Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Sunday, October 03, 2010
The Roof Beneath Our Feet
The Roof Beneath Our Feet
by Jay Baron Nicorvo, October 2010
Want to become a poet? Spend a summer roofing under the Florida sun.
The summer I was fifteen, my younger brothers and I were instructed to replace the roof on our house. Dane was thirteen, Shawn eleven—the asphalt shingles, weathered and crumbling, were older than all of us. Rainwater had been running in and ruining the drywall. If we wanted, our mom said, we could ask our friends to help with the repairs. She’d buy the materials, rent the tools and make sure we had all the sandwiches we could eat and the Gatorade we could drink.
My brothers and I gathered in secret to mount a counterargument. As the eldest it fell to me to present our case: “We’re kids, Mom. How do you expect us to replace the roof?”
“How? Easy, that’s how.”
“But, Mom—”
“Figure it out. You’re not idiots. And it’s not rocket science.”
So it went, back and forth, for a full month. Our impending responsibility literally loomed over our heads, ushering in a terrific dread where the excitement of the approach of summer vacation should have been instead.
Our labors were needed to maintain our own safety and security—our own shelter—concerns that didn’t usually fall to kids, at least not in this country in this century, but that didn’t faze our mom. When she was Shawn’s age she’d troweled mortar as her father, a mason, laid the bricks that became their house. Our mom couldn’t afford a sense of shame, so, trying another angle, I appealed to her work ethic and sense of duty: “Mom, some of us have jobs. We can’t just take off.”
“Jay, you tell that boss of yours he can find someone else to stock the toilet paper aisle for a few weeks. I got you that part-time job, and worst comes to worst, I’ll help you find another one. Besides, you’ll be the foreman of the roofing crew, and I’ll pay you what they’re paying you at Winn-Dixie.”
I was tempted by the idea of bossing my brothers around under contract, but I’d been doing so on a volunteer basis since our dad went deadbeat, and I knew that a motherly directive wouldn’t sway them to obey my orders.
I tried again to get us out of it: “Mom, you can’t expect us to ask our friends to spend their summer working manual labor.”
“Why not? Those friends of yours’re here day and night. They eat us out of house and home. They can pitch in for a change. Otherwise, they can start hanging out somewhere else. I don’t work sixty hours a week to feed other people’s sons, and we didn’t relocate to Florida to be washed out by some rain.”
In 1987, the year our mom and her sister moved us out of a duplex a mile from the biohazardous Jersey Shore to the picturesque Gulf Coast, the Great International Beach Challenge awarded Siesta Beach a notation for the “whitest and finest sand in the world,” quartz pulverized into a sugary white powder that’s ever cool and squeaks underfoot. This was one of the points our mom used to hard-sell us on our new hometown. But we didn’t even need the beach; we had an in-ground pool in our backyard—in Florida even the shanties come decked out with swimming pools—and after renting the house for a year, our mom bought it for $77,000 thanks to a thirty-year mortgage. Months later, she went in arrears on the loan payments.
The house had been built in 1975 as a two-bedroom, one-bath ranch under a simple gable roof. In 1979, the original owners did an out-of-code renovation. They added a bedroom in what had been the garage. Two more bedrooms, a bathroom, and a lanai were built from scratch along the rear of the house under a pebble-over-tar roof that had no pitch. By 1992, the house was separating along that seam. A ramshackle five-bedroom ranch in Sarasota, Florida, it stood out as maybe the shoddiest structure in a subdivision of stucco-over-block single-story homes on quarter-acre lots parceled off and built in the sixties and seventies. We were only twenty minutes from the Gulf of Mexico and Siesta Beach, but we were a couple of social classes away from its manicured condominium culture.
Whenever we drove along the Gulf, we were reminded that our house was a shithole. We wanted to spend just one night in a condo with a name like the Seabreeze. It would be tidy and well kept. We’d break in if we had to, and when we did, we wouldn’t find roaches as plump as Brazil nuts warming themselves under the crumby toaster, seventies-era puke-toned shag carpets, a septic system that backed up whenever it rained and a roof that leaked buckets.
Shithole that our house was, though, my brothers and I each had our own room and no Jersey Shore landlady screaming through the walls at us in Chinese to shut up. We’d been cramped renters since our parents divorced when I was five. As a single mother getting zero child support, our mom spent seven years climbing out from the have-not ranks of renters, we three sons weighing her down with peer-pressured demands for Izod shirts and Nike sneakers. Her slow, determined ascent required help from her sister, the welfare system, and a short-run second husband before she could afford to live beneath a roof she ostensibly owned.
And after sixteen years of riveting rain and unremitting sun, not to mention the occasional hurricane, that roof was giving way to the elements. Every time it stormed, the newer rooms got wet. Shawn and Dane enjoyed pulling out the pots, situating them precisely under drips. What did they care? They slept in the two original bedrooms, both of which stayed dry. In my room and my mom’s room, the sheetrock ceilings grew sodden and discolored. It was my job to climb onto the roof and patch what holes I could find with roofing cement. This was my apprenticeship.
A week before school let out, I swung my feet to the bedroom floor and set them dreamily down into the everglade that was the soggy shag carpet. I was getting desperate. I knew when it came to matters of consequence we were practically incompetent. Our renovation would bring bedlam, and I began resorting to scare tactics and made-up statistics with the hope that she’d bring in hired help.
None of us knew then that the county jail was where we were all headed, in turn, as we hit our respective bottoms, a kind of rite of white trash passage.
“Mold, Mom. People die from that stuff. They call it the Invisible Killer. Or the Airborne Deadly Toxin. They think it’s the cause of autism. That or vaccinations. They’re not sure. Three out of every ten kids die from mold exposure. You got to get someone legit up there to fix the roof.”
“I already got someone. I got three someones.”
School ended, and while we waited for the delivery of the roofing materials we were allowed a summer vacation. Our mom worked six, often seven days a week, so ours was the neighborhood house of least parental resistance. On that first day of summer, we rode our bikes the mile and a half to 7-Eleven, toting empty cups to fill with Slurpees. Our mom was the assistant manager, and she gave us our pick of the two-day-old deli sandwiches before she threw them out. She asked if we were ready to get to work, and I said, “We’ve got nothing to work with,” before pushing into the humid air outside.
On our way home, overburdened on our bikes with soggy hoagies and melting Slurpees, we gawked at the repurposed white school bus, wire mesh over the windows, parked along the roadside, “Sarasota County Correctional Facility” stenciled blackly across it. The chain gangs, on work release from the county jail in their blazing orange jumpers, were digging out the rain gullies as a couple of uniformed guards in dark sunglasses stood menacingly by with pump-action shotguns. That scene captured my sense of our summer-to-be, only we would work unguarded, and we wouldn’t be grateful to be out under the stern glare of the sun.
None of us knew then—though our mom certainly suspected—that the county jail was where we were all headed, in turn, as we hit our respective bottoms, a kind of rite of white trash passage. We would be arrested and processed at different times for odd and sundry nonviolent offenses. Me for trespassing, retail theft, and felony drug possession. Dane for drunk and disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Shawn for shoplifting and a few DUIs, the first before he had a driver’s license. That summer, our hoodlumism was just beginning to take angry hold of us. When we looked around, our lot seemed too damned little, and we were giving first voice to our collective sense of injustice—We were owed. We hadn’t been granted. We would take. Refusing to beg, we became liars, cheats, thieves. As we grew, we grew increasingly impossible for our honest, upright mom to control. But she didn’t give up, that woman, not on us, not ever, and that summer, her plan was to keep us occupied, and thereby out of trouble, while she saved money she didn’t have by paying us a fraction of what she’d pay a roofing crew.
We came home to find in the driveway a Dumpster as big as a tractor-trailer. Beside it in the crabgrass was a pallet stacked with new asphalt shingles. There were a few five-gallon buckets of roofing tar and rolls upon rolls of felt tarred roofing paper.
When she got home from work, Mom told us to get in the car, a ’72 Oldsmobile Toronado, which was about as long, as aerodynamic, and as fuel-efficient as the Dumpster beside it, and she drove us to ASAP Rental Equipment. There, a bemused and burly salesclerk helped us choose our tool: a shingle scraper. We were told, “That’s all you need to get started, that and some back strength.” After we’d removed all the old shingling, we could come pick up an air compressor and a pneumatic nail gun. The tool made the job real in a way that the building materials had not, but it was the promise of a projectile-producing nail gun that made me quiet, stirring my mom’s suspicion: “Jay, don’t go getting any ideas.”
The next day we slept late, got out of bed and ate lunch. It was 90 degrees in the shade. Relative humidity near 70 percent. Heat index over 100, putting the feels-like temperature on the roof at 105 degrees. Sweat didn’t evaporate—nowhere in the saturated, sultry atmosphere for the moisture to go—so our bodies couldn’t cool themselves. If we stayed on the roof long enough, our core temperatures equalized with the feverish air. We guzzled Gatorade so our heat-exhausted heaves weren’t dry. We worked practically naked.
I was prying old pebbly tar from the roof with the claw of a hammer, Shawn with a garden trowel—Dane had been quick and had called The Tool, the lone shingle scraper, which was like a serrated shovel—or maybe we were taking a breather to pick at the tar on our knees, in our arm hair, when I heard the crash of an overheated body throwing itself off the roof into the pool. Daredevil Dane was invariably first, and cannon-balling down into the kidney-shaped pool we all went, the water just as uncomfortably hot and wet as the air, but that didn’t matter. The thrill was our relief.
When I picked at the blisters on my hands I began to understand the promise of an education: smooth hands, narrow fingers, clean fingernails. Freedom from a life of manual labor and physical drudgery.
Before the afternoon rains, we got in a few hours of demolition work, scraping, leveraging, and shoveling off the age-old tar and pebbles like black peanut brittle. To break up the exhausting monotony of our damnation, we winged old shingles into the Dumpster below, a good level throw as satisfying as a well-skipped stone. Around 3:30 p.m., we giddily watched the clouds tumble in. Rain meant quitting time. When the bolts of lightning in the lightning capital of the country were near enough that the thunder didn’t rumble but cracked—more charged feeling than sound—that was when, lemming-like, we jumped off the roof into the pool. Then we gathered the Visqueen, a thick, construction-grade plastic, and did our inept best to Saran-wrap the plywood parts of the roof we’d exposed to the sopping elements of the Deep South.
The wind picked up and the rain fell, splashing in tremendous, viscous globs like a barrage of hurled eggs. The Visqueen got caught in a gust, great sheets of milky plastic whipping wildly, sailing down the block and winding up in the fronds of a palm tree. When we retrieved the Visqueen, it had holes in it everywhere, and when we did get it secured, it was immediately Slip ’n Slide slick with rainwater. Shawn was the first to go down, our frantic work enlivened by the sound of his Whao! as he slid off the roof, the low eaves depositing him harmlessly, if not painlessly, on the sandy soil. Dane observed that our lives had become like a game of Chutes and Ladders, and Shawn, just getting the hang of sarcasm, said, “Chutes and Ladders my ass—this is Candy Land.”
As the days turned into weeks, I had a tougher time getting out of bed. No matter how much work we did we would never finish. We hadn’t gotten the proper building permits. The bank would foreclose on the house if it didn’t collapse first. We were all sunburned, dehydrated, and heatstroked. The watery blisters on our hands were finally beginning their anguished transformation into hardened calluses, and when I picked at mine I began to understand the promise of an education: smooth hands, narrow fingers, clean fingernails. Freedom from a life of manual labor and physical drudgery.
When we moved to Florida, one of the first things our mom did was enroll us in the newly established Florida Prepaid College Program. There were times we didn’t have phone service. When the phone was on, we functioned as our mom’s secretarial pool, fielding calls while she dodged bill collectors. There was an afternoon when I walked through the front door and switched on the lights. Nothing happened: the electricity had been cut off. Yet every month, our mom, with the help of our aunt, made payments into our respective 2+2 Tuition Plans—two years of community college, two years of a Florida state university. The college education she’d never had for herself, and which didn’t stop her from teaching us that education was more important than electricity.
The roofing job moved into week three and we still hadn’t gotten all the old shingling off. The money our mom was saving by violating child-labor laws shrank as we went through more and more costly Visqueen and as the old plywood sub-roof that wasn’t rotted out and didn’t need replacing began to rot and need replacing. From my bed, half-asleep, I heard the tinny sounds of an unfamiliar ascension—the plink, plink of feet climbing the aluminum ladder. I heard heavy footfalls clomping on the roof accompanied by furious muttering: “Fricka fracken no-good fricka cricka franken hoffen . . .” I pulled the pillow over my head. A Jersey girl, our mom was a world-class curser. “Jay! Jay! Get your lazy ass out of bed, get up on this roof and help me out of this fucking hole! Jay! Goddamnit, Jay!”
I was able to hear her better than I should’ve. I looked up. In one corner of the ceiling, not far from the unbalanced fan wobbling round, was my mom’s leg—tanned and hairless, a pink flip-flop dangling from her toes. As she yelled at me, she started kicking at the air—“Jay! Goddamnit, Jay, I’m stuck!” The flip-fop came flying off and landed on my bed.
Shawn and Dane bolted out of the house and climbed up on the roof. They freed her, and I tore out of bed, pissed. I brandished her sandal as I hollered up through the hole, “Thanks for all your help, Mom!” When no response came, I flung her sandal through the hole. “And don’t forget your flip-flop!”
Shawn was finding a rhythm when an explosion of air, a visible white hiss, burst from the nail gun as the clamp, fastening the hose to it, broke between his legs.
A week later, when we finally did get the last of the old roofing off, we picked up the nail gun and the air compressor from ASAP, and we nailed down the tarpaper. The nail gun had a safety release in the form of a depressor on the muzzle. You had to pull the trigger and press the muzzle against a surface for a nail to discharge. It took me all of two minutes to figure out I could engage the muzzle depressor with a careful finger and pull the trigger, firing nails a good fifty yards. They carried end-over-end, thwick-ing through the air, and as I stood on the roof, I caught Shawn by surprise in the grass below, commanding, “Dance!” as I rained nails down around him.
I had promised not to let Shawn touch the nail gun. Told I was the man of the house, it was my job to keep my brothers safe. It took Shawn a few days to break me down with his constant nagging, interspersed with threats that he’d tell Mom I’d shot him with the nail gun. “I didn’t shoot you. I shot at you. Besides, what’s Mom going to do, chain me to the roof and make me work myself to death? You want to use the nail gun? Here, use the nail gun.” I handed it over without instruction.
The contraption was clunky and unwieldy, attached by a heavy-gauge air hose to the compressor motoring in the grass. Because it weighed eight pounds fully loaded, he used it more like a jackhammer than a nail gun, holding it with both hands between his legs and slamming it hard against the plywood sub-roof. The sound it made was three syllabled: muzzle against sub-roof, discharge of compressed air, nail driven into wood—knock-sht-thwack, knock-sht-thwack—and Shawn was finding a rhythm when an explosion of air, a visible white hiss, burst from the nail gun as the clamp, fastening the hose to it, broke between his legs. The end of the hose caught him in the crotch. He dropped the gun and doubled over, moaning, “My testes, my testes,” rolling down the roof but not off, as the hose flailed in the air. We laughed till we cried, few things funnier to adolescent boys than knocks to the crotch. While I climbed off the roof to kill the hose by cutting off the compressor, Dane stood before it, pretending to charm it like a snake, belly dancing and singing, “There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance. There’s a hole in the wall where the men see it all.”
When our mom came home, she saw the waste we were making and screamed, “Why not shingle the whole fucking roof with goddamn dollar bills?!”
We moved into week five, our neighbors complaining about the eyesore Dumpster, the indefinite wreck that was our roof, the shingles and nails littering the length of the block, as if a very selective Category 5 hurricane had struck. On his way home from work, Reggie Hill, who lived in the neighborhood, drove by, checking our progress—he did this from time to time—and as he pulled away, he shook his head, smiling, while Dane shot nails that plinked off his trailer. We knew Reggie to get drunk and slap around his two daughters. Once he punched his wife, and the cops were called, but she, fat-lipped and furious, filed no charges. She probably didn’t want to wind up like our mom—alone with children. At least Reggie was there for his family, even if, from time to time, he stumbled drunkenly around kicking their lovely legs out from under them. He had a landscaping business, drove a rusted-out pickup that towed a rickety trailer filled with lawn mowers, weed whackers, and edgers. There was an aura of pleasant menace about him, maybe because he often smelled like freshly cut grass doused with gasoline. He smoked Marlboro Reds and threw Hail Mary passes to us in tight, high-arcing spirals that stung our chests when we caught them. We liked him because he was a father, and he liked us because we were sons.
We’d nailed down the tarpaper, and were making visible progress, but the application of the new shingling stymied us. We knew enough to start at the bottom and layer our way up, but we had no idea how to lay down a straight row. Our first attempt ran snaking into the gutter, up toward the peak, and back down. We tore up the row and began again. Same crooked result. When our mom came home, she saw the waste we were making and screamed, “Why not shingle the whole fucking roof with goddamn dollar bills?!” She rattled us even though we towered ten feet over her. She’d had enough. The drywall in her room and mine was ruined. There was the leg hole in the ceiling, through which Shawn had retributively shot at me with the nail gun as I lazed in bed. The Dumpster rental was costing her by the day, and at last she understood that what was taking her hapless sons and their useless friends a full month could’ve been accomplished by professionals in a day. She was still saving money, but the emotional costs were bankrupting us all. By the end of her tirade, she was in mute tears, and she stormed into the house and locked herself in her bathroom, the ceiling water-stained and falling in around her.
The next day, Reggie walked into my bedroom at seven in the morning and woke me. He held in his hands what looked like an oversized tape measure. “Get out of bed. Get your brothers up. Meet me on the roof in five minutes.” His command wasn’t angry, yet its sternness was irrefutable. He wasn’t asking. He walked out of my room, leaving the door open, and I heard him assuredly climbing the ladder—tonk, tonk—a moment later.
We joined him on the roof. There he demonstrated the simple genius of the chalk line. The oversized tape measure contained a string on a spool, and in the housing was blue chalk. Reggie stood beside Shawn at one end of the roof, told him to take hold of the tab and go long. As he did, the line, dusted blue, ran the length of the roof. Shawn adjusted his end till it was level. They pressed their ends tightly down, maintaining tension, and Reggie plucked the line a few times, snapping it against the black tar paper. It left a straight blue line, which we followed as we laid shingles Reggie then expertly nailed with the nail gun. By the time our friends showed up around noon, we’d covered a quarter of the roof. At the end of the day, we were halfway finished. We wanted to offer him some thanks, but we didn’t know how or we had nothing to give so we pleaded excitedly with him to jump off the roof into the pool with us.
He couldn’t. He had a bum knee, blown in a high school football game. There was sadness in him as he descended the ladder, a melancholy that was then inexplicable, and our response was to drench him with our practiced splashes as he climbed down.
The following day, he was at our house at 7 a.m. again, rousing us and putting us to work. In less than a week, with Reggie working beside us, we were finished. Our job was accomplished, culminating in the sawing off of the peak and securing over it the ridge cap that served as an attic vent. Giddy with pride, we cajoled Reggie more. “Please, please jump off the roof with us. Just this once.” We loved getting adults to do things they didn’t want to do. In the name of celebration and a job done, he did, his boots on and a lit cigarette bitten between his teeth.
Now that we’re adults, my brothers and I can joke about our mom telling us that roofing is not rocket science. I sit nearly twenty years later in the first house I’ve owned, sheltered under a roof raised, literally, by a retired rocket scientist. I’ve come to see Reggie as an example of what I might’ve become had my time on that roof not convinced me there were other ways for a man to make a living than selling his strength and endurance. Dane and I eventually followed through on the guarantee of a college education afforded us by our mom and aunt and the generosity of the state of Florida. We both attended the local community college, transferred to get our bachelor’s degrees elsewhere, and I went on to get a graduate degree. Maybe because he was younger, or maybe because he admired Reggie more than we did, Shawn didn’t see his time on the roof as a deterrent. “Besides,” I can hear Shawn say, “we were brothers working together on a tough job to make Mom happy, what could be better?” Shawn dropped out of high school and worked construction, cashing in his college fund to buy a truck. He poured slab foundations for a time, worked as a machinist in a tool-and-die shop, and is now the foreman of his own specialized crew. They install industrial skylights in military hangars that cover nuclear submarines and space shuttles. Roofing is not rocket science, but even if it were, there’s part of me—put there by my mom and shared by my brothers—that believes if I have the right tools, the help of my brothers, and a little mentoring, we could send something flying who knows how far.
It’s 1,300 miles from Saugerties to Sarasota, from my part of New York to my mom’s part of Florida. Into Google Maps, I enter her address—4040 Prescott St., 34232—click the satellite view, and zoom in. There it is. Her house. The house where my brothers and I grew up, the blue kidney of the pool occupying a good part of the backyard. But the image—taken from an on-high perspective, seen from space—doesn’t capture the house. It’s mostly a picture of a roof, the roof my brothers and I put over our mom’s head, and after almost two decades it has yet to leak.
Readers like you make Guernica possible. Please show your support.
Jay Baron Nicorvo’s poetry, fiction, criticism, and nonfiction have appeared in The Literary Review, Subtropics, The Believer, and The Iowa Review. “The Roof Beneath Our Feet” will be anthologized in Freud’s Blind Spot: 23 Original Essays on Cherished, Estranged, Lost, Hurtful, Hopeful, Complicated Siblings, to be published by Free Press in November 2010. His first poetry collection, Deadbeat, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. He teaches at Western Michigan University, edits The Ploughshares Blog and is faculty advisor to Third Coast. Recently he moved from Saugerties to Kalamazoo, where he and his wife, Thisbe Nissen, have one newborn, Sonne, two cats, and ten chickens, among them a transgender rooster named Myron (née Myra).
by Jay Baron Nicorvo, October 2010
Want to become a poet? Spend a summer roofing under the Florida sun.
The summer I was fifteen, my younger brothers and I were instructed to replace the roof on our house. Dane was thirteen, Shawn eleven—the asphalt shingles, weathered and crumbling, were older than all of us. Rainwater had been running in and ruining the drywall. If we wanted, our mom said, we could ask our friends to help with the repairs. She’d buy the materials, rent the tools and make sure we had all the sandwiches we could eat and the Gatorade we could drink.
My brothers and I gathered in secret to mount a counterargument. As the eldest it fell to me to present our case: “We’re kids, Mom. How do you expect us to replace the roof?”
“How? Easy, that’s how.”
“But, Mom—”
“Figure it out. You’re not idiots. And it’s not rocket science.”
So it went, back and forth, for a full month. Our impending responsibility literally loomed over our heads, ushering in a terrific dread where the excitement of the approach of summer vacation should have been instead.
Our labors were needed to maintain our own safety and security—our own shelter—concerns that didn’t usually fall to kids, at least not in this country in this century, but that didn’t faze our mom. When she was Shawn’s age she’d troweled mortar as her father, a mason, laid the bricks that became their house. Our mom couldn’t afford a sense of shame, so, trying another angle, I appealed to her work ethic and sense of duty: “Mom, some of us have jobs. We can’t just take off.”
“Jay, you tell that boss of yours he can find someone else to stock the toilet paper aisle for a few weeks. I got you that part-time job, and worst comes to worst, I’ll help you find another one. Besides, you’ll be the foreman of the roofing crew, and I’ll pay you what they’re paying you at Winn-Dixie.”
I was tempted by the idea of bossing my brothers around under contract, but I’d been doing so on a volunteer basis since our dad went deadbeat, and I knew that a motherly directive wouldn’t sway them to obey my orders.
I tried again to get us out of it: “Mom, you can’t expect us to ask our friends to spend their summer working manual labor.”
“Why not? Those friends of yours’re here day and night. They eat us out of house and home. They can pitch in for a change. Otherwise, they can start hanging out somewhere else. I don’t work sixty hours a week to feed other people’s sons, and we didn’t relocate to Florida to be washed out by some rain.”
In 1987, the year our mom and her sister moved us out of a duplex a mile from the biohazardous Jersey Shore to the picturesque Gulf Coast, the Great International Beach Challenge awarded Siesta Beach a notation for the “whitest and finest sand in the world,” quartz pulverized into a sugary white powder that’s ever cool and squeaks underfoot. This was one of the points our mom used to hard-sell us on our new hometown. But we didn’t even need the beach; we had an in-ground pool in our backyard—in Florida even the shanties come decked out with swimming pools—and after renting the house for a year, our mom bought it for $77,000 thanks to a thirty-year mortgage. Months later, she went in arrears on the loan payments.
The house had been built in 1975 as a two-bedroom, one-bath ranch under a simple gable roof. In 1979, the original owners did an out-of-code renovation. They added a bedroom in what had been the garage. Two more bedrooms, a bathroom, and a lanai were built from scratch along the rear of the house under a pebble-over-tar roof that had no pitch. By 1992, the house was separating along that seam. A ramshackle five-bedroom ranch in Sarasota, Florida, it stood out as maybe the shoddiest structure in a subdivision of stucco-over-block single-story homes on quarter-acre lots parceled off and built in the sixties and seventies. We were only twenty minutes from the Gulf of Mexico and Siesta Beach, but we were a couple of social classes away from its manicured condominium culture.
Whenever we drove along the Gulf, we were reminded that our house was a shithole. We wanted to spend just one night in a condo with a name like the Seabreeze. It would be tidy and well kept. We’d break in if we had to, and when we did, we wouldn’t find roaches as plump as Brazil nuts warming themselves under the crumby toaster, seventies-era puke-toned shag carpets, a septic system that backed up whenever it rained and a roof that leaked buckets.
Shithole that our house was, though, my brothers and I each had our own room and no Jersey Shore landlady screaming through the walls at us in Chinese to shut up. We’d been cramped renters since our parents divorced when I was five. As a single mother getting zero child support, our mom spent seven years climbing out from the have-not ranks of renters, we three sons weighing her down with peer-pressured demands for Izod shirts and Nike sneakers. Her slow, determined ascent required help from her sister, the welfare system, and a short-run second husband before she could afford to live beneath a roof she ostensibly owned.
And after sixteen years of riveting rain and unremitting sun, not to mention the occasional hurricane, that roof was giving way to the elements. Every time it stormed, the newer rooms got wet. Shawn and Dane enjoyed pulling out the pots, situating them precisely under drips. What did they care? They slept in the two original bedrooms, both of which stayed dry. In my room and my mom’s room, the sheetrock ceilings grew sodden and discolored. It was my job to climb onto the roof and patch what holes I could find with roofing cement. This was my apprenticeship.
A week before school let out, I swung my feet to the bedroom floor and set them dreamily down into the everglade that was the soggy shag carpet. I was getting desperate. I knew when it came to matters of consequence we were practically incompetent. Our renovation would bring bedlam, and I began resorting to scare tactics and made-up statistics with the hope that she’d bring in hired help.
None of us knew then that the county jail was where we were all headed, in turn, as we hit our respective bottoms, a kind of rite of white trash passage.
“Mold, Mom. People die from that stuff. They call it the Invisible Killer. Or the Airborne Deadly Toxin. They think it’s the cause of autism. That or vaccinations. They’re not sure. Three out of every ten kids die from mold exposure. You got to get someone legit up there to fix the roof.”
“I already got someone. I got three someones.”
School ended, and while we waited for the delivery of the roofing materials we were allowed a summer vacation. Our mom worked six, often seven days a week, so ours was the neighborhood house of least parental resistance. On that first day of summer, we rode our bikes the mile and a half to 7-Eleven, toting empty cups to fill with Slurpees. Our mom was the assistant manager, and she gave us our pick of the two-day-old deli sandwiches before she threw them out. She asked if we were ready to get to work, and I said, “We’ve got nothing to work with,” before pushing into the humid air outside.
On our way home, overburdened on our bikes with soggy hoagies and melting Slurpees, we gawked at the repurposed white school bus, wire mesh over the windows, parked along the roadside, “Sarasota County Correctional Facility” stenciled blackly across it. The chain gangs, on work release from the county jail in their blazing orange jumpers, were digging out the rain gullies as a couple of uniformed guards in dark sunglasses stood menacingly by with pump-action shotguns. That scene captured my sense of our summer-to-be, only we would work unguarded, and we wouldn’t be grateful to be out under the stern glare of the sun.
None of us knew then—though our mom certainly suspected—that the county jail was where we were all headed, in turn, as we hit our respective bottoms, a kind of rite of white trash passage. We would be arrested and processed at different times for odd and sundry nonviolent offenses. Me for trespassing, retail theft, and felony drug possession. Dane for drunk and disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Shawn for shoplifting and a few DUIs, the first before he had a driver’s license. That summer, our hoodlumism was just beginning to take angry hold of us. When we looked around, our lot seemed too damned little, and we were giving first voice to our collective sense of injustice—We were owed. We hadn’t been granted. We would take. Refusing to beg, we became liars, cheats, thieves. As we grew, we grew increasingly impossible for our honest, upright mom to control. But she didn’t give up, that woman, not on us, not ever, and that summer, her plan was to keep us occupied, and thereby out of trouble, while she saved money she didn’t have by paying us a fraction of what she’d pay a roofing crew.
We came home to find in the driveway a Dumpster as big as a tractor-trailer. Beside it in the crabgrass was a pallet stacked with new asphalt shingles. There were a few five-gallon buckets of roofing tar and rolls upon rolls of felt tarred roofing paper.
When she got home from work, Mom told us to get in the car, a ’72 Oldsmobile Toronado, which was about as long, as aerodynamic, and as fuel-efficient as the Dumpster beside it, and she drove us to ASAP Rental Equipment. There, a bemused and burly salesclerk helped us choose our tool: a shingle scraper. We were told, “That’s all you need to get started, that and some back strength.” After we’d removed all the old shingling, we could come pick up an air compressor and a pneumatic nail gun. The tool made the job real in a way that the building materials had not, but it was the promise of a projectile-producing nail gun that made me quiet, stirring my mom’s suspicion: “Jay, don’t go getting any ideas.”
The next day we slept late, got out of bed and ate lunch. It was 90 degrees in the shade. Relative humidity near 70 percent. Heat index over 100, putting the feels-like temperature on the roof at 105 degrees. Sweat didn’t evaporate—nowhere in the saturated, sultry atmosphere for the moisture to go—so our bodies couldn’t cool themselves. If we stayed on the roof long enough, our core temperatures equalized with the feverish air. We guzzled Gatorade so our heat-exhausted heaves weren’t dry. We worked practically naked.
I was prying old pebbly tar from the roof with the claw of a hammer, Shawn with a garden trowel—Dane had been quick and had called The Tool, the lone shingle scraper, which was like a serrated shovel—or maybe we were taking a breather to pick at the tar on our knees, in our arm hair, when I heard the crash of an overheated body throwing itself off the roof into the pool. Daredevil Dane was invariably first, and cannon-balling down into the kidney-shaped pool we all went, the water just as uncomfortably hot and wet as the air, but that didn’t matter. The thrill was our relief.
When I picked at the blisters on my hands I began to understand the promise of an education: smooth hands, narrow fingers, clean fingernails. Freedom from a life of manual labor and physical drudgery.
Before the afternoon rains, we got in a few hours of demolition work, scraping, leveraging, and shoveling off the age-old tar and pebbles like black peanut brittle. To break up the exhausting monotony of our damnation, we winged old shingles into the Dumpster below, a good level throw as satisfying as a well-skipped stone. Around 3:30 p.m., we giddily watched the clouds tumble in. Rain meant quitting time. When the bolts of lightning in the lightning capital of the country were near enough that the thunder didn’t rumble but cracked—more charged feeling than sound—that was when, lemming-like, we jumped off the roof into the pool. Then we gathered the Visqueen, a thick, construction-grade plastic, and did our inept best to Saran-wrap the plywood parts of the roof we’d exposed to the sopping elements of the Deep South.
The wind picked up and the rain fell, splashing in tremendous, viscous globs like a barrage of hurled eggs. The Visqueen got caught in a gust, great sheets of milky plastic whipping wildly, sailing down the block and winding up in the fronds of a palm tree. When we retrieved the Visqueen, it had holes in it everywhere, and when we did get it secured, it was immediately Slip ’n Slide slick with rainwater. Shawn was the first to go down, our frantic work enlivened by the sound of his Whao! as he slid off the roof, the low eaves depositing him harmlessly, if not painlessly, on the sandy soil. Dane observed that our lives had become like a game of Chutes and Ladders, and Shawn, just getting the hang of sarcasm, said, “Chutes and Ladders my ass—this is Candy Land.”
As the days turned into weeks, I had a tougher time getting out of bed. No matter how much work we did we would never finish. We hadn’t gotten the proper building permits. The bank would foreclose on the house if it didn’t collapse first. We were all sunburned, dehydrated, and heatstroked. The watery blisters on our hands were finally beginning their anguished transformation into hardened calluses, and when I picked at mine I began to understand the promise of an education: smooth hands, narrow fingers, clean fingernails. Freedom from a life of manual labor and physical drudgery.
When we moved to Florida, one of the first things our mom did was enroll us in the newly established Florida Prepaid College Program. There were times we didn’t have phone service. When the phone was on, we functioned as our mom’s secretarial pool, fielding calls while she dodged bill collectors. There was an afternoon when I walked through the front door and switched on the lights. Nothing happened: the electricity had been cut off. Yet every month, our mom, with the help of our aunt, made payments into our respective 2+2 Tuition Plans—two years of community college, two years of a Florida state university. The college education she’d never had for herself, and which didn’t stop her from teaching us that education was more important than electricity.
The roofing job moved into week three and we still hadn’t gotten all the old shingling off. The money our mom was saving by violating child-labor laws shrank as we went through more and more costly Visqueen and as the old plywood sub-roof that wasn’t rotted out and didn’t need replacing began to rot and need replacing. From my bed, half-asleep, I heard the tinny sounds of an unfamiliar ascension—the plink, plink of feet climbing the aluminum ladder. I heard heavy footfalls clomping on the roof accompanied by furious muttering: “Fricka fracken no-good fricka cricka franken hoffen . . .” I pulled the pillow over my head. A Jersey girl, our mom was a world-class curser. “Jay! Jay! Get your lazy ass out of bed, get up on this roof and help me out of this fucking hole! Jay! Goddamnit, Jay!”
I was able to hear her better than I should’ve. I looked up. In one corner of the ceiling, not far from the unbalanced fan wobbling round, was my mom’s leg—tanned and hairless, a pink flip-flop dangling from her toes. As she yelled at me, she started kicking at the air—“Jay! Goddamnit, Jay, I’m stuck!” The flip-fop came flying off and landed on my bed.
Shawn and Dane bolted out of the house and climbed up on the roof. They freed her, and I tore out of bed, pissed. I brandished her sandal as I hollered up through the hole, “Thanks for all your help, Mom!” When no response came, I flung her sandal through the hole. “And don’t forget your flip-flop!”
Shawn was finding a rhythm when an explosion of air, a visible white hiss, burst from the nail gun as the clamp, fastening the hose to it, broke between his legs.
A week later, when we finally did get the last of the old roofing off, we picked up the nail gun and the air compressor from ASAP, and we nailed down the tarpaper. The nail gun had a safety release in the form of a depressor on the muzzle. You had to pull the trigger and press the muzzle against a surface for a nail to discharge. It took me all of two minutes to figure out I could engage the muzzle depressor with a careful finger and pull the trigger, firing nails a good fifty yards. They carried end-over-end, thwick-ing through the air, and as I stood on the roof, I caught Shawn by surprise in the grass below, commanding, “Dance!” as I rained nails down around him.
I had promised not to let Shawn touch the nail gun. Told I was the man of the house, it was my job to keep my brothers safe. It took Shawn a few days to break me down with his constant nagging, interspersed with threats that he’d tell Mom I’d shot him with the nail gun. “I didn’t shoot you. I shot at you. Besides, what’s Mom going to do, chain me to the roof and make me work myself to death? You want to use the nail gun? Here, use the nail gun.” I handed it over without instruction.
The contraption was clunky and unwieldy, attached by a heavy-gauge air hose to the compressor motoring in the grass. Because it weighed eight pounds fully loaded, he used it more like a jackhammer than a nail gun, holding it with both hands between his legs and slamming it hard against the plywood sub-roof. The sound it made was three syllabled: muzzle against sub-roof, discharge of compressed air, nail driven into wood—knock-sht-thwack, knock-sht-thwack—and Shawn was finding a rhythm when an explosion of air, a visible white hiss, burst from the nail gun as the clamp, fastening the hose to it, broke between his legs. The end of the hose caught him in the crotch. He dropped the gun and doubled over, moaning, “My testes, my testes,” rolling down the roof but not off, as the hose flailed in the air. We laughed till we cried, few things funnier to adolescent boys than knocks to the crotch. While I climbed off the roof to kill the hose by cutting off the compressor, Dane stood before it, pretending to charm it like a snake, belly dancing and singing, “There’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance. There’s a hole in the wall where the men see it all.”
When our mom came home, she saw the waste we were making and screamed, “Why not shingle the whole fucking roof with goddamn dollar bills?!”
We moved into week five, our neighbors complaining about the eyesore Dumpster, the indefinite wreck that was our roof, the shingles and nails littering the length of the block, as if a very selective Category 5 hurricane had struck. On his way home from work, Reggie Hill, who lived in the neighborhood, drove by, checking our progress—he did this from time to time—and as he pulled away, he shook his head, smiling, while Dane shot nails that plinked off his trailer. We knew Reggie to get drunk and slap around his two daughters. Once he punched his wife, and the cops were called, but she, fat-lipped and furious, filed no charges. She probably didn’t want to wind up like our mom—alone with children. At least Reggie was there for his family, even if, from time to time, he stumbled drunkenly around kicking their lovely legs out from under them. He had a landscaping business, drove a rusted-out pickup that towed a rickety trailer filled with lawn mowers, weed whackers, and edgers. There was an aura of pleasant menace about him, maybe because he often smelled like freshly cut grass doused with gasoline. He smoked Marlboro Reds and threw Hail Mary passes to us in tight, high-arcing spirals that stung our chests when we caught them. We liked him because he was a father, and he liked us because we were sons.
We’d nailed down the tarpaper, and were making visible progress, but the application of the new shingling stymied us. We knew enough to start at the bottom and layer our way up, but we had no idea how to lay down a straight row. Our first attempt ran snaking into the gutter, up toward the peak, and back down. We tore up the row and began again. Same crooked result. When our mom came home, she saw the waste we were making and screamed, “Why not shingle the whole fucking roof with goddamn dollar bills?!” She rattled us even though we towered ten feet over her. She’d had enough. The drywall in her room and mine was ruined. There was the leg hole in the ceiling, through which Shawn had retributively shot at me with the nail gun as I lazed in bed. The Dumpster rental was costing her by the day, and at last she understood that what was taking her hapless sons and their useless friends a full month could’ve been accomplished by professionals in a day. She was still saving money, but the emotional costs were bankrupting us all. By the end of her tirade, she was in mute tears, and she stormed into the house and locked herself in her bathroom, the ceiling water-stained and falling in around her.
The next day, Reggie walked into my bedroom at seven in the morning and woke me. He held in his hands what looked like an oversized tape measure. “Get out of bed. Get your brothers up. Meet me on the roof in five minutes.” His command wasn’t angry, yet its sternness was irrefutable. He wasn’t asking. He walked out of my room, leaving the door open, and I heard him assuredly climbing the ladder—tonk, tonk—a moment later.
We joined him on the roof. There he demonstrated the simple genius of the chalk line. The oversized tape measure contained a string on a spool, and in the housing was blue chalk. Reggie stood beside Shawn at one end of the roof, told him to take hold of the tab and go long. As he did, the line, dusted blue, ran the length of the roof. Shawn adjusted his end till it was level. They pressed their ends tightly down, maintaining tension, and Reggie plucked the line a few times, snapping it against the black tar paper. It left a straight blue line, which we followed as we laid shingles Reggie then expertly nailed with the nail gun. By the time our friends showed up around noon, we’d covered a quarter of the roof. At the end of the day, we were halfway finished. We wanted to offer him some thanks, but we didn’t know how or we had nothing to give so we pleaded excitedly with him to jump off the roof into the pool with us.
He couldn’t. He had a bum knee, blown in a high school football game. There was sadness in him as he descended the ladder, a melancholy that was then inexplicable, and our response was to drench him with our practiced splashes as he climbed down.
The following day, he was at our house at 7 a.m. again, rousing us and putting us to work. In less than a week, with Reggie working beside us, we were finished. Our job was accomplished, culminating in the sawing off of the peak and securing over it the ridge cap that served as an attic vent. Giddy with pride, we cajoled Reggie more. “Please, please jump off the roof with us. Just this once.” We loved getting adults to do things they didn’t want to do. In the name of celebration and a job done, he did, his boots on and a lit cigarette bitten between his teeth.
Now that we’re adults, my brothers and I can joke about our mom telling us that roofing is not rocket science. I sit nearly twenty years later in the first house I’ve owned, sheltered under a roof raised, literally, by a retired rocket scientist. I’ve come to see Reggie as an example of what I might’ve become had my time on that roof not convinced me there were other ways for a man to make a living than selling his strength and endurance. Dane and I eventually followed through on the guarantee of a college education afforded us by our mom and aunt and the generosity of the state of Florida. We both attended the local community college, transferred to get our bachelor’s degrees elsewhere, and I went on to get a graduate degree. Maybe because he was younger, or maybe because he admired Reggie more than we did, Shawn didn’t see his time on the roof as a deterrent. “Besides,” I can hear Shawn say, “we were brothers working together on a tough job to make Mom happy, what could be better?” Shawn dropped out of high school and worked construction, cashing in his college fund to buy a truck. He poured slab foundations for a time, worked as a machinist in a tool-and-die shop, and is now the foreman of his own specialized crew. They install industrial skylights in military hangars that cover nuclear submarines and space shuttles. Roofing is not rocket science, but even if it were, there’s part of me—put there by my mom and shared by my brothers—that believes if I have the right tools, the help of my brothers, and a little mentoring, we could send something flying who knows how far.
It’s 1,300 miles from Saugerties to Sarasota, from my part of New York to my mom’s part of Florida. Into Google Maps, I enter her address—4040 Prescott St., 34232—click the satellite view, and zoom in. There it is. Her house. The house where my brothers and I grew up, the blue kidney of the pool occupying a good part of the backyard. But the image—taken from an on-high perspective, seen from space—doesn’t capture the house. It’s mostly a picture of a roof, the roof my brothers and I put over our mom’s head, and after almost two decades it has yet to leak.
Readers like you make Guernica possible. Please show your support.
Jay Baron Nicorvo’s poetry, fiction, criticism, and nonfiction have appeared in The Literary Review, Subtropics, The Believer, and The Iowa Review. “The Roof Beneath Our Feet” will be anthologized in Freud’s Blind Spot: 23 Original Essays on Cherished, Estranged, Lost, Hurtful, Hopeful, Complicated Siblings, to be published by Free Press in November 2010. His first poetry collection, Deadbeat, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. He teaches at Western Michigan University, edits The Ploughshares Blog and is faculty advisor to Third Coast. Recently he moved from Saugerties to Kalamazoo, where he and his wife, Thisbe Nissen, have one newborn, Sonne, two cats, and ten chickens, among them a transgender rooster named Myron (née Myra).
The Last Newspaper - a new show at the New Museum
The New Museum presents...... “The Last Newspaper” ....a new exhibition inspired by the ways artists approach the news and respond to the stories and images that command the headlines. [Oct 6 to January 9]
including: YOUTUBE video presentation of ''I JUST CAN'T LIVE (WITHOUT MY DAILY SNAILPAPER)'' -- a novelty song about newspapers sung by J. Gale Kilgore of Big Spring; Texas, lyrics by Danny Bloom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8
===========================================
The exhibition will animate the Museum with signature artworks and a constant flow of information-gathering and processing undertaken by organizations and artist groups that have been invited to inhabit offices within the museum’s galleries. Partner organizations will use on-site offices to present their research, engage in rapid prototyping, and stage public dialogues, opening up the galleries as spaces of intellectual production as well as display. For visitors, “The Last Newspaper” will be a unique site of dialogue, participation, and critical thinking, posing new possibilities for a contemporary art museum experience. The exhibition is co-curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum, and Benjamin Godsill, Curatorial Associate.
The partner organizations that will form the active “departments” of “The Last Newspaper” exhibition include: the Center for Urban Pedagogy; StoryCorps; Latitudes; The Slought Foundation; INABA, Columbia University’s C-Lab; Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnlis/Netlab; and Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere. These partners will weave their topics together in on-site offices and a discussion space that will host scheduled programs such as talks and informal conversations between participants, museum visitors, and featured guests such as The New York Times Feminist Reading Groups, a project by Liz Linden and Jen Kennedy dedicated to examining that day’s issue of the newspaper.
A weekly newspaper compiled by partner organization Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna) will report on the events and discussions that take place throughout the galleries during the run of the exhibition. This publication will be distributed, free of charge, to New Museum visitors and will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings in lieu of a traditional catalogue. A second weekly publication, to be called “A Temporary Newspaper,” will evolve from a series of discussions, debates, interviews, and research into the epochal shifts occurring in the global information industry today. The “Temporary Newspaper” team (led by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab: Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture) will engage in the entire publication process, from conception to editorial discussions and design, in full view of the public.
“The Last Newspaper” will also include a selection of important art works from 1967 to the present, in which twenty-seven artists explore their own reactions to the news, the mechanics of its dispersal, or both. Paintings, works on paper, and performance pieces by artists like Judith Bernstein, Andrea Bowers, Sarah Charlesworth, Thomas Hirschhorn, Luciano Fabro, Hans Haacke, Emily Jacir, Mike Kelley, and Wolfgang Tillmans, all disassemble and re-contextualize elements of the newspaper in an effort to take charge of, and remake, the transmission of information that defines our daily lives. Using methods of collage, mimicry, and repurposing, these works deconstruct the newspaper and address the ambiguity about what is “news”.
The earliest work in “The Last Newspaper” exhibition is Luciano Fabro’s Pavement Tautology (1967), which is based on the traditional method of cleaning terrazzo, or tile floors, wherein the previous day’s newspapers are used to dry a freshly mopped floor. The most recent work in the show will be a series of paintings by Nate Lowman which he will create and install every week, working from a newspaper story and/or image that has compelled his attention. William Pope.L will supervise a performative restaging of his seminal work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) enlisting a team of collaborators to occasionally wander throughout the museum eating the financial daily. A suite of twenty works by Dash Snow, Untitled (2006), follows the downfall of Saddam Hussein as captured on the front pages of New York City tabloids, while Sarah Charlesworth’s Movie-Television-News-History (1979) addresses the coverage of an American newscaster’s on-camera murder by the troops of Anatasio Somoza at a check-point in Nicaragua. Featuring this arresting image as it appeared (often framed by a television window) on the front page of 27 U.S. newspapers, Charlesworth’s work shows the newspapers’ emerging dependency on electronic news formats, but also its import as a temporary but tangible record of events.
In many ways the exhibition is an exercise in citizen journalism whereby the constant re-ordering and annotation of information in both the artwork and the processes of the resident participants becomes an arena for the structuring and restructuring of truths.
PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Center For Urban Pedagogy
Founded in 1997, Brooklyn-based CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art, design, and visual culture to improve public participation in urban planning and community design, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. For this exhibition, CUP will present work from the Envisioning Development Toolkits program. Created in partnership with designers and community organizations throughout New York City, the toolkits are interactive teaching tools that demystify complex topics about land use and development. Organizers use them to reach their constituents and build their own advocacy campaigns around such topics as affordable housing and zoning. In this exhibit, CUP's toolkits will be on view, and CUP staff will conduct workshops with the completed Affordable Housing Toolkit, as well as field test hands-on activities from the forthcoming Zoning Toolkit.
StoryCorps
Brooklyn-based StoryCorps gathers the life stories of Americans by having close friends and family members interview each other in specially designed recording stations placed across the country. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. StoryCorps Conversations are preserved at the American Folklife Center and at the Library of Congress, and shared through weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition. For this exhibition, StoryCorps will use the New Museum’s visitor experience to research and rapidly prototype new ways to make their hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded information more readily available to the public.
Slought Foundation
This Philadelphia-based experimental organization, founded in 2002 by Aaron Levy, engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change through collaborations with cultural producers, communities, universities, and governments. For this exhibition, Slought will animate the entire New Museum with discursive displays about their Perpetual Peace Project, which explores Immanuel Kant's essay on the idea of "peace" with social theorists and political practitioners. Media stations in the interstitial spaces of the museum will accompany a shared community "arena" in the fourth-floor gallery intended for public programming, and a reading room "retreat" between the third- and fourth-floor galleries. For this exhibition, Slought and its partner institutions, including the European Union National Institutes of Culture and United Nations University, have collaborated with architect and designer Ken Saylor, as well as filmmakers Laura Hanna, Alexandra Lerman, and Project Projects.
Latitudes
Latitudes, a Barcelona-based curatorial office founded in 2005, will act as instigators and connectors between the various artworks, departments, and other participants of “The Last Newspaper.” They will conceive, report, write, edit, design, and print a weekly newspaper “THE LAST POST / THE LAST GAZETTE / THE LAST REGISTER...” cataloguing the events and discussions that will take place in the gallery spaces during the duration of the exhibition. This free newspaper will be distributed to museum visitors, and a collected volume of all of the issues will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings.
Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab
Joseph Grima is the current editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Kazys Varnelis the director of the Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Along with an expanded network of collaborators, Grima and Varnelis will create The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space in a performance-based editorial residency at the New Museum. This residency will transform a portion of the exhibition space into a forum for discussion as well as an editorial office. Grima, Varnelis, and their collaborators will publish a weekly publication that will be distributed in the galleries and will also be posted on walls around Manhattan allowing for open public reading.
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere
A Dutiful Scrivener looks at the framework of the obituaries section of The New York Times. Through an interview with Bill McDonald, NY Times Obituaries Editor, A Dutiful Scrivener takes viewers through the journalistic criteria of posthumous representation, writing style, judgment, newsworthiness, and the obituary to be written. We see this as an alter-mausoleum where the logging of one’s achievements and failures is transformed into a process of questioning. How might we critically reflect upon this form of writing, its limitations and word count, in order to sum up a life?
Jeffrey Inaba/C-Lab
New York-based architect Jeffrey Inaba will be working in collaboration with C-Lab, a think tank he directs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation which studies urbanism and architecture and makes policy recommendations, to animate the galleries by examining the role of weather in the news. The focus will be on weather as the single element in newscasts that is simultaneously predicative, interactive (with other stories at the top of the hour news broadcasts), and regularly featured on the front page of newspapers.
Jacob Fabricius/Old News
Jacob Fabricius, director of the Kunsthalle Malmo in Sweden, will continue his five-year-old practice of inviting artists to create newspapers that are themselves compilations of newspaper articles and advertisements gathered over time. Fabricius will present past examples of “Old News” as well as a new issue, commissioned by the New Museum for this exhibition.
ARTISTS
Alighiero e Boetti;Judith Bernstein; Pierre Bismuth; Danny bloom; Andrea Bowers; Francois Bucher; Sarah Charlesworth; Luciano Fabro; Robert Gober; Hans Haacke; Karl Haendel; Rachel Harrison; Thomas Hirschhorn; Emily Jacir; Larry Johnson; Mike Kelley; Nate Lowman; Sarah Lucas; Adam McEwen; Aleksandra Mir; Adrian Piper; William Pope.L; Allen Ruppersberg; Dexter Sinister; Dash Snow; Rikrit Tiravanija; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Kelley Walker.
--
YOUTUBE FOR 2 MINUTES EACH:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0
including: YOUTUBE video presentation of ''I JUST CAN'T LIVE (WITHOUT MY DAILY SNAILPAPER)'' -- a novelty song about newspapers sung by J. Gale Kilgore of Big Spring; Texas, lyrics by Danny Bloom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8
===========================================
The exhibition will animate the Museum with signature artworks and a constant flow of information-gathering and processing undertaken by organizations and artist groups that have been invited to inhabit offices within the museum’s galleries. Partner organizations will use on-site offices to present their research, engage in rapid prototyping, and stage public dialogues, opening up the galleries as spaces of intellectual production as well as display. For visitors, “The Last Newspaper” will be a unique site of dialogue, participation, and critical thinking, posing new possibilities for a contemporary art museum experience. The exhibition is co-curated by Richard Flood, Chief Curator of the New Museum, and Benjamin Godsill, Curatorial Associate.
The partner organizations that will form the active “departments” of “The Last Newspaper” exhibition include: the Center for Urban Pedagogy; StoryCorps; Latitudes; The Slought Foundation; INABA, Columbia University’s C-Lab; Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnlis/Netlab; and Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere. These partners will weave their topics together in on-site offices and a discussion space that will host scheduled programs such as talks and informal conversations between participants, museum visitors, and featured guests such as The New York Times Feminist Reading Groups, a project by Liz Linden and Jen Kennedy dedicated to examining that day’s issue of the newspaper.
A weekly newspaper compiled by partner organization Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Canepa Luna) will report on the events and discussions that take place throughout the galleries during the run of the exhibition. This publication will be distributed, free of charge, to New Museum visitors and will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings in lieu of a traditional catalogue. A second weekly publication, to be called “A Temporary Newspaper,” will evolve from a series of discussions, debates, interviews, and research into the epochal shifts occurring in the global information industry today. The “Temporary Newspaper” team (led by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab: Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture) will engage in the entire publication process, from conception to editorial discussions and design, in full view of the public.
“The Last Newspaper” will also include a selection of important art works from 1967 to the present, in which twenty-seven artists explore their own reactions to the news, the mechanics of its dispersal, or both. Paintings, works on paper, and performance pieces by artists like Judith Bernstein, Andrea Bowers, Sarah Charlesworth, Thomas Hirschhorn, Luciano Fabro, Hans Haacke, Emily Jacir, Mike Kelley, and Wolfgang Tillmans, all disassemble and re-contextualize elements of the newspaper in an effort to take charge of, and remake, the transmission of information that defines our daily lives. Using methods of collage, mimicry, and repurposing, these works deconstruct the newspaper and address the ambiguity about what is “news”.
The earliest work in “The Last Newspaper” exhibition is Luciano Fabro’s Pavement Tautology (1967), which is based on the traditional method of cleaning terrazzo, or tile floors, wherein the previous day’s newspapers are used to dry a freshly mopped floor. The most recent work in the show will be a series of paintings by Nate Lowman which he will create and install every week, working from a newspaper story and/or image that has compelled his attention. William Pope.L will supervise a performative restaging of his seminal work Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000) enlisting a team of collaborators to occasionally wander throughout the museum eating the financial daily. A suite of twenty works by Dash Snow, Untitled (2006), follows the downfall of Saddam Hussein as captured on the front pages of New York City tabloids, while Sarah Charlesworth’s Movie-Television-News-History (1979) addresses the coverage of an American newscaster’s on-camera murder by the troops of Anatasio Somoza at a check-point in Nicaragua. Featuring this arresting image as it appeared (often framed by a television window) on the front page of 27 U.S. newspapers, Charlesworth’s work shows the newspapers’ emerging dependency on electronic news formats, but also its import as a temporary but tangible record of events.
In many ways the exhibition is an exercise in citizen journalism whereby the constant re-ordering and annotation of information in both the artwork and the processes of the resident participants becomes an arena for the structuring and restructuring of truths.
PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS AND PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS
Center For Urban Pedagogy
Founded in 1997, Brooklyn-based CUP is a nonprofit organization that uses art, design, and visual culture to improve public participation in urban planning and community design, particularly among historically underrepresented communities. For this exhibition, CUP will present work from the Envisioning Development Toolkits program. Created in partnership with designers and community organizations throughout New York City, the toolkits are interactive teaching tools that demystify complex topics about land use and development. Organizers use them to reach their constituents and build their own advocacy campaigns around such topics as affordable housing and zoning. In this exhibit, CUP's toolkits will be on view, and CUP staff will conduct workshops with the completed Affordable Housing Toolkit, as well as field test hands-on activities from the forthcoming Zoning Toolkit.
StoryCorps
Brooklyn-based StoryCorps gathers the life stories of Americans by having close friends and family members interview each other in specially designed recording stations placed across the country. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. StoryCorps Conversations are preserved at the American Folklife Center and at the Library of Congress, and shared through weekly broadcasts on NPR’s Morning Edition. For this exhibition, StoryCorps will use the New Museum’s visitor experience to research and rapidly prototype new ways to make their hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded information more readily available to the public.
Slought Foundation
This Philadelphia-based experimental organization, founded in 2002 by Aaron Levy, engages the public in dialogue about cultural and socio-political change through collaborations with cultural producers, communities, universities, and governments. For this exhibition, Slought will animate the entire New Museum with discursive displays about their Perpetual Peace Project, which explores Immanuel Kant's essay on the idea of "peace" with social theorists and political practitioners. Media stations in the interstitial spaces of the museum will accompany a shared community "arena" in the fourth-floor gallery intended for public programming, and a reading room "retreat" between the third- and fourth-floor galleries. For this exhibition, Slought and its partner institutions, including the European Union National Institutes of Culture and United Nations University, have collaborated with architect and designer Ken Saylor, as well as filmmakers Laura Hanna, Alexandra Lerman, and Project Projects.
Latitudes
Latitudes, a Barcelona-based curatorial office founded in 2005, will act as instigators and connectors between the various artworks, departments, and other participants of “The Last Newspaper.” They will conceive, report, write, edit, design, and print a weekly newspaper “THE LAST POST / THE LAST GAZETTE / THE LAST REGISTER...” cataloguing the events and discussions that will take place in the gallery spaces during the duration of the exhibition. This free newspaper will be distributed to museum visitors, and a collected volume of all of the issues will serve as a record of the exhibition’s proceedings.
Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis/Netlab
Joseph Grima is the current editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. Kazys Varnelis the director of the Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Along with an expanded network of collaborators, Grima and Varnelis will create The New City Reader: A Newspaper of Public Space in a performance-based editorial residency at the New Museum. This residency will transform a portion of the exhibition space into a forum for discussion as well as an editorial office. Grima, Varnelis, and their collaborators will publish a weekly publication that will be distributed in the galleries and will also be posted on walls around Manhattan allowing for open public reading.
Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere
A Dutiful Scrivener looks at the framework of the obituaries section of The New York Times. Through an interview with Bill McDonald, NY Times Obituaries Editor, A Dutiful Scrivener takes viewers through the journalistic criteria of posthumous representation, writing style, judgment, newsworthiness, and the obituary to be written. We see this as an alter-mausoleum where the logging of one’s achievements and failures is transformed into a process of questioning. How might we critically reflect upon this form of writing, its limitations and word count, in order to sum up a life?
Jeffrey Inaba/C-Lab
New York-based architect Jeffrey Inaba will be working in collaboration with C-Lab, a think tank he directs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation which studies urbanism and architecture and makes policy recommendations, to animate the galleries by examining the role of weather in the news. The focus will be on weather as the single element in newscasts that is simultaneously predicative, interactive (with other stories at the top of the hour news broadcasts), and regularly featured on the front page of newspapers.
Jacob Fabricius/Old News
Jacob Fabricius, director of the Kunsthalle Malmo in Sweden, will continue his five-year-old practice of inviting artists to create newspapers that are themselves compilations of newspaper articles and advertisements gathered over time. Fabricius will present past examples of “Old News” as well as a new issue, commissioned by the New Museum for this exhibition.
ARTISTS
Alighiero e Boetti;Judith Bernstein; Pierre Bismuth; Danny bloom; Andrea Bowers; Francois Bucher; Sarah Charlesworth; Luciano Fabro; Robert Gober; Hans Haacke; Karl Haendel; Rachel Harrison; Thomas Hirschhorn; Emily Jacir; Larry Johnson; Mike Kelley; Nate Lowman; Sarah Lucas; Adam McEwen; Aleksandra Mir; Adrian Piper; William Pope.L; Allen Ruppersberg; Dexter Sinister; Dash Snow; Rikrit Tiravanija; Wolfgang Tillmans; and Kelley Walker.
--
YOUTUBE FOR 2 MINUTES EACH:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnZKIk1Krp8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0
Monday, September 20, 2010
'Allow Taiwan's place in ICAO' says Mao Chi-kuo of Taiwan
Taiwan has long been an important contributor to international civil aviation thanks to its provision of civil aviation services. Yet this key East Asian nation continues to be excluded from the meetings and activities of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a sad state in existence since 1971 that has been to the detriment of international aviation security.
Taiwan’s exclusion is incompatible with its importance to international civil air transport. Situated alongside major Asian flight routes, Taiwan is responsible for the Taipei Flight Information Region (TFIR), which abuts the Fukuoka, Manila and Hong Kong flight information regions. Every year, over 1.13 million flights pass through the TFIR, while 49 airlines operate regular flights connecting Taiwan to 104 cities around the world. The TFIR is central to air transport in East Asia, with some 34.38 million passengers and 14.40 million tons of cargo passing through it annually.
The ICAO oversees civil aviation safety and the orderly growth of the aviation industry. Its mandate covers the entire world. Due to Taiwan’s absence from the ICAO, it has been difficult for Taiwan’s civil aviation authorities to update aviation standards and regulations in line with international norms.
This has had negative consequences for both Taiwan and the ICAO. Taiwan has had to expend considerably more time, money and effort than ICAO members on improving aviation safety and security. For the aviation body, Taiwan’s absence means its goal of seamless global air traffic management operations can never be reached.
Countries around the globe have invested a great deal of resources into improving aviation security since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. All this effort notwithstanding, terrorist activity still rears its ugly head from time to time, with the December 2001 ``shoe bomber” and the 2009 ``Christmas bomber” being two striking examples.
Such incidents highlight a shift in terrorist methodology: as target countries have made their security nearly impenetrable, terrorists now board aircraft at locations where security is less tight. Thus, any nation whose air security efforts differ from or is less effective than the global norm may find itself serving as the takeoff point for an attack. Should terrorists ever be successful in carrying out an attack from such a location, the consequences would be felt globally.
To address this problem, the ICAO initiated the Universal Security Audit Program (USAP) in December 2000. The second cycle of USAP audits began in July 2008, and the process has been helpful in evaluating the aviation security of participating nations. Besides ensuring implementation of Annex 17 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, USAP audits have helped countries plug holes in their security.
The program will not result in a seamless global aviation security network. Despite the ICAO’s stated fundamental principle of universality, not all nations are included in the scope of the audit. Air security concerns will remain even after the program has been completed.
The ICAO should, therefore, invite Taiwan to participate in its meetings and activities as an observer. This would ensure that uniform aviation security measures are in place worldwide and allow for seamless air traffic management operations, meaning safer passengers and cargo in Asia and around the globe.
Mao Chi-kuo is the minister of transportation and communications in Taiwan.
Taiwan’s exclusion is incompatible with its importance to international civil air transport. Situated alongside major Asian flight routes, Taiwan is responsible for the Taipei Flight Information Region (TFIR), which abuts the Fukuoka, Manila and Hong Kong flight information regions. Every year, over 1.13 million flights pass through the TFIR, while 49 airlines operate regular flights connecting Taiwan to 104 cities around the world. The TFIR is central to air transport in East Asia, with some 34.38 million passengers and 14.40 million tons of cargo passing through it annually.
The ICAO oversees civil aviation safety and the orderly growth of the aviation industry. Its mandate covers the entire world. Due to Taiwan’s absence from the ICAO, it has been difficult for Taiwan’s civil aviation authorities to update aviation standards and regulations in line with international norms.
This has had negative consequences for both Taiwan and the ICAO. Taiwan has had to expend considerably more time, money and effort than ICAO members on improving aviation safety and security. For the aviation body, Taiwan’s absence means its goal of seamless global air traffic management operations can never be reached.
Countries around the globe have invested a great deal of resources into improving aviation security since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. All this effort notwithstanding, terrorist activity still rears its ugly head from time to time, with the December 2001 ``shoe bomber” and the 2009 ``Christmas bomber” being two striking examples.
Such incidents highlight a shift in terrorist methodology: as target countries have made their security nearly impenetrable, terrorists now board aircraft at locations where security is less tight. Thus, any nation whose air security efforts differ from or is less effective than the global norm may find itself serving as the takeoff point for an attack. Should terrorists ever be successful in carrying out an attack from such a location, the consequences would be felt globally.
To address this problem, the ICAO initiated the Universal Security Audit Program (USAP) in December 2000. The second cycle of USAP audits began in July 2008, and the process has been helpful in evaluating the aviation security of participating nations. Besides ensuring implementation of Annex 17 of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, USAP audits have helped countries plug holes in their security.
The program will not result in a seamless global aviation security network. Despite the ICAO’s stated fundamental principle of universality, not all nations are included in the scope of the audit. Air security concerns will remain even after the program has been completed.
The ICAO should, therefore, invite Taiwan to participate in its meetings and activities as an observer. This would ensure that uniform aviation security measures are in place worldwide and allow for seamless air traffic management operations, meaning safer passengers and cargo in Asia and around the globe.
Mao Chi-kuo is the minister of transportation and communications in Taiwan.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Ground Zero man burns pages from Koran, video down now in most places, world war III has hereby started....in flames...and will end in flames too
A young American man, about 32 years old, ripped pages out of a Koran and lit them aflame in NYC amid the chaos outside the planned community center and mosque near Ground Zero. “If they can burn American flags, I can burn the Koran,” the unidentified man shouted. “[Americans] should never be afraid to give their opinion.”
http://matzav.com/video-man-ignites-koran-near-ground-zero
http://matzav.com/video-man-ignites-koran-near-ground-zero#comment-59889
http://matzav.com/video-man-ignites-koran-near-ground-zero
http://matzav.com/video-man-ignites-koran-near-ground-zero#comment-59889
The Moslem Threat - A POEM FOR THE NEXT 1000 YEARS - written on the wind
[a poem found on the Internet on September 11, 2010, no attribution or byline]
The Moslem Threat
puts the world on edge
America teeters
on a shaky ledge
The Moslem Threat
is what it is
''My country 'tis of thee...''
He only cares what's his!
Wake up, America!
It's not too late
Wake up, America!
Don't tempt fate
The Moslem Threat
puts the world on edge
America teeters
on a shaky ledge
Wake up, America!
It's not too late
Wake up, America!
Don't tempt fate
The Moslem Threat's gonna
tear us apart
The Moslem Threat is evil
from the start
The Moslem Threat spells
only one thing
It's do or die,
let freedom ring!
The Moslem Threat
puts the world on edge
America teeters
on a shaky ledge
The Moslem Threat
is what it is
''My country 'tis of thee...''
He only cares what's his!
Wake up, America!
It's not too late
Wake up, America!
Don't tempt fate
The Moslem Threat
puts the world on edge
America teeters
on a shaky ledge
Wake up, America!
It's not too late
Wake up, America!
Don't tempt fate
The Moslem Threat's gonna
tear us apart
The Moslem Threat is evil
from the start
The Moslem Threat spells
only one thing
It's do or die,
let freedom ring!
Monday, August 23, 2010
Paul the Octopus: Real or Fake? FAKE!
it’s fake and a hoax….they grease one pole with aroma good food smells and the other pole or box with bad smell aroma, and of course the animal goes for the good smelling food…it’s all fake….but good fun too
Paul the Octopus: Fake
Here are some facts about Paul The Octopus:
Paul the Octopus also known as “Paul Oktopus”, is a common octopus who lives in the Sea Life public aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. Paul, who is sometimes called a “psychic octopus” or “oracle octopus,” is famous for his *******alleged ability to correctly predict the winner of soccer matches in which the German national football team is playing: SEE ABOVE
FAKE FAKE FAKE
Paul the Octopus: Fake
Here are some facts about Paul The Octopus:
Paul the Octopus also known as “Paul Oktopus”, is a common octopus who lives in the Sea Life public aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. Paul, who is sometimes called a “psychic octopus” or “oracle octopus,” is famous for his *******alleged ability to correctly predict the winner of soccer matches in which the German national football team is playing: SEE ABOVE
FAKE FAKE FAKE
Sunday, August 22, 2010
How we construct reality
In a recent essay in New Scientist, the psychologist Dorothy Rowe explained that none of us can see reality. We have to construct it from our interpretation of what we perceive, tempered by experience. As a result, each of us exists in our own world of meaning, constantly at risk of being shattered by inconvenient facts. If we acknowledge them, they can destroy our sense of self.
So, to ensure that we won’t be “overwhelmed by the uncertainty inherent in living in a world we can never truly know,” we shut them out by lying to ourselves.
So, to ensure that we won’t be “overwhelmed by the uncertainty inherent in living in a world we can never truly know,” we shut them out by lying to ourselves.
The Digirata, a Desiderata for the Digital Age
The Digirata
Go placidly amid the hot links and the distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.
Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.
Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.
If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't
worry abut the big guys.
Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future downtime.
Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting
to part you from your money.
Be yourself when you are online,
or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.
Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,
and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.
Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers
and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do it,
and always take time out to unplug
and enjoy a weekly
''internet sabbath''.
You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the SPAM and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should,
well, sort of, and you are part of the great equation,
whatever that might turn out to be.
Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.
E-readers to the fore!
Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace
keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.
Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, atomic typos and qwerky (sic) keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.
Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.
Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often."
Go placidly amid the hot links and the distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.
Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.
Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.
If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't
worry abut the big guys.
Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future downtime.
Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting
to part you from your money.
Be yourself when you are online,
or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.
Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,
and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.
Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers
and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do it,
and always take time out to unplug
and enjoy a weekly
''internet sabbath''.
You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the SPAM and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should,
well, sort of, and you are part of the great equation,
whatever that might turn out to be.
Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.
E-readers to the fore!
Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace
keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.
Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, atomic typos and qwerky (sic) keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.
Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.
Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often."
Bronze sculpture of poet Desiderata poet Max Ehrmann to grace Terre Haute cityscape
Sculptor Bill Wolfe did the work.
Bennett calls it "a breathtaking piece of art, with the metal likeness of the man who wrote “Desiderata” seated on a park bench, pen and paper in hand, on the northwest corner of the Crossroads of America.|
In addition, Bennett wrote, memorable phrases from “Desiderata,” cast in bronze, will be set in the walkway leading up to Max. The full text of that world-famous poem will be visible to visitors who sit down beside him.
A local Cultural Trail Coalition, formed in 2007, has a mission to create public art pieces honoring internationally known Terre Haute natives, such as Ehrmann. The coalition decided to start with Ehrmann, who chose to stay and work in his hometown instead of moving to literary centers such as New York or Chicago. Some people think he lived in Baltimore, but no, he lived his entire life -- 1872 - 1945 -- in Terre Haute, according to Bennett.
Now, the world has a place to say thanks to Max, Bennett wrote.
And not only that, now the world can also read a new version of the Desiderata for our Digital Age, and it's written in homage to Mr Ehrmann, according to the website behind it.It's called the Digirata.
"Go placidly amid the hot links and the distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.
Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.
Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.
If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't
worry abut the big guys.
Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future downtime.
Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting
to part you from your money.
Be yourself when you are online,
or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.
Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,
and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.
Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers
and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do it,
and always take time out to unplug
and enjoy a weekly
''internet sabbath''.
You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the SPAM and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should,
well, sort of, and you are part of the great equation,
whatever that might turn out to be.
Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.
E-readers to the fore!
Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace
keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.
Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, atomic typos and qwerky (sic) keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.
Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.
Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often."
Saturday, August 21, 2010
PRESS RELEASE: A ''Desiderata'' for the Digital Age published by humor web site
for immediate release:
August 31, 2010
contact: danbloom@gmail.com [online 24/7]
PRESS RELEASE: worldwide, for immediate pick up and online delivery
NEW YORK -- [EMBARGOED UNTIL RELEASED]
"Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence."
Max Ehrmann wrote those words in Baltimore in 1927 as part of a prose
poem he called "Desiderata. It's a Latin word that means"desired
things."
While the text was largely unknown during Ehrmann's lifetime, it has
been widely circulated worldwide since the 1960s.
The popular 1927 poem has other gems, among them:
-- ''As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.''
-- ''Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.''
-- ''Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.''
-- "You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here."
-- "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world."
-- "Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."
Now, in this Digital Age, where a different set of boundaries and online
etiquette obtain, one might rephrase some of Ehrmann's lines to read:
"Go placidly amid the hot links and distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging."
Pundits are calling this new version "The Digirata," in homage to the
original. New lines goe like this:
-- ''As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.''
-- ''Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.''
-- ''Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.'
-- ''If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and
have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what
it is and don't
worry abut the big guys.''
-- "Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting
to part you from your money."
-- ''Be yourself when you are online,
or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.''
-- ''Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,
and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.''
-- ''Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers
and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do it,
and always take time out to unplug
and enjoy a weekly
internet sabbath.''
-- ''You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the keyboards and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.''
-- ''Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.''
-- ''Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace
keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.''
-- ''Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, and broken keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.''
And lastly:
''Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.
Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often.''
FULL TEXT HERE:
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/08/digirata-20-by-anonymous.html
August 31, 2010
contact: danbloom@gmail.com [online 24/7]
PRESS RELEASE: worldwide, for immediate pick up and online delivery
NEW YORK -- [EMBARGOED UNTIL RELEASED]
"Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence."
Max Ehrmann wrote those words in Baltimore in 1927 as part of a prose
poem he called "Desiderata. It's a Latin word that means"desired
things."
While the text was largely unknown during Ehrmann's lifetime, it has
been widely circulated worldwide since the 1960s.
The popular 1927 poem has other gems, among them:
-- ''As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.''
-- ''Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.''
-- ''Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.''
-- "You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here."
-- "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world."
-- "Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy."
Now, in this Digital Age, where a different set of boundaries and online
etiquette obtain, one might rephrase some of Ehrmann's lines to read:
"Go placidly amid the hot links and distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging."
Pundits are calling this new version "The Digirata," in homage to the
original. New lines goe like this:
-- ''As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.''
-- ''Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.''
-- ''Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.'
-- ''If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and
have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what
it is and don't
worry abut the big guys.''
-- "Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting
to part you from your money."
-- ''Be yourself when you are online,
or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.''
-- ''Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,
and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.''
-- ''Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers
and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do it,
and always take time out to unplug
and enjoy a weekly
internet sabbath.''
-- ''You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the keyboards and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.''
-- ''Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.''
-- ''Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace
keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.''
-- ''Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, and broken keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.''
And lastly:
''Be cheerful. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible.
Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often.''
FULL TEXT HERE:
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2010/08/digirata-20-by-anonymous.html
Friday, August 20, 2010
Danny Bloom and the perils of "screening" vs reading on paper surfaces
hat tip to Todd I. Stark in the known blogosphere:
Inspired by Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows," and more especially by the varied reactions to Nicholas Carr's ideas, I previously posted 3 articles on the subject of how electronic media are affecting our thinking and reading. I'm no expert on this subject, except that I read a lot both online and offline. The posts were a review of Carr, some thoughts on our shifting perception of knowledge and expertise, and some reflection on the concept of deep reading.
Since those posts, a blogger named Danny Bloom wrote to me and asked if I could blog about his ideas on reading on paper vs reading on screens. He seemed very eager and excited about his hunches. Now, I have a readership of about a dozen very smart and curious friends on a very good day, and I don't know Mr Bloom at all, never met him before or heard of him. Still, he was very insistent that I mention his "ideas". So here it is. Danny, who is from Boston and is now a freelance reporter and English teacher in Taiwan, been in Asia since 1991, graduated from Tufts in 1971, never had a real career anywhere as far as I can tell, has been contacting all sorts of people and urging them to write about the issue of reading on paper vs. reading on electronic screens (he coined the term "screening" to mean reading on a screen). He feels that doing brain scans of people while they are reading will turn up important differences between paper reading and screening. Just a hunch, he admits. And he admits he might be wrong, too.
Danny has been lobbying me -- some might call it pestering me a bit too often! -- to one day blog about this and sending me a lot of the variations of the same thing over and over again by email and FB notges saying that screens are different from paper. Okay, here's my POV, Danny: I think it's true, and I prefer paper for various reasons for serious reading, but I'm not sure that this is all discernable readily at the neural level. I think much is cognitive and psychological. And it is hard to tell how much is habit and preference and how much is intrinsic difference in how we are forced to process different kinds of stimuli and use our attention differently. I expect it's a little of each.
I consider this an interesting question but I'm not nearly as excited about it as Danny is, and my concerns are more general than just the nature of screens vs. paper. Especially since the resolution and shading of of screens has drastically improved and will continue to do so.
Inspired by Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows," and more especially by the varied reactions to Nicholas Carr's ideas, I previously posted 3 articles on the subject of how electronic media are affecting our thinking and reading. I'm no expert on this subject, except that I read a lot both online and offline. The posts were a review of Carr, some thoughts on our shifting perception of knowledge and expertise, and some reflection on the concept of deep reading.
Since those posts, a blogger named Danny Bloom wrote to me and asked if I could blog about his ideas on reading on paper vs reading on screens. He seemed very eager and excited about his hunches. Now, I have a readership of about a dozen very smart and curious friends on a very good day, and I don't know Mr Bloom at all, never met him before or heard of him. Still, he was very insistent that I mention his "ideas". So here it is. Danny, who is from Boston and is now a freelance reporter and English teacher in Taiwan, been in Asia since 1991, graduated from Tufts in 1971, never had a real career anywhere as far as I can tell, has been contacting all sorts of people and urging them to write about the issue of reading on paper vs. reading on electronic screens (he coined the term "screening" to mean reading on a screen). He feels that doing brain scans of people while they are reading will turn up important differences between paper reading and screening. Just a hunch, he admits. And he admits he might be wrong, too.
Danny has been lobbying me -- some might call it pestering me a bit too often! -- to one day blog about this and sending me a lot of the variations of the same thing over and over again by email and FB notges saying that screens are different from paper. Okay, here's my POV, Danny: I think it's true, and I prefer paper for various reasons for serious reading, but I'm not sure that this is all discernable readily at the neural level. I think much is cognitive and psychological. And it is hard to tell how much is habit and preference and how much is intrinsic difference in how we are forced to process different kinds of stimuli and use our attention differently. I expect it's a little of each.
I consider this an interesting question but I'm not nearly as excited about it as Danny is, and my concerns are more general than just the nature of screens vs. paper. Especially since the resolution and shading of of screens has drastically improved and will continue to do so.
Japanese Ad Says Wrist Cutting is Sexy.....But it's NOT a real ad, it's a satircal ad in a Japanese exploitation movie called TOKYO GORE POLICE
The blogopshere is lit up now with this news:
Japanese Ad Says Wrist Cutting is Sexy
Who new wrist cutting could be so sexy? A Japanese commercial for what appears to be a box cutting tool uses a wrist cutting motif - complete with pleated plaid skirt-clad sexy kawaii AV Japanese school girls, of course. With copy like, "Let's go stylish with wrist-cutting. It's cute. When you cut, it doesn't hurt that much. The blood becomes tastier," the commercial fits squarely in the "this would never happen in America" category. But, thankfully, there are still people in this world with a gleefully twisted sense of absolutely politically incorrect humor. And we could all use a dose of that from time to time.
THIS IS NOT TRUE. THE AD DOES NOT EXIST IN REALITY; HERE IS THE TRUTH:
The fake ad is one of many satirical commercials in Japanese exploitation pic called "Tokyo Gore Police."
Enough already of this viral silliness that hurts real people who do have real problems with cutting themselves in many countries, not least of whom was the late Phoebe Prince who committed suicide in Massachusetts in early January 2010 after being cutting herself for several years and being bullied mercilessly by a posse of high school bullies at her school in South Hadley.
Japanese Ad Says Wrist Cutting is Sexy
Who new wrist cutting could be so sexy? A Japanese commercial for what appears to be a box cutting tool uses a wrist cutting motif - complete with pleated plaid skirt-clad sexy kawaii AV Japanese school girls, of course. With copy like, "Let's go stylish with wrist-cutting. It's cute. When you cut, it doesn't hurt that much. The blood becomes tastier," the commercial fits squarely in the "this would never happen in America" category. But, thankfully, there are still people in this world with a gleefully twisted sense of absolutely politically incorrect humor. And we could all use a dose of that from time to time.
THIS IS NOT TRUE. THE AD DOES NOT EXIST IN REALITY; HERE IS THE TRUTH:
The fake ad is one of many satirical commercials in Japanese exploitation pic called "Tokyo Gore Police."
Enough already of this viral silliness that hurts real people who do have real problems with cutting themselves in many countries, not least of whom was the late Phoebe Prince who committed suicide in Massachusetts in early January 2010 after being cutting herself for several years and being bullied mercilessly by a posse of high school bullies at her school in South Hadley.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The future's in "frankenbooks"?
The future's in "frankenbooks"?
OPED commentary in the Providence Journal, Rhode Island, USA,
August 20, 2010
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_bloom19_08-19-10_DQJHRUI_v15.29861b4.html
With two important books making waves nationwide this summer — William Powers’s “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” and Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” — academics will be talking up the pros and cons of reading on paper versus reading on screens for a long time to come. More books on the subject are coming out soon.
We might even be talking about something called “frankenbooks” before long, because more and more, electronic books are being released with in-gadget videos, music and photo spreads. These e-books are being characterized as “enhanced” and “enriched,” reports Julie Bosman of The New York Times, who noted in a recent article that “e-books of the latest generation are so brand new that publishers can’t agree on what to call them.”
Let’s call them “frankenbooks.” They really want to be real books, on paper, the way books were meant to be, but their makers, like Dr. Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s famous story, want something novel.
Meet Anne Mangen. She’s a reading specialist in Norway, and in an academic paper published in London in 2008, she listed a few reasons why reading on paper and reading on a screen are different. Dr. Mangen said that:
• Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading printed words on paper. The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we’re reading.
• Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness.
• The visual happenings on a computer screen and our physical interaction with the entire device and its setup can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or paper or magazine does not.
• The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is both a story experience and a tactile one.
The jury’s still out on just how different reading on paper is from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogosphere are getting interesting and heated. I am certain that professors at Brown will have a lot to say about this in future years, too, as textbooks go digital as well.
We have entered uncharted waters, “frankenbooks” and all. Brave new world? Maybe. Or maybe a very interesting, technogically brilliant world! As for me, I like books, and I like the Internet; I feel there’s a place for paper and a place for the ethersphere, in balance, with time for unplugging, too.
It is my belief, as a lifelong reader who has reached his seventh decade, that future MRI and PET brain scans of people tested while reading on paper and reading on screens will help us understand these issues better. This pioneering work is being done now in a few research labs around the world, and the results will be interesting, to say the least.
When I asked a veteran book editor in Taiwan whether he was concerned that the digital age might do away completely with printed books someday, he smiled and said, “We’re still using candles for some things, aren’t we?”
Let the MRI and PET brain-scan research at Tufts and UCLA begin.
OPED commentary in the Providence Journal, Rhode Island, USA,
August 20, 2010
http://www.projo.com/opinion/contributors/content/CT_bloom19_08-19-10_DQJHRUI_v15.29861b4.html
With two important books making waves nationwide this summer — William Powers’s “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” and Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” — academics will be talking up the pros and cons of reading on paper versus reading on screens for a long time to come. More books on the subject are coming out soon.
We might even be talking about something called “frankenbooks” before long, because more and more, electronic books are being released with in-gadget videos, music and photo spreads. These e-books are being characterized as “enhanced” and “enriched,” reports Julie Bosman of The New York Times, who noted in a recent article that “e-books of the latest generation are so brand new that publishers can’t agree on what to call them.”
Let’s call them “frankenbooks.” They really want to be real books, on paper, the way books were meant to be, but their makers, like Dr. Frankenstein of Mary Shelley’s famous story, want something novel.
Meet Anne Mangen. She’s a reading specialist in Norway, and in an academic paper published in London in 2008, she listed a few reasons why reading on paper and reading on a screen are different. Dr. Mangen said that:
• Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading printed words on paper. The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we’re reading.
• Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks physical dimension, robbing us of a feeling of completeness.
• The visual happenings on a computer screen and our physical interaction with the entire device and its setup can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book or paper or magazine does not.
• The experience of reading a book or a newspaper or a magazine is both a story experience and a tactile one.
The jury’s still out on just how different reading on paper is from reading on a screen, but the public discussions in the blogosphere are getting interesting and heated. I am certain that professors at Brown will have a lot to say about this in future years, too, as textbooks go digital as well.
We have entered uncharted waters, “frankenbooks” and all. Brave new world? Maybe. Or maybe a very interesting, technogically brilliant world! As for me, I like books, and I like the Internet; I feel there’s a place for paper and a place for the ethersphere, in balance, with time for unplugging, too.
It is my belief, as a lifelong reader who has reached his seventh decade, that future MRI and PET brain scans of people tested while reading on paper and reading on screens will help us understand these issues better. This pioneering work is being done now in a few research labs around the world, and the results will be interesting, to say the least.
When I asked a veteran book editor in Taiwan whether he was concerned that the digital age might do away completely with printed books someday, he smiled and said, “We’re still using candles for some things, aren’t we?”
Let the MRI and PET brain-scan research at Tufts and UCLA begin.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)