Gramsci 2008

"Living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a
citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism,
perversion, not life"

Antonio Gramsci

"I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides.
Those
who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan.
Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life.

That is why I hate the indifferent.

The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference
operates with great power on history. The indifference operates
passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted
on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the
raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that
weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their
will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify,
and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve
the power.

The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is
the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who
consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as
the one who didn't know; the active as well as the indifferent.

Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few
ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have
happened? I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their
whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one
liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and
gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they
have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not
squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them. I am a
partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future
city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience.
And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what
happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the
intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the
window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan.
That is why I hate the ones that don't take sides, I hate the
indifferent".

Every morning I get my green tea on 42nd street at 5th avenue from a portly white guy with a big smile. I don't know if he is gay or what but the looks he gives me make me sheepish and deep down make me smile as well. He knows it. He knows that his smile and bright eyes flatter me and make me feel like a beautiful woman. Today I decided to look in him the eyes, but I couldn't, his love and admiration is so strong that it makes me want to hide. When I finish my tea, he always, without fail, says goodbye in his own flirtatious way.

He makes me feel like a movie star, like one of the pretty people in magazines, this guy.

The power we hold within us called love is enormous. What that man does every morning for me, why does it make me feel so uncomfortable yet so good? I look for him everytime now and when he is not there I smile at the other workers but nobody does it like he does it. He is not particularly attractive and perhaps he is autistic but I thank nature for making wonderous gems like him to shine in this deep dark night we call the world. People who do not give in to their circumstances and are shaped by something more than their environment. Their spirit and strenght comes from the past, will go into the future, will forever be with us no matter what happens to the human race.

It is untouchable. Hitler couldn't eradicate it and neither will brand America, or anything else. It will always be there waiting for us and hit us when we least expect it.

After my tea is over, I see the black circus shows in front of the library, our black youth break dancing for money, 40 years after the civil rights movement and I wonder about progress when black youth dance and jiggaboo for white midwestern audiences that smile and feel good that they saw the real authentic new york. They saw the black people dance. Good thing they are not in jail. Aren't they talented? I am not amused but then again what can I give them. They make their money and I am in awe of their muscular strong agile bodies. How did they get bodies like that eating mac and cheese with spam and kool aid.

Incredible strenght, charm and character, this world we live in takes the most superior of races and attacks it.

Lets just love then. Love is all we have in this world. Its the only revelation worth having. We can only love, each other, into the night. Let us come together and be true. You know how much I need you.

Waking up besides a sleeping woman, looking at her breasts and body and holding it tight, into the night.

Slow down

My refusal to run around, is it my strenght or weakness? It makes me
different. I move without moving, to the "unmoved mover's" beat.

True New Yorkers don't sit at home. Growing up we spent idle time
playing on the street, whistling to girls from the stoop, there was
always a constant air of conspiration.

In doing nothing you did a lot. Talk, watch, shout, bouncing balls,
making deals, contemplating the universe from the depths of the
concrete maze. Watching Kitty Genovese get mugged.

There is no inherent vibrancy and life to this city. Every tree in
central park is planned, a constructed work of art. All of lower
Manhattan is granite. The spirit that moves through Washington Square
comes from the native burial ground underneath.

How difficult to be indifferent to the city of love and love lost.

I roamed the streets weeping in fits of mental anguish and unemployment.

Growing up is always difficult, no matter where you are though no place
makes you as conscious of the camera, the cinema, the symphony of it
all than this maddened, jumbled dream.

I know many have written and spoken of, alluded to what I write.
Though it will never be enough, I will never get my fill of hearing,
understanding and feeling the power of the place.

This is Shiva's city, of destruction and creation, life and death on a
daily basis. Where only illusion can set you free. Where you long to
leave and never come back, knowing each passing day and night makes it
more difficult to adjust anywhere else.

I only sleep well on trains now or if my window is open to the noise of
the street. Aeroplanes and taxis and the rumble of people, everyday I
see my lover, my killer, judas, sometimes I see my father again.

He is carrying a suitcase and his thermos. His trench coat is open,
his russian hat sits lightly on his head. He eats his tomatoe and
cheese sandwich while looking out into the crowd. Between sips of tea
he whistles and smiles. The New York times under his arm, rushing home
to catch Peter Jennings on the 7pm news. Eating dinner, contemplating
life on his favorite chair. 11pm Ted Koppell on Nightline and then
1130 Johnny Carson, just his monologue and then good night sweet dreams
to do it all over again.

Sometimes my parents would stay up late to watch Benny Hill. Thats
when I knew that they were in love, from the start.

A review of I'm Not There - a parody of a self parody

Ironically, this film is sacrilege. It was tempting, I am sure, to
assume that one could make a film to represent Dylan, the way dylan
himself is: nothing sacred, constant flux, whirlwind genius, in sum,
an American enigma. But Todd haynes is not Dylan, nobody is, and any
attempt at imitation of the spirit of the that man trivializes. I
don't know whats worse, this movie or the first time I heard the
Beatles in a commercial jingle selling potatoe chips. The inner
sensation of violation is the same.

I saw it in Manhattan at the Film Forum and wanted to scream Judas to
the screen. Dylan proved everyone wrong, with time, but Todd haynes
won't. Because Todd Haynes is an imposter, a conscious artist trying
to do something big when with Dylan, the simple stories and songs are
enough. Scorcese's film is grander in this aspect and nothing can top
Don't Look Back in its understated simplicty with moments of poignancy.
I can't believe the NY times, the entire art scene gave this movie
such hype and credibility. Hyper- constructed art projects are
ridiculous, they are vain glorious, self referential, camp, and try to
hard. Susan Sontag is rolling over in her ashes. Did nobody read
Notes on Camp?

I re-read it last night in a fit of rage. The part of about the Jews
and the Gays is striking. How both groups looked to culture, to find a
niche within it, to gain acceptance in mainstream society. The Jews as
vanguards of morality, explaining their affinity to liberalism and
communism, while the Gays became vanguards of aesthetics, explaining,
well, explaing them. I have never put together how important the City
was for their existence and how without the urban enviroment they could
never survive in America.

The city the city, I am going down with this ship. I am getting office
space in the Freedom Tower.

Athens, Rome, New York.......

"You walk across the hall with that flower in your hair"

The importance of men to compliment the hysterics of women. The
father, strong and able to command discipline. The mother love. That
is the best dynamic a boy could ask for. Nature.

Many boys now have men for mothers and pansies for fathers. They grow
up confused.

I live and breath this city. I feel its deep secrets within me and now
understand its cruelties and gifts. It makes you then breaks you and
then puts you all back together again. ( Humpty dumpty)

It may be that after all my wanderings I will return here, the city of
my metaphysical birth, where my father took his last breath, where I
kissed my first German girl and we spent post-coitus smoking cigarettes
and talking of her Nazi grandfather. Where the staten island ferry is
the best poor man's first date. And also that day I found god on a
street corner in the west village fighting death, who had taken the
form of a homeless man.

It's all here for me. My poverty, my numerous weaknesses all have
dignity here. I can re-invent myself, let go of all my friends, my
name, my people, forget it all and start again.

I would see them occasionally ice skating in Central park, falling
down, they would offer a hand and pick me up and for a moment we would
look and recognize each other and then politely move on without saying
anything. They will understand, the overwhelming burden of history, of
love lost, the only way to survive is to pretend to forget.

This morning I read a story in the Times about 7 Saudi men who
descended upon a couple and raped them both, both man and woman,
repeatedly in an abandoned building. It turned me on, tremendously.
Fucked up, but true, like the rape scene in a Clockwork Orange, there
is something about sex and violence that is deeply rooted in our
collective psyche.

This Hobbesian state, this experiment in order, peace and tranquility,
i don't know anymore. Its as if we repress a potentiality, that spills
over in punctuated moments, engulfing us. Perhaps the obsessive
control, the obsessive desire to live in a utopia is what leads to
perversion and cruelty of the highest order. Prisons are the highest
representation of that, and the human spirit, breaks free, makes a leap
either called genius or insanity.

"it is impossible to describe what is necessary, to know what horror
means, horror has a face, you must make a friend of horror, if they are
not friends, they are enemies...

I remember when I was with special forces...we went into a camp to
inoculate children, we left the camp after we inoculated the children
for polio and then this old man came coming he was crying, and they had
come and hacked off every inoculated arm, there they were in a pile of
little arms, i remember, i cried, i wept, like some grandmother, i
wanted to tear my teeth out, i wanted to remember it, i never wanted to
forget, and then I realized, like I was shot by a diamond bullet
through my forehead, my god the genius of that, the will, perfect
genuine, crystal pure, and then I realized that they were stronger than
me, men who fought with their hearts, who had family and had children
and were full of love but they had the strength to do that. if I had
ten divisions of those men than are troubles would be over very
quickly. Utilize primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without
passion, without judgment because it is judgment that defeats us." -
Brando