “They’re still shoving fifty papers a day in bulk into the prisons of the mentally insane on Wards Island,” he said. “I mean, give me a break.”

“I might even read the Daily News if I were stuck in a white padded cell,” Murdoch said.

Allan laughed: “Yes, very good.”

Murdoch said that he thought the nicknames had gone too far.

“It may have been a little exuberant,” Allan said. “But you’ve got to remember that the folks at the Daily News have this curious view of the world, and it really is that they feel that they can throw shit at the fan and never get dirty.”

Allan got up to leave. “If they want to attack us,” he said, “they shouldn’t do it in the business section—because nobody reads it.”