Jim Costanza and Mike Estabrook, part of theJudgement Day show at Bullet Space
Monday, December 4, 2017
ABC No Rio in Exile at Bullet
Jim Costanza and Mike Estabrook, part of theJudgement Day show at Bullet Space
The taste of rubble
(It's been ages since I wrote on this blog. But it's time to vent, and move some words around on a page. After the occasion of the Senate tax bill middle-of-the-night vote, December 2, bastard Republicans 51-49. And after Juan Felipe Herrera Enter the Void)
The smell of rubble. Not a smell, really, but a coating and
a choking. The taste of rubble, the grit and crunch between teeth, the clouds
of dust that rise as you move, as things fall, as things pale. Smoke of dust
and bone. Wet things in the rubble, unidentified and terrifying. Accidents of
birth and circumstance. I chose the rubble I stood in but there’s no promise my
walls won’t come tumbling down. What lives felt normal, until they weren’t? I sat
at my computer, calm and quiet, until the building started to shimmy and shake,
and a crack opened by my bed. My nightmares rain rubble. Lina went home to Rome
and one day, in her kitchen, the floor opened beneath her and left her, broken,
in the new rubble of her life. How many children are spitting rubble, or split
and broken from it, unexpectant and incomprehending. Tax plan. Military
spending. Calls and emails and no avail. Military spending. Children broken
into pits of brick and stone and bone and dust and horror and mothers wailing
and brothers digging and the mess sending people fleeing their homes to – not help,
not open arms, not shelter and safety, but to cold and fear and abuse. To be depicted
in lies and fury. When I was six years old my father brought home a family he
found on the side of the road, to live with us for months. Rubble rains down
when you least expect it. You can dig, you can carry, you have to water down that
dust. Spit it out.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Saturday, March 31, 2012
To tell an alternative history of the east village... The Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space
http://www.morusnyc.org/
Now fundraising, this museum will be based in the C Squat building and tell of the activists, squats, community gardens and creative battles that are part of the long radical history of the neighborhood.
Here's a tour I was part of recently:
http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/on-a-tour-of-former-squats-trash-artists-and-cat-poo-painters/
Now fundraising, this museum will be based in the C Squat building and tell of the activists, squats, community gardens and creative battles that are part of the long radical history of the neighborhood.
Here's a tour I was part of recently:
http://eastvillage.thelocal.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/on-a-tour-of-former-squats-trash-artists-and-cat-poo-painters/
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Art vs. the Machine
Artist Richard Hambleton tells the story of two junkies, looking to break into the cars, who kept waiting for a lot attendant to leave so they could get on with their business. At daylight they realize, furiously, they'd been foiled by his "shadowman"...
There's a 24-floor luxury apartment building on the lot now.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Friday, January 6, 2012
Monday, December 26, 2011
East River bandshell
Grady's Altar
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Bullet Space c. 1990
4th of July (a good day for arson)
They blamed bottle rockets, but someone set fire to the building across the street. A big old factory - five floors of pigeon, rat and junkie droppings and the piled debris of years of disuse went up with a rush and the flames were so high you could see it blaze from blocks away. It burned so hot that we couldn’t stand on our roof - the heat reddened our faces and the smoke scorched our lungs, and the bricks of our building got too hot to touch. We were engulfed by the heat, afraid we’d burn down too, standing under cascades of sparks and blasts of superheated air.
And then the burning building collapsed, setting the firemen running and the neighbors yelling as bricks tumbled and burning beams flew about. A whole wall fell sideways, crushing all the cars parked in the lot next door and also the unlucky chickens cooped there. They were probably cooked already by the heat. By morning Third Street felt apocalyptic - a smoking, ruined landscape populated by fat rats, skinny cats and the local mob of skeletal stray dogs. For a week they pulled out the twisted metal of flattened cars and lined them up to be carted away - compacted scrap. The smell lingered - burnt neighborhood.
Another year on the Fourth, gangbangers lit up a bag of fireworks they had stuffed under the seat of a stripped car outside our front door. A smothered hissing detonation, then smoldering stinking black smoke until the car burst into flames. It burned so hard the fire licked our front door and second floor fire escape and the choking greasy smoke poured through our crooked old windows. We didn’t want to let the firemen in (safety violations always a good way to evict) but there was too much fire and they were too busy to mess with us. Let us in or we’ll cut the door down. My skin and everything in my apartment was covered with greasy black soot.
As our neighborhood was to drugs, Chinatown was to fireworks -
an open-air bazaar of shells and mortars, M-80s, blazing fountains and
roman candles. They sold openly on street corners and out of car trunks. Which meant that every year our building would shake rattle and roll with weeks of massive detonations in the streets. Smoke hung low on hot nights as the Lower East Side sky flashed colors and smelled of gunpowder. Dangerous and beautiful sparks, like us. We’d watch the shrieking rockets shoot up at buildings and whistle down the street at cars. Kids would shoot them at each other. For fireproofing we’d close our windows in the stifling summer heat and pray nothing landed on our roof.
And then the burning building collapsed, setting the firemen running and the neighbors yelling as bricks tumbled and burning beams flew about. A whole wall fell sideways, crushing all the cars parked in the lot next door and also the unlucky chickens cooped there. They were probably cooked already by the heat. By morning Third Street felt apocalyptic - a smoking, ruined landscape populated by fat rats, skinny cats and the local mob of skeletal stray dogs. For a week they pulled out the twisted metal of flattened cars and lined them up to be carted away - compacted scrap. The smell lingered - burnt neighborhood.
Another year on the Fourth, gangbangers lit up a bag of fireworks they had stuffed under the seat of a stripped car outside our front door. A smothered hissing detonation, then smoldering stinking black smoke until the car burst into flames. It burned so hard the fire licked our front door and second floor fire escape and the choking greasy smoke poured through our crooked old windows. We didn’t want to let the firemen in (safety violations always a good way to evict) but there was too much fire and they were too busy to mess with us. Let us in or we’ll cut the door down. My skin and everything in my apartment was covered with greasy black soot.
As our neighborhood was to drugs, Chinatown was to fireworks -
an open-air bazaar of shells and mortars, M-80s, blazing fountains and
roman candles. They sold openly on street corners and out of car trunks. Which meant that every year our building would shake rattle and roll with weeks of massive detonations in the streets. Smoke hung low on hot nights as the Lower East Side sky flashed colors and smelled of gunpowder. Dangerous and beautiful sparks, like us. We’d watch the shrieking rockets shoot up at buildings and whistle down the street at cars. Kids would shoot them at each other. For fireproofing we’d close our windows in the stifling summer heat and pray nothing landed on our roof.
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