Joe Austin Needs to Get On the Trolley

I have just read 1/2 of Joe Austin's Taking the Train, which is about the graffiti problem in New York City in the late 70's and early 80's. It is an execrable book. I despise it with all my heart; at least, the half of it that I have read.
Austin, who is apparently a professor of social studies or some such crap at Bowling Green State Senior High School, is a total fanboy and makes no bones about it. He is positively in love with graffiti "writers" and hip-hop culture. Right there we have a problem. First, while it's perfectly fine to like your subjects, authors ought not to get defensive of them. That's what some call "unobjective" and what I call "wankerism." Second problem is that Austin never questions or even so much as attempts to explain the supposed link between hip-hop and writing. One suspects that, if he had tried to, he might have found that the two phenomena, while connected, are actually not one and the same.
Forget for one minute, if you can, that Austin is running about twenty years behind the times (he relates information about the 70's/80's subculture as though it's the latest word on the subject, and while acknowledging evolution of writing style, he apparently recognizes no substantive changes in the writers themselves or writing as a movement). Austin's larger problem is that he is so far up the asses of his ubjects that he cannot make a valid point about graffiti. I think Austin wants to tell us that graffiti was a means of resistance for NY teens who had been villanized and marginalized by a fearful, corporatist society. But, he spends the whole first half of the book alternately gushing about the "radical" "awesome" "cool" writers ("funky fresh," too?) and insulting (literally sticking his tongue out at them--I am not making this up) city officials.
Now, it ain't too hard to make a bureaucrat look foolish. And it ain't too hard these days to make a social misfit look like a history hero--this is what subaltern studies are for. But it is pretty difficult to piss off a room full of people who fondly remember tagging from the 80's, and that's what Austin did with my reading group.
Is this resistance? Sure. Does writing graffiti raise pertinent questions about public space? Sure. Does Joe Austin have a cogent argument about either of those two things? Hell no!
Look, the key to understanding graffiti, as Austin sees it, is that the act itself is unauthorized. That is, access to space has been restricted by society, or at least its ruling government, and taggers have to take space--literally by putting their names on it--in order to have any place in the public realm at all. There, Joe, I have just written your thesis for you. Now, why the fuck couldn't you have said that in the first 132 pages??
Unfortunately, and maybe Mr. Austin will get into this in the last half of this train wreck, there seems to be no understanding of the fatal contradiction that the very purpose of writing poses to its future. If the point if to do the thing you are not allowed to, then the only rule of graffiti is to disrespect all rules. Thus, it is positively HILARIOUS to read about writers who are furious that their work has been painted over by the city and, most comically, by other writers. D'oh! That's right: the people who conceived of a world in which everyone is free to paint anywhere are shocked, SHOCKED that anyone would turn that principle back on them.
My biggest beef with this book so far, however, is that the taggers and bombers apparently have no political consciousness, at least as Austin tells it, and thus have no bigger motive for painting on anything than, "I wanted to see my name." This is bullshit, and it demeans the subjects and forces the reader into an uncomfortable choice: Are these people subconsciously political and ultimately subversive, or are they, in fact, just as hopeless and destructively individualistic as the society they supposedly detest? Austin does not seem to know! If we take these stories (and really, this is just a book of stories) at face value, then the writers are antisocial punks who have no respect for public property (or any sense that they already own it and thus cannot "take it back") or the public at large. Austin sees only two groups at odds here: the writers and the city. He sees no third group, which he ought to, because he is himself a part of it: the people who live between the two extremes. Those people have to ride graffiti-covered trains every day. Those people have to pay higher taxes to clean the trains and repair railyard fences cut by taggers. Those people have just as good aclaim to public space as the writers, and the writers don't seem to give a flying fuck what the other people want or expect out of shared space. In that case, it's very easy for me to say, "Fuck you, Joe Austin. You and your graffiti punks are a bunch of assholes!"
I'll let you know how the second half turns out.