ART & GENTRIFICATION

 

The corner of West 25th & Detroit Ave. (1979), which sits on the edge of the Ohio City neighborhood in Cleveland. Ohio City is a reference to an independent municipality that began here in 1836 and eventually became part of Cleveland. It’s as close to downtown that any West Side neighborhood gets. Ohio City is one of the original examples of gentrification in America, but, unlike gentrification in the cities on the west and east coasts, Rust Belt gentrification has occurred more gently. It took Ohio City 25 years to become fully gentrified, and, in a city of devastated neighborhoods there is always cheap and available housing, making displacement less stressful relative to New York. But it’s still felt and leads to the same thing, and is accelerating in any section of a Rust Belt city that is economically salvageable.

Art impacts gentrification especially in Williamsburg, Brooklyn which came to define it, but gentrification itself goes back to the 1970s, gaining steam, until it became the dominant way to redevelop cities.

Even back in 1979 there was opposition to this sort of development, as evidenced in the defacing of this sign into “chic” city. There was more social conscious back then and little gentrification, and during that time, made it look out of place or odd, and still does to some. Just think how the Rust Belt, after years of continuous decline, has pretty much uncritically embraced gentrification as good and a savior.

When, in 2010, the Akron Museum of Art premiered, Detroit Disassembled, a big hit, i knew gentrification would ramp up to unprecedented levels, even, and finally in the Rust Belt, reflecting the perceptual shift to, for instance, accepting viewing ruins as something aesthetic, as manufacturing places died off until. perhaps, a bottom was hit.

A new mindset that had taken out working-class Williamsburg and Greenpoint years before, had finally come to the Rust Belt, when the “powers” in the art world there, had consistently rejected this sort of imagery, until, somehow, it and the Rust Belt became “cool” by the act of flipping. Its history, over ten years now, and my shooting history since 1977 has bore that out big, and that Williamsburg was the model, for spreading gentrification globally, let alone, just the Rust Belt. But the Rust Belt has the abundance of former working-class neighborhoods, that have either maintained themselves or fallen into slums, ripe for the Brooklyn flip into gentrification, our dominant mode of conversion of lower class neighborhoods in cities.

Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse, part of the complex of industrial structures that included the American Manufacturing Company, that burned down in 2006. Greenpoint, Brooklyn as seen from Manhattan in 2004. You could call this downtown Greenpoint – St. Anthony being the tallest structure back then, is just a few blocks from Manhattan Ave. & Greenpoint Ave. The worn structures along the waterfront are mostly the Greenpoint Terminal and American Manufacturing, but to the north and south, just out of frame, was still much operational industry including a lumber dock capable of unloading large ocean freighters. Of course, there is no longer any industry left today on the Greenpoint waterfront.

This shot was taken in August, 2004, when it was more than clear that North Brooklyn was done as a working-class place. i created a series of shots, here, across the river from my home that in retrospect, plainly spoke of dramatic change for a class of people with no voice or creativity. In 2005 the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Contextual Rezoning was approved transforming 175 square blocks of North Brooklyn.

The Water Tower, had for many years, the words “Free the Palestinians” painted across its tank. Later, and in this shot, it would be shortened to “Free Palestine.”

In 2006 fire engulfed most of the complex in a 12 hour burn. The water tank is completely painted over and redone today – the developers want to preserve it as part of their new hotel.

PREFACE

Googling “does art cause gentrification” here’s the first listed hit – “In a study of the 30 largest US metros, they find that art industries generally do not cause gentrification and the associated displacement of poorer residents. In fact, gentrified places tend to attract the arts, the reverse of the traditionally assumed relationship. Feb 14, 2017″ Well, that’s all i need to know. But what if we get all empirical, by using a great example, on all levels from living, more precisely, suffering it. Look at RealStill, i can prove, not that i care, that i have done tons of “art” work, for almost fifty years, that the theme of most of the work is blue-collar and slum life, and it’s accomplished by living it. The one thing that separates me from traditional (ambitious, self-involved) artists, is that my work ends when i return to hand-out great photography to the folks depicted and/or my best prints from the past. It ends here, not in a gallery or museum. You can see it’s not for my Name. Not for nuthin, though, it’s done to both represent and know my subject by intellect and heart. The only reason i would have for cultivating the Name, would be that the work lives on, after my death, which is soon.

I’ve always said that photography is built for the hit and run. But what would happen if somebody would become hyper-local and can guarantee the veracity of the things, people and places captured, and be certain. That’s not a detached opportunity, but a connection with something at stake, beginning with my home, family and friends, and the fact it cannot be refuted since i was there, saw and experienced everything.

At the outset, who, amongst you, know what the words, tight-knit, means, particularly in urban neighborhoods, where everyone, just doesn’t know each other, but grew up together since day 1, in a neighborhood that was seriously multi-generational. Williamsburg had hung on to being a true urban neighborhood longer than most places, particularly industrial ones. And, if ya don’t know close-knit, then you don’t know the warmth and soul that the situation of being tight-knit, wraps you in, and defines you, in an unconditional unselfconscious devotion to place, even if it happens to be a slum or working-class neighborhood.

Being broke or poor got nuthin to do with a person’s character and morality which is an individual decision.

The working-class and blue-color folks are forgotten as part of the definition of belong so, and it makes it easy for me to say, I’m not a Name and i am no one. However, I’m an expert, or experienced in the things i know. This is a no-name site, but if names translates into some sort of credibility for you, call me, Tom Joad. If you don’t know what it means, it means no one, and names don’t mean shit to a no one.

It’s art, gentrification and more that is shaped by intellect, data from only the human senses, and experience as necessary links. No concepts are at work here. It’s art, gentrification and more, that is shaped by intellect, data from only the human senses, and experience as necessary links. Art & Gentrification is a mult-layered critique, compressed into an original book. Art & Gentrification, made from compressing layers of empirical proof, fully experiencing what it is i am writing about, as it collides and eventually is integrated with my intellect, producing, not just the critique of art’s relationship with real estate in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, but the much broader critique of our present and recent past philosophy of reinvention, disruption, and, what i call, Flipping, the cultural and economic philosophy of our times, where culture and the art of business, making money through overvaluations and appropriations, have joined forces in mindless, blind ambition, for purposes of success and more money, in the case of Williamsburg, destroying the lives of honest working folks as opposed to professional artists and real estate developers. More sense, evidence and power of this critique lies in a simple fact that i know as well as the best, not the art world, but the act of creating art, lots of it, over 48 years, and that this art i do is entirely from the perspective of experience, participation, living it out, and, ironically, in the poisonous sense, much of my work has centered around the disappearance of industry, neighborhoods and people in the Blue-Collar Holocaust, that began in the late 1970s, and can be seen throughout this very site.

Dumb-ass entertainment shows masqurading s news like Fox? I won’t manufacture words that will only comfort you and your outlook on things. I only really believe what i see and experience. Not seeing just what i believe, in order to promote person’s bull shit, masquerading as “reinvention or “disruption” as if that’s supposed to be some sort of legitimate philosophy, from the culture of selfies, where the history of the world begins on the year of Taylor Swift’s birth.

But, like everyone else in art, my expertise is self-proclaimed, like when, Andrew Warhola proclaimed, “Making money is art. And working is art. And good business is the best art.” And one of the things about Warhol, he was a man of his words and his work ethic was stunning, plus he had his widowed mother live with him in Manhattan, was privately tied to his Catholicism, going to church by himself…open to much, even a psycho who would shoot him multiple times. Unfortunately, often there can be a very high price for cultural slumming, as in, bad health, culminating in a needless death, alone, in a hospital. Gentrification, too, shortens life by virtue of its negative health affects.

When i think of Dali, as an example of art professional, my first thoughts go to his appearances on the Cavett show with an anteater on a leash. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m a little sensitive about taking things out of context – like old Brooklyn. Or mindless flipping in general. Anybody can turn things upside down. Besides, how does an anteater on a leash play today? Flipping, evolved from appropriation, the natural evolution of capitalistic art, and having nothing much to do with the infamous urinal that a bunch of folks bought into, by taking the joke seriously, where a hidden value is obvious.

Art profession? Between 1968 and 1979 i worked exclusively as a blue-collar laborer, and after 1980, until 1994 whenever freelance work dried up. My starting point was, and, is, blue-collar work. I use a camera, literally, in a blue-collar way as a tool to capture, at a minimum, physical truth.

I’ve practiced writing, photography and film, and, even paying the expense of that work on blue-collar money when needed. People have always seen what i have done with a camera, as art. But, after experiencing the art world during my life i cannot say that. I shoot things long-form labor – dirty, physical, risky, forgotten. The idea begins in the thing, not me. Being embedded i don’t think about any sort of self-expression, even though i’m going far beyond journalism as well. Over years of observation and limited contact with art and its business, i was only motivated to go deeper into a blue-collar/slum world i thought i was escaping for a better life.

I know little about art. I like it that way. I was never trained in it. Pictures, cinema and literature are interests from as far back as i can remember, but they, too were deemed art. As i progressed and my connections to life through a camera and otherwise naturally deepened, i found truth is stranger than fiction, and the real has far more impact, wonder and novelty. Experience remains the difference – transforming, heavy impact, there’s nothing like it, and, if what i do is art, it’s an art of experience. I have never run across that genre or category in art, but very much the opposite. What i do might be art, but given what i just said – i’m no artist.

From my first contact with the world of A & E, a pattern emerged that would replicate itself whenever i came in contact with it, until no contact became the only way to not be distracted and interfere with my production. Without even getting to the important philosophical problems, simply the things like gossip, insecurity and jealousy – that i’m lost at, and, the ubiquitous duplicity and the transactional relationships, that i am completely aware of and against on a good honest work level. I just got done saying i got something to compare that to – life and its experience. If i think the thing represented is more important  than the representation, show or performance, that should explain a lot, and, like i said, i like to spend my time with honest working people, as opposed to professional artists.

In the 80s and 90s, the ceaseless taking, copying or mimicking produced trauma if, unlike most artists, you’re are dealing with real things and folks in the world, because, there, we have consequences that won’t wait, PC doesn’t exist and words and images mean something, and you are held accountable for everything you do.

I then avoided the world of A & E at all costs – bloated egos, absurd market valuations and all that stuff that experiencing the world and its sublime wonders would make you run from, and back to, and, in that way, the world is refreshing. Like i say i probably just make it my way, which is one way amongst many. I’m making it clear what, my apparently, singular way of doing things, is, in relation to art, and it makes me no expert in art. It wasn’t something i was that interested in, and i’ve been self-educating myself in order to write about it.

To qualify myself further, i know very little of names, particularly in art. In fact i consciously avoid knowledge of art at all times. But the art world is built on names and i had to do some research. I received a doctorate of art from the University of Google Search recently, from my research while writing Art & Gentrification. Names like Maurizio Cattelan i never heard, while some i knew from the trickle-down effect sourced from all the publicity someone gets when a ridiculous overvaluation of their work occurs, or publicity about how new, or shocking someone was – Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince or Serrano, that, i think, got further canonized as The Pictures Generation. I’m their age, i would say the difference is experience. Bansky i found out about during his 2013 New York visit, that was covered extensively. I ran into his work specifically in Willet’s Point where i was shooting, when he dropped his “sphinx” statue, and some friends, Chaco and his crew, copped it for themselves.

Banksy and Cattelan, make great money making objects or modes of operation that bluntly express our wonderment at the contradictions inherent in art today and its market, while being ultimately neutered by their own gross participation in the all-pervasive market that makes Banksy’s shredded painting only increase in value. But we still get the point. And, smartly, they get paid.

Look at the top ten prices for photography sales, and it’s dominated by Gursky, Sherman and Prince, all of whom are living artists, the prices for living and recently deceased artists rival the prices of the greatest works of art through time. That says a lot, including how outrageous prices can and do mess with the minds of artists and their expectations. No wonder narcissists, and the the self-involved, and those seeking a Name, to be known, are attracted to art, and i’m not.

So far, it seems the relation between art and real estate is just obvious to be recognized, The one-of-a-kind properties are the ultimate in limited editions. Prices keep pace, and some of our most scandalous communal reactions is to the price of a painting, a house, or, a limited edition photograph made with a machine.

After doing my research it was surprising how so many categories of art got invented so recently in contemporary art. I had no idea there was turd art and an entire poo genre, where the medium is surely the message. Unfortunately it’s not surprising that toilet-themed art can fetch a lot of green turds in today’s art world, and by doing so, neuter the theme of greed and art it attempts to criticize. I learned of Banksy on the streets in 2013, and his critique is from deep within the art business where he bites the hand that feeds millions his way. That’s why the shredded painting is, like television’s What Would You Do – a study in human and financial nature. Banksy is ultimately part of the structure criticized and his source of revenue. RealStill is actually disconnected from that and only plugged into the larger actual world of things and no commerce, allowing for a multi-faceted objectivity to gaze over this contemporary art scene.

I don’t bite the hand that feeds. I feed myself, then 🔊 take off.

But make no mistake about it, on a street level, bringing art to these heavy working-class zones, it was pretty thrilling to see him screw with the system of art while being fed by it, and the better thrill was how the junkyard people got it – literally and figuratively.

Critical thought or ethics applied to art from within as willing participants, who just cannot bear to separate from art, can even be lucrative, but if it is, it’s not wholly true. Outside art, looking in, disqualifies me – i am a danger. I just don’t get it, but i might get it if played the name game from within – notoriety, publicity and a Name that rhymes with fame. And being willing to put up with anything to get a name.

The art of Burning Man that was recently categorized and recognized as art wasn’t so name-reliant, as another category used to be. Outsider art, too, speaks to this and art’s training by academia, as well as, the reclusion-as-reaction approach of this, RealStill, that doesn’t seem to want to be popularized and absorbed into art because it doesn’t feel at home there. Outsider art’s quality combined with the authenticity of it, by comparison, gives straight art a very real run for its money too.

The accomplished artist who works outside, and never comes in, whose clear or honest lived experiences of both art and gentrification, as it collides with the intellect, reason and ethics will never be heard, until the internet’s rise. And the net is simply an unregulated public space where truthful things are awash in a myriad of subjects with varying degrees of integrity, including straight-up lies, but what choice do i have? Tons of work has accumulated.

With photography’s acceptance as a genuine art form, the art world initially promoted work tied to and representative of the world, not one’s mind, in a documentary based starting point. Concentrating on a capture of things, landscapes and people. After a while, more and more photography begins as fiction, in the mind, in a trend that devalues the real, for the contrived. The real becomes rare, now highly devalued, and photography that embraces the subjective and conceptual models, that are also taught now to generations, becomes ascendant, and dominates, until documentary based art is deemed traditional, putting it in some sort of past, by pretty pretentious overvalued views that only the relativity of reality could sober up from the intoxication of trending names in a second gilded age show world.

My forte is experiencing life, the world and things, even going where artists are afraid to be and create from there, places i’m at home. My artifacts arrive from the flow of life and nothing else, no influences or pedigree. Everyone, has called it art, but not me. I always liked art, but it talked me out of it, at every contact, until, and, after having everything destroyed by the effects of it on my profession, and Williamsburg – my home, you can have it.

The point is i’m no art expert, and, in the context of today’s art, i’m no artist. And, honestly, i had to fact-check to either reconfirm what i knew intuitively about art, but couldn’t believe, and to discover the Names i mention. It’s unavoidable with individual achievement in all professions, but, when tied to schmoozing over performance, becomes the end in itself.

Whether it be Acconi’s masturbation performances, Koh’s gold-plated poo or that stuff Karen Finley was doing in the eighties, art seemed almost proud to utilize the most private toilet or bedroom antics as metaphor, disruptor or simply an innocent curious experiment, some, accidentally became valued more than most things on earth. Nothing new, art has played in its and others’ poo before – Piero Manzoni whose 31 gram container of his poo is tied to the gold market and is now worth $250,000.00 per container. It’s so old, because it’s the province of youtube, tic-toc and instagram and everything else released on a wildly free internet for a long time now, all this manufactured disruption and performances is pretty damn old, or, at least repetitive as hell. I myself don’t see, for instance, all the aesthetic fuss over art’s ocd disorder about the toilet and sex. It’s covered in pop culture that has the same disorder with exposing what’s taboo for entertainment, but it’s over done and now that it’s all been done, it’s done in bigger ways to be heard. But with all the new media, it’s all old, the shock is worn out and it’s no big deal, except in art. Modern laxative commercials show men and women impatiently sitting on their bowls, ABC’s What Would You Do or Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator looks like reality television using performance art, the latter with extremely dire consequences for the lead actor, and by the nineties, censorship disappearing, pop tv like SNL became like children with open references to every body function. What’s shocking in art now? Its extreme over-valuations of appropriated photography, selfies, flower puppies and stuffed sharks. Embracing celebrity with no critical eye, but it’s dumb to list, because, of course, it’s simply what art is, and it’s almost always about the mind of the creator. If museums gave up on new realist photography by 1990, i can accept the truth, it shouldn’t have been there in the first place, simply because i accept the world/mind starting points. And they do have hundreds of photo-only galleries as further evidence that photography might not always fit in.

With regards to the gentrification of Williamsburg i saw deconstruction, appropriation and overvaluations destroy an historic blue-collar stronghold far more interesting than what replaced it.

And the right, who learned media largely to use it as cultural and politcal warfare, has, amongst them, some of the biggest and most well-known performance artists of recent times – Alex Jones, Roger Stone, Donald Trump and Kim Jung Un. Trump, wearing more makeup than Lady Gaga, even his hair grooming was deducted from his taxes during his apprentice years, created some of the best performance art ever made, including his return by helicopter from Walter Reed Hospital, with covid, where he posed and spoke on the White House balcony, high on his regeneron cocktail including the stem cells that went into making it.

The right wing radical, Matt Gaetz, with his gas mask on in the House of Representatives, supposedly doing his job, which, i guess, now includes performance artist. The hipster alt-right ecstasy lover, would be right at home, except for his politics, in hipsterland, where ecstasy and coke are available right downstairs at the hipster bar run by another weirdo, Ben Shih, a Grand Hipster and National Guard member. Get it? Conceptual art modes can be copped and used by anyone on the political spectrum, and, in fact, with white identity politics, the far right has become the place, with the biggest actors and performers, They act as if, it’s their job, and, i suppose, they call that, doing something.

Does Mapplethorpe’s (name brand) work still play as it did in the eighties? Have times changed enough, become open enough to see his work differently? My discourse is not about it, but is about its overvaluation. Mr. Mapplethorpe was strong on identity politics before his many fellow future artists. His ambitiousness was extraordinary. Maybe not for an artist, who, let’s face it, all want it and, thus, normalize the soft corruption of the quid pro quo, the who ya know, and, thus, the old aphorism, “there’s no accounting for taste” become even more complicated and subjective. But some were intuitive masters of the who-you-know.

Intrinsic worth, not caring for the name and all that comes with it, doesn’t get seen, of course. The history of the ambitious artists of the eighties wrote the book on getting work shown, and the who-you-know course they took is well-known, will probably become known as the Pre-MeToo era.

The art world, like all groups, value their champions appealing to their particular mind-set. If the work has been canonized, there’s an intellectual and financial investment by artist, museums, galleries and collectors tied to value. Stuff like that kept me uninterested in art because of a truth-to-light thing. Making a ton of it, but entirely outside. It also proved to be the safest place to keep my work in context.

“Art is long, life is short.” A worldly artist, Joseph Conrad, picked up on that, and wrote a beautiful essay about art, itself. Proved aesthetic artifacts go back 250,000 years. The last 40,00 years are filled with self-consciously artistic works. It’s the oldest unpaid profession in the world, that has evolved along with the world’s oldest paid profession. The similarities of what is required to make it in the businesses are interesting, and revealed here.

Limited by not being expert in art (names), only in its execution. Socially adept, in tune with the larger picture that art is consciously disconnected from and forcing some relativity on it. Now the art world has finally called for inclusiveness, but not, in a class sense. With its love for identity politics, thereby excluding, through class, works, like mine, that would help thwart gentrification. Knowing, not names, but life, and not inside institutional art at all, means to a large degree i definitely don’t get it. I don’t want to because, i believe, i have proof i found something better. I’ll use the case of Bayard Ruston, who thought that class is most important consideration. And, with the exception of having surgery and a brain-wash, your race, sex and beliefs cannot be changed readily, but your class-standing and money can be changed, and that woud pay for any surgery, a way out or a way in, in the first place, or, provide funds for “changing” things if that’s your thing. Kark Marx represented the working-class and class consciousness, not PC nor IP consciousness that arose from the culrure wars back to the 1970s. These are my limitations and prejudices, what follows is knowledge by experience, and, as such, cannot be argued. Tommie Jones, and not today’s corporate-sponsored celebrity martyr, makes more sense to me. It’s becomes such a show today. When i covered the RNC in 2016 both sides’ demonstrations were like disjointed individual and group performance art, on the right and left with the likes of Alex Jones that has evolved over four years, into the gas mask – wearing Matt Gaetz and his various other performance art pieces, including going to Wyoming to campaign against a fellow Republican, one that couldn’t go “all-in” with lies.

I ain’t Vivian Maier, obviously, (just in reverse) but i love her for silently revealing things about the Name Game in the art world. I became reclusive to art, from actual contact, finding only egos, self-absorption and too much of our deity – celebrity, sort of Ms. Maier in reverse.

Photography’s relationship with gentrification and the changing city date back to the medium’s invention when it was used on a professional, business, art and documentation level, for instance, in 1850, hired by Napoleon III, Charles Marville shot rapidly disappearing sections of Paris and later Atget would devote a large portion of his life to the same endeavor. In America Don Normak’s Chavez Ravine captured a Mexican enclave prior to its removal for Dodger Stadium, and, by, 2013, the destruction of the Iron Triangle for development next to Citi Field in New York, was captured by media from around the world. Charles Cushman, Harald Finster, and Barbara Mencsh have also made major contributions to the urban vanishings archive. Don Normak’s chance encounter with the Chavez Ravine neighborhood on the edge of disappearance, plugged us into classic American gentrification before there was a word for it. Not the biggest names in art but they have tackled some of the biggest and most challenging jobs in art – a job always way ahead of its time and dangerous. How unappreciative.

Numerous reality artists left in the wake of gentrification within and outside of the art world. Jill Freedman whose high level of quality was matched by her level of submersion, love and unity with her subjects about a place and city that has pretty much vanished. Busting her ass, really living it, to get it both right and aesthetic, until bad health took her out of making pictures and finally living, what she was best at – and respecting people.

These women, like Arlene Goftfried, have themselves become respected street photographers, but their place in the art world remains, a bit like the ghettoes they shot. In 2024 relatives and friends of Arlene, are holed up in a storage locker in Manahttan digitizing her images for future consumption, and a place in this city’s history, while the Pictures Generation cash in. Plus ethical committed street photographers, often let pursuing the money-end of careers go, from 24/7 engagement, the thrill of reality vs. the art world, genuine vs. fake, real vs. remade, or what is vs. what’s been reinvented.

But reality artists have been, in art, downgraded. And unlike just about all, i don’t love what i do. At one time i loved cinema as a job. I never loved photography and don’t love cinema either. But reality artists all love life and are innately curious of it, or, at least, the world – living creatures, places and things. That’s my thing too, but i also include past things, sometimes using history as theatre. Still, i never loved photography, or, even, the magic of it, like most photographers do, like Ms. Freedman. But i’m fair with my p.o.v., i appreciate anything true.

Her big obit said she “lingered in the margins.” Although my planned obscurity means no recognition, the officials default with their mid-class versions of what’s “marginal people” and being one of their top miscalculations, like in the 2016 election when the marginals took over. Big historic populations are not marginal, but their placement there is part of a larger Blue-Collar Holocaust that, in the city, is tied to colonization or gentrification, it’s contemporary form.

In 1990 i was showing my work to the curator of photography at a major museum in a once major Rust Belt city. The pictures were from the immediate neighborhoods that surrounded the museum which happened to be complete ghettoes of poor and working-class folks, mostly black. My mistake was, when i showed him a series of shots from a neighborhood bar that was my own, i honestly mentioned that a portion of the portraits were the classic “strawberries” or prostitutes that had come in great numbers after crack caught on. The curator then observed what he thought was my attraction to what he termed, “marginals.” Of course multiple responses fired in my neurons – the top two hits, of which, i said to myself privately were, “Did you just call me marginal?” and “Yeah, that’s just what i’m sayin – it’s a city of marginals – and a museum oasis is surrounded by that fact, and that fact makes a museum seem marginal, and not the city’s inhabitants who are trying to deal with whatever little they have. In other words, the city is a majority marginal, by far, place where folks are hanging on or getting by. Number one in poverty in America for 2004 and 2006, and always poor, with 30 – 40% of the population always broke.” I’m not talking about the Bronx, where i live, and has a similar poverty rate, but an entire city, wher almost half are broke.

Thirty years later the trend is now inclusion, what the work has been advocating since i began shooting in the seventies, and was trying to do with a curator of photography. It was to bring the beautiful and ugly truth into a museum for show and storage. The physical truth of the city and people depicted that surrounded that museum was the city itself and at the time, to make that link, seemed to make sense. At the time i thought it was part of my job.

And if this is truly your job then to have to somehow fit in with the embarrassing aspects of it is a bigger job. For instance, around art, occasionally, but over a long period of time, my basic experience has been precisely the complete failure at communication, through ego, narcissism, dysfunction, self-absorption, insecurity, jealousy and the worst gossiping – in a profession based on communication. But it’s one-way. How unprofessional.

Art? Never thought about it, to avoid what i sensed intuitively about it, to avoid the distraction, in order to get tons of work done. The distraction for RealStill – art’s lack of relativity to anything but itself – became aggrandized to disruption – physically removing me from my home for life, destroying my subject matter and putting a vast archive in danger of ruin, as well. Other than those small points of contention – why would i care or waste my time?

Warhol’s Empire State, might have been/is overvalued conceptually – perhaps. But it’s not like it’s been revived since 1964. Maybe the original print and neg. is priceless, but it’s one of the most forgotten, insignificant, yet remembered of the millions of art works produced. It was shown in its entirety in January, 2014 at an art gallery for its 50th year since being made, whatever that means. Who and how many showed up? That’s one concept that never caught on, because the camera recorded outward and the future was the art-selfie. Empire State prefigured non-selfie webcams and surveillance. The only thing i could conjure that had any sort of value or worth, beyond excessive minimalism which ain’t much, unless, of course, beyond the name.

Passing time on film is one of my specialties and this approach is far more interesting, even on a conceptual level.

Andy Warhol’s favorite film was The Creation of the Humanoids. True to form.

No doubt, Mr. Warhol was one interesting guy. Look, he’s got me talking about one of his many thousands of works he made a movie that you really don’t have to see, it’s so easily imagined, and years after his death, i’m here writing about it. Not in the best way, but not the worst, either. Platic surgey and wigs, plus culture wars, PC and IP modes? What do i care, meaning i don’t care, and also condemsnit, through producing artifacts of truth not self, by doing what comes natural to me, concern for others and the world.

All that’s fine, it’s another world and it’s fine – we all view things from our world and that’s what makes it interesting. Art, the exoplanet of do as you please remains interesting, only as long as its values are not forced into us. If our world is trashed, by not really thinking, just flippin and trippin, and we lose something as significant as our home and work, without any permission, i would care with all my heart and soul.

Devaluation of Empire State occurred since the modern webcam does it cheaper, better and automatically and because it’s so stupid an idea that only a machine should have to accomplish it, although the intended idea of a webcam, like surveillance, accidental or not, is quite good. I like webcams, too bad they didn’t catch on more. But even with my interest – checking weather or scoping locales, once the info is delivered i aim to experience it, not stare at it on a screen.

Warhol was interesting and I’m not picking on him, however, I am speaking about appropriations, which i find to be overvalued in the sense that it’s easy, lazy, usually entertaining, often funny, clever and profitable. Moreover, for myself, seeing things clearly, appropriation is completely connected to the situation of having, and not. The educated, in relation to the unschooled, take advantage of privilege (not illegal) and benefit their lives and careers at the expense of their victims’ neurology, for instance, in the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where my home was overvalued and appropritated for someone else’s purposes, i mean “repurpose” that of reinvention. Obviously i’m hinting that notions like reinvention, repurposing, all is self-construction and having the the “best version of yourself” is incomprehensible outside of the art world, but makes perfect sense in the real estate market.

If what i do is art, it’s doing and not showing. Showing begins within the representation and proceeds dragging the conceits of its creator along with it, as opposed to any art of the real, whose very starting point is the actual world, where, things and concepts get their test, and after that, then, receive the valuations according to truth. Omphalosxepsis, a serious meditative process, that was called navel-gazing, has been elevated by the overvaluations of celebrity, media and not thinking. Concepts don’t qualify as critical thinking, but professional omphalosxkepsis provides a comfortable and well-paid job producing and cataloguing works, using the world and any representations that have ever existed as meditative fodder, and having the ability to completely avoid reality, is the right fit for the most grandiose of  gossipers and cowards.

It’s not the art works, conceptual or not, it’s the fairly stupid overvaluation and training that praises and encourages wimpy-thought. I’m not talking about hard-working thought architercts like Deleuze or Barthes, but bizzarre overvaluations, which produced the same reaction as the real estae prices in the former slum of Williamsburg. But, as far as i’m concerned, it’s ok in the sense i’m not interested, but it’s only when this absurd type of thinking, combined with narcissism and being raised on media, can have such a say on city neighborhoods, where art and tech workers concede themselves to the original sin of colonialism, but like all colonists consider it a nasty and reactionary thing, but an entirely necessary sin. They need homes for their ambitious lives too, and by this one act alone – forced displacement – they won’t have to do it again, and then they can become sorry and apologetic, as they prosper, in the era of apologies, political correctness and deep profound humiliation for the working folks they have, through their weird untested thoughts, completely fucked over, finding such fertile grounds in my home, that, by the way is and was illegal, and stupid as hell, as stupid as stupid gets.

And here is my grand prejudice that i’m admitting in prefacing the work. I love truth, not comfort, not lies. Appropriation is interesting, even fun, and, i’m wondering if a life of appropriations has gone too far by both excluding and destroying the working-class by appropriating their lands, which means it’s a modern version of colonial thought and principles, and, since art is real estate in the sense of property, applying business moves such as limited editions, plugging into trends like reinvention, and the business of overvaluations, reflect the unity of real estate and art in the process of gentrification.

Appropriation, conceptual thought and works are, by nature, fascinating exersciszes. But i’m talking directly about my “prejudices” here (which might be just disgust with lies), a too stone-cold allegiance to reality that places life, living and good people over conceptual thought and art, including my own, that’s entirely post-facto. Philosophers like Deleuze are interesting as hell and thought-provoking as hell.  I believe in being and becoming, but not into, what opposes warmth, soul and connection, and, certainly opposed to a view that the world is your oyster, which, if you have money, apparently, it is. But it’s mindless, without seeing the consequences for others, simple contemporary colonialism.

“Deleuze’s very method of thinking and writing conforms to his idea of removing oneself from the general public and withdrawing from common sense. Only then, Deleuze believed, can a new thought be formed.” –  Monisha Choudhary. It’s great writing, making, the philosopher an artist of thought, in the business of thought, but intentionally divorced from reality, and, when applied to that, fails, morally. And, that’s my “prejudice” – ethics.

Conceptual thought and contemporary art, by definition, exist in an intellectual vacuum. Philosophers like Deleuze, who is one of the bestat his work,  are intersting as hell and thought-provoking as hell. However as purely concepts, when applied to the very real, hard lives of the working-class and blue collar, and their world, it fails, morally and intellectually, because of that morality.

Free-floating conceptual thought has no allegiance beyond that, and can be used by anyone. Certainly the hard right’s use of it and things like right-wing performance art were appropriated from the Left and applied within the right-leaning corporate media culture, podcasts and websites with the likes of Marjorie Green, Matt Gaetz or Alex Jones. “Alternative facts” “alt.-right” began as lefty terms, as in, alternative culture from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Steve Bannon deconstructs the state itself, boldly expressing the concept of repetition and falsehood, where, the most dangerous and lame ideas, eventually enters minds. Post modernism? Has it “progressed” to Post-truth? If it has, which it has, count me out. The left and right are mutually guilty of starting the culture wars in the 1980s, that are now raging today.

Art, by its nature, attracts ego/elitism. Although on a long fast from the art world, i’ve experienced it, and, I’ve always been, very sad to say, since i have this ton of work, and that i also found immaturity, no experience, dysfunction and territorial egoism on the level of any great capitalist, particularly amongst its most successful living members.

For ten years the the pressure of planned displacement, only resulted in a forced final displacement. Other than that, all the stuff i could always care less about, since i had built a great and productive life, unfortunately came and filled my hood with the arts and entertainment crowd i had been consciously avoiding since 1989. I experienced completely the entire gentrification saga of the place i knew by heart, which, by my own admission, got me in touch with a hate for it, that’s a burden i didn’t want to happen, and, has been sublimated to a large degree, it’s negativity flipped int, for instance, this book.

Did appropriation evolve into reinvention, did the decades of postmodernism contribute to the current mayhem of misinformation. Did postmodern modes, predict the era of post-truth or take part in it? That’s the problem with concepts. Not tied to things, it’s the business of thought, and, can be used by anyone on earth for whatever purposes they want.

This site is anonymous, free and commerce-free, but also, ego-free because of that. Not pushing, selling or careering, the aim is truth

Did appropriation evolve into reinvention, did the decades of postmodernism (no such thing as the original, photography has no special relationship with reality or truth) contribute to the current mayhem of misinformation. Did postmodern modes, predict the era of post-truth or take part in it? That’s the problem with concepts. Not tied to things, it’s the business of thought, and, can be used by anyone on earth for whatever purposes they want, including Steve Bannon, Alex Jones and Marjorie Green. Being provocative about art’s contribution to out post-truth era, but completely realistic about the rlationship between art and gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

This site is anonymous, completely open and commerce-free, but also, ego-free because of that. Not pushing, selling or careering, the aim is truth. The hate from mindless, ambitious idiots taking and destroying our neighborhood, block and homes, eventually forcing displacement due to Bloomberg’s notorious eviction loophole, that was eventually sealed shut because it was illegal in the first place, and is flipped into fueling this book. Things i lost in these times of harassment and forced displacement included the death of all my family and two best friends, wrecking my health and throwing me out in the streets in a city with no reasonable rents, after spending most of my life on Union Avenue in Brooklyn, in exile from the arts and entertainment herd.

I made a fundamental mistake. Art, now, more than ever, is not about reality, but, more, the mind, Photographers, since its start, made an art of reality. Reality-based color photography took a long time to be shown and hpuded in museums. My prejudice, of course, putting life, reality, ethical thought before everything, including art. Making an art of reality is not at all like what most art is, being about the mind of the artist alone. Does art and entertainment affect gentrification? I’m gonna answer that with the what actually happens in the world by my mind, body and expereince, and not more concepts or theories.

But i also have this clincher. I had made quite an rt of shooting what’s about to disappear in America, and that would be the vanishing ot numerous indiustrial neighborhoods beginning in 1977, first with disappearance form economic decay, and later, disappearance through economic development. Throught it all, Williamsburg was a fitting stronghold and base for these operations, since it was exactly that, the quintessentail blue-collar cultural stronghold, that was the most important and significance place i have i lived.

Culture is extremely powerful, if not all-powerful, more so than politics, race and all the other American battle fronts. As a matter of fact the culture wars, started back in the 1980s on both sides and has become ectreme on both sides, and, mainly in one sense, that neither makes sense. What you identify with, culturally, your thing, filters the rest of life and history.

It’s simple, in these neighborhoods, hard-working people love, their home, they made into a their Paradise, culturally, if for no other reason, they couldn’t afford anything else – a single family home, vacations and travel. Devoid of the tourist angle of colonialism,  it’s authentic, thus, vulnerable, and, it is of extreme value to the natives because it’s all they have and beautiful to them.

I’m not interested in changing things when it comes to other people because I have respect. To have something forced on anyone’s life and home to the point of complete loss and banishment, as we all know, is wrong. If you disagree then, of course, you are a certified asshole. Speaking of which, go ahead with your lives and careers, if you want to stick a bullwhip up your ass, or appropriate, not from me, without limits, buy into overvaluations and fame in your lifetime, that’s your business. Speaking of business, the linking of urban development, particularly in old industrial neighborhoods, with art as its motive, is unprecedented, and makes no sense.

I expect more from art, even with its very privileged position and vaulted reputation. Being both native and an artist i’m more than living proof, leaving very little for debate. In a recently old America, after much fighting and turmoil we ended up, you do your thing, i do mine. It’s key ingredient was respect. Now art in an age of unleashed capitalism is only about self-interest. Said another way, we think we are living Jefferson’s ideals, but they were just that. The forgotten one, Hamilton, envisioned a country as a large urban industrial market where all functioned according to self-interest.

Recently, with the ascension of artificial intelligence, the leaders of the tech industry of glossed over it’s negative potential, wow, saying things like. Human beings are adaptable, and it is very interesting, the way there and seamlessly, integrated themselves with computers, applications, devices and technology…” Really? We don’t make billions of dollars off this, and this is not our job that we love, instead, these changes are forced upon us with no discussion and no choice, and, we, the people, have a enormous difficulty integrating all these changes into our lives. The masters of disruption are also the masters of creative destruction, and, are not like us, because we are human, and, for instance, my seamless integration into digital photography was a complete pain in the ass, and, took tons of money and time, many years. Again, like gentrification, no one ever asked if we wanted our lives flipped into the current economy and culture, there was no discussion, and, it was completely forced upon us, leading some into suicide, and, most, into oblivion. With truth as the highest value, we are now in the era  of post-truth because, under section 230, it’s up to the platform’s ethics and abilty to be mindful, in order to control this. Thus, it’s proven the tech heads have little ethics and no social concers. They are interested in money and fulfilling their career wishes.

Political and/or social photography, great, but PC and IP modes, you gotta be kiddin, with these filters, i’m a staight-shooter. Speaking of which, no fan of the surface, i also have no concern for wigs, hair pieces, make-up, plastic surgery, nose jobs and vanity work in general.

Recently, with the ascension of artificial intelligence, the leaders of the tech industry of glossed over it’s negative potential, wow, saying things like. Human beings are adaptable, and it is very interesting, the way there and seamlessly, integrated themselves with computers, applications, devices and technology…” Really? We don’t make billions of dollars off this, and this is not our job that we love, instead, these changes are forced upon us with no discussion and no choice, and, we, the people, have a enormous difficulty integrating all these changes into our lives. The masters of disruption are also the masters of creative destruction, and, are not like us, because we are human, and, for instance, my seamless integration into digital photography was a complete pain in the ass, and, took tons of money and time, many years. Again, like gentrification, no one ever asked if we wanted our lives flipped into the current economy and culture, there was no discussion, and, it was completely forced upon us, leading some into suicide, and, most, into oblivion. With truth as the highest value, we are now in the era  of post-truth because, under section 230, it’s up to the platform’s ethics and ability to be mindful, in order to control this. Thus, it’s proven the tech heads have little ethics and no social concers. They are interested in money and fulfilling their career wishes.

Political and/or social photography, great, but PC and IP modes, you gotta be kiddin, with these filters. I’m a staight-shooter, where things are lit and clear as hell with no filters. Speaking of which, no fan of the surface, i also have no concern for wigs, hair pieces, make-up, plastic surgery, nose jobs and vanity work in general that found home is art and entertainment. What prejudice!

Qualifications? I’m definitely part of a group, going back to photography’s invention, that first combined art, business and document to show changes to our cities. Gentrification and its documentation with a camera goes back to the transformations of London and Paris in the 1850s. Gentrification itself, dates back to any forced displacement by a group with power over those without it.

I have the living proof. I’ve been photographing disapperaring urban American cites for 45 years. Inside this hugec ollection of documentation there is even the sound of gentrification, and the 🔊 noise pollution that comes with it, like obnoxious loud party music from the scummbag hipster/art dive bar below me, that commenced once the numerous pile drivers that raged for seven years non-stop during daylight hours. Great atmosphere for a writer – 24/7 noise from pile drivers to loud stupid pop music in the city’s biggest party scene, a continuation of the college life-style in the midst of tramsforming tenements and worker cottages into what Williamsburg/Greenpoint became.

Prejudices? Preferences in order to make way for the truth, using a camera, as its operator, as a memory machine, one that embeds and connects to uncontrollable, chaotic reality, if that is the choice of its operator.

Art & Gentrification, is, obviously, about the relationship between two institutional and commercial institutions, but also the much larger social and cultural critique, armed with proof,  aimed at what’s become the dominant philosophy, method and strategy for successful existence today – The Flip, another real estate term, I  flipped to simply light up, what’s been the method for the dominant philosophy of  our times – reinvention and disruption. And, as the sign of the times, as proof, i offer The Leader, Trump, the culmination of  success through disruption, who truly flipped the world upside down as its biggest liar and narcissist, and changed the world, in an entirely negative way. Coincidentally he’s the quintessential New York real estate developer who described his moves as the art of the deal, very early on. I’d describe it, as the art of lies and disruption to satisfy self-interest, and, of course, patriotism.

Ultimately, what does economic development really have to do with art? We all know that real estae and art have joined in some ways for quite a while now, and i, unfortuanetly, am proof. Hedge fund ready art, built, it seems, as an investment before the show, not after? It’s the militant kitch of Mr. Koons, perhaps a successor to Warhol on the level of  capitalism and art, where, i guess, it’s normal to tie art to economic redevelopment, which it has been since the invention of Soho.

Art uniting with commercial redevelopment? If you don’t believe an entirely credible author, this piece innocently, exposes what happened, in Soho and became somewhat of a business model for the gentrification of formerly working class zones, particularly those with big warehouses. Soho originated, on a large scale the scenario; broke artists rent old lofts cheaply, it begins to take off as an art scene and galleries move down from 57th Street, then it really catches on, as in money to be made, and the artists flee as the place ascends to something it never was. Soho was the model for art and real estate to merge into gentrification and Williamsburg became the updated model for hyper-gentrification.

And, finally, let’s recognize the dinasaur in the room. Here i am confessiong my “prejudices” and tastes, when i know exzctly how to be as objective a person that you could hope for, even if the union of art and gentrification, modeled on what happenwed in Soho, and supercharged into hyper-gentrifcation, completely snuffed out my career, freelance work, home and beloved neighborhood, as well as, the most importnat events of my life. Success in the art world? Fuck no. Taking care of family in their years long struggle to stay alive. Read the literature. A person, grown, independent and succesful, in his or hers own right, rerturns to his parents, sacrificing it all, to try and help in the most tragic of situations, for instance, alzheimers, and, when it’s done, it’s like a twister, when you emerge from the basement and find nothing left. Read ther literature. But, 3 years before returning home permanently i knew they would force me out, and, they did, illegally, do that, the day after i returned home to live the rest of my years in Williamsburg, which, by this time was not “cool” at all, but i still had the cheap rent. On my 60th birthday i was given the rigged phony eviction notice verbally. The real reason? the next lease i would be a senior citizen, and be untouchable, even though i already was, but Bloomberg looked the other way, and permitted landlords to lie, for instance, about their “cancer” so that their son could move in and take care of the place. I found the cure for cancer. Leave your greedy young lanflord’s property and, miracualously, his cancer is cured and new people from out of town live there for 3,000 per month.

Are you kidding? I’m telling you my my “prejudices” – these are forced tragedies, and, i never allow the ones i choose affect me or give me PTSD, but to lose your home for life, not to mention the great old neighborhood, then become, briefly, homeless (it’s impossible to get an NYC apartment because they check 3 years of tax returns, and, while in family care situation could only make about 12k a year, where i needed 65k a year for a simple 1700 per month one bedroom) and have to start my life over in the Bronx at the age of 60. This ain’t a prejudice, the same way a Jewish person’s flinching, ehtical contortions on contact with a terrorist, or, god forbid, a Nazi. There’s much in class, much more then the trending PC standards of secular morality. And what i pitifully deem my “prejudices” are simply human reactions to the real prejudice of class, that manifasted itself in Williamsburg – modern colinazation – and, it’s always the same fact – people who have, take advantage of those that don’t have, much, in this case mindlessly, often high, with art dreams of success, even though new to the city, and not paying a moment’s attention to the fact that we unconditionally loved the place, and, to kick us, let alone disrupt us, is equal to, pretty much, our deaths. On the all-important economic level, we wanted to protect our cheap but warm, soulfull neighborhood and homes. We knew the routine after the invention of Soho, but we didn’t know that our neighborhood would be ground-zero for hyper-gentrification, where, there is no coincidence, no accident of time, but a fully formed and concentrated effort, established years before in places like Soho. This time the two institutions of art and real estate were in the right time and place to spur the hyper-gentrification of Williamsburg, and become the model for other former industrial places turned into the bliss of growth and profits, all across America. And, like everything eles in the culture of reinvention, it’s a copy, a hollow form with the life sucked out of it. The underlying, all-knowing philosophy, of that there is absolutely nothing original in the world anymore, remains an underlying theme within the culture of reinvention.

This is a much wider social/cultural critique of the dominant “ideologies” and “ideals” – disruption, reinvention, repurposing – of this tiime. What i call, flippin, that does not qualify as anything but scams, that softened up and/or paved the way for the era post-truth, where an entertainer/real estate mogul becomes president and changes the wotld?Rezoning working-class neighborhoods into arts districts, either before the atrists ever showed up, or after they left, after rents got too much. Human and unreconstructed, i have no interest in self-construction, on the level of nose jobs and hair pieces, let alone, entire working-class neighborhoods. Our era is deemed post-truth, begging the question, did postmodernism, its smuggest theories and strategies, help to open folks’ minds to a conspiriatorial world, where the political structures of countries can be deconstructed in order to finally tear out the deep state? Conceptual thinking, ungrounded and rootless, can be used by anyone or any business. My extensive inside experience of gentriifcation is the emperical side of the critique, and its proof of truth.

Art and gentrification, is this just flipping, not forward thinking, anything new, or just contemporary versions of greed stemming from lack of compassion, contact and experience, enlarging the self and individual over all things and just in line with the time? My answer is Art & Gentrification. It’s about the art and era of the flip. These are my “prejudices” or simple differences that arose from the experience of art and gentrification. Differences, as an example, with regards to expressing the truth of things, is, the habit of aiming the camera outward, not inward, and another is beginning from a starting point of function, not dysfunction nor conceit.

INTRODUCTION

At the outset the characteristics of real estate that are shared with art, include the flip and flipping in general, high end property in limited quantities, value and valuations, particularly overvaluations. Art, especially, has bought into the Flip, obviously in conceptual art, but in many places. Moving things out of context and receiving huge valuations – a basketball in an aquarium or, not just a shark in a tank of formaldehyde, but a shark in a tank of formaldehyde owned by one of the biggest sharks in finance.

 

Overvaluations and the flip.

In 2012 i put together a satirical photography book about the gentrification of Williamsburg called Williamsburg National Monument, that, maybe, like relationship Land Without Bread, mocks the gap between vacationing and being, particularly the relationship between ruins photography and gentrification.

Art & Gentrification, is a straighter essay about the same subject. Some things are so pervasive and obvious that somehow substance can easily go unrecognized, even as people yap on about or around it, and even though their own distance and profound subjectivity will become the official history. The actual lived history will be forgotten and replaced with the ideology of gentrification – “we made your neighborhood better.”

As i got further into writing about experiencing displacement it became impossible to deny things that are so ludicrously obvious it wasn’t being seen. The mindset and training of the professional artist or media person is built to change neighborhoods into their own image. In fact they’re masters of it, and reinvention, it’s philosophy. The same fundamentals are true for tech workers who seem as distant as you can get from the broader social scene. Generally, these new arrivals to the city have no connection to its history, and commence to reinvent it in their own image.

Reinvention, my neighborhood became a field of reinvention. No one asked. They came from all over. All is a social construct? Heavy French Marxist theory cannot be lived, the same way any academic discussion or speculation can’t. Mr. A.’s extroverted technicians run the show now.

Their social media and hardware, can be programmed now, to only show what they want to see and hear. Getting attention is the key to everything, combined with not listening or seeing others. Gentrification is entirely legal, leaving the hope of keeping your legal home, on the slim chance for self-control or compassion by the hood-changers. In other words, gentrification is unstoppable.

I don’t have to make the case against gentrification, the same way Nicole Brown doesn’t have to make the case against her moron husband. Being the case as opposed to overvalued commentary about it, stinks – beyond the credibility you’re afforded as a victim – just look at Nicole Brown, she’s dead. And, honestly, only celebrities get a voice in all this.

Gentrification is ongoing for many years, entirely legal, unstoppable and cannot be fought. The Japanese-American internment of 1942 forced displacement of 130,000 people temporarily. It was documented and talked about during its time. But that didn’t stop it.

Gentrification is wrapped in baloney and i must nurture a healthier perspective lest our brains rot. It’s not temporary displacement for the alleged greater good, but permanent forced loss so that the professional class can fulfill their vision, not the greater good, but individual ambition. For those few still left, the trickle-down of foodie/fashion/entertainment is a culture, not theirs, and cannot be afforded.

My only concern here is to create a true memory of the greatest (embarrassment?) transformation of cities since industrial divestiture took hold in the late seventies. Entirely annihilating an original and beautiful blue-collar world, the same culture workers also get to write the official remembered history of how it happened. That’s wrong and insulting.

With regards to the actual history of gentrification those already in place before its commencement, not connected to art, now displaced, are as one in knowing how gentrification in North Brooklyn started, and by whom, from beginning to end. Why wouldn’t they or anybody not know exactly what goes on in the places they live a very long time and care most about?

Artists cause gentrification.

And apparently that’s not enough. The all is social or self-construction crowd wants to extend that philosophy to the city itself. Great, the working-class demise is the ideal opportunity to truly have the reinvented city that artists want. But not the majority of us. We don’t pay attention and are not offended by what an individual wants to do with themselves. We call it do unto others…

Thank you for your integrity and and clear perception, Medea/Pettit, about art’s actual intentions, and its changelings. And our take, not as meek and mild as this, but you’ll get the point of his p.o.v. which is man-made neighborhood climate-change brought on by the disruption of an ideological warming to planet change in general in the form of individual alternative realities. Mr. Petit is truly the ultimate changeling and promoter of all things of self-construction, the ideal gentrifier.

Don’t be offended by the unfamiliar sounds of applying a voice to the unheard, because you will miss the innocent point of this essay. It’s not aimed at art or art works, but the effects of its expansion in our time. Gentrification has two paths – ascending and descending, effecting many people, and it’s no mystery, only the ascendant is heard. It’s the same with all disruption.

And one of the greatest sanctioned disruptions, section 230, designed to create an entire industry and much profit, by not being responsible, at all, for its own content – look at it, now, in sorrowful retrospect, and what happened to our society, fucking with disruption, and creating a platform so dangerous to simple truths.

What are your hopes?

Are you speaking to me? I have not hope for a thing let alone what is hopeless.

As i have stated i’m trying to embed a memory of events obscured by the ambition and progress of a creative class establishing themselves in the city. The most i could hope for would be something like a documentary i recently viewed on tv – it was about the history of Lincoln Center, that began under the guise of slum clearance, and spoke from the perspective of what it’s like being forced to leave your long-term generational home, and not from the perspective of the glory of the arts and music. Something somewhat rectified in retrospect by simply remembering things as they happened and were obscured by the desires of the A & E crowd. And that’s all i’m doing here.

If anyone doubts the relation of art to gentrification, episodes like the fully documented building of Lincoln Center, say it all, and, as art has expanded, these episodes in urban history are full-blown and no longer as rare, and they are documented.

That’s it. Time marches on. Memories remain, but whose?

Local “papers”, the New York Times et al, missed completely this now gone history, the same way they completely missed one of the biggest political events in America, at least in my life – the election of our Chief Disruptor, Trump. The built-in mentality – an acceptance that manufacturing is gone, the future is purely tech and global and requires education, and the blue-collar world is gone – now challenged with the 2016 election, that has painfully proven it to be a way too premature and elitist vision because it’s buried under the same mindset. Did they think that these completely forgotten folks, on their way out, as a class, couldn’t possibly be this real, existent and effective? The inarticulate ones never heard or seen, were instrumental in shutting down both Christie Quinn in 2013 with DiBlasio, and Hillary Clinton in 2016, with Trump.

I keep tellin ya that every four years, these morons get a chance to vote, and one day will erupt into a raw flow of MAGA, lifting The Disruptor-In-Chief, reality tv star and New York City real estate mogul, Mr. Donald Trump, into cult status.

The business of culture, staffed by the creative class has absolutely no regard and/or understanding of the blue-collar class whether it be gentrification or missing the biggest story of the century when an unstable radical real estate mogul is brought to power by a vast group of uneducated white blue-collar folks who just got sick of being sold-out by every party for fifty years. (also capturing 53% of the women’s vote) These hog politicians covet this large number of hard-working, law-abiding, generally happy low wage earners who also, generally speaking, fight all of our many wars. Coincidentally they have by far, the highest suicide rates of all “groups” and they have a propensity for risk, alcohol and drugs, particularly the current heroin surge, and their consumption of booze and drugs is phenomenal. They don’t whine much, or shoot one another but take care of the problem on their own. When the reality of screwed again meets with absolutely no economic hope, the working-class can be counted on to do the right thing – self-destruct, not burden society with incarceration and demands for social service. Experts at guns from fighting wars and experienced in drugs from fighting pain – both can be utilized for slow, medium or swift self-destruction. And to think, with education, and insurance they would have known to visit the shrink. But if they had that they wouldn’t be blue-collar in the first place. I wrote this paragraph in 2017, and, today, in 2021, the deaths from dope have doubled, and, honestly, i can understand it, in the sense, D.T. was in his full power mode, and, with the pandemic, and hyper-unemployment, D.T. so masterfully blew it, and the covid deaths went through the roof. In 2021 108,00 people died from overdoses of drugs, 80% of which was opiates. MAGA nuts bitch about these drugs flooding in from Mexico, but the fact is that Americans consume 80% of the world’s opioids, making them the actual perpetrators and victims, not the black market profiteers.

My pure reaction to this Blue-Collar Holocaust is socialism, not more capitalism, heroin and parades. Regardless, with gentrification, The Times was completely uninformed and ignorant, about the truth out here, and listened to their own mindset, that coincidentally is the same mind at work in the gentrification process up until they woke up to the fact that this might not be as “cool” as thought, but, in fact, a large historical transformation, maybe with victims. Facebook too, is now something people are beginning to wake up about. Overall, gentrification has been an ongoing force, but before the mindset was planted, were the economic and social forces, beginning in the seventies, causing the decline of urban industrial neighborhoods that made real estate cheaper than ever. Meanwhile as manufacturing jobs fade in the city, the service sector begins its rise to domination. The service industries, and culture businesses, particularly art and entertainment, found fertile ground, initially in the hipness and cheapness of working-class neighborhoods, and later, in its expensive hipness.

Within the overall context of a monumental long term shift from manufacturing to service, the educated culture or tech worker, has a certain mindset that has evolved, geared to gentrify, before they leave their former burblands. The mindset creates an opening and opportunity for real estate. The creative class is highly educated, defined by clear ambitions, mobile, and, most importantly have money and a voice – the complete opposite of those they replace.

It will continue unabated and spread like a weed, but it’s probably better than in China where the state decides its economic policy. Today the authorities in China have dictated that the entire country will be moving from an industrial to a service economy to be more like the American-style economy, and “we can become a nation of creators, not just manufacturers” – they said that, just like they do in Cleveland now – and the vanishing is probably on a much greater scale there.

So, in the most general terms gentrification is simply the next phase for cities as what’s left of industry and manufacturing disappears, and is encouraged to do so, and the service economy booms. These are purely social and economic forces we are all caught up in, that is often mistaken for a vision.

The economically and socially determined mind set of the tech worker is decidedly, uh, technical, often buried in minutiae and married to the virtual. Artists, similar, but maybe with the concepts and the knownness thing, required to get work seen, stressed more, as in, gifted/celebrity. It is elitist by nature and has its own cultural mindset, canon and standards. This judgment has always been based on the distance between art and reality that is now so far it’s out of sight. It’s also seen in the inexperience of a guy who started the biggest media and ad company in the world from his dorm room at Harvard, and given monopolistic free reign, as well as, billions, until it’s too late to solve the original problems of immaturity, naiveté and inexperience, as they have become embedded and manifested in misinformation and hate, enabled by section 230 and not thinking about the consequences about not being responsible for what is on your platform.

Whether in real estate and politics or art and culture, it’s the era of the flip and the remake. That’s why “reinvention” defines this era, and its inherent disruption, whose price is paid for by suicidal cab owners and displaced neighborhood folks. With everything developed long ago, remaking, redevelopment, and expansion is the only way for profit to go. Flipping for profit is what i doubt, only on a truth level. What does a source or authenticity matter in an era deemed,  post-truth, bloting facts with feelings in an unrelenting subjectivity that swallows everything. And disruption is a good thing, positive? For whom? Not for the working-class.

There is evidence everywhere – the Bushwick condo called Colony 1209, which advertised for “like-minded settlers” to “Brooklyn’s new frontier.” That colonial mindset is not just how the victims see it, but the Settlers too, and it does not lend itself well to working-class Brooklyn stoop, bar, or street life, and destroyed it. Eight taxi and limo men, some in very public demonstrative ways, kill themselves after Uber arrives, is indicative of a much larger working-class pain completely overlooked in the rush to disruption, and profit.

Art and tech is elitist, exclusionary, but only in a relative way. It’s all right to say that? I would call the working-class, relatively speaking, prosaic and common, and much worse, including ignorant. The point is that the two clash, or would, if they had to be in contact. Neither side is the least interested in the other. Tech never builds in the devastated cities of the Rust Belt unless it’s bitcoin mining which employs about two people to a facility.

The typical image of the museums is that they hold the greatest works of society and civilization, and not that they simply hold the greatest works of art, which are not necessarily the greatest things civilizations have made. This atmosphere of religiosity and praise, often in grandiose architectural temples, occasionally skewered by artists themselves, obscures the nonsense of absurd valuations. And the artists who “criticize” it, make fun of it, and are part of it, are enriched by it, and, thus, neutered by it.

What I am saying is sensible, true and easy to see. Thinking about a career in football? Would Yale or Princeton come to mind? What if you were interested in careers in art, finance or politics? The best schools for football also have huge political science, arts and law departments, but ultimately Ohio State doesn’t contribute nearly as much to the National Football League as the Ivy league does to the New York art scene or presidential elections. Tech? Stanford alone delivers a lot of tech leaders, and has a good football team to boot, but you get the picture.

 

It was always difficult in the last 100 years for most working-class or poor to shift into the arts – obviously the distance to working-class neighborhood life has always been there, but never has it been this far apart from one another. At one time, for a long time, a photographer, man or woman, could easily get started with 600 bucks in gear – and it was actually a paid profession. Today it takes 25k in gear, and even more significant, is the university training to the masters level that shuts out an entire class or two from participation – and the profession now doesn’t pay. Increasing the art teacher population encouraging more academic expansion. Something curiously deemed outsider art speaks volumes on the subject of education. One volume is, if it’s needed to make great art. Generally, artists have gone into training, but that was more apprenticing. Now training is much more highly developed into an industry complete with doctorates, specialists and single artist scholars. And to repeat, photography has gotten too damn technical which is interference on a money and time-spent level, because digital just sucks it up.

The working class probably populate entertainment, pop culture and sports far more than art, for reasons strongly related to class and environment. Now, more than ever, beginning with the unlikelihood of an art career, but also now further compounded, perhaps, by the evolution of the working class into, of all places, the likes of Trump, and seen, by association, as the very opposite of what art stands for. Working-class men have the lowest success rates in marriage, when, at one time, they were equal to any other class. Even working-class women aren’t attracted to to the now unstable unpredictable world of the working poor man.

Before the proliferation and acceptance of the degreed or trained artist, weren’t there more artists with roots and experience in the working life? There certainly were many more working-class subjects and ideas in the art world, that, even up until the nineties, received an equal status. Outlaws and lefties at one time found sanctuary in art and culture, that now thrives on identity politics and special interests.

Art professionals want success or to be remembered and praised, the working-class want survival and, time permitting, entertainment and creativity. Forgotten, they know it as simply being part of the deal, in a deck stacked against them.

Escaping limited opportunities, low wages or mind-numbing work through entertainment or sports fuels itself because lots of money and education is not a requirement, beyond motivation, discipline and talent, and the motivation of shit work for shit pay was always right up front for myself. I think art, artists and curators come out of a far different environment than the ones they gentrify. Not necessarily, always rich, but educated, certainly beyond high school and looking to settle into the reinvented landscape of like-minded re-constructors and literal disturbers.

Opportunity? For myself success never happened particularly after removing myself from the world of A & E which only meant a paycheck to me, not an entire life style. My release from the alternative i was quite familiar with – blue-collar work. Being continually denied, along with the copying and mimicking of the boomers were distractive, but enormous amounts of production did happen, every bit of it involved with whatever beauty abides by a truth told usually with light. After 42 years, the proof is overwhelming – success, today is based on flippin subjectivity, that’s good for profit, not soul. Failure is based on steady objectivity, that’s good for the soul, not profit, or comfort. Art is nothing but subjectivity, even the biggest pop stars know that. One of Picasso’s companions, an accomplished artist herself, says, ” Art isn’t about what’s outside you, but inside you.” Even though much of what originates in her mind starts with things seen in the world.

Here, with me, you have someone, just like anyone from the actual neighborhood that vanished before our witnessing eyes and muted voices. I am the Picture Man who has eyes, an active truthful mind, the guts to live that way, and i own a camera and a pen that i can operate as well as anyone. Williamsburg is a place i loved unconditionally and fully participated in, on its working-class level. The wild card is that i had been quietly documenting this sort of thing for 40 years, and Williamsburg was my hideout, stronghold and sanctuary – right through my own struggle to hang on to my home from 2003 to 2013, when i finally gave up the fight. And somehow i continue to do my work and since moving to my new neighborhood in 2013, i’ve been shooting Willet’s Point, Queens where a developer bought a portion of city owned land designated for only park use – 23 acres worth – for one dollar for a promise to build a giant destination shopping mall next to Citi Field, while displacing hundreds of blue-collar, largely immigrant workers, and putting dozens of shop owners out of business – in order to build a 4 billion dollar shopping mall (in the age of Amazon).

In the case of Willet’s Point, a mostly commercial development of a non-residential industrial neighborhood where no one lives, there is no real connection between art and gentrification. The only art i ever came across there was when Banksy dropped his Sphinx sculpture in a pool of sewage and toxic waste in October, 2013.

 

And that’s the wild card here, along with my free hand in this whole matter – i have been shooting disappearing industrial urban neighborhoods from its beginning with economic decline and industrial divestiture through economic redevelopment and the rise of service industries. I started all that in 1977 and continue to do so. Before confronting gentrification head on with my last three completed books, for forty years i have been anti-gentrification the same way Walker Evans was anti-celebrity. And my money was where my senses are – producing, i don’t know, twenty-two books, with four more in the works, etc. – entirely funded by my own labors, fully behooved to only non-fiction, and certainly not institutional art, training or thinking, and a whole host of other things.

By my own nature, i prefer the company of honest working people as opposed to professional artists. The neighborhoods of the downtrodden and forgotten are very interesting – aside from its poverty, which is the normal depiction by the well-off professional class. It’s also a land of wonder, after all i’m talkin about my home, my ideal place where i set up shop. The run-down, old or impoverished aspect is just there. But because of it, it’s also a magic kingdom with special freedoms, (pre-stop and frisk) like these places always have, including less head-gaming, lots of physical contact, full sensory reception and a very open mind when it comes to being social in the streets. But it’s the sometimes beautiful reaction to the impossibilities in not having and lots of loss – soul and context – that is the ultimate lesson of being in the source, and, thus, believing in one.

Reinvention is the end of something for a source artist, and i’ll have to live with that, but it’s not appropriate to appropriate my home, to harass me or anyone else in their home, or shove your culture down my throat while living in the same home i was in before you were born. And forcing displacement? Now what do you think my or anyone else’s reaction is gonna be?

Oversize egos and conceptual flipping whether in the form of a hammer or a humanist is the shared mindset that gentrifies. The frustration in the face of non-listening egotistical tyrants, if left untreated, eventually results in self-destruction for the muted ones. These tyrants, on the level of overly-cultivated and unfettered ego, are equal – Donald Trump and artists. The irony, of course, is that the most politically correct of people can cause such harm and create such ignorance by the sheer volume of their egos, about as much as their enemies.

At art’s center, usually, a conceit, like vanity plates.

The general gentrification scenario is old now, and we all know it. The creative and technical classes find a home and opportunity in a formerly working-class world. But let’s not forget how gentrification happened, who promoted and lived it, its roots in north Brooklyn, where it became an international model,  and, most importantly, what it replaced. Or, to put it another way, the flip of something that was formerly unthinkable in north Brooklyn, it’s demise. If i could do it again, i would have left Williamsburg by 2003 voluntarily – intact and healthy, not involuntarily in 2013 – in devastation.

I get the art, not its overvaluation. In the widest sense art is property and investment. I witnessed the effects of overvaluation on property in North Brooklyn, it did more than change things, including wiping out what preceded it. Overvaluation distorts everything around it in a bad way.

If, by mistake, if i made an art of anything, it’s the difference between screening there and being there, but apparently that’s not for me, but the professionals, along with the new powers that be – the flippers and disruptors, to decide. No matter it is an art of experience and that’s the defining difference.

I already had a job creating actual unofficial histories that i quietly fully participate in, before steroidal gentrification came to my home. I already had a sophisticated philosophy of representation fully in place thirty years before gentrification in Williamsburg. It is based solely and exclusively on the five senses and truth. I never, of course, turn off my powers of fully sensing so that we don’t speak baloney and remember truthfully. I try to balance the insult and absurdity of being told and instructed about what often is simply a matter of being for many of us, and, that the rest just don’t get because that’s not what you really want.

 

ART & GENTRIFICATION: THE REEVALUATION OF ALL OVERVALUATION

 

“If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.” – F. N.

 

“All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.” – E. B.

 

“The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.” – T.A.

 

“We lost. We always lose.” – Yul Brynner, last scene, Magnificent Seven.

 

Probably more author, than artist, like a novelist, i shoot what i know, usually in the third person, but not this time, and without so many pictures.

Stay open to the unfamiliar sounds of what is yet unfounded, as i apply the stylo to tap what’s unheard, because you will miss the innocent point of this essay. It’s not aimed at art or art works, but the effects of its expansion in our cities.

Not art, but social criticism where things remain relative and art is a part of the larger picture. It’s not necessarily art’s highly individualized nature nor the art itself, but the over valuation in the market of museums, galleries, auction houses and if that extends to the heads in art, then to them, too. But beyond that it’s a look at a way of thinking that, at the least, lets displacement happen and gentrification flourish. At this moment i might be an artist and social critic, but i’m not an art critic. I have experience. I witnessed on a daily basis for many years how Williamsburg got to be hip. The evidence i have is overwhelming and confirms my implacable place against what i fully recognize is an unstoppable gentrification – it’s of a social nature and not art, and certainly isn’t any sort of official history, if only because it was lived, or, more accurately, lived through.

Overwhelming experience is sharpened by something i haven’t run across yet in art – i don’t love it, or the particular brand of it that i do. Occasionally i can enjoy the BDNF production, and there is a sort of elation if i got the shot – the job was well-done. But the question here is what is the actual value of that edification. There’s no preference for it beyond being a certain tool that can have a particular relation to reality. Yeah that’s right, you heard me, a relationship to reality. Notice, at this point i’m already outside art, at least in how it’s come to be practiced.

Critical edge is sharpened by rejecting any life-style trappings. I hear of art, hip hop or fashion life-styles, but can’t make sense of it while in the sway of life, or, production. Social implies relativity, or it used to, but the social is by its nature is relativity. Removing or flipping context is a prime activity in both the making of art and real estate – reinvention and disruption, a positive word for art and tech people, is the price we pay. Just because it’s what i do, doesn’t mean that i love it, or like it, or think or feel about it in any way but a tool. I’ve never heard of anyone in art including critics who didn’t love it. Not to waste fidelity there, is an edge, but nowhere near the quality of the edge from the indisputability of simply not wanting something i disagree with to invade my home against my will. Art or media criticism? How about when a mindset comes right into your living room every night, uninvited until you had to leave in order to survive? That’s right and wrong without shades, and i know shades better than anyone.

By not mixing friends and business the equation is altered to quid pro nihil, which requires taking care of myself. That means i pay for all my work with my own labor, plainly speaking, i don’t suck ass, and i’m not trying to get anywhere but truth in life, or, at least having a real one.

If artists lived in context, their ideas would ripen, fall, root and form flesh, and just plain being would make stupid socially induced practices like gentrification cease. That ain’t gonna happen. We have let too many things lead us by the nose too quickly without thinking, facebook delusions are finally surfacing, but took years for the obvious to emerge, blinded by money and opportunity and the feelings-as-truth era. I saw it first-hand in Williamsburg.

Think we haven’t moved too quickly without thinking about it? Imagine John D. Rockefeller who was the first billionaire and the richest man of his time, if not all time, a strict Baptist, being told that in the future, today’s richest person would have pictures of his most private member, circulating. His own investigation has concluded the perp was the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who would go on to wack a journalist for the Washinton Post, that Bezos owns. Nice world, with “social” keeping us connected.

Social criticism? It’s more like social consciousness in a sea of incredible self-consciousness, to the point where the lens is now turned 180 degrees and records the operator for many.

And gentrification? The pain of displacement and the lost authenticity of real places can only be confusingly discussed from the outside. That sounds terribly uncompromising but it’s a reaction to art that just don’t do context much any more, outside itself. And to do contextual work keeps one outside. And that’s all RealStill does, really, contextual work done outside, literally, done outside of just about everything that is trivial.

Lately, too late for some, there are calls for a look at race, by, of all things, museums, and, while, any discourse about those things has to be contextual by nature (inclusive), the institutions doing the reviewing are not, so good luck. Gentrification is current and raging just outside the garden walls, but, it’s like asking cops to evaluate themselves about their own ethics and procedures. And, seriously, the actual whole histories of the collectors, museums and galleries, and who is behind them at any given time, who will do that? Fraudster gallery owners abound. And, in the context of today’s secular democratic values, the roots of museums and the business of art must be swampy.

Plainly speaking, it’s a literary move, a “narrative” by the masters of “narratives” – in a time when the word, “narrative” has become synonymous with someone’s line of bull shit, hiding the on-the-ground real view, that the working-class know but can’t express or try to get their message out, because, they are blue-collar, not professional media.

A swamp inside the garden wall? Of all places, it’s going to be hard to see, in all the ego and dazzle. It’s another book or two itself probably to handle it. Briefly – even though i would say Nan Goldin holds tremendous responsibility for getting high, it seems museums are now actually conscious of the new Era of Secular Corrections, and, quick now to pin, for instance, the Sacklers as villains, which they might be, i don’t know – a tip of something much bigger has surfaced. The real estate industry thanks the art industry for its role in increasing portfolio values. I both lived and documented it effects, as a writer and photographer, and would never have an outlet, until the internet.

One good thing about the long era of academia and art is that we get some good old college liberal arts ideas and ethics injected into a formerly much more secretive world of wealth, collectibles and what to do with them, as well as, their values. The educated artist and scholar is very well-versed in so much. But can select to be forgetful in other ways. To his credit Holland Cotter can barely write a review without mentioning the absurdity of some things said here about overvaluations. But we are older and living out our extinctions, yet still must speak simultaneously about art, history and ethics, as if being connected, or, even, as one. As long as history hasn’t been bought, and ipso facto expression lives – is what i’m pinning my meager hopes on, and that ain’t much, because art and its history is not about ethics or good will to others.

Coveting your neighbor’s place implies the awareness of wanting something that is not yours. The coveted neighborhoods of North Brooklyn, though, didn’t bother at all with that drop of social consciousness, but proceeded directly to the level of mindless absorption when it comes to entering a place you ain’t from, while keeping your personal ambitions entirely clear. And so your feelings aren’t hurt let me be specific, where you’re from or where you are visiting is of no concern to us, we always welcomed new folks. It’s how you treated us upon your arrival. We were here when you were born, and had seen the immigrations of the hip across the East River. It didn’t surprise us, we knew the drill and the type. It would be strictly separate and unequal worlds, until enough of us left – displaced, to make it another lost hood in the Blue-Collar Holocaust.

Book and film knowledge of human nature exists as one step in the long walk of human experience, if that is your choice, but to walk and move about others and the world, particularly historic others that built and maintain your city, you may have missed a lot. Today NYC employs 350,000 of its citizens. Adding training and specialization sharpens goals and ambitions. But does it open eyes like contact does? Contact, by nature, embeds. Contact changes it all, and is the most powerful education tool around, and is becoming entirely lost in these succeeding waves of virtual existence. Contact means experience, and, for RealStill experience is the difference.

Here’s another fact – New York City has close to 900,000 Dominicans, 10 per cent of the population. Living in their stronghold is why i am aware of that.

I digress, back to the boring story that has run for 37 years, if anyone remembers. Gentrification, is a subject even i don’t want to have a thing to do with, but i shoot cities, and, honestly, it’s the most transformational force i’ve seen since the industrial divestiture that began in the seventies, and it’s not just the supercharged brand on the east and west coasts, all the large Rust Belt cities have their gentrifying sections now, even though, and maybe thanks to the fact that, they lie within cities that still have the most ravaged landscapes around. While these cities seem to have an endless supply of distressed neighborhoods, looking for salvation, many are too far gone for anything but demolition, and this is another large urban transformation occurring in these cities. When vacant ghetto land is finally developed, it has proven to be in the form of convenience store/gas stations or small strip malls done in today’s chintzy style.

On a Sunday you can drive through a huge swath made up of sections of former neighborhoods on Cleveland’s east side, at high speeds, and for miles, never in danger of running anyone over, there’s no one and nothing much there. And the rest of the east side is just completely messed-up, half-gone or going, as opposed to the sections that have reverted to woodlands. All the press about Cleveland being over the Rust Belt, is based on downtown and west side neighborhoods that have gentrified because there is actually stuff still there and in relatively good shape. You can’t gentrify, or, in that way, save what ain’t there.

So the true ghettoes will never gentrify, never rise. It’s like the bristlecone pine’s strategy of complete isolation in an environment that no other organism, can survive in. When the development of the ghetto’s empty spaces finally occurs it will be slow and ugly.

In strong working-class neighborhoods, owners modestly keep up their properties, and pass it on within the family. These places are ripe for the gentry. The third generation son or daughter who lives in Queens – growing up in Williamsburg was too funky for them in the seventies and eighties – has an opportunity to make a fortune either renting or selling the deceased parents’ property. But not to anyone unless they can afford it. That’s the new way, breaking the older order with more money.

 

I live where I shoot. I shoot cities. I know.

New York gentrification is tied heavily to art and cultural hipness, as it should be, and takes place in densely populated, already full up neighborhoods. I’ve seen art professionals, particularly from media, music, art and entertainment “find” a neighborhood, then developers follow, while on the west coast the technocrats, do the same, with even less conscience, but with same big effect on the city and particularly the people who used to live in the places they just came to inhabit. Like everyone else the technocrats and artists have their own culture and quirks.

The version of gentrification at work in the Rust Belt cities comes with less hurt – it moves much slower than on the coasts, plus available homes and apartments are all around when your lease is up. In the true Rust Belt there is absolutely no rent control or stabilization – forty years of economic decline saw to that and things are still cheap out of the newly redeveloped areas, of course, that are as expensive as it gets.

As i watch this and shoot it for forty years, the same evolution always occurs – the poor get more stranded in their ghettoes as the choice sections of the city redevelop and only people with money or property prosper. We all know that. The urban planners all call it a necessary evil for the greater good and development of cities, just like the government does, while never knowing displacement against one’s will and the law itself.

But all in all the subject of gentrification makes me sick, i mean physically sick, let alone the moral nausea. The disruption included, literally, the great disturbance of not being allowed to sleep. In other words the disturbance from disruption was so invasive as to be on a physical level from the ceaseless partying of art lovers. The whole thing is big and ongoing, as is art’s relation to it in this city. Thus never would i think – gentrification? – am i “for it or against it?”

Also, before it came into my home, i never thought about it, never had to because i was so thoroughly living and shooting disappearing blue-collar, working-class life, while residing-for-real in the former blue-collar stronghold, Williamsburg. The writing on the wall about disappearance i could read too well by the time it was my neighborhood’s time to give up the ghost. Up to and during the Hipster Plague in my neighborhood, i would spend all my professional time, with my back to crap like gentrification, lest it bite me, then…

Big story for Brooklyn is man-made neighborhood climate change to upscale, and for me, the big story is i got bit. And that crap infects. To make it clear, the shit of other people that is injected into your home life, and, thus, your blood is unhealthy – and i didn’t even get infected through sex and needles, but torture by close proximity. Who can argue against that or inarguable experience? Things like sleep are necessary for survival. I gotta say that? Living that absurdity will eventually kill you, so you move. Displacement, that’s shorthand for what is about to follow, and is officially called gentrification.

Never stray from the fact this is specifically in the context of artists gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhoods. It’s not some hit on the enshrining of, or creativity itself, but its overvaluation. It’s the overvaluation of both art and Brooklyn in property and real estate terms, and it’s a criticism of art only when that valuation manifests itself in bloated ego and lack of substantive thought. And there ain’t nuthin wrong with that, or satirizing both the extremes and base line of art – kindly limited to its pertinence with regards to the gentrification of North Brooklyn. Remember that context as you react to what is said here.

The world changes quicker than ever, perhaps, though, too quickly, but only in the sense of trying to think about in any meaningful way as a real decision-making process. So that by the time a book has been written detailing the subject, the scene has been thoroughly seized, sealed and delivered and then will be remembered as such. Things move on, and it either becomes untouchable, sealed in a media bubble or gone, by the time i’ve earned the money to buy the time to get back on my feet, to write about it, proof read it and self-publish it. When i began these gentrification books bias or fake news had no name, but was seen everywhere for a long time. And this is the era this book emerges.

Today even El Chapo has moved to Brooklyn, convinced its rent control will be better for him? And Brooklyn does want him to experience its rent control, just not its luxury listings, where, perhaps, in his past, some of that American green, flowed indirectly back to him. He is now displaced to Colorado never really experiencing what the changed Brooklyn now has to to offer.

The transformation of New York particularly, since 1995, with the Guiliani-effect, continuing with a real estate development-centered mayor is a lot of change, we all agree, but it’s rarely been covered critically or in detail, with the exception of Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, and the piece in the New Yorker in 2014 about Bloomberg’s run. I use to say, around 2004, i bet Bloomberg is driven around the boroughs in search of development opportunities, and everyone, who voted for anyone, would argue with me. By 2014 it’s a well-known fact, only he uses a helicopter that he pilots. And his Last Hurrah was selling 23 acres of city-owned, but park-only designated land, throwing hundreds out of work, closing dozens of largely immigrant businesses, and giving it all to developers for the price of one dollar, to build a 4 billion dollar shopping complex –– Citi Field/Related Properties –– Flushing West, more precisely Willet’s Point Mall, in the age of Amazon.

Willet’s Point is the most heavily covered act of gentrification in this city’s history where the media can always be relied on to be there for the last moments of what’s always inevitable for the working-class. I mean in the two years of the close-down i saw large arrays of photographers and documentary vid-makers from everywhere, (it seemed like the Mermaid parade at Coney) all of whom made sympathetic pieces to those effected by the loss of Willet’s Point to a developer for a buck – to build four billion dollars worth of retail. It didn’t halt the project, but recorded the inevitable, and for “all time.”

Joe Ardizzone, born in Willet’s Point and its only official resident, at 82 years old, is the single most involved New Yorker in the battle of gentrification. “They want to take my property and give it to [Met’s owner Fred] Wilpon for one dollar. I don’t seem to understand how this is the American way,” Ardizzone said. And you know he’s right in the absolute legal sense, that’s land owned by the city, that if sold can only be used for park land and the Supreme Court decided years ago that eminent domain is not an instrument for private wealth. He is even more right when you understand that sale included his home where he was born, still lives and intends to die. Joe’s statement is simple, not complex and legally true but ongoing, which means he has to fight for what is his since birth until he dies because the developers just won’t let go.

 

Joe died on July 29, 2016 – collapsed on the street, Willet’s Point Ave., and in front of his home, where he was born, with his boots on, working hard, then died three days later. Joe did die knowing the seizing and demolition of properties would end at his property, his home, an apartment, a restaurant downstairs and two auto body shops. He did have a will, leaving it to his best person, one who still remembers his bar – Joe’s Place that had proceeded everything back when the Junkyards were starting up.

 

And i know by experience the Trump-like perpetual harassment both legal and under the radar, as does anyone forced from their homes.

Change is for politicians, some of whom make films and pictures. That’s not a criticism, that’s what those who require change want and intend to do, change things. And sometimes it’s possible, like Black Fish or Surviving R. Kelly. But there’s also Wiseman. Myself, i see, i capture, and cannot control a thing past that, where i know pictures will only “take place” in a mind, not mine, nor the real time and place that i experienced, including all the senses used in its production, and all that the picture references. So enjoy. To art professionals, it comes in all shades and flavors, as many as there are people. Making is being. Remaking is always almost being.

The fact is, being in a much wider flow of life, not necessarily the mind in isolation, i see art relative, not to itself, but everything. Art pays a lot of attention to itself, perhaps making it feel relatively important, but besides art many other cultural opportunities are always available, for the same goals of personal achievement, money and renown. Some in sports or pop culture make art pale in overall effect on the population and valuation, and are often from the classes with no more than a high school graduation. Back to our home in New Rome, where we see it all, begging the question, what’s art? Look at rock n roll. It has a museum and canon, that needs to be filled. It’s mostly a pop music museum, so the question of what’s rock hasn’t been answered, at least not there. Blurring here seems part of expansion, becoming what it becomes in these business models. But i digress.

The picture people who descended on Willet’s Point are no where to be found since November, 2013 – that was the Big Show, The Shutdown Month. It’s been six years, and i’m still there. now, in 2023, it’s been ten. still there) Half the shops still remain and are active, and the whole event is still ongoing, but apparently the show part is over and the remainder of the Iron Triangle, if it’s gonna die, is gonna do it on its feet, slowly. I’ll see it through to the end. And, for now, i’m celebrating its grim doomed culture, as a spot to hang.

 

I know how it feels – it’s only answer will, for working people, always be – get out and start over, and find a way with your people. People, like myself and others are happy to be here in America, and that’s our foundation. We find a way, particularly with our backs pressed to the wall.

Anyways it’s the next book i did after WNM, and is also about gentrification but of the shopping and entertainment variety, that goes in for the kill by wiping out blue-collar jobs that pay for a decent modest life, usually in Queens, and an interesting original culture fades.

With DeBlasio’s zoning changes passed, affordable housing in the Bronx will take out the auto repair and body shops that line Jerome Ave., under the #4 train. It won’t be luxury development, but it seems this realm of blue-collar worker really gets kicked around, and, coincidentally, is almost entirely immigrant, poor and with all the powerlessness that goes with it.

Even though people pay their taxes, city services don’t really exist in the Junkyards, so things like snow removal or waste removal still must be taken care of. In Joe’s case, it’s also his home, so when he leaves to go to work every day, he never knows what to expect. This is where he lives, and where he grew up. Not long before he passed, Joe cleared snow in the winter and traversed floods in the summer like he always did, only now the city covets his home and land, while still not providing city services.

 

This is the only entrance into the restaurant, planks are strung along on supports in place of the sidewalks. This only happens when it rains.

Killing the buffalo, i mean, killing businesses that employ the working-class is one of many fears for poor immigrants, who are also taxed and fined at rates equal across classes. But working-class neighborhoods are under the most scrutiny by the police (stop and frisk) and the 148 dollar seat belt violation is the same for everyone, and, if you’re a wage-laborer a traffic fine can be thirty per cent of your weekly income.

 

 

Back to Joe Ardizzone, a friend and Willet’s Point’s only official resident, having been born there 82 years ago. Joe fought gentrification every day, like no one i’ve seen, after all it’s the obvious, obscured by language, illegal seizing of his property to develop a shopping mall, where he was born, lived and, in his words, “They want to take my property and give it to [Met’s owner Fred] Wilpon for one dollar. I don’t seem to understand how this is the American way,” Just thought i would repeat that because it really is that simple, without all the language. Joe’s life ended in front of his home on Willet’s Point Avenue in 2016, but he died knowing that the development halted at his property. Today the restaurant is open and the body/repair shops are thriving, and the 23 acres next door is devoid of shops, awaiting development and remediation.

 

WILLIAMSBURG – A MONUMENT TO HYPER-GENTRIFICATION

 

While being finally and fully displaced from my home in Brooklyn and hanging around with Joe, hiding from the world of A & E, especially after an abusive show in a gentrifying neighborhood (Valentine’s Uterus Gallery) i made Williamsburg National Monument. It’s an accompanying book of photography which this essay sometimes references.

WNM is a satire. It’s a send-up of art colonies, ruins photography, the mechanics of gentrification, hipsters, art and its associate, real estate. The latter two in the business of property, and its speculation, favored instruments of the wealthy. And both absurdly so. As purely a messenger i know not to blame the artist, but let me put it this way, it’s not a situation i embrace but one i run from. Particularly the relation between ruins photography and gentrification, and, of course, absurd over-valuations.

Artists not enriched by the absurdity of the high-end market, stay fused awaiting their day, or, at least some know-ness. What’s the choice? For work to be seen, before the internet, it was impossible without passing the muster of officials of our media and art institutions, and having a brand name in art came into being along with mass entertainment, and was the original model for the star system. It’s the campaigning, the image building and convincing that an individual is worth the attention. In other words the long schmooze that it takes to get there and stay there, and takes too much time from actually working at making something.

I’m surprised by the rise in the number of Yale graduates who became presidents – both Bushes and both Clintons. Mr. Obama clearly is a Columbia/Harvard man. The number of curators and artists from Yale or Harvard in New York since the eighties is surprising, as well, as artists, who, i believe carry a predetermined mind-set based on ambition, made guilt-free by virtue of inventions like political correctness.

I’m sure they won’t settle for anything less than success in their field.

If Chris Rock were an artist he would be saying, “Art museums are secret society racist. We really like you Ronda (LaQuanda), but we’re not at liberty to divulge anything more.”

People have aesthetic opinions. Where do they come from?

Can a politically correct, highly educated, liberal artist cause harm, beginning with their own pc hate for their “dead white men” and then going on to get so much reality wrong by virtue of their accepted concepts?

H.I.P –– Hipster Induced Parkinson’s – the neurological condition induced by head trauma, similar to Ali, but the blows are not physical. Some are 🔊 sonic – sleep deprivation caused by constant loud music and the pounding of piles in the soft sea level land of Williamsburg to stabilize those condo towers. Some are tactile – rats, many rats, then later their ticks and fleas, and some overwhelm the senses – the destruction of my apartment, unmaintained, already under years of planned deterioration, then, in one day, maybe 30 per cent of my place is destroyed in a rehabilitation error that is another way of saying you don’t dismantle a five story chimney from the cellar. And on and on – accumulating year over year until I had lost so much, including my job, and, the ability to make a living that supported my work, the maintenance of my archive and the final struggle of my family and remaining friends to stay alive.

Done against the iron will of a neighborhood mentality something had to be effected by hipster shell-shock. In the struggle to live even in your home, you can’t realize much except hanging on, until one day, you get far enough away from what happened in Williamsburg, and learn the price to pay for the stress. It’s so obvious in retrospect, i should have moved immediately in 2003, at least i would now have the same neurology. By 2006, the damaging effects of being in full Brooklyn mode – the old Brooklyn, as in, i’m gonna kick yer ass, since 2003, were obvious, but there still remained nine more years until some form of neurological stasis occurred. The event of gentrification took a total of fifteen years from me, including recovery time of eight years, in order to sort of get back to the decent, but modest life i had, before the “New York is all about change” crowd showed up in my living room, albeit with the health effects of the millennial value called disruption.

And to be clear and thoroughly embarrassed by the fact – constant loud noise was one of dozens of violations, but just this consistent unrelenting loud reminder that hipsters are truly assholes, alone, destroyed me. Do i have to explain? Depriving a living creature of its sleep results in eventual death. Sleep is necessary for survival. After explaining the most basic things, a child would understand, to them, they continued. Hipsters and artists, i found to be the most pc of people, a bubble so strong, that not even repeated direct communication over a period of many years could be understood by them, “Turn it down, it’s killing me, i lost my job, my equipment.” Most importantly, the care of my parents, which fell to me, was completely ruined during all those years, and left a permanent mark to carry to the grave, along with the neurology of a falsely accused terrorist in Guantanamo where the same torture tactics were used – loud, obnoxious pop music, and devastating cultural and religious intrusions. Trouble is, I’m an American, not a terrorist, especially American when i beautifully document disappearing urban industrial neighborhoods, just like my own, since 1977. Ya hear that – patina dogs and explorer scouts? The photo-onanisms of the ruins’ crowd, brings manufacturing, the life blood of all working-class closer to its ruin by promoting it as mysteriously entertaining, which, to the working class is not so much entertainment and mystery, but something fully comprehended and historically and socially lived out and documented by the likes of RealStill. Perhaps feelings and pleasure are your truth now. You are wrong, and certainly not correct in any way. You are highly educated, you should know better, but, if you act as though you are better, obscuring that with the secular morality of your Second Gilded Age pc culture, you will never learn in a real way, but could definitely prosper, and not learn that pc culture is not working-class inclusive.

I lost my health, not sharpness, memory nor cognition: The book, Williamsburg National Monument, is a satire – think Bunuel’s Land Without Bread. It’s bitter, not emotionally, but financially. A depression, where i come from, is when you lose your money, your job, then, perhaps, the mental part will appear. Maybe you, the reader, have not lost the ability to do your best work, and make your money, from years of harassment, so, uh, it might be a little too experiential. For you folks out there who might not be able to imagine, what it’s like to be living in your home peacefully for 30 years and suddenly have to fight like a dog for what’s yours to begin with, it’s a very long list: to be kept awake for stretches of 24 to 96 hours for many years, your four rooms collapsing around you, the day begins with 🔊 pile drivers as new condominiums are raised in a 360 degree circle around a row of three wooden no-law tenements from 1885. And the perpetual reconstruction occurring inside my building, seven days a week, with no permits for nine years.

It was very invasive, and, literally, disruptive to the point of physical torture by the pork-pie hat and scooter crowd, where Breslin, Mitchum and Capote would be out of place too.

Uh, i’m gonna react with mui abhorrence, and it’s gonna be one hell of a hateful unstoppable reaction. But even more when i hear this – that same scenario involved many older people, who lived in Williamsburg their entire life. They were in their eighties, in a wheelchair, spending their last years in their little home as the uniquely hipster taste of music blasted from the bars. They fought it for years, and there was never any peace until these poorly run hipster bars would die out, usually 5 – 7 years. These buildings, that where built in 1885 when they didn’t have electricity or, even, toilets let alone state of the art loudspeaker sound systems, in my case, 15 speakers in the ceiling and cornices. Assuring, whether i like it or not, every night was gonna be a party, including the den of ever-changing hipsters above me. I heard continually what they “liked.” And where had i been? What was once square had been reinvented hip, or whatever has been a commercial success in the last thirty years. And just as the bar closed at 4:00 am, work on multiple condominiums for 360 degrees around the crib would then commence, for a period of ten years, as well as, the rehabbing of apartments within my building, above and below me from 2003 until 2013. If you want to see what kind of change occurred, stand where Roebling dead ends at McCarren Park. You’ll see only modern luxury living on the high end that was a working-class enclave just years before it changed. Change?  Elimination would be the most extreme change.

People who have lived in New York briefly have a common saying, “New York is all about change.” Is that it? That’s all you can come up with as a defense? After ripping up the social contract and updating it with this inexperienced “change” nonsense, reflected in their culture – SantaCon, underwear day on the subway, flash mobs, axe throwing bars and the like.

At least i got the guts and heart to say it – i am justifiably angry. But i have directed that overwhelming negative force from displacement to a work of art called, Williamsburg National Monument, and to fuel another more serious depiction of gentrification out in the Junkyards of Queens, and all my other haunts on the verge of extinction. When i shoot displacement my subjects see it in my own eyes, the homeless 500 yard stare. I live in a world where you would get a severe beating or death spreading that brand of narcissistic destruction to innocents that the hipsters so blindly and selfishly delivered, what millennials proudly call disruption. I won’t be sitting on any panels of experts, or viewing things from the perspective of that of well-off and highly subjective celebrities who may have a connection to Brooklyn, or working-class life or whatever plays on the screen, but don’t give a shit in a real way, and live in luxury while growing their pc bed of flowers on their terraces. Good, but when your mindset hurts or destroys?

An art that requires your presence in, of all things, too real reality, might be a truly transformative one. It certainly is one you can feel by contact, and, like music is indisputable. Art requires no presence in the actual world, so, then, perhaps i’m the odd one out, but i read and screen about what these highly trained and educated artists pick up in academia – what to fill the blank slate with, the endlessly new (but not original, that’s over) and conceptual. So much dealing with your interior perceptions about how you do or don’t look at the world including the one you move to. And, of course, your identity, not self-knowledge, but your notion of being part of a larger group, even though your profession is known for singular ego, but you get to attach it to a cause, and in America for a very long time there could be no greater cause than racial, and sexual identity, and no greater sin than racism and sexism, as secular morality, like political correctness, blows up in the corporate, service and political professions.

Today it’s common for people to describe themselves as writer-musician-filmmaker-poet-painter and activist.

The perception of existent working-class Brooklyn evolved from, what a cheap, great and funky original place, to, it’s there for the taking to be remade. None of the art waves that happened there, including the first one, had anything to do with the existent place or its people. Now look what the educated and trained creative class did to its antipode, the original working-class neighborhood of Williamsburg, if you could find it. Big solid proof exists everywhere in Williamsburg, so much so, all my views of the city were eventually blocked by this proof.

But to keep it fun, entertaining – hey, i coulda been born in the ice age, or the dark ages instead of the age of the hipster plague. It’s the slower, more humiliating death by embarrassment, that ends quickly in suicide but without any fever or throwing up, only sleep disorder, tremors and whatever physiological effects that occur when someone’s culture, one you have disagreed with and suffered from on a career basis for 42 years (appropriating the inappropriate, for instance, my lived work) – is forced into, even the privacy of your home and at 4:00 am.

So to condense, in 2003 – in order to save time i’ll use this as a metaphor and, of course, to be entertaining – all of a sudden, a group consisting of artists, hipsters, developers, my “new” landlord, a hipster bar owner and other assorted greedy rats, along with a revolving cast of tenants who were always new and changing, placed a steel garbage can over my head and took turns pounding it with hammers for nine years, around the clock. And this was done while “living” in my home. They say it’s the leading cause of both H.I.P. and A.I.P. in otherwise normally developed people. Not too much an exaggeration in the age of disruption. Just ask the families of the taxi men who have killed themselves by virtue of another’s unregulated opportunity seeking. And speaking of suicide, just the sound of multiple 🔊 pile drivers for seven solid yers, forty hours per week, would be enough incentive to end it, by ending your own life.

In other words, i know precisely what i’m talkin about. Don’t tell me your “likes” and “dislikes” and, lose the screen that you live in front of, where you play the Wizard of Oz, and, instead face me, eye to eye, in real time and place, and see if i’m kiddin. That’s strictly rhetorical, it’s no longer 1990, the I-don’t-get-its were three years old. The gulf is so vast, you’re disconnection to all but the self, so embarrassing, we just don’t waste our time telling you or fighting you. We move on. With no street smarts, no common sense, no guts, and your education, your parents’ money and a secular, pc-bubble morality, of coddling, it’s hopeless.

I’ve seen media inside and out, and i stayed out of it (1989) so long now, because i know it, and now i’m supposed to socialize with it? As a litmus for outrageous subjective commentary by virtue of disappearing from an ultimately self-contained and self-referential world of media, that can eventually signify only itself, and resurfacing in it every ten years for one month only, for a show, i can testify. The level of subjectivity, now tied to the reinvention view, is beyond pervasive and ubiquitous, as it licks up even its antipode. Mimicry, appropriation, the long era of the remake, the sequel and how you relate to it all, is old but now wrapped up in the mindset of the colonist-gentrifier. But, please, ignore source material in favor of referencing only the art, and yourself, leaving me with more good source work, because, you know, “art is about what’s inside you, not the world.” And i couldn’t agree more.

I would say it is entirely impossible to truly get away from all the bull shit of useless bits of information for a long time now. I was real good at it until 9/11 when, amongst other things, free over-the-air television was knocked out when the Towers fell, and i got the cable for the first time. It was incredible what i missed, and how little sense it made, unless you were inside it the whole time. People act like we’re the pinnacle of civilization, but i guarantee much of what is so aesthetically valuable today, will be largely indecipherable in the future. At least one hopes – knowing, in fact, that’s like the possibility that absolutely no racism will ever occur again, if we just heed the practitioners of identity politics. It’s that simple.

And then, in 2002, i get a computer, and the internet. Now i wake up in the morning, sit with a cup of coffee, look at a front page article in the morning digital “paper” and immediately see a video, in high detail, of a group of Somali pirates being machine-gunned to death. Do they still talk about how the Viet Nam War was the first conflict brought into the home? The actual paper was a much softer medium, and now our media is a complex fractious affair, that includes video, sound and the high production values taught to the college-trained staffers. The Times essays of the ethnic underbelly of Queens is done with a high value film noir photography. Did you see their piece on Willet’s Point using an old tin type process? It was excellent, and, now, in fairness, the Times hit a home run with Ms. Barker’s gentrification analysis complete with old school black and white photography and hard-core stats, but whatdoiknow? It was excellent and dense with facts and details, the real thing. Did it suffer from less hits because of its objectivity?

Without asking, my job was completely transformed, and my personal history and data are for sale, and i never do any form of social media, wiping histories, cookies and any other invasive things that were not thought about in any meaningful way, before getting cute names like cookies. Not to mention my camera is a computer now, and photography has become way too technical for its own good, as digital beats film in many ways but two – quality, and light capture, which film still owns. I don’t have to list all the positive stuff this gear and the internet does. But there is a the literal and social price for all the tech, along with ads and giving up, to chicken-shit corporations willing to partner with our government in keeping us checked, and selling your data behind your backs to corporate data collection businesses. Your complete search history is your authentic mind turned inside out and listed by date and time. Spending way too much time in front of a screen now. I used to think staring out a window was such a disconnection. However, as anti-screen as i am, it finally offers something of value to use – content for everyone, probably too much content, but it is wild and free content. The CRT screen was also a dangerous piece of hardware, that a matte LED screen has replaced for the greater health of civilization that spends more time screening than anything.

Are you kiddin me? This is a screen culture, and i mean deep screen, particularly if it’s been there, as given since day one. I watched daily, not on a screen, all the time, on Union Ave., where i lived, mostly women, walking with their attention immersed in a small screen, often with headphones, in a city. Were they headed to other screens? Certainly heads buried in screens even while walking and driving are not paying attention to reality. However their unconscious slalom skills were outstanding, and would appreciate a little Olympic disruption by reinventing the slalom category.

Years after first purchasing the Sony Walkman for cassette tapes in 1982, i tried walking around McCarren Park with a headset actually using it in the way it was made. It took, maybe five minutes, to shut it down and remove it, due to disconnection with the immediate reality, which makes someone like me feel unsafe. So i fully recognize the sizable group of people who feel just the opposite and find safety and more in their devices. I own a fully equipped smartphone, and use it for phone calls, and, coincidentally speak truth, so don’t listen to me, simply pay attention to your self-tuned devices.

Are you kiddin me? Someone finds the time to briefly turn away from their screens, and i don’t care who they are, to tell me about matters like the gentrification that occurred as close as being inside my home for a very long period of time? (along with a whole host of self-referential opinions about exactly what they don’t know). Hypostatization from the cuddled ones who mistake the combinations of their feelings and the information they like as the truth about things. I don’t think it possible to detox media enough for it to sense someone that deep into it. If you would have told me that people who were not yet born, while i lived, where they would later arrive, only to inform me about the whole nature of change in New York, then that would immediately produce a neurological reaction of titanic proportions – to be told this city is “all about change” as if it were Robert Moses or Michael Bloomberg themselves telling me what time it is. Look at a map, hipster-liberal and artist-liberal neighborhoods, are, relatively speaking, inconsequential. With their numbers, especially in a democracy, it proves their media can be far worse than the bite they took out North Brooklyn. However we vote or influence to a large degree with our dough and the Cuddled got the corner on that. However in a controlled vote where all votes are equal and your money has no consequence, we get Trump, but also Obama, and the ones who flipped the election were the same who voted for Obama for two terms, but felt short-changed.

 

But millennials are not inconsequential in their transformation of their immediate surroundings, and the power that bestowed on them by the city. Take for instance, Bronx County, with 1.5 million people and with well over a third of its residents considered pretty damn poor, that’s a large number with little power, but it’s only geography and attitudes that is holding its flip, because those poor immigrants, on paper, seem ripe for the picking. In reality Bronx people will fight you nasty, like when you tried to rebrand Mott Haven as, of course, a homage to the industry in general that was driven out long ago – The Piano District. By the way, as a city truck driver always using Bruckner Blvd., all through the eighties and nineties, i can testify that Mott Haven’s gentrification began in the early nineties and was not hyper until 2014 when the Bronx was finally targeted once three other boroughs filled up on high rents. The Bronx gentrification remains more like that of the Rust Belt – a testament to the amount of devastation and the the weight of a very large stereotype that resulted from the devastation.

As prepared for the worst as we were, we had seen it all before, we could only hope, that by smearing the blood of our butchered pigs on our streets every summer we could for another year, have a peaceful redevelopment passover. The dead fish thrown through windows was useful against, the initial wave of bos, but eventually was ineffective for the I-don’t-get-it hipsters, because they had never lived in a city before. Then the developers and bankers that followed, not to mention greedy-ass individual two-bit landlords from Queens, who had nothing to do with the change, except being there at the right time to cash in, which then would help it change more.

The gulf, the absurd distance, between what i’m told and what i experience, live and know is insulting. Without mentioning the quality of the people doing the telling, what’s more of an insult, is they are doing it from a screen, gathering and sending information, bypassing the most important thing – an obviously ignored reality experienced by thousands of displaced citizens, and occasionally one of those citizens is a privately accomplished photographer on the subject since 1977, and arguably America’s only artist really looking clearly, or at all, into gentrification.

Today the keys, at least the cities’ hopes, have been put in the hands of the creative classes – artists and technocrats – the least diverse, least experienced, and most blind to the historical life of the city, and from places completely unlike New York. They remake.

Max Frisch once commented about, “Technology – the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” And artists? Perhaps it’s their specialty of changing the world conceptually and within the exclusion of individual mind. Both seem the ideal vehicle to speed gentrification as a home for service workers and not blue-collar, let alone the outright poor. And, again i’m explaining the effects of a mindset on old particularly industrial places, not art. However the mindset, when applied to art, let’s say, photography, completely devalues experience, elevating the trivial and the conceptual.

“People rooted in their hometowns? That sentimentalism is for effete readers of Edmund Burke. Join the hyper-mobile world.” (Brian Dougherty)

It’s not what i normally do, and i sure as hell do not want to be the spokesperson for anti-gentrification. Even Spike realized its dead end nature after having spoken against it, and, for him, it is always gonna be the race angle, and not the dominant blunt-force shot-caller called class, but that would be something to unite. I’m not attempting to change or confront art and entertainment, i’m running from it, and explaining why i run. And while here, ultimately i’m all for Etats Uni and E Plurabis Unum, after all get their respect, of course, it’s in many, one. In democracies with tons of freedoms occasionally you will be unfairly called “names” and the pc crowd is correct here, there is no heaven, respect me now. But seriously, to be called a name and be named are the two big horrors of our time, and statues.

But specifically what i mean by running from knownness and idle schmoozing, is that my standard mode has always been, i’m anti-gentrification the same way Walker Evans was anti-celebrity. But you can kinda feel, how i gotta process a whole lot of baloney that i’ve had a life-long distaste for, because, ironically, it got shoved down my throat. It’s been let’s now praise famous working-class and slum neighborhoods for 41 years – doing it still, but with gentrification and displacement adding the burden of lost years and starting over when it’s too late in age to ever actually recover.

And it’s all so authentic, you won’t find any Luc Sante introductions in any of my books. Besides all the folks who could write my blurbs are dead.

And so genuine i don’t need to remind the audience of who i am or that they are viewing my fictions, and not truth.

I’m never one to move, an understatement, but goodbye to Brooklyn never hurt as it was a busy life trying to survive disappearance while simultaneously documenting it, in the towns and cities i had already been shooting for a long time. And to have to be forced to face the prospect of leaving New York against my will, even though, now, i could never blame those who have left for the same reasons. Leaving New York used to be incomprehensible, until it became logical in the light of gross art and real estate immorality. Leaving wouldn’t even be a consideration, though, if you’ve got the means to be able to move around the big city. But getting kicked out of Brooklyn isn’t felt because of its power. I rarely think of any of the thousands of great warm memories and experiences either, because of its depth and power, it’s been placed in the RealStill yucca Mountain archive, along with our nation’s most dangerous wastes. Making light of a truly horrible experience. Displaced, but surviving another day. Maybe not where i want to, but where i belong.

Brooklyn’s move to being both hip and upscale, along with the already upscale Manhattan, beginning with the taming of 42nd Street and Times Square, in 1995, continues its non-stop exponentially expanding redevelopment phase that still won’t quit. That’s some redevelopment.

In some places most of the original looks remade. Painfully reinvention/redevelopment will be a marker for these times. In Manhattan super-tall slender square shafts will mark the skyline as The Era of the Billion Dollar View. (the view alone being so expensive there’s no money left over for design). What matters is the inside looking out and down. The erection of a separate and self-made environment as high as money can buy, and all about the view.

Gentrification’s media machine would lead you to believe that there isn’t, at least an equal area, with a larger population in Brooklyn, that is a poor-ass ghetto. Is that fact lost because even Brownsville, East New York and Bed-Stuy are only seen as potentially ripe for redevelopment instead of, as usual, for what they are as poor places only affordable quality housing will improve, not luxury housing to attract out of town money and cause displacement and maybe a handful of affordable units to qualify for tax breaks.

Funny how some see that as a shame, while many others see “the next hot Brooklyn neighborhood.” It’s my belief, after seeing and depicting a lot of things over time, including, now, the business of art, as it meets class and race has everything to do with displacement. Just the accepted practice of degrees in art, and i’m not talking community college, shuts out a terrific amount of people. And the gallery and museum scene is plain caucasoid, while it is trying to get better at including in a painfully obvious way like on commercials or at the Oscars or in movies. Where i see difference in the art world it’s sexual orientation, but pretty much within the same class and life-style de l’artiste, and it’s always been there, so what.

Relative to dominant themes artists, who now inhabit Brooklyn were informed about, in school – sexual orientation, race, religion and gender, culminating in the critique of the “dead white men” and its own stereotypical conclusions or just plain old identity politics, it’s class that seems to get ignored. As far as dead white men are concerned, what does that have to do with living working-class white people who built this place you covet? When it comes to oppressive practices by whites, much runs along class lines, as plenty of poor whites have been screwed by their happen-to-be-white landlords, for instance. It’s sad to have to remind people of that since it signifies the inexperience in reverse racism. Or that this modern white master of real estate, half my age, and with tattoos, doesn’t care about sexual orientation, religion or race, just green, and its accumulation. And the prick, in the absence of the pretty green stuff as his motivator, yes, despises all that is not like him, is prejudiced, but he will do anything for money.

When it comes to class, in an overcharged market, there are no rights, it’s dog eats dog. I don’t think i’m even asking to change that but simply to recognize it and what it might mean.

Sometimes when Spike Lee or others speak of race and gentrification, i laugh, because i’ve been treated far worse, far more often by “white people” than, at the very least, Mr. Lee, who i would remind, a majority rules in any hood, and, ultimately identity politics leads back only to the self.

White on white real estate crimes are rampant, but it’s caused by who has and who don’t. To make a lump of folks called white people, who, in fact, are made up by dozens of ethnic groups and religions, etc., is more inexperience or simply screening things.And now the Bronx, which is the poorest county in the land, has been sighted by the gentrifiers – creative types and real estate interests, in that order. And it still ain’t about class? And when we speak of the Bronx, if all you think is simply Black and Spanish, remember American, Caribbean, South American and African Blacks, and the multitude of Spanish-speaking countries, without forgetting the many different Europeans cultures assimilated into the east and north Bronx, that also originated in the Bronx on its west side. Yo Spikey, you even been to da Bronx? It’s truly forgotten, can you conceive of being forgotten including – both you and your work? It’s not a concept, an issue, but the solid pain of actual disruption. It’s not a show or transactional in any way because it is true.

 

GENTRIFICATION

 

There’s nothing too special about being productive without witness, it’s just another category, or i’m told, by practitioners of the art life-style. As far as lack of interest in their attention or anyone else’s, selflessness is no mode of action in a selfie world of art and entertainment. I’m sure that’s invisible. But if i am an artist, i don’t put myself, and my art first, second or third, in fact, i’ve forgotten where i put it. And like i’ve said i don’t like the description artist or photographer, but the truth is, it’s photography and not art. Reflected in the fact that there are so many photography galleries. A citizen first, of this city, who, like so many others, since the beginning of gentrification in 1979, in New York, has been effected by it. It happens silently in varying intensities and continues, particularly virulent in the last fifteen years, as it becomes perfected like a Wall Street instrument used to drum up enormous profit, like the art object as investment.

It’s legal, as it should be in a capitalist land, and cannot be stopped, as is the embedding of the memory of its inequity by RealStill.

People once left New York because of its pollution, congestion, crime and dirtiness, now they leave because of the rents. And the fact that it just ain’t New York anymore. I’m gonna ride it out, but i sure as hell recognize the truth of that, and also the truth of this simple statement, “Hipsters are assholes.” or as they say in today’s verification code, just “google it.” And for the “what’s wrong with that” crowd, even these more and specifically described documented incidents, will not penetrate your closed senses, but, perhaps there’s a couple of real souls left in art, and they can spread the word – artists, technocrats and hipsters cause gentrification to happen. (Ethan Petit/Medea)

Specifically and using my lived experiences and my friends’ from my neighborhood, there was the owner of the royal oak bar whose business wreaked a lot of havoc on my block. He is a lawyer as well as a bar owner, a classic hipster – professional and pc. The havoc i speak of is thoroughly documented over many years. My next door neighbor’s 311 log just for 2 years had hundreds of calls. The 9-4 precinct will have tons of documentation, and, i, myself have been documenting my entire life, and, as a matter of course i document everything including all the vile unabated noise and destruction in my home for seven years with camera and sound recorder. What i say here is true and is documented. I stopped going into the bar to complain after two years into the invasion of the Shihites, but others my age would walk in to see what was going on, and their reports definitely align with the lady blogger neighbor across the street, not next to, the classic hipster dive bar. She was a good 600 feet from the bar across the street and park triangle, and, apparently, even at that distance, it was disruptive, not in the way it benefits the artists and hipsters, but could bother a considerate hipster or artist and certainly all those on the block who are properly socialized when it comes to noise. We don’t even know or understand political correctness, but know for a fact, sleep deprivation will eventually kill ya – pc is respectful? benjamin-number-is-in-my-cellphone-except.html

It becomes trauma when you begin to lose your ability to earn from disturbances like no sleep. And when you can no longer support your work, yourself, and trying vainly to use remaining resources and energy in keeping your family alive only further traumatizes things, for, what looks like the remainder of my life.

How, in a city of groups, could one so small, have this sort of impact? Well, unlike the working-class they followed, they voice a lot. In other words, they’re noisy and funded. Noisy – it’s even a show on the hipster news channel, Vice, that moved here as well. Noise, central to the new culture but exactly what no city dweller does not wants after working in the city.

Often obnoxious, loud, lousy, stupid music with girl hipster howls, chants and mutterings came into my home all night from a top hipster dive bar in Williamsburg next door and below me. The owner of the royal oak, that is also a suburb of Detroit, Mr. Benjamin Shih, who i talked and pleaded with numerous times, was ticketed numerous times by the local precinct, briefly shut down and fined within one year of opening for a litany of violations, like watered down drinks, was the specific source on my block of the “changing” Brooklyn. Upon meeting Mr. Shih, he even used the same lame “New York is all about change” justification for what should never change – decency, respect, uh, the social contract. If you come in here talking change to people who have been here for generations or even forty years, it only proves your inexperience and specific inexperience regarding cities. To speak about or describe him in order to communicate things here and what he did is so revolting, toxic and vile for me, just google it. But good luck there’s no trace after leaving his path of ruin. I wonder why?

Around this time the Times ran a piece about a young hipster drummer, moved to Brooklyn, and, while rehearsing in his apartment, being surprised by the fact that people would hate that. Changing Brooklyn? With rock and pop drum kits they come, and the 🔊 pile drivers follow, and the Times is accepting this as the way a city changes? Not really, i think the subtext at the time was should we accept this, because the disruptions were dizzying, and eventually the Times found their footing, like us all.

The tactic first used at Waco to flush people out – playing bad, loud pop music that also went completely against the target’s values, and used the same 🔊 torture technique in American torture facilities, was to be accepted here as well, under, of course, the banner of change, or disruption as they now say.

His investors were like-minded people as well, one of them, just around the corner, Thomas Burr Dodd, ran the old Brooklyn Fireproof building as an art gallery, and is now “navigating Newburgh’s Commercial Properties.” Newburgh is the northern once funky industrial city now filled with former Williamsburg artists and hipsters, and, Mr. Dodd, like Mr. Shih, a horror, both visually and ethically, similar to Zuckerberg, these “men” and their weird views are almost physically manifested in their look, which, too, is a horror. When i met Shih he was in full hipster-gear of used old bad fashion from the seventies including a white vinyl belt and the usual tattoos, etc. According to Mr. Shih, because Mr. Dodd was an investor, his family’s picture was framed above the royal joke of a bar, up by the state of the art speakers below me, blasting, for instance, Michael Jackson at 4:00 am into my home.

Thomas Burr Dodd – artist, entrepreneur and real estate developer who came to Brooklyn Fireproof, just around the corner from my home around 2000. Benjamin Shih opened his royal oak bar in 2003. Mr. Dodd came to my attention while pleading with Mr. Shih to quit disrupting my life, particularly with his really loud music. Part of his reply was pointing out pictures that were framed above the bar. These were, according to him, his investors’ families. I guess the implication is that family is of great importance to him and his investors. I understand that, we all do, but acutely so, since my family was fading out and dying at the time, and i was there being humiliated begging for what’s already mine and is the law – to be able to live and sleep in my own home, because i needed to sleep in order to earn money and have the energy to care for my parents and keep them alive, not because it was cutting into my leisure time, i have none. That’s for hipsters and artists. I repeat my parents are slowly fading and the person screwing it up is yapping to me about the importance of family.

Mr. Shih, boasting of his unbounded respect for family, including those who invested in his scumbag bar, while defending his actions as part of the traditional ingrained history of New York City, that, in the disruptor’s perspective, is all about change, even in a neighborhood previously known for 160 years of not changing, and was its former attraction as a real stable authentic working-class ethnic neighborhood. Part of the city’s attraction was that it was dynamic in places while time stood still in many neighborhoods, giving it the flavor difference and color that has now flown the coop. Neighborhoods, free of the dynamism of other parts of the city, get a chance to develop an interesting, beautiful, indigenous culture, portrayed in art, books and movies itself, and now gone.

Curiously during the entire fight to save my health from the torture of having his bar creep into my home, the most significant event of my now shortened life was ruined by simultaneously trying to keep my home, myself and my two parents alive, completely draining me of all resources and energy. All the while knowing it’s futile and eventually you will be beat down to submission. If anyone is paying attention, Mr. Benjamin Shih, one of the most pc people i have ever met, helped ruin amongst many things, the most significant event in anyone’s life, while declaring his own sensitivity to the notion of family, as the art world would put it. Now that’s one creepy and swampy-ass person. And to his investors – i never met you, but you helped do it, through your agent, screwing up my life – a good one and in a good neighborhood. We have families, we have businesses and we, too, make art and were doing so when you guys weren’t anywhere near here and so long before you got here, it’s not funny.

 

Of all the humiliations and disturbances, which were plenty, the royal oak hipster bar will stand as the single most damaging and worst memory in a place where i never could say that until 2003. The Shihites of the royal oak sect, were here. God help me.

How bad was it? It made me want to leave what i love unconditionally.

 

The benches outside our homes at Private Sonsire Triangle Park. Sonsire lost his life in WWI. Frankie, Dukie and Veronica hang out. It’s July, 2001 and the first condos are being built in the background.

In a few years, Veronica, born here, will be evicted successfully from her apartment using a loophole that emerged with the Bloomberg reign, where tenants, even ones with 20 plus years as tenants, would get evicted because the landlord “needs” the unit for a blood relative.

Frankie would be dead by 2006, i escorted him out of our building, and to an ambulance and nursing home where he soon died, Dukie, a.k.a, Paulie who is from the House of St. Cono on our block would be dead from pancreatic cancer too.

Using the same lame housing court loophole out of the Bloomberg years – the landlord’s son has to take the apartment because of the dire straits of a landlord – his health and economic need – and by January, 2013, i. too, was gone from my neighborhood.

Of course, the landlord’s son never moved in, because i left “voluntarily.” Miraculously the landlord, 17 years younger than i, then, suddenly had good health and many millions in worth. My old home rents for three times what i paid, after a bit of rehab from a construction company that is also owned by the landlord.

So much for passing the torch of neighborhood life, culture and history and being in a place so completely part of you, that your own destruction can result.

Veronica did clerical work for Bear Stearns for many years, she was across the street, there, when the Towers fell. In the late nineties she used to talk to me about something called credit default swaps – a dubious financial “product” that would later bring down the economy in 2008.

Out here in Brooklyn we never understood that type of stuff on a “this is good” level, but it was Manhattan, and, at one time, that was a world away. Later it would come to us beginning with the Hipster Plague, the social movement that allowed the financial movement of capital into poor neighborhoods under a guise of greater good, and its destructive side obscured by necessary creative destruction. Isn’t that how it’s taught?

Empirically and painfully speaking it’s your inside look into the mechanics of losing your home and being displaced from Brooklyn and all you know. Folks like Veronica and i are just the Last Mohicans, and we are reminded of Chingachoogook’s words, “Will there be anything left to show the world that we ever did exist?” And for myself, exiled, will have plenty to show of what no longer exists, why and how it happened. Chingachoogook was born before the camera.

But i digressed, back to the major local embarrassments led by the royal oak bar.

“Brooklyn Fire Proof Workspaces is a kind, creative work environment built to inspire and promote the artistic endeavors of professionals, micro-manufacturers, and entrepreneurs…” Except me, of course, and anyone who’s been here before the arrival of the newly minted creative class. In this case with money to invest.

If anyone hasn’t noticed i live stabilized in a dump for 30 years, then go through a real hell both living there and in leaving. It’s because i don’t have money to invest – even in a one bedroom apartment in Queens.

Don’t miss the irony here that is manufactured in hipster town – the name should have been Brooklyn Soundproof. That’s where the money is, now that it’s the noisiest neighborhood in America. Mr. Dodd, developer/artist and owner of Brooklyn Fireproof states also his love of photography. What a coincidence, i don’t love photography, but i am a highly accomplished professional photographer, writer and one time filmmaker who was making dynamite work in combining a documentary base with art, when you were in grade school. Others who did the same to Williamsburg i know by name as well and some quite personally, like Fred “Gumpy” Valentine, who didn’t come to Williamsburg with any money or Tony Millionaire, but left their mark. What i am saying is true and certainly not anything but. The empirical evidence is overwhelming and my own Brooklyn sound proof alone – proof of disruption – is staggering, i mean literally staggering, for me, because a nervous system banged around for years by loud obnoxious pop music and bar noise and deprived of rest and sleep produces staggering vertigo amongst other effects that still won’t go away years after deportation.

The tactic of using bad loud pop music to flush out domestic nuts like david Koresh, or used in an American torture facility for terrorists, i became privy to.

These masters of inconsideration who arrived in my world were children when i was a man producing works on changing American cities and unchanging Williamsburg as my home and base of operations. Images mean something to me, anchored in the world, maybe not the same thing to Richard Prince whose appreciation of appropriation and promotion of it, who knows, may have influenced artist/entrepreneurs and lawyer/bar owners in their education and life in the A & E world combining the millennial principles of entitlement and pc values to block their own culpability. I exaggerate, but who knows? Deconstruction, post-modernism, reinvention – i see a line. It certainly had its impact in fake news, laying the groundwork for documentary suspicions and fear of the real world from the perspective of the walled gardens of art and dubious aesthetic concepts, but only compared to those concepts at action in the world. Such as, if i’m politically correct i’ll cover all my moral bases and proceed to reinvent and disrupt. Hey, it’s the new economy where rapid change is normal. Secular professionals call no real moral shots, and try to be clever with the negative side of their unbridled ambitions, whose defense is a politically correct secular morality.

Sherman and Prince proved the worth of success. Politically correct, of course, and proceeding to undermine meaning in an unarguable conceptual innocence. Innocent art but possibly dangerous if an idea like appropriation is taught, then brought into where you live, or “alt-right” nuts get a hold of the idea, and appropriate images or information for their anti-democratic political beliefs.

Yeah, appropriation, as not just another artist mode or tool, but became one ot the dominant (influential) forms of contemporary art. It’s like critical thought has been determined by executives in the advertising industry and real estate industries. Mr. Blake Gopnik says that, “There’s a lot that judges can do with the stroke of a pen, but rewriting art history isn’t one of them. They’re stuck with appropriation as one of the great artistic innovations of the modern era. Their job is to make sure the law recognizes that.” And appropriation and the Flip, is one of the great financial innovations of the modern era. The flip, when a slum neighborhood becomes valued, a banana taped to a wall sells for 75k, a 660 square foot immigrant railroad flat rents for 3200 per month, or a urinal, soup can, canned feces or a stuffed shark is conceptually washed in a purely mental operation that makes its weight worth more than gold, while proving a successful career in art could be made without getting any of that sticky nasty paint on your hands or hard work, by being witty, flipping and conceptual. Suspicious of real estate concepts, like overvaluations, limited editions, the business of property and commodities, combined with art, as it manifested itself in my neighborhood becoming an art haven, that, then, became a rich cultural hub that excluded those who couldn’t afford it and were from there, resulting in a cruel unrecognized devastation – that’s all. Beyond that, my big criticism of appropriation, is that it is just so lazy. Mr. Warhol, though, had, himself, a tremendous work ethic where he toiled celebrating, and puncturing market capitalism for all its glory and contradictions – born deep in blue-collar Pittsburgh, transformed, into an ad man that became a center, himself, of art and artists, dying alone and, relatively,  young, by virtue of excess fluids, cardiac arrest and his own hard working schedule combined with his fear of hospitals, where, after very serious gunshot wounds from another artist, and lingering serious health problems from that, Mr. Warhol believed that any stay at a hospital might be his end. This was routine gall bladder surgery, and a tragedy. He certainly was not a source artist like myself, but, i guess you could say, he reinvented himself in New York, like so many artists, with an early nose job before people even widely heard of such things, a wig for a bald dome and a beautiful uptown ice cream parlor for a hangout, living with his Mom uptown, not the downtown factory scene which was more like going to work.

His shooting in 1968 was motivated by an artist that thought Mr. Warhol was going to steal or appropriate her manuscript. The wounds were severe and, some say, led to his death years later. Apparently appropriation and perceived theft is devastating, to the victim, so much so, that the suspected absorber of her work became her victim, although this is very rare and a tragedy. Ms. Solanas, believed the great appropriator was stealing her manuscript, Scum Manifesto, a radical femme’s attack on men (Chiraq, 2015), i guess, told through culture, that even Warhol and friends thought was too extreme.

Warhol, who slummed downtown, paid a huge price, as i did when the students of Warhol and art, came to my town, and changed it into its antipode. His wounds were horrific and he had to wear a band of elastic to hold together his internal organs which, were hit. The scars on the chest, stomach and back, were way beyond cosmetic surgery, but could never be seen, and were the antipode to pop art, as depicted in Avedon’s black and white documentary pictures.

I mention Lou Reed, only because he loved Mr. Warhol, and, from WIKI – “I Believe,” Reed sings, “I believe life’s serious enough for retribution… I believe being sick is no excuse. And I believe I would’ve pulled the switch on her myself.” Reed believed Solanas was to blame for Warhol’s death from a gallbladder infection 20 years after she shot him.^[87]

No fan of no cultural figurehead, i feel the same way about hipsters. They are a horror, and their dysfunction and privilege is no excuse.

It reminds me of the early Williamsburg art scene, in the sense of dysfunction, booze, drugs and partying that was the exhibition on all the time, in other words, the Williamsburg art scene itself. Unlike lower Manhattan art scenes before, the art works sucked. It was generally a based on artists reading and studying about it, arriving in Williamsburg, recreating it, and, doing so, as prosperous, wealthy times occurred in the city, and thousands of fresh college-trained white artists wanted a career in New York, providing the window to real estate to finally pile drive the downtown art scene into oblivion, as motivational memory to bring in these creative professionals who, unlike Warhol, had parents that could afford the expense of city life.

I clearly remember the threat of the postmods in the art world, seeing or using blood work as a source for “appropriation” by ignoring context, which is fine when it comes to soup cans and stuffed sharks but not people who live their work and go directly to its source, combining aesthetics and documentary as lived work. This ain’t nuance or subtlety, but a big obvious thing, that self-involved naive artists, couldn’t determine – that there are others  in this world, with their ways that you don’t even have the chops to consider in their gilded bubble.

If i wrote grafitti, my epitaph would be, “Appropriation is lazy.” That’s my criticism, that something that became so big, dominant and generated so much in luxury sales to the wealthy, was so easy, fun and witty. I guess i got into the wrong genre for the times which, in Williamsburg, during its gentrification, was host to creepy, scumbag wannabes, all of whom, left the city in the disgrace, that their ambitious self-involvement hides from them.

Let’s compose ourselves – overblown value of art images or the images of hipsters like Shih and the likes of Dodd who came, disrupted and left, are a horror, thus viewing their pictures is horrific, because, like i said, photographic pictures can still have meaning as when they are tied to life experiences, regardless what the trending art market has comes up with about their credibility. Perhaps my pictures of the natives they displaced would be a horror to them which they never paid attention to. This overeducated pc crowd of disruptive wannabes, specific ones, that took out my home and neighborhood are horrors because i had the misfortune of experiencing the consequences of their failed ambitions that were proved to be what they are – both when they arrived and when they left Williamsburg. Of course, there was no telling them that at the time.

The virtually gilded age has its manners and a moral decorum for age of creativity and disruption, flipping and displacing or reinvention and destruction. Political correctness is the secular morality of many artists and techies. It strains and purports to be based on respect for individual groups, while, ironically, ignoring the groups of folks they displaced – natives, woking-class, poor, elderly, seniors, as well as, the ethnic groups they are part of, in old polyglot blue-collar class in old Williamsburg. Nothing at all like what came in large waves after 9/11.

Techies are probably the least empathic professionals. They even ban their own screen technology and phones, they invented and put into the market, for their own children, since they know it’s physically stunting young minds. Tech workers, empirically and scientifically speaking, themselves, have dysfunction in their the neural empathy network, specifically in the frontal operculum, medial prefrontal cortex, and the middle cingulate cortex. However, scientists do stand just above psychopaths on the low end of the empathy curve. The other big group of gentrifiers, artists might have the capacity for profound sensitivity but, it seems, over time, it’s become only self-compassion. For instance, in art photography, the selfie, either conceptual (Sherman) or documentary (Goldin, Frazer) has dominated while simple, direct, pure documentary or art shots of reality with no presence of the artist – Arbus, Frank, Davidson – are hardly seen anymore as new art. Ironically these documentary based people moved into books and art because of the constraints of corporate journalism, etc.

No one refers to newspapers as dead trees anymore, which was the old techies version of social and environmental good, hiding the lager problem of mass increases of electrical consumption by them and their billions of users, during the coal era, that only recently ended. Political and environmental correctness, when, compared to reality, and the consequences of applying such weird individual concepts, is nothing but the bubble of flatulence that it is. In fact electric devices have increased energy consumption considerably, and soon 8% of all electric will go to simple data storage, most all of which will just sit there, never again used, but kept archived.

Dead trees? How about blockchain.

China’s main man in a.i. predicts 40% of jobs at definite risk for elimination. Just think of one job category about to disappear – the truck drivers. But he gives the same tech-head self-companioned response to the social consequences of their actions – “people are resilient and find a way and that they bounce back.” Yeah, bounce back only because of the law of survival, but they bounce back deeply wounded, impaired and often broken, and, in much worse shape. Some – NYC cabbies – in their forced economic journey, kill themselves.

Let’s look at the history of a movement. The term, gentrification, was created in 1964 in London by Ruth Glass. By the eighties it had tremendous relevancy in some American cities, particularly New York and Boston. And, for the last fifteen years, it’s proceeded in its evolved state, as “hyper-gentrification” or “super-gentrification” as the few scholars who track the movement, determine it. Even a severe Recession couldn’t dent it in 2008/2009, so it’s become very powerful as a force of change, and it’s a lasting one, shaping the city with a new pedigree for 37 years now, slowly at first, but with momentum for twenty years and becoming the biggest driver of change for cities since they declined so quickly.

After so much practice and refinement, i call it a business, science and an art, like entities such as Brooklyn Fireproof. Although today’s educated artists prefer business models, even though they themselves have to deal with an evaluation system within art, that is a business model that still runs the range of strategies, from American Idol to the way Rao’s restaurant uptown, has got it locked – so much so, the owner can’t even get a reservation. (by the way, the Albanian godfather, Alex Rudaj, immediately after having brazenly killed his Italian mafia rival in the Bronx, demanded the kilt guy’s table at gunpoint, inside the restaurant and got it.) But i digressed, i was speaking of my Museum Idol idea propelling me to the producer/player status, that had always eluded me, then maybe i can move back to Williamsburg – reinvented and renewed and in alignment with the new disorder.

The other alternative for artists is to increase schmoozing potential exponentially and to actually get shown, opening your own gallery.

The natural order of capitalism is a hierarchy, as is everything, even more so, in A & E including individual achievements in sports – the easiest to quantify/qualify, entertainment – a circus, but we know a good act when we see one, and art, which in the words of Mr. Adorno “…it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying.”

Piero Manzoni’s “Merda d’’artista” or Serrano’s “Shit” to mention, but two, means art’s got it pretty well covered. I don’t think many paid attention to Serrano’s Shit show, though, in the sense it didn’t catch on, but it proved art has a lot of openness, going so far as to let in pictures of real shit. That is a tremendous load of unrecognized contradictions. After Duchamp it took some time for the actual contents of of the fountain sculpture, to be shown. It was done one hundred years ago, and, true to contemporary art it’s an accepted genre, particularly in sculpture. But not the smell. Art as shit, art is shit. I shouldn’t have said that but nothing goes without saying, here. The point of this poo digression is to exaggerate and refract about the subject of conceptual flipping. In art there is by definition an openness, even about sewage, but that’s a show about how open-minded art is and not the sullage concealed in its expansion and history.

Everything is rated, marketable and has a price, and cities in that eco-system, are stratified top to bottom by money. And people vote with their money. And people are grouped and classed by that standard, although poo poo is done by all.

Today you might have a mixed-income neighborhood, but it’s mixed-up, because that only reflects the natives who are solidly stabilized, still left, who remain weary and leery, under constant pressure to give it up and move on, amongst these Newtowners. The Williamsburg Contextual rezoning, by 2012, left maybe one of twelve, but, just this minimal aboriginal ratio, qualified developers and landlords to take advantage of the Shy of Genocide Tax Abatement clause, saving money that can be plowed into more redevelopment.

After they do, a complete shift in class is made on a very large scale, and you have your rich, hip destination that you hear all the time about – its coolness. Today i still clock the image transformation of former Rust Belt punching bag, Cleveland. It’s now praised in clone-like fashion by media outlets as a tourist destination. It’s as false as the city’s role as the nation’s go-to stereotype for a city gone wrong – until Detroit stepped in around 2009 and reprising the role in a star performance that still holds sway as a stereotype today. My focus is always the flip side of that equation that i find far more interesting and something that you never hear about, although truthful, buried, valuable and alive. What does that tell ya?

A lot.

But we all know, money, or no money, can’t fight more money, then what you got. It’s also very hard to continuously fight under the terms of harassment – sleep deprivation, destruction of property, loss of income, you know, the physical things, not mentioning the heartbreak of slowly losing your lifetime home itself, after slowly losing all your spots and friends, your past history and future plans. Oh shit, i gotta start over, but in a broken way depleted and exhausted. Funny thing about constant disruption in a formerly ideal and stabile world, it wears you down over the years so much that the fight you are putting up cannot be sustained. Absolutely justified, but depleted, exhausted from no sleep, no money and no peace, you give up the fight. It would have been different if i was younger, but the tragedy of long-term care with my parents was draining as well, and there comes a peak and fall with age that i am well into.

At my age, chances are that during such a long destructive harassment, there could be some real complications, like losing your family, Mother, Father, or taking care of them for years, while simultaneously losing your two best friends, while you had to fight like a dog just for basics like sleep in your own home, and my health? Forgetaboutit. And now with permanent lasting effects on an aging neurology. That’s just the bad part. There was no good, though, otherwise i would state it. If i sound like a genocide survivor then so be it, because when i fled to the Bronx it was as a refugee, starting entirely over again at the age of 62.

How could someone survive all that, sleeping in a bed of job loss through harassment, year after year? This has gotta be staged. Then, if it was, i would have finally created art, only i’m a this ain’t no performance artist. instead of a mattress i should carry around a book?

Being Brooklyn before, was strictly stand your ground, and to the death because what little you had, you had to have some form of control. And lack of resources keeps you closer to the edge. In this case, the gentrification case, you lose, and lose big, and it becomes, do i want to die with these people i don’t like or live out my life with freedom and peace with people i can like. Many, like me, became the suckers we had never planned to be. It’s all i kinda knew – stand your ground, it was also, i thought, absolutely necessary to survival – not to be pushed out, on the money level. This home where i lived the longest, and where i was surely gonna die, sheltered me into my later years, which i never even thought about, until i lost so many years in the fight to keep it. Even though i had a legal right to stay until the time of my death, being stabilized. If i so chose i could have fought the Last Battle, but in the Time of Bloomberg. And making this clear – from the first to last days in that building in three different apartments – it was a dump. But it was home.

Make no mistake about it, i chose to leave, and, as a person that should know about what’s retrospect before it happens, i blew it, and i was stupid to stay past 2003, which would have prevented enormous pain.

Here’s the deal, modern Williamsburg became what it never was, and has nothing for me, or people like me. I had very cheap rent, it’s New York, whataya gonna do? Cheap rent is enough to keep you in a place that you have come to be embarrassed about. But ya know my landlord was so corrupt that to give him a nickel a month for the dump i was renting for 30 years, was getting sickening, particularly after having lost so much for too many years, and having the Final Battle to go through. Since i would be an official senior citizen on the next lease, he had to get me to move out, or be reminded every time he saw me he was losing a half million bucks if i survived to be 85 in a dump left to deteriorate, that itself was a killer, but, of course, being entirely stabilized wasn’t gonna happen.

It’s nuthin personal, ya know, strictly a numbers game.

So i left. This NYPD retiree at age 29, perpetually 17 years younger than me, getting his tax free disability pension with a complete health care package, who has a net worth, that we knew of, in the millions, he was going to say, he’s broke and in poor health, and must take me to court to be evicted in order that his son could have a place to live, and take care of the building, while poor old dad convalesced. (absolutely the only possible way to remove a stabilized tenant is this move – only a blood relative of the owner, proving need, can kick someone out, and they always go for the longest tenant paying the cheapest rent.)

During the Bloomberg years, landlords, usually an individual owner, with a small building, say an eight flat, were permitted one freebie eviction each using the family member variance. The only complication would be if a tenant was a senior citizen and/or lived in the building for twenty years or longer. Later only the senior citizen status could save your ass.

In the old days i was offered vacant, “better and cheaper” apartments in the building as tenants passed, nobody moved, and people croaked in their tiny places, when the Mom passed the daughter would take over the cycle. I ended up in three apartments in the same building, and i’m sure a lawyer was going to point that out. But in reality it was that Bloomberg-era winky-deal, where, even the blood of the lamb, would no longer spare the first-born’s stabilization rights, at least not in Williamsburg. In other words forget the twenty year threshold that i surpassed years ago, you got months to find the place that has no hipsters – 99 per cent of the city, and will come close to suiting you for whatever time you have left – fat chance at that.

Since i moved out rather than take any more 🔊 Parkinsonian-inducing insults, immediately a hipster gobbled up the rehabbed apartment for five times the rent i paid. These common miracles, a father is suddenly cured, his son can now afford to rent his own place, perhaps the Ruse Arms that has great amenities, and many millions of dollars, much in other real estate holdings, are suddenly discovered, coincidentally all this good fortune landed on the side of the Young Trumps from Queens. These events and the family who got the building for a deal in the first place from relatives at 25 per cent of its market value, is now celebrated every year in Queens as the Feast of the Immaculate Deception. And the fact that the rent of my old crib could skyrocket so quickly and illegally is proof that Reverse Karma is alive in the Second Gilded Age of Blowhards, always being rewarded for their personality disorders masquerading as business.

And that’s how it’s done.

Speaking of the self-importance and overvaluation often at the center, as in base-line (for comparison’s sake), within the arts, sports and entertainment complex – that’s what should be reevaluated, not reinvented/redeveloped, and, then, thought of critically. The era of the remake is boring me to death. The art of cultural references is a hall of mirrors, with no actual reference point, and is boring on its own. The eternal regress of mirrored minds, is, uh, weird, numbing and, ultimately, stupidly self-consciousness.

When i finally went to pick up my work at the Gumpy Gallery, of course, i fully intended to have a final honest, really honest discussion about being treated like so much an asshole, as to come away molested, i was asked to please leave. How pompous, and utterly standard in all of my art world experiences. And you know what he was doing? He and another artist had two cameras aimed directly into each other, with the corresponding egress on a large screen. Truthful art not welcome in these times of the wonder of the infinity mirror. Hey, Fred, return the two prints i never got back, can ya hear me? You kept my prints and never returned them, can you hear me?

Remember what used to be called the mass society? It’s still here, bigger but harder to see, since more of the world is based on the protected individuality of democratic principles more than ever, now. The expansive ego still exists in a time when physical territories have been entirely developed. Ideal conditions for the erection of the remake. How many copies until the loss of its context and source? There is a huge rise in the imaginary world of individuals, no doubt driven by digital tech. It’s true everything is a copy of a copy but it’s not because there isn’t anything sourceful left. When Melania Trump gave the most important speech of her life to a global audience, it was exquisitely post-postmodern like all our new original remakes. A copy of another person’s speech, who is your equal. We think that way more as we progress into the life of the individual cultivated mind and its virtual substantiality and hypostasizing.

This is the reevaluation of all overvaluation and the transvaluation of any accepted or forced overvaluation whether in art, entertainment or real estate, quite specifically, in North Brooklyn, as an example.

Generally, popular entertainment is for consumption and art is for collecting. But now to swallow or to savor has more in common. More people enter the field of art than ever. Many schools of art ease the terror of the blank page with an academic structure staffed by experts and working artists. The primary employment for artists might very well be as teachers. In the American way we’re all raised on pop culture, including anyone later trained as artists. Even with an original or limited edition business model, and its built-in elitism, entertainment and art share a lot as they evolve. Money, the star, corporate ties, the wealthy individual and expansion. The star model emphasizes personality over character, of course. It sells much better, but because of it, sometimes a substantial vision or depth isn’t necessarily required, as much as variations on the same thing.

Richard Prince with his connoisseurship and cataloguing of pop culture doesn’t repeat himself much and, again, the culture is catching up with him and Ms. Sherman. Mr. Prince’s latest show in San Fransisco debuted his 159 dollar designer/art packs of of five low-end pre-rolled marijuana joints. They are mild low quality products, their ultra-expensive packaging, that functions as an “image” for the consumer. To understand my concept – think about the image of Williamsburg as the hip place you gotta be, and gotta have, and pay $2500 per month for a dump worth 25% of that. And, certainly, who can judge something of taste? An image is like that and has to be networked. Gwnyeth Platrow’s Goop, producing, for instance, candles, that smell like Ms. Platrow’s vagina, can compete with best appropriational or conceptual works, by-passing the art world and going directly to the bank.

I don’t know much detail about art, but if i would be attracted to it, it would be because it is a more thoughtful, rigorous and time-consuming approach, yet entertainment has shown how sometimes something easy, simpler and fun can be a work of art as well. And art has showed us that, too, particularly in making variations of the same thing and theme over a life time.

And then you hear remotely, at least for me, something about stuffed sharks or giant plant puppies, or, of all things, polka dots, polka dots all over the place. Is it a Disneyian amusement? Certainly not Dionysian, but Steve Cohen must have it for good reason. If the working-class had money to invest, would a stuffed hedge fund operator, floating in formaldehyde, be considered art? I think Disney-like adventures is this art’s competition, not Lucien Freud or William Turner.

With all the wolves slaughtered, it’s time for flower puppies. Is there a point of view that amusements have somehow reached a valuation that can’t be reasonably or intrinsically explained? Koons et al is an example of information i have managed to keep free of my mind until i wrote this and searched it on the net. I’m a person that, after spending 40 years doing photography as history and experience, just heard of the floating basketball (i also finally learned what the “glass ceiling” meant). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine diversion, and arty, i guess, i’d even like to have it, but i couldn’t afford even its intrinsic worth, as a lot of science went into it. It sold for fifteen million at auction in 2016. It’s my belief, though, for the price of an admission you could see marvelous man-made wonders akin to this in carnivals and science exhibits.

The profundity of price even for good art and great art and no art, paralleling that of New York real estate, has lost relativity to the intrinsic worth of property itself, but that’s to be expected. It’s how far the valuations have moved, but that’s too is to be expected in a market akin to Second Coming of Big Money in America. Source artists can only suffer displacement from the art world under such circumstances, at least that was an experience i had.

What would be the dollar value on a Disney creation like the singular Mickey Mouse franchise? Pop culture, without limited editions and the one of a kind original, was usually on the other end of the market from art, and criticized for being crass, mass-produced and commercial. In the expression game if you wanted to make the big money quickly, in your lifetime, popular entertainment was the way. I think that model of ambition for expectations in popular entertainment is an embedded language that we all know. I think it got transferred to art in some ways, particularly celebrity, and the perception, somehow, of a gifted class, above the rest.

Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Have Gun Will Travel and Suspense Theatre do ring bells, hey, this is art too. As was the Beatles or Hendrix. And can you imagine if no one shot or recorded Hendrix doing the national anthem?

“Cutting edge envelope pushers” as if that alone is some sort of noble endeavor, not just overvalued. Now that nothing is relative in New Rome, and we have all finally achieved the final level of numbness on shocking images and concepts, there’s no impact left, no surprise, because we’ve seen it all. And if your worth is based on that, and, as you say, it’s all be done before, then why do it? And why not do it all over again? Updated culture on demand, what’s worked in the past is remade for the present generation in their terms.

It’s not that stuffed shark is anything to write or think about, but absurd overvaluation is, and, if the investor, artist and gallery buy into their own poo we have an insurmountable subjectivity, no truth or critical observation could penetrate, even Maurizio Cattelan’s golden usable toilet. I mentioned a few of the more obvious ones, some even with a touch of substance, but doing what is essentially the same thing, which could be entertaining or edifying, but, according to the market, per square inch, it’s the most valuable real estate in the world. Can the market and the content stay separate? Or does the bloated success of the object also inform it and, more significantly, other objects by way of their object-makers?

Overvalued property, in real estate terms, effects the scene and landscape significantly, and i also have the before and the after in pictures, proving the effects of both over and under valuation for the last forty years in our older cities. Today single paintings are on the level of the world’s most expensive single jewels, like the Hope Diamond. There is such motivation to dig for diamonds, even though it’s hell and expensive, why not just make them yourselves?

I do not relate art with experience, character or morality, but talent, usually that of an individual. The same can almost be said for the agents of real estate. Coincidentally, character is my top dog.

Reveling at Kim Jong-un’s art of both disconnecting reality and walling it out, i have great wonder about his mastery of virtuality – it’s so finely tuned – in service of ego, that is one with the country. His very blow-hardness, an art itself, commensurate with art, where relativity gets skewed. When culture progresses monetarily, its stars can afford the final dream come true – to enter a world truly of their own making, and communication dies along with relativity. How much further can you go than that? Many of the most successful in a lot of fields build their own worlds, to truly be free.

Gimme the Pope Frances Show, redolent with art, music, costume and ritual. If practicing what you preach to change the world can be both the work of the tyrant or humanitarian we look only at the actions and make the right judgements. Williamsburg is no different.

Truth, aside from being out of step, will never be part of the party, but that don’t mean there ain’t no la jouissance de la verite, as the French philosopher and artist, Deux Chaussures, used to say. Satire is an example.

Confronted by an impenetrable subjectivity, i prefer to remain in the unrepresented, or, at least, the unselfconscious world, where i belong. Entitled, i would call the latest generations of artists and hipsters. Untitled is the most common name given to artistic subjects. The terms of specificity are real identifiable objects in the world, possibly proving theories and arguments while being good pictures. Mostly art is unfettered here and wants to be and, again, i have no argument against what is fundamentally just art, but its overvaluation, and whatever pomposity results is something that, at least, is a question.

 

INVISIBILITY

 

Another Invisible Man, that’s my experience once i “submit” to the art officials. Forget the work, i’m immediately mistaken for this degreed artist who lives with other degreed artists in a hip art neighborhood? From the get-go, they don’t get what’s fundamental to what i’m doing, and, because they don’t listen, our shared common language is useless. Unless i, guess, it includes the unsubtle selfie to make it all absolutely clear, that i depict and participate. Art professionals don’t really think outside that cliché, and by having to provide self-portraiture to make it clear, it’s my world too, proves this. And, as it turns out, after having been forced to fully experience the stereotypes of highly trained, allegedly free-thinkers, i know that the colonists, really don’t have eyes and ears for what’s real as in really distinct or maybe it’s just that they don’t listen to begin with because it’s like that with highly developed egos, complete self-involvement and promotion.

Invisibility is my usual experience in the presence of artists and art, i’m talking about an invisibility that Gloria Steinem speaks of in the presence of businessmen and men, in general, in the nineteen seventies. Perhaps a reality artist, who by definition, has some character, is bound to be treated this way, eternally recurring, you might say. Irina Dunn by way of Miss Steinem said “Women need men like bicycles need fish.” and that’s basically philosophy. I need artists like bicycles need fish, so it’s grown philosophically, but hasn’t flipped, by staying true to the source.

But it is the Colin Ferguson Moment, as i refer to it, that is, metaphorically, my experience when i find myself inside art, which i could count on less than five fingers and i’m a four-fingered sort of working person. Colin Ferguson: “Mr. RealStill, could you please identify the person or persons who took your home?” Mr. RealStill: “It was you.” Colin Ferguson: “Mr. RealStill, again, can you identify the person or persons who caused so much harm to your life?” Mr. RealStill: “How many times do i have to say it? It was you, you are the one who screwed up my life, and anyone like you, who has no ears, and knows nothing beyond your desires. Do you hear me, can’t you hear? It’s a class thing. A class thing. And a moron thing. What i’m saying is your rich parents raised a moron.” Colin Ferguson: “Again, Mr. RealStill, can you identify the person or people who caused you so much harm, as to flee your home…”

Another situation where there is no choice but to flee this shit, as i’m supposed to fight what is now as ubiquitous as the air we breathe? A world-view, of complete disconnection, came into our neighborhood and even the privacy of my home, where, amongst so many things, i was trying to keep my family and best friend alive, as well as, keeping an archive of what the art of replacing industrial city neighborhoods, destroyed. Simultaneously over a stretch of seven years i fully participated in the loss of my job, home, neighborhood – parents and best friend, all of whom went in 2010, their deterioration beginning with the hyper-gentrification.

Complexities are complicated, ethics, which we all know by heart, is not, but get ignored because things are, uh, complicated, particularly if you come to this city from a completely different environment, or have made it here and are now part of the reigning class. Or just possibly over-informed. A reigning class equipped with all the virtuality money can buy, on the level of Kim Jong-un’s, but a class that’s also into human rights and something they call diversity, at least, conceptually because they don’t bring it with them and don’t seek it when they get here.

Kim Jong-Un, now there’s an artist for our times. When they piss on you, but tell you exactly who and what is reigning, like a Brooklyn landlord from Queens, sleazy lawyer/bar owner from Michigan, and all the opportunists who actually tried to tell us, how better Williamsburg has become with their redevelopment schemes.

“If a man has character he also has his typical experience which returns.” And that’s why i carry an umbrella for the piss-as-rain crowd, and boots for the baloney swamp. And the most inane of my typical experiences, the Colin Ferguson Moment, where you vanish in, not an innocent benign subjectivity, but a genuine personalty disorder. In popular terms, it’s Groundhog Day all over again, only now in the company of the pretentiously named millennial morons, as well as boomers who have consumed way too many images, cocktails and weed, if not for their own good, then for mine.

Or maybe they just don’t listen in the first place.

The same invisibility i had to contend with in the art world occurred in the process of gentrifying Williamsburg. It was as though the Colin Ferguson Moment had become the reality that replaced my home and neighborhood. I already knew what it’s like to not be heard when you have things to say, but never on this scale.

 

THE COMPLEX ISSUE

 

“Issues” is not the way i talk, particularly about this subject, that just isn’t another discussion, opinion or debate. Simply put, gentrification is so thoroughly ignored as a social problem, precisely because, people who could help – media, lawyers, professionals (forget all the artful self-expressionists) – are themselves or, perhaps, their children, are involved, i guess, mostly unconsciously since there is no prohibition on being an asshole, or benefitting from the act of displacing rightful quality residents who happen to have less money, but, again, it’s because we were not seen, becoming invisible, dwarfed by the desires of hipsters. I guess the Ferguson court room episode just seemed to encapsulate so well what happens mixing with the Kim Jong crowd, while living relatively and respectfully, utilizing self-control and mindfulness – the only standards available in an individual-rich environment of people who can afford to act out their desires.

It is a matter of consideration, not just law.

Of course, i clocked the media coverage on the changes to my home base. The Times uncritical praise for anything hipster in Williamsburg, was seminal and lasted through a lot of the Plague, then reversing its welcoming chorus when the evidence that what i am saying here became overwhelmingly true, yet still unheard. By really delivering the message globally that Brooklyn was “cool,” and, originally a cheap alternative to Manhattan, then, recognizing it as the place for newcomers to begin their lives and careers, the Times, like no other spread the word, that with today’s viral media possibilities, can have a swift effect. Only it wasn’t like Alexander gazing out at an empty land and sea and envisioning the prototype for the modern city. People had been living here a long time, and it wasn’t Alexander, we were worried about, it was Columbus by way of Ohio.

Uncritically cheer leading the next professional, creative, rebellious American generation to arrive in New York because that’s always a good thing? But, for us, that meant a chorus of sadness. Am i asking for reparations? I’m barley asking for a memory of something for the future, and that’s it. And it’s not the art, i get that, it’s all the levels of overvaluation, and currency that those outside the art world can get effected by something from which they are innocents – displacement by virtue of disruption. You know it happens, there were the Japanese-Americans who were forced to live in camps during WW II, and every Indian in every tribe was displaced, until few were left on American soil. That’s what they’re left with, but it’s something – that the whole thing will be remembered for what it was. The Lakota still refuse government reparations that amount to billions for the theft of the Black Hills. It’s the principle, god damn it. The fuckin forgotten ethics of the whole thing. Time, nor our present perceptions, don’t eliminate social historic fact. It should stand. The truth and the accurate memory, that film, and, now digital can deliver with the right operator, is the most important thing with a value that no amount of money can match, when it comes to memory of fact.

Curiously the Times cooled it, some years ago and now features good articles on west coast gentrification caused by technology workers. But New York gentrification, the kind caused by artists, media professionals, in the art and entertainment industry itself, doesn’t seem to be as much of a story. It’s complicated to write critically about something that benefits the market of a transformed New York and its institutions, but that’s not it. It’s simpler. The class of professionals that staff media offices in New York, i bet a lot of them live in and around Williamsburg, or party there and certainly the new residents of those neighborhoods are a core audience. Brooklyn’s worth, now competing directly with Manhattan and on equal terms, also means newer media like Vice prefer a home base even closer to their core audience in the branded hip, Brooklyn. The old transactional ways of respect keep going on.

Too bad Vice arrived so far into the colonization, the original scene – Williamsburg National Monument – was actually, in their terms, hip, brutally and originally so, of course that was as they say when “Brooklyn was cool because it wasn’t.” and because it wasn’t being marketed. And while here – Vice? it certainly has not lived up to its hype or potential at all. Like facebook look to its starting point in Montreal. I admit Shane Smith is far more human than Zuckerberg, but what about his former partner the hipster Nazi? Better a starving media company that might come up out of sheer necessity with some new, but actually substantial forms that don’t just turn things on their head – the simple hipster flip as i’ve been calling it. That’s my message to Mr. Smith who landed on the shores of hipster Williamsburg well after the neighborhood became the embodiment of “le centre du cliché de la culture hipster, et la maison aux gens de concept.”

The Times did do a bang-up job on shooting the gentrifying Junkyards in Queens culminating in the very good “End of Willet’s Point” piece. Curiously this was not classic displacement of residents by culture workers, but the complete loss of working-class jobs and businesses for a luxury shopping mall. They missed doing that in Brooklyn, particularly Williamsburg, for the obvious fact it has become the home of the future professionals of New York who got a pass because they were considered hip. The great new voice of media, Vice, great in the business model sense, since it captured so well the ideals of millennial’s particularly the new look of social journalism that’s headquartered on the old Monument Lands in a neighborhood that i was pressured to leave and was my headquarters for my work, the production of authentic things.

The very hip Vice, that travels the world pointing out, in an entrepreneurial, casual, journalist-as-participant way, all the contradictions and social injustices (as if they somehow hinder millennial partying). I witnessed my neighborhood’s shift from working-class to professional, and North Brooklyn became very much a home of culture workers, and, curiously, there was never any critical or investigative reasoning done about Williamsburg displacement, for the obvious reasons. And it was a long painful story for the historic Williamsburg, and a big one that wasn’t covered. Would have made many great stories – the classic melting pot industrial neighborhoods of North Brooklyn end their long historic run, i mean, the wretched crime-ridden neighborhoods of North Brooklyn were finally being revitalized by entrepreneurial hipsters who the Times uncritically gave the cultural keys of the city to, so much so, all we ever heard officially by the chroniclers of our City was how positive the changing Williamsburg was, because it was, of all things, cool.

I shoulda had kids.

Right now the Times does an excellent job of speaking openly about class differences. Which, for me, begs the question, why not in art? Race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, from what i’ve researched for this essay, were the dominant themes in the life of trained artists throughout the last 30 years. But often excluding the most powerful force of class that is innately wound up in the foundation of art institutions themselves and often in the training required to participate in that scene as well.

A philosophy that promotes the always new and changing, and the conceptual, cerebral and quirky is the perfect world view for gentrification. And now the Quirk Aesthetic, if anyone is paying attention, is incorporated as another marketing strategy where you bring your pet pig to one to the world’s largest banks for a your financial consultation while Shaggy’s “Mr. Bombastic” plays. Very entertaining, i’ll have to bring a barnyard animal myself when banking, updating our urban scene with yet another flippin business model, urban farming, that if you research it is like ethanol production, but sounds real hip.

Quirks are but one small element in the only quality i find worthwhile – character, where compassion is not reserved for the self. Want quirks? Try truth, where things are quirkier than fiction, stranger and more alive with it.

Complications arise because gentrification is both unstoppable and people, whether they admit it or not, have a stake in it. Displacement is sad but true, but people in the arts and entertainment industry, if they would think about it, might say sad, true and complex, end of story, knowing it always ends the same way – it’s unstoppable, all you can do is document its physical truth.

The art industry and the tech industry – the creative class, as it relates to changing cities – highly educated, often at the finest schools, with multiple degrees, moving into poor and working-class neighborhoods that had been around since the industrial revolution, let alone their birthdays. And it’s not about class? It’s pretty much not considered. Is that because it clashes with what’s endemic to the art or tech scene and its overvaluations in the market?

But then to be told, “we saved you.” With stuff like that, it’s better to be ignored. “We made your neighborhood a nice place to live.” And who are you to judge? Judging implies relativity to the whole, not simply the burb you arrived from. You were not here, unless you call screening here, the same thing as being here.

 

Its complexity is not simply that it is unstoppable and a fact of city life. One usually doesn’t fight the unbeatable on the modern real estate level, otherwise the too real complexity of bare survival lurks. But that’s nothing like the complex realization that it’s a fact, and everything is geared to that on the level of urban policy, training and education and technology. Tech and service reigns like industry did in its heyday, and they get to call the shots, and forget industry the same way industry forgot the farm. Whatever attention is paid to having a truly diverse economy with manufacturing in cities, is now just lip service. Factories are located in places where taxes are low and the workers can afford to live.

Today North Brooklyn is replaced by both a remake and the new. I know many buildings in my old neighborhood, mine was average when it came to ratio of whose left. Out of 8 units by 2000, only two were original people, since 2013, just one. One in eight got to stay, and i would say that’s being generous. Can you hear me, i’m not invisible in reality, and i have evidence, both lived and documented, very few might have been able to stay in the place they, too, loved and built and i was not one of them. This limits discussion as i proceed to demonstrate. Chance would be good i would still be in Williamsburg.

To decimate, from Roman Times, means literally to kill one of ten. Williamsburg, located in New Rome, wasn’t decimated, but replaced. Next time, please just decimate me.

The idea that artists’ presence in a neighborhood is solely positive, that it, in fact, adds something special, is absurd. An artist is as good to have around as an office worker, truck driver, nurse, factory worker or shop owner. And, in New York, too many artists translate quickly into rising rents and prices, until all the economic pressures prices everyone out, even the first and second waves of artists themselves, that then find another, usually working-class, or even impoverished neighborhood, say, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy or Ridgewood in Queens.

Displace/replace, i saw it and had it shoved down my throat until i couldn’t fight it any more. I don’t think you want me on the panel that debates the issue of gentrification. An issue? I’m not built for issues, and i certainly don’t have to explore the causes or any so-called solutions to something that is completely unstoppable even though its causes are thoroughly documented and there is no solution. There never will be with creative destruction, what’s now praised as disruption. Without mentioning the fact that i thoroughly experienced displacement, so i know in a purely empirical sense i am writing the truth.

Realistically about all you can do is be mindful. It’s America, where we have to rely, sometimes solely, on self-control, even amongst rampant dysfunction that is characterized by gross inconsideration.

And, of course, if i am eating at one of the finest restaurants in Brooklyn, being taped for a celebrity foodie show, you’ll understand, i will not be able to answer any questions, or discuss gentrification, thank you. Was that to aid digestion and relaxation or did it actually have anything to do with ethics? And what about coolin it with the annual M. Jackson party…

Like i say all the time, poverty’s got nuthin to do with being good or bad, or as the measure of a person’s character, or how smart you are, and it’s insulting to equate a great place without tons of money, as bad or derelict. It’s usually imperceptible since they work with agents and brokers, developers and banks. And, who are we kidding, who the hell cares?

The Spike Lee Critique at Pratt University, not far from where he grew up, is a well-known anti-gentrification rant. Mr. Lee, who, to me, is phenomenally subjective and outfitted so, is a case where a person sides with the natives and has a real neighborhood reaction to what’s happened there. His jabs and put-downs were decisive, and completely in line with what we said in our neighborhood, and he uses terms like the natives and colonists, because that’s how it feels, and given the history of Brooklyn, that’s also, how it is. But Mr. Lee’s emotions –– sympathy (black) and disgust (white) fit nicely here, denying, uh, a complexity not part of the theatrics.

The degrees, i guess, that are “required” for a career in art, could exclude a lot of perspectives too. A quality education is expensive. Here the celebrity filmmaker and N.Y.U. film school graduate, commiserates with a roomful of Pratt folk, who, by their nature, are built for success, in art and design, but not necessarily awareness of the poor and working-class who surround them, or did at one time. Talking around it, and subjectively, amounts to more self-expression about the same subjects that are the self-expressionists bread and butter –– race, gender, religion, but not class which might unite all the differences and expose all the contradictions.

I don’t care what color, sexual orientation or religion ya got, it’s all kinda boring for me, being immersed in uncategorized difference, and engaged in it always. Essentially class (money) transcends handicaps in this country, at least it’s the only thing that’s going to help. It’s lack of money that gets your home took and your voice on mute, and with the exception of an election every four years, money talks and people listen to it. Differences, even real ones, can be be transcended by money and, better, wealth. After all, this is America, and it is our foundation back to the original colonies –– money-makers welcome.

Back to voting, the lead evaporated for Quinn once Deblasio tapped into a huge dissatisfaction that opposed a continuation of Bloomberg’s way. Gentrification (housing) and stop and frisk is what we were so frustrated about in a very experiential way.

Michael Jackson and O. J. Simpson are two celebrities who transcended some race problems on a legal level, through wealth, and possibly a kind of popularity. Of course, all the isms are sticking around, but raising your class status helps, at least by the salve of success, and what that might buy.

These trappings of celebrities we never experience. Stuck in the hoods or not, i had to “step down to the Bronx” for a better life, and i ain’t complainin. But even a small home to own will never happen for the majority of New Yorkers. And i never left Brooklyn entirely on my own, but was kicked out, of all things. None of this is complex or unusual, as let’s say, viewing it from the perspective of a former Brooklyn resident, who struck it rich expressing himself and his love for Brooklyn, or anyone who can now afford to live in the former ghettoes of Polish, Italian, Irish, Blacks, Puerto Rican, Dominican and Jews, especially in western Brooklyn, who, now cannot, themselves, afford the place. But more of this later in discussing gentrification’s complexity when those involved in it, speak on it.

Su Friedrich’s Gut Renovations video, for me, has nothing to say on the subject. Maybe the starting point being that of an artist for this subject, is an unmistakable self-nullification. When the place changed in a supercharged way, yeah, i was yelling out my window too, but not at developers. If i’m gonna yell at anyone it’s gonna be hipsters and artists, who the developers followed. And as far as neighbors, i’d take developers – they gotta get up and make money from all the speculation and artificial hipness. Being kept up all night by hipsters partying would not aide that pursuit.

Eventually an investment banker moved in above me, that alone is historic and a first, he actually made a point of telling me he needs peace and quiet because he works. Was i happy, it was the first sleep i had gotten in years. But he was here temporarily, and would move before his one year lease was up fully paid – but not until five friends moved in to party and to repeatedly cry out, “Let’s check out the hotties on Bedford Ave.” for a long time, even when the actual tenant wasn’t there. And you know when you’re staying for less than a year things like carpeting are a waste of time. And at what point does spring break die? I lived there in the epicenter of the newly college-educated and saw it everyday for years and it looked no different than college life that was supposed to end upon graduation. How cool is that? A tradition, i found, were the sleepovers – especially friends visiting from out of town, as well as, handing the keys over to them when, as the actual renters, they leave, insuring the constant rootless and out of context 🔊 noise would continue unabated, unlike the property taxes on the luxury units that sprouted to surround the old tenement.

In Williamsburg it began with the artist, we called the bo. But it was the hipster that finally kilt it. Like any neighborhood, inviting more and more like-minded friends to discover a good place to live, will result in speculation, and these aren’t immigrants arriving hungry and broke, but the creative class, well fed with organic ingredients and funded, and ready to party. Whaddaya expect? For the first time in 150 years, Big Leisure is back. Williamsburg originally and briefly was home to mansions as second homes for the likes of Vanderbilt and Frick, and even had resorts hotels where the media moguls of today today now work and play, prior to a 150 year industrial run. Williamsburg itself originated as a speculative real estate venture in 1802. it took 160 years of dirty stable working class life to end, before returning to those days of real estate speculation.

Unless you have mindful artists, ones who know the gravity of loss, that can occur in an ambitious, indulgent, class party in pursuit of a career in the arts, then, displacement, being entirely legal, will not slow. I don’t think the art and entertainment crowd is at all built for outward social concern or respect. It’s suppose to work the other way around for them.

Are you serious? The link is too much, and why even publish it as anything but an example of making an idiocy of context.  Yeah, and police brutality is a hoax, especially within the last fully documented twenty years. And who judges the objective content of a camera anyways?

Two Flags, one of the best documentaries i’ve seen, has a remarkable take on gentrification in Columbus Ohio in 2003 and, because of its bittersweet complexity, told simply and quietly, it delivers the real interesting complications at work in urban redevelopment schemes.

And there’s Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, the ultimate umbrella for those appalled by gentrification, although, since coming out of hiding it seems a bit neutered. I’m not picking on any one in particular, though, because overall where you’re from is no guarantee on how exactly you will look at things as you age. Leona Helmsley came from a modest Brooklyn background, and JZ in the projects, yet you wouldn’t call either big on the social consciousness level, when it comes to affordable housing, but they both love money as true capitalists.

There was lot of displacement with Barclay’s that JZ wasn’t exactly demonstrating against. In many ways his name kinda sold it to the people, and at times it seemed his interest was even much larger than in reality. Leona Helmsley, born working-class and raised in Brooklyn, certainly changed her life around, never looking back at that borough or where she came from. It’s simple – it’s gentrification – a process that can only be complicated by self-interest, partial or otherwise. You’re “anti-gentrification” concerns are thin, if you’re in the art/entertainment industry, wherever you are living, and in an emotional reaction (“my grandparents were working-class.”) as well. Sympathy For The Truth exists because we all know what’s real, and undeniable – but it’s just not real enough or mindful enough, when your head is in the feedbag, even with all that education.

I do understand, though, on the level of who the hell wants to be working-class? Or go so far as to even think about it. That world is gone. I only regret its disappearance because it’s a hell of a lot more interesting that an art colony, which is a comparison i wouldn’t even waste time to consider, until it happened just as i was becoming old in my home in Williamsburg. Whether we like it or not, and i think most don’t, it’s true. And i can prove all this the same way Walker Evans could prove famous men lived in squalor.

I’m no artist complaining about the rising rents. For one, i’m no artist. At least not according to the terms since around 1980. Yeah, i would like to have seen New York, and all the other big cities in 1886 and the explosion of industry or been around when Teddy Roosevelt set his tone in an exploding era of original singular development. But with regards to representation something 3,000 years past, is sometimes more relevant for me. All across America it’s mostly gone, but it’s still sometimes visible, in Utah at Head of Sinbad or in Horseshoe Canyon at the Ghost Panel, or dozens of other places that are good examples of what is the earliest surviving and visibly known examples of American art. These panels are almost contemporary since we know they were doing it in France 35,00 years ago, and, again, simply based on physical evidence as far back as 250,000 years ago, all of it very interesting, and very little left.

Art is influenced by whatever environment in social history it’s in. Today that’s highly democratic, capitalist and academic, where one hundred and twenty years ago industrial wealth called a lot of shots in collecting. Critical thinking sees different responses throughout time as art survives. Now that it is a mature full-fledged business and institution, far from its time in, let’s say a hunter/gatherer world, it’s still completely unregulated, extremely secretive with a very determined slave force willing to work as, let’s say, an art teacher to fund what’s impossible to make a living at except a few. You call that a business – donors, patrons, funding – a philanthropic Mooch Central of grants and festivals? “We take fifty per cent with no guarantees for anything.” It’s still an American Idol model, just with multiple degrees based in an absurd philanthropic base of elitist tax deductions and investment opportunities. Shoulda realized that making an art of actual time and place is backwards to the success of being at the right social event at the right time, hoping to catch the eyes of those who can afford luxury goods. And to think, those places grew to be right under my neighborhood nose, where i was coincidentally already doing years of production before the opportunists got established. The very first thing i learned upon contact was always to run from the art hand that only took. Their heads could transform the raw material for my art into useless empty shells of reinvention. But only if you lived there and understood a source or were mindful, and were not inconsiderate.

Why do the art colonies look so cliched to me? To start with there were the Villages in Manhattan, sections of the city where concentrations of artists lived. The L.E.S., in my time, being a good example of an art-hood that was rough, as required, with blue-collar ethnics of all stripes – Eastern Europeans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, you name it. Cheap rent. That art scene didn’t overwhelm it’s slum/working-class world, in fact, many used it for inspiration or seemingly emerged from it, not to mention cheap rent meant people from any class could be here. In the past, some of the biggest art heroes from Manhattan – Pollock and Johns were self-taught and not exactly affluent. Seems to me, the big difference between now and then is money and a lot of academia.

I’m not advocating more crime to keep rents down? Just more manufacturing jobs so the uneducated or those who want to work physical labor can afford the rents, but also to maintain a diverse economy, and what that brings. It’s not gonna happen, each mayor gives manufacturing less lip service while real estate has so many options for tax deductions it makes you wonder. These tax privileges even extend to their tax abated clients as the residents of new luxury buildings, as poorer folks around them get a higher tax bill because their slum, home has appreciated. Philadelphia has put a cap on assessments for property taxes on residents who have been in their neighborhoods for ten years or more. Like eight taxi suicides in a short time, this is indicative of a large problem for working people – they’re losing their small businesses and homes from new economy disruptions.

The latest biggest political falls in New York, Silver and the Skelos’ were involved in real estate, where, especially in New York City, even without corruption, the tax breaks and loopholes are enough as to legally avoid some taxes all together. Jared Kushner’s father did four years after, then, attorney general Chris Christie went after him and today’s the mogul-in-chief looks close to something that only his office is postponing.

If you wanna call me an artist, it’s a long-term one, whose worked the notion of home as confronted by disappearance. The blue-collar job loss is the same kind of fact that gentrification is. It’s loss. Capish? And to exaggerate in order to make a point it’s been a Blue-Collar Holocaust. And, in the case of Williamsburg, considered the shining example, and ultimate model for gentrification by hipsters, for a reason, they honestly remade it happen.

It seems, after an eighties East Village interlude, the art colonies are just plain middle-class or traditional bourgeoisie. Multi-degreed artists live with, and next door to, other artists. As one of them, has expressed matter of faculty to me that he was more jealous or insecure, i mean, “i am more ant-gentrification than you.” He then spoke of the “art life-style” matter of faculty, as if responding to the age-old question, hey, what nationality are you? All while sitting in his art gallery which was part of his home, in a neighborhood with many new budding galleries called Ridgewood. My god, that was it. The fusion of three words, that i never had even heard before – horrendous, abhorrent and heinous as they sounded, it was the truth. The art life-style. And as far as my own invisibility, my existence a whim of the ego before me, i just learned to accept that as the way it is too many years ago, and just try to come out of it with only evidence of stultas verba, what i’ve called the Colin Ferguson Moment. But i would prefer to never of had contact, the price for that knowledge is so high. It is the same poison that lives in Newtown Creek, English and Dutch Kills and blooms in such colorful configurations to the surface. I photographed it a lot as an example of pretty poison, something that causes neurological disorder with repeated exposure.

To reiterate, when full-blown gentrifiers cannot see beyond their desires that’s one thing, but when you are sitting in a gallery with a gallery owner and artist who, coincidentally, has hundreds of my images temporarily in his gallery, proving everything i am speaking about here in this essay, yet not see it, it says it all, and with proof. No wonder i lost my most valuable connection, my home, to this same asshole mindset. I mean when i can completely explain who i am as an artist, and then be ignored, and injected into the baseline model of today, as if i’m the typical artist – college educated, looking to make it in the art world. It’s proof of thesis to perfection. And, all ya’ll gotta do is listen, but i know what you really pay attention to – youse self.

Could it be that’s what’s been “blurring the lines” whatever that means, between art and entertainment, fun and self-expression?

Husband, wife, two kids and a dog, but quirky, genuinely so, and i give degreed artists, credit who go through a training process, with their quirky characteristics in tact. Those who have shaken their pedigree enough to be a source themselves, bravo. I guess i missed something but i thought art was by nature a bit anti-bougie, not the weird inverse middle-class reversion that has settled Brooklyn and trickled into Queens and the South Bronx.

It’s me, i’m working too hard. Anticipating medicare, not fame, so i can finally deal with the health effects from exposure to art and real estate in Brooklyn, with the last fifteen years stamping me like a Dagmar bumper on a ’53 Cadillac, and a consequence of the art life-style, which i still don’t understand.

Art colonies, to use an art phrase, are traditional now, more than ever, not, uh, cutting edge and new, when an artist in the hood was really something. And now it’s me who is pushed into the traditional slot, because in a few years almost all photography seen on the high end (museums), became abstract computer-driven stuff, that does not require a camera or stuff that’s pre-made fiction shot as though it’s sorta real. There are zero artists where i live, i don’t wanna be known, art didn’t save me, in fact my art could get me critically injured. It’s a non-traditional approach to art. I’m kinda sick of word games, and unsubstantiated thoughts, you know, language, artifice, castles in the sky, logical fallacies and the Celebrity’s new clothes as art, and particularly photography’s search for their new identities as the newer technology “dictates” something i missed. I understand that many want expansion, but myself, i’ve got none of the colonial attitude or devices that are just more media machines that are changing how we think without thinking about it.

If i wanted a career solely within the realm of language then i would have been a lawyer. Language is one of many means to get to something, or produce and make things. I also recognize what rules – professions where talk is means and end.

That doesn’t make me perfect, but, perhaps, too stupid for my own good. And then, OK i have always admitted to a monkey-like appreciation for “the redemption of physical reality” by the camera. And definitely my subjects are not new, only how i go about capturing them is, which, while nothing new, is done by just a few. The physical world is always the starting point, i become even less of a monkey as i am capable of controlling it with a very free hand occasionally asking the the wild card i don’t know or own, to arrive and grace me with its novelty.

Hasn’t it been The Era of the Degreed Artist, and art professional who conveniently overlook their social place in a larger view, if simply because they have a very busy life, producing, of course, and campaigning for a position, where a consensus can occur, or maintenance if you are already there.

That’s a lot of time. In short, no one cares, even me, not only am i busy too, producing, but because gentrification is unstoppable, so why care. If i would have left Williamsburg in 2003 instead of 2013, i would be so much better off, and relatively undamaged. So, why care? Include me in on that.

One thing that i can’t help notice, in my rejection of a screen life designed to deliver the next I-Moment, i’m in touch with bigger stuff, uh, beyond selfdom, and particularly self-expression. I’m nuthin, or a really a small blip. There are eight billion living of us and, my importance being relative, if not globally, than in The City i live, where i’m still just one of eight million living beings. I wish i was a landlord who makes the big money now and quickly, but with a city of eight million, its size, at least theoretically, dictates that there are many rules to the game, because, theoretically we all have rights. Is there anywhere left, except wilderness, where one man can have and do whatever he wants? Yes, with the big money, in fact it’s the ultimate motivator for a heavyweight ego. Williamsburg National Monument is from back when we didn’t get much, so we didn’t ask. It became a place where people, asked for a lot, on the level of “I think I want your home.” And then got it. That’s some change.

And they are knowledgeable, often liberal or humanist, and know all about the human conditions, having studied it enough to have an opportunity to scan the entire cultural output of this planet. They are fully informed on gentrification, that does not stop its march either. They are artists encased in their highly individual endeavors in their own little world of art and concepts. How could they possibly have any sort of negative effect on an environment lucky enough to have them?

And i really did sit in a gallery in the latest trending section of New York, on and off over a period of months, and watched how various gallery owners talked neighborhood change and real estate, after all, their galleries are directly part of it. Such awkwardness trying to avoid the elephant in the small gallery space, that, of course, people trained as alleged perceivers, couldn’t see in a real way. Be patient, so far no neighborhood lasted for the class that built it and eventually it will be the midnight train for them, and they and the gallery people know it.

PC is the convenient way to park your morality. Why care? Reparations, punishment or Me Too? I don’t need that. Simply an accurate recollection of events from the Blue Collar Holocaust would be appropriate.

But now the uneducated have free degrees from Google, as well as, still being allowed to vote every four years and, are, at least, very aware of the way others conveniently ignore or speak around their situation. We are their captive audience historically, but the new technology, like self-publishing and the net, means our message might be found eventually, in an underground spring if anyone cared to search.

“Hollywood (Art) is sorority racist. We really like you Ronda, but you’re not a Kappa.” – Chris Rock

Like i said gentrification is unstoppable, but you could do what i did – never, with the exception of a photography show every 7 years (always a mistake), did i have a moment of contact with anything even remotely connected to anything in art or entertainment, and, thus, gentrification, particularly in the emerging colonies, where my life and work got overtook. I had pretty much, if i were forced to think about it, already spent time fleeing what i detested, that, i guess, grew so pervasive, it would even come back to kill, the Stronghold of Williamsburg, and, almost myself, simply ending up crippled in some areas, but glad to survive the hipster plague and having antibodies to the disease so that the same mistakes will never be made again.

And to think it’s just basic consideration. Realizing, at best, artists can be an element in a neighborhood mix of professions, like truck driver, shop owner, factory worker or office worker, not thoroughly dominate it to the point of eliminating difference. If being in the whole world, is unimaginable, as a life-style, then it’s an inconsiderate way of living.

Living in your imagination, excludes so much material, but living with your imagination in the world, gathers material, growing respect for others and possibly compassion. While appreciating the aura of the real, i’ve grown to see only character as valuable when it comes to people. Dashell Hammet, Frank Delano, et al, were once artists whose work stood equal to, along with, other forms, is gone in this age of hyper-reification.

Schopenhauer made the distinction between concepts and ideas, google it.

If I am an artist, my only complication would be, i also have 40 years of actual work that has always stood against gentrification by turning its back on it, capturing the places it is replacing. That’s one of the few gentrification complications that instills only credibility. Before using the pen and camera i was a a laborer for twelve years, and kept laboring when necessary until 1994 when laboring for it ended for good.

Just as in the past, with the other economic policy of wage-labor job loss, gentrification effected a whole class of people of all stripes. The demise of manufacturing, the lifeblood of the working-class, where reasonable wages for the uneducated once existed, raged through neighborhoods. To survive that (deindustrialization) and build back into something better, only to be finally driven out when others found out about the place, is how sometimes the surviving working-class neighborhoods finally get kilt and die on their feet, while trending on someone else’s screen.

The landlord, when the first bunch of assholes moved in, suggested (sarcastically) i try to talk with them. (the old Brooklyn way was you don’t do much talking after the first time.) My response was, “A 28 year old man-boy, wearing a 35 dollar Brooklyn Industries t-shirt that states “Never Sleep” and with his hair dyed psychedelic blue, only signifies one thing – I don’t give a shit.” Reason with that. Or even try to fight it, in the old Brooklyn way, or any other. The colonists are here to stay in their New World. It was artists who discovered Williamsburg, the same way America was discovered by European explorers looking for about the same things made up of gold, escape and reinvention, and only to discover that millions in hundreds of tribes had already been there from the get-go. Simply overlook, or even wipe out what existed prior to the colonists usually solves the problem, although creative destruction by the ruling class has become more civilized and swift as hell.

But this was a whole new way of taking real estate, without arms, and with liberal principles in tact – completely ignore it all, by virtue of the inconsideration only narcissism can produce. In other words, the descendants of Columbus, got it down to a science and an art deemed disruption.

I would hear the clicking of the spiked heeled trendy-femmes, coming back from the city with MOMA shopping bags, they climb, click and stomp up the stairs, then, walk around, dance and do whatever the fuck they want with heels striking old wood floors, until pass out time around 7:00 a.m. Considering there is the only the privacy you care to make in a 135 year old wooden tenement, i knew, by blunt osmosis, every detail about hipster lives, as every year a new batch would come to inhabit units above, below and on both sides. Just one thing i learned about them, they loved the sound of heels on a wooden floor, that alone, after nine years, would require professional neurological care. Well, at least there weren’t 🔊 pile drivers every day for 10 years, or one of the worst of the hipster-style scum bars in Williamsburg next door and down below (the royal oak, google ben shih, the owner) or unending construction in my building…

In Williamsburg i didn’t have the money, and i lost. There’s truly no prejudice with a lot of white folks, because it’s only about the pretty green money. Skin color? Sexual orientation? Religion? “Hey, i just want your home, I don’t care about all that stuff.” And it’s all very simple. Taking a home for age, race or religion is wrong. But for profit? That can be argued in court.

Everyone else’s complications with the subject of gentrification, their subjective assumptions, is kinda worse than being forced to eat someone else’s taste in food, it’s like eating their stylish crap that’s really no better than anyone else’s i had to eat, including hipsters, artists, landlords, bar owners and developers – in that order. I’ll say it again, and, i am confident that the health-conscious professionals would all agree with me, that injecting the waste products of organisms into other organisms will produce quality salmonella and cause pain and sickness. I did hard manual labor for peanuts for years and the people who ran that were saints compared to that cast of hipsters and artists that got control of my immediate world.

Man, that’s complicated, it stinks and it’s unhealthy. I’m sure you all agree, even though i’m invisible and cannot be viewed or heard, i mean, theoretically, wouldn’t you agree? That it is inappropriate to appropriate me without my permission, to use your language. Would you like to hear it in our language?

Shouldn’t had Brooklyn portrayed so hip and subjectively cool in those movies, Spikey. Your audience, in those first films, were a lotta white folks too, who, as Mighty Whiteys, we all know, just gotta have it. Brooklyn, that is.

And another thing, a live jazz band in tenements or brownstones at 4:00 am was always unheard of in working-class Williamsburg, until the plague of hipsters. It’s your death if you have to work every day to pay the bills, and if someone pulled that shit on a work night in the “bad old days” the reaction would be swift and decisive. But, where i lived, that ain’t complicated, we all gotta get up and work every day, and, in my case, my work day was every waking moment. I’ll remember to bitch about it at my next celebrity function, Huffington interview or appearance at an art school. May i say it? I been sayin it, all along. Self-expression is kinda stupid, but it’s some serious fun, addictive and self-important. Keep tellin me how you feel about what, not you, but others, like me, have to experience every day.

And ya know somethin? Ultimately i don’t care about any of this, i mean, i have been forced to care somewhat, but it’s mostly baloney that i never liked and always avoided, and plan to. It’s no cure, but this just might be my zafa, but it is the truth, and i can spell it out and go back to having my experiences kept private and sublimated into work.

What i’ve been saying with my work for over forty years now, and gentrification says it once more – the divide between what i am told officially about the things i live and document for a very long time, is absurd. These official views eventually come to be about language. To the point of being a highly scripted movie called “I Want” Art discourse can be very convoluted, and wound up in artifice, wouldn’t you agree? I mean relatively speaking, of course.

Anyone who wants to see a terrific documentary about the much more real and bitter complexities of gentrification, check Flag Wars.

Gentrification is not complex, at least for its instigators and their quarry. As a class thing, or at least a money thing, you either benefit or you don’t.

Not complex to me, neither is a 14-year difference in life expectancy between children born in richest and poorest ZIP codes. Complex? Flint water, Cleveland lead paint, Brooklyn gentrification, all are poison to working-class folks, shorten their lives, and kill them.

And to make it clear again, i am saying that in the case of Brooklyn gentrification, in Williamsburg and beyond, the cause of gentrification was artists, art, culture and hipsters, the same way government officials started the Flint water crisis, and paint companies selling lead paint started the neurological impairment of children in Cleveland. It’s called documented history. Artists and hipsters brought gentrification to Brooklyn. If i express, i do so accurately, complete with evidence and i have been doing that a long time. And curiously that style of thinking and doing is more disregarded than ever.

The Williamsburg that i mostly knew had the same per capita income as Bed-Stuy in the eighties and nineties and before. As a matter of fact, when i worked in Fort Greene, and sometimes in Bed-Stuy, when i got off the bus on my street and walked home, i always thought how much more badly the Union Ave. blocks in Williamsburg looked, a residential triangle cut off from the rest of the Italian section in 1952 by the BQE, it’s where the factories and warehouses began to thicken up seven blocks in from the waterfront, where our wooden tenements were boxed into lots, that, for some reason weren’t used for manufacturing, but residing.

I never thought of “improving” it though. It thrived in the day – really buzzed, was quiet at night, was a great place to live and one stop from Manhattan.

Don’t fit in at all with the artist bitching about rising rents that are a result of them attracting sharks. Check a starting point that no one gets, or, at least, wants to, even when i say it simply and directly. I’ve had as much to do with gentrification as Taylor Swift has to do with street life in New York City. Of course anything today is possible, while writing this the Daily News did an article on the first Calvin Klein up-skirt ads. You know even as you write it, you think it’s fiction…

Are you kidding, i was a bit aware of places like Galapagos, but never was there and only regretted the fact that it would be the end of the little slaughter block of butchers and meat stores. I remember giving directions to visiting, what appeared to be, celebrities, to the art fun spot on North Sixth, while hanging around my block and the park. Teddy’s, still is a great neighborhood bar, but by 1989, i was gone from there with the first hint of bos or artists. My fear of these artist people went way back to my first contact with them where, to my surprise, i first ran into the phenomenon of someone, a stranger or simply someone you work with, saying anything they wanted to you without regard to any context whatsoever, often part of a bizarre childish girlie-like gossip-mill that really reflects jockeying egos. It was unimaginable back then that they and their infants would grow to entirely take over the place in their image of leisure, culture, art and entertainment with a highly developed duplicitous and transactional atmosphere where everyone is an agent for themselves with a single goal in mind – the name. The name must first be secured to open doors, then, if canonized, you will be in a safe zone of non-critical thought where everyone, through media and canonization can only admire you and your work for the remainder of your life, if you’re the one.

“Cleveland is like a really good dive bar with cheap drinks, great music and cool people. The fastest way to ruin a good dive bar is to tell everyone about how cool it is. The next thing you know, they jack up the drink prices, fill the Jukebox with Top 40, and deny you a seat because the place is packed with hipsters.” – the comedian, Mike Polk. Cleveland, one of the dominant forces in working-class bars, and bar culture, is now closer to gone on this level then it’s ever been. Cause? Gentrification. I bring it up because this was one of the true lost cities that craved what the creative class of Boston and New York, or, even Pittsburgh. I guess because it’s a model that works. And if it works there, or Detroit, it’s pretty damned transformational for cities. Unfortunately it kills a lotta great historic cheap bars.

By 1990 the first official professional bo-hemians hit. People like Tony Millionaire and Medea gaining attention in the Williamsburg dive-gallery/entertainment art scene. The former underbelly of the art world, home to losers and artists who were so broke they couldn’t live in even eighties Manhattan, began to flip. Curiously, Medea, the female alter ego for Ethan Pettit in an early nineties Williamsburg art scene, who is still very active in the Brooklyn art scene today, and was one of the first official art characters in Williamsburg, is an artist, who was there, and can express the truth of Williamsburg’s gentrification. Particularly when he emphatically states, “Artists cause gentrification.” Thank you, Mr. Pettit for showing us how simple it can be. I hope that doesn’t disqualify him as an artist, though, as artists are, by definition, the little public relations machine for themselves, and involvement with gentrification is something Mr. Ferguson would prefer to ignore. But what’s the big deal? It’s simple and it’s true, what he says. And all i would like is to create a memory of that, which is true.

And also to remember that it’s a flippin mind, that reinvents neighborhoods.

There’s no question i occasionally came in contact, on a bidness level, with a some of them, and you calling me thorny to their thorny would be accurate. But I was there the whole time and before, and as the Sober Bukowski. It was a party. I’m tellin ya, i saw it. And i saw it for each, i guess they call them, generations. Drugs and booze, entertainment and art and nothing else sticks in my mind from that time, but not any art.

Other players in the eighties Williamsburg art scene were photographers and writers who used the working-class milieu in their work, while others expressed sympathy for the working-class, even though they maybe weren’t seeing that their “art life-style” and art venues were not aligned with the class that provided all the cheap available rents or no rents to make that happen. One of the founders of Galapagos, Mr. So-And So, i had not spoken with in 25 years, and he asked if i had ever been to the art/entertainment venue eight blocks from my home. I didn’t elaborate past “No.” since i was pretty sure he wouldn’t listen, and if he did, it would quickly turn into his his towering self-expressive, non-stop self-expressing. Not knowing his involvement until now, years after Galapagos left a completely remade Williamsburg, i was surprised. It wasn’t just the further confirmation that there was art modeled on entertainment in Williamsburg, or, art clubs, if you will, but that it was the place i always associated with gentrification. Galapagos, the place on the old butchers’ block, that was bringing in even the successful artists from Manhattan and had always represented the birth of real gentrification in Williamsburg, for me, and in real time. It’s funny, at the time, i was upset that the block would be lost, it was such a cheap food and supplies venue, and it was lost early. Galapagos closed before my block went, in 2003, but i witnessed the creep.

And to think Gumpy was a founder. I didn’t know that until i made a mistake and accepted his invitation to show work in yet another trending neighborhood. My policy is never to link to the art gentry, so it was, for me, a huge mistake. One i paid for.

I mentioned earlier that i never yelled at developers, only hipsters and artists, and sure enough i yelled at Mr. Millionaire, and he at me, from my front window and on the streets whenever i could during his last year in town, before settling out in California, now with a wife, and two kids, like the great majority of today’s artists, to become middle-class, after their middle-class version of urban poverty in Williamsburg – bohemia – an interlude to becoming the middle-class you always were.

I can’t say that the early Williamsburg art scene was that heavy, or significant. It’s marked i guess by mixing entertainment with art, abnormally lubricated with both booze and drugs, to the point of that being the point. Booze and drugs, that eased the irony of trying to be a celebrity in a slum or blue-collar stronghold, where its cheap rent made it happen for the artists. Art and entertainment scene, party and all, Williamsburg became that and grew through a few consecutive waves of ever more professional and affluent creative types, eventually losing its slummy roots.

But where’s the art?

I probably don’t know what i’m talking about, but the few times i participated in the world of art, i don’t know – the self-consciousness, or “whiteness” or that garden wall attitude, or just saying shit without regards to truth or anyone else’s presence, trampling context, and promoting gossip, but, if i may, is the educated white person colonial by nature, or, at least, a version of that, the professional tourist? But it’s on me and my catholic attitude, nuthin to do with the religion, but, universally speaking, purports that art is an aspect, and small part of the larger whole world. Staying only inside art, the self-importance and overvaluation skews that. Even with inclusion which is also coming about during museum expansions and general growth, art’s ground in class and race is still glaring when compared to the actual face of this city, or, for that matter, entertainment and sports, or America in general.

By the time of the 109th anniversary of the neighborhood’s Feast, the Newtowners in their expensive condos and rentals would call the precinct complaining about noise and congestion that occurs on their street every summer like clockwork for a couple of weeks, year after year, not unannounced as a party whim. It’s called The Feast. It’s been done, here, every summer, for over a century. It’s a tradition and it’s wild, but not new. And it’s free, blue-collar-style. I shot it every year until, in 2005, family care and hyper-gentrification ended another major part of my life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would even pay for my work through blue-collar labor or, whatever it took, as if i’m proud of it. Took forever to get away from, but still don’t earn enough to live outside of, a place i can afford. And that’s fine, so it’s still what i know, and that should only be valuable to juice the work, and that was supposed to make me some dough and have a better life. Freelancing and even blue-collar jobs, but nothing paid for or funded with anything outside of my own labor, including a slew of completed books with four in the works now. And none are like WNM, as sarcasm was required to balance the too real reality of nothing being real anymore.

 

It can be trusted since it’s not partnered with someone else’s money. I don’t see what i believe, but believe what i see, and have no influences, and certainly not trained to think in any particular way because i only believe what i see and sense and that excludes mediation beyond one layer of pen or camera.

The immediate pleasures of my block, if i had spare time, is what i liked, and how i lived. I would cease going to any neighborhood spot at the first sign of bos, let alone, the coming hipsters, years later. By 2005 there was nowhere to go left. I never spent even a second, promoting, participating or being anywhere near any sign of gentrification. But it wasn’t a protest. Art or gentrification is not what i shoot, but disappearance is. I was living a neighborhood life and enjoying every minute of it, while being long-term, if unheralded, on the subject of the same disappearing urban neighborhoods, particularly industrial – either devastation from a declining economy, or, later, from an ascending economy, that was so rich, that is was renamed by some The Second Gilded Age. After gentrification was forced on me, i reacted with three books – a satire, an essay and a large long look at the Junkyards in Queens, that i felt a responsibility to do, but can’t wait to once more turn my back on it and shoot only what reinvention is not, a source, hopefully one that is not threatened with extinction.

In all honesty. i thought i wanted to leave this world through the camera, but never forget it. There was never any doubt that i wouldn’t, but that’s not what happened. The fact is that immediately upon my first contact with the art and entertainment world, many years ago – even in the beloved late seventies, early eighties pre-AIDS scene – i preferred the neighborhood life to this other questionable path, while still always looking for a way out. All along i have been paying for the work, living, according to my values, with no reason to be connected to things i learned not to like. Never one to accept repeated blows, just for some stupid chance of knownness that i’m supposed to be obsessed with, it became amor fati a long time ago, and the results have to show.

But only with honest working folk, as opposed to professional artists, who don’t see at all, certain things, large things that have great affect. Soft corruption, a quid pro quo and who ya know is the dominant mode. That and time and place, or, luck gets you there.

 Georgie, Veronica’s father, from next door has a good laugh with Frankie who lived below me. Our stoops were outdoor living rooms, where all are welcome. Normally the domain of women after dinner – we had the club across the street and the little park with benches, but this was after the old ladies in my building had passed. Both men were Irish, like TwoSoes, in an Italian neighborhood from a time when that mattered.

 

I met George when i was trying to fix my car’s starter. Georgie, who worked at Beach Russ two blocks away, had a clean white t-shirt and had just showered and ate, he then completely installed my starter for me, and got covered in grease and dirt in doing so – “shirt off their back” folks are the best and can even transcend politics and religion, by their actions as socially functional people who love their home and neighborhood where they’re from.

 

Hear me, i lived through a Blue-Collar Holocaust that is finally in some ways fading, but still ongoing – manufacturing’s long slow demise, and the neighborhoods that depended on it have disappeared.

The reason for this disappearance of working-class neighborhoods in cities has evolved from economic decline to economic development, where, after surviving the sting of job loss, the final solution would be displacement. That is, a complete loss of home, whether legally or not. Displacement is the final solution. I know, being there while it happened. Displacement by hipsters and artists is exactly how all neighborhood people see it. Are they mistaken? And where do all the displaced go? Ask me, i’m one. I’m interested in the “complicated subject” of gentrification the same way Tecumseh was interested in the settlers’ complex point of view, which was only the concept, “I think i want your land.” put into action.

At the same time, i understand why someone wouldn’t like to be called an invasive species, who is into a world of “likes” and “dislikes” and what’s epic is not, no matter how it’s spelled. The fact that Paris Hilton was once at the hipster bar next door in 2005 – which, to me, sounds like a neighborhood gone to hell – was the high hipster moment of that era in Williamsburg, is, uh, invasive as hell. We had arrived, credible evidence was everywhere – celebrities are here and we are being put on the map with the likes of all from Galapagos to the Royal Oak. Remember Tower of Power’s What Is Hip? Near the end, the counter lyric emerges, “Hipness, what it is? And sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.” In my book replacing interesting historic blocks with upscale entertainment et al. just ain’t “cool” but you certainly have the choice to do so.

Taking Williamsburg’s North Sixth Street as one example – a mix of meat stores, butchers and residents produced a block of steady work, culture and living for 150 years that needed nothing as far as quality of life to covet, since all of life was there and cultivated in everyday real terms being completely authentic. Until art and entertainment arrived in the late nineties and turned the street flow to leisure, pleasure and profit. Today North Sixth Street is clean with nice new buildings and absolutely no soul or good meat.

We’ve been asked in the pop realm, what is it that’s hip and a lot of people have been asking, for the last thirty years, what is it that’s art, after never even thinking about it for centuries. Flippin for profit, or being famous for nothing had given us the credibility that we only knew as the cruel civic fact of this moment in urban history. Just remember, though, that’s on me and my nervous system.

Here’s one – for all time Greenpoint (and Canarsie) were the laughingstock for New Yorkers. Not just their stubborn working-class ethnic personalities but their physical neighborhood. Greenpoint had old and dirty unremarkable wooden buildings with many small oddly shaped wooden worker cottages and two flats. It was the chintziest architecture fitting a poor industrial neighborhood. Today those same 140 year old workers’ cottages with renovations are priced between two and four million dollars surrounded by new tax abated luxury buildings where a twenty year reprieve from taxes somehow isn’t upper class welfare, but controlling rents is.

After seeing and being in those old wooden homes for years, i still see pretty much that, but in the real estate market it’s the location which, i admit, is the best in the city.

I wouldn’t look to the art, sports, entertainment or a gaming complex for morality or character. I’m leery of talent that requires less character, more ego and self compassion as opposed to reciprocal thought and development from the everyday and real end of things. Real events challenge, building healthy cells and character because of the stakes, beginning with survival. Character has no defense for hipster values especially as more neighborhood characters leave or die. That realization ends up being the final ugly complexity.

Watching others get challenged is the stuff of entertainment, but being challenged for real helps character, and only that marks you in a good way. Experience does that. Conceptual challenges, purely cognitive challenges also provide very little BDNF production, and blood flow, a situation akin to growing cobwebs and calcified deposits where new brain cells should be.

My complications are painfully simple, shameful and clear, i photographed disappearing urban America, usually industrial neighborhoods, since 1978. Through most of it, Williamsburg remained a blue-collar stronghold, and a logical base of operations, that lasted far longer than expected. It was changing, before, but 9/11 was a marker for a lot of things that changed, and sometimes into its opposite. Our local twin towers were blown up months before in July, 2001, and this really was a planned demolition, the Greenpoint Holders – the Tanks, that dominated our skyline and signified, industrial. Godard would have had a feast filming in our town between July and September in 2001. The world did change that year.

METHOD (schtick)

No models, no schools, i deal with source material. My pictures are not what’s real, but the way i make them is and i certainly am. To be offered two alternatives by the institutions of art – it’s either art and documentary or a blend. Really? What do the self-appointed experts say when confronted by one of their own categories – untrained and/or so-called outsider art? If too documentary for art, and too art for documentary, then i’ve done my job of creating good and unique work, so much so, it has no home in any camp but its own. I must be, then, a true artist, creating new genre – RealStill. Of course, i exaggerate, but far less than Nietzsche.

What no white (in the colonial sense) artist or photographer has ever gotten and understood, even if i provide the proof and say it to their face. All the more reason to ignore the simple fact you could either see or acknowledge – when i go home from the “field” i still haven’t really left it.

Go to the source, rooted – Howlin Wolf singin/playin Highway 49, there’s plenty of examples. The actual is originally so. And the real maintains an aura that is gone most everywhere else. That’s what i’m sellin, as a big part of my schtick and the nature of source material.

The unity of the high and the low, both in subject and style, and maybe audience. And how can i unite that by living in an art colony? I’ve written my share, never using first person singular, and here it’s extensive. The point – my connection to the subject at hand, normally there to juice the shot real and credible, is, for the first time, upfront. And i don’t like it that much, and hope to get back to basics soon as i’m done here. But my inspirational home has been remade into an antipodean nightmare that even flipped me out physically, and i’m into truth, even if it’s a drag on me, which the time spent writing this is.

Picture a Sober Bukowski, a mentally healthy, a properly socialized Van Gogh, or a Gangster Maeir? Picture Muddy or Hendrix as they wanted to play guitar, sing and perform for the blues and rock and the joy of it and the root of it. It would take away from their accomplishment if it had anything to do with therapy or just celebrity. Only making money is a better reason. I picked up the camera as an objective conscious decision, not because i used to lock my self in my room growing up, for whatever reason, to produce art, nor because our city offers a place where i can finally be myself and be accepted, no matter how different or off-the-wall i am and not because i have any need to express myself, except to speak of a things beyond that. An uncomfortable existence, including critical injuries about every seven years but worth it as a refuge from the self-expressionists. In an enormous open air geography of social discovery, playing a camera that writes files by performing a capture in the chaos of real time and place, opens the mind to many things outside it, and the art of it, through contact in time and place. It’s a contact-art genre fading like the old neighborhoods and for no good reason. But, i tell ya, what i learned through contact is nothing short of truth. In an update, Muddy Waters Capital is the name of an investment research firm.

The competition to turn your city into a tourist destination (reinventing) has made sections of cities into just that. I guess that’s what many now want. As a roots photographer i’ve spent my life catching what’s about to fall, doing the only practical thing left to do in the face of an unstoppable vanishing, taking a picture. It provides abundant serotonin in my synapses, increases BDNF production through physical exertion, leaves a record with worth by virtue of disappearance, and, by adding the wow factor, increases both the worth and chance that it will embed in the final resting place of all images – the memory. In some other world that would also add value – the intrinsic qualities, but it’s only through schmoozing that you get anywhere.

All the actuality that is built intrinsically into the object, it’s my mistake alone that i see this as its sole worth But with reality being supplanted daily will soul no longer have the fertile ground? I don’t know, but i think i have responded with a camera in a very significant way and for 43 years, so on a picture level i am certain that time will tell.

Art saved your life only so you can ruin mine? If it’s a haven for dysfunctional being, it’s not my art. And if that’s not too highfalutin or not hip enough, at a minimum, i truly have dug into life and lived, forcing relativity. An environment based ultimately on individual achievement and taste, to name but two of its characteristics, is not built for that sort of relativity. “It’s a garden wall.” That’s Leon Golub explaining things to me in the lobby of a Brooklyn Museum where i was sent to take his picture. He knew me from doing the same thing at his home on LaGaurdia Place for a documentary project, and was explaining what he knew so well, making giant violent political art that got hyper-valued into places notably far removed from its subjects. So he should know that it’s a garden wall and that’s not anywhere near what i do. And i’ve been made to feel more like the low paid gardener or maintenance person, than any sort of artist.

It’s a job in the best sense of the word, and even the word, photographer, has always sounded foreign to me, as i am pretty much disconnected from it, as well as art in general. I think that’s one of the good things from throwing away 15 years of filmmaking, that, at one time, i did love. I don’t love what i do and that helps. I can produce multiple books of pictures for years and never see a print or proof, let alone have friends who are photographers or artists, mixing it up in an art scene, club or gallery. I never really have been to galleries or museums. The camera is a tool. The social end of it, what do i know? I’m not kidding, i work, but i’m not stupid, the social is required for promotions in arts and entertainment, businesses where artists pronounce their love for each other in transactional discourses, and just plain high from getting to do your thing.

Having to bury a film career wasn’t much of a choice, being forced to do so by the disordered circus of ambitions described here, that than bloomed into, not just swiping an evolved hard-earned and valuable culture, but swiping my home and source of work.

I never made the mistake that art or entertainment had any answers. There are people with disorders of all sorts that find a place there but still inflict wounds on people around them, and, perhaps have seen me as an empty vessel to relieve themselves in. When art is therapy i definitely don’t trust it. Reproducing physical truth, if anything, can physically or emotionally hurt you or enhance you. I’ve made other mistakes though. I got a bit suckered on the level of art being a more constant repository than my own life would be. It would be nice to have something archived, that’s my goal, not the success that normally gets the work a chance at being archived. But i haven’t looked to any institution for any other reason than that. As for providing something to live on, i went out and took care of that on my own. As a result of my independence, and the price of its disconnection from the art world, i am left with a large pile of work that still can’t be put to rest yet, but still feels very dumpster-ready, and to be real about it that’s where i think it’s headed.

And certainly the “known-ness” thing, itself, would not do much good for work that’s based on anonymity. And, let’s face it, the time saved by not campaigning for shows, attending them, art fairs and schmoozing, and not doing the party part of art and socializing translates into at least doubling your output, that’s if production is the goal. The time spent in fun and schmoozing, that’s ultimately attached to the traditional quid pro quo business model, i just pumped into more work.

And to someone who only works, it seems like more awards, partying, art fairs, festivals, openings and even the middle class dream of “genius.” I guess it’s here one experiences the joys of art, particularly when enshrined in a lavish museum environment or gallery in a relaxed party-lite atmosphere. Got suckered thinking art is a place more constant than a mortal memory, which it is, but it is also so separate from what i am trying to remember. Way too social, on the business as friends level, since i never look to friends that way. Preservation would be great, but at the cost of being attached to such pretension, even architectural grandeur doesn’t seem to suit the times. The art of the ancients and everything up until modern times, probably deserves to be shown and stored in a heroic monumental structures, rivaling religious architecture and ever slicker designs and new materials. But certain art, i don’t know, conceptual? A lot of it, and i wish i went to expensive amusement parks only to verify this, might be outdone by Disney. Even roadside attractions can be more interesting. The funky old ones showed pretty wild stuff. But, what do i know?

I only know this – work every day producing books which take from five years to a lifetime to create, as well as, hustle to earn the money to fund the work, then, upon completion, lay it in the archive. I do not spend time, like a politician, building a consensus for the genius of my work, because it’s wrong and if i did my fate and history dictates a really bad experience. Not hard to figure, a source artist cannot be part of it by definition, i guess. Nor a shaman, or a soldier in his or her role.

Realistically, after seeing the whole life to death cycle in intimate detail too much for my own good, and too many times, specifically knowing what happens to us all in too real detail – my work will be deposited to the landfill. And why not, our waste is probably some of our most archival materials. My ambition will always be to have my work stored at Yucca Mountain, along with our finest and most dangerous waste, but, by producing too real reality products the local landfill seems more realistic, at least, when considered relative to our time.

WNM was put together in 2012 during my final months in my former home for life, and during my migration to the Bronx. (It was ultimately five forced moves within three years, for someone who just never moves) It’s completely different from my other books in the sense it’s pure satire, and it’s also different in my desire to have a say in this. (I cannot believe i just wrote that i had to move five times in three years, but it’s true.)

I paid for everything with blue-collar labor jobs initially, because that’s how i had always been earning my living since the age of sixteen. For ten years, before picking up the camera, that’s all i did. Four years after picking up the camera, i began to freelance, which eventually set me free, but not after continual bouts with labor, until around 1994, when i, thankfully stopped. I don’t have to imagine a camera as a tool, a clock (Barthes) or recorder (Edison), because that’s all it is to me, a machine to operate. And i want to see all types of things different from that, and let art expand, but, again, i’m speaking of the social consequences of what we might think or not think about others who basically know nothing about art, but are still people with rights the same as artists and hipsters. Could be a class thing, as we had Italians, Jews, multiple religions and different cultures and that’s the hyper-local world of Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Hasidim, Polish, Italian, Irish, Black, that all shared a common class.

And i never had to imagine a lot of stuff, like workin hard for nuthin, and everything that comes with it, including, now, displacement at the whim of strangers.

Sometimes it’s folk art, sometimes it’s might be art, sometimes it’s documentary and sometimes i just want to take a stupid picture, or just exercise – to speak categorically. And just overcoming the negative effects of displacement on my shooting, beginning with the theft of my cameras, all the way down to wrecking the spirit that drove the machine, is an art of survival. I’m catholic in approach, and it requires all that can be said to come together in a moment in chaos. It’s a target. How often does the hawk get the kill? Many photographers are this way for a reason. Geico would say, “It’s what they do.” Another thing i give photographers credit for is seeing so much uncategorized difference. And experiencing it, and not opinions, that theorize it from a view of no experience.

Art is vast varied and long. For every member in art’s canon, or its categories, how many have disappeared or were never or rarely heard? I can’t imagine being expert in something that should, by definition, defeat it. As evidence, i offer my work, that, without the who-you-know cross-pollination that is required for success, exists only in my archive. And i can’t imagine ass-sucking, or, to calm down a bit, fakery, either. That should, jeopardize authentic things and destroy what i seek which is authentic things not a name.

Unrecognized work exists in reality, but not conceptually, since it hasn’t entered another’s cranium. What does that tell you about the life of the mind? Making the pop or art map is for many what’s on their mind, is it not?

What should have been a sweet spot is embittered by being too documentary for art and being too art for documentary. That’s my rationale. My audience still, are the subjects i shoot and often hang with. My work also gets more and more pro bono as i get older, where sometimes it seems like that’s all i do. I freely give the work to my subjects to the point of it being a pre-condition to the work, and a very bad habit for myself.

Without thinking, i might have been shooting from the streets up. The unity of the high (light) with the low (my subjects) is pretty much it, and, easily comprehended and enjoyed from the street up. And i would rarely shy from the pleasure of the image. It’s a documentary base that won’t exclude hedonism, my full participation or the joy of doing it for just plain BDNF production. The pleasure of the image, though, is not the same as entertainment, but pleasure from trying to do something justice and it’s the pleasure of the intellect’s choices, guiding a body through the actual physical contact of discovery, and capture that makes a book like a map.

I’m thinking that’s the formula of a source artist when consciousness comes from reaching outside, not inside your head, or, at least having your head informed by what’s real, and around you.

Outside, literally, and without any art connotations, aspirations or connections. I suppose for those who have always been and in, only art, and i know that’s how it’s lived today, will never know what the hell i’m talkin about, though. And, god, i don’t want the argument. As it’s said, leave me be.

But please imagine an art where the shooting is the performance, the art is getting home safely with the worthy artifact. In the jargon of art, i am a – this ain’t no performance artist. What i am saying by all this, i can see things real good where some others’ cannot. You might say it’s my job as a chronicler of unofficial histories.

Twain said, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” Being there, seeing it, you can’t make these things up, as they say. So give a reality artist credit, at least for purposely throwing dice with being wherever is required to be, guaranteeing, at least, half the time you will fail. Sometimes even falling so low as to never make it worth the price. That’s different than smoking pot and drinking craft beer, listening to your favorite music in your home studio because art is about what’s in your mind. No problem, but please recognize our difference.

A friend i’ve known forever, who ran the bar i spent the most time in, upon seeing my work for the first time, and after about 15 years of doing it unknown to my friends, gave its finest critique. Knowing it was good work but has had some trouble along the way as far as exposure to the public, or making a living – smiling, perpetually intoxicated, gesturing wildly, he declared, “It’s too real. It’s…Too Real Reality.” And an art movement is born, in the funkiest ethnic Hungarian bar on the planet, such credibility, too much. The Mike Boros Cafe itself was so real, that today it sits exactly as it always did, only closed since May, 1998, completely empty, but untouched in a place gentrification has yet to come to.

Not advocating to change things. Not avoiding the political, (what i would want for all) it’s just an element i see in the mix. Sometimes a picture or film can change things, if no one sees the work, it’s inconsequential. I compensate by shooting it, hopefully, in a way that will outlast, both gentrification and the demise of the industrial age, and prove in the future, what folks had no eyes nor ears for in the past and will become present over time. Create a memory of resistance, during its collapse, but like it is, knowing it’s soon to be gone, is not like how it’s argued about by people who are invested in it, as most artists or culture professionals are in Brooklyn. “Whoveh hoid of such a thing?”

 

THE JOKE’S ON ME

 

My method insures that this Joke is on me. For instance, in a field with more untitled works than any other, i chose to be specific. In an era of fantasy and subjectivity, and feelings as truth, i chose the real as truth.

The formula for cultural success – like Apple, the design comes first, and things must fit. Then do what comes naturally to us all, something fairly dumb, but entertaining, and possibly quirky, and then, upon its success, do it until death, or possibly a uni-themed aesthetic/conceptual one-liner. The repetition of a successful formula, saying the same thing, sometimes with profound worth attached is seen as suspect when the market is gone, what does that say?

Now that i know the formula it’s too late. Mistakes were made about substance, soul, truth. It’s way too late, i am a failure, even down to losing my home, to the folks who replaced critical thinking with “dislikes” but know their business models and what they “like.” The new experts on the city, weren’t even born when i was documenting changing, disappearing places, and would later lecture me on the nature of New York change, that it’s always changing, in response to being asked to keep the noise down. What is being sold as, the new New York, is a mindset that found nothing wrong with ruining a person’s life as part of your arrival, even when communicated in spoken and written words to the new arrivals. It was the Colin Ferguson moment all over again, just like what i had to put up with in the art world. Only it wasn’t “simply” about my work now, but everything, including my home. It’s called disruption, and today it depends on which end of it you exist – one end has reinvented the city, and on the other end, the city has died.

Talk about your bull shit diversity, and while making a blue-collar neighborhood into an urban middle-class sphere with suburban comforts. It’s relative to reality, or history, and what came before, not what originated in your self-constructed head. This is only the second time i have muttered the word – “diversity” but its exactly, in their terms, what ended upon their arrival.

New York was a city, like many, that was both always changing and remaining the same. You could move to a more modern-minded neighborhood or to a place that was generational, tight-knit and completely stabile.

And thanks for that neurological disorder, Mr. and Mrs. Hipster. Your contributions to the science of torture techniques, breaking down a human, every injury making it more difficult to defend one’s life against the Hipster Plague – the Hitchcokian Swarm that found its way to Brooklyn.

And speaking of changing New York, and losing valuable things, Williamsburg, and each of its ethnic enclaves went back many generations, very unusual, even before the bridge was built, as opposed to the West Bronx with classic ethnic sections but ones that flip ethnicity in one or two generations, particularly in the crowded West Bronx, where, by nature, no one sticks around through multiple generations. (wonder why?) That’s what’s rare about those old ethnic places like Williamsburg – it went back 150 years.

In the Bronx you will find the cheapest real estate and rent. In the Bronx, then, you will find the most poor. That was true in Williamsburg for 160 years. I guess in modern times, the rich now follow the poor.

To put it briefly and upfront – the one who documented displacement more than just about anyone, and with a compass, got displaced, classically so, complete with years of humiliations. Thus this joke is on me in a big way.

The new economy forced me to convert, not just all my production and shooting, but my archive to digital format. That includes, the tossing of all the equipment (replacements for stolen cameras) for new digital technology (money) learning the equipment to make it do what i want, and, particularly, scanning, processing and editing 40 years of film work (time) to convert it into a digital medium – it consumes all your resources. And, yeah, the digital camera is quick and efficient and can do anything in the field. With regards to post-production and general expenses, it’s four times the time and five times the money. Further shutting out the uneducated, the very folks who might have something to say about all this, and, for me, it robs so much time from shooting it hurts. I’m not kidding the money and time that technical matters consume, take tons of resources from production and is antithetical to the skills and mindset of dealing with the outside unpredictable world of chance and chaos that is fundamental to the craft. It’s antithetical, ironically.

And the clincher is that film is still better quality than digital, with the latter surpassing film in most other concerns, but that main one. And, honestly, in an already technical art it has become too technical for its own good. Similar to gentrification, speaking from a highly experienced place, to be a photographer takes way too much money, and the education part too. There is now a built-in exclusion to it that, in turn, must effect it.

And that’s the high end, and the high expensive road of photography. There are net possibilities, though, for pictures, and, of course, a free degree from the University of Google. Digital shooting is built for the screen, really, not the frame. But still good for books.

Compounding further, it becomes difficult to pay for it all, since your profession, at least a way to make money at it, has vanished, and not just in journalism. Or just harvest off Instagram, Flickr or any picture farming site. Today i expect, journalistically, my picture to be harvested, released with maybe my credit, if i’m lucky, let alone being compensated for it.

During these years of conversion to digital photography, i was serenaded with the music i always avoided, as my home fell apart before my eyes. I learned, through loudspeakers, 12 hours a night, that Michael Jackson and Madonna were hip, and so was success and anything digital. To be fair “cooler” music was also blasted – Elvis Costello or Talking Heads. But from where some stand, there ain’t much difference. Near the end of its run a Sunday afternoon event was to adore classic boomer rock, such as Bob Dylan. Pillows were strewn on the floor and the audience would lay about and groove on one vinyl album, like Blood on the Tracks. They paid for this, and, no matter what they did, there had to be musical noise.

Operations like converting your film archive to digital, producing books, all the technical things necessary for my job, not to mention earning a living, are almost impossible in good times, but when you, for periods of time have to live out of your car, even though i have a lease on a home i already lived in for thirty years, the physical discomfort and mind-bending absurdity becomes too much. But the car and motels had no hipsters, artists, sometimes less noise. That situation is the worst.

By 2006, this wasn’t about sacrificing it all for an allegedly hip zip code, or doing it all for art and self-expression. If a city has become that goofy stupid and greedy, ya gotta leave. Certainly by 2003 it wasn’t my scene, and it became as simple as now my only love for a neighborhood was based solely on cheap rent.

But facing, for the first time, the reality of being priced out in what is for me, a strange new world of finding a home in New York. I never looked for another place to live, since the days of shake your hand deals, no credit or criminal check, just rent the dump, pay in cash and on time. Having to prove that, at a minimum, i made 60,000 a year to qualify for a 1500 per month Queens apartment, was gonna be difficult. If anyone has been paying attention, i lost my means of making money back in 2004, first, with 15 months of no sleep, then my cameras and lenses stolen, i didn’t go digital, stayed analog (art), so in 2004 i was the only photographer in New York that was entirely non-digital, staying that way until 2012 when i purchased my first digital rig. Wasn’t freelancing, making money, as my family required long term care – the downward slide of my home situation were also the years of my family’s slow descent to their own deaths entirely. That’s how i can find hipsters as soulless and with the bad timing and lacking the rhythm of life that they are known for, at least if you’re still real. But i will always remember them as the Big Players in loss – my tools, my home, my health, my entire neighborhood, my family and best friends.

For eight years i was lucky to make 12,000 a year, as i spent easily ten months of the year trying to help keep my parents going. And now, in 2012, at the age of sixty, i have five months, to find a healthy apartment to live until i die, that i now do not qualify for, and, in Bloomberg’s New York?

Making the Big Move on me the day of my 60th birthday, the next lease giving me senior rights, was that age discrimination? And, in moving to many sections of the Bronx, like everyone else, for its cheap rent, do you think i ran into any other forms of discrimination? There were pressing matters then, like finding a home by a deadline, and it numbed that truth, but i clearly clocked it.

That other compounding factor, the slow death of my family, the fight to keep them going, also began with the hyper-gentrification and lasted through most of it. Toss in the death of my best friend, too. It’s a long story, but that’s actually the worst of it, as it finally ruined anything good that may have come from caring to the death for the last ones who ever would care for me.

And the worst experience in gentrification, was having the experience of the last years of my family’s life, screwed up by what was going on in Williamsburg, stamping me with something i never asked for or had anything to do with, or didn’t deserve, but nevertheless stamping me. And just so i’m heard – the most important valuable, but tragic, event in anyone’s life, including mine, was completely fucked up from having the added devastation – loss of job and loss of home dumped on me, at the worst possible time – and by hipsters and landlords, directly and consciously. And it was worse for others.

No bitching, blowing off steam, certainly not self-expressing, but an examination with proof of a subject that only museum administrators or celebrities or those who benefit from it, get to talk about, or at least be heard. The pain or benefit is distributed along job titles and earnings. The rarely thought of pain associated with largely uneducated blue-collar people in cities once dominated by them, as they lose their home base, is a benefit to those that can take advantage of it, affording to catch the wave that sweeps so successfully that not a drop of what came before, during 150 years of industry, remains, particularly in the character department.

I think it absurd that any accomplished professional, who respects all professions, doing what i do, who should be an asset for any city, is forced to crawl like a pig as he approaches his “retirement” years, under the terms of gentrification in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Hipsters armed with their parent’s money, invade, take over your neighborhood, destroy your job, health and life, and so be it, the new disorder. And that’s just the hipster element – then the developers and a landlord who sniffed the undeniable presence of the parents’ money, and got so high as to forget basic rights, without which, a person will croak, living unhappily until the end. The alternative, then, is to move.

Source artist – please construct me that category, and to make it entertaining you can present me as someone who, might be perceived as nervous, but that’s only because hipsters, artists, landlords and developers put a steel garbage can over my head and beat it continually for nine years. I tried to put that in an entertaining and satirical way, so i don’t upset the ice cream cart, but by the time you make sixty years old, trauma like this, over a period of nine years could attract Oliver Sachs’ attention even from the neurological void he now inhabits.

Colin Ferguson: “Mr. RealStill, just an observation, but you seem nervous.” Mr. RealStill: “Yes, that’s correct, and to clarify, while in the presence of anyone who cannot listen or hear, or otherwise has a personality disorder, primarily self-involvement, so vile and complete, that it can effect my life then, yes i might appear nervous. But it’s anger. And being respectful, i keep it unexpressed, so as we don’t upset the ice cream cart. Does that answer your question, that you surely are not listening to, since you are clinically and obviously screwed up to the point of absolute delusion. Does that answer your question, Mr. Ferguson?”

“Again, Mr. RealStill, my observations of you lead me to believe you are quite a nervous individual, perhaps one who does not listen to what others say.” Mr. RealStill: “That’s exactly what i’m saying, you are so wrapped up in yourself, even the most basic function of real communication is blocked by the simple fact you cannot even listen to what i am saying, and who the fuck are you tallkin to, i operate and can see from the other’s point of view at the drop of a hat.”

Unofficial histories, truer, because they are specific but less arguable, is where i have ended up. Not to have to argue with a schizophrenic about my earned, evaluated and tested perceptions, is eventually where i would want to be the rest of my life. And i am there – now that i’m back in an artless place without the likes of the gossiping self-expressive Fred Ferguson contingent.

It’s outsider art without the mental illness, and literally just outside, that’s it. That’s where i find all my answers, outside. Up until WNM, i was anti-gentrification like Walker Evans was anti-celebrity. But, by also living with honest working folk, as opposed to professional artists, i differ from him as well, and so many others. I live there.

 

🔊 Joe Brick, an 86 year old brick recycler at his job. Joe gets up early every day to clean and save bricks, outdoors, all the time, in all weather with only a barrel fire, every day. His wife died from covid in January, 2021, and he finally kicked back, but, only after a heart attack, that has kept him home now (2023). People get inspiration in different ways reflecting interests and character. All living things are creative by their nature and making things is nothing too special. Joe’s art is his garden which takes up all of his backyard, and has numerous bricks, of course, forming paths to Joe’s numerous crops.

Work of art? It’s Joe’s peaches.

A long time ago, after ceasing all attempts to make some sort of living at my specific work or “art” i jettisoned that concept and proceeded to produce book after book, the way i had always done it – work and get the money then make the book, which, upon completion, would be buried as a preference to being ignored, and certainly as my record states, insulted. In fact i made numerous books where i never even bothered to make a proof or print from the negatives, until around 2002, when i decided to start printing, you would think to get the work exposed.

And that was the year that my neighborhood began to hyper-gentrify. My building was sold to the greedy non-neighborhood in-law, whose goal was money and at the top of that money list was the removal of his longest and cheapest tenant. Master had bought the building i lived in from the father-in-law. But Master had no connection to Williamsburg, beyond the love of money that could be made there in rents, and to say, “I own two buildings in Williamsburg.” If you’re from Queens, that means Middle Village to Malba, and at an early age. Like a painter wanting be shown at the MET, his ambitions are unstoppable, and he’s gotta have it, which happens to be my home.

Great timing, after laying so low for so long with my work, when i decided to start printing, and thus expose it, a bunch of hipsters, many of whom wanted to be artists, some photographers came to my neighborhood and really fucked things up. It’s where they debated whether ruins photography was “cool.”

There was the Beach-Russ Plant on Union Avenue at Frost Street. Beach-Russ made industrial pumps going back to the 1800s. This building in Williamsburg was a living museum of machinery, dating back a hundred years, making their 60s Warner & Swasey machine tools look ultramodern. There were rolling machines that were worked by hand, and many vintage machine tools. Beach-Russ closed not from lack of profit, but because it could profit so much by selling the plant to developers to be torn down for condos.

I never thought about shooting it, let it disappear. Instead i would travel 500 miles and shoot such scenes elsewhere. Part of it was it was home, and by shooting it then i couldn’t take it for granted, since all this stuff was such a fixture, having walked by it maybe 30,000 times.

 

It took nine years to be worn down enough, not to bother to fight the final battle, that may have finally won the war. I’ll never know, although at the time every housing attorney was saying that under the rules of the game in 2012, it was legalized eviction. (my lease would run out before Deblasio, and at the time, the front-runner was Quinn who was a major player in rezoning my hood for development back in 2005). But so be it, just flee it, was the only answer all along.

My specific way requires me to be there, respect it, then tell it like it is, not entirely from my perspective, but from others, without baloney, not for now, but how it is to be seen when it’s gone. It’s 40 years of solid documentation, on the subject of disappearance in urban, particularly, industrial neighborhoods, from the birth of the Rust Belt in 1978, through the era of hyper-gentrification whose core are the technocrati of the west coast and the professional artists of the east coast. And through it, Williamsburg was my base of operations, being so stubbornly blue-collar it would be a Stronghold, as all those places pictured vanished.

Living outside art and inside a milieu i depict, by managing the time wisely on production, and not on building a consensus for years, to be an official blip on the culture map, while doing all its maintenance, allowed for two lifetimes of work at a minimum. Fully recognizing it as, something out of my control, and completely against my will, my archive will go to the landfill. And i know a ton about landfills, dumps and toxic waste sites, where i have spent a lot of quality time, in real and metaphorical terms. Our wastes, ironically, are our most archival material, that just won’t go away. The Yucca Mountain Museum of High Art, if i were a hedge fund billionaire, is where i would keep my investment, particularly subjects prone to decay – stuffed sharks and color film. Poor-ass photographers who cannot afford such a facility, particularly those who used color negative, that is guaranteed to fade, need to hook up with the hedge fund community and do some ass-sucking quick, to get what’s disappeared in American cities this last 40 years preserved, at least for history, in a suitable climate controlled environment.

I have spent my time depicting first, the loss of places from economic decline, and, then, places that were wiped out by economic redevelopment. While doing that, and struggling to pay bills, and keep my one family alive, it was complicated by not just simple displacement, but the new scientifically and legally modified hyper-gentrification. (The Greenpoint/Williamsburg Contextual Rezoning of 2005) It would forever stamp my psyche, with the memory of the rotten baloney, that i had successfully isolated myself from for an entire life, until artists and hipsters invaded the Stronghold, and it was impossible to avoid, particularly while inside your living room, bedroom and kitchen – in your little railroad flat of a home in Brooklyn.

We ghost dance now, and it ain’t “cool.”

Urban displacement before gentrification was the result of eminent domain, wars, famine, drought, the next new big poor ethnic group moving in and threats by organized crime. It is too ironic that the antipode to every one of those categories took over and call the shots in the old blue-collar neighborhoods of Brooklyn, but the level of pain is the same, while the embarrassment is overwhelming, and the old tools of warfare just don’t work with Mom and Dad’s money.

Documenting displacement and getting displaced, it’s all long-term, capturing whole blue-collar worlds that fell, before and after the Williamsburg debacle. And how i managed to save almost all my archive, in my home’s planned ruin, and it’s organic descent, is miraculous, staving off its eventual dumping in a landfill, not of my choice. Many thousands of images, with both an historical and a wow factor, all of which are better than the ones in WNM. WNM was only done for the hell of it, and, accurately, that hell turned out to be gentrification many years later, but while i’m still living there.

If i removed any pictures from my living room wall i would see my neighbor’s bedroom, that, by the way, was just about the only good practical use i have found for my framed prints. Merely touching any electrical “conduit” or insulation over the hot wires and it would turn to powder. Often we would have no heat or hot water for days, and, before the broke windows were finally blown entirely out, i would typically find snow draped on my couch in the winter. This is before gentrification, which, then made it much worse. The new landlord laid down the “law” and i would not be permitted to make the repairs i had been doing. Legally, it was only the Master’s job, who, of course, wouldn’t fix anything, as an incentive for my departure. Now it wasn’t a matter of just the cheap-ass Italian landlord, and working man, but the son-in-law who was the Little Trump with no attachment to Williamsburg. The one with the police pension and health benefits our taxes pay for. He loved Queens and not Manhattan, had no ethnicity per se, or, at least, identified genuinely with money, property and Malba, Queens over everything.

Gentrification is destruction, for anyone who stayed, or were stuck there, because they had affordable rent in an unaffordable city and were now stuck there permanently under uninhabitable terms, because no affordable apartments exist, except through forced displacement out of the borough, in my case our city’s cheapest and poorest. I know no other perspective, and i do know there are many more who went down the same road, and we all ended up in the same displacement. People move to the West Bronx because it is cheap – plenty of no-fee rentals, and rent stabilized cribs most at the preferred lower rate due to the absence of any gentrification jacking up rents, by sucking up supply.

The years of displacement were preceded, by “peaceful” years of simply trying to stay out of the way of post-modern “strategies” including appropriation, which, if your work is real, or lived or original in that way, can kill it – and the author. The art mutterers, muttering some fairly moronic terms, for and by people who grew up in and around, basically, images, and then were highly educated in images, appear that way both then and now, at least to a source artist who both stuck to and evolved his guns. In retrospect, saying pictures only represent other pictures or are all equal in their fictive nature, is a soft, even condescending position towards representation, but only viewed from outside of the art perspective, where i’m from. Sometimes pictures represent a foundation that goes no further than the earth and its possibilities which for any one of us is limited by time. An innocent example is when a person loses everything through the dementia of neurological disorders, a few years from imminent death, and finding themselves in a small room in a nursing home, where the final possessions are some necessities like clothing and many photographs of time, people and place. Proving pictures’ first worth, is probably its final one. That’s not conceptual, just forced true by proximity to expiration, not unlimited possibilities, over-education, too much information or whatever all this pretending that we aren’t mortal is called.

How have all these ideas and strategies of the educated evolved into a real privileged position? I’m thinking my home was took, blue-collar Williamsburg wiped out, by people with no memory, no history of the place they were about reinvent, but definitely had an identifiable mindset. The copy of the copy was absorbed into the philosophy of the perpetual remake, that in its most brutal form – the brand, the franchise and the sequel – is particularly numbing. Coming to Brooklyn to reinvent/ redevelop their image or cultivate their desires, colonists bring with them the purest simulacrum, forgetting some very convenient things, like assuming maybe there’s no source to anyone else’s voice or pictures, but college. Even if you can see and hear me in your face, “I have to work, your noise has kept me up for days, also, my family is dying and need my help, please, let me sleep.” Particularly under these circumstances i really don’t wanna view your tattoos or the crack of your smelly waxed ass, let alone be subjected to your taste in music, bad seventies and eighties fashions, and your glorification of vinyl and film, for all the wrong reasons – particularly inside my home. I said inside my home. Of course there’s gonna be people who argue that, and they are particularly moronic, but that’s not a majority rules thing, because it’s true, even if you’re the last person left saying it.

Tattoos, butt fashion, even the formerly most derogatory slang for descendants of slaves, gets flipped, upside down – one of the few flipping events that’s justifiable, easy to understand and is packed with meaning. So much so that a huge double-standard exists that can’t be broken in light of history. And it’s all a conceptual process and an ally to expanding commerce, providing “purpose” (the time spent between birth and death) in the mental territories that direct our opinions and spending, not necessarily our progress.

Now here i am back in Stage One of the simulacrum, while trained art photographers are literally born into Stage Three, and by the time i’m understanding it all, they and their children are living La Vida Simulation somewhere beyond Stage Four, while i try to just stay alive in my city and keep my archive from disintegrating.

Nevertheless, always, after it’s all been said, the urban explorer, the urban pioneer, and then the settlers, discover what Columbus did – a land inhabited for what’s proven to be 15,000 years by hundreds of tribes and millions of people, that had names for everything already tied to a lived history…oh, what’s the use?

But maybe you would have to be out here to see it, and i’m not that far gone, in fact, it’s just da Bronx, out on main land. But in people’s minds, in Brooklyn, the Bronx is nowhere. In people’s minds is their existence, but outside it’s real. It’s a catholic experience (universal) as your mind is but one amongst many millions, you realize it and act accordingly.

Never react – only act, is the only way to be, but survival tested that, and consumes whatever pity the inexperienced may deserve. But make no mistake about it, the world and the world of experience is here, can be accessed freely and is transformative in a way that fictive starting points or conceptual pursuits never are. There is a price to pay, too, that’s part of the whole deal in the category of, this-ain’t-no-performance-art or documentary as experience.

 

IN VITA REALI

 

There is a huge problem with molesting the good works of RealStill. I don’t agree with celebrity or overvaluations and uncritical praise. Violations, particularly over 43 years of professional life, as one ages, become more and more damaging. The tragedy of hyperthymesia is that you have almost perfect recall for all memories – good, bad and ruinous.

My last contact with art was 2013 and six years past this episode, it’s as fresh in my memory as it would simply for the gross considerations, but, in fact, it was so stupid it rose to the level of gross molestation. As a metaphor, imagine a person who was molested upon every contact with their clergy, suffered from it, but could handle it by running away from it. While turning homeless and looking for a home years later, he comes across a priest who says he can help. He explains that’s what they all said, but then went ahead anyways, while saying that, if abused again, and, one more time, it will be the last and i will never enter a church again, even though it’s because of my beliefs,  and certainly not because i get my kicks from molesting what should be, at the least, honored. Since members of institutional art or religion, commonly called organized, are sometimes hypocrites, my situation became – i always wanted to like art, but it always talked or molested me out of it with contact.

Permanently alienated from art – no choice there, as art, and, now, with gentrification, has ruined all i care most about. Of course, if i got it all ruined and had to start over again at the age of 60 that would include the most significant and valuable things beginning with health, home, family and work, plus everything else, smaller things like losing my address, phone number, cameras, life-long friends and on and on.

Why would i participate in a deadly irony, and, then get gang-pressed into it? Ambition, or a sometimes uncontrolled need to express? I presume artists wear a necklace of humiliations by the time they make it. I’ve tried not to, but the last show and straw would be because Mr. Fred Valentine’s sick, immature, molesting narcissism that is based on his own molestations, that, when in the presence of truth, easily self-resorts to his learned, tried and true ugly-mommie skills, while feeling sorry for himself.

I can also easily prove it’s all about names, and schmoozing, not content, at least not mine, but that’s easy to discern already, unless you wanna make it, in which case, one sublimates it into the schmooze, flipping the put-downs to charm. Beyond that, i can also prove a hell of a lot of other things that i am saying, because they’re things, not concepts, lived out, experienced and documented.

I made a huge mistake – RealStill agreed to a show, one where the unknown RealStill with mountains of done work, and the known and want-to-be-known, were juxtaposed and i got a chance to do another “experiment” which i began to call any contact with A & E since 1989. I went in, though, with an open mind, but it ended a Trojan Horse-like episode where, admitted into deep art, i can gut it critically, but using art itself to do so. But i’m not Tom Wolfe or John Hughes in the sense i am, technically, one hell of an artist – a reality artist. This should make RealStill imminently dangerous. I just call it truth.

It was during displacement, far beyond stressed and exhausted, and in complete grief-mode by the recent loss of family in one year, and was looking for a place to live in full displacement-mode – i agreed to a two person show, while repeatedly saying i had vowed to never do a two person or group shows. The other person is an art star. RealStill is completely unknown. Nothing at all to do with the art star fellow i was juxtaposed with, rather the problem lies with the juxtaposer who, naturally, just can’t get it – the object isn’t to schmooze, but produce.

A gallery owner i met doing grunt work in Chicago, who i have known longer than anyone in New York with the exception of his wife, a man who is a ball of dysfunction sublimated to entertainment, i ran into, after 25 years, through displacement in 2012, while looking for a home. He is Monsignor Fred, a high priest of art that is his and many others’ religion, and a place where names like Roma and Close received their excommunication orders recently. A fact – molestors, molest in a power trip and some because they have been molested, while others molest from ambitions. Unfortunately character flaws are the quirks of art currency and considered positive even while inflicting harm  while creating their art district wombs, zoned to protect the wishes of the urban dwelling artist.

He has a gallery in the next trending neighborhood, close to where i was supposed to get another apartment at a great rate, actually set up by my landlord. While walking past his gallery/home on a Saturday night i knocked on his door to inform him that, most likely, i would be less than a mile away – displaced out of Williamsburg. Upon opening the door and seeing me he spit out, at me, whatever was in his mouth which was a mixture food and craft beer. Like George Bush ducking the thrown shoe, i quickly evaded an unhealthy situation, particularly for him. It’s dangerous for anyone in the real world to have contact with people who live mostly in a room, of non-stop self-expression, comments, jokes, craft beer and weed, which functions as kind of womb – at least relative to the larger reality in which the rest of us all live and surely gets wrecked, through contact with the extremely self-involved, or, as they say, super selfie-involved.

Ya know what? Just that alone – this moron who i never did anything to or spoke against, tried spitting shit in my face while high, his inhibitions unblocked and his personal truth of me laid bare – in 1988 i invited him to my home to watch Paris Texas and he had a nervous breakdown, so i made sure to avoid him after that. Spitting in my face? 43 years of non-stop production and this? Would he have done it if i had a name? Of course nothing like this would have happened with the name, it would have been smiles with piles. To make it in the art world, it’s all about who you know, so folks are more than willing to accept all sorts of humiliations.

I should have left, normally i would have, but there was something different. I was now out of  the place i had lived in and for most of my life, and, at the age of 60, was just starting over again, and in desperate need for an apartment, in months i would have no home. Anyways, we talked, i later dropped off five books, he, then, wanted to do a show, i agreed, although he is a painter and this was a gallery of mostly that. I should never have stopped by that night. My contact with art is few and far between, but this will be the last. He listened to nothing for months. He never heard me. Every time i would attempt to straighten some falsehood or misconception out, he would deepen the falsehoods and misconceptions that he was inventing before my eyes, by either reminding him of a story of himself, or leading to pontifications about every little thing. Has anyone ever told him that hardly anyone cares? I know no one cares about myself or my opinions.

Not getting, in any way, shape or form my work, and reacting by essentially calling me an asshole behind my back to his same quid pro quo segment that would be at his show, not mine. Yeah, at this ripe age, if i’m around conspiracy theorists, nazis, the pc-adled, reality tv stars like Jesse Ventura (who, he told me is his kind of politician) or an A & E crowd of liars and pompous assholes with Trump sized reality tv star egos, than, yes, i do get loud, nervous and stressed, as i fight their bull shit off with my machine gun mouth, that a slo-mo recording of – would certainly find more truth per word than has ever been expressed in a trending neighborhood gallery.

Since i have run from this world for a long time, i have a long, short string of humiliations. It’s more like a train leaving on a journey with fewer and fewer stations, until, following logical conclusions, there are none. I produced only work for a good solid 30 year stretch, damngood years of production, and just had two episodes with art during that, after no contact from 1989 to a show in 2006 by my own free will. A 2006 show wasn’t bad, although gossip-as-mode of thought, was there. Then, in 2009, and, in 2012, while desperately trying to get back on my feet in the process of finally getting the boot from Williamsburg, two ambitious members of the A & E industry reminded me once more that contact had passed distraction and had become disruption of the most offensive sort. That would be molestation while in forced displacement, grief and loss that leaves a lasting mark.

Coincidentally two big molestors – the two Last Straws, i had met, long ago in Chicago – Quinn and Valentine – and you could call them, Chicago people, one of whom, Mr. Valentine, moved to New York, saw it and made his “Five Year Plan” in the eighties, or my family will leave, and return to our Amish life-style in Illinois, by way of Columbus, Ohio when it was a city of hillbillies. It took a lot longer to schmooze to a position of lording over future artists trying to make it in New York, by virtue of helping to change Williamsburg into an art colony. Self-invented assholes erect the ego it takes to get a little name. The two Last Straws got that way from their terrible timing, because their combinations of self-absorption and ego have left them soulless and unconnected. But no more so, than so many in arts and entertainment. As two of many A & E ‘hos and ne’er-do-wells, they are everyone and no one. Self-proclaimed experts of art like Mary Boone, and all of us, are examples. Anyways the grand inconsiderations of these two middle-class artists of our time – the Two Last Straws – at this late stage, were highly destructive – not listening and bad timing – the hallmarks of today’s artist, they had mastered so well. Someone requests not to be treated like an asshole during displacement, etc., and i have to cater to your special needs? The special needs people’s starting point is a conceit, so strong that even a common shared language is of no use. The value of Trump is that people instantly know what i am talking about. When you’re broke, literally feeding your Mother while she is dying in hospice, and, after informing all to stay away, i get a call from a straw man about shelling out my work for free, and, am told, by this one, of his deadline? More about this other Last Straw later at the end of this book. When you realize someone exists in your business that is not transactional to the hilt, yet proceed carelessly, you put yourself at risk ethically. Capish?

It’s embarrassing to recount and describe my destruction in this book, let alone, getting ultra-specific and empirical, with the old macro and micro analysis concerning the ignorance i speak of at work in the mindset for art and gentrification that also exposes my own molestation at their hands while experiencing the overwhelming disruption of displacement. Just a very few of these A & E professionals resulted in enough damage to end things – two name brands and, for instance, a wannabe with a developing name, named Carl Gunhouse – a New Jersey suburban aging ivey-leagued hipster who is another transplant to changing Greenpoint who, calling on his road map of names, trashed me completely, while he calls Father Valentine, “rad” of all things. This is New York? And what has remade Brooklyn? It doesn’t feel like New York anymore. Most importantly, this is evidence, proof and not a concept or opinion about something, you will have to ask the likes of Father Gumpy Valentine for that. His expertise is that he has an opinion about everything. It’s called uncontrolled expression. Do they know it sounds like sucking straws that always mistake themselves for lack of a better word, melodious, while sucking in a glass whose contents have been emptied already.

This ain’t The Internet Research Agency that helped elect Trump via Russia, or the internet itself, nor is it an opinion, but it happened in real time, was thoroughly documented and, because it was of such great hurt, humiliation and stupidity at the absolute worst time of my life, it got embedded permanently and accurately in my memory machine, a finely tuned well-maintained eidetic instrument i use to cast light to truth and capture it. Using specific people, brand names in art and media, that i know quite well, i offer truth about them and their self-constructed world, by actually, of all things, naming names that are attached to the weirdest, and not in any good sense, moments of my life.

I use the metaphor of the empty vessel of deep pure clear cold water, as symbolic of the main problem i have had with interaction with an art and entertainment world, polluted by its contradictions rooted in self-involvement. In other words, upon seeing a vessel pure of this mess, my fellow artists, have been known to proceed to relieve themselves, pissing and shitting on me, my work and life. But i could control that by running from it culminating over a period of 43 years, into illegal, immoral and entirely unethical displacement, but they really like the work. They know a good picture when they see one, but not how to connect its source, but they do know a good picture when they see one.

 

MO MEDIA

 

Never have pictures been believed so much, or doubted. People routinely get locked up on surveillance camera evidence alone, yet the moon landing and Sandy Hook can be seen as a hoax. In art, “The old myth that photographs tell the truth has succumbed to the new myth that they don’t.” is a great comment by the late Alan Sekula many years ago. Truthers go too far and truth seekers are devalued.

And there has never been so many images, delivered so well and fast, and freely. Camera advancement still marches to the technical ideal of resolution, clarity and definition, in order to produce seemingly the most “real” of shots, that can also be the most manipulated of images. From its inception as a quasi-scientific instrument it immediately branched between two extremes – fantasy and reality, and everything in between. I think that a lot of our advanced photographic thought about it being simply another fiction, forgets faithful recording and subjective manipulation were born with the instrument, and it was really cinema that intuitively figured that out from the get-go. It was only photography that, generally speaking, stuck to its reality guns, more that its fantasy ones for so damn long. And now that it discovered what cinema knew for 120 years, they’ve gone nuts with “photographic” abstractions and justifications that digital means fiction from the get-go. Digital, far easier to manipulate than film, still leaves it in the hand of the operator and publisher who do what they want with a technical instrument and not the other way around. The tool of my art changes and so does its purpose if i let it.

The two words, social and media, for me, kinda run along these lines, not quite sensible. Long ago, in 1989 knowing the media inside out, i fled. Now, as if just using a digital camera and a computer isn’t radical enough, i’m supposed to socialize with or through media, and buy into this techno-myth. Just because something is the future doesn’t make it right. Just because something is legal doesn’t make it ethical. But if it’s funny and entertaining at least you can get away it. If it’s generating tons of money like facebook, you can get away with monopolistic practices and fraud. just wear your sorry suit, act like an actor and pretend before congress.

Digital photography changed everything about shooting the real, just as much as providing an opportunity for completely camera-less computer generated images. With regards to shooting the real, digital changed everything, but not to the extent that the change crowd wants to dramatize – the machine changed dramatically but did the Truth? With digital i can shoot much more from the hip since endless shots are the price of only electricity. Ironically digital has made me more of a street photographer and i regularly shoot on cloudy and dreary days because it wants that for light. Weirdly, now, if i would go back i would have done a hell of a lot more simple snapshots of the times, rather than always going for an arty shot, thus, digital, the great manipulator you can’t trust, i guess they think you can’t control it, but, in fact digital made RealStill more real.

When your actual presence is required, that’s really nothing like a presence in front of a screen, or wall art or anything made up, reinvented, copied, mimicked or redeveloped. That’s why the working title of this essay was The Broken Shoulder Essay. You get the picture. Thank god i don’t have a need to depict actual grizzly bears, overseas combat, or commercial products. Although i did find the need to, off and on, for years, depict significant toxic waste zones. One of the most polluted waterways in America in North Greenpoint and East Williamsburg is where i found the stinkiest, most poisonous waters i had ever seen and smelled and i am an expert in the field. Ironically, colorful, even attractive in their vile blooms on the water, which always reminded me, not of any environmental concern, but how it fit an image of the art and media complex, that i couldn’t get rid of at the time.

When i say that as i did in a place i never am – a gallery, particularly one in a another gentrifying zone, filling up with artists priced out of Williamsburg  just down Metropolitan Avenue, as expressed to Fred “Gumpy” Valentine, in his gallery which is the front portion of his home, i got the predictable response of no acknowledgment, but it did remind him of a story about himself. Mr. Venue, whose gallery is a womb, the way our bedrooms or living rooms are for all of us, but so much more. Another self-named business that is truthfully living up to its name. That of a hillbilly from Columbus, Ohio. But i’ll say it again, when i did my 25 year look at Newtown Creek, the deep pollution shots, for myself, were not representative of my neighborhood in peril from toxic waste, but poisonous people. – the A & E crowd who are like preening tarantulas. For instance, attractive, well-educated members of the cool and hip creative class destroy what you love or humiliate you at every turn. Proof is everywhere in too many events like this – Gumpy never returned the 2 prints of the Kills i did in 1995, ironically he selectively never paid attention when i explained what the shit in the Kills and Newtown Creek represented to me, which, ironically, is this entire theft/schmooze scenario itself in his hall of mirrors.

 

 

Shooting waste in the Creek off and on for 25 years, it was one of the most challenging shoots i’ve done. The smell alone was impossible to take, and it was. But it didn’t remind me of the years i spent doing blue-collar work poisoned seriously from chemicals. It reminded me of all the completely dysfunctional, duplicitous, and creepy episodes with people in A & E who had pro

Too bad i can’t deliver the smell of that twenty year off and on again shoot, as well, because it’s the key to really understanding my view of the weird ethics of the pretty party people, i’ve been trying to avoid. Back then i didn’t criticize the partying, just the taking. Now it seems the party is partly based on taking what’s not yours, beginning with my most valuable venues, the ability to make pictures from my home world, and then finally swiping my home itself while destroying the blue-collar stronghold of Williamsburg. Back to the toxins in the Kills, that stink was the worst i’ve encountered in the 40 years i’ve been shooting toxic waste sites, and it was where i lived, and the reason i won’t condemn it is that i know a worse toxin than that invading the neighborhood. One that will wipe it out. The same one that had poisoned me on first contact and the ever fewer that would follow.

And now one of the founders of a Galapagos club combining more art, entertainment and partying on North Sixth Street in Williamsburg, formerly our neighborhood’s little Meat District, that the art-fun spot help take out and replace with one of the most expensive streets in New York, i have to now beg to get back my work of my neighborhood, that, in fact, was an attempt at depicting acts against the working-class as poison and death. How ironic. Gumpy never returned my prints of toxins, confirming once more, my basic experience of the art world for 43 years now – being periodically dipped back into poisons, theft and gross ignorance by self-involvement that’s sold as charming discourse.

To confess, i never thought it possible to shoot in this deadly zone for more than fifteen minutes, the stench was overpowering, but i did, and for long periods of time, because any worthwhile credible work takes time and concentration, not hit and run. I suggest the way i got through it, and what precisely was on my mind while capturing the most vile waste of my “career” was the anger caused by having to be there and face that truth of having some connection to poison, even if one i didn’t ask for. That stinks so much and is so unbearable i made an art of it. I had run across a perfect metaphor in my world, for what ails me – contact with poisonous waste. A blunt shot even with personal live narration could not penetrate the ego of a classic artist of our times. It’s not what I want to hear, which is only what i want to hear, that i can only translate as, ego.

 

 

Reality color photography, once shunned as art, was accepted and raised into the canon of art maybe in the late seventies, especially with more archival color material on the horizon. By the early nineties, that stuff then started to become categorized and stereotyped as “traditional” photography, and especially its journalistic role as former truth-sayer (let alone as how i use it – predictor of things to come by what has passed). Formerly questioned in the eighties, by the nineties, photography’s unusual role with reality was laid to rest by many experts in art. How dare it claim a special relation to truth or reality? Is that because there isn’t hardly any connection to much truth or reality in art anymore rather than some hidden truth about the medium recently discovered, such as it’s all fake to begin with, or is it just a matter of equal opportunity? Contemporary art would want me to believe the truth of what i do is, that it is a fiction too, a “blurred boundary” or however they put it? While every day i prove that wrong. You cannot communicate that to people in a garden, walled off and separate, and tell me all i have done as proof of existence, is only proof i have done fiction, or, because art, generally is about what’s in your mind, not the world – which is true, but not for RealStill. Capote made pure art from a journalism base. There’s a big price to pay, but it can be done.

Francois Gilot, who was physically at the center of the art world in the last century and still working today, recently said, “…Art doesn’t come from what is around you, but from what is inside of you.” Pretty much generally true. What’s interesting, too, is the edit. The pronunciation of what art is, was preceded by “Things I have seen, I want to take them out of my mind…” Painters can begin with images that were sourced out in the world or simply in their own mind or television for that matter. I know the process and it appears to boil down to either the world and experience, or, conceptual thought as the source material.

Photography that is close to the world or one with it, and connotes it, is seen as less as an art now, but a big thing in the past after being ignored for a long time as art. When it delivers its message, and its expression and art, it stays tied to solid objects, the social and historical, people, places and things – referencing the world, not the mind. It’s the art of the real where the world is first. But the mind of its creator is there, with its look and style. Sometimes even done with bravado. It’s just not the point.

One thing i noticed folks from elsewhere who are slumming or observing, they like their ultra-straight shots, no style, all content, the straighter the better. As if to say look at this – squalor. If you’re a player/artist, if it’s home or you’re part of the scene and you’re out there enjoying yourself with a camera you do it with some style and flash. You’re connected.

My similarity to fiction is this – i shoot what i know. And i know it so well i made the predictive moment out of so much reality and that’s certainly not the fictive moment that i am proving. One thing i can do, is know when something goes, i call it the predictive moment, and that’s something.

RealStill always has a purely documentary starting point. Its look and style run a gamut from objective, flat and still to a much wilder style of movement and color, and even abstractions, but it’s simply to embed the memory of the actual world because i would like it to begin and end there and not solely in my mind. Then, perhaps we can understand things like gentrification if your compassion is lacking and RealStill can remind you of that. The point is i accept the fact that, generally art is about the mind of the artist and that there is purely conceptual art and art from “the things i have seen” as well as, art about real things alone, no filter, just experience and contact. My beef is the that the art of the real has been devalued, after celebrating its arrival, now, to the point of not getting it all, both because people don’t live so real as they used to and because of what’s taught them and they accept. And there’s no doubt we are living more and more virtually, simply with the oxymoron of social media, let alone all the other fantasies the digital world will provide. So i’m also concerned about the an unstoppable flow of subjective data, more self-directed favorites, thus lessening the meaning and even questioning the solid physical truths my camera is solely engaged with.

Then, it seems, at least from the perspective of being outside, that this flipping phenomenon in art might be kinda attributed to the business of art that has boomed into a sizable service industry, where thousands of trained art professionals spill out of the universities every year and into cities like New York. That influx, changed art and the city the same way industry did 160 years ago. Considering my work is the city itself, before, during and after the art boom, and through all its other economic cycles, i question it, critically, even using the cleverly disputed empirical evidence of experience, photography and writing to back my claims.

And returning again to the core fault – reification. People have all sorts of things to say about all sorts of things they know nothing about or have ever been close to. Wittgenstein’s word-picture model and its use in correct communication occurs only when the words’ intentions line up amongst individuals.

Could the dissolution of photography’s singular, (in only one way, though, but it is significant), relation to reality, in a matter of years, be attributed to an industry staffed by the thousands of trained art professionals looking to expand or reinvent/redevelop their field? And to them i say, it’s a fact, that for a while now, almost all photography is done electronically with computers, and cameras today are computers. But the computer should have a thinking operator, who i look to in order to judge the level of fantasy and truth in what i see.

And to push it more, open it up – from the perspective of a reality-based Picture Man for a long time now – art finally found a great way to keep the mongers of the real at bay. I think it’s because the actual, being so non-conceptual, sure of itself, being molded by the field not the parlor, requires very little discussion. But art is also an expanding field and has a business model that needs to label things traditional, or passé to expand the mental territory of what is considered art. Really, cable and the internet is now the home of the real, and a lot of fantasy too, while having a value system based on the ever new and changing is a vast map of conceptual opportunity reserved for art. In photography museums went nuts for pictorial and reality-based work up until maybe 40 years ago. I could see, with, particularly what i have written here as a documentary based photographer, they wouldn’t want me around. But they do know a good picture – even a real one – when they see it – but not what to do with it.

The curatorial erection of categories is a necessary taxonomy to educate, train and edify thousands of years of disparate work that has managed to survive and communicate that to a public. Curatorial nimbleness, can also accommodate the “blending, blurred lines, borders crossed and rule-bending” and then the reaction to that is a hipper, “that’s all art school crap.” – all of it seems trapped in the prison house of artifice that i would more accurately call the prison house of incestuous exchange value to get your own two cents in. And my two cents, especially from my renewed and culturally deprived perspective, here, Uptown now, is worth less than half that, i’m sure.

As far as completely abstract photography that is only generated with the computer, and software, could that content be shifted to the painting category, creating the new sub-category, digital painting. I’m sure it already exists. Then an older painter could experience the years learning how to do the same thing, only digitally, plus the years earning the huge amounts of money to invest in the technology, instead of the actual mission. And after you make the transition you begin to wonder, has the technology become the subject itself – ’cause i’m spendin all my time in front this damn screen. And by the way what is digital filmmaking or digital video? I made films for years and this new way is a technical oxymoron. The technology comes so quickly, we don’t have the correct words, yet, to describe it, let alone think or use it in the best, meaningful or social way. Self-driving transportation is next up, again, forgetting the trillion needed to maintain, let alone upgrade an analog infrastructure, ya know, source stuff, basic stuff we found a way of forgetting, perhaps too distracted by our new comfort-gadgets and machines that deliver only what we like. Advanced auto technology is one example where, juxtaposed with interest in updating our entire infrastructure, it’s a joke. It might not be “cool” and a money-maker but we gotta do it, and China is blowing us of the map as doers and innovators in infrastructure projects. Bike lanes for scooter and bike shares is not what i’m talking about.

Please, art world, construct me a category – reality or source artist, and master of chaos. Then i can be understood before i ever show up, and avoid degradation, kinda like like being successful which would be a useful stereotype to prevent having to prove yourself, when you’ve done that to death already, carrying an archive that sees and speaks volumes. It all hints at some truth of human nature – having the name-brand is supposed to equate into some form of credibility, or, something, now more than ever, as virtuality increases, so does deception and public relations. So much so that anyone can have the public relations and image power of social media and with a storefront mailbox – you in bidness.

Some past dominant isms in art theory were poison for a reality-based life at work, and by 1989 it was strictly no contact, to protect the work from something deemed postmodernism and appropriation that was difficult to avoid. It killed lived work. Unless, you let it be known it’s specifically your world, perhaps done like the documentary-based work of Clark, Frazer or Goldin, it was open season, by the ever-new highly trained professional culture vulture, who thinks in an unreal way, and can miss even the most fundamental and obvious – i enjoy being part of what i shoot, but why should that be the subject, when it’s the engine, and why would you take what’s mine? Do i need to claim it by including myself?

Within art’s canon, notice, using Ms. Goldin and Ms. Frazer as examples, it’s documentary based photography, where the operator is sometimes present in the shot. RealStill, connected to its subject, comes from a perspective of compassion as well, but not through, with or around self, is the definition of compassion. Your connection to the subject at hand is hidden in an upfront way, but sublimated into the shot by virtue of the fact that it’s there to fuel the shot, and make it authentic. But i can’t help but think that’s my problem in a nutshell with folks “getting” my work who are in the world of art.

Without saying any of that, just the simple fact that, if, to stereotype, once you have exposure, articles about you, established in a gallery and in museum collections, and have the name, people know exactly what to expect beforehand. The canonization process is so interesting – a cocoon of universal acceptance that will never suffer the indignity of, for instance, a gentrifying moron who writes from the context of the name game since, in art and entertainment, great performance and products will yield nothing unless known and that’s a different ballgame entirely.

In all fairness to Ms. Frazer, whose earliest work involved placing herself in her context – family – she has progressed into more purely documentary, journalistic works. But what i see as a progression, is in fact, what art got sick of long ago – documentary as art, or art as documentary. Ms. Frazer’s a weird case, she starts by using the camera in an established fine photographic art practice – the selfie – makes it, and, ironically, evolves into the straight documentary practioner, that the same art world got so bored with back in the late 1980s.

And once in the canon even stuff like Ms. Goldin’s dope protests at museums that got gifts from opioid profits, gets absorbed without much analysis, or being called into question, though it’s rife with data on artist and art world contradictions that are, again, brushed over, by the sanctity of the canon. If i went to the Brooklyn Museum and blasted noisy pop music in the exhibit halls from the ancient art to contemporary art as a protest of art and hipster led gentrification in Brooklyn, i would be arrested, probably prosecuted and effectively neutralized. My arrest would actually be for not having the name first, before criticizing the sacred cows – stars, but untouchable ones. Robert Frank and Banksy, can do it from, at least, a cushion of comfort and successes. Perhaps, though, a much quieter performance – carrying around my mattress during the Met Gala, for instance, to let the entire world know of my pain and humiliation of having an entire life’s work screwed up, by amongst many things, being disturbed and disrupted by hipster and art behaviors to the point of being deprived of one of the few absolutely necessary and basic ingredients to life itself, right up there with food and water – sleep. And, speaking of survival, as if constant physical disturbances wasn’t bad enough, another requirement for survival was took – shelter – and i ended up going without it for a while. Art, very unhealthy for real people, but could be a perfect form for the self-involved, or self-constructionist – for a reason. Just don’t mess with me while i am in my home.

This was preceded by years of inappropriate appropriation during the eighties and nineties when i would cry out, take your inspiration from the next copy, i don’t do that. I go to the source. That’s ridiculous, to take something akin to blood, because it might take that to get the shot, and you can’t help yourself because you learned that a photograph is a social construct, and thus, up for grabs like your free-floating concepts themselves. Reminds me of gentrification, another kind of remake with the same pain of inappropriate appropriation, only even more encompassing. Appropriation and entitlement walk hand in hand down a path of success. The entitled have no choice. Their success always trumps morality. They have no choice in the middle genus.

Taking what’s not yours – even work based on actual connection to its subject is up for grabs? Is that because the art world has truly locked reality out from within its garden walls after letting it in with photography for its first 100 years, and has evolved until the same mindset literally took my home and wiped out my subject matter – that nothing is no longer real, but simply self-constructed? In pursuit of your Name you forgot the effect on us? We don’t need no stinkin names.

The art made down here, has the same liberating quality, and without thinking about it, redeems the social negatives. It’s roots photography, and having those ties, it naturally falls into soulfulness and context, and yeah, the existent world is painful, at times risky and the antipode to any garden, let alone a walled one. But you get something for that, some i just mentioned, as well as liberation, a truly open mind to things, additional BDNF, and really healthy living.

That’s what also was at the center for throwing away a fifteen year film career, my ticket out, if you will, it wasn’t art, but even if it was considered as such, it was popular and fell short of art normally, but could make good money, get a better life, and still make points.

They were trained and socialized with the use of images. When your head is in the feedbag, source material and mimicry are one, and acting cannot be distinguished from being. I guess, in my naiveté, everybody else is saying, “What’s wrong with that?”

 

YET MORE MEDIA

 

An art business that is phenomenally white, while crying diverse inclusion. Oddly, although my work unconsciously, accurately and completely reflects whatever urban demographic i’m shooting, they didn’t get it in the eighties, and that’s a fact. Now it’s the symbolic rage, but when i brought in my work of the poorer neighborhoods that sometimes surround museums, like in the Rust Belt or Brooklyn, the people seen in RealStill were called “marginals.” Frustrated i would simply go back into the world of uncategorized difference that i swim in all day every day.

Although distinguished with lots of women and gays, and when i’m talking this “groups” talk, it’s the language used in art and culture, and it’s for the sake of communication – it’s not my talk because of how i live and this includes other buzzwords like empowerment, diversity and inclusion. And what’s known as identity politics, my acceptance of it being a matter of degree, depending on wear it leads and ends up. As for RealStill that is actually universal, and, thus, by nature including everything i can muster, and in contact with all, i can’t help but repeat the ultimate words of our country, that a civil war decided long ago – “in many, one.”

We once valued finding more of who we were, but now prefer an alternative ego. That’s probably linked to the reign of remaking, we are jive, one-way communicators, in a time that’s unleashed the “it’s all about me” mentality and justified it. I have a limited liability company and please always refer to me by my stage name, getting it covered pretty well.

And hasn’t it just evolved into sharing, and harvesting where the audience are closer to equal participants? It has and i find that a better situation, at least finally quieting an ism, that made careers and, some, even rich. The world has caught up to Richard Prince, providing instagram, which must be a dream come true for a true imagist. As we have progressed today gaining attention is one thing, its value another. Can we separate the market from the art, or from the real estate? Or give an honest, objective answer?

Speaking of the credible, reality sorta dictates, ya tone down the Name part. Where i come from, celebrity, like politician, has become, synonymous with a lack of credibility, and particularly, with celebrity, a misdirected self-compassion that is even embedded in the technology itself that now consumes us.

The tremendous overvaluation of some art, even while artists are relatively young, doesn’t help overall, and sometimes pushing ideas that don’t make sense on the streets, surrounding the institutions where they dwell, it’s something you ignore intuitively until you have the time, and reason to evaluate and assemble outside yourself, in an essay, that started by being convinced i can’t be be an artist, relative to what I know, and still saying, a photographer, not an artist, like Hiller Becher said, and the art world proceeded to ignore. Realizing I don’t care at all about the role or job of a photographer, or its canon, it’s an honest accurate assessment. I’m not promoting something over another because i could care less. In fact, photography, like the Bedfordshire 700, was appropriated into the art world and grew. Color photography wasn’t considered worthy of art status until the seventies. The last century, especially during its last twenty years, deemed things as art, like no other.

This may have added value and status to photography, but photography would become subject to the ideas, concepts and perspectives of art.

A significant practitioner of the myth of photographic truth explains the premise: “When we see an image however degraded by halftone, silk-screen or xerox, when we feel it has a photographic origin, we deal with it as photography It may be that that quality is becoming dissolved. Once it becomes possible to invent images in no way distinguishable from photographs that feeling may evaporate It may be disappearing Even the sense of it as a feeling may go away.

There has been a lot of moaning and groaning from the photojournalist community about the loss of truth in photography but, then the photograph has always been subject to manipulation. Look at the Stalin era photographs where unwanted people were regularly retouched out of photographs. Or, the decision of a photographer to only draw a frame around two people in a group of four when taking a picture. The photograph is an edited thing from the beginning. I’m not interested in maintaining a status for photographs that seems fictional from the first.”

Darn, i thought photography, formerly the most literate of the arts, would be a place for social truth to unfold like one of my books, even after being fully informed for years by the art truthers that it’s all fiction, and even though my source material is solid physical truth. Mr. Galassi please go to the prisons and tell all those convicted by their presence on surveillance footage, that the evidence against them is fiction. When you’re dying in the nursing home of dementia and there is nothing left but a void of memory, documentary photographs of your family will have great value if they don’t already, for a reason – they can represent physical truth in time. Other things are true about photography and interesting to discuss, mine, it has always been clear, is one of many. But mine are tested “in a field.” and are stacked high in the archive, where you will find this – evidence of physical truth imprinted by light, especially during the golden age of color film photography, and, for years now with a digital file.

Truth activists, photo-atheists or pictorial truthers still capture attention with the one-liner – it’s all fiction – and certainly documentary as a pretext for staging has seen some enormous worth attached to it, while doing just plain truth has been more a path to extinction in this freshly declared era of bias news, post truth and fake news. Language about and relationships to things opens up the museum to so much more territory in their growth, than their fully stocked archives of what dominated photography up until the late eighties from its beginnings. Concepts that flip conventions that deserve it are always on time. But flipping because you can is not enough, particularly when it extends into my home.

Should i go to the trouble of breaking it down? I’ll put it in these terms, when you’re on the Charlie Rose show, with two of the top American war photographers of that year, and you never mentioned anything remotely like this, and this is your big thing, it’s puzzling – a proponent of the myth of photographic truth is with two of its most traditional practitioners, and there is a critical silence. There is a garden wall. Art refuses by its nature, then, to integrate with a larger world, except, when using the world by its own terms. I watched that from my home, in Williamsburg, but probably should have been outside working, which would exclude the fictive moment of a television show in preference for what’s out there, producing something, however ignored, outside this mobile garden wall, about the thing itself, that’s not a concept, because it’s a universal thing and outside each individual.

And now we have fake news brought to us by the social reptile class. But did the art world help with its own long ongoing trend become canon and genre, that pictures lie? That, again, of course, is too ironic since artists lie so much, but not so well because when a clever person lies it’s blatantly obvious, like so much they do. When something is simply a matter of taste, then networking skills must be applied to gain success with the art object, and transactional “friendships” then turns an artist’s “narrative” fiction and desires into the world, or, at least, the world as, the world-as-me.

Emphasizing the picture fictions aspect of media sounds like the basis for what we have now with the situation of conspiracy and fake information.

My prediction? Ongoing remaking of the planet will continue to make realism outmoded, until we, again, colonize other planets. Producing, once more, a resurgence of realistic depictions and furthering the idea that sometimes human vision and intelligence is intimately tied to self-preservation, and not necessarily the preservation of the neighborhood or planet in which we live. Of course, the earth’s destruction by large asteroid is way overdue and my money is on at least 40,000 years, if not, 135,000 years from now. That’s nothing in planet history but in human terms it’s not like that, and we’ll find more ways to extinction before the asteroid.

In the popular art of movies, something both understood intuitively and articulated over 100 years, is that a film or a camera, even in the age of digital reproduction, can reproduce reality and fantasy clearly and separately or be mixed into, as well as excluded, in any recipe for any work in any degree. Everything from pure reality to pure illusion can be reproduced, but this began with the invention of the camera. In photographic terms, since the “first” official shot in 1826, it seems people were mostly in love with recording reality and it’s like they couldn’t get enough of it. Niepce’s shot in 1826 was a window shot. That says a lot and you can look at photography or cinema’s complete evolution and history, out of that, it’s all relatively young as a medium and self-documented as a matter of course. But i think it was cinema sixty years later that really informed photography it could be anything. You could convince, fool, test, bore, excite, educate or do whatever the hell the operator wanted to accomplish whether consciously or not and, ain’t it beautiful?

If you are trained to, or somehow see a polemic or a wave that will wash away or, at least, chip at, the previous era of photography, then that’s a strike, and i would appreciate something beyond conjecture within the garden wall. Adding more of the purely real to an already stocked archive, the time is now to be anything but real, i understand that. Whether objective, stunning, beautiful, brutal, funny or unique, the real is for the masses now more than ever, unless done a certain way, for instance, in a staged or completely real but diaristic manner that includes the photographer or just constructing the world from scratch and recording it. And the venues for the global masses are there, cable and the internet handle a lot of reality based stuff, that would have been considered fairly profound cinema and images thirty years ago. The news chase scene, complete with dashboard, and body-cams, helicopters and narration, is a staple, and with cameras everywhere, and with cable and internet we see it all, reality that is. All this plays well on cable and on the net. But that’s not enough, the camera has the power to fool, of course, and they brought us reality tv, another construction that connotes this is real but it’s not, like the trending themes of the trained art photographer, all of whom grew up with television and popular culture as the fundamental unifying force in American culture, that eventually advanced degrees would sometimes refine/redefine into photographic art.

The post-post-mod glee of a contemporary photographer who happens to depict real scenes, whether constructed or not, that fooled you into believing they were true, is a one-liner, a standard reminder, and has few benefits for the soul, or, as the French social critic, Jacques Blowhardalard, once said, “There’s no transcendence in a deconstructed form.” This is an age of truthers, when the truly fringed freely use photographic evidence as proof of its opposite, that, in fact, it’s a fiction. Moon landings or Sandy Hook never really occurred, and funny how only a truther knows which major public events are really staged. All of this investigation is done in home and off their screens, and, as humans do, they mistake their own infinitely mirrored thoughts for substance. Apparently there is a segment of humanity that cannot deal in a real way with too many images, but go and get off on them, in some of the most incredible insensible subjectivity of our time, that’s not a problem, unless it’s masquerading as truth. It’s called reification, and it’s at an all-time high.

Earlier there was another sort of pictorial truther whose mind was awash in pictures, to the extent of concluding there were no originals, only copies. A newer more expansive art was born. While just plain telling the truth by exposure is more in the realm of documentary, cable or the net, and, you know – traditional. And, ya know, it doesn’t matter what is said. In reality if anyone cared to make an art of it, they could. I don’t know about anything beyond that making of our reality the starting point, then see what i’m up against. I’ll come up with a new form without intending to do so, if i have to.

No documentary is objective. That’s the best, most insightful you can do? It’s a given, that’s also taught to each successive college class since the seventies, if there happened to be a lefty or two around the campus. We get it, and got it the first time. Now let’s get on with producing, instead of entering the latest conceptual era of post-truth, which, let’s face it, can only be a detriment to truth or lead to more biased or fake news. Documentary cameras are still operated by humans, and with rise of fake news, and with what’s taught every art, film and media graduate – all news in constructed and thus fiction – i can’t help but think how much art, usually associated with the left, has given to the creation of ultra-conservative notions of conspiracy and staged news events, like the moon landings, continually harping about photography as a fiction.

It’s called machine art. Ask the Spinning Top who was doing it in Russia in the 1920s. It can be used in any way the operator wants it to.

Today the digital image is still a contrivance of convenience (and corporate profit) over quality. Film is now very close to being inferior to digital, and, along with gentrification, both moves were forced, even in full recognition that the “old ways” are better and the new is not yet thought out enough to be better, or, in photographic terms, digital cares nothing for light. Digital will eventually be the clear winner, something gentrification will never be, but only if you can be truthfully informed.

What a flip.

The job of the photojournalist, or newspapers themselves aren’t dying because they have been discovered to be fiction makers like everything else, it’s because of a technology, that seems like it’s gone to some people’s heads in a way that doesn’t hold up in practice, but nevertheless is the acknowledged future. Today there is the new “conceptual documentary” a way of thinking (a rule?) that has some difference from the old “conceptual documentary” where reality will be presented only in an “archival way.” I guess i could still understand it on simply an intellectual level, except i am so worn now from having my home land seen conceptually as another’s blank slate, before, even their arrival, let alone contend with fake news or whatever happens after truth is wrecked. Inexperienced billionaire tech heads guarantee complete openness, connectivity and privacy? That never happened. they even sold user data and lied about it, while reinventing news into what it’s not.

Getting back to the thing itself, if doing, making, and existing can only be presented conceptually than that’s language, which will become language about language, and what i’m certainly not talking about is the work of Chomsky or even Baudrillard, except in a working-class Grouch Marx way, but just perhaps how they get copied into art or even The Matrix. And isn’t it a shame more pop folks than artists understand the poetic criticisms of Beuadrilard? The point is, as an uneducated schlub i enjoy the work of others, and my home philosophy, so we all know, would be perhaps as existential as it is social, originating in Germany between 1880 and 1969, and also in Denmark in 1830. Of course there’s a name for it – continental philosophy. Schopenhauer made the distinction between ideas and concepts early on, google it. I guess my influencers,  although dead, just got it right.

The free-floating influences, that ain’t no thing, and some would argue, then, that ain’t no idea, or at least not ideas limited to this old world and verified in their relativity. My sole concern is the degree to which lack of experience in the world, combined with floating concepts might effect others whose cultural views and education level are very much the opposite of this and have not the power to prevent it from effecting their home life. Beyond that, there’s nothing. It’s not the art and the concepts, that’s fine. It’s the overvaluation that might cause an unthinking rush of those without any sort of social compassion to piss on me and tell me it’s raining. There’s an argument for that?

Digital reproduction changes the whole game, even if you use the new technology in pursuit of the same thing prior to its general acceptance, such as documentary based work. One could argue, that in the field, it does it better, cheaper and quicker, but that’s only the means, which somehow became the end in various degrees. But what if technology (something i have to master, to reach actual content with expression never on my mind) is the destination, and the money-maker? Opening up endless possibilities, the techno-romanticism flourishes. One weird possibility is that corporations somehow can be a force for social good and/or change – and that’s outside of the company’s well-paid employees? Coke’s Perfect Harmony? There is so much evidence against that, especially when that mindset takes over its inverse and the poor-ass good folks and characters that had been there in the first place lose their homes. But now i’m talking class again, and that’s not complex. Yeah, corporations are good depending on your relationship to them and biting a hand that feeds so well, doesn’t make sense but dollars. But when you’re living under the continual strike of the expensive spiked uncomfortable high heel of what’s fashionable now, you will question that all night long in your fight for peace, health and sleep.

Cultural institutions and corporations seem to get increasingly pc, after having come up with so much of it – practically inventing it with sugary coke in a commercial that became viral for its time. The first time i heard of pc was through the civil rights work of Joseph Columbo, who even got the FBI and Francis Copolla not to use the words mafia or la cosa nostra, even though he was the head of one of the New York’s five mafioso families, that were completely Italian-American and la cosa nostra.

The next time, seven years later, i heard of the notions of pc was from my first foray into art by way of cinema and was first encounter with any sort of gossip, let alone the deep-gossip of the arty. They apparently, couldn’t handle the reality of the world i represent, and mistook it for their own, laying bare the subjectivist underpinnings of the pc world. Or was it that they were just jealous?

I’m into difference, enjoy it as the spice in life, and that holds true for methods of representations. Let’s not forget the lesson of cinema, that simultaneously took off with the camera’a multiple abilities – to fantasize and make worlds, record the physical world or both in varying degrees under the direction of its operator. Knowing that the machine possesses many abilities, that the operator controls in varying intensities, a machine, no matter its sophistication or wonder, that you aim, shoot and capture with intent, with never a thought of which category one belongs to. We use our tools for our purposes, or the way we are trained at any certain time in history.

For the sake of communication, preservation and history, art works are stored and displayed into categories, time periods, movements and their isms. This, to an outsider, seems to be the origin of “les maîtres mots de concepts” as the French social critic, Jacques Blowhardalard called art’s penchant for “lines, territories and boundaries.” Trained artists can work within those concepts or, here it comes, sound the trumpets, “blur the lines.” And then, more trumpets, “that’s just art school stuff, i’m so hip as to know that’s baloney…” What’s left from a deconstructed form or object? The philosophy of reinvention.

Isms, sets of trained presumptions, this ever-changing guard/commentary is absurdly sandwiched in language. Concerned with the flow of life, being and becoming isn’t expressing my relationships to things, but the thing itself. “No idea but in things.” which i actually just discovered while writing this essay searching for others who have done more things than art in the world but still keep the art in high value to explain the things of experience. It worries me a bit that i find it in the past more than today. One can only hope to be wrong, though, but ultimately not care.

On the other hand staging, constructing reality and a diegesis has been the domain of film since its invention and, while, young, i thoroughly loved it. And, like i said filmmakers have had the handle on this for a hundred and forty years, intuitively knowing that the camera machine makes what you want to say come alive, whether it’s true or not. And, then, like life, there are no prior concepts to cross, blur or yap about, unless that’s your business. For a while now i see occasional photojournalism in the Times that looks like film noir, many prominent color photographers stage their work to look both cinematic and documentary, and exactly the same thing is done as purely art that happens to be photography. Film has “informed” photography intensely the last twenty years. And my stills are cinematic to the degree i was a filmmaker for fifteen years and know how to wrangle the machine for soul, atmosphere and context because i’m an operator and i know what i want. But it’s not for my lost love of movies either from when i was a kid, or when i made them. Do you wanna tell me differently? Meaning i know you know more about things you have never seen or experienced than anyone, including me and my subject because of your ego-conceptual view. It’s too bad that no one listens at all anymore in an era of hyper-reification.

As a filmmaker, of course, on an “independent” level, i witnessed and worked with another group of ascenders, in another business caught up in large valuations for its top players. It’s called the star system and has been in effect for 100 years, and nothing else delivered celebrity like it. I saw, though, that no matter what its “opposition” became, it was still defined by it. A baseline, it was supposed to be the answer to, but got absorbed in comparisons, or, as part of it (Bansky) becomes self-deflating. “Independent” moguls may produce better films but are just as unethical as the baseline institution they use to define themselves. Harvey Weinstein or Russel Simmons are surely the most pc of people, proving what i say here – politically correct people cause enormous harm.

It’s evolved over some time, and, unfortunately, there’s nothing more remade than movies now. Why is that? Has deconstruction and postmodernism become completely popularized, trickled down from publicity to the mass art of pop, and has it consumed so much that there is a belief there is no source material left in the world? And with less people experiencing things, we speak the language of the remade, concerned with versions and updates, and not really new ground.

In the nineties when extremely large photographic prints by people like Gursky or Struth started to catch on and simultaneously explode in price, photography was effected. The big print was everywhere, and financially, false expectations grew, as Gurskys (the Name, not the worth) went for record prices. I mean six million for a machine art print? So i wouldn’t say the bloated investment end of the art market is just a phenomenon operating in weird isolation unconnected to even the typical struggling photographer, particularly young ones, who, might succumb to the same star dream at work in all entertainment like the big print trickle-down from the late nineties.

Hyper-trained, degreed artists beginning with boomers into the pretentiously named but true-to-type millennials change things. These are the original screeners and their descendants who don’t suffer from the myth of substantive thought through a screen. Their thoughts, heavily mediated, nevertheless are thought to be true by themselves. Feelings becoming their version of truth which is a single version server only. And they act on them as anyone would in accordance with their desires. What you think, guides your acts. The educated people have concepts, where do they come from?

Not from the world, but their world.

Photography neither tells the truth nor lies – people do that. Cameras and computers, who still have individual operators, many under supervision, are hopefully still subject to their operators’ training and intuitions.

If you truly believe photography has not one singular relevance to the world, i do and so does my archive in the physical object sense – made up of artifacts and relics from a struggle with a physical truth people escape from and ignore, but comment on, as if, they truly know a thing.

The machine that can be used for art, entertainment, religion, law enforcement, science, i use to capture light and physical truth simultaneously. Do i have to resort to cliches like it’s the lie that tells the truth? It’s a machine that can tell physical truth without distortion, or with it depending on who’s doing the shooting, lending itself so well as a starting point for desires, or, in my case, as clarity and atmosphere as the end itself. It’s physical truth that you can capture on a card, and the larger dimensions of truth can then be handled with words and sounds. Our perception has been so altered by our constant media, replacing real relationships to people and things, that we would have to learn to start again. Too late, ain’t gonna happen. If i have a picture of a tree, and we can all agree that it is a tree that existed or does exist, then we can use that agreement as a starting point to accomplishing stuff, such as this tree’s use and place in society, as opposed to only harping about identity – personal, social, ethnic, sexual and generational excluding even a dose of universal or catholic thought. Exclusively worrying about your identity rights and privileges, detached from the universe of possibilities and folks, only leads back to the self. That’s just one more nail in our coffins of deportation, simply because it’s not our thing.

And in my book, the deceased, too, get a vote, falling on the side of history that is only always real, documented, unlike our future, yet we  try to make it fit the present time.

The web has given us a standard situation – fakery and reality – in spades, just like photography or any media that is operated. Make your choice or mix it up, the possibilities are more abundant than ever. Fake or real we are now also awash, if we choose, in content that no one human being can successfully absorb. There’s way too much now, including the content of everyone’s particular identity and needs. It’s just too much to absorb.

 

TRENDING TO OUR END

 

But what does all this have to do with gentrification? A trained mobile art mindset (I’ll move to New York) honoring what’s new, and, thus, change – fitting the concept, the desire to alter reality that is shared by all, to the tune of one’s ambitions. Making us invisible by not fitting the art career concept, and not having your means, we are entirely susceptible to destruction by loss of our homes through your actions. That’s just the way it is. You make limited edition, highly crafted and thought out work, or innocent fun experiments like a child would, but trying to make an art out of the truth of the visible physical world, is tough on both ends because in this aesthetic climate (tastes) after your work is done, it’s ignored. So be it. And i learned to completely accept that it was enough to crawl like a pig, and sacrifice like a saint, dropping all production in the darkness of my archive.

I accepted that as my fate and destiny 30 years ago, decided, the slum neighborhood i was stuck in, relatively speaking, was the much better and healthier place to always be than amongst the people who would, ironically, show up around 2000 and reinvent it and disrupt it as real social comedians.

The joke’s on us – the Tanks were imploded (where was the conspiracy  theory here? 9/11 was two months away when the renewed era of conspiracy began) the same year the Towers fell, meaning while the entire city is a bit ruined by an act of war on it, our neighborhood itself is invaded and changed to the point of disappearance, replaced by its antipode. How funny and entertaining is that? Because all we saw was fun and entertainment strivers after these events, where, before, we would only see them once in a while because of our inherent “diversity” as its said by those who don’t experience it in a truthful or in any meaningful way, where we have all types not just one. Otherwise north Brooklyn would not have flipped.

But after all that, to now swipe the home i was convinced, even according to our laws, would be my last and only home? And i am supposed to pretend that i was not familiar with the mindset that displaced me or that i didn’t see exactly, all that led to that displacement? Or that i, somehow, missed the culprits behind my clocked demise? On the contrary, eyes open as usual, like 9/11, i felt it, but i also clocked it and documented it.

What do you do when it’s all been done, developed or wrung dry of all its profits and, thus, meaning? Flip. You flip, remake, preconceive, repurpose and reinvent. And when that doesn’t match your dreams, disrupt.

Flipping – people flippin, just plain-flippin. It’s as though there’s a critical mass met from an ever developing flip to its opposite. It’s all a mental operation – places that were derided for decades as slums, finally change, and at the moment of change they’re basically still what they were. Perception is the key. That’s mental, conceptual. As they say, work it. Work it enough, a planted seed, it flips and grows. Jerkin off underneath the floor boards of a gallery by an artist who, too, never considered himself so, is something i don’t want to add a bunch of value to, but it does kinda make you think – about a lot of things, some opposed directly to art itself, like training and education in art is not necessary, and that art is something most all can do if they want. It’s approved and, safe if done within art, it’s art’s self-revealing penchant for proving its own open-mindedness, to the extent it sets off a fuse which could have explosive results, if it stood outside its nemesis instead of enriched within it.

Flippin, like when the young white professional, NYU-trained engineer, while starting his career and life in my building, below me, in Williamsburg, became, in a matter of weeks, a gifted intoxicated “black” man, and professional rapper. Miraculously a son of a surgeon from Boston, in a matter of weeks was transformed into a gifted ghetto rapper, the Johnnie Manzel of show biz. Rachel Dolezal, now known as Nkechi Amare Diallo, was more serious about her similar social affliction, that, with absolutely no biological connection, a person can self-construct themselves to such a degree culturally as to, in their minds, become exactly what they are not. After a period of reflection by her, we have been introduced to another category of human, self-made, that want to be heard , and, of course, have rights, by vitue of self-diagnosis, STS – Sudden Trans-Race Syndrome.

My mother took a serious turn for death that required my presence with her for eight weeks. This person who lived below me had quit his job, began hanging around the hipster dive bar next door and had the bouncer who looked like the alien hunter in Predator, from the bar, illegally move in with him – if you’re gonna sell drugs outta the building, at least be on the lease. If that wasn’t transformative enough, he had remade himself into, with the exception of his genes, DNA and skin, a black person, or wigger, as they say. This next new reinvented wigger naturally wanted to be the next big white rapper, and, while perpetually intoxicated would tell his white hipster emo-style musician neighbor that he was going on a world tour, opening for JZ. His noise, as he rose on his imaginary road to stardom, from yuppie engineer to the next big white rapper, took 2 months. Your mother’s dying and it is in this atmosphere of a thousand absurdities, that should have been the refuge it always was, that wrecked me, by getting the too close and personal view of this shit i had heard about remotely that now was in my home – the self-wiggering of a millennial. If only i could have prepared for it with a staff of psychiatrists and pharmaceutical restraints, instead i ended up like Herbert Lom as if he was dealing with Inspector Zuckerberg.

There he was in the “backyard” with a choreographer he hired, to prove black moves matter. His surgeon father from Boston sent him to NYU but his son couldn’t stifle his dream which made such a disruptive imprint in our building, one of many. Culture is one of the most powwrful subjective forces, equal to religion, in obscuring fact and science.

Flippin is what i’m talking about – the effect on human nature when the source is lost, both purposely and accidentally, usually for someone’s profit or purpose. It’s a disturbance, but saved as an insight, brought on by the unnecessary disruption created by unthinking morons who, ironically, say they believe in smartness. Just not smart enough to know there’s no actual worth to the copy now accepted and praised as the remake, and updated to reinvention and disruption. It’s racial and aesthetic masturbation, and more of the reason why there was no great art or culture that came from this talked about art scene that began slowly in the early nineties, got supplanted to Bushwick by 2009, where it still is supposed to be raging. But where’s the memorable works of art? What became most talked about was the real estate as investment and attachment to what’s considered cool, but where was the memorable art?

It’s The Age of Embarrassment as Wilson McCray famously said in 1992 Williamsburg – and out of the very first wave of artists, who then left Williamsburg long ago because they could see through the hipness, since they were the originators and truly hip.

The embarrassment that Williamsburg became if you are actually hip, is now lost. But all this is ironic poison for me, i don’t wanna know this stuff (the embarrassing hipster or artist), because the thought of it alone is so damaging. Until it literally took over the working-class world of Williamsburg every day, and inside my home, and i had to survive it. That wasn’t minor damage from the art-lite crowd, but brutal destruction. I’ve painfully dredged up only a few of these embarrassing stories to make my points, but there were so many, that it’s a separate book of calamities, a couple of satirical featured films, a documentary and a twelve part series on PBS, and we don’t have the time here for a full portrait of embarrassment.

To be clear, i’m saying that a certain mindset in culture that is prevalent within art and entertainment allows gentrification to happen and benefits from that mindset. That’s when people set their minds on a goal but think of no consequences. I said it allows gentrification, but, of course, not on purpose, the same way innocent adult artists making their poo pies can accidentally become an art star making obscene amounts of money.

The kind of self-construction i saw in Williamsburg had to be afforded. And the all-is-social-construction crowd promotes what works for them, which, by its nature takes nothing else in.

No one thinks about the jamoke they displaced. Fighting for my right to photograph anywhere in the city particularly after 9/11, or fighting for my simple right to live in my home unmolested, or even keep my home for that matter, in the midst of people whose fight is the right to party and create, meant the type of people i had fled so long ago had sent their sons and daughters to Williamsburg to remind me of what i had successfully forgotten. The postmodness was now installed in the DNA and now called reinvention which is a view of things as endless opportunity and possibility – by disruption if necessary.

Unmediated source artists have to fight to get it done. First Amendment rights are constantly contested by police, continual trespassing, gaining trust and access. Risk strengthens the price. It doesn’t matter if it’s a landscape, a street or person, in the city there’s tons of contact. It’s an appreciation of your rights in practice, not after the fact, and out of reality and into the media in their post facto debates on censorship, which by 1999 had gratefully evolved into just free advertising for a cultural institutions to get it’s word out and people in, like Chris Ofili’s elephant poo painting of the Blessed Virgin. By today the net’s lust for showing, has pretty much deflated the idea of something being shocking, and, after our first reality tv president got in office, the boss of ever new shocks has further enshrined it, who, coincidentally, is being vigorously defended now by the knight of Our Blessed Virgin Mary, the great critic of offensive art, Rudy Gullianai, is Mr. Trumps’s lawyer, ironically defending the art of his disruption.

I only criticize it because poo is old and done, and i find it, because of that, boring, traditional and in the past. It’s criticized for its obviousness and over-valuation both as art, commerce and provocateur, and appreciated for its demonstrated skill as art alone. Historically the Brooklyn Museum had a new director whose avowed goal was to boost attendance. Mission accomplished, but the panels and debates, supported by advertising and commercials, who, like the museum are selling themselves, that followed, were meaningless after-effects from what was just a plain old American publicity stunt. The museum was far smarter than anyone else about it since they set it up and let it happen on its own.

In September 2002 i took a freelance photo job to get good money to shoot my work, and pay nothing in rent in my dilapidated slum apartment that i thoroughly loved. I was hired to document the Olympics chairman’s pitch about using the north Brooklyn and south Queens waterfronts for the 2004 Olympics. It took place on a cruise line on the East River, and as we passed the Williamsburg waterfront he gave the usual spiel about its decay, but also saying that the neighborhood was done – crime ridden, mentioning crack, all that stuff. The fact that i could practically see my home from the ship as he narrated its ugly descent into a crime-ridden slum, was, uh, challenging. He had gotten everything but the slum part.

Later, after devolving into the New Order of Immaturity, i realized, it was us, we just couldn’t for some reason, see it, even though many of us were into ninety years of age, we never realized we were deprived, and, for all these years, we had lived in squalor, looking at ourselves historically, in a roots manner rather than as a blank slate for hip entrepreneurial activity, and we all missed out because of our mindset – making 30,000 a year we never have to even bother with wondering what a nice home might be like in the city, let alone think of our homes conceptually as if it were also an investment.

Want a city to function as your blank slate? When Alexander the Great, “after conquering Egypt had a dream in which Homer visited him and spoke lines from The Odyssey. Among them was a reference to the Egyptian island of Pharos in the Mediterranean, and so the next morning Alexander traveled to Pharos and stood upon its rocks, clutching the golden casket and staring out at a scrappy, forgotten stretch of coastline. After a long silence, he nodded. From these shores, the most remarkable city the ancient world had ever seen was about to rise.” Now that’s a blank slate, and for you art and book lovers, this city came up with the idea of a museum (place of muses) and library, both huge and the first of their kind. I never heard of reinvention until much later and during our times, first with endless Hollywood remakes of the original, later with reinvention now defining our time and embarrassing us who enjoy truth by remaking everything to the point we have to discuss biasnews, fake news, post-truth, alternative facts or as Mr. Gulliani recently said, “Truth isn’t truth.” which is something that sounds like it also came of MOMA’s photography collection after John Saworski’s tenure. And here we are with fake news – did the art world contribute to it with so much successful work that undermined standard meanings, deconstructed for the sake of it and played “gotcha” with truth? Steve Bannon, right-wing deconstructionist is what we get. Once a concept leaves a brain through its muzzle, it’s like a bullet, that has a mind of its own unfettered by nasty stuff like truth, or the truth of things themselves. I simply say, this is thou art and “Thou are that.”

The aim should always be considered and found to be true, first. There’s plenty of examples of having knowledge of injustice, before, as well as during, and that knowledge having no effect in changing that injustice. In this sense i don’t care, the memory of a resistance will eternally interfere with its official denouement, keeping its loose ends raw and unsettled and still opened. At least I could hope for that. The waishichu always want something unreal – closure. Memory denies this when there’s indisputable lived evidence that cannot be altered, and says otherwise, and, here, with this gentrification i aim to set the record and representation of it right, as in true in order to build a just memory of an historic transformation in our cities that won’t benefit me because i will be dead by the time there is a different mindset available whose feelings have nothing to do with truth.

But to be fair and there’s probably worse forms of gentrifying. In China, where capitalism is guided and restricted by communism, the national policy is gentrification. Like their commercial says, “we want to go from a manufacturer to a creator.” And they mean it. Communism has the guts and power to put their aim upfront without feigning, but i cannot imagine state-run redevelopment as being in any way better than the capitalist way, that’s pretty much organic rather than dictated. And it’s a copy of the American model of redevelopment and economic retooling into service on top of that, and, as such, an act of reinvention.

The government in China made a decision – lose more industry and go to service and copy America, but, of course, not the free speech stuff. Their practices against labor in industrial cities today make the West’s approach to deindustrialization and decayed neighborhoods appear sympathetic. So relatively speaking, development and redevelopment, being necessary to living cities, complete with its pain and rewards, it could be worse, and that’s an example of being fair even though victimized by my subject.

Gentrification is a sad fact of life. I fought it for ten years in Williamsburg until i had no option left, but leaving. Yeah, it’s unfair, largely ignored, completely devastating and very ruinous, and i hate the fact it left its mark. You forget, move north, do what ya gotta do. But it left its mark. I hate that.

Damn, why am i always saying your income has nothing to do with whether you’re good or bad, or your character or morals, even if you perceive that i live in a slum, or even if it is a slum, that has nothing to do with my character or any sort of level of “goodness” or “badness.”

Yeah, i got outta there…but i thought about it.

Had to get outta that place, and it is the last thing i’ll ever do. With displacement on top of 43 years of professional baloney, the last thing i’ll do is die in that humiliating place, where, once that was taken for granted because it used to be real there.

I’m an outsider because i work outside literally. The artist part i’ll leave to someone official, chances are they may even now live in my old neighborhood, or, at least party there. And will they be as experienced, fair and objective as i? Not bitching, blowing off steam or expressing but an examination with proof of a subject that artists, museum administrators or celebrities or those who benefit from it, get to talk about and be heard. The pain or benefit is distributed along job titles and earnings. The rarely thought of pain associated with largely uneducated blue-collar people in cities once dominated by them, losing their home base, is a benefit to those that can take advantage of it, by affording it and being informed about it to catch the wave. And, sure, of course, it’s not intentional we understand.

Understand this, too – where we come from there is no such thing as the unintentional. And, in this world, as Mr. Adorno said, there is nothing more suicidal then intention.

Critical thinking today is personal “likes” and “dislikes” or selfie theory. Some of these morons, i guarantee, just moved to North Brooklyn the day i left, maybe with a Yale degree, yet, ironically, end up with a theory of photography rooted in suburban New Jersey, by way of Yale, thereby coming full circle i suppose, without giving thought to any sort of history they are replacing. One couldn’t find a better example of this than- a perfect proof of the generational evolution of the complete uncritical buying into of Name culture, whether mainstream or art and honoring uncritically a celebrity road map taught from the age of six to, perhaps, thirty, and, apparently, accepted as the only way. And guess what? He lives in my old neighborhood, arriving as i was being pushed out of a place i was at before this wack-job name-dropper was born in his suburb in Jersey. Credibility? he referred to Gumpy Valentine as “rad” while trashing me from his p.o.v. which is the cannon he learned and his parents paid so much for him to recite it.

There’s also an art and pop model of doing one thing with variations, making it simple and entertaining, funny, sad or frightful, and, if it succeeds, well, ya give more of what they want, and you do it to death, possibly in a steroidal American way of franchises, brands and sequels. In art, it’s an individual gold mine, particularly with the conceptual art toy model where individuals are overly-compensated for their toy-like creations, concepts and identity politics’ gripes.

Art, very early on, saw the value of monogamous branding even before Picasso and the the incorporation of the individual, that, even in death, can consistently reign in more money than ever. And if someone can do that, the way they see it today, is that the person must be good or important – they’re rich, they’ve got the world’s attention. And that’s only part of the tyranny of fame, that also creates an unfair baseline to draw comparisons. If an artist stays out and is utterly unaware of any thing going on in art – first of all, that’s unbelievable and too good to be true, but there is no escape from comparisons even if you have escaped, literally, for, now, many years.

There’s probably always a little place for reality in certain art hangouts, but from where i stand it seems now more than ever, the last thing that art wants to be is real. And if it’s real, at least in photography, it’s probably a selfie, staged or paid. Documentary based art photography is a tiny category in the mix of what’s shown in galleries. even the best exclusively photographic galleries that housed only documentary based art photography, now has a few, or one, the rest being the conceptually oriented photography that is taught in schools.

Oh yeah, reality is disappearing, because it is being replaced, i mean remade – even out deep in the Rust Belt where they’ve been talkin that reinvention talk for a couple of years now. Now where did all that begin? China?

What i’m saying is i know many who went through it and there are many more thousands, and, for us, there aren’t many sides to something deemed, an issue. In fact for those displaced there is no issue, they don’t talk from perspectives or analysis unless you call actions like breathing or being as one, a perspective, and reacting to your death, an analysis. Our argument is indisputably lived out, and documented. Living through gentrification, meant i was long-term, not formerly of, or benefiting, or observing from across the river in Manhattan.

Unfortunately i’m pretty much an expert at artist/hipster driven gentrification, a gun was put to my head, and i was given the option of becoming the world’s leading expert on straight-up gentrification or dying by it, and with regards to it, there is nuthin in it for anyone but its practitioners. I was just a neighborhood guy, as they say, the life-long invisible witness and expert no one can hear. The only thing worse, i presume, is being over run with tech professionals who seem even more disconnected to the actual or historic city as classic squares but now with the money.

The only real play that the original residents get is in the very local papers. This is an excerpt from an Astoria newspaper in regards to the gentrification of Astoria, in 2015, although it began there fifteen year ago, and must have gotten supercharged recently. It’s not complex at all, but gets to it, how thousands of good lives simply get crushed, if just from the simple act of not being allowed to sleep, which, like oxygen, food or water, is a requirement for life: “In these instances there is a clash of cultures, age, class, and lifestyle, which Transplants, generally, are wholly unaware of, and wholly disrespectful of!!! This “clash” very often upsets the nature of these buildings, causing friction between long time residents and new Transplants. Very often causing these residents, such as the retired cleaning woman, to live, her last days in her HOME of a generation, in misery, as the selfish uncaring creations who are her new neighbors think and act like life is a party called NEW YORK CITY!!

Imagine if she had spent the money she earned over her entire life, to document – shoot and write – about disappearing urban America. She would be considered the world’s leading expert on modern gentrification.

Coming in at 3am and commencing a hipsterfest, playing guitars, drinking alcohol, smoking pot, and blasting music that i grew up with, a lot of which i thought i had escaped, till all hours. Disregarding the old people and the immigrants needing to be at work at 5am, to earn a living and feed their families? Think older Greek/Eastern Euro employed working a food cart in the city; or a Mexican/Central American working in a diner; or, a new era woman cleaning woman, housekeeper, nanny; Indian taxi driver.”

With Williamsburg is the epicenter of hipster culture, Astoria got nuthin on us. Below is a documentation of a typical party week in just the apartment below mine. The non-stop hipster scumbag bar noise, construction disturbances and other tenants inconsiderations were, of course, mixed in with the situation described below. This is also the summer numerous rats had nested in my home due to all the damage to my apartment during renovations above and below me from years ago, that was never repaired, coming up from the hipster bar’s cellar. I know because the male rats were wearing fedoras and the female rats were drunk, with tattoos and swearing like sailors. Below is an email concerning a shocking but typical night in the Big Flip Era. A night of disruption, where i get loaded up on knowledge and experiences about this stupid shit that gets literally forced on you and in your home, before the email i sent to the landlord let me describe it:

Curiously this young man had moved into the building as an engineer with a very straight suit and tie job, although he was of hipster age and a recent graduate of NYU. My mother took a serious turn for death that required my presence with her for eight weeks. Upon my return this person who lived below me had quit his job, began hanging around the hipster dive bar next door and had the strange-ass bouncer from the bar illegally move in with him. Hey, if you’re gonna sell drugs outta the building, at least be on the lease. And, if that wasn’t transformative enough, not reinvented enough, he had remade himself into, with the exception of his genes, DNA and skin, a black person, or wigger, as they say. This next new reinvented wigger naturally reinvented himself into the next big white rapper, and, while perpetually intoxicated would tell his white hipster emo-style musician neighbor next door that he was going on a world tour, opening for JZ. His noise, as he rose on his imaginary road to stardom, from yuppie engineer to the next big white rapper, took 2 months. Your mother’s dying and it is in this atmosphere of a thousand absurdities, that should have been the refuge it always was, that became a loud, embarrassing circus, particularly by wrecking the most important years in the limited time that we get to live.

The Insect is our house name for the large dread-wigged drug-dealing cockroach that came in from Bed-Stuy to do the security at the hipster shit hole next door, and eventually moved to the join the remade career of the wigger from Boston. They set up a bunch of tents in the cemented backyard for those special private hipster-‘ho love moments and general drug usage. Later his father, a surgeon from Boston, called me concerned about his son, that the Master now wanted him to leave, and requested i keep a noise log. That’s simple – non-stop noise at all times from 2003 until i left in 2013. Anyways just some details from one person’s stupid life, not mentioning the simultaneity of stupid events still occurring constantly from a whole group of people that now controlled my life. Below is an email to landlord:

 

On Jul 13, 2008, at 9:20 PM wrote:

“Kid’s been a party boy since day one but really began to flip in June until it culminated in a 72 hour party from June 27-30.

I think the second tent went up on June 27.

The insect had been hangin in the backyard every night since this became his home and right next door to his dumb ass job.

I discovered on June 27, Friday, the start of a three day party. Loud music began at 11:00pm died down after midnight but at 6;30am Sat. June 28, lots of noise like I never heard before, on and off noise all day. Then on Sunday

June 29 at 4:00am, extremely loud noise/partying, should have heard me yelling down at the jerks at this time, party continues off and on until Sunday at 9:00pm, It’s quiet until 2:00pm Monday afternoon that’s when they are partying again – Monday June 30, when I had a pretty big violent argument with the bouncer from the bar who has now been living in our building for weeks.

The following weekend it’s quiet on Friday cause he’s in Boston, he returns July 5th at 12:30am Sunday morning, messed up and high outside on the street all night but building remains quiet.

On July 6th the music blasts from 4:00pm to 7:00pm.

The last big party woke me up on Thursday morning July 10 at 4:30 am. Also the apartment above me had seven people living there two weeks ago and four people this past weekend staying with the actual tenant.

Seems like a lotta keys out there for this place.

Lemme know if ya need more info.”

That’s the report from one person and one event from amongst hundreds that both rattled my head and made an objective, yet angry, analysis of the era of the reinvented.

Flippin. Yeah, great sitcom stuff, but the furthest thing from why i live there and make it my It was a real place with real people not cultural reinvention for profit, or, specifically mixed-up white boys. If a person can flip, for all intents and purposes from white to black in a matter of months, what does the power of conceptual flipping do to a neighborhood? Ask Medea a.k.a. Ethan Pettit. A social-construct person if there ever was one, he’s quite honest about it.

It’s simple for landlords, developers and their victims it’s about money and money is broken down through class. Money and class. It’s complex only if you’re part of the problem, and, apparently, everyone who has enough power and skills to do something, at least symbolically as they are trained to do, is part of the problem, that originates in a particular class.

So why not drop the defenses and devices plugging your senses and, for the first time, see it for what it is – people with more money taking neighborhood homes from people with less and no money, and no voice. If not directly then through their agents, always adding to the economic pressure to push more out.

I try to look at it in an entertaining way, as so much is done today, within the institutions of news or art, misery obscured, not sublimated, with entertainment values. And, speaking for myself, there are some things experienced, so awful, ruinous, unjust, but unstoppable, that any living organism must react, especially when it comes down to survival, and considering i’m a human organism, i’m also conscious of the whole process, and know something so bitter and reactionary can only be managed by some satire and straight-up social criticism that is not art criticism except if a career in art brings about mindless gentrification which apparently it does.

If you combined all art, sports and entertainment it would not equal the amount of money generated by gambling. Americans lose usually around 90 billion dollars per year, in a form of entertainment based on the reaction between risk, glutamate and dopamine. The risk in a few arts and many entertainment venues is representational but still activates the mind similarly. But in the case of America’s most expensive amusement people will pay a bigger price for the experience of controlled but real risk in pursuit of a tangible, quantitative dream. I guess the same could be said about amusement parks, that also, require your presence in the face of risk, but purely for the sake of risk with no payoff. The fastest growing place in America before the recession by far, Vegas, also fed the real estate boom there and it grew to be the capitol for risk and speculation like New York still is a capital of finance, real estate and the art of speculation.

The world market for art and antiques was around 60 billion in 2015. Gambling generates over 90 billion, tobacco 85 billion, soda 80 billion, and pot by 2030, easily over 100 billion in sales, making it the prime diversion for folks in a dollar sense. Each category of pleasure, combined, surpasses entertainment and art in interest and money spent, but, it’s all part of the same thing – an arts, entertainment and pleasure industry that provides relief to the masses and classes that they are stratified in. Risk, reward and intoxication is what we value most culturally, not art. But both art and entertainment can provide a pleasurable experience about larger or possibly more important things, and that i like, as do us all.

But to face facts the A & E industry is a force. It’s been tapped into as the way to change cities for their alleged greater good whether they like it or not. Look at Marfa Texas, years after one artist moved lived and died there, or Beacon New York.

And now the Amazon’s rejection in Queens in an old industrial neighborhood that had already hyper-gentrified, has, for the first time, bit a hand that was to feed, because people are getting smarter about the act of gentrification and who is responsible.

And nowhere was intoxication, art and entertainment more entwined than the first couple of art waves, even the first hipster wave that hit Williamsburg. They were all into the middle-class version of poverty – bohemia. Replaced by hipsters who were their sons and daughters, back when they had children and had to find a good job in academia.

And maybe the walled garden oasis of museums and all its artifice, the language about its art, or the gross manipulation at the heart of movies and all the other virtual choices, leaves a desire for something else. Chaos, whose art is called time and place, not to acquire a name, but more work, still has a life, and a very small niche. The Masters of Chaos, who utilize the stuff of life which has the risks and pleasures of actual time, place and things, aren’t as welcome on the walls of the local correctional institution especially the last 25 years during art’s expansive years of growth, so much so that the camera is not required at all to create “photographic” art and, if used, is often a selfie, a copy or deconstruction insecure with meaning and soul.

Aiming the lens of cameras backwards at yourself has caught on with such momentum, it had to have hit a major chord. When i finally went back to the Gumpy gallery to collect my work, and possibly discuss my abuse at this schmuck’s hands, he and another artist had aimed two video cameras into each other and they were examining the projected results. And then when i asked for a discussion, was told to leave the gallery. I’m not supposed to say anything? Are you kidding? This sort of treatment is all i ever got. That’s why gentrification ain’t no mystery, nor a complex social issue. These ones are built to self-express and ignore all else. Pointing two lense sat one another? Flippy, ain’t it?

So perhaps i’m an author not an artist, but categorization is not my concern. I have always said if anything i am a photographer, but no artist, pushed by the credibility of having no pride or real love for photography itself to begin with. I could care less about being a photographer, and i never related to it, but, like Hiller Becher said, “I’m a photographer, not an artist.” Did she really say that? Or does it just feel right? There’s a reason there are a lot of galleries that show nothing but photography, i think.

The thing itself is not trending at the moment and for a long time now, but everyone’s relationship to it is. It’s another level of mediation that’s useless for a clear view on the things that make the world into endemic regions with characteristics, distinctions and roots. Which, by the way, is still the only way to slow gentrification, which, like a. i. cannot be stopped, even if no one wants it but mid-level tech-heads.

Is gentrification, basically, a modern version of colonialism? With everything developed, it’s only redevelopment, and with all territories owned and developed, and redeveloped, is the last frontier to colonize the mind? Sure, as there has been tons of money made there already, and as real territories have shrunk, with ownership by fewer rising, that whole space, the mind, is about to really open up. Ripe for development as they say, and art and entertainment is there for the development of new mental worlds, that virtually preserve the great adventures and explorations of the individual in a world so filled with people, development and management, that the only place left to Rome, is the mind, which, of course, is not private now, but recorded and the data sold and that concept/business model is sold to us as “free” access.

Many companies like Musk’s Neuralink will join technology and human biology

Infectious fads signify just that, so says the intellectual, and, i’m pretty sure fashion is considered art these days more than ever, and in the realm of the hip, tattoos, former symbols of tough low-lifes, bikers, criminals and war vets, usually men, becomes body art and feminine. It’s the opening of a new sales territory and markets linked to humanist themes of self-expression. And in another flip made possible by the ahistorical life-style movement, it would be sexist to think of anything in a whole and historical position.

Tattoos, waxing, some once illegal, now popularized and on sale at local strip mall of services. Ass fashion, after having run the full course of cheek exposure, cleverly, decided the way to go was the top down, and the culture of crack was born. Today you see less crack addiction amongst women, although men remain a different story. Underwear, formerly purposed for wear underneath clothes, is outerwear, and the bush – there is a whole evolution and history to the bush that has progressed to its complete disappearance. But only to flip again, we now see a pro-bush contingent gaining ground complete with celebrity spokespersons. On and on, so much material, ready-made verbatim stand-up. And so much profit to be made in the waxing/shaving/lingerie/swim wear and health industry, with, of course, cosmetic labiaplatsy for teenagers – all to meet the demands of the shaved bush industry, that, let’s face it, has paralleled the internet porn boom, all part of the larger individual body ownership movement.

And in wider popular culture during the K-Era, the female Ass has been raised to its final level of cultural deity. Will art follow? A stuffed buttocks in formaldehyde, a buttocks made of plants and flowers, and we may even have a new genre, butt art. We can grow it, and the business, connecting it to the many products associated with its upkeep. Not to mention competitive eating and the financial masterpiece of all reinvention, credit default swaps.

And men? Men shoot each other.

They even tried to flip the act of tipping on its head in some fancy restaurants in Manhattan, with Danny Meyer leading the charge. It failed. But the greatest reinvention is having a rich real estate mogul/celebrity be flipped into the White House by, of all groups, the working-class.

But, in the era of Flipping, when is it not reinvention? Smoking, slavery and women’s lack of rights is something that eventually turned on itself, because the complete universal truth, that was obscured, even for long periods of time, finally surfaced over the former official versions.

Now when Marx or Fuerbach turned a philosophy on its head, it was back when a fresh substantive perspective was considered more than hip, and, coincidentally was an actual critique. Today ideas turned on their head – flippin for profit – has been so overdone, things have been so raided inappropriately that overall i would say what’s significant is trivial, what’s trivial is significant. Coincidentally i had been flippin myself, but a different type of flippin called righteous anger in order to shake the bull shit out and move on, to once more escape the Colin Ferguson Moment.

The commercial expansion of authentic culture as it grows, some with cash cow growth – rap, hip hop, women’s sports – isn’t what i’m talking about. Flipping for profit, sometimes under some sort of higher overvalued guise is the eternal rehash of imaginary needs, sayings, and trends that genuinely create new business models that offer imaginary and real things to do while on earth, to keep us occupied or comfortable before, our imminent and fully guaranteed deaths occur. Amusements, diversions and interests are just that, in fact, stripped of personal ideals. There has to be some degree of entertainment in culture outside real news. I embrace the pleasure of the image a lot in my work, as much as i do physical truth. Entertainment is a vehicle but not a destination, and most of it isn’t worth getting all critical about it, except that, even when ignored, it still manages to screw up your life.

A situation that was seen years ago in these terms, “Diversity is more effectively present in mass media than previously, but this is not an obvious or unequivocal gain. By the late 1950s, the homogenization of consciousness had become counterproductive for the purposes of capital expansion; new needs for new commodities had to be created, and this required the reintroduction of the minimal negativity that had been previously eliminated. The cult of the new that had been the prerogative of art throughout the modernist epoch into the period of post-war unification and stabilization has returned to capital expansion from which it originally sprang. But this negativity is neither shocking nor emancipatory since it does not presage a transformation of the fundamental structures of everyday life. On the contrary, through the culture industry capital has co-opted the dynamics of negation both diachronically in its restless production of new and “different” commodities and synchronically in its promotion of alternative “life-styles.” – Adorno. I quote someone who says it best.

We flipped so much for fun and profit, that being famous for nothing is ancient news. And yet the time honored wisdom that fame is nothing, at least nothing real, is probably somehow reflected in this. But honestly and relatively this is the time of the get mine, because this time it’s so encouraged.

Flippin, remakes and sequels produce lots of “change” quickly for, uh, fun and profit. And, ya know, everyone needs something to do while they still can. Entertainment is here for us, it’s the American answer for a lot of things, including a dead soul. So much so, and so uncritically accepted, it obscures the fact that, although not comforting, the forgotten actual world that everyone is so busy expressing their opinions about, is always there for full participation, wonder and actual assessment, but screening is comfortable.

Trained that art is not supposed to be anything, but perhaps the ever new and possible, i summate that i am not, in fact, trained, nor an artist. Now – it’s a vehicle that travels on its own as does change. I use my camera occasionally to extract abstraction from the physical truth of the world, and, mostly to simply capture the physical truth of the world, as in, this person who is now gone, or this neighborhood that disappeared or this city that went to ruin and returned gentrified. Look at Williamsburg National Monument, it’s another sarcastic essay of unbearable, but completely obvious truth.

Relatively speaking, the amount of subjectivity, particularly amongst the culture-addicted, effectively seals out any unapproved “dislikes” as the technocrats have designed custom cultural settings to meet the subjective needs for the individual, and the individual becomes a nation of one or, in other words, a notion of one. The Colin Ferguson Moment that i just accept, now, as the way things are, and have been and will be. Not to mention the layers of cultural references one would have to plow through to get to something that only will end in another Colin Ferguson Moment. It’s a community and business of exhibiting their inner selves and the life of their minds and conceptual flipping – we, the displaced, are simply opposed to that on the level of a mindset that has no shame, no embarrassment in causing displacement and its enormous pain.

I don’t know if i’m anti-art, that’s like being anti-aging, whaddyagonnado? I’m for no influences, going to the source, soul and a muted but definite connection, so i couldn’t really tell you if i am an artist or not, in these gilded times, but i am uncomfortable with them, now more than ever, and, obviously, the difference lies in the difference between ideas and concepts, the latter attached to itself, the former attached to the relativity of the actual world we live and work in.

Like when Paris Hilton came to the block in 2005, to visit, the Royal Joke of a bar next to my home. My suffering was awesome, the embarrassment epic, and that might be the first justified use of those modifiers in ten years. The old working-class mob bar was appropriated into its antipode – a rather trust-funded, affluent, global and pretty scummy crowd, heavily tied to “art” who were just too fuckin hip to give a shit, except when it came to shittin on us, that they did to abandon, and our ruin. Paris Hilton, even my landlord was impressed, and that’s a sign of what is hip – pure unadulterated success, the kind Trump branded.

In fact, purely on the level of disconnected oversize egos, i see the hipsters and artists i speak of to be Little Trumps, and signs of the times. And it was only when the grand ghoul, Giuliani, cracked the whip on New Yorkers and made Brooklyn safe, that the hip hoards came.

And as far as actual art is concerned i can’t think of anything too memorable from that early Williamsburg scene that bridged out of Manhattan. But what do i know? Many names from the last authentic art scene – Mapplethorpe, Basquait or Warhol – are dead, but their works live on (or because of) through continued publicity in auction prices and more shows. I saw parties or good times and cheap rents – lots of drug and alcohol fun, constant entertainment – the art was in its party. The Williamsburg school of art was founded on the principles of art, entertainment, privilege and parties, just like the previous one in Manhattan, only without the memorable pieces of art you would expect from an authentic art scene.

Compare that to the early street schools and isms that preceded and in retrospect culminated in the now beloved seventies/eighties art scene, downtown. Maybe because it was the last real one. It was in a time of great decline for the city and when many things, now popularized, were taboo, or underground, and it was, generally, a pretty real setting of splendorous decay that could be drawn on (obviously, Haring, Basquait) and used as art. The antipathy of a tourist experience, though, it still loved celebrity. Today there’s nothing shocking, it’s all been turned inside out and its meaning, watered down for profit, packs no punch. I saw art cash in on the so-called taboo until new media absorbed it, and, now, is offered for free on the net, and is part of the same old thing.

Bohemians grow up, have children, get jobs in art, and that’s art? Our digital times have left whatever was shocking art in the eighties, behind in the dust.

Williamsburg bridged the last Manhattan hip art scene, that, i guess, was literally taught in college – the glorious down and dirty Warhol era. Just as the city’s economy, like the nation’s, boomed up until 9/11, and, with the exception of two recessions that really did nothing to dent development in New York, is still humming today. By 1995 capital was available, a formula (Soho, 42nd St. and Times Square) was found to work, and especially with crime falling, things were ripe for the unexpected boom that was about to happen in a city that was founded on a real estate deal with the Lenape. Art with its links and maybe its foundation in wealth, had also become much more democratic albeit academic, and more open and needed to spread just as the city went on a huge economic run that would eventually transform it. I doubt if the economy didn’t finally supercharge, Brooklyn would be where it is today. The money followed a growing one time funky art scene, while Manhattan rents were rising. The domino would finally fall and people were willing to cross the East River, first to party, and later to live and party. The more professional artists with more professional jobs arrived with more money, and to their surprise found it to be a great place. Now an old-timer in Williamsburg is someone who moved into that scene ten years ago, shortening the ugly dues-paying and wisdom gathering requirements not usually associated with a quick purchase. And, they, too, are upset, though, just as unattached to the actual working-class neighborhood.

Gentrification doesn’t follow art, it’s part of it. Today in New York the places synonymous with the art crowd are quirky middle class provinces of former poor and working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Artists no longer just show in nice upscale environments but live there, and being close to Manhattan helps, since the two boroughs are finally on equal terms.

Less street schools because it’s one big graduate school of art with no street left in it? Gentrified or gentrifying neighborhoods are the artists’ havens, where they feel safe. It’s a formula now more than ever and there’s a lot of that in the culture of the remake.

I have used specific examples of artist/entrepreneurs who lived within two blocks of my long-term home, such as Mr. Dodd, please don’t deny simple truth that is not complicated. But you would make it so by not seeing its simplicity – natives suffer.

Once territories, cultural and otherwise have been claimed, and “it’s all been done” as the hipsters say about the boomers, there remains, the concept of “blurred lines, reinvention/redevelopment, pushing boundaries, continually pushing boundaries”…being one of the first to do this or that, demystifying, appropriating, deconstructing, followed by reinvention/redevelopment, and no source left after all is drained of meaning by reinvention and annihilated by disruption.

Great. But don’t forget my basic human rights, liberal and hip one. Did you dislike your own home so much, that you came to mine, not thinking that i love my home, wanna stay in it and, thus, want it to stay the same, because, like i said, i loved my home, and it couldn’t get any better than that. And then you took it?

Over a period of time, and, while my home was destroyed, people who arrived from suburban lands, confessed to me – the boomers “did it all” and “there’s nothing left to be done” – sealing yourself up from any source that that could tap an unending well of true novelty, instead of pledging allegiance to a remake, reinvention and repurposing, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

As if my fellow Boomers weren’t spoiled enough, growing up smothered in images, and coming up with the regressive aesthetic of the copy, begs the question, is that why their spawn is right at home in the remake/reinvention industry?

The transvaluation of all overvaluations is needed more than ever, whether it be property, ego or ideas. !50 years ago the transvaluation began with institutions like religion, god, morality, but today the readjustments have to be applied to things and secular ideas, unless comfort is your aim. At least define it for what it is, as it becomes canon, as a very rare, relatively speaking, individual, highly subjective and absurdly speculative. When so much worth is applied to what is essentially a conceptual sanction and is not intrinsic to the object that is tied to sources, and invites more concepts, new genres or categories, i can’t distinguish the market from the art. What’s legal is not necessarily moral, what’s valued is not necessarily substantive. And what’s moral and substantive in the Gilded city is unbridled entrepreneurship.

Political correctness is a secular and professional more and standard, that i guess, must feel like their morality and culture that has replaced older religious functions in a lot of ways, but, unfortunately it cleverly leaves out entire classes that exist below, and, here, the races and religions truly mix and rub up against each other, unlike the pc folks who celebrate “diversity” while never really living it. I doubt the canon of living white women and men almost as much as i doubt the canon of “dead white men.” A debunking, is the only thing that comes close to truth. Schopenhauer, without which, Nietzsche would be different philosopher, and the world a different place, because these were ideas, not concepts. Both modes are attached to different starting points. Schopenhauer also wrote one of the most offensive and small-minded essays ever written about women. Time and place, grain of salt, relativity, and he still comes out bad on that one to be fair, but it’s fairer to give it all context and not miss the progress made from Kant, and later, Nietzche.

You would think the politically correct might be fair-minded, compared to their foes like our real estate mogul president, who would have no problem in seizing my home and would find a way to get it. However my experience and it’s a long one, that the politically correct are, in fact, the same, and, that means on the level of absurd ego – not listening, supreme self-involvement and unbound narcissism. I experienced that in what is supposed to be my profession, the way i earn a living, until i had to retreat permanently into the real world, until many years later those same culture whores would populate my neighborhood, eventually causing the collapse of it and the loss of my home for life.

Another pc warrior, Mark Zuckerberg invented fake news, he’s a gentrifier himself in Hawaii, and is quite liberal. He’s also a liar, a hipster sorry boy, a monopolist and now, well-documented proof that he’s a fraud, selling private contracted data to just about anyone worth the money.

The people who helped transform Williamsburg, like Mr. Benjamin Shih and Mr. Fred V., and then left, are pc too. And, like political correctness in general, it’s a protective bubble from which secular judgments are made about a world that they don’t get, see or hear – because of their bubble of pure subjectivity, i guess, mistaken for truth, perhaps caused by gross inexperience in the world.

Grand Asshole Gavin McKinnes, Shane Smith’s former partner in Vice and fellow hipster and billionaire, is the founder of the proud boys – they have a strict masturbation policy – once a month, and they relish milk because its testament to “whiteness” and genetic/cultural identity. He’s definitely not pc, but he is a hipster and does do the reinvention thing. The hipster look which this fool sports proves that their culture is a rootless one, and, thus, conceptual. In other words fashion first with hipsters giving no indication of their politics unlike their grandparents.

It’s good to think critically about our institutions. In media, another institution, there are new and entirely documented media, like facebook and vice where we find the usual corporate pc world, but both are rooted in frat-boy like behavior – checking girls out – particularly their faces and Vice was into drugs, booze and acting on Schopenhauer’s misguided On Women essay. Ironically Vice built their headquarters square in the Williamsburg National Monument lands, blocks from my home in 2014, really late in the Flip and two years after i was flipped outta my neighborhood and home. But i’m fair, even though, Mr. Smith in my opinion, is a flipper for news and for a certain demographic, he’s a hell of a lot more interesting, dynamic and sympathetic character than Sorry Boy, who, apparently, the wiser older tech heads like Mr. Cook might share some of my aversion to trusting and socializing electronically.

When a celebrity filmmaker from Brooklyn mocks the affluent whites that have moved next door to his elderly hipster father, i find it pretty true and funny, but beyond that brand of the accepted humorous racism by black entertainers, there is nothing of worth there, except in entertainment. The Lee family was not displaced, they own a brownstone with a huge overvaluation. A real, and, thus, a truer evaluation of gentrification, filled with knowledge about it, is mine, and my friends and all the tens of thousands who were really displaced and suffered the consequences, and whose voices as non-celebrities are muted. They’re called working-class and their forgotten now more than ever, but we know gentrification by heart, blood, sweat and insomnia, not comfort, which is the other half of the equation.

Mr. Lee, the name synonymous with black cultural promotion, can, of course, because of wealth and independence can be a bit “racist” particularly at a university, the classic bubble, and say what he pleases both seriously and with clownish humor. Yet Art & Gentrification coming from an actual outsider to A & E but a complete insider on the subject at hand, with something real and true to offer, complete with pictures and words, but will get blackballed by invisibility and, at, best ignored, with no Name to attract any attention.

And, again the gulf that separates what art and media tell me is true, and what i actually live, experience, study, think and ruminate about, grows more ridiculous, thereby moving me further outdoors into less mediated lands.

Less struggling with my forced displacement, has provided the time to be back inside others’ displacement, in the Iron Triangle and the rest of my haunts, still a counter spell to the curse of the art scene. But i will have to listen to all the other bologna-language about it – ya know, where i live and what i experience from the mouth, ears and eyes of someone who experiences a screen, but not the thing in itself.

Being is worth the time, a screen helps in the sense it aids in getting there and i’m still not convinced of anything, but the world. Being there is a world of difference from screening there.

Mindfulness is seeing, hearing (listening) and thinking, not multi-tasking, tweeting or self-preening. The first premise in mindfulness is listening, opposing the first premise of a selfie world, not to listen to anything but your own desires. Fight that, try to get along with that or live with that. Impossible unless you are that. You move. End of story.

In the midst of a profound immaturity and subjectivity, unchallenged, in a self-looping mentality of screen life, much of it tied to entertainment, the only choice is to move. Cheap rent or not, it’s not worth it. Now argue with this – artists cause gentrification. In New York, art and artists, as it’s done yesterday and today, cause gentrification. As one of the most educated segments of society, somewhere, up top or down below, they know it. For the same reason i wouldn’t look to a financial institution to explain the social consequences of credit default swaps in 2008, i wouldn’t look to the businesses or institutions of art for their take on displacement and gentrification, or themselves. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Although, even i admit that’s an oversimplification of, uh, a very complex subject.

The crossing boundaries and blurring lines industry is nothing new in pop culture and advertising (The Daily Show, Mary Hartman, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on tv.”). Speaking of advertising, that in some ways melds with art, wasn’t it Calvin Klein that blurred imaginary lines in photography, so well, between advertising and documentary? Once while showing my book, The Deuce, a depiction of the last ten sleaziest gritty years of 42nd Street and Times Square, in the offices of Def Jam, being interviewed by a potential publisher, a young photographer walked in and saw my work. His first words were, “We do the same thing.” And sure enough he showed me his Klein ads using documentary “strategies” to hint at gritty, non-slick, underage street sexuality, albeit with pretty people, models selling Klein products. And, unlike my Deuce book, it really caught on, especially after a planned, constructed controversy was pre-made for major media coverage. And isn’t Mr. Locasio sometimes doing something very similar with the exception of using/paying actual street people? And in a country and an art world that loves firsts, who was the first to mix it up, art or advertising? In this Warhol was right, in work and in thought.

American art, relatively young, has an elitism mixed with strong democratic principles coupled in capitalism, as much as, a strong dictatorship coupled with socialism, echoes that particular society, or any other social setting, which, coincidentally pretty much decides what’s seen and valued. Unlike art from, let’s say, the time of the Great Depression, today’s art situation is effected by a supercharged capitalism in a gilded age of information, swimming in content. So is there anything constant in art like its money source during its rise in Europe and America under differing regimes and eras?

Naturally, to varying degrees, each individual believes they have found what works for them. The most bizarre part of it is that what comes so naturally, smooth, with no thought, because it’s just what is learned, cannot simply be understood, unless schooled in that specialty’s particular logic. In this democracy at this time literally everyone in the art world is university trained, with so much liberal arts and academia in it, so much unlived knowledge that has evolved to spawn almost special interest groups, business models or my relation as an artist to these “issues” that i learned in college and who i identity with politically. No wonder i ponder the lost source in all the talk, concepts and copies.

I wish the source of my damage never arrived, and, for the first time, i regret being in a source for writing about it because this source wasn’t mine and one i sought. This source was pretty, and pretty educated and civilized but it had the worker’s poison of disruption by thoughtless reinvention. Elizabeth Holmes, Travis Kalanak, Adam Neumann are modern types. Mary Boone, or Glafira Rosales are simply the self-proclaimed experts that somehow, combined with a sucker’s strong desire, is the age-old fraudster.

Speaking of constants, like we have a limited time on earth, i’m still not convinced of anything, but the world and our temporality in it. In the rarest of situations like meeting fashion/art or fashion photographers, or at my own occasional gallery show, my discipline has to kick in, not to go home and destroy my archive. You split from the scene for years and you find what you kinda knew – it’s worse than ever, of course, reflecting clearly my stance, but it’s a real danger, at least for myself, particularly, after having my neurology ruined. And it really did take a lot of discipline not to trash my archive because when you’re away from it (baloney) this long, a little bit can go a long way, and a mountain of poo has already accumulated over many years, even becoming its own art category. Then the golden toilet called “America” reinvented/repurposed into “Art in America” as an institution that has accumulated waste as well. Overvaluation contributing its share of the blame. The cushion, that success might provide is not attainable without the schmooze, and all that goes with it which is antithetical to my aim. Endangering my secret ambition to be a curator of body fluid art that has fizzled, and now, with this, my blackballing is even more assured.

Seven years earlier in 1998, chilling in deep reclusion from anything that could produce this sort of stress, while at the commercial public darkroom that i printed out of in Manhattan, a photographer asked about my prints which were my yearly Feast shots from Williamsburg that i do pro bono, or, more like community service, every year in my old neighborhood. To me they were portrait-snapshots, done in a professional way just as the way i would do a typical freelance job in Manhattan, then i would return with their prints. It’s part of a ton of pro-bono work i do, or, is it, that’s all i do. These shots were pretty typical for me, and without her making me feel self-conscious about them, i forgot that, yeah they were shots of some classic mobbley-wobbley sort of gentlemen, and i guess that was her attraction. But always expect more, particularly on the asking level – it goes without saying that that artists are always asking for something/taking, between their self-expressing – in art, and she then asks if i can introduce her to the those people, and, of course, i asked why, and she said, of course, she wants to photograph them. For their authenticity? Well, sorta, like i said this is art. More of an ever-growing chorus, “we know these folks as an image” and, of course, if that’s true, then that source is there to be remade.

The Grimshaws were all off the block by the time i got the boot under the same overused Bloomberg-sanctioned/caused pretext for smaller eight unit stabilized buildings, if the landlord can put on a show about his need to sieze the unit, out of need.

It’s not funny but painfully ironic how a 45 year old healthy man who is worth maybe 10 million can be needy, or how 20 year tax abatements on upscale homes isn’t welfare for those who least need it.

In my case the young rich landlord claimed health and economic need will force him to allow his son to live in my unit. Of course, once i leave, his health and economic situation improves immediately, and his son doesn’t move in, but a new sucker millennial who pays five times my old rent

Being and context is always rich in novelty, the places i’m from, are original to begin with, and everything else follows. Context and being is a good foundation for novelty and just a good foundation, where one can get busy with the life at hand.

OK, first shocking violation to context and my home – they’re not actors or strangers, and the shots were done for them. Then showing me her pictures, done really well, and in the Spanish section of my neighborhood, done in the backyards of the same slum-ass tenements, as my own. Posed there, was, what seemed to be the inhabitants of the tenements, and it all looked entirely real, down to the clothes. Except these were the most beautiful looking ethnic slum dwellers i had ever seen. When i turned and faced her we simultaneously said “models” – and they were.

At this point a portion of you, i’m sure, says, “What’s wrong with that?” A conceptually flipping mindset taught in schools help lead to the destruction of my home, and let thoughtless disruption becomes a virtue. And maybe, if she convinced or hired folks from the slum she was shooting, posing under her direction, that would be interesting. But it would still be a copy – another version of so much contemporary photography. It’s a mindset that’s soft and fluid on context, unoriginal, not novel and might be hard on those who only know context. That’s simply my opinion, although objectively it’s the difference between outward and real and inward and mental The choice reflects you and your tolerance, understanding and ability to handle real situations.

And these cherished (if experience is your thing) locations will vanish by virtue of hipster-thought.

That’s also someone else’s business model for changing things around, and the concept could alter the reality that happens to be someone’s home. Models posing in a backyard that could have been my own, proves that pictures lie, and without anyone’s help or direction? That pictures are fiction? That we should pay close attention to pictures or none at all, that pictures don’t mean anything but the artist’s fiction? That since the nineties some photographers take Let’s Now Praise Famous Men literally – with models? Obviously i’m not sure but it would have made a great poster for the 2005 Contextual Rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, or a great painting, Hipster Gothic, or book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Hipsters, or an essay, about the similarities of Calvin Klein and art photography. The infinity mirror of the remake is boundless, and that’s the only universal element in hipster culture and its absorption rates are boundless.

Official contextual rezoning of Greenpoint and Williamsburg was eight years off. It was 1997, had photo-gentrification arrived in my neighborhood, aesthetic rezoning, softening up the historic context for the arrival of the creative people who would eventually populate its buildings and own them as truly the hippest place on earth, but, at the same time, ruin the authenticity of their slum staging for their post post-mod dreams. And what did she want to do with the Italian guys from the neighborhood? If she wanted to tap into the real, i mean the really real, she came to the right place, only she was the wrong person.

I’m not sure what she intended to say by that, but that could have really done something for her career, consciously tricking the audience, or perhaps selling fashion. And also got me shot, jeopardizing my ability to depict the less depicted in their context, many of whom are either innocents or actual wiseguys, but like privacy and to know “what will it be used for?” More importantly, i’m worried by fake news and documentary, which, can even be great like Reni Lefenstahl, but is ultimately only subjective. People got aesthetics, where do they come from? Why care? Because what others think and value changes where we live, so much so, it becomes what it’s not and is lost, by the virtue of money and concepts, who possesses it and who doesn’t and that’s what fuels the Flip, now progressed to Disruption.

She turned out to be avant-garde. Russel Lee and Jack Delano i believe are important photographers for their work in the famous, for good reason, FSA unit, but also opening up both the Depression and earlier times in color, putting a whole new light on all subjects, remarkable in de-abstracting our black and white view of the same subjects and our past history. Jack Delano’s use of 4×5 Kodachrome, particularly industrial shots, are as sharp, and resolved as anything after, and as clean and pure as the day it was processed since Kodachrome is so damn archival. Russel Lee did a work called Pie Town. It has been updated and reinvented.

Anything is fodder today in the same “style over substance” and nuthin but pure “reimagining” after all the remakes, sequels and franchises, we raid history itself, if we have none, for another self-absorbed flip. I don’t know what’s worse – deconstructing or reimagining, but both are boring in all the wrong ways, and, probably unhealthy.

“I’m a blue-collar worker … I’m nobody, and I’m everybody,” – Michael Dilorenzo.

Thanks for using us, common bluebunch as your career fodder, that, if done enough, will change the perception of us as simply some spare used parts for ambitious test vehicles that run us down. Get outa the car and experience us before conceptualizing us to aid your identity or conceptual politics, only because it hurts to lose your home.

This new president since 2017 gave us the art of the deal in the eighties, where art was found as a model for business. Since the times of the art of the deal, art itself has been significantly aggrandized, monetarily and socially, enough, that now commercial fashion and business models make sense in the practice of art more than ever feeding off each other.

Some provocative artists riddle the whole thing with holes, contradictions and absurdities, and making fecal metaphors and toilet humor. But they don’t leave it behind, or produce at an intense level with no audience. No one does that.

 

HYPER INFORMATION DISORDER (HIDS)

 

The poster boy for this new is probably Anthony Comello, or Alex Jones, but it’s infected so many in subtler ways. No bug, love, obsession, life-style or therapy, you don’t work the the beauty and ugliness of truth in an image, by loving it and what you do, simply because the art of the real is dirty, dangerous and, sometimes, can get you killed. It’s also a place of checks and balances where an asshole decision like gossip, duplicity or being overly transactional results in an immediate correction to truth and that will be direct and could be violent, for good reason, because, in reality, betrayal is corrected with a hammer.

Shopping, screening, bingeing, teaching, gossiping and driving aren’t experiences, but concentrating on doing the same task isolated by four walls and no windows over and over is, i guess, the safest most redemptive mode to avoid experience. Unfortunately, to simplify, due to the power of money, folks with no experience and only opinions off a screen, were allied to real estate whether they cared to know it or not, as they sought places for themselves from an old “ruined” in their hipster parlance, place they wanted. The Art of the Deal, being what counts, keeps Williamsburg still rated as the number one place for new, young, hip strivers and rich slackers to begin their life in this city. That’s longer than this current economic run that is longest in the country’s history. Williamsburg is an investment where it used to be simply great shelter, and not a bank. But the facts show that indeed an investment there grows every year for a very long run now – over twenty years of increased prices.

Self-styled disruptive technologists and self-proclaimed professional subjectivist artists i ignore, in fact, run from because their flipping ideas are a plague to innocents, as proved empirically, in an ongoing 43 year production run of the art of the real, and more precisely, using the all-out destruction of my neighborhood, home, that, coincidentally, is the subject of my work and is about about loss and history and not development and the future. They used to say the past is never passed and over, but we finally reached an era when it is over. I might not appreciate it, but, as you can see, i’m realistic about it.

The innocent sense and nonsense of art and entertainment is not of interest to me. Why, god knows, anyone would want to be an art-child or view a flower puppy past the age of twelve, or be a selfie-artist is only beyond my comprehension and experience, as is money and fame – but that’s not my beef.  It’s the dumb pandering absurdity of grossly overvalued work, whose starting point is a conceit, from, and staying within, a very small self-important world. The pomposities, not simply making money, but being “known” in your lifetime was popularized in the eighties as it actually began to happen to more artists than ever before. The attachment to investment property aggrandized things so well, we expect overvaluation since the eighties, and, if anything, it’s the overvaluation life-style that is the blanket life-style of all life styles.

Too much content and information any individual cannot handle wholly, saturates if you, let it, by allowing personal feelings, and ideology without thinking. Exposure to HIDS infected citizens is also a big contributor to the rise of SDD, and is considered the most potent agitant for those inflicted with social disruption disorder from a society that has flipped them without permissions.

 

THEY ARRIVED DERIVED

 

Verbification is a type of functional shift. It is also a form of derivation, and may involve any of the various derivational processes. “My only objection comes when verbification transforms perfectly good nouns into perfectly awful and unnecessary verbs. Corporate America is the worst verbifier in this sense.” Brian Wasco

Nouns are things, verbs are actions. Derivations or verbing, itself, a derivation (just google it) is a pretty neat tool as in, “email me” or “Artist, please, do not weird (molest) me.” or “Artist, please don’t ferguson (deny obvious truth) me.” Arting to go along with tweeting, friending, following and liking, during the time of the ultimate verber – Trump – who has done just that to us all.

Derivational experience grows in a climate-controlled environment, working in a studio, office or lab concentrating on a task at hand, some in a state of bliss for doing their dream work, is all just fine, until they gain enough money or power to dramatically alter the working class neighborhoods, that are now so gone, as to not be remembered.

But most linguists/social observers only take offense at corporate verbing or any other language formation that masks actual intentions or is a conceit. Corporate word shortening –  the fam from family, vacay for vacation and, corporate verbing – “gifting” or “this is why we science.” (HP) are examples.

But it’s the remake and franchise culture that is the derivative heartland. We are not trying to remake or reinvent our lives that we are completely satisfied with, or our slum neighborhood that as, home, we don’t want alterations done on it or inappropriate derivations of it, let alone its reinvention, just for the record. It’s a lost art.

It’s America, do your thing, that most of us just ignore anyways, since we are hoping you’re just ignoring us doing our thing. But that combo of art and gentrification hurts us because both art and real estate has its head so entrenched in a feed bag of middle class ambitions.

My favorite verbification covers the idea that nobody really knows what they are talking about but could sometimes sound or look that way, and is an “action” that is even mistaken for actual experience. It’s called screening.

 

THE ERA OF THE FLIP

 

When Nietzsche’s Zarathustra emerged from the mountain cave, after reclusion and discovery of the great but hidden truths, he went directly to the marketplace. Unlike Plato’s cave, where, after careful contemplation and discovery of the way shadows are made, and reality perceived, they walked out into the sun. But if they would have gone to the marketplace, let’s face it, it would’ve been the same reaction that Mr. Z. found, or anyone else who conducted themselves with intention and honesty.

And the marketplace in the 21st century? What if Zarathustra had to deal with that? He was created before even the first gilded age, and the digital economy, where, even then, there were no eyes or ears for this, but today, our senses are rendered more useless as open data ports, since the modern mind only lets in information that strokes the ego and desires of the Re Generation – rebirthing, reinventing, repurposing, rehabbing and being ridiculous as a starting point.

Zoroaster, a real person, was, of course, turned on his head, not flipped, because it had a point, a large one or two that when tied to actual existence can be philosophically entertaining while being instructive.

By 1989, after experiencing the world of art and entertainment, simply to earn a living, i needed, not to go to the cave. That had been done and covered quite well, but mostly as metaphor. I went under. In a physical and real sense, i went under. But if i did emerge, and i’m not quite sure that i did, i would now know enough not to go to a marketplace where there are no ears nor eyes for an art of experience as it’s not on any one’s mind. The marketplace i speak of here is the market of art in the era of loose moorings and ethical ignorance, staffed ambitious monads whose gift of exposure is based on the transactional model of developing the acquired taste.

Inside the Arches, in Jersey City at night, utilizing a one hour exposure to flip the old movie practice of day-for-night into night-for-day.

After self-gutting my “careers” i found the most forgotten places within the country’s most densely populated cities and worked there around the clock for many years. I also expanded to include a book about all of the American Badlands, also at night, but with only the moon, using long time exposures, and i continued adding to my other books documenting the Rust Belt.

A pictures quest that was a long trek with no human contact, and, no distractions, and where no violations to ethics can occur. With that type of clarity and unfiltered concentration about the actual world, conclusions and insights come right to the surface and, for lack of a better word, a vision is made.

Documenting my going under while exposing the tunnels and cuts in pictures was not about hiding but attempting the practically impossible, making it perfect, and, at the same time record the most forgotten industrial landscapes of the Tri-State in ultra-long time exposures. During a ten year period of producing multiple books, i never really saw my results until many yeas later making this website. I only checked my negatives for exposure, sharpness and resolution and never even made a proof sheet. I would make my first prints in 2004, of work that even i had never seen going back to 1990.

Digital has made this much easier (the problems of camera shake and vibration still remain) but really long time exposures in places with little and no light is difficult with film and requires a high iso that low quality film can deliver. I used 120 and 220 rolls of Ektar 25, the slowest, most highly resolved negative film that was made, really, for bright daylight.

Perfection is only attainable when we make things – literature, art, sports and architecture are examples, and, of course, requires hard work to pull it off, and many do. With my documentary starting point, experience, precision, accuracy and fact add value, at least for myself.

With all the material created in the years going under, even i had never seen, or printed, my work and books. I began to make prints. People saw them, i was offered shows, i did two, the last at The Fred Gumpy Gallery is the worst mistake of my life, as far as the biz of art, where, going into it with open arms, after so much reclusion, thinking – i can do what Zarathustra couldn’t – prove things with both a camera and pen, with my extensive output. But i was forced into the Trojan horse, the only redemption, after realizing, at least, according to my perspective, the unfounded subjectivity and need to have a name while still alive, out of hand, and that was in the eighties, and now way beyond that, but without the actual art scene, but plenty of artists, professional artists, who with so few life experiences, are not too interesting. But they are nice middle-class people, but the constant culture references of the art life-style, do they ever touch down?

I returned to my life and the actual world, deeply bewildered, by the reconfirmation of the obvious, but to experience that humiliation amidst the devastation of, ironically, an art and culture-fueled displacement, that left me, neurologically shaken, without my old stronghold for healing such wounds – i was homeless. Even if you come in with undeniable proof for your words, there are no ears nor eyes available. These portals, seemingly designed for outside entry of data concerning the world, are only self-focused, or, like two cameras aimed directly at each other, the effect, the same as two mirrors, is an endless copy.

It feels like a high-tech Pax Romana now, in present-day NYC. It’s a nice and loose analogy, but remember when Rome became an empire, after 500 years as a republic, and had its greatest era of stability, expansion and culture. That high point lasted perhaps 200 years in a 1000 year empire. A high-tech Pax Romana wouldn’t have changed things politically, socially, and globally, but everything would’ve happened much quicker. The largest city of the country that accidentally dominated the world after 1945, may not be the capital of the national government, but is the capital for commerce and culture. The Romans’ peak era comprised 1/5 of the time when they were what they were, and if it was today probably it would be far less time in this golden age of Rome-like splendor we have arrived at.

 

THE ART OF THE FLIP

 

Copying? Who did it like the Romans did? Getting so much of it from Greece, they would make exact duplicates of Greek culture. Rome was known for its statues, and their contributions ended up being that instead of being made of bronze they use marble, but they were absolute copies. They even had many instances of play and in-jokes using art to poke fun at all the Greek replicas. And of course Rome had extensive graffiti throughout its years, whatever’s left and is found is preserved, but tagging by nature is fleeting.

But it wasn’t until the death of the Republic when Rome became an empire and peaked in wealth, its culture exploded – the coliseum and tremendous spectacle where real life and death was mixed into historical theatre and reenactments, the Trajan’s Column, the great frescoes, sculpture, painting, architecture and beyond, for instance, the discovery of cement and concrete. Emperors after Augustus, who made the Roman Empire, were followed by Caligula, Nero and and even Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Rulers that ran the gamut of philosopher and Stoic to flamboyant egotistical dictators. Anyways it’s a loose but fruitful analogy and this is the point. What commences after food, water, fire, and shelter is something entirely different but dependent upon, first, having time and resources in order to be able to afford anything beyond work and survival. Culture and art should be checked out through various times and countries and i’m sure the wealthiest and most powerful times had the greatest output and maybe the greatest art. In a way that is the most basic relationship between art and war – money and power decides the level of culture that might occur and what kind.

People, conceptually adept, ambitious, secular, with a professional position in the service industry would like to move into a neighborhood of people who are content, religious, blue-collar, skilled and unskilled with ideas limited to reality, and a morality grounded in religion and work, not political correctness and work. And since differences are huge on the most basic level, that’s all there are – differences, and, thus, the deciding factor becomes money. And the hipsters and artists that came to Williamsburg with their political correctness and “narrative” of inclusion, in fact, cannot handle difference but trample it at every opportunity.

Doing unethical things ethically is a marker for political correctness, ambition and people who are no stranger to conceptual thinking that too often separates things that matter, as when the mind separates from the body, or social reality and displaces. Other than the social sin of displacement, i spend no time on what others’ do. Excluding obvious social sins like displacement by notions like political correctness or improvement by your presence is obviously ridiculous outside its own manufactured fantasy.

Location is not enough in real estate anymore in the city today, location and cool is where it’s at. It begs the question, is what’s good for you, good for another that is not like you? Location? That’s the old thing in itself – the physical place. More than ever, people buy the image and more than ever the dominant image is what’s “cool.”

Chinese fortune cookies were never admitted into the canons and precepts of Chinese cuisine for a reason, one of which is that it is entirely American invention, and may not be, even, Chinese-American. You could eat that after chop suey and never have eaten anything that was Chinese.

To say all is not original, is to put it all up for grabs, in a representational free-for-all, that, can, over time blot the source, perhaps wipe it out. Not recognizing, even if it is interesting, it’s a baloney premise in certain circumstances, especially when it comes to representations that are earned, lived or born to, and that eventually this type of conceptual nonsense applied to the purely non-conceptual, is completely destructive and not in any creative sense. The same applies when the idea of flipping folks’ homes for youse own fun, profit, reinvention, or whatever, while not realizing a thing, one of which is, my home ain’t yours. Unreality might be the future, but it’s not by choice or preference.

Schopenhauer made the distinction with concepts as representations of representations. At its worst it happens when two lenses are turned into one another, and is the wonder of the eternal nothing.

The current age of the flip was prefigured in the world of art, and, then, landed comfortably in academia, but perhaps not in the way fully intended in case there was intention in the first place. Today’s disruptions – gentrification, annihilation of the working-class, but also the idea of multiple fake moon landings, government-staged Sandy Hook theatrics and the whole host of misinterpretations, as if reality itself was torn from its innate moorings. Structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism might have its roots in French Marxist philosophy, but as concepts not linked to actual things, anyone, even someone like Steve Bannon, or these neofascists, with the Home Depot tiki torches, can learn deconstruction and use it for their purposes. The exposure of the infrastructure of language and culture eventually undermined their meanings and by the time of the digital age, had been popularized enough, and forced true by the new technology, that such phenomenon as interpreting even documentary content to measure up to feelings, became some perverted form of analysis. That is some flip.

Ironically, but true to itself, art stumbles on to some provable truth about itself that its premise can also be viewed as a fraud. But instead becomes a new genre and category of art and objects tied to concepts now bringing in record sales figures for the living artists who both celebrate and detest the flipped-out marketing going on in the art world. Document-based art such as art photography in the eighties flipped pictures of straight reality as art, but then got flipped out themselves from the museums within 10 years, so, like stocks, it’s unpredictable, and a market of precepts, but a market, and a unique one where high performance is cut off from success without the equation of networking, or convincing.

The first defender of conceptual art said about the urinal “…to say, whether Mr. Mutt, with his own hands, made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that.” Today the same incident would fit in, but would be criticized for being sexist and, perhaps, another nominated member of the dead white artist shit-phrase, for using a symbol of men’s hygiene and ignoring women. Yeah, and a taste that doesn’t include tattoos is sexist.

Speaking of flipping infrastructure like the Bedfordshire 700, 100 years later, observational scientific documentary images, the first became known as the Pillars of Creation, were created outside of the world of art, and, even our world, and, though both function as science and utility, without artistic intentions, they feel right at home as art, or have become to feel that way. But instead of recognizing it for what it is – a kind of, at least, challenge to art, if not an end. Hubbel remains way outside the garden wall and proves so much.

“Fountain” or commonly known as the Bedfordshire 700, was it the first flip in art where something is decontextualized, for an art of ideas, not things, and, unlike things, having infinite possibilities? At the time the 700 model signed R. Mutt wasn’t worth much money, but had tremendous currency as an idea-joke and caught attention because it had a basis in recognizable truth. Picking up traction, until today when, in a conceptual art road show, seemingly valueless things endowed with a conceptual shell such as self-consciously ironic bad art, or cans of shit now compete with the highest valuations in art, and laugh all the way to the bank but instead of shaking the foundations of art, it’s blown up into investment bubbles that make bananas and duct tape attractive investments and a future tax deduction upon giving it to a museum.

Again, i do not care now and never did, but i do care about folks losing their home, block, neighborhood and city, and the fact that i have found work there my entire life, and, more importantly, forming a remembrance of actual events before they have time to set by the people who are responsible for the events.

In the business of taking something conventional or existing, and then, simply flipping it, turning it on its head and then declaring it, art – it’s too easy, comforting, quick, stupid and painless, if you’re not part of the end-of-tragedy-through-comforts crowd or in the pc realm. Done, a little or a lot, for the sake of art, just ain’t the same nutrition as when something is at stake, and, that’s what comes from the things we all know as humans. The elimination of tragedy through comfort and fantasy are desires that are finally attainable and, with the exception of death and uncontrolled catastrophes, is real and attainable. So, for many, why not?

In post-mod days mimicking and copying peaked, source artists went underground to protect their blood work. The receding of the copy culture was refreshing, but its version now – reinvention, repurposing, disruption, and the the conceptual flip – is not at all intrigued by the implications that occur after deconstruction, or some sort of truth uncovered, unless it’s success which is more important. Flippers cut to the chase and deconstruct to make a buck or be known – as a flipper – like in real estate, when nothing’s really constructed, made or lived in, but only flipped for the dollar, or, like in hedge funds or so many other financial products. Flipping art or real estate, it’s all property, and it’s all perception. What makes big money, does that effect what’s built? What’s seen?

With a habit of copying the source was always ‘”there” but now multiple reinventions have taken out the source, and, without that, we’re left with a vacuous profit device making objects built on empty Chinese boxes that open to the reality of another version that leaves nothing after profit taking, is complete. Brands, franchises, sequels, prequels and series are the products of reinvention, as is bingeing. Movies are dominated by huge-budget franchises and sequels. Somebody’s just in love with the movies, but without contact with what stories are based on – real life. So many stories based on other stories, and it shows.

Conceptual or identity arts – newer categories, expands art dramatically, furthering the cause by defining themselves against everything else as “traditional” and with an implied worth that to move “forward” beyond the traditional is what it’s all about. I don’t know if all that’s true, constantly expanding mental territories? I’m pretty busy working, but i do know that, with regards to gentrification, these mental states are dangerous to other humans who aren’t aware of such mental conditions, get trampled by them and by the need for housing for people who are about to further art’s realm into new territories with the bars and shops that cater to them.

This is the flip, and another flippin business model, real estate, is also hooked up in gentrification’s march, and is the only thing i am really concerned about here, as i have purposely lived in extremely artless places by a choice defined by what i can afford, and relate to, then that was absorbed by hipsters, then what came after was increased non-stop value, what i’ve been calling overvaluation. Conceptual thoughts open up limitlessness imaginary territories, in an endless expansion, and is the dream come true of capitalism especially when physical territories are long-claimed, leaving mental states for development. Yes, Hirst, Koons et al embody their times – a second virtually gilded one, in such a way as to be in step with it. Even Banksy gets absorbed to a degree. I mean the guy can’t even destroy one of his works, without, even that, increasing its market value. Manufacturing declined, service boomed, everything aspires to be upscale or, at least, entertaining.

Is it progressive, liberal, or conservative? This field of complete desire we have arrived at by virtue of placing individual freedom and business above all else since 1492? Have we rid ourselves from that original vision of, to cut out the science of an urban planner – “I’m attracted to where you live, i don’t know you, but i do want what’s yours to be mine, but it just appears that way, in fact, it’s complicated, and i have to do what i have to do, but whatever happens, we are going to make this place better…”

After an entire city becomes an arts district, there will be no source for any real stories, or truth, as it all becomes a conceptual garden, hiding the determinant infrastructure and, most importantly, their own, which no one really knows a thing about.

Flip art and flipping in general, what does all this have to do with gentrification?

The father of Trump’s treasury secretary sold Koons’ shiney steel bunny to Steve Cohen in the biggest price ever paid for the work of a living person. This environment does not affect artist in their work? Are you an art lover? I am not an artist because i don’t want to be part of this in any way shape or form and, even if i’m not really part of it, it’s still too close, so, for one, i am affected by the circus the same way so called Hollywood affects avant-garde filmmaking – not at all, except if you’re Thom Anderson, it’s not on our minds, we moved on a long time ago.

If Steve Cohen gives 500 million tax deductible to MOMA and sits on the board, does that, then mean tat..

Cross imaginary boundaries, that are merely conceptual, enough, when it involves others who live outside its realm, and aren’t even concerned or part of it, they can get whacked, by minds stewed in their own desires, pc bubble morality, freedoms and inexperience.

It’s good art because it captures the go-go financial times during its creation? So did Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal, and that was a terrible book, as we all know. (check his comments on van Gogh) The ascendant self-consciously bad art coinciding with large shifts in wealth management, into investment art, that can favor conceptual art which, by concept, can flip normally low-value objects such as cans of shit or flower dogs, into something worth their weight in gold, perhaps echoing the buyer’s own art of the stock flip. Hedge fund wizards pre-ordering custom art work from the art stars of our time. With that kind of vision it’s no wonder Williamsburg flipped. The children who flipped it with their parents’ money had similar concepts about change, art, money and the city. Where do ideas come from? What bubble? Especially those not attached to the things we all have and know as humans?

The great white shark, Mr. Cohen, ironically owns Hirst’s shark in a tank. He’s a big collector of living and dead artsists’ names of the last 100 years – Picasso, Johns, Hirst, Coons, et al – sits on te board, that real estate mogul Jerry Speyer led, and Leon Black, the founder, chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Management, and another financier, is taking over, and is presently being scrutinized for millions of dollars of business with Jeffrey Epstein. He and his wife bought Phaidon Press, a leading publisher of art photography. It probably comes with the financial turf – getting around like that. Mr. Cohen bought the Mets and i think, for the team’s sake, it’s the best choice possible

But as i continue to pump out work after work, in an art market that forgot about realism, and in a real estate market that forgot about laws that never left the books, those facts are the poisonous irony of our times.  Has real estate and finance money impacted what is valued in art? Those sources, factually and certainly directly impacted my work, life and home. Ruining it.

I’m bad at entrepreneurial art, i’m sure it’s, then, my failure is just my fault.

And, as far as the trickle-down swamp of hipsters and artists trying to get noticed, i don’t know or want to know you, and never did. Just respect my home. I love it, more than you can know. It’s truly shelter, very important, when living close to the bones. You act like you do not know what that means. No matter, securely living by their bubble concepts, they don’t hear or listen in the first place and are not equipped to understand a basic thing like shelter even if they could listen to anything that they don’t wanna hear.

The original sins of colonization now manifests themselves as simple displacement and not smallpox, massacres, or forced marches. Although, after having been displaced, our progress to our new home, has its peculiar health effects, mainly SDD – Social Disruption Disorder – manifested most acutely in the eight cabbies who killed themselves within 18 months in New York recently, but also in the spread of H.I.P., A.I.P and V.I.P – hipster, artist, technocrat and gallery-induced Parkinson’s, and, of course, post-traumatic social disruption disorder, millennial entitlement nervous disorder, PTHCD – post-traumatic hipster contact disorder, RBD, ruined bereavement disorder and oneirophrenia. Instead of outbreaks of biological plagues by small pox infested blankets or conquest, we have electronic social ones advanced enough to make chain migration appear primitive as neighborhoods or work forces are flipped, devoured immediately, resulting in the neurological and mental challenges of having your life ruined by assholes with money. People, new to the city, definitely define cities now since they have the required money to do so. Plus the blue-collar ones – we all know – their days are numbered by progressively fewer jobs and greater expenses in the cities, they built, but can no longer afford. Exiting s scene knowing even that exit history will be officially remembered as ultimately a really great thing for a city, coded exactly the the way it did not occur, but was conceived as in relation of denial to what actually occurred, excluding the consequences they don’t have the skills to recognize.

I really enjoy Leonard Bernstein – and what a character – even when he brought together the chic ones with the Panthers, and, man, those tv shows where he deconstructed culture and chain-smoked, but if he ever denied the fact that Lincoln Center took out Spanish Hill, which aided his causes, that’s too much. We look for an admission with no punishment, and a simple record keeping, for the sake of the historic city. It would be like the person who chain-smoked, denying effects while in stage four cancer, well, if you were a former resident of Spanish Hill, that would by your p.o.v.

Board members whose businesses do not please like-minded artists, can now be flipped out of the museum by the artists themselves – the Sacklers. But i know many who have had nothing in the way of resources, and certainly have nothing to do with the manufacture of tear gas or pain killers, and don’t use them, but got booted from a rightful home, so that art could find room for its self-made obvious expansion in Brooklyn?

Time to break out the mattress, proceed to the Brooklyn Museum of Art and wander around the galleries with my concerns. It’s either that or write a book, and a book and a show are two entirely different “arts” with entirely different reactions to each – one expressive with experience behind it, and the other, expressive with experience behind it but with documentation not attached to entertainment or even, art, keeping the black ball rolling over me.

Chain migration? The Hasidim, no fan of vaccines, called it the Hipster Plague because it was truly viral, as youngsters from around the world, the ones truly into social media and all its oxymoronic anti-source skills, found Williamsburg, Brooklyn as the place, to be reinvented into adult life and, to use a contemporary phrase, to be the “best version of yourself” and, if i knew what that meant, i might, then, be one of these artists. Word and images got out, only this time it was quick and electronic – one could have an apartment and neighborhood overview set in motion before even arriving, filling up all available units, pressuring the unavailable ones to flip in their favor. No vaccine nor no blood of a lamb can protect against wealth.

It wasn’t like the hippie invasion of San Fransisco, which was also media-driven in the sixties, these were the descendants, children and grandchildren, of that generation who evolved connected to mediation like no others in history. San Fransisco was telegraphed by Walter Cronkite and Time magazine, and the record labels to great effect. But now the construction of trendy urban geographies are driven so well by electronic info-gossip, that began with developers and urban planners saying our home was blighted. Then well-off kids who never experienced a city, let alone one of the city’s industrial neighborhoods, got off on it, in an imaginary level, and deemed where we live as ruins that were “cool” and “awesome” and not symbols of the Blue-Collar Holocaust.

The Domino Sugar Plant’s last use was a dramatic setting for, of all things, an art installation – Kara Walker’s “Subtlety” featuring a stunning lady partly constructed from sugar, that, of course, had some good historical identity politics mixed in, but not the unrecognized irony that the site itself, and the aesthetic  compulsions of our times, one of which is supposed to correct history and let the voiceless be heard, obscures the loss of another source of jobs for the locals. Our voices tried to keep decent jobs for the working-class of Williamsburg at this plant, and didn’t want it to close. It’s transition, to more luxury housing and not jobs and affordable housing, was, in fact, as an art gallery where a stunning and impactful art installation was held, was very popular, and brought in crowds to another ruined industrial facility. It was used as a transitional art space before its reconstruction into a 4 billion dollar development that beautifully wipes out the physical history of the neighborhood as a workers’ paradise that was not based on work, with fun and leisure, as one of the rewards for hard work and, that’s too ironic for this straight-shooter who really lived there.

One of the developers was a board member for the arts group trying to get the site for an art installation which made permissions possible, if not easy.

Is there a relation between art and the city’s gentrification? It was both great art and entertainment, that appealed to everyone, including the highfalutins – the Wyeth effect – but it did gloss over what, by this time was a given – the blue-collar world is dead in Brooklyn, along with the lost perspective of experience and truth.

MISTAKE

 

The objective infrastructure-as-thing, and its people, as the guts of the city, is my thing not what’s furthest from it – a completely subjective network, so i can see it real good. Straight shooting and direct talk is not at home in the world of A & E further complicating things, but the internet simplifies that, at least for a recluse to the art world, but no other.

Was it that long ago that working-class intellectuals like Algren were not separate from art, but lauded as art in itself, when it wasn’t so academic and institutional only now allowing for RealArt, two measly categories or, even, a blend of documentary and/or art, in territory that stretches back to Emerson and Whitman, Guthrie, Leadbelly, Patton, Hammett, Breslin, Royko and even Beckett whose theme of no inherent meaning in life has been empirically challenged, successfully, by the culture-as-comfort industry in a Second Gilded Age reviving renewed interest in fantasy sequels as a comforting culture heavy on entertainment, light on art, sometimes know as art-lite, buying into, uncritically, these times.

Color photography, made it into the canon of art in the 70s, and like many black and white shooters, was a combination of documentary and art. But by 1990 it was relegated to the archive, as photography began to largely be perceived in another way. Maybe that was a mistake in the first place, and photography is photography and not an art, but the A & E scene is always proving how open and “inclusive” they claim to be, beginning with the Bedfordshire 700, and through appropriation and art as identity politics.

Making the case for the relationship between uncontrolled ego and gentrification, something that’s very interesting is documentary work, that by its nature, implies compassion and that may come in all forms but it is compassion, and outside connection, in other words, care for the world and things outside yourself. In art, where compassion is replaced by ego and the starting point is in fact the ego, and the signature business model is Names. The Hubble shots going back to the Eagle Nebula days of 1995, without intention, questioned the premise of art, Maeir’s life did as well, whether they know it or not. The accidental art of Hubble is only scientific data in an effort to explore territories. Images, that no matter how sublime or beautiful, originate in the actual world of randomness, chaos and accidental simultaneity.

Compassion, character, integrity and functioning, and, while at it, the Indian qualities of bravery, generosity, straight-talk and emphasis on not having more than one head and tongue. American qualities like that aren’t mistakes.

Duplicity, insecurity, jealousy, cowardice and dysfunction, even victims of child molestation was the experience as i tried to earn a living from my work, not a name. That’s no mistake of perception, but true fact. But it is a mistake, only there seems no choice, and that’s just the way it is, was and will be. There’s no choice there.  Art-lite was at the Gumpy Molestor Gallery and could be found all through these trending gallery scenes that i mistakenly entered, and redeemed in a kind of Trojan Horse move to gather my abundant evidence for a book about the gentrifiers and their own self-delusions.

The same things have occurred ad infinitum. From my shock at first contact, i learned painfully and quickly, art’s about something else. When you’re driven back into the world that you thought you were escaping, trying to get the better paying job, and, then years later, essentially, that same crowd has found your most prized possession and coveted it for themselves – your life’s home, where you were supposed to die. In the art of the deal, a self-proclaimed experts’ best skill is doing the unethical legally while making themselves look good, by creating invisible wounds.

 

HIGH PERFORMANCE ≠ SUCCESS

 

It would be a mistake, a big one, to think that all high performance objects and deeds, based on quality and output, or relying on character and discipline, would meet with the same successes as athletes in sports, the soldiers in conflict, or a neighborhood guy being displaced, replaced and forgotten. Not the case with art, it is elsewhere – both inside and outside business – but not in the A&E biz, where, an odd business model, and not in any good sense, exists. Athletes, don’t get hired because of their networking, skills and who they know, but performance and achievement. Art is seen and sold through networking. It’s a completely subjective, time and place, who-you-know business, which means not necessarily the best gets through, but what is perceived as the best, at any given time. It’s a formidable conceptual barrier to anyone not built for it, perhaps out of integrity, or stupidity, trapped by the very method implied by the work – authenticity. Performance controls success but not in the arts and entertainment, a business of supreme subjectivity but also luck. There’s risk. For instance average people, can, through connections and some luck, make it, and, then, don’t go away. Hurting the audience, without folks knowing it.

With performance and individual achievement it was said “there is no success without performance.” It’s not always true now after the rise of the famous-for-nothing celebrities, and simply average artists, who become masters of the market. No one has broken this down better than Albert-Lazlo Barabasi. His first law is performance drives success. But when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. It’s that simple and now science proves that there is no basis nor way to gauge performance and value in art. It’s entirely subjective, as proven scientifically. Thus, one must schmooze.

High performance equals success in sports, war, finance, law, medicine, assembly lines, mines, factories – in many businesses, or any place when achievement is measurable and compensation proportionate. Perception equals success in art and entertainment where success is based on the perception that precedes it, emotional, conceptual and entertainment value, particularly, after a first (big) success. In art there is a lot of talent, and people do the same specialty over and over for decades and also are highly educated and trained at doing it, they’re professionals like lawyers or doctors, and at a certain point, after training and experience, they’re ready. Luck is also at the heart of what’s perceived as worthy to enter the cannon of entertainment, because it does not rely strictly on performance standards, but networking, basic public relations. Something like so-called Outsider Art or Vivian Maeir’s life might point to a missing foundation, the same way bad art as high art does, but, of course, that is absorbed into a vast ocean of art, becoming part of it. Art goes back to the Paleolithic times, picking up speed thereafter. There are hundreds of paintings that survived from the Magdelenian period alone (15,000 – 10,000 BCE) and these are only the ones discovered, in over a dozen caves and rock reliefs in southern Europe. Did only the best examples of this art remain? Or only the works of art best equipped to survive? Today that equipment is celebrity and the Holy Name, while during other times it might just have been the durability of ancient binding materials. It’s all entertainment speaks to our time, but not all time.

The perception of the art object’s worthiness, has only pure subjectivity, and investment value, and the market to justify a 91 million dollar purchase of an object, that if it was on the old Pee Wee Herman Show would be an interesting prop that would get a couple thousand dollar appraisal on Antiques Roadshow. Don’t get me wrong any stainless steel bunny is really something to look at and competes with so much, let’s say, at Disney World. I don’t know if the idea behind it, is worth as much, but who wouldn’t want a stainless steel pet?

In art the talent is there, and a lifetime of specialty craft labor, rehearsals and practice, education and training, or, as when someone remarks, “That’s a good shot.” my answer is, “It should be, i’ve been doing it for 43 years.” You start with a blank slate, a bit of a horror, but you persist, after time, you can do it, and if called, are good-to-go, but the recognition takes both luck and public relations skills, so the ones that make it, not entirely by accidental luck, know who and how to manipulate, while being manipulated themselves. The well-known documented stories about people like Mapplethorpe or Basquait plotting to be known, in order to be respected or famous – they show what it took to be a star, in the eighties – what to do, and who to get close to. My particular subject matter and my mode kinda confine me on this level. Talent plus schmoozing, to be shown, the only way to be known. And there is so much of it – my friends and business relations are the same – what, for myself, would be poison.

Honestly the years of capture and what and how i captured it is transforming in a way a studio or office will never be, and certainly opposite of the art scene itself, where, if i found myself, would want to immediately leave to do some work, something worthwhile, to leave behind rather than talk about art. One of the transformations that occurs in documentary-based work is the perspective generated in the face of what has been seen and experienced, true or not, is that so much is simply trivial.

The notable execution, deeds or an art of high performance is easily seen in most sports. Even in team sports, individuals are clocked for their performance in quantities, the qualities already present, proved in action, signed and paid for, to just deliver the goods in quantity and increased payment closely follows. It’s entirely verifiable and is verified and updated and a bit unarguable in a way that, politics and art aren’t, as professions of deeper subjectivities and fantasies. Talent, ambition combined with the schmooze is a job itself – public relations.

In art the talent awaits the recognition, like in acting, in other words, the only way to show work is to network. Get yourself out there, so to speak. I remember Gumpy, before his little success, a life in the making of, begging his wife for more free time, not to paint. create or make, but to schmooze, socialize and hangout. And by any means necessary, but, more practically, in time and place – known as luck, and the schmooze. Working people don’t get that. If they did then they, too, could carry their mattresses with them to museums and galleries to protest/express conceptually their lack of sleep and insomnia from middle-class and well-off kids partying at all hours. Professional party people in an unceasing arty party. Don’t tell me different. I lived there.

MISTAKES AS ART

 

Mistakes, we all make them, and my camera mistakes often look like straight-up art and then i hesitate to delete, thinking it might have some worth, and, unfortunately, it probably does have more worth than what i’m actually trying to accomplish – in an art sense, but catch myself, remembering to get my head out of a market and feedbag of someone else’s desires. But most importantly it’s the flip – do photography in an “amateurish” mode, or just generally ignore “professional” standards. This is the taste of the professional artist. But it’s just a flip and way too easy for any sort of art to go beyond good, and that’s questionable. After dismissing celebrity market trends and basic subjectivity, though, it’s not convincing in any way, shape, form, or its substance – what it’s backed by – not much. Whether it’s the real thing, the conversion or the remaking, reinvention, disruption, it echoes the art and entertainment business model of today’s pure subjectivity. The “progression” of entertainment and conveyor of truths, to feelings as truth, form and content which may just be the definition of art.

Out of focus shots and blurred movement shots, in art, that alone could make a splash. I control and use movement and blur, along with focus, really enjoy it, but it ain’t a worthy subject, or the end itself. But then, i live mostly in this world and not my mind, and if creation is merely flipping something upside down, and then that would attract a lot of followers, maybe lazy ones looking for a name or the next big thing that’s actually petite, but valued, and success occurs, then we will have a new genre and school. Such is the path of extreme individuation, not the thing itself, nor any deeper common modes. Art has ended with the special interest orientation of self-interested  groups.

I have no idea why anyone would choose to be child-like with their creations, but, of course, i have no problem with it at all, as it exists far away and runs on its own rules. Its overvaluation i would laugh at and against. But if a type of bubble-thought i’ve seen in culture were to come into your world, against your will and wipe (white) it out, then that’s stupid – stupid as shit.

 

BLUNDER ART & BAD ART

 

Blunder art and self-consciously bad art can be something to look at and think about, it could be an opening (the non-gallery, philosophical kind) or starting point to some thing, but, in and of itself, hasn’t the protein for a growing mind and body, but sugar. It’s been called art-lite. In the fanciest of jellos, The Met Gala is supposed to be a sign of these times where the version, or reinvention, has its most natural manifestations as fashion, but whose? Celebrities, of course, who also invest. With gentrification and everything else i’ve worked on, my aim has been the forgotten unheard of downside of these fabulous disruptive times and the economic collapse that preceded it, the big disruption of deindustrialized cities between 1977 and 1994. and then again between 2001 and 2010, when things sort of bottomed out and turned a corner for the first time in a very long time.

At least there was plenty of cheap neighborhoods, some very grand, all my life until after 9/11. It’s no secret the jobs that employed the working-class are elsewhere, in cheaper sections of the state and country while demand for homes in the city, even with high rent, exceeds supply.

It sounds too simplistic to be true, but when Duchamp’s flip gained, what first was, a back door entry – he was already known – art expanded its reach, and, to prove the power of its openness to new ideas and crossing imaginary lines, it eventually was allowed in, because it’s truth could no longer be denied – the end of art itself, the ridiculousness of it all, cleverly flipped into a new art category of concepts. No tragedy there, it’s comfort art, art-lite, a way of living that finally thwarts all tragedy but death. And don’t get me wrong, stuffed sharks are neat and certainly entertaining and aesthetically pleasing, and is probably more Disney – corporate art than anything else, but that’s the point of the Bedfordshire 700 and that might even be part of the point of flipping the idea of what constitutes bad art into museum center pieces. My big obvious point is, it’s all over-valued, hedge fund ready, as an investment, and, by saying someone like Koons captured perfectly his time when money ruled in and outside of art, to such a degree that in its absolute apolitical and asocial vision it becomes pure, investment, after, of course, being praised, accepted and shown at museums to insure its institutional pedigree, is missing some valuable points. Intrinsic value doesn’t sell, what’s thought about it does.

Pee Wee Herman, situated in the pop world, might even be more the artist and much better. But when he masturbates in “public” it wrecks his career, even though, while not appropriate, it was a porn house, probably because his audience was supposed to be children, and it was a prurient act. But if he would have done that in a gallery situation, or under one, it might be declared a highfalutin art piece. It would have then been notable and the legal stuff – censorship, first amendment, etc. – could then be flipped into furthering the value through disruption and artful contrariness.

In other words, art seems divorced from context, except the one it imposes. Writing this book will bring no rewards and will not be seen, but if i sublimated it all to a performance piece or an object, like a gold mattress i could show and be heard and seen and parlay that into money or teaching position, abiding by the laws of entertainment and the name in art that makes claims of openness, freedom of expression, inclusion and even having no rules.

Art is adult entertainment because it’s the place to present it all as if we were children or schizophrenics, including all the body fluids that exist, whole or parts of the anatomies, human waste materials, masturbation, s & m, sexual grievances and the mundane, and that’s the stuff that’s cable and the internet made boring and middle-class. Who masturbates, where they masturbate and why they masturbate is a matter of course, or an art course, of course. If i had the money to realize my concepts into an art object – a hedge fund manger sealed in formaldehyde, a golden syringe, the placing of large speakers in the bedrooms of hipsters that will be controlled remotely and blast God Bless America as rendered by 100 different artists, the Gettysburg Address and Tower of Power’s “What is Hip” or displaying my gold mattress and taking a knee at the Met Gala.

Not that i really want to say this, but it did occur. I would eat my lunch, before departing for work around noon in my kitchen. The neighborhood was slipping hipster and the second hipster crew to move into the apartment building next to mine (they usually stayed one year), also had access to a roof which basically constituted the view i had. There, on the roof in the middle of the day, and with his partner present, he masturbated. There were a total of 12 windows from six other apartments that had that ideal view. I bet he was a nice guy, educated, and, of course politically correct, a little edgy, as they say. There were no children in my place, but, with regards to these kind of events, i try to remain a child myself for the sake of my soul. Being open-mined, the day that only artists look out windows is a day to jerk-off.

With hipsters and artists, or anyone for that matter in A & E, i don’t care, ever cared or paid any attention to you or what you do, until your mindless invasion. I pumped out large quantities of what looks like art for at least 40 years before “studying” it here in this text. I formerly just tried to live with it, suspecting all along, that, even in a cursory analysis, some of the the most obvious goofball things could be seen for what they are. I knew the mind set, a profession of subjectivities whose subject is ego and then, work – i ran from it my entire life, eventually driving me into the forgotten sections of even the Tri-State, one of which, was my home. In art, there are conceits, one of which is that art is always good and that it enhances and is positive. Even Holland Cotter, who i give a lot of credit to, for constantly bringing up the absurdity of money in art, fails on his automatic take that artists enhance the neighborhood, when, that only occurs after the long-termers are displaced, construction is done, and the new transplants declare it clean, safe and with a much higher quality of life that big money brought into the neighborhood. I’m here to tell you that it was a great place to live and i loved it thoroughly, to the point of planning my demise there. That was at any time before gentrification, and what gentrification ruined.

 

FLIPSTER

 

One of the most, speaking oxymoronically, original of flipsters, Mr. Sean Combs scored big and right with Mase and Biggie, but his multiple reinventions have rendered him sourceless and filthy rich. Commonly called mojo and soul, it, by its own nature, if copied or versioned, loses its power, commonly called meaning, for the culturally sensitive, less materialistic audience members. There is so much generational loss in versions and reinventions that sometimes the money-making is just laid bare, and the intentions – reinvention for profit and notoriety – become the subject. I guess its purest form, is hedge fund art. Mr. Combs, like JZ and Beyonce, are art collectors as well. Not to pick on Mr. Combs but that’s who first came to mind. He has got plenty of company – practically everyone in the business of showing off, and some don’t have any of his early track record. Name and image. And, aren’t they smart? It’s the most commercial of pop, so why pick on them?

A 91 million dollar stainless steel bunny bought by fund shark, Cohen, sold by the father of our treasury secretary isn’t wrong, but legal and normalized. What does it say about us or the effect of its trickle-down can have on people? Both negative and positive i presume, but we all know what many feel about things in art right now – bloated, like my old neighborhood.

Art objects, whose focused theme is deindustrialization, disruption of the working-class or gentrification as the end of the blue-collar presence in cities, is not sought after, unless it uses an art sanctioned strategy of identity politics and/or self-representation.

Art, not all art, of course, has become more like that, more entertaining, personal and “narrative” like news, and lots of things that have gone upscale and become a life-style. Open your eyes the contemporary proof is strewn about the institutions, with its overvalued concepts and objects that are in step with the unfettered version of capitalism, growing all around us, and, now without asking, the next bigger disruptions like a.i., will reinforce all that is said here. Going to other planets will open up new physical territories, just as all of ours have been consumed by profit or image. An era that would be built for a man with a camera that points outward, that, i wager, is beyond our capabilities, except in movies, but also made inconsequential by the chances of a major asteroid collision. But it’s a nice thought, particularly after what Hubbel taught us about great camera systems way outside and far from home, and truly something new. And the asteroid is still maybe 150,000 years out, and can we survive ourselves in that time?

 

FLIPPERS

 

Reinvention and disruption. Change? You call that change? I would like to understand change, guided by the demands of originality and novelty as a better way for all. The act of reinvention or flipping, is mental and without regard for others that are effected. Context, often original, is earned, but ignored or ironically flipped by intention or not, combined with blind ambition, lack of experience, that gets flipped itself – is how it’s done. Perhaps deconstruction, post modernism and appropriation simply became part of the tools of hedge fund owners, and can be applied to the economy, which, in turn, controls working peoples’ lives. Credit default swaps? What a concept and highly valued, until 2008, when it blew up, only to reform, until today when real estate values, worth and debt are at all-time historic highs.

The removal of the original context, whether by inexperience, ambitions or ignorance of reality, along with the elimination of the sublime and tragedy, through comfort and extreme fantasy is done by the least emphatic professions – art, tech and finance – that happen to be seen as the only savior for old cities, on the economic level – the way of the flip. Today’s big corporate flippers – wework, uber, lyft, tesla, et al aren’t profitable in any year, yet they sail on purely investment winds.

One of the big reinventions of the last twenty years were tattoos, which, of course, had another history in developed countries for centuries, prior to their gross popularization today. The Yakuza, known for their markings, go back a few centuries and are laden with this history and tradition and ways of expressing that, building on it. Obviously their culture was completely coded by being hidden, until they were forced to show their hand. Their tattoos were designed not to be seen. Their other well-known ritual was to slice off the tip of a finger as an offering to an offended party, usually their Boss. If justice was real i would have thousands of pure white tattooed and unworked hipster fingers, as just compensation, or some reparations.

Their tattoos evolved to be considered the finest and are now easily absorbed and accessed in an actual popular growing industry related to fashion and trends. There’s context, but not much, i mean, in regards to living by codes. Will ritual finger lopping catch on? Branding like cattle branding caught on. If Holocaust survivors are offended by tattoos, are they deemed culturally insensitive to another group’s sense of fashion over history? Permanent ink used in marking codes and traditions that are considered eternal, on the skin of the trendiest, most mobile generation in history. I recently heard a comment, “saying tattoos aren’t feminine is sexist.” Opinions/feelings as truth, asocial and without any historical knowledge, where do they come from? Minds whose conception of history goes back to their grade school days alone.

And in the Times i recently came across this comment about the Smullett fiasco, “…people like him, in a positions of cultural and political authority…” Are you kiddin? I don’t believe an authority exists in either of these professions, let alone a cable tv star in some show many don’t watch or know. That must make Michel Jackson god-like in his authority, which he is unfortunately, to a weird segment of the world.

We have our first Mafia disruptor, who literally flipped the notion of mob hits with the swoop of ten shots. Tony Comelllo, right-wing, post-hipster, slacker conspiracy dope and another self-proclaimed authority. Just as out-of-it and hurtful as Colin Ferguson but updated with a defense of insanity by fake news or just too much television while doped. From Ferguson to Comello in 24 years. I’m sure we can all relate to that in some way.

I have suffered from Social Disruption Disorder like many whose experience of the new economy came without benefits or even being asked. The consequences of too much socializing with a screen too much, becomes immediately apparent by a documented reality that we all live in, at least on simple fundamental levels beginning with universal similarities like our homes are ours and not yours. But money trumps all, now, more than ever.

I have also mentioned, earlier, Colin Ferguson. It symbolize the supremely out of it ego, that, became the norm. No problem there, just leave us alone. We’re innocent.

Weird ironic flipping like the Contextual Rezoning of Williamsburg and Greenpoint in 2005, matched the weird ironic language and atmosphere of hipster reinvention. Calling the elimination of a one-of-a-kind 150 year old blue-collar place contextual? To what? To Whom? Not considering the natives was revealing, and to call it contextual, when it became nothing like it was before since it was completely eliminated, or displaced. I was watching Warhol’s Empire State, and, i believe, i was into my sixth hour of anticipation looking for a light to be turned on or off, and i suddenly realized – Williamsburg doesn’t have be a working-class enclave. In fact, it can be anything with the right money and concept.

 

HIPSTER/HYPESTER

 

With originality a thing of the past, novelty becomes simple reinvention. Something that has none of its original authenticity left after its rehabbing, can then be marketed, nevertheless, as historic – the Domino Sugar Plant. With reinvention, exaggerations keep it fresh, like “contextual rezoning” or events like “super moons”

The full moon, certainly an astronomical phenomenon that is nothing new, but counted on, with its 4.53 billion years of continued functioning, we are at its half-way point to disappearance with 4 billion years left, and it has, since 2015, been hyped into super moons with completely predictable perigees that happen always, or eclipses that have been regularly scheduled events, are now the “super blood wolf eclipse moon.” Run of the mill winter storms now are named, thanks to the Weather Channel, since 2012. Terms like snowmageddon or super moons come right out of entertainment’s beautiful exaggerations – The Perfect Storm, The Reverent. Armageddon which is always around the corner, now more than ever, or, our machines taking over, are all bankable themes in pop culture. It’s all hipster-dramatic, and is the next generation discovering stuff that’s alway been there, but being converted into some alleged significance out of nothing but the dramatic conceit of first-timers. The Polar Vortex means it’s a lot colder than normal and the bombogenesis is reinvented from bomb cyclone, used by meteorologists for decades to describe an explosive storm.

It was cloudy on the super blood wolf moon eclipse, and, at the age of 66, there’s a good chance i’ll never see another in the future, but that’s because of either clouds or my death that i have no control over, and this event will occur thousands of times in a future not to be witnessed. It’s the nothing-new or original world of reinvention that makes it feel like things are “really changing” – they are, but in ways not thought about or considered for their social impact, but only an entertainment value.

“That last toke on my vape was awesome, i look super-cool when i view my polar vortexes and super-moons in an epic awesomensess.” The insignificant and ordinary is deemed extraordinary from a lack of experience, age, soul, authenticity or simply deeming ones own tiny self and time the center of our universe. Which is ok, i just don’t like being awoke in the middle of my sleep by music and parties.

Like playing out amid the nothing new world of reinvention that feels like things are “really changing” as if there’s there’s any shock of the new left. Disruption is now the two shock system – the shock of finding riches and comfort by disrupting, and the the shock of losing everything by being so disrupted. The disruptors win, the disruptees lose and become victims of SDD – Social Disruption Disorder further characterized by Art Induced Parkinson’s or Hipster Induced Parkinson’s.

Immature, remarkably inexperienced in the ways of the city, people like Shih and Dodd, disrupt the shit out of my neighborhood, wreck it, then sleaze off after being told for years that scenario was going to happen – that you will fail, destroy us, then leave to another city. Their blind ambition and the pain they caused, was truly super-awesome, and a game-changer, for the new normal, allowing us to be the best versions of ourselves, and, at the end of the day, to have reclaimed our own narrative to become our best self through self-empowerment and the art life-style. And, of course, to be the best version of ourselves.

The correct relative usage, not the exaggerated, lameness of inexperience, but, speaking their language, i would describe displacement as a bombogenesis beyond repair. If, over civilized time, up to the Boomers, it’s all been done, then superlatives, exaggerations and flipping become the norm, and, the flip and its hype, the method. Entertainment, exaggeration and flipping is the way to make money, truth will have none of that. Everything has its exchange value priced in, right down to the lost source. It’s only truth that will keep you broke. When folks pay it’s for escape and pleasure, most likely, from truth, which, for me, is fine because i go to great lengths to add pleasure to the image.

In response to a Times article on an extremely insignificant, small, wasted piece of industrial trash that was left on the waterfront – this ain’t what Williamsburg National Monument is satirizing and this book is putting into perspective? If you want to pick an insignificant and non-representative run of the mill facility to symbolize the heavy industries of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, then you got it. That is to say you don’t get it. You’re gonna remediate a piece of junk into more tourist bull shit? Of course, it’s never gonna happen, but exposes the lack of experience and knowledge that might have bad effects if they get their way and do their flippin, and even write or rewrite history itself without the perspective of being there.

Like the rewriting of history through statuary – “fearless girl”, confederates, etc. – where the phenomenon of the pure colonial concept is exposed, complete with nonsense  rationalizations that avoid the actual pretzel logic of its own subjectivity. The past is history that when judged from a moment in time the desire is to strike back. And like all colonialism, the original object of affection itself is eventually destroyed by its own popularization as a social instagrammable thing like the ruins photography.

Experiencing screens isn’t experience. Followers and influencers is the language of proverbial swarms, and a vision of ambitions. Likers and dislikers are the millions of little emperors, that now decide with clicks, what is determined right for these times.

Let’s bring back Bushwick Creek that, at one time, flowed outside my home on Union Avenue and down into the inlet on the East River like back in 1638. We could then take a gondola to party in Bushwick, perhaps, also restoring some of the lost hipness Williamsburg has endured following its own logical conclusions.

Flipping a sewer back to an open canal and creek linking Williamsburg to Bushwick, would bring in more tourist and development money, but is downright productively eco-friendly because Williamsburg and Greenpoint are in the red zone for flooding, and with climate changing hurricanes bearing down in the future, i see an American Venice as the neighborhoods final reinvention. As far as the veracity of the hypesters – remember the phrase “dead trees” the idiotic justification for a new economy – computers use no paper and save trees. I’ve never used so much paper since using computers, that along with the internet alone, boosted coal-fired electric consumption enormously. Because of companies like Amazon 165 million packages are shipped consuming one billion trees for cardboard boxes, as a single example of thousands of new things requiring enough juice to melt icebergs. Look at bitcoin mining operations, the only tech outfits to move into the Rust Belt but employ no one and are there only to suck up cheap electricity and rent. Or What’s App, when bought by Facebook for 19 billion it had a total of 55 employees that became wealthy overnight with stock options, promoting an economy of high pay and few jobs. Soon data storage alone will consume eight per cent of electrical consumption. Most of the data will never be used again and will simply stay stored electronically.

A.I. is looming and every techie and a.i leader says the same thing, that, “people are innovative and creative and will find ways…” which is no different from saying it’s pure survival, some will live, few will truly benefit.

 

GENUS MIDDLE

 

I’m creating what’s supposed to be photographic and literary art, and, at one time, cinematic art, while never paying any attention to it as art, or art, in general, for that matter. If, for nothing else, the experience of being around artists was always way too humiliating, in fact, running from it at every turn since, at least during my life, as it evolved into more and more the real antipode to everything my work stands for and against, and so what would you do? Schmooze and suck ass until the art world sees only their genius? They couldn’t even recognize my genus which is all i was asking for from the get-go. Now that i stopped and really look at it, confirming what is, at least for myself, so painfully obvious, that i have been searching for something to sum it all up. I found it, it was too big to see. Artists and their scene are middle class, and i mean that mostly in the cultural and mindset sense. Then i ran into Ben Davis’ Theses on Art and Class where he covers the middle-class character of the modern art professional, the way i mean it here. He utilizes Father Karl in a pretty strict, but true, logical way. Unlike Mr. Marx, and knowing dirty, hard work for low wages, an experienced wage laborer is speaking philosophically and socially here, but, like all wage earners, is a no name, anonymous and off the radar, until the next election year.

Highly critical of boomers, i’m one. Knowing the facts of the boomer scene, then, and using the Pictures Generation as one example, i don’t get it. Selfies and appropriation? At one time i may have thought you were talking about  absurd self-involvement or real estate, but it now makes sense nested in the ever more adaptable art world. The connection to self and disconnection from life outside that began with this big-ass Me Generation growing up entirely with media, and, whose offspring step to its evolution with digital media.

Drowning others not like them in their sea of reinvention, it’s as if they related to us as only pixels that were similar to one another, and nothing beyond that. Cherishing so-called genius creativity, or child-like innocence is so completely middle class. The original media generation was only a prelude to today’s streamed binges. Neither poor and authentic or really rich and spoiled their children inhabit the middle ground, where the genius fable lies, and the only way is up. To be recognized genius is so strong a middle class dream, there are institutions that cater to it. With great food, health care, and education, growing up, to travel far to a place that is not them, never was them, to make it them, in their nest of repurposing, whatever the hell that means, and, thus, flip Williamsburg into what it never was, now forgotten, for their exclusive benefit, and, after failing miserably, leave complaining about the expense that was their creation. Or staying in an ahistorical bed of me, now.

They say a genius can think like a schizophrenic and, yet, not necessarily, be one. It’s one of the best short definitions of an artist or so-called art genius – idealized, ignoring the fact that many are disordered by narcissism and focused ambition and its ideas, and in A & E, they will be able to fit in and earn a living. Hyper-specializing and/or doing the same thing again, over and over, seems close to the autistic side of being the artist, and, of course my favorites – art life-style and art-as-therapy – to be able to function while still existing in the actual world. Oh, and having that name. It’s a great excuse for truly being crazy. And in my book that’s acting without regard for anyone else. People say that’s a good photograph. My answer is always – it should be, i’ve been doing it every day for 43 years.

The landscapes, people and scenes i shot now capture a world largely gone, but also not comprehended any longer, and thus not regarded in any way, let alone cherished, after its fall. Glimpses are available in movies – Deerhunter, Christmas Story, Rudy, and back through the great Hollywood social problem films in the 1930s, the music of the Iron City Houserockers in 1980, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels in the 1960s and Norm Nardini and the Tigers in the eighties. From 80s  rock – “Hard Times in the Land of Plenty” – to folk, blues and country of Guthrie, Leadbelly, Haggard et al. Interest with the subject of working-class life fades out along with it’s subject as does good cinema, bar bands, true soul and all good things tied to redeeming oneself from hard basic wage labor.

The world i shot that has disappeared entirely could not be understood, like so many things, by anyone who didn’t experience it. We have changed that much and too swiftly without much thought about it. A great, real and gritty paradise are words – nouns and adjectives. But i do have the pictures, set in all its time and place and still not stopping. And that is backed completely by lived experience. Proving i really did think as my starting point, that this world is going, never to return, getting busy with the premise of the Blue Collar Holocaust – there would be such value for it in the future, only what became of the future? The blue-collar genus, moving to extinction is, of course, forgotten in a rush for a more comforting culture. Futuristic views, technical habits and the obsession of made-up beauty has captured the attention and cash of people. Besides, now that so many blue-collar folks got aligned with Trump, any notion of the working-class artist or intellectual is lost even more by that connection, where, at one time, before finance and hedge fund money supplanted itself on all the major boards, working-class themed art was equal to and shown along with all other art forms, that, by the late eighties, with the rise of identity politics, etc., became storage material in an archive of darkness, hibernating while awaiting market changes that forces a return to social reality, instead of unreality.

I never shot stories, but unmediated immediate life and things. Lack of money and opportunities, means with hard work you develop a strategy based on family – both the blood connected and the experience connected. And make some good old soul from a stew of intellect, heart, familiarity, memory and experience, mitigating the effects of pounding your head into the wall for a living. Or being completely disrespected, humiliated and insulted by by all the experts of the art crowd including its audience who are entirely made up of the self-proclaimed, speaking definitively about things that are only part of the mediated gossip, they’re hooked on. Fleeing into the lower classes for a breath of fresh and truthful air, a lot of experience then comes from a bottom floor of lived despair or oppression – it’s the second class treatment all people get who live below the middle genus, obviously, getting more oppressive the further down you are, finding the only kind of positive redemption available – art, music, writing, sports and religion, and is certainly the only real way out to experience freedom that our country is known for. Freedom simply takes money, and without it remains a dream. What happens when you strive for a good job, that you’re born to do, but can find no place, yet continue working?

It’s not really necessary to provide proof or examples for the obvious facts that tech and art are not into reality, especially since we are all living in a time, whether we want it or not, of futurism like in the Hudson Yards where you can now live in a spaceship neighborhood with a complex stairway to nowhere, and the fictional character, Neo, from the nineties, would feel right at virtual home, facing the new realities. The Wachowskis certainly know man-made change.

Economic and business terms, that have blended with aesthetic terms where liberal arts, business and science cross-pollinate just like college intended. Appropriation, originally a business, law and government term, post modernism, originally from European leftists, as a discourse on art and culture by way of anthropology and language, got cross-pollinated with our right politics and business. Perhaps as far back as Trump’s first cultural hit – the Art of the Deal. Steve Bannon speaks of deconstructing liberal democracy but is a media figure with films and into the internet, He is a good example of the squares of the right, getting educated in media and plunging into it with their own websites, shows and politics while appropriating their concepts literally from that of their enemy, the leftist intellectual university elite. Here lie the dangers of conceptual thought or simply loving the shit out of what you do. Concepts, thoughts not grounded, or thought of thought can be used by anyone, and loving what you do is just way too uncritical to be considered near to real thought, as is the toying of things and all the cartoon imagery, It can look quite dynamic at times, very artistic, nothing against that or any work, just a flipping mindset when it negatively effects people who aren’t even interested in it in the first place.

The world, and its own sense of itself, at best, is fodder for the likes of tech and art. Considering technology and media dominate the economy starting with the big five, the same way the top five corporations were industrial and were dominate prior to 1995, and its no wonder we are pointed in this direction and is the last chapter for the true blue-collar working-class people, who haven’t really caught a break since the seventies. Working-class folks, due to cashier level wages, for a long time, are simply the poor that work. At one time there was a blue collar culture that peaked, when cities were majority blue-collar, was plain glorious – movie palace temples, giant extravagant churches built by the members, little crime, slews of independent, often family run bars, stores, restaurants, amusement parks you name it, all of it built by the common citizens. The Grand Concourse and much of the Bronx was this same wage earner dream come to fruition when it exploded as droves of wage labor folks finally coagulated in the twenties, then rising out of the Depression in the thirties, into the WW II boom years and beyond, that grew and flourished into the late seventies, when this glorious, sublime, original, working-class world began its long unraveling. A class of folks that includes all religions, races, nationalities and individuals that comprise earth. In the Bronx i’ve seen my own neighborhood flip Irish, Puerto Rican, Dominican between 1975 and today, and has been completely working-class going back 110 years. That is what has remained constant, something better to identify with than today’s obsessions. Read some history on that screen, before the Irish and Jews were Germans and before them British, Dutch and Lenape.

I haven’t written or shot any thing that suggests the warm soulful, connected and dirty days are returning, but, in fact, disappearing, and it’s not a plea or a call to return to better times that are completely gone, and no one any longer gives a shit about. It’s a document from deep inside a genus and their environment, largely gone, but, when started, dominated the economy of all the older large cities right on down to all the many towns, a lot of them one-industry places. Now, to the degree that it is written about here, it remains as fodder for imagining what that world might have been like, yet i possess all those answers and so does my work, and, can, at least, bring you back into it, reinforced by the fact that is how i shoot in film – low late penetrating light of high resolution, saturation, three-dimensionally on a flat surface with light caught within the reflective print, catching in eyes…

I never look much at anything i shoot and i haven’t thought, ruminated or reminisced about anything gone – let’s say, for instance, my true home, one to die in because it was so damn worth it. Always keepin it down, way down – here, by the rolling falls, that i always hear. It’s never thought about – as dynamite buried in a bunker might be forgotten – but it’s there always, for all time, protecting it from…

Flipping is the basic business model, that the real estate industry most successfully lays bare, as does drug and commodities dealing, and has been at the center of both the business of art and its practice. Appropriation is a legal term at the center of eminent domain, its first official manifestation, it’s second is the culture of secular wanderers who enjoy, for instance, dipping into an historic working-class neighborhood as a platform for ambitions that are completely unaligned and have nothing to do with said place. Fighting for their right to party, eminently, and making Williamsburg their domain, they flipped it.

There are so many board, academic and institutionally provided lost unsaid layers compressed into today’s art business staffed by professionals who all love it, and, so, accept it, promote it and, i guess, believe in it. Art, now, it’s so completely middle-class it’s ridiculous, that, for all its supposed open-mindedness and inclusion, anyone working outside, what should be called, calcified concepts behind the objects of art, are rendered invisible. Using the term middle class not defined by its annual earnings, but as a culture in relation to the very rich who put up all the money, also known as board members, and, in many ways, call the shots, for the striving upward hoards of artists trying to make it, and somehow stand out. I suggest do the grossly obvious and easiest and tape a banana to a wall.

Flipping and appropriation – were legal, business and real estate terms that fit art’s evolution, which, i guess, could be called follow the money, luxury commodities and properties where expectations of increased value over time are expected by the smartest investors in America. Appraisals, parties, shows, openings, auctions, festivals blending business and art, for professional artists striving to create luxury goods. A secular self-constructed morality, such as political correctness, conceals its own deep illusions and its own complete bias on a class level. The middle class life-style blends perfectly with the striving transactional art life-style, and its invented secular morality of what’s correct in the professional world. It is what it is, not what it was, and probably not like it thinks it is, but, sandwiched between those below them who have to contend with the bare facts of capitalism, and those above them, whose wealth has bought them the freedom to do as they please, by virtue of money and be comfortable in their own world, which, coincidentally is the artist’s dream come true. Perhaps the extremes in wealth of a gilded age have brought commodities of all sorts closer together and the lure of your prize money will make you less compassionate a person, but successful in your lifetime, at least from the standpoint of this completely experienced, wide-eyed artist whose entire outlook is based on the five senses combined to one in order to perceive correctly, what is presently an anomalous situation.

The cities is where the individual young professionals go in increasing numbers, willing to pay five times what a native working family could afford, and, these families had originally immigrated into America with nothing and built these modest homes that are now so sought after, not to mention, the cities’ themselves and their glorious infrastructures. University-trained monads – art professionals comprising the multitude of artist specialties, along with all its institutions and businesses are so much a part of our cities’ developments now, that places declared, then zoned, as art districts makes the connection between art and real estate that much more undeniable, particularly before there is any art in the section declared an arts district in the first place.

Any artifact or truth would be without influences or mediation and only organized by the senses, and certainly not be institutionally derived.

Certified, accredited, approved, established, canonical, hierarchal or institutional, but the experts are all the self-proclaimed variety, usually backed by layers of education. It’s a business and practice, ultimately, of pure subjectivism – taste. Tamed or trained artists simply do a middle-class inversion, or flip on who they are via the standard charming entertaining Addams Family logic. Be different but remaining comfortable at all costs, with wife, kids and a dog. It’s all so well, good and boring, and, in reality, petty. It’s only the part about mucking up the lives of innocent hard-working natives that makes the problem here. It’s a society of individuals with enormous freedoms, etc., but just respect others that ain’t like you. OK hipster? On a macro/empirical level, your gossipy insecurity, and jealousy and your schmooze-reliant behaviors, are absolutely transactional, duplicitous and phoney. I can sense that real good. But, so what? The objects i make contain none of that, remaining worthless according to the mores of the times.

Institutions of social control, health, and representation – government, medicine, military or media and institutions attempting objectivity – science and journalism – and those of subjectivity – art, sports, intoxication and entertainment – dominate. It’s what heard and seen all over the place and covers much of our employment, and, as institutions, they think like institutions. Add the digital economy masters to that mix, the top five richest corporations are technical and media corporations, one of which is simply a big merchant and the things that concern me aren’t anywhere in sight. There are no institutions of truth. What’s truly real and experienced can’t be tamed, trained or coerced in any official way, or corralled into institutional thinking that is its antipode by its very nature. It should be a valuable commodity since there is so little veracity left.

And if you speak this way, you better be sure and confident that you perceive accurately.

Go deeper, and, after reading it, why would anyone bring art of the blue-collar world into this domain? The same domain that has, as it’s turned out,  such a negative hurtful impact on the blue-collar world they took and changed. “no works on deindustrialization, gentrification” No shit? I wonder why?

Whose gonna care for my soul or soul in general, but me and those left like me? Science, technology, business, law, art and a.i. cannot help. Truth and soul are entwined. I would never look to an institution for meaning or approval. Institutional perspectives are ungrounded and, thus, simplified generalizations scaled for the survival of swarms. Saul Bellow saw literature’s place as precisely an answer to that. The comparison might be to religion, but that’s another institution. However, right or wrong, religion, like my aim, is meaning. In religion’s case it’s the big meanings and with all the answers, where as, i have little but questions and thus, have all the details on meaning, but without any and all answers.

You don’t work hard making the art of the real out of its own beauty, ugliness and truth by loving it. I mean for one thing it’s a thankless, dangerous, dirty job. I’m supposed to love that? Then i would be crazy. That’s why i don’t want, for instance, billionaire mayors and presidents, coders or painters, making important decisions that directly effect our lives. In America you’re supposed get to do your thing. But having voice time is a much different matter. Billions upon billions of tax-deductible support to museums and the art world who cop a non-profit tax profile, to the whole affair. And that’s not going to effect the art? I understand the allure of conceptual sharks and puppies and golden toilets in such an atmosphere, and why works that use to share the center of art are now never seen. All boards going back to the original industrial money have been made up entirely of fat cats, donating to and building museums. What changes is the general source of the donations, which today is owners of large corporations and the finance wizards of our times, particularly hedge fund masters, some of whom, are huge art collectors, smartly hedging their financial bets further into high end luxury items, particularly art, and literally putting in 16 million dollar orders for single art objects from the top dogs of hedge fund-ready art – just order it and contract it out. It’s like making your own golden investment by complete high-end funding of a valuable name brand, that looks more like a franchise for eliminating the cost of a museum or gallery as middle-managers in the act of selling. Why mine and refine for gold, when you can make it yourself?

RealStill, not ordered in the canon, hierarchy, taxonomy nor beau ideal in art, but aesthetic accumulation of undifferentiated, pure difference, actual novelty and by the best teacher – experience of the life we have, but not one of us ever asked for, or, to be in, when we never had a say in the first place.

The golden toilet has taken on a life of its own – purloined and still missing. It last made headlines, when offered to Trump instead of a Van Gogh for his White House. It was a true show by the showing experts, concealing by its own liberal heroics, art’s connection to moguls like Trump – they are the only ones that can afford the art, and now dominate boards on museums. Art heists are notoriously and weirdly motivated by the difficulty to sell the stolen works, that can’t be shown or dangled like jewelry. The heist becomes another chapter in the show. This toilet is unlike most conceptual art and has the intrinsic worth most conceptual objects lack, if you’re willing to melt it down for luxurious scrap metal. As one of the most generalized, stereotypical and entertaining comments on America it’s only truthful if that broad generalization includes art itself. This huge business enterprise spanning centuries, not odd by nature until it becomes a more corporate, investment-centered market for luxury goods, while loving to think of itself as still separate and free, precisely because it is such a separate or parallel reality on a really small scale, and one whose starting point is always a conceit. Only absurdly gilded times makes the creation of toilets, coated with gold possible. America or Art in America, show me the difference. Whatever is in and of America is American.

It’s called experience and time spent on earth experiencing. If you can’t imagine that or things beyond self, because it might take some actual living, try understanding that and not your funds, or your boomer parents that raised you to reinvent, ok?

If it is art, it’s the art of the real not art of the deal or schmooze. It should be a valuable commodity since there is so little of it around but it’s only made up of entirely and only intrinsic value. The financial wizards keep it that way by their choices. Does that filter into what is exhibited? Aside from all that, art gets to have so much say in the city now. Exactly what lacks in the culture of art – truth and accuracy can still be embedded in expression, and not just feelings as truth or art-lite, but entertaining/pleasurable and truthful. The best example would be DaVinci, his universal taste, and combined expertises in art and science. The latter having rules and laws. Photography, using the camera, also has that combination of art and tech.

Boring, self-important, overeducated, middle-class, gossiping, petty creeps in any era are a drag, and that goes well beyond any Marxist critique, but comes from experience spread out over 45 years as the real meets the unreal, finding the unreal not open-minded and loaded with prejudice, and having such a say in city neighborhoods today. Truth and accuracy can still be embedded in expression, though, it’s proven.

 

END

 

If an artist captured all that has vanished, you would think that as an intrinsic value, but not an acquired value, it would be charged with worth, particularly if made memorable through intense photographic labor, and that’s just how naive i am, particularly in the art sense. Character, the top dog, is best found in places, where it’s required, and schmoozing has its world. The truth shall set you free, but only a drop or two of fairness or a 350mg tablet of justice would cool my inflamed 🔊 nerves in order for me to do my work like i used to be able to do or enjoy the freedom of not being forced to move.

As the foremost recorder of the Blue-Collar Holocaust, i knew that industry and manufacturing on the waterfront would die – i had been preaching that through pictures since 1977 when i began shooting it. But even in the late nineties Williamsburg/Greenpoint was a blue-collar stronghold where folks had already been weathering, successfully, the facts of deindustrialization, so i could keep it out of mind.

Colonists, after the fact of colonization occasionally become sensitive to what their ambitions fostered, so much so, emotionally, they, on the extreme, want their hearts buried at the site of their ancestors transgressions, instead of being shipped back to where they originated.

I thought, by shooting things sure to go, there would be a built-in value by virtue of its goneness, often busting my ass to add a wow factor to make it more memorable, i thought additional worth could be added. If that’s not enough there is a good chance i could have long experience within the things i depict infusing the image with authenticity and lived meaning, refusing to add my selfie to a scene i am often one with, and don’t need to prove it in such a limited art-sanctioned way. Completely misguided, because the only thing that increases worth is schmoozing, i made a big mistake and it’s too late. My shit’s headed to the landfill and could not make even a deposit in a museum’s golden toilet, called, “Art in America.” If highly educated with a better social standing, instead of slaving over this book on the cheap, my message would, in fact, get way out there if, for instance, i applied for a grant, secure funds, hire engineers and a foundry, then create my gold mattress for display at our art institutions. Now a conceptual artist/activist/social critic, i can join an institution in my entertaining critique of American institutions while cashing in. Or forgo the art, use my grant money to hire neurologists, find a nice working-class place to live and continue to do what i have always done – express from only a real and sensible place.

It is not appropriate to appropriate my home, or my work, in your reinvention/redevelopment scheme, that also considers 150 years of working-class history as a blank slate for ideas and profit without much mindfulness, social concern, thinking or ethics. Pope Frances, master of the really lost art of practicing what you preach, as well as being an avid participant in original music, theatrics, costumes, performance, ritual, great art and architecture, and really respects people for who they are and where they come from, not inconsiderate flipping and disruption for the sake of profit. Even the very hip (currently?) Wim Wenders found the pontiff a swell guy and made a film about him.

Art rage on, do your thing. I know creativity too, but not dysfunction, immaturity, and disrespect to the point of ruining the accomplished, actual and innocent by your colonial comfort concepts that others pay for with the unnecessary and tragic disruptions of losing my valuables.

As i have stated i saw and experienced the whole thing. There was never any curiosity, interaction or thought, let alone respect, for the people who were there (that’s why they’re gone) and the mindset was decidedly non-contextual. Maybe it’s just simply contextual to the individual monad – self-involved. Or, again, it’s probably a lot simpler and maybe they just don’t listen. We were to be flipped against our wills by people who believed in trending concepts about change, perhaps as, of all things, their “truth.” Concepts about so much of importance being a “social construction” that then allows for conceptual permission to deconstruct in order to reconstruct in the conceiver’s image, like the “wigger” transformation below me in Williamsburg. If that’s what you want, do your thing, it’s not for me. Just turn down the music, parties, and vocal demonstrations through the nights – “I’m opening for JZ on his world tour.” Really? With zero experience in music and the music biz? I like weird, but this is bad weird, even worse than weird for its own sake. All is self-construction? That’s good for you and bad for us – even deadly, if you have more money than us.

To flippin real estate culture, customs and flippin in general, i ask, what for? Not that that would make a difference, in the face of the greatest flip – a billionaire real estate mogul becomes president, with the help, of all things, the working-class. After reading this can you see why a group of people got fed up, got emotional and we got Trump. Hipsters, artists and developers replace me, but Trump would have done the same, and, maybe that’s what i’m saying – when it comes to ego, entitlement and inconsideration there ain’t much difference, and that’s way too bad to be ignored – the biggest of Trump’s enemies are the same on the level of inconsideration, displacement, knee-jerk disruption and ego.

If you’re going to reinvent/redevelop yourself, it’s not my business. And if you’re going to come into New York and reinvent/redevelop yourself, leave me out. Leave me and my home out of this ruinous, deadly, poisonous shit, that took my health, home, job, friends, my hard-won peace of mind, and, most importantly that destruction that played so negatively into my struggle to keep my family alive.

I don’t care to understand George Custer’s views on displacement and the same holds true for hipsters and artists or, for that matter, derivative default swaps or any such concepts. Understand this, the original sin is always there, even after colonialism having done its damage, corrects itself, from its now exalted position as Victor P.C.

You assholes. My work and i are the historic and missing link to so much shit that you have incorporated and appropriated in cities and industrial neighborhoods that you allegedly love. By displacing all the original context? You destroyed the final missing link to lost but actual context by virtue of a fetish fueled by the complete absence of experience. If you can’t be mindful, of anything beyond your own desires, keep your personal poisonous toxic shit outta my life. What results is a gentrification that extends the comforts of tourism with art into yet another urban life-style, injecting into, of all things, a working-class Shangri-La, now gone.

There was the temporary displacement of 120,000 Japanese-American citizens in WW II, the end of Willet’s Point, Queens, Pole Town in Detroit, Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles, and in Williamsburg we could never even dream of leaving either, and we always fought our displacement, ignoring all the evidence that came before, no one survives colonialism, the writing on the wall was screaming about. But you still fight. You should heed unofficial histories, at least, consider them. Tell the Americans who happened to be Japanese, “we made your life better. What’s your problem?” Ugly displacement takes a long time to be seen untangled from the desires that made it happen in the first place.

Assholes, your displacement techniques mimicked perfectly the torture techniques used by our government on suspected terrorists – chained naked to a ceiling, deprived of sleep for more than 72 hours at a time, and subject to stretches of darkness, cold temperatures and persistent loud music. I wasn’t chained to the ceiling, but by 2004 i had built a sensory deprivation chamber over my bed a small room within my small bedroom to escape the torture of hipster culture all around me, invading my home. Added to these torture techniques of Guantanamo, the landlord provided collapsing rooms, bouts of no heat or hot water, rats, their ticks and fleas. His rich asshole hipster tenants, their penchant for loud non-stop noise and constant partying, guaranteed the rest of my life would be a neurological hell that torture victims are forced to live with until they pass – plus i lost my home.

I first saw the purposeful blasting of loud, embarrassing lousy pop tunes when they went after Noriega and then Janet Reno used it as a tactic to make David Koresh surrender in 1993, later as a torture technique in facilities throughout the world and in my own home in Williamsburg between 2003 and 2013 when i left. These hipsters and artists now actually love bad pop music, instead of seeing it as a gas chamber for others. Good jazz, done in-home at 4:00 am by the father of a Brooklyn celebrity is also stupid, but having bad reinvented as good is the flip.

Talent can’t transcend what is bad difference. I never listened to Michael Jackson. I guess you could say it’s my right. In the years after his documentary exposure i then had to listen to his hits while inside my apartment at 4:00 am – a lot. I don’t get it or him and never will, but do get it forced into my home and work life which are one. What’s this shit about “narratives” and respecting people’s stories, who they are, what they identify with and people owning their “stories” and “narratives.” Who talks like that? People who are all show perhaps, and that is a set-up for our fall.

The direct, plain-speaking, no bull-shit class of people, toughened by economic vulnerabilities don’t need no voice or good vocabularies and proper education to know truth. Save that for the art of the deal when you sign a lease on a gentrified apartment. “Narratives” – it’s such a marker for the best and purest of bolognas, while letting real motives become crystal clear. You want something, to get it, you’re pretending consideration, that’s only gonna get us killed. Real ethics and moral backbone put political correctness in its place, as the bubble to cuddle through life. Suffocated by the octopus of ego the frustration is impossible. You know your’e going to fight to an end, but you already know the ending.

White suicide rates are soaring for ten years, the current heroin scourge is largely white and in mid-size cities and small towns. Between July 5th and 26th, 2016, there were 236 heroin overdoses in Akron, Ohio, that spiked a bit because the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil was mixed in. It’s 10,000 times the potency of normal Akron dope. Why this level of frustration? You would be surprised how many are pushed to killing themselves one way or the other. It’s an update from a Robert Stone novel, “When people resort to shooting elephants tranquilizer mixed with heroin…”

Frustration, rooted in the knowledge that, coincidentally, the deck is stacked against you. The kind of frustration that you have to keep absurdly bottled because you are a good person, and have found nothing but deafness, and god help you if you upset the ice cream cart. We’re talkin about workaday people with no money and power getting completely screwed up, down, right and left and completely sold out always, because politicians and companies covet such a large number of working-class people who never break the law, scrape by doing the dirty work almost gladly and also, generally speaking, fight all these wars by our volunteer military. The suicidal white message is just beneath the banter of both of these white candidates in 2016, especially after Bernie was gone. It’s a frustration that was left to fester so much that it let the impossible happen. Nobody points it out, especially returning soldiers (with their own suicide problem) but these wars we only screened and highly edited, all that dirty work is being done by a very large group not known for its murder, but suicide rates. There’s a lot to extrapolate here, and white on white real estate crime is a part of the suicide problem as you can plainly see, the same way the suicides, of eight NYC cabbies, in a short period of time, is part of a huge problem they are emblematic for. So is the rejection of Amazon by Queens locals fed up with disruption.

Non-violent white on white real estate crime is a killer. The lower ones do the dirty work gladly, some fight the wars, some document the 40 year continuing Blue-Collar Holocaust and then the gifted ones swipe your home? Quietly entering the logic of suicide, how could it not distinctly be remembered when, after having, unethically and illegally, finally lost everything, realizing there was no way back at my late age, it wasn’t depression, self-pity or self-involvement. It was a completely sane, rational and logical progression to self-expiration, and the only intelligent, logical and honorable thing to do. Don’t burden society by paying for the long term incarceration, health care or social services. Take care of the problem quietly, even paying for the body pick-up and burial, hurting only ourselves over the absurdity of what things can become and the impossibility of being heard. What do you do with righteous hatred? Yeah, to get that boot of real estate off my neck, but that was only one of many white on white crimes i’m forced to live through and get over. One offense with the greatest logic for suicide follows, and, naturally, it’s a pc-type.

RealStill is too good to be true. Nevertheless i have to deal with the facts, 43 years and counting. Policy One, for a reason, for us all. I reserve to, at least, have my work published first, before use by everyone else. People only took. With their special language – emails entitled, “Great Pictures” – translation – i could use these, for free, even though i’m loaded. It’s unpublished? So what?

And, true to form, they lack timing that comes with context. Precisely what the narcissist makes invisible by virtue of an enlarged ego. Context makes terrible decisions apparent before happening.

There is a destruction so sensible that it cannot be denied like when a healthy mind speaks from a forced abyss after losing everything and literally feeding my dying parents in hospice, media “artists” still came after me pursuing free use of my hard-earned unpublished photography even after fully informing them of my dire situations including i can no longer subsidize these free photographic services for them over a period of forty years, and it is now destroying my life. These are trust-funded, highly educated and quietly well-off boomers, older, and perpetually richer than i, asking me for big favors – my early unpublished industrial work in Chicago that i had just spent probably 300 hours restoring because it was so old – no one was doing color back then on these subjects.

No wonder gentrification occurs, when no one is paying attention to anything but careering. They’re so entitled, that even after explaining the whole thing – dying family, displacement, loss of everything – they still want favors and not little ones, and in strange places, like when my Mother was deep in hospice, and i was feeding her on my birthday, and this moron from Chicago is telling me – “I have a deadline.” Deadline?

A known but not a good, as in person, documentary filmmaker from Chicago, who, unbeknownst to me, had morphed/reinvented himself into an artistic director of a full-blown media arts limited liability company, complete with dyed hair, and a half a million grant from the MacArthur institution, wanted my Chicago pictures to use in building his company’s legacy. Without even mentioning any of this (i thought he was still the cinema-verite nerd he always was, but he flipped and fancied himself an artistic director) he repeatedly called about free use of my early unpublished Chicago industrial work that i had sent him 5 months prior only as an expensive gift, and a starting point for a possible future discussion about my work and its actual context, what it’s all about, and why i’m praised and never paid. And what for? Primarily, i figured, this context might be protection from the continual line of Blowhards who want to use my unpublished work in their own work for their legacy before they die, even though it is entirely my work and i, my family and the blue-collar subjects of these peoples’ films are the ones that are suffering and dying, and being ignored, so much so, that we have to take insensitive requests for unpublished work, while helping our Moms eat their food, after returning from what was diagnosed as death by sepsis. They cannot get what’s entirely obvious and what separates my work – the social forces depicted are also the exact same forces in my own life. Out of integrity i usually only depict a social world where i am connected. In other words, when i leave the field i don’t. But also out of integrity that’s my business, and it’s only there to fuel the work with truth, and not be part of the art personalities or Ted Talk thing let alone ungrounded and pure expression of self.

Bypassing that, and, even after being fully informed of my actual death march of forced displacement while my family is fading, in real time, he still wanted to use my work, and, of course, Mr. Media Arts, whatever that is, had a deadline. I am feeding my Mother, now in hospice care, on my birthday, and, on my cell phone, he says that he has a deadline? Why am i even talking to some media schlub and pretender while feeding my dying Mom? From a person who i had not seen in 14 years? Because, even after being told, they just don’t get it. Do you get it? It’s as simple as people don’t listen and that when they listen it’s only their desire and ambitions that is heard. This same highly respected media arts person also has videos, his hair dyed and coiffed, explaining things like ethics and documentary, copyright, and even what went on in Cartier Bresson’s mind when he shot, or this profound discovery – “The core value of telling a story that moves people’s hearts.” All these people talkin stories/narratives, selectively picking their own over someone who is truly interesting, and making the most rudimentary comments about the obvious.

We are so literally sick of the ways of the wasicihu trapped by their profound egos, with only impossibilities as options, eventually it will evolve into forms of self-destruction if only to silence the incessant mooching – it’s that bad. I’m talking suicide, after 42 years of this, not listening on purpose stuff, it proves an absence of soul and context that is a no-heart of purely transactional relations that masquerade as something else, done so well in the world of art and entertainment, and so obviously. If told, great pictures, the praise, a p.r. line to snatch my work. My skill is street smarts, sizing up the level of character quickly and seeing through any duplicity in an instant, and, as a hunter, i see all that most miss, with clear sight even in the often missed wavelengths of deception, duplicity and scamming, praise is just a set-up, a blind and deaf person could sense the clumsy and phony.

As for the seggfej from Chicago – it was simply the last straw, and it fell to him, asking for favors while everything i have and made is going and will be entirely gone, and when my entire experience of trying to make a bit of a living has been just this – “You’re work is great.” Media happy-speak, the translation into real terms is, We want it. Give it to me with the compensation that you know your work is in the expert care of another self-proclaimed media “art director” whose only compassion is his own career. My reward is that you have given a compliment? Huh? I’m not the one with uncontrolled ego, thus i don’t need nor want to trade work for praise. And the fact is i have verbally and in writing explained that to people all the time. How stupid. Not having a Name, thinking i could transcend the idiocy of the suicide of intentions, or be heard, instead of being the Invisible Man of art & entertainment drowned, out by the ever-increasing malignant narcissism of older creepy men who aslo dye and coiff their hair like women such as Donald Trump, Mike Murdoch, Mike Lindell or this one, betraying facts, that they are just salepeople with multiple degrees, working their version of art, the art of the deal, just like D.T., the flip side of the same media coin.

And there’s you hard-won insight into how folks who voted Obama twice, flipped to Trump, both of whom, used the working-class to be elected. And here’s a deeper insight – the blue-collar conspiracists that are into the most absurd and untrue versions of the world, many of them have simply been ripped off their whole lives, abused, and their outlandish lies are simply their internet medicine, because life has said loud and clear to them, “You don’t matter.” My “career” which turned out to be doing pro bono work, not for my downtrodden friends, but for well-off media wonks, was a similar ordeal – constantly praised as “great” in a swamp of media scratch-my-back, but never my own. Well-off, trust-funded, like D.T., himself, their mission is to get something for free that they want – votes, pictures, working-class housing, the list is as large as their egos and pocketbooks.

Unlike much of the continually betrayed working-class, though, i don’t flee to OAN, Fox, Newsmax and especially not to promising politicians of any stripe. I do truth, history and fact, often as art. The key, of course is not to react. I act with a camera, sound recorder and pen, as i am doing here, and tame my emotions to fuel the truth of what i represent.

RealStill – too real for both art and documentary, as personified by this Doc Buddha and others, coincedentally i met in Chicago, like Gump Master Fred, both of whom, if i would spend any time with, and their self-proclaimed careers, that is their main focus, would only lead to my self-termination, as it would, anyone raised under the suicide of consideration or mindfullness.

The Brookings Institute has demonstrated that the vast majority of gun deaths amongst white people are suicides (77%) as opposed to homicides (19%). But gun deaths claiming black victims is overwhelmingly homicides (82%) instead of suicides (14%). That’s damn interesting.

Hear me. What’s seen as white and simply a majority blob of similar people, is, in reality, made up of dozens of countries and cultures and religions. Furthermore take the entire “white population” whatever that is, divide it in half. Generally speaking the top half calls the shots that effects the bottom half, that works for the top and fights all our wars, and makes our stuff, or at least delivers it from overseas, so amongst other things Kanye and Kim can do their thing and i can write this essay. The long continuing Blue-Collar Holocaust, with gentrification only the latest social movement in feeding on that loss, is still a class thing, and, let’s face it, whites got class.

All-consuming over-sized egos and conceptual flipping, by hammer or phony humanist touch, that is simply out to get my work and home free of charge and for their sake, is, of course, terribly frustrating, particularly when it is now 43 years long. Knowing full well that this mindset does not have a bit of consideration, only an unbridled self-involvement of ambition and fun, it’s unstoppable. This is the Frustration of those who cannot afford to avoid it and don’t have the cushion of success. A Frustration that can manifest itself in self-destruction, or, in a rare case, sublimated into truthful artifacts.

Forced from home and neighborhood, illegally, immorally and unethically, the New Way even forced an expensive digital process sucking up my retirement money, that is only now equal to the film i used for over 43 years that is if you work on the high-end and think on the high-end, where profit and blind individual desires are not considered proper motivations. Digital sucks up post-time, leaving far less time and money to shoot. (source)

A week before my Father died, we watched, on tv, The Train a masterpiece on all levels, including originality. The use of sound alone was remarkable. Inspired by the non-fiction book Le Front de L’art by Rose Vallard, who documented the works of art placed in storage that had been looted by the Germans from museums and private collectors. It’s the last word on the value or overvaluation of art objects, forced by those in a life and death situation with the subject. So check it. Thank god, i had that chance to spend time with my ailing Father who wouldn’t be there with me in just five days. It artfully questioned art’s over-valuation and its intoxication, placing it above respect, decency and life itself. Probably, my Father, a WW II vet himself, simply saw a great movie, and believe me, the old man was a natural born cinema lover, and he loved The Train. How could people of character who lived outside art comprehend its logic of absurd valuations, appropriation or their dirtiest secret – displacement? What is called affectionately, disruption. This film, a work of art, did. It’s the last word on the value of property, and the objects that will outlive us all. And how some people view valued objects as more important than anything, including life itself.

My Father, a man who i never could talk to about all the nonsense of artists, hipsters and real estate because he just plain couldn’t understand it, since, it is so wack-ass stupid, as is the world of our remaking, that blots the source. Even after getting the new world of doing things shoved down my throat – losing my rightful home or converting to an expensive digital process, that was always inferior to film, until recently. I actually prefer it now, it’s finally gotten so good. And i do not understand it either, but only in relation to life and the world, not the self-involved mass of monads that we have become.

I saw cinema in real movie houses until around 1991. The crowded movie palaces all became dollar movie houses. Screens now proliferate – smart phones, hundreds of cable channels that i cannot find much to care about, just like movies that are now so characteristic of the remake culture we’ve become. I’ve lived a full life of experiencing things and its been exciting in both negative and positive ways, sublime, and, generally, very worthwhile but the opposite of the movies particularly since 1995, when the anal rape scene in Pulp Fiction was considered a masterpiece, it’s time to forget and move on. But the assholes in A & E i ran into along the way wouldn’t let me and came into my home, and even while taking care of a now gone family. The social movie houses have evolved into bingeing at home with a big screen and simply having your own youtube channel or website. It’s not your fifteen minutes of fame, but your 24/7 access to a world audience about everybody and everything, and, with Tic-Tok it only takes seconds if you want to go that route.

Our country was found by colonialists who were, in their view, backed by god, destiny and religion. Art colonies and hip hoods are populated by the most politically correct of folks. Art itself, has been, more and more, hyping identity politics and respect for others. It’s the age-old story where, religion’s function, replaced by A & E, complete with the secular morality of political correctness, gets endowed with a cloak of well-being and righteousness, neither earned nor examined that in reality is simply a bubble for the cuddled. And this book is the proof that pc morality can harm very seriously.

We have been officially instructed about the updates to the most significant aspects of our lives home and work. Being told by experts, playing the Wizard of Oz in front of their screens, and celebrities, playing themselves as celebrities, that art, digital technology and gentrification is equal to improvement, not to mention, being told of official versions of a history that i lived through and documented but, unlike opinions, are grounded. But they will always be the experts. The conversion to digital drained me of money, and added another full-time job that doesn’t pay, to my already overburdened no-pay work, all that for an instrument of art that still delivers a product, that only now is beating film, and is much more convenient.

Forced gentrification with forced digital conversion, how did that help? By losing my job, home and health? Although the internet is damn interesting, the family care burnout combined with SDD wrecked the most important event of any properly socialized person. I wish it didn’t happen but only the unnecessary things like the complete deletion of the most soulful, warm and authentic place i have ever encountered, and where i had planned to die? And by the way, one of the chief reasons why the cowardly came here was we had maintained it as a safe place and the 9-4 was always amongst the safest in the city, that’s why bad cops under investigation were placed here, less trouble available.

The historic protective warmth in the middle of such population and industrial density, came from a world where everyone, family and friends, for generations – lived and died together in one place. At least that was the way it was on my block, where, like most everybody in the world, no matter what our technical reach is, and, without a lot of spare money, we live local. Most all of us live locally. Aside from our device portals we absolutely live locally in reality, or whatever reality we have reinvented for our comfort. Real city dwellers, their street and blocks, make up most of day-to-day existence, and is what counts. Of course, the desire to be in two or more places at once (great for a photographer) doesn’t go away through rationalization, and neither does reinvention. Professional media artists travel relentlessly to shoot their chosen subjects, and many never really touch down. That’s not my way. There’s no contact.

Usually by the end of a book, even this one with this sour subject, there is elation, mostly because something got done, and i’m free for more work. But i have never felt so downtrodden, realizing more than ever how powerless working people have become. Usually i’m concentrating on the culture that develops in a stable blue-collar environment, not thinking about politicians and developers carving it up on google maps from their offices or even the Hipster Plague or the artists who cause gentrification to happen, not to mention my plain love and participation in Williamsburg, the Neighborhood. It’s like the Indians that were brought to New York and Washington in the 1870s, and then returning to their villages and tribes, with the full realization that the numbers, wealth and technology have already brought defeat, similar to the sci-fi device of our world being taken over by superior colonists. More wealth and technology will call the shots, always rolling over beautifully developed viable and stable cultures. Stability in a poor place allows the time to create a great working-class culture. Its disruption was its end.

I have been meaning write this, and never thought i would. Something that’s impossible forgetting would produce complete recall and truth, by virtue of leaving its deadly mark. Overcoming disorder in sleep, the absence of ethics and the loss of a beautifully productive stability (stabilization), better known as my home, that’s just part of the legacy of what is H.I.P. and will require heavy lifting until older age weakens me. But a source artist, curious about physical truth and light control, who has applied that to vanishing urban neighborhoods, here, focuses on and lights up the the physical truth of displacement through gentrification caused by artists, hipsters and developers in that order. The starting point is the pure reality of my subject, fully embedded, documenting, perceiving and remembering it all, as i have always done.

Knowing fully that the self-programmed devices, screens, tripped-out concepts and subjective feelings-as-truth mindset, will completely block the social truth and consequences of their anti-working-class mindset, even when i can present them with physical evidence, documentation. But truthful social criticism complete with painful empirical proof has no therapeutic effect, but is a restlessness, that a bit of fairness and justice could cure a hell of a lot quicker than time, that there’s not gonna be enough of, in order to heal. One tablet of fairness is all i need, not writing about it.

Humiliation. That’s a word i first came across mingling with the arts and entertainment crowd that was a whole different world. People were talking about the humiliation of certain things, common talk of those who are well-off, and i thought to myself i never really thought about it in these terms. I worked in a blue-collar way for a lot of years before and during my camera years and, i guess, that (humiliation) was just a way of life. Being forgotten, and loss, so routine in the working-class world, as not to be considered. I guess, more precisely, it’s simply total inconsideration on a grand scale.

Impressed, back then, by the making of culture, and knowing that i always had it in me, and wanted to do so, i finally began the long pursuit of having work where i would have full control to make my own things as a photographer, writer, and, at one time, a filmmaker.

Only to find a greater humiliation.

Quod erat demonstrandum.