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This lithograph is the final proof for the cover of James Joyce's Ulysses was created by the printer Maurice Darantiere to match the blue of the early 20th century Greek flag.

image: cover proof of ulysses, 1922, lithograph at the library at SUNY Buffalo, via The Morgan Library

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McMansion Hell urges all New Yorkers to Rank Zohran Mamdani #1 for Mayor of NYC

I know I am just a blog about ugly houses but I want to say something important here: the ruling class in this country does not want you to have affordable housing. They don't want you to have clean, reliable public transportation. They don't want you to have access to groceries you can afford. If something bad happens to you, they don't care if you live or die. If you lose your home, they will hole up in their penthouses, McMansions, and mommy-bought apartments and tell you it's your fault -- but it's not. It is theirs. Everything from budget cuts to rent hikes, is their fault, their way of ensuring that the city becomes a place made up solely of people like themselves.

Zohran Mamdani is the only high profile candidate I've seen in my narrow, millennial lifetime running for any position -- least of all the mayor of the biggest city in the country -- on a platform of decommodification in terms of access to food, housing and transportation. City-run grocery stores would ensure that food stays affordable because there is no profit motive. While some are critical of his policy of fare-free transportation (as opposed to spending the same amount of money improving services), given the amount of policing involved in watching the fareboxes, it's something I'm coming more and more around to.

In demanding a rent freeze, Zohran is one of the only politicians able to articulate a direct plan for keeping people in their homes at a time when rent is skyrocketing with no end in sight. Zohran is one of a limited few in this miserable, cowardly country who are willing to speak out for the rights of Palestinians being murdered en masse by Israel. A vote for Zohran is a vote for the idea that better things are possible and, if you ask me, I think we live in such dire times that we've begun to forget this fundamental truth: things do not have to be like this. We do not have to live under the jackboot of privatization and exploitation forever. That choice, however, is up to us.

I am forever skeptical of the power of the ballot box to enact lasting change, especially in recent years. In fact, I am the most skeptical of electoralism I have ever been. However, why is it that the right can use what little sovereignty and enfranchisement is available to us to enact sweeping, if devastating changes, and yet, when the opportunity presents itself to the left, all we hear is that such things are no better than pissing in the wind? The answer to this question, of course, is that the ruling class is perfectly content with a party that hinders rather than ushers in change. Zohran may be using the sclerotic party system we've been doomed to inhabit, but despite these limitations his candidacy has surged immensely in the last few months, and the momentum of the people is on his side. This may be one of the last chances wherein one can attempt a truly progressive campaign like this.

Now that things are heating up, the ruling class, the backers of Andrew Cuomo, an abuser of women and a man responsible for the untold deaths of the elderly because he valued profits over their lives so early on in the pandemic, will stop at nothing to make sure that Zohran Mamdani does not win, that things stay the same. That the rent goes up, that the grocery prices continue to explode, that New York City becomes the playground of the rich and famous at the expense of everyone else. The party will try to intervene in undemocratic ways just like they did with Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primary. There will be untold lies and accusations, the press will abandon what few journalistic obligations they still abide by, and it will get ugly. There are even rumors that Cuomo will run as an independent even if he loses the primary, which, to be honest, isn't a bad tactic -- he's just the worst guy to be using it.

I realize this post may be annoying to some (hell, I myself live in Chicago), and I'm sure there's some rightful criticism for my not having used my blog like this before. (However, for those of you who don't know, I usually write about all manner of politics in my column at The Nation!) That being said, if you follow me and you live in New York City, rank Zohran #1 and Brad Lander #2. DO NOT RANK SUBURBANITE BIKE LANE-PARKER ANDREW CUOMO.

Anyway, that's all. I'll be back with a new McMansion Hell this Friday, so stay tuned.

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Bonus Post: The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo, a treatise

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Recently, Roblox players have been conducting virtual I.C.E. immigration raids. Roblox players dressed as I.C.E. agents have barged into other player’s houses. They have "arrested" a user hiding in his kitchen and chased down another player while conducting “border patrol” surveillance. Roblox I.C.E. agents hunted down a young player in his bedroom before banging his door down. Tensions reached a boiling point and last week, as thousands took to the streets to protest I.C.E. in the offline world, Roblox players protested within the game, battling cops, breaking down barricades, waving Mexican flags, and facing off across a line of players dressed in police SWAT gear. Despite being primarily a children’s game, Roblox has evolved into a sort of emergent civic theatre for kids online. The game is now where thousands of children go to process major world news events through highly intricate role play. These simulations are how many young people experience news events, representing a shift towards more participatory forms of media. Simon Gutierrez, a 17 year old high school student, who organized yesterday's Roblox protest against I.C.E. said that he wanted to attend the IRL No Kings protests this past weekend, but his older sister said no. So, he staged a protest on Roblox to allow other young people to make their voices heard. “A lot of young people really want to protest and put their words and beliefs out there but are unable to, so this is the only thing we can turn to,” Gutierrez said.

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related, literally: the Josh Henry Living Structure Carole and Ken Isaacs built for their son, from How To Build Your Own Living Structures [via daddytypes]

Also Public Collectors still has a complete scan [pdf]

Susan Snodgrass, Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs, Half Letter Press, Chicago, IL, 2019 [Art: © Estate of Ken Isaacs]

From the back cover: «Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs surveys the highly individual practice of American architect and designer Ken Isaacs (1927-2016), whose populist, DIY designs created from the 1950s to the 1970s challenged conventional architectural concepts in housing, as well as mainstream definitions of modernism. His flexible, accessible plans provided alternative solutions to the spatial and environmental challenges of midcentury modern life, while influencing subsequent generations of architects and designers interested in nomadic architecture, sustainability, and DIY practices.»

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Susan Snodgrass, Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs, Half Letter Press, Chicago, IL, 2019 [Art: © Estate of Ken Isaacs]

From the back cover: «Inside the Matrix: The Radical Designs of Ken Isaacs surveys the highly individual practice of American architect and designer Ken Isaacs (1927-2016), whose populist, DIY designs created from the 1950s to the 1970s challenged conventional architectural concepts in housing, as well as mainstream definitions of modernism. His flexible, accessible plans provided alternative solutions to the spatial and environmental challenges of midcentury modern life, while influencing subsequent generations of architects and designers interested in nomadic architecture, sustainability, and DIY practices.»

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Looking back, 2005, in the middle of the Global War on Terror TMTM may have been a bit #toosoon for Tania Bruguera's Terror Chic editions to take hold.

We are more than overdue now, though, and there are still metal stencils available from the ed. 200 "to be used to print slogan on T-shirt, bag, wall, car, or any other object."

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[Tweet from @/fozmeadows: "human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there's actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that's okay"]

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a lot of people could stand to start viewing the nakba and the holocaust as a continuum rather than as competitive binaries

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Wedding, 2015, he's even on tumblr, @markentwisle

Dressed (artist unknown)

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“Candle TV” (1990) by Nam June Paik ☀ Old TV, new fireplace—same hypnotic effect.

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The Beyeler Foundation in Basel is a fundraising edition powerhouse. Just in time for Art Basel they've announced two Wade Guyton editions, full-scale inkjet prints of paintings which are on view in the gallery atm. The paintings, ofc, are also inkjet prints.

images: installation views of wade guyton paintings [top] and prints [above] at the fondation beyeler in basel.

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My image is Ben Shahn's “Contemporary American Sculpture," from 1940 and now hanging in his landmark retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York. It shows a gallery full of sculptures from that January's survey of American art at the Whitney—a survey Shahn was left out of. In a kind of revenge or correction, he imagines the walls of the gallery full of his own paintings.

When I reviewed the show for the New York Times last week, I talked about this painting as the key to Shahn's entire project. Shahn's imagined paintings, I said, give us "scenes of everyday life during the Great Depression — decrepit workers’ housing; a farmer by his shack; poor Black women at a welfare hospital — depicted as though the Whitney’s walls have been pierced to reveal the all-too-real world out beyond. It recalls how Renaissance murals pierced church walls to let in the more-real world of the Bible."

But there's one important detail in Shahn's “Contemporary American Sculpture" that I didn't have room to discuss—how he makes the cinder-block wall behind the two Black women continue "out" of the space of that scene and into the "real" world of the Whitney gallery, where it entirely blocks one entrance to the room.

His “Contemporary American Sculpture" represents a kind of ideal scenario where his visions of a troubled nation quite replace the more comfortable reality that most museumgoers experience. His paintings aren't merely framed art objects (note the absence of frames in his Whitney image); they are true portholes into other worlds, on the model of the "quadratura" paintings of Renaissance and Baroque churches, where the real ceiling is utterly dissolved and replaced by a painted view into the roiling heavens.

In reality, Shahn's paintings might have circulated in any number of sizes, to be hung in any number of places where they'd have no illusionistic effects. But “Contemporary American Sculpture" tells us how to think about what they want to achieve, and the scale of their ambitions. (Image copyright estate of Ben Shahn/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; via Art Institute of Chicago)

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Via the Getty Images Archive: “85 years ago today, the residents of Paris were waking up to the sound of a loudspeaker announcement, informing them not to leave their homes—the Nazi occupation of the capital had begun.⁠”

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Margaret Bourke-White (June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971), two photos labeled Greenville, South Carolina, 1956.

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Catherine Opie, Mariela's Tacos/Uprising, 1992

Most recent Apple Maps view of Mariela' Tacos, in the same location 33 years after Opie's photo was taken.

Opie's show at Regen Projects last year (review / artist's walk through) featured several photographs made during the 1992 uprising, when the National Guard was called out to quell actual violence. 63 people were killed and thousands injured. It would be nearly impossible to find anyone here who experienced the summer of 2020, let alone 1992, who believe the National Guard or Marines were needed in Los Angeles this week.