'Cathedral of commerce'

I read this article in the New York Times this morning about how construction in slowing down:'End Seen to New York Building Boom'. I think this will demonstrate the economic turn of events most dramatically in the long term, because the city scape that is home to Wall Street won't up and re-invent itself, in 'The American Way' which people have come to expect. Instead, things will slow down, and perhaps in a few more years the city will look even older than it does already. I think that will change our visual experience of the city, and in turn its symbolic function as an icon of western capitalism to the rest of the world. 

Frank Winfield Woolworth, head of the self-named chain shop, called his famous Gothic style skyscraper, the Woolworth Building  a 'Cathedral of commerce'. In the light of this apt quotation perhaps New York is more akin to the fall of Babylon rather than 19th c. Paris! If that is the case then Joe Friedman's epithet for New York's famous brand of tall buildings 'temples to Mammon' springs to mind. It remains an apt comment considering such temples and their priests, the banks, have been pretty humiliated by this crisis. In turn, their power, as reflected in the architecture, seems to be receding. 

Unfortunately it will be schools, and city infastructure that is the most hard hit by this recent turn of events. It's sad to think that monumental public buildings will be a thing of the past. Of course we will mourn the passing of new corporate 'cathedrals to capitalism', but one gets the feeling that now is neither their time nor place. It seems that Grand Central Station will become all the more bizarre, as a relic from a time of national affluence in conjunction with a serious faith in the public sector. 

'That One'

This website called ThatOne08 is another addition to the wordplay parade that is stomping right across the USA election campaign. If I wasn't so tired I think I'd like to hold forth on McCain's creepy reference to Barak Obama. I can't recall anyone, even somebody trying to be really rude, call another person  'that one'. 

Do you W or Dubya -

Ok . A kind of follow on from the Palin 'Verbage' track of thought. I was reading the Vanity Fair Online daily gossip - it pointed me to this ABC blog about how Sarah's statements about the 'Troopershed' scandal are straightforward lies. One of the comments at the bottom talks about the letter 'W' in relation to the Republican party. Well this is pretty funny as 'W' has become synonymous with the George W. Bush administration because 'W' is what differenciates George's name from his father, former President Bush. " The letter has become such a popular symbol it's now a word in its own right. The urban dictionary (irritatingly on the button for linguistic development) has an entry for 'dubya' which is meant to be the phonetic spelling of 'W' pronounced in a Texan (the state of Bush) accent. This is what entry 7 of the urban dictionary defines 'dubya' as  - 'If the 23rd letter of the alphabet is "dubya", you might be a redneck.'

The iconic statement of 'W' during the Bush presidency was even endorsed by the election campaign back in '04. Again I'm going to accompany this with an image from the New York Historical Society. This is a campaign hankie. And as you can see, it only uses 'W'. Spelling out the man's full name is no longer deemed necessary. He is simply 'W', or 'dubya'. So I suppose 'W' is positive and 'dubya' is negative. This is reinforced by the context of use: DubyaSpeak.com  for example is a website that claims 'We record the damage'. 

It is ironic that 'talking proper' is historically considered a bastilion of conservative values,  but is now what the republicans use to critique 'overly intellectual' democrats. George W. Bush, like Sarah Palin is reinventing American semantics. Their distinct lexiographic style only reinforces how the political weight of phraseology plays such a big part in this election. But what I'm saying is nothing new. Roman Jacobson's theory of communicative functions famously applied to 'I like Ike'. It's the best example of why 'Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics' remains a jolly worthwhile read. 

Word

 
I just finished reading James Wood's article in the New Yorker on Sarah Palin's semantics. In 'Verbage' Wood discusses the anti-intellectualism that underpins the Republican ticket. Moreover their 'war on words' has reached a climax with their nonsensical VP candidate Pain. She can certainly be labeled as linguistic maverick with her deliberate flouting of conventional grammatical codes, in both vocabulary and phraseology. I suppose this means she's truly a radical breaking free of linguistic norms in order to deliver to all those Joe Sixpacks out there a more honest and direct way of communicating. Sort of like Tupac with marginalized black men in the 90s. Her use of language should be subject to analysis for years to come, as a nuanced product of a certain type of 'all and only' American culture. 

This photograph is another gem from the New York Historical Society. It depicts loads of badges from previous American elections. 

Authentic Bicycle Thieves

Charles Burnett described the story of Bicycle Thieves as "diabolically simple". I think you'd be hard pressed to elaborate on "Man gets bike. Man looses bike. Will man ever find bike again." Simplicity is what make this film so ethically complex and dramatically heartbreaking, although it explicit about neither. The images we see are just a guy and his son trying to find a bike. 

It the viewer who connect these images with radical social commentary. We are plunged into a moral grey zone, in much the same way as a Graham Green novel, where we identify the criminal a victim, the right as wrong, and the bad as necessary: our moral absolutes fail to stand the test. The workers in this film are forced to the thieving trade because they live in a state that fails to provide for the poor. In order to survive they have to renounce social duty for individual gain. 

Again, it is the simplicity of this film which makes it such a sophisticated interrogation of post-war Italy. The documentary style (although highly manufactured) is what Godfrey Cheshire describes as an 'ethical stance' which 'continues to represent a struggle for authenticity'. Here is where I think the film becomes involved with contemporary America. The entire nation is gasping for any last grain of authenticity they can believe in politics. McCain's slogan 'The Original Maverick', implies the Republican ticket provide some kind of root source, a primary, unfettered, unfiltered character, to it's voters. 

Obama's campaign is centred around 'change', which is the clearest demand of 'Bicycle Thieves'. After watching that film it's impossible to think that the status quo of its characters should be permitted to continue. The Democratic ticket's compact slogan – one verb 'to change', seems in complete alignment with the socialist principals of Italian neorealist emerging from fascist rule with a fractured cultural identity and complicit guilt in the atrocities committed by the Nazis, being unearthed at the time the film was made in 1948. 

Yet the Obama slogan is still extraordinarily vague. It doesn't pin down precisely what is going to change, in the way that the Republican ticket identifies 'original' expressly with 'Maverick'. This American election seems more like political theatre than ever before. Yet we seem to be sliding further and further away from the 'total cinema' of the neorealist social conscious message for change, to a vague and non-committal rallying cry. It's function is to rouse rather than deliver. 

Angry In Brooklyn

Thursday morning I went to Brooklyn. On  on 3rd Street I took this photograph. The hand painted slogan reads: 'NO MORE CORPORATE BULLSHIT!FUK WALL ST. !' Although it seems a little trite writing it out in compute text, the scale of this graffiti is so big that its statement completely dominated the skyline. It was in a trendy part of Brooklyn, but on a derelict site. Without Manhattan sky scrapers to blot out the phrase, it really screamed out. The tone of the work was particularly jarring because the day I visited this part of town happened to be incredibly beautiful 9.11 weather. 

'My Lost City'

A fairly old article (2003) by Luc Sante in the New York Review of Books is spot on about the city's extraordinary buildings and why they haunt the imagination. The depiction of New York as an elderly metropolis connects with Wall Street's crumbling (demolished) fiscal might. Every day the press is full of photographs that depict 'the suits' in abject despair. Their expressions seem to portray Sante's meditations word for word.  

New York is neither the Wonder City nor a half-populated ruin but a vulnerable, overcrowded, anxious, half-deluded, all-too-human town, shaken by a cataclysm nobody could have foreseen.

(the photograph is from the 'front page' of the New Yorker website on October 8, 2008 in conjunction with an article entitled 'The Rationality of Panic' by Steve Coll.)

19th C. Paris - NYC: Pictorial Evidence