Basquiat

On a grey saturday afternoon, on my way to a friend's dinner party, I saw the retrospective on Basquiat at the Brooklyn Museum. An apt quote on the artist, who's been compared to Icarus in his meteoric rise and fall:

"I believe that, as an expression of a time that is tragic like no other in the history of the world, he consciously aimed his flight in the opposite direction, toward the infernos that are unexplored even by the outcasts of humanity who live out their brief earthly existence in the sinister roar of the subway, no longer on the road, but underground, irresistibly attracted by the disturbing profundity of the abyss."

-Robert Damiani, (Deputy Mayor and Councilor for Cultural Affairs, New York

uprising day

I keep running into Tibetan people this week. First at a sandwhich shop - where the manager egged me on to get the veggie pattie sandwhich, between animated, chit-chat in Tibetan with his workers. Apparently there's a sizeable exiled community in Queens.

The other day I was on the way back to work from grabbing lunch. Stopping at the light on 42nd street and Madison, I saw in front of me a stream of people, extending down the street as far as I can see, chanting as they crossed.

They were Tibetans, on their way to the U.N. There was a determined, steadfast anger to their energy, I asked one lady what the significance of the day was and she said they were marching to commemorate the March 10 uprising of 1959 against the invasion by the Chinese.

I thought about how much the Tibetan situation has largely fallen from public view and media coverage. The human rights situation has gotten worse, bringing to question the theory that trade and economic liberalization will bring political liberalization in China and greater respect for human rights. Another thing that struck me was that the Tibetans were marching alone - I didn't see any other colors in the sea of asian faces.

This is from the site: http://www.freetibet.org/

"On 10 March 1959 Tibetan people in Lhasa rose up against China's occupation of Tibet and as a result tens of thousands of innocent Tibetan men, women and children were killed by the occupying Chinese forces. Since then Tibetans have waged a non-violent campaign for freedom from occupation. Don't let the world forget the 46th anniversary of the Tibetan National Uprising."

Interconnection

Call it what you want, the mind of God, or in the Buddhist tradition, a shared field of consciousness between all living beings. Time flows forward as well as backwards.

Read this amazing article (it gave me goosebumps):

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649#121

Renditions

One of the worst episodes of genocide in modern history happened under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975-1979). Tens of thousands of innocent people were "processed" (ie: tortured in indescribable ways, forced to write "confessions", then executed) in a secret facility dubbed S-21.

In essence, the logic was simply that if they caught simply a handful of spies amongst the masses, it was enough to justify the deaths of thousands of innocents in order to preserve the security of the Angkor (central organization), led by Pol Pot. All of this happened largely out of the eyes of the world, behind the curtains in one of the most brutal totalitarian regimes modern society has known.

A similiar sort of absolute "means justify the ends" logic is currently at work in Bush's "War on Terror". Read this article from the New Yorker, the magazine that recently broke the news on Abu Ghraib, as well as "a priori" pre-emptive planning for Iraq.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6

Ground Zero

Started my first assignment today. The client was downtown in World Financial Center 2. This was also the coldest day this winter so far (12 degrees). I tried to sleep standing up on the E train from Queens after a fitful night of non-rest.

At the Chamber's street station, people streaming out of the subway stations converged with the PATH/NJ Transit commuters from across the river. At 8:50am, there was an intensity to this place that rivaled financial districts elsewhere.

There's one line I'll always remember from Henry David Thoreau's Walden: "The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation". This desperation was papable in the air - there was no joy in this teaming mass grinding their way to another week of cold and stress. And I found myself amongst them.

And yet in the center of these masses like ants circumambulating, there was this gaping, unnatural, negative space. As I rose out of the stairs, out of the subway at the Chambers street station, I was unprepared for the sheer scale of ground zero.

Out of our client's office, the large windows opened into a panoramic view of the WTC complex - and for the first time, I had a primal, ineffable experience of the message Al Quaeda has chosen to bestow upon this epicenter of world financial power. Throughout the day, when we would query our client about this source code or that legacy system, we'd invariably hear things along the lines of, "we lost that during 911. They told us it was backed up but it wasn't".

After work, on the way back to the subway, an african man with an african accent asked me, as he literally stood before ground zero, where the twin towers were. I pointed behind him and said, "There. Its all gone now". For a brief moment, the agony that was very local to the people of this city transcended cultures and oceans and this man wore a hollow, almost inconsolable look before moving on to pace the perimeter.