There is a symmetry between Corky Lee’s passing and the rise of Stop Anti-Asian Hate: the departure of Asian America’s greatest documentarian and its most visible recent efflorescence. Years earlier, the brief window of postwar Asian American radicalism seemed to have already swung shut. Today, our most notable figures are corporate CEOs and conservative politicians, the eponymous Asians rich and crazy, so the artists, revolutionaries, and workers preserved in Lee’s prints can feel as elusive as their author. No matter how distant an Asian American poor people’s movement may seem, his prints still vibrate with radical temporality and potential.
I’m interested in how words with particular identities and backgrounds—“spirit,” “God,” “thought,” “tranquility”—take part, without comment, and perhaps without full knowledge, in a metamorphosis, a movement across meanings that leads not so much from the “West” to the “East” as, subtly and suggestively, away from the Enlightenment to a new emergence and sense of the “literary.”
As Kimmelman’s employer keeps reminding us with googly-eyed headlines, rent is soaring. The city’s pandemic-era eviction moratorium has been lifted. Our new mayor is a cop who seems to disdain unhoused people. And the architects of the largest residential transformation in the city today—the supposedly radical campaign to close Rikers Island—insist that incarcerated New Yorkers should be in a better jail, not in apartments.
Hugeness has been one of the more flamboyant features of the Modi government’s tenure
The afterglow of this communion extends into the final, much-anticipated delight: a “cultural boat ride” promising “ten thousand years of Indian Culture in ten minutes.” This air-conditioned funfair ride begins, appropriately enough, on the mythic “banks of the Saraswati” (a now unknown or extinct river celebrated in the Vedas) festooned with tableaux of ten-thousand-year-old “Vedic” agriculture, Vedic universities, Vedic bazaars, Vedic elections and even the “first conference on embryology.” Never mind that the prevailing historical consensus is that the earliest Vedic “texts” (they were originally orally transmitted) are little more than 3,500 years old. Further downriver, things get weirder as we witness the Indic invention of everything from plastic surgery to the airplane.
Sustainable buildings are buildings that have been sustained
In my mind, Geller I always pairs with Casablanca, another instant classic that would have been in theaters when Breuer started drawing it up: a work of high-low insider-outsider hybridity, expressing a very particular old-world immigrant’s dream of the character of modern life among the Americans. Geller I remains somehow poised at that postwar moment of collective trauma and redemptive domesticity, in its contemporary description by House & Garden magazine forever “the house of tomorrow, today.”
A man flips a baby through the air while standing on the edge of a high roof, a cityscape surrounding him. A car runs into a brick wall on a race course. Over the archival footage, Bordowitz tells of his father’s death: he went to see Evel Knievel jump across the Grand Canyon, then was fatally struck by a bus as he left the event. Bordowitz lays in his bed and describes getting fucked in the ass for the first time, his gaze trained daringly on the camera. When he speaks of the man coming inside him, no condom, the image jumps: a stuntman shoots out of a canon. Unlike the moralizing narratives of the era, Bordowitz equates contagion to chance.
Once safely out of office, he acknowledged that “millions of Americans” had been “spooked by a black man in the White House.” An undeniable truth, but one that was miles away from the embrocations he had offered the country when he launched his national career by declaring that “there is not a black America and a white America.” That kind of thing sounds like denialism to some, a postracial utopia to others, and then, in certain places, like a threat.
