Brian Holmes: More on the affects of organized abandonment
The city of Chicago has built a new Millennium Plaza including a fascinating ellipse-shaped reflective sculpture by Anish Kapoor entitled "Cloud Gate," 66 feet long, 42 feet wide, 33 feet high, made to look like a scintillating drop of mercury, known by Chicago residents as "the Bean." It instantly became the promotional emblem of the city.
The circulation of affects is perfect here, because there is no product, no star, no logo, no punchline, only you and your friends and the ebullient crowd, elongated, distorted, mobile, undulating, an animated image at one with the reflections of the clouds and the blue sky and the scrapers. Underneath, where the ellipsoid sucks up from the ground to form the shimmery dome that the artist calls the Omphalos or navel, just look up and become your own firmament.
Right next to the Bean is not only the Gehry-built "Pritzker Pavillion" bandshell, but also Crown Fountain plaza, built around two 50-foot towers made of glass bricks with LED video screens installed behind them. The towers exude 50-foot video portraits of nearly 1000 Chicago residents, looking beatific until the moment when their lips purse into an "O" and a jet of water gushes out onto the plaza, then they open their eyes and smile, the children squeal with delight in the summertime, check it out on Google image search, there are about 500 photographs.
Cloud Gate cost $23 million but it was all paid for by individual and corporate donors so who's complaining?
What the United States tries to hide with the kinetic (and of course, copyrighted) images of its own endless diversity is truly staggering. Ryan Griffis talks about an occupation at home. Follow the link from the Ruth Gilmore interview he quotes to another site called www.realcostofprisons.org, and look at the carefully drawn educational comic book called "Prison Town: Paying the Price," which you can download as a pdf. The booklet is addressed to people living in the rural areas where America's ever-expanding park of prison facilities are built by private corporations, run by the state and paid for by the people, including the people in them. "There are more prisons in America than Walmarts. There are more prisoners in America today than farmers." Those who come back traumatized and insane from their "service" in Iraq, unable to find a job as a security guard or a mercenary or anything else, denied the benefits they were promised when they signed on, will likely as not end up doing time in these places.
Concerning the economy of the built space of oppression, the amazing thing that comes out of the "comic book" (which is clearly phrased, touchingly and respectfully drawn, and peppered with footnotes to back up what it says) is that under the neoliberal system where there is ideally no redistribution and every public program should ideally "pay for itself," what many impoverished rural towns that have decided to go down the prison route in hopes of making money by renting out jailspace to the state actually end up doing is floating bond issues of the more expensive kind known as "Revenue Bonds," designed to be paid off by the revenue that the infrastructure earns, all because the cheaper "General Obligation Bonds," backed up by the taxing authority of the local government, have to be approved by voters and are usually rejected. So you have a situation where the containers of the "human trash" produced by the organized abandonment of places like New Orleans (or East LA, or the South Side of Chicago, etc.) proliferate in a competitive economy which is actually a dupe's market for local collectivities that are supposed to act as public entrepreneurs competing for contracts from state and federal governments, all of which are looking to "cut costs" by letting the "magic of the marketplace" provide the needed services, in this case incarceration. Page 13: "Reeves County, Texas, found itself servicing a bond debt close to $1/2 million a month for three prisons they built on spec. When they couldn't keep one of them filled, they paid $62,000 a month to GEO Group, a private prisons corporation, to find inmates."
However, there is a future for the finances of Reeves County because new supplies of inmates are being produced in innumerable urban environments like Baltimore, which after pioneering the "creative city" model of waterfront redevelopment back in the 80s is now getting ready, through organized abandonment, to extend its capacities for the gentrification and beautification of the people's real estate by literally imposing the decay of vast, mostly black neighborhoods left untouched by the wealth of the waterfront renaissance. What City Hall does - as I learned from the work of www.campbaltimore.org, check out particularly the "Indypendent readers" in the library section - is buy up for peanuts the houses of whoever goes broke or dies without heirs or can't pay the repair bills or whatever, and then "landbank" the property which is boarded up and cemented closed, leaving deserted streets and even entire abandoned neighborhoods which you'll never see reflected in the corporate media bean, but which do serve as temporary crack houses or gang hideouts further encouraging the decay of the surrounding real estate. Then on the transitional fringes of these urban "dead zones" they have some pretty impressive police practices in operation, which include creating an outdoor incarceration ambiance by parking portable floodlight masts on the side of the public street, equipped with their own generators that run all night and sometimes even throughout the day, while also installing pretty much everywhere these incredible telephone-pole-mounted surveillance boxes outfitted with cameras, microphones, who knows what kinds of other movement detectors and a weird flashing blue light that pulses like a staccato unconscious reminder of where you're actually living. Some of these surveillance units, which I have also seen in Chicago, apparently have loudspeakers in them (just like the good old days in the former east-bloc countries) and in Baltimore they are all surrealistically emblazoned with the single word "BELIEVE," which refers to some municipal policing slogan whose significance every resident is assumed to know. The ultimate fate of the landbanked areas will be demolition, a victory John Hopkins University just achieved for its new biotech complex, driving out the former inhabitants of a neighborhood known, appropriately enough, as the "Middle East" (see the intense conversation between David Harvey and Marisela Gomez in the Indypendent reader #1).
Meanwhile back in Chicago, it seems like the "problems" of too many poor people getting in the way of urban redevelopment have finally been solved with the destruction of the last public housing projects at Cabrini Green and Stateway Gardens (see pictures at www.voicesofcabrini.com; stories at www.viewfromtheground.com; and for some chaotic circulation of affects around the Chicago Housing Authority, http://areachicago.org/chaos-creates-change/). As with the construction of "country homes" in the rural prison towns, the new "mixed-income" housing is supposed to pay for itself, not so hard to do when the mandated "low-income" units in the new buildings are calculated as affordable for people earning 80% of what the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, calls "median area income" - an inflated "average" based on a total population including all the corporate highrollers and multi-millionaires or billionaires in a financial center like Chicago, who can afford to pay for a $23 million bean sculpture just on the bet that it's gonna increase the value of their already sky-scraping downtown real-estate holdings.... If you want to find out something about the upbeat rhetoric of government and its relation to the airy affective lift of the Cloud Gate sculpture, maybe just read what HUD says about how hard and faithfully they're working on affordable housing for the public good (www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing) and contrast that with what Nicolai Ourroussoff reports in the New York Times about HUD's role in New Orleans, where, he says, "the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/weekinreview/19ouroussoff.html?_r=0).
After reading all this, if you are white and middle-class you probably still don't know much about what Ryan Griffis, quoting Anna Deavere Smith, evoked as the particular sadness of black people in the USA. But you could guess something about the affect that made me forget all the supposedly urgent things I had to do this morning and write this post. Echoing what Anna Deavere Smith added about the particular sadness of white Americans, the "comic book" Prison Town says at the end of its story, about Anytown USA, "What is unknowable is what the prison will do to the hopes and the dreams of the people who live here."
> Brian Holmes
The circulation of affects is perfect here, because there is no product, no star, no logo, no punchline, only you and your friends and the ebullient crowd, elongated, distorted, mobile, undulating, an animated image at one with the reflections of the clouds and the blue sky and the scrapers. Underneath, where the ellipsoid sucks up from the ground to form the shimmery dome that the artist calls the Omphalos or navel, just look up and become your own firmament.
Right next to the Bean is not only the Gehry-built "Pritzker Pavillion" bandshell, but also Crown Fountain plaza, built around two 50-foot towers made of glass bricks with LED video screens installed behind them. The towers exude 50-foot video portraits of nearly 1000 Chicago residents, looking beatific until the moment when their lips purse into an "O" and a jet of water gushes out onto the plaza, then they open their eyes and smile, the children squeal with delight in the summertime, check it out on Google image search, there are about 500 photographs.
Cloud Gate cost $23 million but it was all paid for by individual and corporate donors so who's complaining?
What the United States tries to hide with the kinetic (and of course, copyrighted) images of its own endless diversity is truly staggering. Ryan Griffis talks about an occupation at home. Follow the link from the Ruth Gilmore interview he quotes to another site called www.realcostofprisons.org, and look at the carefully drawn educational comic book called "Prison Town: Paying the Price," which you can download as a pdf. The booklet is addressed to people living in the rural areas where America's ever-expanding park of prison facilities are built by private corporations, run by the state and paid for by the people, including the people in them. "There are more prisons in America than Walmarts. There are more prisoners in America today than farmers." Those who come back traumatized and insane from their "service" in Iraq, unable to find a job as a security guard or a mercenary or anything else, denied the benefits they were promised when they signed on, will likely as not end up doing time in these places.
Concerning the economy of the built space of oppression, the amazing thing that comes out of the "comic book" (which is clearly phrased, touchingly and respectfully drawn, and peppered with footnotes to back up what it says) is that under the neoliberal system where there is ideally no redistribution and every public program should ideally "pay for itself," what many impoverished rural towns that have decided to go down the prison route in hopes of making money by renting out jailspace to the state actually end up doing is floating bond issues of the more expensive kind known as "Revenue Bonds," designed to be paid off by the revenue that the infrastructure earns, all because the cheaper "General Obligation Bonds," backed up by the taxing authority of the local government, have to be approved by voters and are usually rejected. So you have a situation where the containers of the "human trash" produced by the organized abandonment of places like New Orleans (or East LA, or the South Side of Chicago, etc.) proliferate in a competitive economy which is actually a dupe's market for local collectivities that are supposed to act as public entrepreneurs competing for contracts from state and federal governments, all of which are looking to "cut costs" by letting the "magic of the marketplace" provide the needed services, in this case incarceration. Page 13: "Reeves County, Texas, found itself servicing a bond debt close to $1/2 million a month for three prisons they built on spec. When they couldn't keep one of them filled, they paid $62,000 a month to GEO Group, a private prisons corporation, to find inmates."
However, there is a future for the finances of Reeves County because new supplies of inmates are being produced in innumerable urban environments like Baltimore, which after pioneering the "creative city" model of waterfront redevelopment back in the 80s is now getting ready, through organized abandonment, to extend its capacities for the gentrification and beautification of the people's real estate by literally imposing the decay of vast, mostly black neighborhoods left untouched by the wealth of the waterfront renaissance. What City Hall does - as I learned from the work of www.campbaltimore.org, check out particularly the "Indypendent readers" in the library section - is buy up for peanuts the houses of whoever goes broke or dies without heirs or can't pay the repair bills or whatever, and then "landbank" the property which is boarded up and cemented closed, leaving deserted streets and even entire abandoned neighborhoods which you'll never see reflected in the corporate media bean, but which do serve as temporary crack houses or gang hideouts further encouraging the decay of the surrounding real estate. Then on the transitional fringes of these urban "dead zones" they have some pretty impressive police practices in operation, which include creating an outdoor incarceration ambiance by parking portable floodlight masts on the side of the public street, equipped with their own generators that run all night and sometimes even throughout the day, while also installing pretty much everywhere these incredible telephone-pole-mounted surveillance boxes outfitted with cameras, microphones, who knows what kinds of other movement detectors and a weird flashing blue light that pulses like a staccato unconscious reminder of where you're actually living. Some of these surveillance units, which I have also seen in Chicago, apparently have loudspeakers in them (just like the good old days in the former east-bloc countries) and in Baltimore they are all surrealistically emblazoned with the single word "BELIEVE," which refers to some municipal policing slogan whose significance every resident is assumed to know. The ultimate fate of the landbanked areas will be demolition, a victory John Hopkins University just achieved for its new biotech complex, driving out the former inhabitants of a neighborhood known, appropriately enough, as the "Middle East" (see the intense conversation between David Harvey and Marisela Gomez in the Indypendent reader #1).
Meanwhile back in Chicago, it seems like the "problems" of too many poor people getting in the way of urban redevelopment have finally been solved with the destruction of the last public housing projects at Cabrini Green and Stateway Gardens (see pictures at www.voicesofcabrini.com; stories at www.viewfromtheground.com; and for some chaotic circulation of affects around the Chicago Housing Authority, http://areachicago.org/chaos-creates-change/). As with the construction of "country homes" in the rural prison towns, the new "mixed-income" housing is supposed to pay for itself, not so hard to do when the mandated "low-income" units in the new buildings are calculated as affordable for people earning 80% of what the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, calls "median area income" - an inflated "average" based on a total population including all the corporate highrollers and multi-millionaires or billionaires in a financial center like Chicago, who can afford to pay for a $23 million bean sculpture just on the bet that it's gonna increase the value of their already sky-scraping downtown real-estate holdings.... If you want to find out something about the upbeat rhetoric of government and its relation to the airy affective lift of the Cloud Gate sculpture, maybe just read what HUD says about how hard and faithfully they're working on affordable housing for the public good (www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing) and contrast that with what Nicolai Ourroussoff reports in the New York Times about HUD's role in New Orleans, where, he says, "the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/19/weekinreview/19ouroussoff.html?_r=0).
After reading all this, if you are white and middle-class you probably still don't know much about what Ryan Griffis, quoting Anna Deavere Smith, evoked as the particular sadness of black people in the USA. But you could guess something about the affect that made me forget all the supposedly urgent things I had to do this morning and write this post. Echoing what Anna Deavere Smith added about the particular sadness of white Americans, the "comic book" Prison Town says at the end of its story, about Anytown USA, "What is unknowable is what the prison will do to the hopes and the dreams of the people who live here."
> Brian Holmes