Editor's Note: Please pardon our appearance; poem still under construction.
Revisionist History of the Titans
By the end of this
sentence the wealthiest
man alive will be one million,
five hundred-seventy-two thousand,
twenty-seven dollars and sixty-five cents richer
while in that same time, I will have lost
another dollar to a broken vending machine
and fallen behind on my rent. That used to bother me,
how the statue of Atlas in Rockefeller Center would gloat,
how he sported the sky on his shoulders,
more his trophy than his reason for despair;
how his buddy around the corner, Prometheus,
enlightened mankind without a pigeon in sight
to shit on his skin (to say nothing of the Harpies)
as smooth and golden as a 30-second spot
for soft light type light-bulbs. If ever I gazed
too long up the facade of the General Electric building,
its height representing its yearly cash flow,
I tended to shrink in proportion, to my gross income,
and thus bruise my shin against the side of a dime
for not paying attention to where I was going.
That’s how you learn the worth of looking up,
though I wonder if people who stand
for snapshots beside the bronze Titans know how small
they’ll appear in that frame, if they find strength
in never counting the decimals that precede their net on paper,
or if the only thing they can do is pretend they really don’t care.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Dry Up, America
When God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, Norman Rockwell and Jimmy Stewart wrote the Constitution on a stone tablet on top of the World Trade Center in 1776, they clearly instructed George Washington that to preserve the young, fragile federation of colonies, he must invent something called a Third-Party Candidate. Ever since then, it has been the job of Third-Party Candidates to herd voters into one of two electoral corrals in the false left/right dichotomy that preserves Democratic and Republican control by making them look like honest and superior choices by comparison. That's why we have dark horses like Gene Amondson.
Gene wants to resurrect prohibition. He has frequently dressed up as the Grim Reaper in order to drive that message home. "Death to the Demon Drink," he likes to say. Gene is a world-class painter, as well, and the author of children's stories for which he gets his inspiration by falling asleep and dreaming during the sermon
portion of a church service. It wouldn't be surprising if it turned out that Gene here were really just having fun tilting at windmills and drawing attention to the delusion of meaningful elections. But no matter what his reason for running, the irrelevance of his cause guarantees its failure, which is exactly what the managers of our society want. Besides, don't we already know what happens when a dry drunk sits in the Oval Office for almost eight years?
Gene wants to resurrect prohibition. He has frequently dressed up as the Grim Reaper in order to drive that message home. "Death to the Demon Drink," he likes to say. Gene is a world-class painter, as well, and the author of children's stories for which he gets his inspiration by falling asleep and dreaming during the sermon portion of a church service. It wouldn't be surprising if it turned out that Gene here were really just having fun tilting at windmills and drawing attention to the delusion of meaningful elections. But no matter what his reason for running, the irrelevance of his cause guarantees its failure, which is exactly what the managers of our society want. Besides, don't we already know what happens when a dry drunk sits in the Oval Office for almost eight years?
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
Where in the World is Jane Jacobs?
From an e-mail exchange with a friend regarding the development of the Lower East Side since the early 1980s. Re-printed here without anyone's permission:
That's absolutely true. The difference to me is that all of that [housing projects, old school barber shops, Puerto Rican kids hanging out on the street, community gardens with black ladies lovingly tending the flower beds, synagogues, bums, junkies, knish joints, wholesale fabric shops, even some orthodox Jews] was there 25 years ago, but being white in the LES signified something very different back then than what being white represents now.
I wouldn't say that the change was a matter of going from better to worse, necessarily, or even of authenticity versus forgery. But it parallels the overall development of Manhattan since the late 1980s, at least. White migrants, to grossly generalize, used to come to New York (especially the Village and LES) as an aesthetic or social repudiation of the suburban experience, concomitant to an openness to all kinds of reinvention using the material most at hand: the abandoned debris of urban decay.
Maybe nothing illustrates this better than the community gardens, which not only transformed rubble into the resurrection of urban life, but also created a commons, a basis for cross-cultural, cross-generational unity.
It's easy for me to idealize the time before Real Estate, but it's not nearly so easy for me to imagine that the inhabitants of new condo developments on Rivington Street would even understand that vision, especially now years after Giuliani's purge of community gardens in the heat of a commercially driven urban renewal. Recent arrivals to the LES enjoy the idea of the Lower East Side, but perhaps would shrink in horror from the raw ingredients that went into the creation of that idea. These people, too, are suburban migrants, but they are not the refugees of a generation ago, and for that reason alone, their experience of the LES will be markedly different, and perhaps more informed by the new New York, the city-as-mall-and-food-court.
I know, I'm being unfair. There's still a lot of rawness around. But it feels pickled, kept in a jar, a wildlife refuge where young white people can "safari" without ever having to get their hands dirty.
That's absolutely true. The difference to me is that all of that [housing projects, old school barber shops, Puerto Rican kids hanging out on the street, community gardens with black ladies lovingly tending the flower beds, synagogues, bums, junkies, knish joints, wholesale fabric shops, even some orthodox Jews] was there 25 years ago, but being white in the LES signified something very different back then than what being white represents now.
I wouldn't say that the change was a matter of going from better to worse, necessarily, or even of authenticity versus forgery. But it parallels the overall development of Manhattan since the late 1980s, at least. White migrants, to grossly generalize, used to come to New York (especially the Village and LES) as an aesthetic or social repudiation of the suburban experience, concomitant to an openness to all kinds of reinvention using the material most at hand: the abandoned debris of urban decay.
Maybe nothing illustrates this better than the community gardens, which not only transformed rubble into the resurrection of urban life, but also created a commons, a basis for cross-cultural, cross-generational unity.
It's easy for me to idealize the time before Real Estate, but it's not nearly so easy for me to imagine that the inhabitants of new condo developments on Rivington Street would even understand that vision, especially now years after Giuliani's purge of community gardens in the heat of a commercially driven urban renewal. Recent arrivals to the LES enjoy the idea of the Lower East Side, but perhaps would shrink in horror from the raw ingredients that went into the creation of that idea. These people, too, are suburban migrants, but they are not the refugees of a generation ago, and for that reason alone, their experience of the LES will be markedly different, and perhaps more informed by the new New York, the city-as-mall-and-food-court.
I know, I'm being unfair. There's still a lot of rawness around. But it feels pickled, kept in a jar, a wildlife refuge where young white people can "safari" without ever having to get their hands dirty.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
PLEASE STAY INSIDE THE FREE SPEECH ZONE
Presenting the 2010 Active Denial System from Raytheon, a breakthrough non-lethal technology that uses electromagnetic energy to stop, deter and turn back liberation theologians, poli-sci majors, hippies and New Yorkers at relatively long range from the safety and comfort of a truck.
It comes with dual air bags, an anti-lock braking system, 64-0z cup holders, a rear seat video entertainment system, and the capability to emit an energy wave that makes your skin feel like it's on fire!
The 95-GHz millimeter waves travel to the target at the speed of light, penetrating less than 1/64 of an inch into the skin, which heats up to 130° F in just two seconds! Thus Active Denial humanely causes a target to move in a desired direction using the human instinct to avoid bursting into flames. Active Denial is the perfect system for maintaining authorized free speech zones. Let's face it: as much as we'd like to shoot them, sometimes there are more peaceniks than bullets.
And remember, we have a pretend democracy to protect.
It comes with dual air bags, an anti-lock braking system, 64-0z cup holders, a rear seat video entertainment system, and the capability to emit an energy wave that makes your skin feel like it's on fire!The 95-GHz millimeter waves travel to the target at the speed of light, penetrating less than 1/64 of an inch into the skin, which heats up to 130° F in just two seconds! Thus Active Denial humanely causes a target to move in a desired direction using the human instinct to avoid bursting into flames. Active Denial is the perfect system for maintaining authorized free speech zones. Let's face it: as much as we'd like to shoot them, sometimes there are more peaceniks than bullets.
And remember, we have a pretend democracy to protect.
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