With each passing day of dire news on Wall Street, the housing market and in the auto industry, many have been swift to point out that the country is plunging headlong into spiraling recession. The lifestyles of the urban "aspirational" (one who seeks to live a more luxurious life) is in grave peril, to put it rather mildly. Is New York City going to regress to the fabled, destitute days of the 70's and 80's? The indicators are everywhere, but the one that I've seen most recently that hearkens to that not-too-distant past is the return of Missing Foundation's cryptic graffito, the upside-down cocktail glass over three slashed tines, the message being that "the party is over." This symbol was formerly splashed, sprayed and carved on innumerable facades around the East Village and Lower East Side when it was still considered a badlands comparable to the lawless terrain of Afghanistan. While ostensibly to connote Missing Foundation the band – an amorphous, highly volatile and discordant industrial collective fronted by an enigmatic agitator named Peter Missing – the "party's over" scrawl arguably came to signify squatter's rights and was used as a means of scaring off real estate developers and other would-be gentrifiers. Is its re-appearance a sign of the times?
Missing himself, I gather, has re-located to Germany (the band even has its own MySpace page these days, which somewhat defangs its notorious insurrectionist mystique just a wee bit). But I'm now seeing the graffito newly appearing on ATM machines, phone booths and brick walls. Inspired by same, I pulled out my old copies of MF releases like Demise and Ignore the White Culture (their best album, however '1933' remains seemingly unattainable on compact disc) – and found them to be just as thrillingly (If disturbingly) unlistenable as they were back then. For a fleeting moment, Missing Foundation captured the neurosis-fueled imagination of the city when some newscaster cast the band as a Satanic cult of riot-starting squatters. While parts of that colorful mythology are rooted in fact (they did instigate the odd riot), I doubt Missing Foundation really posed that much of a viable threat to the fabric of society. I'm sure they'd bitterly disagree with me on that point. Perhaps to Missing's mind, his prophecies are coming true.
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