Freewrite

What aspects of the city/urban environment does style wars map? What does graffiti make visible that a traditional map does not?

-layer of subway
-mobile canvas
-more than aesthetic
-law/city admin ... writer/artists
-tension youth
-express their feelings through art
-graffiti, break dancing, rap
-"all city"- names
-writing on the city- illicit -marginated groups/culture
-marking their territory

Key Concepts of Michel de Certeau (Walking in the City)

about: mapping the city through walking

-Optical Knowledge: Looking from the skyscraper of the World Trade Center "agitation is momentarily arrested" (157) : stopped before the eyes
-Voyeur: connected to the objects of seeing, see's the city from above then coming at it from experience or plan, not being a part of the experience down below "His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that likes before one's eyes. It allows one to read it to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god." (157). Viewpoint that no one has.
-Walker: "The ordinary practioners of the city live 'down below' below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk-an elementary form of this experience of the city; their are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it. These practioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen." (158). They're using space, inhabit space, making distinctions down below, knowledge they don't have to think about, experience through body and not through eyes, there's connection between wanderers and walkers, movement define city. "geometrical or geographical space" (158): planned and built part of the city, being watched every time or not being watched but feel disciplined, geometrical- planning according to geometry.
-migration: refers to mobility
-citizens to use the city productively, and not only passively
-Practices: "Beneath the discourses that ideologies the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate" ... "concept city is decaying" (160): everyday practices, not exceptional
-idol footsteps: not productive, not contributing to the cities system, walking that has no set roots
-maps are problematic but walking uses space to Certeau

Style (161)
Rhetorics of Walking (161)
Fiction of Knowledge (157)
Waste Products (159)
Optical Knowledge (158)
Legibility (161)
Spatialized (161)
Threshold (158)
Accepted Frame Work (163)
Imposed Order (163)
Agglomeration (158)
Voyeur (157)
Walker
Concept City
Urban Practices
Migrational, Metaphorical City (158)

Fun Home review in class
-fun home vs everyday: domestic space, urban space, our everyday psychology
-dominant point of reference to the understanding of the author: relationship with her father and the understanding of him
-Fun Home references: funeral home (ironic), own home- gothic revival, NYC, grandmother's place, thinking its like a circus