Comfort and Security

The revolution will not be waged in the name of joy. Joy is only a byproduct, the irreducible of life. The place where joy grows is less flashy -- a comfortable chair, a warm meal, a safe place to stay.

A small measure of comfort and security is a life's pursuit, and still unnatainable by the majority. Under capitalism it cannot be any other way. Pinky points out that, despite neo-lib economics all-worship of the pleasure principle, it is the pain priciple that is the real driver of the world. The pleasure principle has a tenuous reality at best -- mostly, as you move up the "economic ladder" there is just an exchange of more comfort for less security.

So yes, do we fight for a world run by joy? But can this world be struggled for under the banner of joy? I doubt it. My joy and your joy are fickle things, and fleeting, often contradictory, and not easily lined up. Because this is the question. Power is a question of being lined up.

Back lot

Formed a relationship with the new landlords of the old lot. Back in; officially as of tuesday, unofficially since last friday. My whole nervous system heaved a sigh of relief, and I can't seem to remember anything. or really do much of anything. or anything.

This interruption of a week and a half was a terrible strain on me. Adding that much physical labor to my daily life has a strange effect. The front of my mind goes cloudy -- it becomes difficult to organize my thoughts -- and meanwhile, in the background, there is a feeling of dread, of unsustainability, of creeping death.

The body knows things the mind does not.

Dad signed up for the Kerry Army...

and Mom too.

My father has been in Cincinnati for the past week and a half, doing work for a unaffiliated Kerry-for-Prez 527. He was due to go a week earlier, but the lot crisis happened and I persuaded him to stay and help me for a bit. He goes back on Friday, and will stay on until the election.

Mom, meanwhile, is spending weekends in Buck's County, Pennsylvania, with the Kerry campaign.

It's adding even more twist and anticipation to the election for me. Nothing will be normal until Nov. 3.

Leisure Life

"Capitalism's crime is not that it makes us work too much, but that it makes us work too little." -- Mol Tse

It's a bad mistake to think of leisure as a human's natural state, best state, or worst of all, his right.

The bonds formed on the basis of leisure, often masked under the concept of "free association," are weak and ineffectual. Give me the hot fusion of compulsion any day. Moreover, unless we are referring to the leisure of the jobless and destitute, leisure rests on a bloody pedestal. Thinking of leisure as our "right" can only be clamoring to be let up.

Even a minor thought, such as "I shouldn't have to work this hard" can be an opening to this error. It is important to be clear what (or, might I suggest, who) this "should" relates us to. Not the fantasy-world of leisure -- this is obscurantism.

What is required of us...

"What is required of us 

     is that we love the difficult

  and learn to deal with it. 

In the difficult are the friendly forces, 

the hands that work on us. 

Right in the difficult 

    we must have our joys, our happiness,

  our dreams:

       there 

    against the depth of this background,

      they stand out, 

there for the first time we see how 

                   beautiful they are."

-Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke

Report: Stanton and Ludlow

The environment is what we all share -- it is the revealed fact of our unity. This is nowhere more true than in the city, which always tends to resolve wild spaces.

What was the environent? As summer was changing to fall, something was getting wild at the corner. The cart was caught up in this uncertainty. There was one night -- I think it was Yom Kippur.

I was parked on Ludlow, adjacent to the crowd out front of Pianos. We had weathered the first cold front of the season, the temperature had rebounded but not all the way. The beginning of the night was slow business -- many groups of people, but drifting or standing around aimlessly. I myself was caught in one of these groups for a while -- and it was pleasant: making some food, enjoying some conversation.

[The incident of the hundred dollar hot dog happened during this part of the evening, but that's a yarn for another day...]

Then suddenly it kicks into another gear altogether, starting with an orders for 4 Korean Style Beef Barbeque (my most elaborate and expensive dish), followed immediately by two more orders. The rush is on, and I'm caught flat-footed, with not much food already prepared. I'm tossing off a few hot dog orders, a few sausage orders, and then the orders for Chicken BBQ Sandwiches start coming in. People are hungrier than they had realized/ the natives are restless...

Then a silver BMW SUV pulls up off the curb behind me, the soundsystem amped. It's good music, too -- a cold fusion of hip-hop and latin dance. It's one of my regulars -- he orders a chicken sandwich and sits back to wait, propping the car door open and jacking up the sound on his speakers even higher. It's a party in the street. What do you do -- you rock and you don't stop.

In reconstruction: it must have lasted for a little over an hour, from about 2:30 to 3:40 -- nice young people getting loose, hardened partyers brightening up, Puerto Ricans stoned and straight, a car service driver, a two German chicks snapping photographs -- a good time, and no casualties. It ended quickly and well, the crowd dispersed peaceably. Someone must have taken notice...

The next weekend I arrived to find the the police squatting on the block. There was a police checkpoint at the bottom of Ludlow. The manager from Pianos told me the story: they had been harrassing him about "blocking the sidewalk." They kept asking him why I put "his" pushcart there. He had explained that it wasn't his, but offered to pass on the word: "they don't want you on this side of the intersection." When I asked why, he said I could talk to the Leiutenant myself if I wanted. He pointed him out: the white stuffed-shirt asshole swaggering around overseeing the checkpoint, his fat belly hanging over his belt, an unlit cigar caught in his slack mouth. I declined.

On Friday, the building department raided Pianos, dropping its occupancy by a third. The checkpoint was still in effect. Every car with any violation -- so much as a seatbelt law violation -- was pulled over, the occupants forced to show ID. Apart from one incident where the 5-0 bit off more than they could chew and the driver leapt out, screaming "I'll have your jobs! do you know who I am? who I know?" --- I didn't see it, but the manager of Pianos recounted it with great glee: "the Leiutenant backed right the fuck down!" --- apart from that, the action had the desired chilling effect.

The next week the "emergency response unit" lowered the occupancy of Pianos even further. The checkpoint held, in Friday they even added a paddy wagon, parked ominously directly across from Pianos. No one was arrested, but the message was clear. Business was, shall we say, quiet.

[was there another weekend in there? -- I don't know, the ordeal of the lot switch strains my ability to recall]

Yesterday the police were finally gone. Business was at a record high, but it was no party. The manager of Pianos invited me to go to the Community Board Meeting on Wednesday, and I've decided to take him up on it. It is, ominously, held in the police precint building on Pitt Street.

Your faithful reporter...

///////

further analysis to follow...now I need to sleep...

A multitude of errors

"more numerous that mushrooms on a shit-pile after the rain..."

At work throughout multitudes is a confusion between the functioning of ideas, which can be expressed discretely, and objects, which must be described relationally. Unfortunately for the authors, this expresses itself not as a single error, which can just be flipped in each case without dismembering the whole, but as a persistent failure of sense -- more like being chauffered by a blind person than by a dyslexic.

Setting aside for a moment the dismal prospect they set out in the preface: to illuminate a way to "an open and inclusive democratic global society" with the dim-bulb concept of "the multitude," a term as lacking in style as it is in conceptual content, let's leap straight into the first chapter, "Simplicissimus."

This chapter is an excruciating excursion in the conceptual terrain of security and what they call the "state of exception." This is excruciating not with the white-knuckle excitement of driving at night with a blind person at the wheel (as their adoration of Nietche might suggest) but rather with the tedium of having to play along with a blind person, who long ago decided it was unsafe to apply the gas, and simply pantomimes driving, vigorously swerving the wheel and telling you about the wonderful places the two of you are driving through. It would take a lot more poetry than these two have to offer to make it interesting to follow along with the charade -- BUT, IN YOUR SERVICE, GENTLE READER, I SHALL PERSIST.

No, this is not poetry, just a dogged recount the imperialist ideology of "security," followed by the exhausted, wan promise to describe later what "real security" might look like. If we are writing politics, not poetry, we have to go at the problem the other way around, starting with real security and working towards the ideology. Instead of starting with the global concept, and trying to interpolate a resistance "in its shadow," it becomes clear we have to choose an example: I choose New York City. What security do we have?

The question immediately starts to open, to divide into two "clear and distinct" pieces: security relative to the environment, and security relative to other people. This simple distinction entirely eludes H&N -- they sloppily describ a misshapen unity of two lobes: "biopolitical production" and "the right of the police."

[a brief ad hominem rant: fuck it guys -- once you decide to look directly at the problem and stop swirling these words around in your mouth in emulation of a plugged toilet, once you roll up your sleeves and fucking engage with it, it starts to open up to you. Not all words taste like shit in the mouth, just onces you've been sucking on too long. These fuckwads wind themselves with spurious prologues and preliminary notes, vast promises they leave unfillde -- relative to one another? Or relative to our environment? these are two questions, and you have to deal with each of them separately!]

So now we need an even more specific instance: let me use the police presence on the corner of Stanton and Ludlow.

continued....

OK

Godard claims, in "In Praise of Love," that the expression "OK" comes from a report in the Civil War -- "0 Killed."

When we complete a particularly difficult or trying task, Molly has taken to saying "and nobody died." Try saying it, it's reassuring.

I still find it hard to hold in my head...

that the crack crisis was engineered, at every level, by our very own U.S. government.

"...and resolved by the populace," adds Molly.

(this a propos of the new vh1 documentary "and you don't stop: 30 years of hip-hop," which I heartily reccomend)

fucked on both ends

this has not been a good week. on the one side, there has been a change of landlords at the space where I store the cart. Hopefully, I will be able to work out a deal with the new owner. In the meantime, I'm having to push the cart over half a mile (again), just to get to work. This is trouble I don't need.

on the other hand, the police have been hasseling me and my collaborator about setting up on ludlow street. They say it's a matter of "keeping the sidewalk open." Open for what, I wonder? Almost all of the people on the sidewalk are either going to the cart, or going to the club. So they are, presumably, blocking the street -- from themselves. But there is no point in trying to talk to the police. The last time I tried that, I got slapped with a ticket. So we have to stay off Ludlow, which reduces our revenue by about 30%. Fuck and double fuck. Working harder for less...

faceoff

lightningfield.com

from the high line series on lightningfield.com

been browsing some nice photos at lightningfield. the resolution of the photos are beautiful; I love the painterly quality that comes out in some of them, like the one above.

Just in case...

...you were wondering how well things were going in the wake of the U.S.-engineered coup in Haiti. (Um, read through the propaganda, please -- my favorite line is "slum infested with gangsters loyal to ousted President ").

two a more-or-less klassy reports.

and from CBS

So, campers, one "day of struggle" down, next one coming on October 17th.

"Security," highlighted by the CBS article, is an issue I will be trying to address here -- it is also raised by Hardt and Negri in a mushy and wrongheaded way.