FOG2: A Close Reading of an Old Joke

I continue to think about the new edition of The Faith of Graffiti. FOG2 really is quite a remarkable book. One could even make a case that it has changed the world in a way that’s difficult to describe.

I’d known about the book for awhile, but had never seen the original edition. It’s out of print, not in my local library, and I didn’t want to pay a collector’s price just to see the photos and read the essay. Besides, the photos have been newly avaible since 2007, when Naar reissued them in a collection, The Birth of Graffiti (Naar talks about the book), which also contained 100 photos from that shoot that hadn’t made it into FOG1. Thus, the photos in FOG2 didn’t surprise me, though I was glad to look at them in a larger format.

But Mailer’s essay WAS a surprise. I’ve read a bit of Mailer, some of it very fine indeed, but I feared he might have coasted through this one. Nothing I’d read about it suggested otherwise. But he didn’t coast. Not a bit.

His essay is cultural criticism at its BEST. While the range of reference is not astonishing in itself, not from a man of Mailer’s intelligence and curiosity, the way he deployed it in this essay IS astonishing. Here’s his third paragraph:

The first is a Jewish joke. Perhaps it is the Jewish joke. Two grandmothers meet. One is pushing a baby carriage. “Oh,” says the other, “what a beautiful grandchild you have.” “That’s nothing,” says the first, reaching for her pocketbook. “Wait’ll I show you her picture.”

What has Mailer done here? In the first paragraph he introduces himself as A-I, Aesthetic Investigator. In the second paragraph he gives us CAY 161, TAKI 183, Junior 161, half the Italian Renaissance (well, not half, but you get the idea), tosses in Rothko and Ellsworth Kelley, and ends with the Church and God. And now a Jewish joke. A Jewish joke.

So he’s told us he’s Jewish, sorta. And he’s moved from the sublime – though the reader may well have been wondering whether or not these photos of vandalism merit such rhetoric – to the quotidian. And what’s that joke about? It’s about pictures, in a picture book no less. And what’s the joke about pictures do? It asks us to compare the picture to the original, that’s what. How very old, how very Platonic. Also, remember that this book came out in the Spring of ’74, less than a decade after those pesky deconstructive postmodernist French landed in Baltimore. In THAT climate, Mailer, who’s gonna write about pictures in a picture book, tells us a joke in which a Jewish grandma elevates the picture over the original.

What crazy chutzpah he’s got, this Norman.

So, let’s take Naar’s pictures and reconstruct that joke around them. The pictures of graffiti-in-New-York-City become the picture of the beloved grandchild. Therefore graffiti-in-New-York-City, the thing in itself, becomes the beautiful baby. Naar and Mailer become the grandmother with the baby and we the audience become the other grandmother.

What a trick, what a con, and how cozy.

The humor in the joke, I suppose, comes from the absurdity of elevating the photo above the baby-in-itself. But the fact is that Naar’s photographs allow us to see graffiti in a way that’s impossible when we’re on the street. Forget about the fact that, at that time, most people would not have been on the streets seeing graffiti, that graffiti, and that this particular kind of graffiti didn’t exist elsewhere (except in Philadelphia and, no doubt, here and there in dribs and drabs). Even for New Yorkers those photographs were revelation, at least for those who were open to them.

When you’re on the street, going from here to there, graffiti is just something that happens on the way. You may pay it no mind, or only a little of your mind. You may be deeply annoyed by it, if, for example, you’ve got to look at it in the station while waiting five slash eight slash ten minutes for a train to arrive, and it’s even worse when you’re inside the train and see it all around you, boring through the acid light inside the subway car. Even if you like the graffiti, or some graffiti, as some New Yorkers surely did, even then it’s only in passing. And you see only what’s there on your normal routes through the city.

But now you’re sitting in your favorite chair, it’s Sunday afternoon, or Wednesday evening, whenever you’re relaxing and doing a bit of reading and reflecting. Or maybe you’re in a library, or even browsing a bookstore. Whatever. But you’re attending specifically to the book. You’re not going anywhere else, you’re comfortable. And you see Naar’s luminous pictures, their artistry. You let them wash over you. You leaf through them, most of them, perhaps all, depicting places in your city that you’ve never seen. To a first approximation, of course, the interior of one subway station is the interior of any one of them; the interior of one car is the interior of them all; and, who knows, maybe you DID ride in the car that’s marked “Franky,” or that one with “ACE 137” on the side. This is a world that’s both familiar and strange, remote and accessible.

And you now see it as never before. Naar’s put if before your eyes and spirit.

And now Norman Mailer’s going to give you a way of thinking about what you’re  seeing all together in one place for the very first time. He’s going to interpret it.

First an introduction: Hi, I’m A-I. Then a lecture: Piero della Francesca was born . . . And now a joke: Two grandmothers meet.

Clever man this Mailer. He coulda’ been a rabbi.