Who is SYM? All Hail SYM. Sometimes, his tag is blocky and compressed, as if to contain each letter's energy: S-Y-M, with garrish, overdone shade under, for would-be perspective; othertimes, its a candy-wrapper colored, snakey bubbled, almost as if it would sell you something; still other times, its simple, casual, quick sharpie strokes, like a teacher's correction marks, or bureaucratic scribble, on the back of street sign: SYM. No one is as prolific, by my estimation; no one as fearless, leaving his art at heights and depths, where the danger of position or danger of prosecution is quite so threatening. He's been name-checked in a free weeky, mentioned in the comments section of a site that carries photos of some of the best graffiti along the Cuyohoga River, but as of yet the hardest working tagger (or tagger identity?) in Cleveland has yet to have his (or her?) work publicized beyond its silent, mocking function. This could be because SYM doesn't seem to bother with striking visuals like this one from pbase.com: Instead, he sticks to language alone, either his tag and occasionally his tag and the word "droids." If you note that SimCity, from which SYM might derive his name, involves the player taking on an imaginary mayorial role, building schools, police stations, etc, over vacant lots, areas of urban decay, etc., and believe then that SYM has appropriated this idea for his tag, then the tag SYM itself takes on quite a wonderfully complex decidedly "post-modern" meaning. Superimposed, say, on the back of a speed limit sign, it's a double entandre: not only is it SYM's mark, but an assertion that the city's itself is, well, less than real, if not a simulation. With each tag, SYM marks the city as a kind of collective hallucination, more or less real, depending upon where you stand, and he calls to question who builds the city, making it what it is--who makes its destiny, monied interests or the people? In some of the neighborhoods where SYM's tag is prominent, calling the city a simulation might just be a call to escape, a "don't worry, all of this isn't real, and if it is it will pass soon enough." In others places, the tag, like the one that hovers above the westbound lanes of Chester Avenue, somewhere in the E. 50's and 40's, on the back of a billboard for Detroit "casino-resorts, " it's a taunt. SYM droids, it says--that's all all of you are, you all, simulations of life, mindless at the wheel, unable, too, I think, to see out the power windows, where the projects at E. 55th, stand in more time paralyzed. Cleveland Uber Alles is collecting sightings of SYM's tag, with the hopes of photographing it and assembling on on-line gallery show. Leave any information you might have in the coment section.

No Now, The Land of Begin on Euclid Avenue, near the squat Ziggurut encampment that is the Cleveland Clinic, where the continual broiling and frying of our fast food cartels scents the street with a thick, sweet fattyness, one that overwhelms the exhaust of rusted out hoop-di cars and under-utilized buslines. If there is any now to be found in this city of death, any sense of contemporaneousness, it's here, in front of the strong-armed, and childishly smiling storefronts of the Burger King and Colonel Sanders (names one suspects to be a vestige of the promise, so popular in the 1920s, that consumerism would make each of us, alone in our "affordable" homes, satiated dictators); here, where two construction derricks rise high above the backhoe-scarred asphalt, bringing us one more "state of the art building" with a bodypart or disease in its name, one more room to the ever-expanding hospital of our times. Of course, as the city dies--flashing back through its slummy mind to once proud buildings, like the Hotel Bruce, now signless, further down Euclid Avenue--it can't stop calling for doctors. Whole companies flee and the most well-to-do teenagers board Greyhounds and budget flights out, following those companies, if not their dreams. Entire offices sit vacant, save for the last few who stand outside nervously smoking under the For Rent signs. Neighborhoods sit quietly with their TVs tuned to news custom made for the fears of the suburbs, and panhandlers, wondering where all the commerce went, worry they will have only each other to panhandle. But the doctors keep coming. They might be the only ones left when the whole thing shuts down, just them and a few janitors to turn out the lights, lock up for the distant landlords and close the whole enterprise down. Somehow, when I smell the smoke that raise the roof of of the Burger King, I think of Paris, of Steak Fritte, my favorite dish, and of all those other meals the French must have enjoyed while their empire bogged itself down in Algiers and Indochina on its way to its end. It's beautiful, I think.