{"id":2125,"date":"2015-04-17T20:48:29","date_gmt":"2015-04-18T03:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.org\/weblog\/?p=2125"},"modified":"2015-04-17T20:56:34","modified_gmt":"2015-04-18T03:56:34","slug":"evidence-of-absence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/?p=2125","title":{"rendered":"evidence of absence"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_3457\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So I was walking westward along East 10th<\/span> St. early in the afternoon, feeling a little jet-lagged, having just got back\u00a0to NYC after a month\u2019s stay in Berlin. \u00a0Moments before I’d said goodbye\u00a0to Ruth\u00a0as she boarded the M8\u00a0bus on her way to the West Village.<\/p>\n

My first day back\u00a0in a place\u00a0I’ve\u00a0been away from for a while can\u00a0feel fresh and full of possibility, though I noticed that winter had been very slow to release its grip on old NYC this year\u00a0and the sky was still grey, the trees unpromisingly bare and the sparrows disheveled as they pecked at a pizza crust along the\u00a0sidewalk. A sudden\u00a0rumble percussed the air – disconcerting\u00a0louder than the usual construction noise, the ground shaking. \u00a0My iPhone buzzed with an incoming text:<\/p>\n

Ruth: \u201cDid you hear that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Oliver: \u201cYes I did.\u201d<\/p>\n

She calls and\u00a0tells\u00a0me the people getting on her bus are\u00a0talking about some kind of explosion.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s probably nothing,\u201d I said, (as if I knew what I was talking about)<\/p>\n

But New York is an incredibly noisy place and one gets used to the din of sirens, pile drivings, and demolition noise that punctuates the background\u00a0infrasound of thrumming traffic, the vibration\u00a0of subways and the\u00a0whoosh\u00a0of steam conveyed through pipes hidden under\u00a0the street.<\/p>\n

So that was that, I thought and ducked into the\u00a0barber shop I always go to\u00a02nd Ave, to get a\u00a0hair cut. It wasn\u2019t busy and I hardly have any hair so it took only\u00a0a few minutes to restore my stubble and by the time I got out, I could see grey smoke billowing up a short distance down the avenue, just south of the venerable Gem Spa news stand. A crowd had gathered and the first emergency vehicles were rolling in.<\/p>\n

There is something horribly magnetic about a fire\u00a0and I found myself heading\u00a0toward it\u00a0without even really thinking; though it was, broadly speaking, on my way home.<\/p>\n

The intensity and volume of the smoke was getting worse by the minute and by the time I was a block closer, the fire department had deployed its high ladders and were blasting water from above\u00a0onto the five story tenement, which by now was\u00a0almost completely engulfed with the fire spreading to the adjacent.\u00a0 <\/span>From that point on things moved very quickly, and in a few minutes we were being herded\u00a0backward\u00a0from the existing police cordon, at which point the intitial\u00a0building blew up. It was surreal, horrible and one felt completely helpless knowing that what\u00a0was happening, what one was seeing at that moment likely\u00a0involved the loss of life \u2013 how could it not? Some\u00a0of the onlookers were already sobbing or\u00a0frantically calling or texting loved ones they thought might be\u00a0in the vicinity and were not\u00a0yet accounted for.<\/p>\n

I exchanged a few words with the long time East Village character, Jim Power, a.k.a. the \u2018Mosaic Man\u2019, who had been darting in and out of the chaos on his motorized mobility scooter, sharing bits of news with onlookers and comforting the more obviously stricken. But what does one say in such a situation, other than to communicate one\u2019s concern for the victims, the shock that such a thing has indeed happened; that this unremarkable building, with its sushi place, \u00a0people\u2019s apartments, their stuff, their lives, a building like so many others, a place that one might have even taken for granted, a mere blip in the optical subconscious\u2013unless of course one lived<\/i> there, knew<\/i> people there\u2013had so abruptly been ripped\u00a0from our midst?<\/p>\n

I worked my way eastward, away from the fire scene, looking\u00a0back at the roiling column of smoke that by now must have\u00a0visible throughout Lower Manhattan. Everywhere I looked, people\u00a0had stopped in their tracks.\u00a0Even five blocks away, knots of people gathered on the street corners, pointing at the sky and shaking their heads; all of us one moment in the midst of\u00a0our quotidian routines and then presented with the sudden spectacle of disaster. That night the media confirmed what many on the street had been speculating\u00a0– that the explosion, which cost two lives and injured 22 people was due to\u00a0illegal modifications to the gas lines in the building. A couple of weeks later I happened to speak\u00a0with\u00a0one of the ConEd workers \u00a0first on\u00a0the scene and he\u00a0lamented\u00a0the criminally shoddy gas-fitting and shared\u00a0 how furious and frightened he was at the many cases of dangerously careless workmanship\u00a0he so often encounters\u00a0in his job, and how this continues to put all New Yorkers at grave risk.<\/p>\n

During the weeks that followed, as the ruins got pored over by teams of\u00a0investigators and then proceeded to be gradually demolished, the intersection of 2nd<\/span> Ave and 7th<\/span> Street had the air of a grizzly carnival with satellite news trucks jammed into every available niche, television journalists recording their live spots against the backdrop of straining heavy machinery, mounds of simmering rubble and disaster tourists, posing for selfies \u2013 the tragic obliteration of half a city block endlessly mirrored in a mis en abyme<\/i> of Instagram and Twitter updates; its cause, not terrorism as had been feared, but carelessness and callous indifference. And so\u00a0Manhattan is left with\u00a0yet another hole, a lacuna, which the forces of turbo-capitalism will soon\u00a0fill. But with what?<\/p>\n

Even without such tragedies, the streetscape of the East Village is changing so rapidly I am\u00a0almost always in a state of cognitive dissonance, looking for familiar landmarks that have disappeared, seemingly overnight, subsumed by the juggernaut of gentrification. These are \u2018micro-worlds\u2019 complete with endemic communities, ways of being, and so many of them are being lost: the affordable mom-and-pop eateries, the Hispanic botanicas<\/em>, the dive bars, the squats, the bait stores along Houston \u2013 even the cars parked on the streets belie a degree of conspicuous wealth that would have been unthinkable but a\u00a0decade ago. Though still a diverse and vibrant place, the neighbourhood has lost much of its character, its eccentricity, and has morphed into a theme park of its former rough-hewn\u00a0self. The blogger Jeremiah Moss tracks this steady\u00a0diminishment in \u201cJeremiah\u2019s Vanishing New York\u201d<\/a>, which reads as a chronicle of cultural extinction. But Moss hasn\u2019t given up and\u00a0is at the vanguard of a resistance movement he calls\u00a0 \u2018Save New York\u2019<\/a> and he\u00a0recently instigated\u00a0a \u2018Small Biz Crawl\u2019 to help out vulnerable East Village businesses affected by the fire. But is authenticity, so reified, still authentic, or are have we fallen victim to some idealized nostalgia? The East Village at the dawn of punk rock was a much grittier, more menacing place with ubiquitous crime along with the cheap rents and opportunities for squatting. But it was this set of conditions that\u00a0allowed a\u00a0vibrant\u00a0non-commercial culture to thrive, the fumes of which the East Village is still running on to\u00a0this day. At some point though, this will be forgotten.<\/p>\n

When small establishments close down and are\u00a0replaced by banks and chain stores, a\u00a0sense of ‘placelessness’ descends.\u00a0The likes of Subway, Starbucks<\/em> and Urban Outfitters<\/em> are essentially machines, \u2018non-places,\u2019 as the critic Marc Aug\u00e9 puts it<\/a>, interchangeable with others anywhere in the world provided they\u00a0share the brand.\u00a0The human interactions\u00a0occurring within\u2013optimized, efficient\u00a0and perhaps even affordable, are\u00a0insipid, anonymous\u00a0and non-relational and I would argue, contributory to the epidemic of loneliness we are now facing. A\u00a0sense of\u00a0allegiance, a feeling of belonging to the local, a culture of identifiable place, is lost\u00a0when that place becomes just another instantiation\u00a0 of a globalized retail platform. When our every public interaction\u00a0is\u00a0imbued with overarching commerciality, we have a\u00a0recipe for psychological disaster.<\/p>\n

In her Guardian essay: \u2018The Future of Loneliness,\u2019<\/a> Olivia Laing makes the case that\u00a0the internet, in particular social media, is the ultimate commercialized non-place, where the made-up-ness of one\u2019s on-line persona commodifies personal\u00a0relationships into \u2018likes\u2019 and \u2018re-tweets,\u2019 distancing the messiness, the imperfection of the real; resulting, says\u00a0Laing: \u201c in being looked at and not seen.” We engage\u00a0with each other in a state of ‘hyper-anxiety’ \u2013\u00a0constantly surveilled yet\u00a0never understood.<\/p>\n

Laing goes on to reference\u00a0the quite excellent ‘Surround Audience’<\/a> exhibition now on at the New Museum, which for her epitomizes this anomic, yet narcissistic aesthetic. When I visited the show, the work most literally embodying the sense \u00a0of pervasive social isolation for me was\u00a0the series of quarantine chambers designed by the Chinese artist Nadim Abbas,\u00a0 entitled: Chamber 664, 665 <\/i>and 666,\u00a0<\/i>each containing\u00a0an abject sleeping bunk and some\u00a0personal effects that can only be contacted\u00a0 through a pair of thick rubber gloves \u2013 a metaphor it seems to me, as apt for ebola as it is for Facebook.<\/p>\n

That this epidemic of loneliness, this feeling of \u2018not being seen\u2019, might have consequences far beyond individual indisposition is what\u00a0the Marxist critic, Franco \u2018Bifo\u2019 Berardi<\/a>, suggests in his provocative\u00a0reflections \u2013 \u2018In the lonely cockpit of our lives\u2019<\/em> on the recent Germanwings crash, \u00a0by now widely believed to have been an\u00a0intentional act by\u00a0its\u00a0co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz. For\u00a0Berardi, neo-liberal capitalism, with its relentless competition and ubiquitous connectivity, is responsible for us running into the \u2018embrace of the black dog\u2019<\/em> \u2013 the system\u2019s demands have transformed our social lives into \u2018a factory of unhappiness of which it appears impossible to escape.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

He goes on to declare:<\/p>\n

\u201c(Lubitz) did what he did because he could not get rid of the unhappiness that has been devouring contemporary mankind since advertising began bombing the social brain with mandatory cheerfulness, and digital loneliness has been multiplying the nervous stimulation and encasing the bodies in the cage of the screen, and financial capitalism has been forcing everybody to work more and more time for the miserable salary of precariousness.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

A more extreme form of Berardi\u2019s proposition was foreshadowed, in part violently, in the early 1970\u2019s, by the radical German therapist, Dr. Wolfgang Huber and his Socialist Patient\u2019s Collective<\/a>, who believed that psychiatric disorders stemmed from the capitalist system and could only be cured by a turn to a Marxist society. Though the therapeutic aspects of Marxism as it has \u00a0thus far been applied can most charitably be described as \u2018mixed,\u2019 the psychological stress engendered as\u00a0contemporary neo-liberalism subsumes\u00a0all aspects of our\u00a0lives into a pervasive, competitive commerciality need to be taken much more seriously. The system\u2019s increasing inhumanity, its emptiness, is clearly driving people crazy\u00a0yet rarely do we critique its basic legitimacy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Horrific events like the Germanwings crash may well be the symptom, not the disease.<\/p>\n

\"via<\/a>

via National Geographic<\/p><\/div>\n

The overwhelming sensation of diminishment in our working lives and in our relationships with each other is compounded in turn by the vertiginously\u00a0decreasing finitude of the natural world\u00a0on which our human institutions, our very lives, depend. We are bombarded with heartbreaking images of ending\u00a0\u2013the last male western white rhinoceros left in the world, with his abbreviated yet\u00a0still too valuable nub of a horn, encircled\u00a0in his placid grazing by a full-time phalanx of armed guards, there to protect him from poachers. We\u2019ve reached the point where there is not a single territory on this planet where such a lonely and iconic creature could live out its life outside the market system. So it\u00a0is doomed to die.<\/p>\n

That we are in the midst of an anthropogenic \u2019Six Extinction\u2019 event is well known and the artist Brandon Balleng\u00e9e<\/a> (who I was in a show with at the Media Sanctuary in Troy New York last spring) recently produced a series of works called \u2018Frameworks of Absence\u2019 in which he represented the lacunae of extinction quite literally, by cutting the images of extinct creatures out of historical prints and burning them, leaving behind ghostly white absences amid backgrounds depicting\u00a0their idealized habitats.<\/p>\n

With or without\u00a0extinction, climate change will create absences in what we have once held familiar. Researchers have recently estimated the velocity<\/i> of climate change in temperate zones to be approximately a meter a day<\/a>, poleward or upward; meaning that in a given nature reserve, the localities having\u00a0now the coldest conditions will be hotter\u00a0than the places that are now the warmest, within a hundred or so years – the mountaintops becoming as hot as the deserts they\u00a0loom\u00a0over are now, and so on.\u00a0This means species requiring specific temperature ranges\u00a0will have to migrate higher in latitude or altitude to survive, provided there are no barriers to movement, which in the real world is often not the case. Alpine and polar organisms<\/a> will be\u00a0particularly vulnerable, as they often already inhabit the extremes of what is topographically possible and will likely run out of accessible places to move\u00a0– \u2018deterritorialized\u2019 literally, into oblivion.<\/p>\n

Other species, now at home in more southerly regions, will need to move northward, as their accustomed haunts become uncomfortably hot. In places such as the North American west coast such migration would be\u00a0impeded by almost insurmountable man-made obstacles in the form of massive cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, which interrupt the continuum, the cline<\/i><\/a>, of available habitat.<\/p>\n

In such cases we might initiate preemptive, \u2018assisted\u2019 migrations, which I have investigated over the past years in my \u2018Neo-Eocene\u2019<\/a> project \u2013 a logged-over acreage in coastal British Columbia, where I have planted hundreds of young coast redwood, giant sequoia, walnut and gingko trees, all native to more southerly zones, in anticipation that continuing warming trends will create conditions more favourable to them, and less favourable to the vegetation now considered to be\u00a0native. So far so good, with the coast redwoods making the most impressive progress, thriving unassisted, almost 1000 kilometres north of their closest native range. The sequoias too are making considerable gains, which is reassuring given the prognosis for their survival <\/a>in their Sierra Nevada home is increasingly grim, to the extent that by some estimates natural sequoia groves are unlikely to make it through the area\u2019s shift toward permanent drought without artificial irrigation and the construction of fire breaks. Is there not a certain poignancy to the fact that we might only manage to preserve something of the primeval sublime of the sequoia groves through the epic administration of artificiality? But then the climate itself has become a human artifact. We broke it we fix it, I guess, only we can\u2019t fix it, not really, not any more.\u00a0But absence makes the heart grow fonder.\u00a0Which makes the Anthropocene the biggest lacuna of them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I was walking westward along East 10th St. early in the afternoon, feeling a little jet-lagged, having just got back\u00a0to NYC after a month\u2019s stay in Berlin. \u00a0Moments before I’d said goodbye\u00a0to Ruth\u00a0as she boarded the M8\u00a0bus on her way to the West Village. My first day back\u00a0in a place\u00a0I’ve\u00a0been away from for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,13,22,53,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animals","category-architecture","category-cities","category-climate","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2125"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2138,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2125\/revisions\/2138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.oliverk.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}