jrmilazzo

[jrmilazzo]

Grant Wood, "January." 1940-1941.

[jrmilazzo]

Today's necessary noise.

[jrmilazzo]

“The Future of Poison Gas”

The smoke has barely cleared from WWI, and already we’re back to the war-mongering. This survey of gas weapon technology from the Chief of Chemical Warfare Service claims that making “warfare more universal and more scientific makes for permanent peace by making war intolerable.” Shocking from America’s head of military poison gases.

[jrmilazzo]

Francesco Clemente, "Morning." 1981.

[jrmilazzo]

Today's necessary noise.

Elliott Sharp, The Velocity Of Hue. (zOaR Records, 2020; originally released by Emanem Records, 2003.)

[jrmilazzo]

LeAnn didn’t draw the connection between Darryl’s condition and the chemicals she worked with until the late ’80s, when she saw a PBS news special on birth defects in Silicon Valley. She wrote a handwritten letter to the state’s health department, which she says subsequently referred her to the same occupational health attorney that represented Yvette.

Both women settled out of court with their employers, which helped each of them care for their sons full time. IBM also reached settlements in at least two closely watched suits filed by other parents who worked at its semiconductor plant in East Fishkill, New York. One child was born with microcephaly. Another was born with a rare disorder called Hallermann-Streiff syndrome that causes face and skull malformations. IBM avoided what likely would have been high-profile trials by settling, and denied wrongdoing.

“I mean, everybody trusts their workplace,” she says. “They think they’re going to be safe when they walk in.”

[jrmilazzo]

Lynne Mapp Drexler, "Untitled." 1960

[jrmilazzo]

Today's necessary noise.

[jrmilazzo]

Their success in limiting new housing in the West Village hasn’t just kept the neighborhood from expanding; it’s helped empty it out. The neighborhood that Jacobs fought to preserve in the 1960s was already shrinking. Jacobs celebrated the fact that her neighborhood’s population, which peaked at 6,500 in 1910, had dropped to just 2,500 by 1950. This represented, she argued, “unslumming”—what today we would call gentrification. As households more than doubled the space they occupied, amid rising standards of living, the neighborhood would have needed to replace its existing townhouses with apartment buildings that were at least twice as tall, just to maintain its population. Instead, the neighborhood kept its townhouses and lost most of its population. Despite her strident insistence that not a sparrow be displaced from the Village of the ’60s, Jacobs cast the displacement of a dynamic working-class community of immigrant renters in the 1950s by a stable, gentrified population of professional-class homeowners as a triumph. “The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out,” she wrote. Jacobs prized stability over mobility, preferring public order over the messiness of dynamism.

Yet in one respect, preservation proved more lethal to the texture of the community than redevelopment. Jacobs bought her home for $7,000 in 1947, rehabilitated it, and sold it 24 years later for $45,000. “Whenever I’m here,” Jacobs told The New Yorker in 2004, “I go back to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now.” Five years after that interview, it sold again, for $3.3 million; today, the city assesses it at $6.6 million. If you could scrape together the down payment at that price, your monthly mortgage payment would be—even adjusted for inflation—about 90 times what the Hechlers paid each month to live in the same building.

[jrmilazzo]

Emil Nolde, "Excited People." 1913.

[jrmilazzo]

Today's necessary noise.

Michael Gordon, Decasia. (Cantaloupe Music, 2015.)

[jrmilazzo]

Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.” (“We spent a day together,” Lohan tells her lover, James, in Irish Wish. “I admit it was a beautiful day filled with dramatic vistas and romantic rain, but that doesn’t give you the right to question my life choices. Tomorrow I’m marrying Paul Kennedy.” “Fine,” he responds. “That will be the last you see of me because after this job is over I’m off to Bolivia to photograph an endangered tree lizard.”)

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.

[jrmilazzo]

Guillermo Mordillo, "City Life." 1993.

[jrmilazzo]

Today's necessary noise.

[jrmilazzo]

The pace and sentiment change slightly when Ludovico calls for citizen, activist, and artist librarians—“the information shamans” and “cultural guerrillas”—to be custodians and guides and “help construct and discover paths to reclaim cultural space” as their mission is to “improve society by facilitating the creation of knowledge in their communities” (210). We are presented with a world of living libraries and archives, from the national institutional libraries paving the way for free and available information to all to the artistic and temporal libraries providing a social and cultural space and being a nation’s cultural memory. There is a more uplifting sentiment in this chapter, which starkly contrasts what Ludovico briefly mentions, the enormous cutbacks and closing of public and academic libraries, as they are seen as outdated and redundant in the digital age (169). We get a sense of the main argument that even in this fast-paced and dehumanized digital age, these gathering places of collected and cultural memory are not only custodians of knowledge and champions of free information but also provide a physical space where social reading and relationships can be formed.

[jrmilazzo]

Joe Milazzo, "Mare Crisium (Sea of Crises)." 2024.

[jrmilazzo]

Today’s necessary noise.

Félicia Atkinson, Space As An Instrument. (Shelter Press, 2024.)