#listen the intersection of faith and culture is a weird place to live

[mezzalunanova]

Me, a Heathen with a Jewish grandma:

"Baruch atah Odinai...."

[imacrowcawcaw]

@oblvions @shes-outta-sight @lazingonsunday @karrotkate @satans-helper thank you all for the tags 💗💕

A buttload of info about me:

Last thing I read: "Lovers" by @satans-helper 😍😍😍

Favorite Book: The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

Favorite Movie: Beetlegeuse

Dream Date: Imagine this: a nice, plush couch, covered in down pillows and fluffy blankets. There is a fire in the brick fireplace, the wood smoke combines with the scent of Nag Champa incense and the homemade treats that cover the low table next to the couch. There are brownies, bread rolls, cheeses, bowls of fruit, dipping sauces, cakes, sandwiches - a whole feast of my favorite foods. My partner and I would cuddle up on that couch, listening to my favorite symphonies on the record player in the corner and talking for hours. This isn't really a first date thing, more like an established relationshil date, but god I'd love to just spend an afternoon surrounded with my favorite things and my favorite person.

Do I have a crush?: Not really. There are people I find very very attractive (a friend, Sam Kiszka, Duff Mckagan in his 20s, Lucy Lui) but nobody that I'm actually romantically and sexually into.

Hobbies: Swimming, observing nature, browsing Pinterest, daydreaming, writing, reading, making art, singing, listening to music, love to cook

My favorite time of day: late afternoon, right before the sun sets. I'm usually free to do what I like, the temperature starts to drop, I can watch the sun... it's nice

If I could choose what I looked like, anything, what would it be?: I want tattoos, and more piercings, I'd love to change my hair color again - it's been natural for awhile but I think I want either burgundy or bright blue. WINGS! I kind of want giant, strong fairy wings, and maybe glowing eyes, a forked tongue, and tattoos that move and change (kinda like Maui lol)

Am I romantic?: Yeah, I'd say I am. I love to treat people, friends and significant others, but I'd be especially affectionate and romantic for a partner. I'm constantly buying gifts and things that remind me of them, cooking for them, planning dates and buying tickets for things I know they like, quietly taking care of stuff I know they need to do, cuddling, complimenting... I love to shower my partner in affection 24/7

My favorite kind of weather: Late Autumn, generally. About 55ºF, cloudy but not raining, windy

What do I like to talk about?: Lol I talk a whole lot and I've probably talked about everything at some point. One of my close friends and I particularly love to debate religion, mythology, magic, history, and the intersections of those. We also regularly plan heists and crimes lmao

My turn-ons: Long eyelashes, pouty lips, dirty hands (motor oil, paint, flour, etc), sarcasm, seeing someone get excited about something, compassion, casual physical affection

My turn-offs: Nastiness without a reason, knees (I just think knees look weird idk), Trump supporters, 100% pessimism (I understand being depressed or doubtful or being generally a pessimist, but if you adamantly refuse to see anything in a good light and try to ruin it for others f u c k y o u)

If I got a tattoo, what would it be and where?: ohhh I want tattoos so bad but I'm saving up and I'm not certain about some yet.... but I know that I'm getting a tree of life matching with my mom, I want mushrooms, pine trees, lavender, wildflowers (all for personal reasons). I'd also like to make maybe a charm bracelet of sorts with little charms for my favorite bands, books, movies, and other peices of media. I know that interests change and I might not like something in 30 years, but I see my life in periods of interests and I want to catalogue the things that shaped me

My pets: I have 3 cats - Pumpkin Pie, Lady, and Sweetheart

My dream job: I just want to live a free life doing what I want. I want to grow my own food for the most part, and raise animals, and paint, and write, and play music, and go on random adventures, go antiquing, decorate my home from my travels, learn without expectations - I don't want to exchange a fulfilling life for financial security from some mundane modern job.

My dream place to live: Secluded, in the forests of Oregon (or maybe Pennsylvania idk) on the bottom third of a mountain, on my own little farm

My dream vacation: I just wanna go explore historical landmarks and buildings

My dream house: A beautiful historical house -- like an 1870s American farmhouse, or a craftsman cottage, or a Victorian painted Lady, or maybe a New York brownstone -- filled with antiques and records and books and artifacts that I've collected. I LOVE antiques so much, everything would be of fine craftsmanship, it would be lavish and inviting and packed with interesting items at every turn (I want my house to be a curios shop lol) I also want a big ass kitchen and nice woodwork, I literally get horny over original built ins

My piercings: Sadly, I only have my standard ear piercings right now, but I think I'll get more soon. A nose ring, eye brow bar (yes I know that's so 2000s but I like them), probably 4 more on each ear, navel, nipples

If I had kids, what would I name them?: I love older, interesting names, so - Euphemia, Hartford, Monroe, Malory, Louise (me lol), August, Fredrick

My worst traits: I'm incredibly stubborn; I love talking to people but I'm awkward; lazy and don't care; I'm a bit of a collector/hoarder; I bottle up any anger or sadness I feel so I don't inconvenience others

My best traits: I love to give and help; I try to make people comfortable around me/in my home; I have excellent taste; I appreciate quality, culture, and creativity; I have many interesting interests that I'm eager to share and learn more about; I'm very creative

My worst fear: a painful death - I'm not afraid of dying, even though I'd rather not, I just don't want it to hurt

What do I want to eat right now?: Well, considering that I just ate my first bit of solid food in 3 days and immediately had to run to the bathroom... nothing

My favorite vacation memory: *blushes* my first kiss AND nearly my first time (we went like halfway): making out with this dude, son of my mom's friend, at my family cabin

My favorite city: I really don't know. Timber, OR, let's say

My favorite social media platform: Tumblr or Pinterest (does that count?)

My favorite article of clothing: My leather motorcycle jacket. I can't actually ride a motorcycle (trying to remedy that because *sexy*) but I got it a few years ago and it makes me feel so fucking badass. It's heavy, about 15 pounds of good quality leather, has lots of secret pockets in the lining and some cool looking zippers and studs, but nothing crazy. It's hella warm and comfy, I wear it everyday it's cold enough to

Do I play any sports?: pfft no. I like to swim, and I'm interested in baseball and tennis, but I suck at them and also I just don't like team sports

My favorite meal: What I order when I go to Buffalo Bills - a pesto/feta/mozzarella/Italian sausage/basil/tomato/garlic pizza, with homemade potato chips and chunky blue cheese dressing for dipping. If I had room, I'd finish with Marionberry cheesecake pie from Sherri's (but I am incredibly sick and have no faith in getting better enough so I feel like I'll never be able to eat like this again)

What am I excited for?: The winter holidays! I'm atheist, so Christmas is all about the personal stuff and non religious family traditions for me. I love the decorations, the music, seeing my family, baking, giving and receiving presents, it's all just so fun

What am I not excited for?: Cleaning my room, it really really needs it though. Also just continuing to live like this. I'm not suicidal, I'm just in a lot of pain constantly and I don't know what to do

When was the last time I cried?: an hour or so ago, I'm in loads of pain right now

What is something I hate about the world?: There's too much to choose from

What is something I love about the world?: children and nature

My favorite scents: vanilla, lavender, pine, Nag Champa incense, BBQ meat, pizza with basil, rosemary, my Dad's cologne

Cats or dogs?: kitties 💗

What kind of sleeper am I?: A weird one lol. I can't lay on my stomach for more than 15 minutes without it making me incredibly nauseous for the rest of the day, but it's also my favorite way to sleep cause its comfy somehow... I can't lay on my back without a pillow either, 30 seconds in and the nerves pinch so bad I'm screaming. I snore, and I sleep deep, but it takes a long time to fall asleep and usually only beeping or banging noises wake me up??? Like I said, I sleep weird

How long would I survive in a zombie apocalypse?: I really don't know. I have some skills and the drive to learn to fight, but I am currently, as I'm sure y'all can tell, very sick and I don't think I'd be able to live with so much movement and so little medicine

Am I trusting?: Generally, I probably trust too much but I'm not gonna stop

What fictional characters do I identify with?: there are many I like but none I identify with

My most common labels: Mom friend, butch, that weird fat chick (doesn't bother me tho), the well behaved daughter, old soul

My life's anthem: I really am not sure if this is a good anthem song but I love it so so much... Take Me In Your Arms (Rock Me A Little While) by Kim Weston - you see where I get my love of long titles lol

Problems I'm dealing with: my health and whatever painful sickness is wrecking me, figuring out what to do with my life, saving money, getting my anxiety under control, getting the house to actually heat up because I'm cold as fuck

How can someone win me over?: let me express my interests and feelings, show kindness, be funny

What is something people don't know about me?: Idk

Not tagging anyone, this took over an hour

[glamoplasm]

i'm goknba. can my fellow trans men just like fucking accept They Are Men And Therefor Benefit From Male Privilege listen i get it being a trans guy is weird in that intersection of simultaneous privilege and disprivilege but like.

if you think you're immune to misogyny just bc people did or sometimes still do misgender you you're full of it. not even women are immune to taking on misogynistic ideas who the fuck are you to think you are. if you refuse to recognize your bigotries BECAUSE YOURE A MAN!!! you will become the most obnoxious misogynistic shithead imaginable. obviously there are intricacies to this but like. why do you think so many trans guys feel entitled to speak for women cause i'm gonna tell you now. it's the man. it's cause you're a guy. you can have a unique perspective on some things but at the end of the day you're STILL a man it isn't your place. passing or not if you're a guy you will have taken in the misogynistic culture we live in in the context of being a fucking dude and the idea of you being inherently better then women will be in your head.

obviously this doesn't apply to stuff like reproductive rights shit don't bother if you're going to argue in bad faith.

[transhumanitynet]

Episode 85 - Charles Eisenstein on Living in the Space Between Stories

Hello my friends and other fellow naked apes!  Another uncut interview plus fully produced, HIGHLY edited show for the inner circle…this time with one of my favorite provocateur-lover-authors, Charles Eisenstein. Do you like having the video of the full interview?  I ask because:

It usually takes me 5 – 10 hours per episode just to do the audio editing, because without the video there the normal long pauses and weird placeholders we insert into conversations just don’t seem right.  

Plus, sometimes we have to interrupt the recording to move – like in this video, from 9:00 – 11:45, which I encourage skipping over unless you like watching me stare blankly into space… 

Giving you this raw secret thing is kind of like taking off all of my makeup now that we’re actually in bed.  It’s vulnerable, raw, and real…but I’m not sure how much that matters to you.  So send me a note if you feel strongly, one way or another!  Or, you know, about whatever.  I’m listening.  🙂

love Michael

This week’s guest is Charles Eisenstein, author of five books that challenge our inherited stories of civilization and progress – but move beyond critique and into an articulation of the new paradigm emerging simultaneously through all fields of human inquiry and practice: new modes of inter-being in a living and intelligent world; humility and celebration of the mysteries that bridges science, art, and spirit; and new perspectives on how we determine value and how we can thrive amidst an age of transformation.

Charles offers us a literate and savvy look at how we got to where we are and what we will require to move past the suicidal, ecocidal myths that got us here. He’s also warm and kind and makes it easy to unfold into this awesome conversation, in which he calls BS on the rhetoric of endless economic growth and scientific conquest, and invites us to co-dream the future that so many of us have become too cynical to hope for. Enjoy this bracing dose of cool, clear wisdom and bright insight:

Our New, Better Life?

https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/7061-2/

Why I Am Afraid of Global Cooling

https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/why-i-am-afraid-of-global-cooling/

Discussed:

What inspired Charles’ thorough history and critique of civilization, The Ascent of Humanity, and how it differs from “anti-civilization” texts.

The independent convergent evolutions of civilization in Mesopotamia, China, India, and several other places, pointing to the inevitability and directionality of what we call “progress.”

What new stories emerge at the intersection of the timeless attractors toward a whole and healthy, thriving biodiverse world of human inter-beings, and a fragmented post-ecocidal VR fully artificial landscape?

When is it useful to think of humans as part of nature and when is it useful to think of humans as distinct from nature?

“Participation begins with listening. And that listening is motivated by accepting that there’s something to listen TO. That there’s something that wants to happen. What wants to happen and how can we participate in that? How can we exercise our gifts in service to this larger thing?”

What cultural appropriation gets wrong in its attempts to retrieve and revive indigenous rites (“It’s not the content of the rituals; it’s the spirit of the rituals.”)

Money as a ritual: “One of the reasons money comes so easily to us is that it’s a kind of ritual. The human mind…ritual is its territory.”

“Law, Medicine, Money, and Technology: those are the most powerful realms of ritual that we have.”

Operating on a story that believes the world to be dead leads to a world that is, in fact, dead – whether or not it actually was dead in the first place. Treating nature as a resource rather than as a community of minded cohabitants and potential collaborators is a self-fulfilling prophecy and an act of self-sabotage.

Charles’ critique of the New Age technologies of manifestation as oblivious of where the intention or vision comes from in the first place, how we’re enfolded into our environments…

…and how paradoxically similar that critique is to the disenchanting philosophies described by people like Yuval Harari and Timothy Morton, who make the case that it’s equally the case that the world is alive, or that humans are basically just machines. Or Erik Davis’ “re-animism,” in which we return to a pre-modern sense of a sentient environment through our encounter with AI-suffused devices.

How the scientific quest for control over a purely mechanical cosmos pushed us all the way around into some truly weird revelations about the indeterminate, irreproducible, and contingent workings of our mysterious universe.

Why machines don’t provide a sufficient metaphor for understanding consciousness, and certainly not for reproducing it.

Is trying to fit the complexity of the world into a linear narrative structure the problem at the root of all this? Is it a form of violence to talk about time and evolution having a direction?

“I’m not a story fundamentalist. If I say the world is built from story, I also recognize that that itself is also a story. I look at the story of inter-being, for example, as really just the ideological layer of an organism that is far deeper than story.”

“There are many ways to know. And we’re conditioned by a story that says only the measurable is real. So we’re conditioned to give priority to ways of knowing that have to do with putting things in categories.”

“Progress as currently formulated is not real progress at all. We’re not getting ANY closer to the fulfillment of human potential. Well, aybe we are getting closer on one very narrow axis of development. But there is so much more to a fully expressed human being…and we’re moving away from it in a lot of ways.”

What metaphor for mind/life/nature is set to replace “the computer,” just as “the computer” replaced “the steam engine,” which replaced “the geared watch?”

How black box AI solutions restore the mystery and magic to the technosphere, replacing reason with blind faith.

Kevin Kelly, Stephen Pinker, William Irwin Thompson, Douglas Rushkoff, Arthur Brock…

“The more empathic our participation, the better off we’ll be.”

Can we be TOO empathic?

“I think on some level, we all DO feel what all beings are feeling.”

The boundaries we draw between our selves and the world, between one organism and another, also evolve.

The healing power of grief.

Purge-aholics Anonymous.

The evolution of service as a continuously shifting, molting thing that changes, that requires careful listening. No moment is the same.

The sacred disquiet that attends our new perspective as we learn to see a bigger (ever-bigger) picture.

“We have to be cognizant of the inevitable reduction that happens when we assign values to things…one way to translate the humble awareness of the limitations of quantified value is to design currencies that do not need to grow in order to survive.”

Did money invent science?

“Property is an agreement. It’s not an absolute objective thing…as much as libertarians would like it to be.”

Why cryptocurrency (wants to, but) can’t replace human agreement with code.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts:

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0085 – Charles Eisenstein on Living in the Space Between Stories.mp3

Charles Eisenstein,

Future Fossils,

economics,

philosophy,

science

Episode 85 – Charles Eisenstein on Living in the Space Between Stories was originally published on transhumanity.net

[jfpark]

Prose of the Housing Question

paper presented on 13 October 2017 on the panel “This Side of Real: Renee Gladman’s New Narrative” at Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today

Though it was just a year ago this October 4th, I can no longer remember precisely how I came to read Robin Tremblay-McGaw’s post “Remembering Francesca Rosa” on the blog she edits, X Poetics. I strongly suspect David Buuck posted it on social media, but I’m not entirely sure; I don’t know which platform, and I didn’t consult the platform archives to write this. By way of this memorial post I first came to encounter the words of F.S. Rosa, in an interview with Tremblay-McGaw, also posted on X Poetics on the second day of January 2009, entitled “From The Angels of Light to New Narrative and Labor Activism.” I’ll get back to that interview in a moment, but suffice it to say that as I listened to software on a mobile device read it aloud to me while washing the dishes, it put enough suds in my soap to get me to later chase the books she published with San Francisco press Ithuriel’s Spear. The one I’ve thumbed most thoroughly so far is POST WAR and Other Stories, one of two books I’ll talk to you about today. 

The reading I’ll be conveying of POST WAR and Renee Gladman’s book To After That (or Toaf) extends a line most succinctly delineated in a sentence from Rosa’s “Author’s Note” to POST WAR, so it’s there I’ll start. Before dedicating the book to the founder of Small Press Traffic, James Mitchell, who also publishes Ithuriel’s Spear, a press at which Rosa was co-editor, Rosa writes, “I had thought of dedicating the book as a whole to all those San Francisco landlords who gave us all that cheap rent in the ‘70’s, thus making art (in big apartments) possible, but that of course is ridiculous.” While perhaps politically ridiculous to dedicate one’s book to a class enemy, I find the historical claim this considered but averted dedication offers to be fundamental, and it’s looping of cheap rent and weird art is one somewhat regularly threaded. Rosa mentions something like it in the interview that sudsed me, which I’ll quote at length.

In the 70s artists, writers, painters, musicians, underground filmmakers were swarming everywhere all over each other to get at that cheap San Francisco rent, not to mention that the city was so much nicer and freer and more fun than most other places.Gentrification was already happening.[...] But it was still possible to live here very cheaply if you weren’t one of the targeted working class communities or communities of color sitting on land the Redevelopment Agency or big Hong Kong real estate conglomerates et al, wanted. We were to a certain extent unwitting shock troops in the gentrification process, including in the Haight, but that is another story. Later it happened in the Mission, but much later. 

The role of what’s now sometimes called artwashing in the gentrification process will, like in Rosa’s interview, remain a detour not taken in this talk, but I do want to flag that this citation here is not the only intersection that artwashing and landlordage has with New Narrative today. Some of you, for example, may have followed the recent IRL and social media clashes between Semiotext(e) and Los Angeles’s Defend Boyle Heights / Boyle Heights Against Artwashing and Displacement regarding the eventually cancelled but would have been gallery boycott defying book release for Chris Kraus’s After Kathy Acker.

Meanwhile, a version of the history Rosa describes, suggesting some of San Francisco neighborhoods’ cheap rents as a necessary condition for San Francisco’s art production, including New Narrative, pops up in the Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian introduction to Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997. Having noted the fact that in the late 70s / early 80s there was still a decent amount of state funding for artists (some of which came to Robert Glück for the famous SPT workshops), Bellamy and Killian write, “San Francisco was not then the most expensive place to live in America. Rents were fairly cheap” (viii).

As the child of a real estate developer, as a partisan of the tenants movement, as someone who came to involvement in the tenant struggle through dating a tenant organizer in undergrad, as a person who’s been involved with tenants’ organizations since shortly after moving to the Bay in summer of 2014, it will surprise few that I find the quotes I’ve thus far cited interesting. They pose of this prose an attention to what Engels called The Housing Question. But though I think they are interesting, it’s only so much to note that more than one New Narrative writer has been self-conscious about the extent to which affordable rent was among the social conditions that made their writing possible. That associates of a literary movement noted for among other things its leftist politics would have an awareness of historically relatively low rents in a city whose gentrification has been among the most notable in the US since the 70s seems a matter of course.

But these quotes pose, I think, more than just an attention to the housing question, but also, for me, one admittedly seeking precisely this, the possibility of a Prose of the Housing Question, a prose that doesn’t merely think that question as a condition among other conditions, but as an architecture of prose itself. For shape to the sense of housing and prose I’m after, I want to share with you another long quote. I first encountered the following paragraph in Gladman’s Toaf probably only a year before I encountered Rosa’s “Author’s Note.” Toaf, unless I’m mistaken, was first mentioned to me by Stephanie Young, whom recommended Gladman’s work while I studied with her in the beginning of my last year at the MFA at Mills College in 2015. I’d read Gladman before in undergrad, even studying small press publishing with her, but it wasn’t until Toaf that her books caught hold of me. It was Young too, that, in comments on the early drafts to my manuscript Every Breath You Take, drew my attention to New Narrative, a movement which at the time I’d studied relatively little. Toaf, as you may know, is an elegiac report about a novella called After That that Gladman began in San Francisco in 1998-1999, second drafted in Oakland in 2000-2001, and third drafted in, I believe, Brooklyn and Providence in 2003-2004, before in pronouncing After That lost and writing the elegy. Here’s the promised paragraph.

That city, that for lack of a better word housed my novella, remained—for the duration of the first draft—faithful to me. By faith, I mean that it kept its light on: I could see it as I had come to love it months after it no longer was itself. Thanks to the economic boom of the late nineties. The temperate climate kept me calm, but everyday I mourned the displacement of the city’s people. I saw my favorite streets overcome: apartment buildings, having stood a hundred years, demolished in a day to erect lofts, holes-in-the-walls restructured into     boutiques, and new money-laden citizens crowding the sidewalks. [20]

Gladman’s elegiac report, Toaf, is also an elegy for San Francisco, a city that Gladman had left “because I could not stand to see the demise of my old one, though I was aware that I had been living in its entrails for some time” (27). These entrails, as the long quote states, had housed the novella, before the late 90s boom unhoused Gladman and the book by way of an overwhelming affection for those displaced, a mourning many of us in Oakland, and many other places, now know well.

Before I share a brief historical summary of some the rental political economy and tenant resistance that condition the period in San Francisco spanning from the time Rosa was writing her stories to Gladman her novella, a history I’ll share before returning back to more closely discuss their books, I want to share a definition of the word prose Gladman offers in her essay “The Person in the World” from the 2004 New Narrative anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative.

Prose[…]is the registering of the everyday, the phenomenon of life[…]using a kind of heightened language. Prose moves across genres, practices of thought, cultures, realities, bringing to both the writer’s and reader’s attention the blurred yet visible borders between.

The project of such a prose is informed by, Gladman continues, “a kind of semantic trauma,” and seeks to “reattach statements to their conditions” and “the habitability of those conditions” (46). Gladman’s particular sense of prose names a genre that distinguishes itself from the marketing and disciplinary distinction between fiction and non-fiction, and describes perhaps a general category to which much New Narrative might be considered specific.

So I want to say, after Gladman, that the registration of the everyday habitability, the living in, and the housing amid social meaning and the historical violence of displacement from one’s home, define a Prose of the Housing Question. The library of this prose is undoubtedly and unfortunately vast, since, as Friedrich Engels notes, the housing question is not one formulated only under capitalism but under all class societies, (and—as I add to Engels) even as capitalism gives it a distinct form through the profit driven racialized displacement of gentrification, imperialism, and settler colonialism, a library within whose New Narrative sections Gladman’s book and Rosa’s are notable, as I’ll before long go on arguing.

Now an interlude of historical narrative.

I draw here extensively from Randy Shaw’s “Tenants Power in San Francisco” from Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, a text I came upon after a poet-comrade, Lucy Asako Boltz, shared with me the link to Shaping San Francisco’s Digital Archive, Found SF.  In 1970s San Francisco “no laws stood in the way of landlord greed,” and the laws that would come were in large part products of tenant struggle. The books these laws are written in, could also be considered, I think, to populate the library I was just talking about. Plenty writers on the period, including Rosa in a passage I skipped over from the earlier quoted interview, mention the tenants movement begins to heat up in 1977 in reaction to the mass eviction of nearly 100 elderly Filipino tenants from the International Hotel, or I-Hotel. From 1975-1979 thousands of affordable single room occupancy rentals were gentrified away. The lack of local and state law combined with federal tax deductions for business expenses helped fuel gentrification’s search for profit through tenant displacement and real estate development, a search that was necessary for capital because of the limits to profit faced in industrial production and resource extraction in the US and around the world in the early 1970s.

Gentrification encouraged the formation of a coalition between the political struggles of those whose organizing emerged from black and brown, LGBTQ, and working class communities, communities which of course already multiply overlapped but insofar as their organizations were socially divided from one another had lacked context to overtly unite. As already discussed, in the early 70s San Fran had offered parts of these communities, in some neighborhoods, some housing security, but much less by the end of the decade. Under the newly created San Franciscans for Affordable Housing, the coalition organized for a 1979 ballot initiative on comprehensive housing protections including rent control, but, due to the passage of a weak Rent Stabilization Ordinance under Mayor Dianne Feinstein, their sails lost wind and their initiative was defeated. A dispute within the movement over a slow growth ballot measure led to organized labor splitting from the tenants movement.

The very tax deductions that helped motivate gentrification were eventually doubled by the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, raising the rate of return on investment, and consequently gentrifying pressures and average rate of rent increase. Tenant organizing responded by narrowing focus on strengthening rent control, a narrowing that contracted their capacity to continue pushing for the broader social transformations in the city their initial coalition envisioned, and thus also further narrowed movement participation, even as they won incremental reforms that established their political power. By 1991 the 1986 repeal of the 1981 Tax Act contributed to a further shrinkage in the tenants movement base as the reductions in profits from ownership and speculation reduced real estate prices, rent growth, and gentrification, taking the winds out of efforts to close remaining loopholes in the rent ordinance, most notably vacancy decontrol, i.e. the opening of rents to market rate when a unit was vacated by a tenant. In 1992, the movement recognized the effects of its political narrowing and organized neighborhood conventions to set a new agenda rooted in a broader analysis of the causes of urban crisis in the acute racist heteronormative profiteering of the Reagan-Bush era. This renewed broadness brought back together constituencies united in the earlier coalition while updating to the times, times by which the AIDS crisis was and had been on and the city had already lost the lives and residence of many. The renewed movement won, in 1992’s Proposition H, a huge cut in the allowable rates of rent increase. In 1995 Wille Brown, who campaigned as pro-tenant, was elected Mayor, though in office he failed to deliver the tenants’ movements agenda. As Shaw writes in words that echo the earlier paragraph from Toaf,

Brown’s abandonment of the tenant cause corresponded with the onset of a new wave of skyrocketing residential rents and property values. Fueled by the economic boom in neighboring Silicon Valley, San Francisco rents climbed 37 percent from February 1996 to February 1997.

Brown remained until 2004, tenants continued to lose housing, the rents just kept getting higher.

What interests me today about Rosa’s POST WAR and Gladman’s Toaf, as books of a Prose of the Housing Question, are both of their attentiveness to everyday life in late racial capitalism, reflecting on respectively earlier and later moments in San Francisco’s residential history.

In Rosa’s book, the stories regularly document their narrator, Lena Rossi, interacting in San Francisco with immigrants to the city, immigrants that include her, and her bohemian and post-bohemian friends. And when they do not take place in the city, they depict the narrator in motion elsewhere, moving toward or returning to the city, growing up in upstate New York, or traveling in Europe, the Middle East, and India in the 1970s. San Francisco remains a relatively livable center of the stories’ oscillating centrifugal and centripetal circulation. As things are elsewhere forced to fall apart by imperialism and revolt against it, San Francisco still largely holds and continues to pull peoples toward it.

In the story “Fred’s” Rossi makes friends with a college student named Ahmad that migrated from occupied Palestine. Ahmad works at her local Mission District liquor store in 1982. Through Ahmad she learns more about the Palestinian Liberation movement and the Israeli settler’s ongoing displacement of Palestinians, a movement and history we encounter Rossi first learning about in the preceding story in 1971 from her friend Jack. In the liquor store, among other things, they watch on television news the US and European military belligerence on behalf of Israeli and pro-Israeli forces in the Lebanese Civil War.

The title story, opening the book, narrates Rossi relating what she’s writing in April 1983—at first about pre-oil embargo 1972—to a friend while on the phone. The story loosely revolves around Z., a character of affluence and sexual violence, reported by way of another friend in 1983 to have jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1972 Z. shows up onto the scenes, where the scenesters are young and clinging to their avant-garde art making while pushing their physical limits with coke, ludes, and opiates, which by the 1980s Rossi has moved away from habitually consuming. The residential transience described is of a comparatively casual character.

On the home front, we were rare if we lived alone.[...] People lived with four or twelve other people.[...] Nomadic vestiges of feuding households roamed the streets and alleys. At night we could be heard screaming across airshafts as we fought over the PG&E and phone bills. The crash of disputed possessions flung from windows onto the street was a common sound. Any excuse to mount a production.[...] [T]he ephemerality of one’s home and the question of where one might find oneself from solstice to solstice led to the heightened state of     awareness that a lack of security sometimes brings, and a change to meet new and interesting people. [14]

Two paragraphs later, Z. appears and makes a reputation, aside from knowingly giving a sexual partner an STI, by bringing progressively interesting intoxicants to the parties. At the most elaborately described of the parties, this one with a guest list curated by Z. and held in a mansion, in 1976, the first party many of them had been at that had a butler, Rossi meets a stylishly dressed Vietnamese woman who laments the Communist takeover of Saigon. Rossi regrets having not told the woman her politics are disappointingly pro-capitalist, but feels for her when she sees a man at the party feel the woman up without apparent invitation.

Gladman’s book addresses and emerges from a different period of the housing question in San Francisco. In Toaf’s late-90/early-2000s San Francisco begins becoming the place we know today, the only San Francisco I’ve ever known, a city of increasingly less differentially popular condensations, as it was more so in Rosa’s 70s, 80s, even early 90s, and one more and more of popular displacement and especially black queer working class displacement. To After That is a book in which, through a mourning whose sorrow and celebration is made both clear and cloudy through flat reportage, we come to feel the absence of a thrice drafted novella about a day that gets messed up by a neighbor’s cell phone back when not everyone had cell phones, when a cell phone seemed to some a white-racialized thing to have, a day that’s ultimately okay because it ends with the narrator seeing the movie she wanted to see, a movie called Carla and Aïda set in San Francisco about two black lesbian painters living and working while listening to Alice Coltrane in their spacious apartment.

Though most of After That’s narrative would have taken place on the streets—streets that no one writes like Gladman does—it turns out the book would have been partitioned by titles that name spaces that internally divide urban habitation, titles naming spaces between the door of a person’s apartment and the door out onto the street. In order, the titles would have been “Corridor,” “Landing,” “Stairs,” “View,” and “Lobby.” I want to mention here that while all of Gladman’s books that I’ve read (which is all of them, except those out of print that preceded Juice, and the newest, Houses of Ravicka) write through architectures of urban inhabitance, this is to my present recollection the only, excepting Calamities, that substantially deals with living in apartments—the sometimes uncomfortability and often unpredictability of having roommates and having roommates let unexpected, cell phone carrying, waffle-making guests into one’s home; the novels of Ravicka, when dealing with residential buildings, are about houses, minus the first, where the traveling linguist -narrator’s residence is a hotel. While the housing question is one asked by perhaps every word of Gladman’s prose, in Toaf it is formulated as the iteratively drafted and displaced narrative of one person that doesn’t own their home and is for a limited time only faithfully housed to write a life in a given city.

Toward the end of the book, just before Gladman tells us the story of the novella she refers to as failed “but not quite buried” (52), we’re told how in 2000 she became “obsessed with identifying the tone of [her] sentences with that of other writers” (48). Reading Henry James she wished to fancy herself a Jamesian, but where his sentences were long and full of twists, hers were short and flat. In Hervé Guibert and Julio Cortazar she found a radical flatness that matched her sense that there was “something radical about walking down the street” (41), a kind of moving without going anywhere (50). This kind of flatness is a sort of transient intransigence that insists on being at home in an urban and urbanizing world, even as one and one’s communities are unhoused. Toaf, like the twisted plane of a möbius strip, begins and ends the same, with Gladman’s reaction upon returning home to consider again whether After That might have a future in the world after San Francisco. “Let me see it,” she writes. 

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: This Week’s Must-See Art Events:

Michael Williams’ digital paintings open at Gladstone Thursday night.

There’s plenty of good stuff to do this week, starting with a Felix Gonzalez-Torres book launch reception at the Whitney Monday night. Carla Gannis has a book launch of her own Tuesday night at the Pratt library, including augmented-reality elements. The rest of the week is dominated by painting and digital art—exemplified by Michael William’s solo show of digitally-produced paintings at Gladstone and Jason Lahr’s digitally-informed paintings at the Painting Center, both of which open Thursday night. For digital purists, check out Low Res: Spatial Politics in the Cloud at NARS Foundation’s Sunset Park digs Friday night. For painting purists, catch Rebecca Leveille’s brushy portraits at Site:Brooklyn. Fans of both media will be relieved to note they’re but a few subway stops away. End the week with FIN’s ICE PIX album release party on Sunday in Bushwick, which features performances from rising stars such as FlucT and Raul de Nieves. Your Monday hangover will be so worth it.

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Mon

Whitney Museum of American Art

99 Gansevort Street New York, NY 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. Website

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form Book Launch

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how prescient FGT’s work feels to our current political discourse. Maybe that’s because it’s always been about change? Curator Elena Filipovic will be discussing her own groundbreaking work on the late artist’s posthumous exhibitions, which each adapted to new contexts and the work of other artists and curators. The book features loads of installation shots, and is likely beautiful.

Tue

Pratt Institute Library |

200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn, NY 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. Website

Carla Gannis: Selfie Drawings Artist Book Project

Carla Gannis’s new publication represents a year’s worth of digital selfies. Each has been enhanced with an augmented reality experience, so come prepared with Blippar on your phone. Hovering over one or another illustration, the viewer will be treated to a multimedia surprise…my curiosity is piqued.

Swiss Institute

102 Franklin Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Christina Forrer: Grappling Hold

Zurich-born artist Christina Forrer’s politically-charged tapestries are chock full of references to 20th Century European textile art history, and the artists and craftspeople who responded to fascism. The chaotic, sometimes violent, acid-hued works also bring to mind punk illustrations. They’re weird and wonderful.

Wed

International Center for Photography

250 Bowery New York, NY 6:30 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Nationalism, Networks, Borders: Refugees in Visual Culture and Social Media

One of the most urgent and timely sections of the ICP’s epic exhibition Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change is The Flood: Refugees and Representation, which looks at how social media and the ease of sharing images affects the global conversation about the European refugee crises. Curator Joanna Lehan will discuss the tricky topic with Carne Ross (founder and executive director of the Independent Diplomat), and featured artist Tomas van Houtryve.

Thu

Gladstone Gallery

515 West 24th Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Michael Williams

Michael Williams is one of the few artists who has managed to make digital paintings that one can appreciate like paintings. Somewhat ironically, they feel more like good David Hockney paintings than Hockney’s own forays into digital art. They have a lovely balance of impulsivity and a sense of design—a quality that’s hard to achieve with physical paint, but oddly elusive in digital processes as well. This is William’s first East Coast show with Gladstone, and here the prints will be bigger than ever. I’ve never seen these works in person, so it should be interesting to see how they translate to a larger, physical scale.

The Painting Center

547 West 27th Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Jason Lahr: Electric Funeral

Jason Lahr’s technicolor paintings feel a bit like guilty pleasures. That might be because their content is sourced from some of pop culture’s most base vices—video games, action films, and just a bit of the internet’s endless churn of pulp critical theory. His graphic, shaped canvasses are inspired by the intersection of class and toxic masculinity. A timely topic indeed.

New Museum

235 Bowery New York, NY 7:00 p.m. Website

Raymond Pettibon in Conversation with Massimiliano Gioni

Why this is a “Must-See” needs little explanation.

The legend himself, Raymond Pettibon will join Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, to discuss Pettibon’s epic retrospective “A Pen of All Work.”

The event is $10 for members, or $15 for the general public. I’d highly recommend booking your tickets now!

Fri

EFA Project Space

323 West 39th Street New York, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time: Against Capitalism’s Temporal Bullying

“Exhausted” has become on the most common responses to “how are you?”, especially since the election. There’s been a lot (but probably not enough) discussion about the effect of recent stress on productivity and mental health. But beyond the news cycle, that perpetual state of fatigue probably lies in the failures of our societal structures.

Curator Taraneh Fazeli posits that “rest” is an act of resistance to late capitalism. What’s one sick day when you’re sick of it all? The event description claims “we are all united by the fact that we will experience fluctuating states of debility throughout the course of our lives. Furthermore, so many of us are exhausted from living and working in a capitalist system while insufficient infrastructures for care have further deteriorated. ”

The artists here, including AFC fav Sondra Perry, comment on this shortcoming, or propose alternate models for recuperation. These include satellite programs in Texas, where the social net is even more frayed than in neoliberal states. This looks to be one of the week’s most promising shows for discourse-sparking.

Artists: Fia Backström, Jesse Cohen and Carolyn Lazard with Canaries, Danilo Correale, Jen Liu, Zavé Martohardjono, Sondra Perry, Carrie Schneider, Cassie Thornton, and Constantina Zavitsanos

NARS Foundation

201 46th Street Brooklyn, NY 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Website

Low Res: Spatial Politics in the Cloud

Curators Nicole Siegenthaler and Alvaro Luis Lima (winners of the 2016 NARS Emerging Curator Program Open Call) have turned their attention to the spatial politics of the web. Namely, what do artist-made online spaces look like in the age of corporate sanitization and intersectional identity politics?

The show includes work from  Dan Halter, Faith Holland, Devin Kenny, Paula Nacif, Tabita Rezaire and Nicolas Sasson. We’re expecting a little conceptual overlap with our own online exhibition Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place. Here, though, Siegenthaler and Lima are focusing on works with a nostalgia for web 2.0 aesthetics.

Site:Brooklyn

165 7th Street Brooklyn, NY 6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Website

Rebecca Leveille: Crush

Rebecca Leveille’s handling of paint is gorgeous. In this series, she applies those skills to the topic of a “crush”. According to the show’s description, that can manifest as both attraction and a feeling of being overwhelmed.

Sat

Equity Gallery

245 Broome Street New York, NY 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. Website

Artist Workshop: Writing and Editing Artist Statements 101

I write this recommendation in the middle of a day spent scanning untold events listings: every artist (and curator, gallerist, etc…) should attend this writing and editing workshop. Mastering the ability to write about art in a clear and accessible manner is just as important as the ideas themselves. It’s impossible to get people to come to an exhibition without this skill.

The event is free, and led by Shama Rahman, Senior Marketing Coordinator at the Whitney. Professional advice doesn’t get much more “pro” than that.

RSVP: info@nyartistsequity.org

Gitler & _____

3629 Broadway New York, NY 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.Website

Susan Carr: Headspace

Susan Carr’s clunky impasto paintings undeniably charm viewers. They give an impression of speed that’s counterintuitive to their obviously built-up surfaces, and that tension satisfies. Here, it looks like this new body of work incorporates more 3-D sculptural forms inserted in the paint. One gets the impression these should definitely be seen IRL. They’re worth a trip far uptown.

Sun

929 Broadway Brooklyn, NY 8:00 p.m. Website

ICE PIX USA

One of our favorite things about all of our weirdo friends is the breadth of stuff they do. At this event, for example, we’re looking forward to listening to music by visual artists and watching performance art by musicians. We assume there will be more stretching of the disciplines over the evening.

This event is the release party for artist FIN’s new album ICE PIX, and undoubtedly the most fun thing happening Sunday night.

Artists: Diamond Stingily with Adele Thibodeaux, Negashi Armada, Eartheater (Alexandra Drewchin), Sable Elyse Smith, Rebecca Fin Simonetti, FlucT (Monica Mirabile and Sigrid Lauren), HARIBO (Raul de Nieves, Jessie Stead, Nathan Whipple)

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