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“Abolition,” as a word, is an intentional echo of the movement to abolish slavery. “This work will take generations, and I’m not going to be alive to see the changes,” the activist Mariame Kaba told me. “Similarly I know that our ancestors, who were slaves, could not have imagined my life.” And as Kaba and Davis and Richie and Gilmore all told me, unsolicited and in almost identical phrasing, it is not serendipity that the movement of prison abolition is being led by black women. Davis and Richie each used the term “abolition feminism.” “Historically, black feminists have had visions to change the structure of society in ways that would benefit not just black women but everyone,” Davis said. She also talked about Du Bois and the lessons drawn from his conception of what was needed: not merely a lack of slavery but a new society, utterly transformed. “I think the fact that so many people now do call themselves prison abolitionists,” Michelle Alexander told me, “is a testament to the fact that an enormous amount of work has been done, in academic circles and in grassroot circles. Still, if you just say ‘prison abolition’ on CNN, you’re going to have a lot of people shaking their heads. But Ruthie has always been very clear that prison abolition is not just about closing prisons. It’s a theory of change.”
For Gilmore, to “never forget” means you don’t solve a problem with state violence or with personal violence. Instead, you change the conditions under which violence prevailed. Among liberals, a kind of quasi-Christian idea about empathy circulates, that we have to find a way to care about the people who’ve done bad. To Gilmore this is unconvincing. When she encountered the kids in Fresno who hassled her about prison abolition, she did not ask them to empathize with the people who might hurt them, or had. She instead asked them why, as individuals, and as a society, we believe that the way to solve a problem is by “killing it.” She was asking if punishment is logical, and if it works. She let the kids find their own way to answer.
[...] Alex’s paintings, meticulous renderings of pixelated or otherwise fragmented images, were each the result of hundreds or even thousands of hours of work, technically precise and meditatively, masochistically obsessive. His source material was imagery that had a “specific emptiness”—travel brochures, postcards, amateur pornography. “Turning [these images] into formal arrangements of color, pattern, and repeated form,” he told Hudson in 1998, “becomes a sublimation, a ritual that allows me to enter their profound vapidity.” The frame of mind needed to make this work seems to have required a big buffer of loneliness, which Alex successfully located in Des Moines. He could stay there and paint, and Hudson, whose gallery was entering its heyday, would be his lifeline. That was the arrangement.
oooh i like this [painter alex brown]
I never wrote about most of the people from the Blue Lamp. If I transformed them into fiction I might lose my grasp on the real place, the evidence of which has otherwise evaporated. The bar is gone. All those people have died. That might be why. Or perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them, and that transition is not yet complete. The person who writes about her experience is not the same person who had the experience. The ability to write about it is proof of change, of great distance. Not everyone is willing to admit this, but it’s true.
As I said, I was the soft one. Maybe that’s why I was so desperate to escape San Francisco, by which I mean desperate to leave a specific world inside that city, one I felt I was too good for and, at the same time, felt inferior to. I had models that many of my friends did not have: educated parents who made me aware of, hungry for, the bigger world. But another part of my parents’ influence was this bohemian idea that real meaning lay with the most brightly alive people, those who were free to wreck themselves. I admired a lot of these people I’m describing to you. I put them above myself in a hierarchy that is reestablished in the fact that I am the one who lived to tell.
I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home. And then I left for good, left San Francisco. My friends all stayed. But the place still defined me as it has them.
Why would they have left Lucania to begin with, a world where you relax in the sun, go to the beach, take a tomato from the vine when you’re hungry? There was chronic underemployment in the south. The soil was of poor quality. After grain markets were deregulated, prices plummeted. For rural populations in the Mezzogiorno there was simply no future. At the same time, the Italian postwar economic ‘miracle’ meant there were jobs in the factories of the rapidly industrialising north. Between 1951 and 1971, 9 million people migrated from rural to industrial areas in Italy. They often arrived in the big cities with nothing, and were forced to live in train station waiting rooms or on relatives’ floors, if they had that option. They worked day and evening shifts on building sites or in factories that offered treacherous conditions and long hours.
“Like, I marry a wife, and they take her, and then give me back the legs of the wife,” Ali Ayyad joked, and we all laughed. “Did they offer you money for their use of the hotel?” I asked. Ayyad said, “You agree to rent to them, it’s like this: They say, we will give you a ring as payment. But in order to give it to you, we need to cut off your hand. Then, we will put your hand in a freezer for one hundred years. If you ask, where is my ring, they say: We are still preparing the ring.” We all laughed again. Ayyad’s entire family is in Abu Dis, but on the other side of the huge concrete separation barrier. It takes him one hour and $20 USD in taxi fare to visit his relatives, who, before the wall went up, were a one-minute walk down the road. Can you call to them? I asked. “Yes,” he said, “from the roof we can shout hello.”
“I want to live in peace,” Ayyad told me. “I want to take my family to Tiberius to swim in the sea, I want that kind of life, of happiness and pleasure. Instead, no one has pleasure. We are afraid and the Israelis are afraid. We are all the sons of Abraham. We have only one God. There is no paradise. This place is paradise, but we are wasting it. When you die, you can’t take anything with you, no dollars, no euros, no black whiskey, no red whiskey, nothing. You sleep alone. So what is the point. We all need peace. We want peace.”
I’ll start out Fanny Factoid then say it straight: L.A. is the most populous county in the nation; adjusted for the cost of housing we have the highest poverty rate; we’re the manufacturing capital of the US (used to be steel, now it’s tshirts and underpants and wut, u got a problem with that?); almost half the goods that arrive in this blighted and trinket-rich nation come through our two ports. If you want to know what the future looks like, and I mean its near-brutality, this is the place to live. Snow-capped mountains, citrus blossoms scenting the breeze, and scavenged train tracks with a bomb-blast of packaging materials for miles. Text me when you get to Union Station I’ll pick you up in front. — XOXO, Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
<3
With Lucien and boys like him—who will forever remain mere boys—there is no war nor suffering nor valor. There is only some bland girl, some banal pop song, a romantic comedy, an August vacation.
harsh but like yeah
Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.
Without having met him, I was certain that Pascal Balmy’s charisma, like anyone’s—Joan of Arc’s, let’s say—resided only in the will of other people to believe. Charismatic people understand this will-to-believe best of all. They exploit it. That is their so-called charisma.