Journey Into the Mind of the South Bronx

[rich]

just a thought
pls let us not aestheticize trauma
the south bronx isnt a lab
reminds me of the german tourists on a bus tour of the S Bronx in Underworld
it's like only focusing on the wars, famine, etc in Africa (my god they
have cell phones)
only punks look back to the 70s/80s with fondness. most were on a junket

On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 10:58 AM ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >> --
> >> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
> --
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>