Monday, September 12, 2011
Borough President
The Borough Presidents are a kind of leftover of City government. Up til Charter reform in the late 80's, the 5 Borough Presidents had some juice, each with a representative of the substantially powerful and not altogether transparent Board of Estimate, an entity that controlled basically every City contract. The Board of Estimate died in 1989. Borough Presidents now serve mostly as cheerleaders: they disburse some grants to not-for-profits, appoint some community board members, make some zoning recommendations, sure, but not too much. Hence the office attracts an interesting mix of goofballs who are quite colourful, but not very effective and are not taken very seriously. Our current Brooklyn Borough President ("BP or "BEEP") is Marty Markowitz, a sort of cheerful, tiny man with a pot belly and a very loud voice. He loves to in hyperbole about "outrages" and "travesties." He hates bike lanes. He just got fined $20,000 for accepting free travel for his wife to make diplomatic trips to Turkey and Holland. His defense to the press was great," most people get in trouble when they don't take their wife. I get in trouble when I do!" Not quite. She could've gone if he paid her way. He also claimed that his wife needed to be with him as an official government function, under the principle that she was "the First Lady of Brooklyn," which is a little like a Ditmas Park City Council member saying his wife was the "First Lady of Ditmas Park."
Barbecues in Prospect Park
The Park swells in the summertime. Family groups of all sizes squeezing into a little bit of space, ethnic garb of every description and color: yarmukes, hijabs, baseball caps- grills, nets, blankets, coolers, chairs, frisbees, baseball; one party bleeding into another, seemingly. Drums and music and small children streaming in and out. Bikes racing around. A pulsing mass of Brooklyn on a weened respite. Food trucks swarmed around the entrances. The farmer's market on the north end entrance.
Friday, September 9, 2011
9/9 - other sh*t
Food trucks. They are everywhere! That's gotta make it in some way. Maybe food truck w/o permits and also unsanitary conditions that leads to a question about illegal indentured servitude? Or a minor subplot about a favorite food truck having to move b/c of some change in regulation?
9/9 thoughts, continued
I went to a show on 9/7 at he 59 East 59th. I highly recommend the show, which is in town til October 2nd. It's a clown show called, "Cirque de Legume." Anyway, the show is Irish and I was hanging out with one of the creators, one of the producers who brought it over, and some random friend of the producer's after the show.
Lots of things to say, but I just wanna focus for a sec on the random friend. His name was Ciaron, or Ian, or Seamus. I can't remember. He was there at the producer's invitation. Salt & pepper hair, skinny, big laugh lines in his face. He talked about where he was from and compared notes with the Irish guy who'd just performed. Ireland is a small country, so people tend to know the same people and have been at the same venues. This guy, let's call him Ian, somewhere mentioned that he hadn't been home in five years. And he's not a-typical. He's a type. And he reminded me of a type in the old neighborhood in Brooklyn, another Irish guy who worked as a carpenter. A single dude with a youngish face who gets over to NYC illegally, does construction, mostly for cash, and drinks a lot. Always with a bit of good banter, but some sadness as well. And lonely. And usually with wine stains and slurs around his lips by the end of the night. Surrounded in a sea of people who claim Irish heritage. And he probably feels a bit alienated from that, but also feels like he can't go home.
Lots of things to say, but I just wanna focus for a sec on the random friend. His name was Ciaron, or Ian, or Seamus. I can't remember. He was there at the producer's invitation. Salt & pepper hair, skinny, big laugh lines in his face. He talked about where he was from and compared notes with the Irish guy who'd just performed. Ireland is a small country, so people tend to know the same people and have been at the same venues. This guy, let's call him Ian, somewhere mentioned that he hadn't been home in five years. And he's not a-typical. He's a type. And he reminded me of a type in the old neighborhood in Brooklyn, another Irish guy who worked as a carpenter. A single dude with a youngish face who gets over to NYC illegally, does construction, mostly for cash, and drinks a lot. Always with a bit of good banter, but some sadness as well. And lonely. And usually with wine stains and slurs around his lips by the end of the night. Surrounded in a sea of people who claim Irish heritage. And he probably feels a bit alienated from that, but also feels like he can't go home.
9/9 - some thoughts about the week
A few different threads here I may elaborate on later. Just want to get them down before I forget them.
Went to go see a photo-journalist retrospective about 9/11 at Pace yesterday. It was called, as any such event must be: "Witness to Tragedy and Recovery." Aaron Brown of CNN was the keynote speaker. He was well-spoken: a perfect mix of a little bit of personal, which he used to speak to broader issues. The most important point he made was that speaking about 9/11, while a potentially lucrative activity, was something he had rejected until this particular address. He was conflicted. He didn't want to exploit the event for his own ends, or be seen to be doing so. As he said, "9/11 did not happen to you or to me, or to Rudy. It happened to us." As he went on, it became clear that he thought the potential benefit from such a momentous event - a coming together of the American people in some sort of new civic wisdom - had been squandered quickly after. It was squandered by leadership, by the citizenry, by the media. In other words, we had all tried to capitalize on the tragedy - emotionally, financially, artistically, politically. He also mentioned an insider's exhilaration about reporting on such an event.
The rest of the presentation was downhill. Each photo journalist on the panel, introduced incompetently by a moronic anchor from a local ABC affiliate who must have taken journalism lessons from Ted Baxter III, used their remark time to describe their experience on that particular day. This is fine once or twice, but after that, such a structure cannot but help descend into a snowball of banality, as it did. One can only hear the phrase, "at 8:22am I was talking to my [insert loved one here] when I heard a Cessna crashed into one of the towers, and I thought, I better get down there!" before one feels more at a grand presidium of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, replete with choreographed paeans to the leader and the party, than bearing witness to emotional truth. This was compounded by the "audience Q & A" section, where each questioner prefaced a rather short question with a rather prolix description of themselves and where THEY were on 9/11. This is why I hate these forums. I spend a lot of money on therapy to get my shit and my ongoing shitty egocentric narrative sorted in private. But any event with 9/11 attached to it inevitably turns into a confessional where I play a therapist who is not paid to listen to their bullshit.
Interestingly enough, photo journalists seem to have no sense of narrative. As evinced on several metaphorical levels. On the most basic level, they seemed to have no idea that each successive "I was there" description was another brick on the wall of banality. Secondly, they seem to have no interest in what their trade means to generating informed discourse. There seems to be a professional platitude, "we take pictures. That's what we do. To censor ourselves would be anathema!" Fine. Go watch "Man Bites Dog" and see where that kind of fetishistic dedication got those journalists. One gentleman asked a very interesting question, after taking fifteen minutes of my precious time describing his 9/11 experience, which was, "how much is too much? Is there a point where you say 'no, I cannot take a photograph of this.'" Unanimously, the photo journalists chimed in that there was no limit. "Not my job," would be one way of putting it, reiterated by the moron moderator who seemed to awake form her slumber long enough to condescendingly retort to the audience member, "these aren't editors up here, you know."
This speaks to a larger issue that may well come up as a theme for our characters in Exposure: the conflict between compartmentalized professional (be they journalistic, legal, medical or otherwise) ethics and a larger sense of ethics. When does the devotion to the shot come into conflict with a larger sense of responsibility to community, to knowledge, to history? Are there shots that should not be taken because one knows how they will be used, not to generate knowledge, but to generate hysteria? Obviously, I have no answer on this, but it seems like a fruitful issue to explore.
One journalist who was the Pace student newspaper editor during 9/11 parted with an interesting idea. 9/11 was one of the first events to be captured totally digitally. This means that those images never fade. They never yellow. They never seem to age. Metaphorically, they never die. Does this fact disrupt our collective grieving process? Always now, on video, audio, in photographs, we can relive the trauma as if it happened yesterday. And to the extent that we cannot cast these images into the past, what are the implications for turning the information of emotional trauma into a somewhat more emotionally removed sense of "history?"
Went to go see a photo-journalist retrospective about 9/11 at Pace yesterday. It was called, as any such event must be: "Witness to Tragedy and Recovery." Aaron Brown of CNN was the keynote speaker. He was well-spoken: a perfect mix of a little bit of personal, which he used to speak to broader issues. The most important point he made was that speaking about 9/11, while a potentially lucrative activity, was something he had rejected until this particular address. He was conflicted. He didn't want to exploit the event for his own ends, or be seen to be doing so. As he said, "9/11 did not happen to you or to me, or to Rudy. It happened to us." As he went on, it became clear that he thought the potential benefit from such a momentous event - a coming together of the American people in some sort of new civic wisdom - had been squandered quickly after. It was squandered by leadership, by the citizenry, by the media. In other words, we had all tried to capitalize on the tragedy - emotionally, financially, artistically, politically. He also mentioned an insider's exhilaration about reporting on such an event.
The rest of the presentation was downhill. Each photo journalist on the panel, introduced incompetently by a moronic anchor from a local ABC affiliate who must have taken journalism lessons from Ted Baxter III, used their remark time to describe their experience on that particular day. This is fine once or twice, but after that, such a structure cannot but help descend into a snowball of banality, as it did. One can only hear the phrase, "at 8:22am I was talking to my [insert loved one here] when I heard a Cessna crashed into one of the towers, and I thought, I better get down there!" before one feels more at a grand presidium of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, replete with choreographed paeans to the leader and the party, than bearing witness to emotional truth. This was compounded by the "audience Q & A" section, where each questioner prefaced a rather short question with a rather prolix description of themselves and where THEY were on 9/11. This is why I hate these forums. I spend a lot of money on therapy to get my shit and my ongoing shitty egocentric narrative sorted in private. But any event with 9/11 attached to it inevitably turns into a confessional where I play a therapist who is not paid to listen to their bullshit.
Interestingly enough, photo journalists seem to have no sense of narrative. As evinced on several metaphorical levels. On the most basic level, they seemed to have no idea that each successive "I was there" description was another brick on the wall of banality. Secondly, they seem to have no interest in what their trade means to generating informed discourse. There seems to be a professional platitude, "we take pictures. That's what we do. To censor ourselves would be anathema!" Fine. Go watch "Man Bites Dog" and see where that kind of fetishistic dedication got those journalists. One gentleman asked a very interesting question, after taking fifteen minutes of my precious time describing his 9/11 experience, which was, "how much is too much? Is there a point where you say 'no, I cannot take a photograph of this.'" Unanimously, the photo journalists chimed in that there was no limit. "Not my job," would be one way of putting it, reiterated by the moron moderator who seemed to awake form her slumber long enough to condescendingly retort to the audience member, "these aren't editors up here, you know."
This speaks to a larger issue that may well come up as a theme for our characters in Exposure: the conflict between compartmentalized professional (be they journalistic, legal, medical or otherwise) ethics and a larger sense of ethics. When does the devotion to the shot come into conflict with a larger sense of responsibility to community, to knowledge, to history? Are there shots that should not be taken because one knows how they will be used, not to generate knowledge, but to generate hysteria? Obviously, I have no answer on this, but it seems like a fruitful issue to explore.
One journalist who was the Pace student newspaper editor during 9/11 parted with an interesting idea. 9/11 was one of the first events to be captured totally digitally. This means that those images never fade. They never yellow. They never seem to age. Metaphorically, they never die. Does this fact disrupt our collective grieving process? Always now, on video, audio, in photographs, we can relive the trauma as if it happened yesterday. And to the extent that we cannot cast these images into the past, what are the implications for turning the information of emotional trauma into a somewhat more emotionally removed sense of "history?"
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