I.

Phone tag --- it doesn't happen much anymore and it's the type of phrase my mom used to throw around. Still, I have one friend who went back to a flip phone which seems to have significantly improved his quality of life. I play it with him.

Email tag scarcely seems to exist --- the response time is variable, depending on the amount of time and thought one desires to go into a message. When having a dialogue over text, there's an implicit set of rules that govern response times and double/triple/response-less messaging, given the assumption that one receives a message near-instantaneously. This instant has shrunk through the history of the post, yet one can assume that same etiquette rules, or rather rules for finding an etiquette, have remained. In fact, email tag cannot exits, as tag requires active play from both parties, i.e. picking up the phone and speaking to the other. The temporal lag of reading and writing renders this impossible. Rather, new terms, such as ghosting, have emerged.

II.

You're it. Like everything there's etymology at play. Per wikipedia: "According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the origin of the name 'tag' is unknown, while the Oxford Dictionary of English speculates it to be a variant of 'tig', which itself is possibly a variant of 'tick'."

III.

The leap into the Tag of graffiti is an an interesting etymological link. Like the game, the origins are murky. One could attach it to a commercial tag, like that on an item of clothing, creating a quasi-commercial linkage. Like any community, graf heads have their own language. Like any community that is relatively closed to the public, this language is not readily disclosed on the internet. One can refer to a Glossary of graffiti on Wikipedia, complete with a flag on the top signifying that the page requires additional citations for verification, which will remain slow to catch up to the evolution of language.

IV.

Sunday night I went with my roommate (who tags but is still relatively green) to a friend's barbecue. The friend grew up in East Village and has been into graf since "way back" (my assumption is high school, could be before). I met him at a screening at Film Forum of Stations of the Elevated (1981) with a few others --- the film is one of the earliest documentaries that captures the graffiti of New York in a city symphony type film. At the BBQ were mainly graf heads --- a real mix of guys and backgrounds. My friend went to Bard and art handles, his roommate traps and records rappers, it's vague what most of the other people do for work and it isn't what people are there to talk about. Someone asks my roommate if he used to art handle at White Columns though, and then reveals that he used to intern there. Later, my roommate tells me that he probably didn't recognize him because his clothes are the barbecue are very different from his gallery intern clothes. The host of the barbecue got his art handling job through my roommate. There is another guy on the grill who knew their boss, a rich French gallerist in her 50s who runs a gallery that isn't sexy or cool, growing up. This action occurs on the deck in the back. Inside a group is smoking and recording music. It's one of the most socioeconomically diverse rooms I've been in.

V.

The language I key onto my friend using the most is "drawing" and "painting", though here the word is completely removed from its Art World Definitions. He tells me about his friend who lives in a sober house upstate: "All he does is paint bro. That's all he can do". I end up talking to a kid from Greenpoint who can't be older than 20. He traps weed and shrooms and is about to move to a room in Sunset Park. It's one of the few non-Brownsville type places where one can find a room that's less than 800 a month. He talks about the shuffling of peoples and how he feels bad but there's nothing he can do, he can't afford his own hood, and whoever's running the bluetooth speaker is playing a lot of French Montana and Max B.

Max B remains a fairly localized New York cultural signifier and serves a lodestone for the sort of simulacra-NYC culture that exists today. His mixtape run in the late 2000s was incredibly influential but before the sort of networked internet that allowed A$AP Rocky, coming from the same Harlem neighborhood, to reach rapid (inter)nation(al)wide internet notoriety. After being sentenced to 75 years in 2009, mixtapes continued to come out. Max B and French Montana's mixtape series Coke Wave morphed into a Montana-led group which included Far Rockaway rapper Chinx, formerly Chinx Drugz. Many thought Chinx would be the most successful rapper of that movement, but he was shot and killed in 2015.

At the BBQ, "Feelings" by Chinx feat. French Montana is playing, which prompts a conversation between my roommate and I about a time where I was explaining Chinx to a mutual friend on the street in Chinatown and that friend was telling me to chill saying that word. A conversation with the Greenpoint trapper ensues about how the thing about Max B fans is that everyone has different favorite songs because there are so many mixtapes and there are songs that people have never heard. I talk about how that exists w/ Gucci Mane tapes and we illustrate our point w/ how neither of us knows the other's favorite song off Lil B's 101 track long 2013 tape "05 Fuck Em".

Later, while we're walking back, my roommate points out how funny that interaction was, as that non-knowledge of the complete discography stems from not being there as that mixtape run was happening. Him and I are able to properly catalogue current mixtape runs happening (largely in Milwaukee and Stockton, where the mixtape ethos carries on vs. the pursuit of singles seen in most places). The people who have that knowledge with Max B are in their late 20s at the youngest, and more likely to be in their 40s.

But it's a matter of language. James Ferraro in The Fader circa 2011 on St. Marks: "It's a copy of a copy, yeah. I think a lot of people flock to destinations all over the world based on things they learned from movies or books. It's like how Nubia took over Egypt and they fully embraced their whole culture and it became this second-wave Egyptian civilization." For the new generation, to be into Max B is to affirm oneself as a Real New Yorker.

VI.

The thing about graf heads is how all of this knowledge exists either orally or in the realm of the image. It's taboo to codify it into a text, but of course, what constitutes a text is fluid. A film like Stations of the Elevated can be celebrated, but in the Q&A that followed the film, a young man bringing up how he got a B.A. in Graffiti Studies or something of the sort from Hunter College only hastened the groans that accompanied his "more of a comment than a question".

VII.

On the 4th of July, I went on a walk with some friends down the rail tracks behind Fresh Pond Road that lead to a railroad yard. We were looking at graffiti, my roommate was giving context to certain tags and pieces --- he was translating. I began cataloguing what we were seeing, which turned into a catalogue of the day, which I edited into a 5 video piece entitled "the poo ling surge 4", playing off of Eduardo Williams' "The Human Surge 3", a film which had its last day screening at BAM on the 4th, which I didn't see. "poo ling" came from a train car we saw, which in full read "Railcar Pooling Experts", though poo ling was split into two words by the train. Initially, we thought it was a Chinese company's car, and also compared it to LA rapper Drakeo The Ruler's language, who'd use phrases like "Mei ling just took me shopping" and "Ling ling boppin" to describe robbing Asian people (who don't believe in banking and keep a lot of cash in the crib).

VIII.

While I was in the Pacific Northwest the last week, I began to heavily consider the relation between Stories and Language. It was prompted by the friend who came with me, who went to middle and high school with me. His parents moved back to Connecticut after he graduated and he hadn't been back since. He stayed with me and my family and we spent a lot time together, seeing people he hadn't seen in a long time. He'd tell far more stories than I would and by the end it was wearing thin on me. A friend was comparing how the two of us hang out in New York ---- he goes to bars and talks to random people, they exchange stories, whereas I go to more scene-y places where I can speak a mutual language with people, about art, music, books topics, ideas.

As I've tried to tease out this relation, the "I" continues to hit me --- it's a stylistic habit, one that I could easily tease out through a round of edits, or ask an LLM to handle for me, but in the above section there are a number of Stories --- stories which contain Language and discussions of Language but are stories nonetheless. It's the sort of thing I noted about Bartleby & Co. in my Residency piece, about the hyper-literary referentiality occupying the bulk of the narrative.

IX.

A short, simple story:

All stories have Language, all language has a Story. Story implies Histoire, language implies Lengua. The story of Tag is a reminder that the loop continues. The story of Tagging is a reminder of how much remains unwritten.