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Memes and Mortar: October 2009
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An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Wednesday, October 28, 2009. In poor neighborhoods, history is a bit more legible, more transparent. Houses are less often painted, signs less often replaced, while abandoned buildings experience a long afterlife of slow decay. Within their walls, the artifacts of the distant-recent past sometimes remain for decades, suspended in time even as time accelerates for the world around. Thurston Saw has not made the switch to digital record keeping. Photo by Richard Townley.
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Memes and Mortar: midstream map-check
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2010/01/midstream-map-check.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Friday, January 15, 2010. My task, then, was to provide a condensed history of what the old South Bronx was and how it came to be, and then try to demonstrate how the experience of that place informed the arts that it generated. I studied historiographic sources—the best among them Jill Jonnes' South Bronx Rising. And Evelyn Gonzalez's The Bronx. As clues to the geist. This has taken me a while to figure out. Beginning this project, I operated on the unexamined as...
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Memes and Mortar: The Weaver's
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2010/01/weavers.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Friday, January 15, 2010. 8220;We control your icons. We wrote them on your trains those big gigantic rolling pages.”. Rammellzee, interview, Style Wars. I first heard of The Rammellzee through my man Chuck Galli, who interviewed him for a paper titled “Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity.”. Chuck directed me to Zee's website. 8221;”, Style Wars. So, here is the interview:. SC] You seem to have a unique understanding of language an...
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Memes and Mortar: December 2009
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2009_12_01_archive.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Tuesday, December 29, 2009. Hip Hop: La Musica de Las Ruinas. This essay, which I wrote in late 2007 for a Spanish composition class, was the seedling of the South Bronx research project. The main issue that I am wrestling with now, that is, the dialectic between the arts and the built environment, is introduced here. It's a bit reductionist, but still holds up pretty well. Hip Hop: La Música de las Ruinas. One World/Ballantine Books, June 2004. 3 United Nations Popul...
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Memes and Mortar: The Valley of Ashes
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2009/12/valley-of-ashes.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Wednesday, December 23, 2009. The Valley of Ashes. As a child of the Bronx, Marshall Berman asks “Why did it go? Did it have to go? Was there anything we could have done to keep it alive? For the young people of the Bronx, a trip to the 1939 New York World's Fair—“The World of Tomorrow” as it was called—was a means of imaginative participation in this new American order. “TIME TEARS ON” was the slogan greeting entrants to the gr...The World's Fair popularized a social...
memesandmortar.blogspot.com
Memes and Mortar: Back Story / The Cross-Bronx Expressway
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2009/12/back-story.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Wednesday, December 23, 2009. Back Story / The Cross-Bronx Expressway. Those of means began to move, while working-class families stayed behind, to be joined by a culturally distinct and generally poorer wave of Puerto Ricans and African Americans whose numbers steadily rose throughout the forties. [2]. Moses first publicized the plan in the February-March 1944 edition of Bronxboro, the magazine of the Bronx Board of Trade. A year later, in the same paper, he proc...
memesandmortar.blogspot.com
Memes and Mortar: Hip Hop: La Musica de Las Ruinas
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2009/12/hip-hop-la-musica-de-las-ruinas.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Tuesday, December 29, 2009. Hip Hop: La Musica de Las Ruinas. This essay, which I wrote in late 2007 for a Spanish composition class, was the seedling of the South Bronx research project. The main issue that I am wrestling with now, that is, the dialectic between the arts and the built environment, is introduced here. It's a bit reductionist, but still holds up pretty well. Hip Hop: La Música de las Ruinas. One World/Ballantine Books, June 2004. 3 United Nations Popul...
memesandmortar.blogspot.com
Memes and Mortar: November 2009
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2009_11_01_archive.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Monday, November 2, 2009. Peace, Unity, Love.and Swear Words! My interest in the old South Bronx is inseparable from my interest in hip hop music. But truth be told, I can't fully get into the classic partyin' and bullshittin' jams of the genre's progenitors. Like a too-sweet slice of cake, I can swallow only so much 'and you don't stop' before, well, stopping. Reading' the streets as if they formed a great big secret book. Subscribe to: Posts (Atom). Teaches that the...
memesandmortar.blogspot.com
Memes and Mortar: Thoughts on Wild Style
http://memesandmortar.blogspot.com/2010/01/wild-style.html
An ongoing study of the South Bronx. Tuesday, January 5, 2010. Thoughts on Wild Style. I saw Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style. Almost back-to-back with The Fire Next Door. The documentary noted on a previous post. Both are stylized representations of the old South Bronx, but they convey very different impressions of the place. Fire Next Door. Is hard-boiled populist journalism that concerns itself with the arson epidemic and the deadly mix of social/political problems of which fire was the most graphic symptom.
