From a Table on Avenue C: Ergogenics 101
Sitting at my
vantage point at the corner of 7th St and Ave C with Uberbabe, my #1 model, I
was reading War Against the
Weak, Edwin Black’s
scary/brilliant new book (Four Walls Eight Windows) which reveals attempts in
the 1920’s to breed a blue-eyed, blonde master-race in the US, in pursuit of
theories floated by the dodgy (but well-financed— by Rockefeller,
etc.) “science” of eugenics. My
Little Blonde Uberbabe grabbed the book and got so riled up that soon she was
declaiming passages to the startled drinkers of Schneider’s special brews
(she’ll personally castrate child-molesters and cheerfully mow down yuppies with
an AK47.)
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War Against
the Weak tells of a
eugenics movement which was finally discredited before it morphed— after 60,000
US citizens had been sterilized, right into the 1970s— into the respectability
of genetics. According to Black,
the ghouls who practised their crack-brained schemes at Cold Springs Harbor
Labs in Long Island took some ideas from livestock breeders: the wanted to cull
the physically-defective bottom 10%.
On the other hand, my knee-jerk Brit version of culling the human herd
would get rid of the morally-defective top 10%.
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Only one thing
bothers me about Black’s stunning expose, and maybe this should be the subject
of his next book, but… when the news finally emerges, to no-one’s surprise,
that the HIV virus was dreamed up in another secret lab, will it not be obvious
that the rate of HIV/AIDs deaths in Africa, coupled with corporate
pharmaceutical price-fixing have amounted to a much more effective program than
Cold Springs Harbor or Hitler could have ever dreamed up?
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Welcome to NYC—now rotate on it and die
I guess Edwin
Black has me and Uberbabe seeing signs of eugenics everywhere. But if you
accept my new coinage–‘Ergogenics’ it’s hard to avoid being confronted at
every turn by an urban environment that has been designed by highly-skilled
people who have been highly paid to kill you.
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My favorite
example is the spikes that have been added atop the stand-pipes at 51st and
Madison to prevent exhaused, sweating human beings from resting their bones.
Somebody was paid to dream this up; somebody was paid to cast these torture
instruments in bronze.
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Ergonomics the
design of the human environment, joined to Eugenics: Q.E.D.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> At this point, as a further example of
what I mean, I was due to go off on the
Plaza Cultural’s diligent and hard-working Gardeners in their little
piece of Paradise at the corner of E 9th Street. But hold the rancid rhetoric; all forgiven as 9th St
gardeners join the free food folk.
I was about to
unspool a polemic against a cabal of key-and-chain fetishists who keep the
place locked down 99% of the week–and took a sadistic glee in turfing out the
occasional book-reading visitor.
Then I was going to gripe for a while about how they don’t post their
opening hours, so there’s always the risk of encountering one of the denizens
of dog-heavy 9th Street– or
“yappies”— that is, people who’d rescue a stray dog lost in the bushes but
wouldn’t offer a sofa to a human cowering in the park for the night.
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I think I was
even going to speculate unkindly that maybe the Garden Lockdown Gruppe objected
to the woebogone procession of Diana’s free foodline, which sweats, soaks or
freezes twice a week, year-round under the willow trees on 9th Street.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Often the lines snake around the corner
to the steps of a smart new Australian bar, The Sunburnt Cow
style=’font-family:Geneva;color:black’>, which replaced the community-minded
cybercafe Union Coffee.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Cow
style=’font-family:Geneva;color:black’> had just opened
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> when the blackout happened; good old
Aussie intiative had a barbie out there on Avenue C before you could say
“Tucker bag.” Heaven forfend
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> that all those hungry folk clutching
their styrene-container meals might feel it’d be cool to picnic at the tables
under the shade-trees; or rest on the dozens of mostly-empty chairs and benches
after lining up for hours. God forbid they take time to puzzle over the
sculptures and murals, smell real flowers. As if. I was even going to assume that Rolondo Politti’s fantastic
100-yard-long jagged cutup soda-can flowers atop the 10-ft chain-link fence
would be as cruel as razor-wire to climb over (it is actually.) Indeed, Rolondo
tells me that it wasn’t planned for the fence, but sort of migrated there at
the suggestion of the garden committee…
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Then in my
naive way I was going to bring up the Plaza’s long tradition of humanism, back
to the early-’60s heyday of the late, great environmental visionary Buckminster
Fuller. The last remaining signs of his Geodesic Dome are five little circles
of grass in the tarmac performance arena in front of the amphitheater
seating. I can remember the five
I-beam supports sticking up from the concrete when I first moved here.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Apart from Fuller’s spheroid I have
memories here of great performances, concerts, plays and happy audiences
stacked up the amphitheater seats digging my poetry. Bucky coined the term
“Spaceship Earth”: for the whole story read The People of the Dome
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Sociopaths
cloaked as Urban White Knights.
Okay. Apart
from the cultural history, there’s more going on at The Plaza than a bunch of
creative egos playing Urban Environmental White Knight and struggling with
their collective Inner Nazi.
When Bette Midler bought a bunch of gardens and gave them back to the
neighborhood under her New York Restoration Trust, everyone breathed a sigh of
relief. The remaining gardens wouldn’t —like Esperanza, as big as Plaza between
7th and 8th— get bulldozed for $1,700-2,500 yupartment blocks.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Plaza Cultural opted out, claiming a
loss of autonomy and stayed under the Green Thumb of the Parks Department, a
Koch-era award program to plant disused lots and bump the junkies out.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The plays and concerts
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> mounted here are a thin red line of Art
Cred against the relentless garden-gobbling ranks of real estate stormtroopers,
rather than the garden committee’s passionate devotion to local Shakespeare
groups. So what comes over these
good-hearted folk once they get their hand in the dirt, and feel the primal tug
of Mother Earth?
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Alan, a
pleasant-faced Japanese guy on the 9th Street Garden Committee, a fan of Urban planning guru Lewis Mumford, spent
a while making a study of gardening committee politics in New York. He found
that somehow garden committees always seem to attract at least one sadistic
martinet cloaking his sociopathology in a utopian mission.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> As if on cue, whilst I was working on
this piece one of the gardening committee decided I’d stolen his Palm Pilot (not
style=’font-family:Geneva;color:black’> true, but what can you do with a
righteous zealot who’d spend enough to feed Diane’s foodline for a month on a
techno-toy?) and got me 86’d. I’m
in good company; a friend of mine, Mister Pitts, who helped to hump those big
slabs for the amphitheater seats on his strong black back likewise got the
heave-ho. The boisterous, barrel-chested painter/poet Pitts, an old-school
urban scrapper from Philly with a very creep-sensitive radar, inevitably got
into an altercation with Don Yorty, the Plaza Committee’s Chairperson.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> I really don’t mean to be unkind to
Yorty, fellow-poet and essayist, fan of Milton (tho’ not of John “it tolls for
thee” Donne); plus I count (hopefully), a couple of the Urban Plaza Group as friends, do portraits of their
beloved pets–even get paid sometimes. Besides, I’m in a forgiving mode after
my little Uber Babe received a gift of food from above, as it were, whilst
waiting for me on the stoop beside the garden entrace. The onion I braised for a
pasta sauce; the egg unfortunately got broken. Could the generous donor please
spare another?
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Snafus en route to Brave Destiny: Surrealism still in the trenches
Brave
Destiny was the
somewhat Huxley-esque title for a much-hyped show of Surrealist work which
happened last Fall at the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> Since one of the founding Surrealists,
Andre Masson, was my mentor I should have checked it out. He once told me, “No
matter what the experts say, the Surrealists were a support group formed by
post-WWI art critic Andre Breton to eat hashish to help them get over trench
warfare traumas." But
horror stories are still reaching me about the curator Terence Lindell
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> showing signs of Monster Art-Show
Stress Sydrome. And about
the artists who’d ponied up a $50 hanging fee and found their work stuffed
behind couches; they were demonstrating outside the celeb-studded opening
party.
Looks as if
Surrealism never moved too far away from trench warfare.
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> The guys who hung the work of 400 artists
in the show are as of the time of writing being stiffed on their pay, and were
also denied promised participation
in the opening party. Steve, from Empiresnafu, who was promised a showing ,
then bumped, had to deal with threats from cops for “using the lights.”
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> A lady artist invited to submit work
was told by Lindell, who looked at the piece still in its crate, “Too
big.” Her big boyfriend then
responded, “If you don’t show the lady some respect and at least look at her
work I’ll tear both your arms off
and stuff them down your throat.”
style="mso-spacerun: yes">
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> I understand the piece got hung.
