Journey Into the Mind of the South Bronx

ish mailian ishmailian at gmail.com
Wed Apr 29 14:58:01 UTC 2020


Yeah, and CP's assertion about how the best minds of a generation were
destroyed by LSD is apt here too.
Shine on you crazy diamond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLPDyOib9oM


On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 7:02 AM gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What's interesting is the kids who grew up while Berman was writing his opus, or in the overweening shadow of modernity.
>
> Isaiah 2:4 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+2%3A4&version=NIV) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_to_ploughshares
>
> The exchange between Zoyd and Isaiah is something out of a sitcom, complete with a green and magenta mohawk. It is also the realization of the logical conclusion of the social and cultural upheavals of the 60s. See Camille Paglia's quote below:
>
> "Dionysian empathy is Dionysian dissolution. Sparagmos is sharing, breaking bread and body together. Dionysian identification is fellow feeling, extended or enlarged identity. It passed into Christianity, which tried to separate Dionysian love from Dionysian nature. But as I said, there is no agape or caritas without eros. The continuum of empathy and emotion leads to sex. Failure to realize that was the Christian error. The continuum of sex leads to sadomasochism.Failure to realize that was the error of the Dionysian Sixties. Dionysus expands identity but crushes individuals. There is no liberal dignity of the person in the Dionysian. The god gives latitude but no civil rights. In nature we are convicted without appeal. (SP, pg 98)"
>
> Also the Punk aesthetic, which emerged in its own right in the late 70s but has antecedents in the 60s Counterculture, which Lester Bangs describes when discussing Iggy & the Stooges:
>
> "Bangs admired the Stooges as fools who leveled the hierarchy of rock stars and mere fans, puncturing along the way the manufactured myths of rock as serious art-making and rock performers as artistic geniuses. The Stooges's lead singer, Iggy Pop (born James Osterberg), was simply "a nice sensitive American boy growing up amid a thicket of some of the worst personal, interpersonal, and national confusion we've seen." Bangs did not define this "thicket" of "confusion" in more detail, but he seems to have viewed Iggy Pop as an individual caught up in the alienating desperation and absurdity of an America that was defined increasingly by a mass-consumer system proffering mostly meaningless goods and images to citizens stranded in suburban wastelands. Iggy was, Bangs explained, "a pre-eminently American kid, singing songs about growing up in America, about being hung up lotsa the time (as who hasn't been?), about confusion and doubt and uncertainty, about inertia and boredom and suburban pubescent darkness." [24]"
>
> See article below:
> http://rockcriticsarchives.com/features/creem/michaelkramer_creem.html
>
> The Bronx during the late 70s was the birth of Hip Hop.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PobrSpMwKk4
>
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 10:06 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> More from Marshall Berman's classic on modernism:
>>
>>
>>
>>  the hallmark of twentieth-century urbanism has been the highway, a
>> means for putting them asunder. We see a strange dialectic here, in
>> which one mode of modernism both energizes and exhausts itself trying
>> to annihilate another, all in modernism's name. (165)
>>
>> Ten minutes on this road, an ordeal for anyone, is especially dreadful
>> for people who remember the Bronx as it used to be: who remember these
>> neighborhoods as they once lived and thrived, until this road itself
>> cut through their heart and made the Bronx, above all, a place to get
>> out of. For children of the Bronx like myself, this road bears a load
>> of special irony: as we race through our childhood world, rushing to
>> get out, relieved to see the end in sight, we are not merely
>> spectators but active participants in the process of destruction that
>> tears our hearts. We fight back the tears, and step on the gas. (291)
>>
>> As I saw one of the loveliest of these buildings being wrecked for the
>> road, I felt a grief that, I can see now, is endemic to modern life.
>> So often the price of ongoing and expanding modernity is the
>> destruction not merely of "traditional" and "pre-modern" institutions
>> and environments but—and here is the real tragedy—of everything most
>> vital and beautiful in the modern world itself. (295)
>>
>> The motive forces in this reconstruction were the multibillion-dollar
>> Federal Highway Program and the vast suburban housing initiatives of
>> the Federal Housing Administration. This new order integrated the
>> whole nation into a unified flow whose lifeblood was the automobile.
>> It conceived of cities principally as obstructions to the flow of
>> traffic, and as junkyards of substandard housing and decaying
>> neighborhoods from which Americans should be given every chance to
>> escape. Thousands of urban neighborhoods were obliterated by this new
>> order; what happened to my Bronx was only the largest and most
>> dramatic instance of something that was happening all over. (307)
>>
>> Why did the futurologists's laughter make me want to cry? He was
>> laughing off what struck me as one of the starkest facts of modern
>> life: that the split in the minds and the wound in the hearts of the
>> men and women on the move—like him, like me—were just as real and just
>> as deep as the drives and dreams that made us go. His laughter carried
>> all the easy confidence of our official culture, the civic faith that
>> America could overcome its inner contradictions simply by driving away
>> from them.
>>
>> As I thought this over, it made me see more clearly what my friends
>> and I were up to when we blocked traffic throughout the decade. We
>> were trying to open up our society's inner wounds, to show that they
>> were still there, sealed but never healed, that they were spreading
>> and festering, that unless they were faced fast they would get worse.
>> We knew that the glittering lives of the people in the fast lane were
>> just as deeply maimed as the battered and buried lives of the people
>> in the way. We knew, because we ourselves were just learning to live
>> in that lane, and to love the pace. But this mean that our project was
>> shot through with paradox from the start. We were working to help
>> other people, and other peoples—blacks, Hispanics, poor whites,
>> Vietnamese—to fight for their homes, even as we fled our own. We, who
>> knew so well how it felt to pull up roots, were throwing ourselves
>> against a state and a social system that seemed to be pulling up, or
>> blowing up, the roots of the whole word. In blocking the way, we were
>> blocking our own way. So long as we grasped our self-divisions, they
>> infused the New Left with a deep sense of irony, a tragic irony that
>> haunted all our spectacular productions of political comedy and
>> melodrama and surreal farce. Our political theater aimed to force the
>> audience to see that they, too, were participants in a developing
>> American tragedy: all of us, all Americans, all moderns, were plunging
>> forward on a thrilling but disastrous course. Individually and
>> collectively, we needed to ask who we were and what we wanted to be,
>> and where we were racing to, and at what human cost. But there was no
>> way to think any of this through under pressure of the traffic that
>> was driving us all on: hence the traffic had to be brought to a halt.
>> (328)
>>
>> Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.
>> Where, then, are we going? Always to our home. —Norvalis, Fragments
>> (on p. 329 of Berman)
>>
>> Many of us who demonstrated in those streets allowed ourselves to
>> hope, even as the trucks and police bore down on us, that out of all
>> these struggles a new synthesis might someday be born, a new mode of
>> modernity through which we all could harmoniously move, in which we
>> all could feel at home. That hope was one of the vital signs of the
>> '60s. It did not last long. Even before the decade ended, it was clear
>> that no dialectical synthesis was in the works, and that we should
>> have to put all such hopes on "hold," a long hold, if we were going to
>> get through the years ahead. (329-330)
>>
>> Rumstick Road suggests that this is the kind of liberation and
>> reconciliation that is possible for human beings in the world. For
>> Gray, and for us insofar as we can identify ourselves with him, the
>> liberation is never total; but it is real, and earned: he has not
>> merely looked into the abyss but gone into it and brought its depths
>> up into the light for us all. (336)
>>
>> Many of these blocks are so comfortably ordinary that we can almost
>> feel ourselves blending in, nearly lulled to sleep—till we turn a
>> corner and the full nightmare of devastation—a block of black
>> burnt-out hulks, a street of rubble and glass where no man goes—surges
>> up in front of us and jars us awake. Then we may begin to understand
>> what we saw on the street before. It has taken the most extraordinary
>> labors to rescue these ordinary streets from death, to begin everyday
>> life here again from the ground up. This collective work springs form
>> a fusion of the government's money with the people's labor—"sweat
>> equity," it is called—and spirit. It is a risky and precarious
>> enterprise—we can feel the risks when we see the horror just around
>> the corner—and it takes a Faustian vision, energy and courage to carry
>> through. These are the people of Faust's new town, who know that they
>> must win their life and freedom every day anew. (344)
>>
>> To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a
>> maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration
>> and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be
>> part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a
>> modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make
>> its rhythms one's own, to move within its currents in search of the
>> forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid
>> and perilous flow allows. (346)
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 3:21 PM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > All those cars in Vineland got me thinking about the Bronx.
>> >
>> > And RR's theocratic police state America c 1984.
>> >
>> > And Berman.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > https://newleftreview.org/issues/I144/articles/marshall-berman-the-signs-in-the-street-a-response-to-perry-anderson
>> --
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