Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

It won’t be up much longer, Concrete Utopia. Jan. 13 it comes down.

A part of the world, a moment in time. Currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art.

Could you find Sarajevo on a map?

Where is Ljubljana?

What borders Serbia to the north?

Split, Croatia? Dubrovnik?

Then there is the library in Pristina, Kosovo … and Ernst Bloch’s definition of utopia, “a hopeful, future-oriented process in a perpetual state of emergence.”

Back in the day (I hesitate to use my father’s phrase, “Back in my day …” but) we’re talking the Third Way, a living socialism, however imperfect, with bilingual signs (English being one) across the so-called Balkan states of Yugoslavia.

In 1984, the year of the Sarajevo Olympics (I have the pin), I was twenty-eight and impressionable, odd the Orwell string, one I’ve not plucked until now.

Age of the concrete – shown in now vintage photos – limns the limits of theory when it comes to the manifold possibilities of disruption through social – not capital – gain.

I look about me here, at the people attending Concrete Utopia, and think:

The immaculate truth of an idea, so last century.

And what, do tell, feeds the dreams of today’s twenty-eight year olds?

Next: Running for Your Life: New Yorker?

Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix II

Reading “Go Down, Moses” by William Faulkner is like coin-mining an ancient plain, ever so periodically, while stirring pools upon pools of patience that in the early pages seems beyond human capacity because so much of what is put down seems, at first, aimless, even inert, you come upon a gold doubloon, an object of such perfection that your heart skips a bit, to wit:

“Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of it, arrest at least that much of what people called progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its ultimate fate.  He seemed to see . . . a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both – the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

Running for Your Life: Prospect Park Shoot

On alternate days I run, typically for about 45 minutes – five miles more or less – and like to take a route to the skating rinks in Prospect Park.

For years, from the mid-90s to the late ’00s, M and I would go for morning skates, back when there was an outdoor facility, called Kate Wollman Rink.

Now, it’s a swishy two-rink affair, one under a skylight cover, the other in the open air.

The second ice surface will, from time to time, be commandeered for product photo and video shoots.

I’ve seen Martha Stewart signs, but typically there is nothing outward that would identify the client.

On this day (Dec. 6), I noticed the shoot but kept running along the path near the ice, a route I like because as an avid skater I admire the skate cuts in the surface of the ice, and perchance, be drawn back into memories of mornings past.

Just as I get to the middle of the outdoor rink wall, a woman starts cursing like a sailor, slashing my reverie to ribbons. F-words, S-words, a cascade of muck, pierces the morning cold, the “talent” in the shooting pen is a girl in expensive-looking winter wear, eight years old max, looking wanly on.

When I return on the same path, two members of the shoot crew block my way as I attempt to return along the public route I take every other day for months of the year. Like a good doobie, I retreat and look for a second best way to run home.

Turned away – yet another example of how in our profit-obsessed culture, “your options have changed.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Concrete Utopia

Running for Your Life: Simply “Reporter”

When it comes to making a difference, try this:

Being a reporter.

Not a journalist, not a pundit, not someone who would distinguish oneself through ambition to establish some home truth that separates and divides, builds yet another data and opinion silo that forces the genuflection of the media.

Rather, trust the path followed by Seymour Hersh in his simply titled book, “Reporter.”

I’ve been in a news business awhile. Since 1979, the first four years as a reporter, the balance as an editor.

But there’d be no news without reporters. And rarely is there a book about one dedicated to getting the story with the tenacity of a junk yard dog.

“Sy” Hersh shows the way in this book. Consider this essential reading.

Next: Running for Your Life: Faulkner Fix II