TAMA STARR
265
To a visitor's tentative questions about whether the system might not,
let us say, contain seeds of instability, the answer is that the situation is
intransigent. "Too many people," 1 heard again and again, "have an
interest in things remaining as they are." The media focus on titillating
tales of corruption and scandal, with interchangeable casts of (mainly
white) characters. Our media are info-tainment too. But not on this
scale.
1 am in the outdoor advertising business, so my hosts took me around
to survey the city's signs and billboards. A new format, aluminum pan–
els the size of "No Parking" signs, adorns tens of thousands of street
lamps on high-traffic boulevards. Dedicated to AOL, UOL (the Brazil–
ian AOL), and other dot-corns, they give the impression that high-tech
owns the streets.
The best advertising locations in the city, though, belong to graffiti
writers. Giant, incomprehensible messages-using an ornately elegant
"alphabet" different from that of our taggers, with African-looking,
Hebrew-ish, and totally fanciful hieroglyphics-blaze down from para–
pets our professional installers could not reach with two-hundred-foot
cranes. At ground level, similar messages march across fencing and side–
walk bridges. Remarkably, they are almost never defaced. 1 was espe–
cially struck by the work of one anonymous artist who consistently lays
down a gleaming silver-gray background behind his eerie red and black
communications. Nobody touches that artist's work. The messages
scream out, immensely compelling and impossible to understand.
My hosts were bewildered by my fascination with this anti-establish–
ment form of expression. 1 acknowledged that it is a defacement of
property and a defiance of order. "But don't you see?" 1 said. "It's how
they talk to you." Big words from the silent city, the one they don't see
or hear.
"What are they saying?" asked my hosts.
"I don't know," 1 said. "But perhaps one ought to listen."
