Friday, March 25, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers trapped at their machines. Most of the people who died, either consumed by flames, or jumping out of the windows on the ninth floor, were young women, recent immigrants. This is the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City.

Terrible Karma is project Merle Patchett and I put together. The title - Terrible Karma – refers to both the title of a protest song sung by Cambodian female garment workers at a union rally in Phnom Penh (July 2010) and to the idea that events of the garment industry past continue to haunt the present, that they are always coming back.

Merle  and I will be out this Friday morning and afternoon (10-2) in downtown Manhattan, at Cooper Square, and near the location of the fire, at Washington Place and Greene Street. Follow the path on the map, and look out for our UHAUL truck, containing the audio-visual installation above. If you’re in town, drop by and spend some time in the back of the truck, feeling the reverberations of the fire, 100 years later.

It is July 2006, and Israel is at war again with Lebanon. Terrible waves of shelling sweep over densely populated south Beirut and the Israeli army enters southern Lebanon. Small mines, shaped and colored like toys rain from Israeli planes into farmer’s fields, making a deadly harvest. Each day, missiles assail the northern Israeli towns closest to the border. There is little protection for Arab Israelis. Their communities are hit hard. An overwhelming silence about Lebanese casualties engulfs the country—a wall of support-our-troops-bomb-them-into-the-next-century rises up into the air. On Israeli television a few heartfelt cries to please stop the bombing come from Arab Israelis standing in the ruins of their neighborhood, places forgotten long before the war.

I am in Tel Aviv, “Israel’s urban bubble,” where there are no demonstrations. (This is not to say that there are never any protest for peace in Israel. Here’s one from the other day. They’re just hard to find during wartime). At Hagada Smalit, the Left Bank, a cultural center, art gallery and the headquarters of Hadash, Israel’s communist party, a few painted placards lean against the wall in the corner behind the stairwell. Another kind of commentary is emerging on the city’s surfaces—quietly covering the walls and boulevards of particular neighborhoods, and entering into the everyday experiences of walking, riding and driving in the city. Commentary like this:

Am Israel hai: The people of Israel live

Am Israel hai?: The people of Israel live?

Am Israel hai al kharbo: The people of Israel live by the sword

Am Israel hai al heshbon mi?: The people of Israel live, [but] at whose expense?

Tel Aviv is indeed a surprising, confounding place to be during war-time. Despite the city’s absorption of refugees from the besieged north into its homes and hotels, and the signs at restaurants, bars and other shops offering free food and merchandise to refugees, everyday life in the “city that never sleeps” does not appear altered in any significant way. A stroll along the lively boulevards of the city reveal musicians playing at street cafes or sun-darkened French, American and Israeli children building in the sandy surf of the Mediterranean. At dusk lounging on one of the city’s many rooftops, with the darkened water shimmering just beyond the palm-tree line boulevards, and throughout the night, the sounds of construction on the any one of the city’s many new high rises are all that disturbs the peace. There is no great increase in the ubiquitous armed military or police personnel; there is no announcement by authorities for citizens to ready themselves for attack. In the apartment building in which I stay, residents remove their bicycles from the basement bomb shelter (which doubles as a music studio from time to time), and someone brings in two water containers. Within a few days, the bicycles are back and the water jugs removed. Tel Aviv, geographically and psychically, remains in experience a few kilometers outside of the war zone. For this reason, the events and inscriptions that refer to the war, directly or otherwise, are most striking and most difficult to easily categorize or explain.

(If the video won’t play, click “Watch on youtube”)

In his song “Ebonics,” is the entirety of a kind of Harlem life.

At first it appears that the song is a short dictionary—a brief English-to-“criminal slang” guide–aimed at beginners.

Yo pay attention/And listen real closely how I break this slang shit down

He proceeds through a list:

Weed smoke=lye
Ki(lo) of coke = pie
Lifted=High
Cars=whips
Sneakers=kicks

But as the list goes on it seems that what I am hearing is the story of a day in one life, the parameters of an entire world. A list of words, definitions, everyday objects, places, situations, his body and yours:

Burglary=jook
Wolf=crook
Sweat box = small club
AIDS=germ
Angel dust=sherm
Relax=max
Heart=Tick

This is not a simple list. The cadence of his voice—fast, insistent, yet never out of breath, deliberate, could-go-on-forever, the sound of New York—its energy and intelligence, makes my tick stop at times. This happens especially when his voice rises and speeds until it creates an entire picture, suggests another sound, places me where he is. Example:

The iron horse is the train/And champagne is bubbly

The words on the page, as empty and soundless as they are, still remind me of standing high above the street at the top of an elevated train platform made of crossed metal bars, wood and cement, in the winter. My body is shaking with the wind chill, tipsiness left over from a night out, the force of the train approaching at top speed, and the skyline is glowing. All of this is in those lines, his voice, and the beat.

Listen real closely while Big L breaks it down

Young bodies navigate the city streets more gracefully than luxury vehicles.

My dad sent me this wonderful picture of Lagos, his hometown, in the year of his birth. Friday, October 1, 2010 marked the 50th anniversary of Nigeria’s independence from British rule. Remember?

In general, I try to distinguish between what one calls the future and “l’avenir.” The future is that which–tomorrow, later, next century–will be. There is a future which is predictable, programmed, scheduled, foreseeable. But there is a future, l’avenir (to come) which refers to someone who comes whose arrival is totally unexpected.

For me that is the real future: that which is totally unpredictable. The Other who comes without my being able to anticipate their arrival. So if there is a real future beyond this other known future, it is “l’avenir” in that it’s the coming of the Other, when I am completely unable to foresee their arrival.

–Jacques Derrida, “derrida” (2002)

If l’avenir is always the meeting of the Other, the unknown, the unpredictable future, then we meet this Other, we lock eyes with this unforseeable future, almost every day in a chance encounter on the city’s streets.

New York, you’re perfect, oh please don’t change a thing!

you let the people see just who you want to be,
and every night you shine just like a superstar

On 14 december, 2009, on Stout Street, between Lambton Quay and Ballance Street, in the center of Wellington, New Zealand, there was a pile of rubbish blockading the entire road and making the street impassable for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. This impromptu blockade was a “One Day Sculpture” called Journee des Barricades by British artists, Heather and Ivan Morison. According to the artists’ statement:

Car wrecks, discarded furniture and other urban detritus barricaded a central city street in Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday 14th December 2008.
The temporary public artwork entitled Journée des barricades acts as a rupture in the everyday comings and goings of the city. In its barricade form, the sculpture might suggest associations with the history of political actions and social unrest, but as a collection of discarded consumer products it may also bring to mind questions about our environmental and economic future.

This street art in Wellington looks eerily like the streets of Naples looked last year (though probably not as smelly, and certainly not for the sake of art).

This artists’ collection of urban detritus also reminds me of the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the Arcades Project.

Benjamin’s project involved collecting things, books, pamphlets, scraps and quote related to the bourgeois transformation of Paris during the Second Empire (mid-late 1800s). One of his goals was:

To educate the image-making medium within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of historical shadows.

I think this means that he wanted “us” to become sensitive to the affective images of our everyday lives, to open ourselves to another kind of “seeing”–a seeing that would engage us deeply in our time, our space through intense connection with the “past.” A way of seeing that what we think is “gone” is always with us, in the shadows.

Benjamin had an interesting method for this daunting project. The name he gave this method was “literary montage.”

I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse–these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

Making something with refuse, detritus, trash, rubbish, was Benjamin’s way to help us see better. This was his archival practice, his archive of the city.

Slavoj Zizek, in the film Examined Life (2008), takes us one step further, asking us to actually love our trash:

Colors of New York :: Part I is a video made by Stadtblind, a Berlin-based collective “dedicated to transforming the perception of urban experience.” The video takes pictures of New York City street scenes and sets them against a background of corresponding swatches of color. To see this video, click here.

The Colors of New York builds upon Stadtblind’s earlier photo project, The Colors of Berlin, a color-coded “guide book,” which indexes the city by color, and is made to look like a designer’s swatch book.