Justicia del Sur

after viewing Héctor Rondón Lovera’s photograph “The Priest and the Dying Soldier” and Norman Rockwell’s “Southern Justice.”

A street corner is a kind of
crossroads. “Where do
we go from here?”
is the usual
inquiry,

but I prefer
“What is to be done?”

It’s funny how you can feel
so big and so small
at the same time,
sometimes.

Those who cast shadows
tend do so from
afar.

Re: the minimum wage

As a perpetual wage worker, I think a raise of the federal minimum wage to $9/hr as Obama has proposed would be great, but we should keep in mind a few things:

1) The minimum wage has been steadily decreasing in buying power since the late 1960’s. In order for it just to be returned to the level it was at at that time (disregarding the objective gross exponential rise in worker productivity, and thus corporate profits, during the same period), the minimum wage would need to be at least $10 an hour.

2) It’s true purpose is not to help workers in the first place, it’s for Obama to bring mainstream organized labor back into pocket with the Democratic party. Labor has been showing signs of drifting and increased militancy after repeated betrayals by the Democrats over the past four years. We need to be prepared to agitate for direct action as a means of improving the lives of workers and not get sucked into looking to the capitalist state for much help. And

3) Its probably not gonna happen anyway.

My feeling is that most political poetry is preaching to the choir, and that the people who are going to make the political changes in our lives are not the people who read poetry, unfortunately. Poetry not specifically aimed at political revolution, though, is beneficial in moving people toward that kind of action, as well as other kinds of action. A good poem makes me want to be active on as many fronts as possible….Political poetry seldom achieves its goal since the people who should read it (presidents, politicians) don’t read poetry, and most of those who do are already persuaded of the truth of its messages (war is bad, government and industry are often corrupt, racism and other kinds of discrimination should be abolished, global warming is destroying the world, etc.) and might be annoyed at being lectured for wanting ideals they in fact possess. Non-didactic poetry, which seeks merely to delight (Keats’s sonnet about the grasshopper is a good example) can inspire readers to act humanely on many different levels, including the political one.
John Ashbery

Source: http

The banal machines are exposing themselves
on nearby hillocks of arrested color: why
if we are the anthropologists canopé
should this upset the autumn afternoon?

It is because you are silent. Speak, if
speech is not embarrassed by your attention
to the scenery! in languages more livid than
vomit on Sunday after wafer and prayer.

What is the poet for, if not to scream
himself into a hernia of admiration for all
paradoxical integuments: the kiss, the
bomb, cathedrals and the zeppelin anchored

to the hill of dreams? Oh be not silent
on this distressing holiday whose week
has been a chute of sand down which no
factories or castles tumbled: only my

petulant two-fisted heart. You, dear poet,
who addressed yourself to flowers, Electra,
and photographs on less painful occasions,
must save me from the void’s eternal noise.

Frank O’Hara, “Ashes on a Saturday Afternoon”
Modern society in its present form may be likened to the pattern of a caravan site. The place is open to everyone with his or her own caravan and enough money to pay the rent. Guests come and go; none of them takes much interest in how the site is run, providing the customers have been allocated plots big enough to park the caravans, the electric sockets and water taps are in good order and the owners of the caravans parked nearby do not make too much noise and keep down the sound from their portable TVs and hi-fi speakers after dark. Drivers bring to the site their own homes attached to their cars and equipped with all the appliances they need for the stay, which at any rate they intend to be short. Each driver has his or her own itinerary and time schedule. What the drivers want from the site’s managers is not much more (but no less either) than to be left alone and not interfered with. In exchange, they promise not to challenge the managers’ authority and to pay the rent when due. Since they pay, they also demand. They tend to be quite adamant when arguing for their rights to the promised services but otherwise want to go their own ways and would be angry if not allowed to do so. On occasion, they may clamour for better service; if they are outspoken, vociferous and resolute enough, they may even get it. If they feel short-changed or find the managers’ promises not kept, the caravanners may complain and demand their due - but it won’t occur to them to question and renegotiate the managerial philosophy of the site, much less to take over the responsibility for running the place.
Zygmunt Bauman, from Liquid Modernity

Source: http

Finding Place in American Waste

“Are our cities really becoming mere addresses for businesses, names that serve as guideposts to let us know that we’ve moved to another point in space and geography? And the truly interesting, culturally significant parts of our cities are becoming domestic green-zones: gentrified, militarized and privatized so that only the privileged can enjoy them. Or utterly forgotten and neglected by city ‘leaders,’ and left to rot…

We ought to recognize that architecture and planning are not non–ideological. There is a relationship between the current neo-liberal ideology of late capitalism and the alienating, oppressive structures they produce. There is no space for this class consciousness in the projects of well-meaning liberals. We need a revolutionary social movement to reshape the aesthetics and ownership of our cities, so that we can both design new types of structures and urban plans that enrich life, and empower those who actually live and work in them to run and benefit from them.”

(Click the title to read more). 

Source: chambrebs.wordpress.org

New blog, first real post.

Wordpress allows me to write posts in a little more depth, so I will be using that to publish such kind of writing from now own. Here is that essay I mentioned a while ago about things I was thinking about after watching The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. You can follow me by email if you like. Check it out, friends! (Click the title of this post). 

In the suburbs and exurbs where the typical American lives today, tiny nuclear families inhabit enormous houses, in which each person has his or her own bedroom and, sometimes, bathroom. Compared even with suburbs in the sixties and seventies, when I was growing up, the contemporary condominium development or gated community offers a striking degree of anonymity. It’s no longer the rule that you know your neighbors. Community increasingly tends to be virtual, the participants either faceless or firmly in control of the face they present. Transportation is largely private: the latest SUVs are the size of living rooms and come with onboard telephones, CD players, and TV screens; behind the tinted windows of one of these high-riding I-see-you-but-you-can’t-see-me mobile PrivacyGuard units, a person can be wearing pajamas or a licorice bikini, for all anybody knows or cares…Unfortunately, the fully public place is a nearly extinct category…Privacy is protected as both commodity and right; public forums are protected as neither. Like old-growth forests, they’re few and irreplaceable and should be held in trust by everyone. The work of maintaining them gets only harder as the private sector grows ever more demanding, distracting, and disheartening. Who has the time and energy to stand up for the public sphere? What rhetoric can possibly compete with the American love of ‘privacy?’
Jonathan Franzen, from the essay “Imperial Bedroom.”

So I wrote a movie review...

My friend at the Winchester Film Club asked me to write a review of a film I had recently watched, a documentary called The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. The film was about this (in)famous public housing project, the Captain W. O. Pruitt Homes & William L. Igoe Apartments, in St. Louis that existed from the 50’s to the early 70’s, and how the dominant narrative about why the project failed became the foundation of this national myth about public housing itself. I had never written a review of anything before but I think it turned out pretty well. Click the title of this post to read the full review. I’m working on a full-length essay for my new blog that explores some of the ideas I touched on in the review. Stay tuned for that. 

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

“The primary goal of the film was to challenge the dominant narrative about Pruitt-Igoe, which has been, to a significant extent, representative of the dominant narrative about public housing in general. As a former resident put it, ‘I know a lot of bad things came out of Pruitt-Igoe but I don’t think they outweigh the good.’ As the film dissects the issues, what becomes clear is that the mission of affordable, not-for-profit housing should not die with Pruitt-Igoe. While the failure of the project came to be seen as the failure of public housing in general, the reverse should be seen as the true story. What happened to Pruitt-Igoe was the same as what happened to St. Louis and other formerly industrial American cities at the time: decline and decay. Or, more broadly: the defeat of the welfare state and the rise of neoliberalism. The film implores us not to throw the baby out with the proverbial bath water and re-examine what we’ve been told about the alleged failure of public solutions and superiority of privatization. This is what makes the film so valuable, as today cities across the country are grappling with the same lack of affordable housing and decent jobs in the inner city, and the same questions face us that faced St. Louis in 1949…Since most of us are living in urban environments already and the percentage is only getting bigger, affordable housing is becoming increasingly important, and this film is an invaluable contribution to the discourse over how to achieve that.”

Again, click the title of this post to read the full review. 

Source: http

Gore Vidal, In Quotes

Some of my favorites…

“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”

“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”

“Never have children, only grandchildren.”

“You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: ‘Where are the readers?’” 

Rest in peace, man.

Source: http

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