Returning from New York City to Helsinki feels like lobotomy.
20181227
The Bronx Slave Market (1935) Ella Baker.
Paradoxically, the crash of 1929 brought to the domestic labor market a new employer class. The lower-middle-class housewife, who, having dreamed of the luxury of a maid, found opportunity staring her in the face in the form of Negro women pressed to the wall by poverty, starvation, and discrimination.
No Scrubs (2018) Meagan Day interviews Kristen R. Ghodsee concerning the sexual freedoms socialism facilitated.
KRG: What we see is that when women have economic independence from men — in the sense that they can support children out of wedlock, they have jobs, they have pensions, they have access to housing and their basic needs like utilities and food are subsidized — they don’t stick around in relationships that are unsatisfying. When they can leave, they don’t stay with men who don’t treat them well.
20181222
A man does something to himself, it causes great discomfort but he survives it. He is an artist. #ॐ
20181217
Indian restaurants in New York City make me feel like home. The interiors are decorated with art from the same sweatshops. Handmade wall ornaments painted in earthly hues, paintings of nature made in haste. Illustrations showing mythological figures, sports heroes and a distant relative. Some blinking lights, paper flowers and cityscape prints glued on walls, with peels revealing the sockets. Seeing the Brooklyn Bridge on the print makes more sense here then in Helsinki but it feels dislocated even so. The music is the same too. If I didn’t know better I would think these restaurants are designed by the same corporate stylist. This is not a complaint but a celebration. The food is good.
20181213
Can the Yellow Vests Speak? (2017) Édouard Louis. An analysis of the protests rhetorics.
For the dominant, the popular classes are the perfect representation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a class-object; an object that can be manipulated by discourse, one day represented as the salt of the earth — the authentic poor — and the next day as racists and homophobes. In both cases, the underlying intention is the same: to prevent the popular classes’ speech, about themselves, from ever coming to the surface.
[…] the gilets jaunes movement is still a work in progress, and its language is not yet fixed in place: if there does exist homophobia or racism among the gilets jaunes, our responsibility is to transform this language.
[…] the gilets jaunes represent a sort of Rorschach test for a large part of the bourgeoisie. The gilets jaunes force them to express their class contempt and the violence that they usually only express in an indirect way.