My Old Neighborhood

 I almost hate to contribute to the ICE discourse, because it doesn’t seem like there needs to be discourse. ICE is blatantly evil. That should be enough. 

First, there’s the gravity of the moment. I’d like to write cool, dreamy analysis about art and landscape. That makes me happier than writing twitchy current-events prose. But fuck, the moment is pulling me in. Load a John Dos Passos newsreel, let’s go baybee.

Renee Good was murdered on the south side of Minneapolis, on the corner of 34th and Portland, just a few blocks over from 38th and Chicago, where George Floyd was murdered. Contrary to what you may see on the right-wing news, this part of Minneapolis isn’t a violent inner-city slum in which the only law is the law of the jungle while liberal politicians helplessly flail, and contrary to what you may see on lefty social media, it isn’t a quilombo of BIPOC resistance either. It’s a neighborhood like many others, remarkably diverse, with significant white, black, and Latino populations, largely working class, but with a fair number of comfortably middle-class homeowners as well. Sure, it’s a little worse for wear, but the area has a fine and well-preserved stock of Victorian and Edwardian homes, lovely little parks and lakes, and an abundance of independent merchants serving the local community, hippie cafes and hopelessly unprofitable record shops next to Ecuadorian butchers and Ethiopian salons.

And, once upon a time, it was the neighborhood I called home.

 

So fuck it, I don’t want to spend too much time in this shitty, shitty moment. Let’s get cool and dreamy about art and landscape. The landscape that has, much to my shock, set much of the political tenor of the past decade.

It was one of those living arrangements that one can only have when young and free. My roommate was several years older, a graduate from the same college spinning his wheels between political campaign work, hosting tables at the Bennigan’s out by the airport, and supposedly writing a book about Deep Space Nine. We had three cats. Our neighbors an agoraphobic lesbian across the hall, and a rotund middle-aged woman who drove an Escalade with a leopard-print steering wheel cover below. Wealthier neighborhoods were just on the other side of Blaisdell Avenue. On one side of the street was a minimalist Stella Artois billboard. On the other side was a Modelo billboard in Spanish with fake-titty Mexican telenovela blondes in crop tops. The local branch of the sureños kept tagging the building, only to be painted over by the landlord. Their little arms race. I looked up our local gang. They had a Myspace.

I barely worked, because I really didn’t need to pay for much more than my rent, and had a bit of cash saved up that I could burn through. What little I owned could fit in a ’95 Camry. I scrounged a mattress from an alley – don’t judge me – and who needs a bedframe when you’re 20? We didn’t have internet, although we could sometimes get onto our neighbors’ wi-fi networks. We skinny dipped in Lake Nokomis. We drank Pabst and Evan Williams bourbon and smoked rose-flavored hookah and listened to Justice and Glass Candy on our second-floor porch – a Minneapolis specialty, ideal for cool Northern summer evenings. We got yelled at by the tweakers in the building next door who threatened to call the cops on us, and we yelled back that they wouldn’t call the cops because they were tweaker trash. Apologies were made in the morning, and we’d put on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and spark a joint and sweep the floors and empty the ashtrays from the night before.

And then, my roommate left, packed up his things, leaving me with an apartment empty, save for a mattress, a sofa, and a floor lamp. With no work, nothing to do, I spent my days reading library books, as well as the countless used books I’d brought, stacked up on the floor, next to my mattress. The sunlight came in over the wooden floors in the afternoon as hookers smoked in the parking lot. I got an awful sunburn tubing on the Apple River, and I ripped a postcard-sized bit of dead skin from my back, and I couldn’t believe how beautifully it caught the light. I would walk everywhere. Maybe down Minnehaha, past the old grain elevators painted with the verdant fields of the hinterlands, a little bit WPA, a little bit Stalin. Or maybe just over to the bodega above the basement mosque. Maybe I’d buy something, maybe not. I lost a good 30 pounds that summer, and when I returned to college for my senior year, I was, for the first time, considered “hot” by some.

And other than a few visits, that was it for me and Minneapolis.

And yet Minneapolis followed me.

The din of Cedar Avenue after late-night punk rock shows and quiz nights with cheap pints of Summit Extra Pale ended in the Somalian delis, eating spicy as hell falafels, long before anyone started talking about daycare fraud.

Stopping for gas in Brooklyn Park, before that suburb’s representative, Melissa Hortman, at that time minority leader in the Minnesota Statehouse, and later speaker, a competent, well-meaning technocrat if ever there was one with a strong sense of a social mission in her good Catholic heart, was murdered by a Christian nationalist with Mittyish operator fantasies as delineated in his wildly exaggerated CV, an estranged family, and a laundry list of grievances against imagined enemies.

And that bodega with the basement masjid I mentioned earlier? A feckless George Floyd tried to pass counterfeit bills there only to be shot down by Derek Chauvin. The city burned, on the precise streets where I’d once read Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s “Empire.” And in the aftermath, any serious calls for racial justice quickly devolved into hollow rhetoric, faux-radical stances being adopted by the professional classes with a complete lack of skin in the game, consultants being called in to convince consumers that Unilever actually cared about anyone, mewling performing arts collectives trying to “decolonize” their abstruse set pieces, Black Lives Matter transformed into a floating signifier, actual black Americans as poor and fucked over as ever, police budgets still proudly high, complete with a new stock of Halo Warthogs to prepare for the Fallujahfication of American cities.

Until that fateful day last week where a mother of three got merc’d by a fat fuck in tactical gear as she tried to make a three-point turn in the middle of Portland Avenue while ICE goons went about their usual business of harassing random people of color.

 

But even when I lived there, there were signs. That August, the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River at the peak of rush hour, the first sign that America’s proud mid-century Keynesian infrastructure was reaching the end of its natural life, with no one willing to foot the bill to replace it.

And the past nearly two decades play back, quickly, in reverse, until I’m in the Minneapolis summer, riding my bike through the summer night to the house party in Como, and the horizon still seems endless, the midsummer sun dipping behind the lake.

The World You Were Born In...

You know the phrases. “Hold my beer.” “The perfect ___ does not exi…” You get the idea. The tired cliches plunged from the depths of the discourse, irredeemable mass-market quips. Some of them, to be fair, were once clever, before multiplying like anaerobic bacteria in the hogshit lagoons of 4chan, Reddit, etc., repeated by 14 year olds and bots until their mere invocation becomes repulsive. You can call them memes, but you could argue that all idioms, sayings, and turns of phrase were really just memes before we called them memes. However, these phrases are used more like memes – impervious to creativity and lacking defined by their repetition, they are a pure statement of one’s own social and discursive standing. Sometimes deployed sincerely, sometimes ironically, almost always repulsively.

But sometimes one actually makes an impact -- not much of one, perhaps, but enough to spark inquiry rather than a dismissive snarl. 

1970s grain, VHS font, doomed buildings. If it was in a gallery, it would get far higher praise.

A memory of years ago, right before I first stepped off American soil for a long period, for my first travel adventure in Asia. I sent out a Facebook message on blast to maybe 20 or so people one day, saying I’d be camped out at the Redwood on Howell and Belmont (RIP) that evening. And I drank dirt-cheap pints of PBR and read library books in the interim – I finished Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and started Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield if I remember correctly – and friends came by in ones and twos and threes, most of them not saying when or if they were swinging by, just coming and going, on their way to or from other loose hangout sessions, gigs, theatrical rehearsals, shifts at the bar or the café, while All the President’s Men played silently on the projector and someone put Guided by Voices on the jukebox.

It's hard to even imagine a world like that now.

But look a little bit further, and a certain hollowness emerges. The memelords, while they get the feels right, seem to lack that sort of long, telescopic view of their own past. They’re pretty young, and despite the aesthetic cribbing from other eras, they’re not talking about the longue durée of history, but like 2017. When you have fewer rings on your trunk, you think about time in more compressed terms. Remember those “Only ‘90s kids will remember this!” posts from back in the day, posted shockingly quickly after the ‘90s had themselves ended? That being said, the past decade or so in particular has been a motherfucker. COVID, of course, being the big thing, but many, many more things have happened in the interim – and it’s only natural for younger and youngish people to contrast the chaotic present with the more sedate if bovine world they associate with the ’90s and even ‘00s. 

Therefore, it’s unfortunate but unsurprising that the term in question has its origins and has had its greatest currency in the world of online “traditionalists,” a cadre that seems to mostly consist of alienated boys and men, mostly young, but with quite a few divorce dads and the like in there, who in their worse moments fancy themselves as Saxon warriors or Goldwater Republican picket-fence patriarchs deprived of their destiny. Men who believe that in a better world they would be slaying Saracens right now, or puffing their pipe in the study while wifey massages their shoulders and pours them another dry martini (although something tells me many of their taste buds are nowhere near mature enough to enjoy an actual dry martini). Plenty of ink has been dedicated to this kind of modern creature, but it’s hard to see how this could be anything other than the logical end result of a mirror maze of signifiers without signified, and every single moment of one’s life becoming a consumer choice, with minimal regard to what it is to be human. Their solutions are idiotic and often psychotic, but their instincts are not too far off. 

I would like to dance through the chaos, to take this Spinozist joy in the present, even amid the ugly world, but it’s tough to find the energy. Beer and peanuts and Paul Auster at a long-gone Seattle tavern. Did any of us know what was coming?

The Summer Vibes Never Die

 On Sunday, 15 June 2025, I do what we all do. I wake up and check in on the world.

Then I see this beauty, shot at a Beirut rooftop club:

 

“Missiles in the sky, but the summer vibes never die.” Sun emoji.

Click the link for the funky beats and Baker Street-level sax solo: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK5Z41RMRkz/ 

Netanyahu, of course, is hiding out in Greece right now. The Israeli Air Force One is apparently called “Wing of Zion.” Maybe he wanted summer vibes too.

The water is for the coffee is taking too long to boil. 

Meanwhile, back in my country, one Minnesota Democratic lawmaker has been killed, another injured. The presumed killer was the head of a security company called “Praetorian Guard,” but was apparently debased to living with a roommate, an old buddy. His CV said he’d worked for “the world’s largest convenience store chain” as a flex, meaning he had managed a 7-Eleven. Said roommate seemed to be a Papa John’s employee, and now the image everyone is going to remember of that poor bastard is him crying and reading text messages to the news cameras as he sweats through the Papa John’s polo stretched over his gut.

The suspect was experiencing “mental health challenges” per the local sheriff’s office. “Challenges.” 

I got baked last night and made post-midnight eggs au gratin with hella hot sauce. Probably a bad idea.

There’s probably still shit going on in Los Angeles, but Trump had a birthday rally in DC so all eyes were there, with troops failing to march in time to generic rawk and roll music that sounds suspiciously AI-generated. Sponsored by Coinbase, Palantir, UFC (natch), and Scott’s Miracle Gro. 

Miracle Gro.

Who’s been sending me messages? Seoul, Paris, Kyoto, and New York all send their regards, or at least their memes. I send back a picture of the pool outside (there are summer vibes, we must remember, even if it’s the bleak and rainy monsoon season here) and I have to ask myself whether to use the sunglasses emoji, or to playfully allude to the fact that I want to use the sunglasses emoji. 

The signs at the other rallies read “No Kings!” and I genuinely can’t figure out what this means. General dissensus, I suppose. I don’t see much in the way of concrete policy goals, mostly just one big frowny-face emoji.

Meanwhile, marines are detaining US citizens in Los Angeles after storming elementary schools, cops firing, point blank and with intent, at an Australian journalist reporting on the scene, Latino cops roughing up Latino protesters, LAPD and LASD shooting rubber bullets at each other, and Brian Wilson is dead.

 

But I repeat, “summer vibes never die.” Brian Wilson, at least you were given the dignity of being called profoundly mentally ill, not challenged. 

I really shouldn’t have had those late-night eggs.

The coffee is almost ready, though. 

What they tell you, five things you can see, four things you can feel, three things you can hear, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste. Zero things you can vibe on, summer or otherwise.

I don’t know that that necessarily works. 

But I hadn’t even noticed my foot was bleeding.

Aufhebung at Nottoway

When the Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, Louisiana, the American South’s largest remaining plantation home, burned last week, what was interesting was the degree to which the response was gleeful. Obviously, the media is going to focus on this response, but this was borne out by a quick foray into the social media space – something that would have been difficult to imagine 20 or perhaps even 10 years ago. And the reply from the reactionary right has been tepid, at least publicly, although I imagine what’s being said in upper middle class parlors throughout the South is somewhat less so. And this is something worth inquiring into.

 

I mean the reason people are celebrating is obvious. It’s a goddamn plantation. It’s a place built using the forced labor of slaves, and unlike, say, Monticello or Mount Vernon, the owners of Nottoway deliberately avoided using the buzzkill language of slavery – “antebellum home,” not plantation. The history section of their website says a lot about their lovingly named oak trees, and nothing about the people who were tortured and worked to death there. The picture of the couple celebrating their wedding on the property is decidedly racially ambiguous. It was, according to the owners, restored to its “days of glory.”

So before you read any further and willfully jump to any conclusions about my affiliations, I do want to underline the fact that antebellum nostalgists can fucking suck it.

But while I can empathize, I can’t celebrate. Because the fact remains that this is a historically important property, one of the sort that I think worth preserving because of course it is, especially if one wants to understand the role that industrialized slavery had in my nation’s history. The Grecian columns reflect a particularly pernicious belief among the ruling classes of their own natural aristocracy, a view of themselves as modern-day Solons. Architecture is perhaps the most potent of object lessons.

And it is/was just very pretty. In the same way a delicate moonflower blossom dripping with neurotoxins is.

So, as usual, the liberal consensus gets in my craw. I have to wonder how many of the choir of voices knew anything about the Nottoway Plantation beforehand (I certainly didn’t), and how many just checked their social media feeds for right-think, and responded accordingly. How much critical thinking about the whitewashing of history is going on here? And how much is just the kind of binary thinking that, at the end of the day, is little more than John Calvin hitting the pulpit and contrasting the total depravity of the world with the perseverance of the saints?

Because if we’re being honest with ourselves – what isn’t a product of horror? What cultural capital isn’t contingent upon suffering? Who do you think built those elegant Georgian townhomes that line the streets of London, and how many of those lords’ names are also found in remarkable number among black people in the West Indies? And who do you think owns those Georgian townhomes today, and how much unspeakable suffering do they continue to perpetrate throughout the tropical resource belt in the name of capital accumulation?

Who do you think built Rockefeller Center, and what do you think Standard Oil was up to? Is that what we think of when we see Jimmy Fallon yuk it up with background banter from The Roots?

But I don’t wish to moralize. Instead, I turn to the Marxian concept of aufhebung – a difficult term to pin down, but, more or less, holding the past condition of man and the ugly truth of material conditions, placing them in contrast, and arriving at a more humane synthesis.

History proceeds not through winners and losers, but through a more complex process. And so perhaps it’s best to admire the graceful line of an ancient oak, at the same time as one sees it nourished by human blood and sugarcane stubble. And after observing this contrast, it is perhaps helpful to admit that there perhaps really is a specter haunting the world.

Or maybe I’m just good at pissing all sides off. Worth a game attempt at honesty all the same.