I like this weather. I like all the preparation, the media, the chatter, the dread, the excitement. People have been talking about it for a week, and now finally, we're in it. Will the city shut down? Will commerce stop for a day? Will capital stop creeping around with its filthy little hands? What an exciting thought!
I remember reading Drew and Nada's reports on the NY blackout and being really excited by them. About what happens to neighborhoods and to shops and our bodies when something so basic, so constant, disappears. When you're forced into the world. Does it really take something so dramatic to jolt us out of the day-to-day, the (sorry, Levinas) complete lack of recognition of the other?
I remember what happened after the Northridge earthquake. My family's shut-up suburban block came alive. People came out (I guess they got shaken out) of their homes, they encountered each other for what seemed like the first time, they asked for and provided support for one another, they made EYE CONTACT (wow).
Will this HEAT bring a similar situation? For just one day at least? Let us out of our offices! Let us out into the streets!
Brandon and I were on the stoop last night. Maybe we'll be on the stoop again tonight. I bet a lot of folks on the block will be out and about. I know it won't be as dramatic as "consciousness of my humanity, consciousness of my interchangeability" but maybe something will happen. Something real. Something strange. I'm holding my breath.
I remember reading Drew and Nada's reports on the NY blackout and being really excited by them. About what happens to neighborhoods and to shops and our bodies when something so basic, so constant, disappears. When you're forced into the world. Does it really take something so dramatic to jolt us out of the day-to-day, the (sorry, Levinas) complete lack of recognition of the other?
I remember what happened after the Northridge earthquake. My family's shut-up suburban block came alive. People came out (I guess they got shaken out) of their homes, they encountered each other for what seemed like the first time, they asked for and provided support for one another, they made EYE CONTACT (wow).
Will this HEAT bring a similar situation? For just one day at least? Let us out of our offices! Let us out into the streets!
Brandon and I were on the stoop last night. Maybe we'll be on the stoop again tonight. I bet a lot of folks on the block will be out and about. I know it won't be as dramatic as "consciousness of my humanity, consciousness of my interchangeability" but maybe something will happen. Something real. Something strange. I'm holding my breath.
6 Comments:
Yeah, I remember the quake, too--waking up my sister, grabbing the keys to the car, and stepping outside: for the first time ever, because all the lights of the city were off, you could see the stars, swarming billions and not six or seven. And then the weird blue flashes as the power plants discharged the current they couldn't run through the grid.
I hate to subscribe to the crisis is truth model, since it has meant so many bad things as a politics, but there's something undeniable about it, too.
--JB
why wait/hope for "something to happen" & instead make it happen yrself/ves? everyday is/as an earthquake. make yr own heat yo.
what gives david buuck enough sense of self-righteousness to go around proposing into comment boxes---no doubt from the midday comfort of his own bed---that alli warren isn't already making her own heat, and what keeps him from understanding the real temperature of what she writes here?
it must be all the extra Time he's got on (in?) his hands to 'make heat' while the rest of us are WORKING.
AHHH, you should've seen oakland unified today. Water fights in the halls (indoors), throwing water on security guards, dancing, "stoopin." They emptied the classrooms, and were and about indeed. WATER.
i want publish a chapbook full of blog posts that i like. can i have this one?
there was something amazingly corporeal particularly about public transit yesterday afternoon. bart delays, sure, but more than that? sweat. and standing. and being that it was bart (and not the subway, though how many times I heard the phrase, "this is some realy New York shit, yo"), the crowding and falling on each other by uncontrollable jolts and ridiculous amounts of sweat were refreshing, communal. at the time i didn't think about it, was tired, but it was really a pretty fucking awesome moment.
though really, I'm with Dan. WATER. poetry readings should lead to far more all-out water brawls.
BYOB=bring yr own balloons.
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