The Infrastructure of Repression: Repression of Infrastructure

In my last post, I mentioned the planned May Day marches in Istanbul and the order given by the governor of Istanbul and surroundings at the behest of the country’s ruling pro-Islamic AK party to ban both the marches and the traditional May Day rally of labor unions and leftist parties at Istanbul’s Taksim Square, the city’s traditional rallying point and largest open space and an iconic symbol of the Turkish republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk some 85 years ago.

The governor’s stated ratonale for the ban was the supposed threat of infiltration of the march by members of the PKK, the outlawed Kurdish national organization branded as terrorist by Turkey and other countries. The real issue, however, was the growing tension between Turkey’s secular and Islamic parties, most recently brought to a head by the government’s order to allow the wearing of women’s head-scarves symbolic of Islamic orthodoxy at the country’s universities and by the countermove by secularists to obtain a court order to disband the AK party and bar its leaders from politics on the grounds that they are committed to undermining the secularism that is the foundation of the Turkish constitution and state. To add fuel to the fire, the country’s prime minister, AK party leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, condescendingly quipped last week that May Day should not be declared an official holiday because Turkish workers get enough time off as is. In fact, Turkish workers work far more hours each year for far less pay than their western counterparts.

The Infrastructure of Repression

To enforce the ban and prevent mass protests, the Turkish government bussed an army of police to Istanbul from throughout the country, stationing dozens of riot geared policemen at every street and alleyway leading to Taksim and to Istiqlal Caddesi, the main pedestrian artery that feeds into the square. Policemen carried truncheons, shields, automatic weapons, gas masks, and tear gas cannisters. Larger arteries were blocked by tank-mounted water cannons manned by police. In many neighborhoods, scores of policemen lounged on curbs and against walls, some dozing, seemingly tired from all-night bus rides into Istanbul from provincial towns. To nip the marches in the bud and to squelch anti-government protests, the police launched an early morning attack on union headquarters buildings in the neighborhood of Sisli, only a few kilometers from Taksim, assaulting union members with water-cannons and tear-gas barrages and beating with truncheons those who tried to flee. At least one union member was killed in the process. In their zeal, the police also gassed neighboring hospitals, forcing bewidered patients and staff to flee. Fortunately, there was no gunfire.

The Repression of Infrastructure

The transportation infrastructure that moves people and goods in and out and through Istanbul is as monumental as the great mosques that dot the hilled skyline of this 1,600-year-old city. Somewhere between 15 and 20 million people live and work in Istanbul and its suburbs and their daily movements to and from offices, factories, workshops, stores, and markets, both traditional and modern, is the medium that keeps the city alive. In Istanbul, the sound of movement is continuous and throbbing. Modern high-speed metros and trams, far less modern busses and jitneys, endless car and truck traffic, and the human muscle-power of load-bearing porters keep Istanbul moving.

Most characteristic of Istanbul’s transportation infrastructure are its ferries. Istanbul owes its might, prosperity, and attractiveness to its setting at the point where Europe meets Asia and where the waters of the Black Sea mingle with those of the Aegean and the Mediterranean. From the heights of the hills that constitute Istanbul, one looks down on vistas of water — the Bosporus, the Golden Horn, and the Marmara. From early morning until midnight, these waterways are crisscrossed by smoke-spouting white ferries leaving white foam in their wakes, and crossing each others’ bows with breathtaking confidence.

On the morning of May 1, Istanbul was strangely quiet. In neighborhoods near Taksim and Istiqlal, the streets were empty of pedestrians and moving autos both. On larger roadways, small clusters of passengers waited for trams and busses that never arrived. A glance seaward showed the Marmara and the Bosporus blue and silvery in the sunlight and uncharacteristically peaceful. A second glance revealed that something was amiss — not a single ferry nor moving ship was to be seen. Without warning, the core of Istanbul ’s entire transportation infrastructure had come to a halt and all sea traffic had ended. The only sound to be heard was an occasional unfamiliar mechanical drone overhead, the sound of police helicopters circling in search of crowds and marchers.

The quickness and effectiveness of this shutdown of the infrastructure of urban movement of one of the world’s largest cities was alarmingly effective. By knowing exactly where the pressure points of urban movement are and how to pinch them, the government and police succeeded in isolating neighborhoods  from neighborhoods, halting the movement of people, and putting a pulsing, hyper-alive city into a state of near sleep.  Even the communications infrastructure of the present age — internet and mobile voice and sms — could not compensate for the atmosphere of isolation and the breakdown of information flows and of the ability to exercise the basic rights of citizenship that ensued when the infrastructure and freedom of physical movement, the most elementary components of cities and civilizations, were frozen.

For more on recent events in Istanbul see the website of the Turkish Daily News as well these specific articles chronicling outrage and media reactions in the wake of the events of May 1.

Rust Belt Memories, Roots of Bitterness: Life Amidst the Industrial Infrastructure of a Past Age

If I remember correctly, it was Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that “… all of philosophy is but a comment on Plato.” Possibly all of the present US presidential primarily election season is but a comment on the 1960s. As a follow-up to Jim Kunstler’s excellent Slip of the Tongue on the mealy-mouthed controversy following Barack Obama’s comments on the (rightfully  observed) bitterness of small town Pennsylvanians, go to Tom Brown’s recollection (Small Town Slander) of his southern New Jersey hometown becoming of the center of a similar storm following an iconic television news expose nearly a half-century ago. Tom Brown, by the way, is a convinced Quaker who had the courage to stand up as a Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War. If the US memorialized its COs as much as its GIs, Americans might think twice before marching off to the likes of Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney/McCain/Hillary’s “cakewalk” victory in Iraq.

Infrastructural Links: Linux Journal, R.Crumb, NPR, Insightful Weblogs, and Good Old-Fashioned NYC Rage

Thanks again to Doc Searls for his kind mention of me in his recent piece on infrastructure in Linux Journal. Doc and I are now working together on a number of think-tank and private sector consultancy related projects concerning the concept and history of infrastructure and the place, future, and issues surrounding internet and telecommunications as the infrastructural core of social, intellectual. and economic exchange.

Worldwide View, Regional Imperial Webs

As our think-tank debates take shape, one of my tasks is to lend an historical perspective and an international view. As important as the controversies surrourding the arbitrary limiting of web content by California’s cable internet provider Comcast and the Republican-colored, privilege-oriented policies of the FCC (the US Federal Communications Commission) may seem to US-based internet observers, scores of other issues preoccupy the rest of the world. The stakes of interference with internet content and access are far more severe in countries on the edge of political and civil crisis ala Turkey (see this previous posting), Afghanistan, and Pakistan while plain old access to communications and information at whatever speed remains the main issue throughout the third world. In Eastern Europe, the wild-westm laissez-faire post-communist social and regulatory environment in many countries prior to EU-accession made it easy for individuals and small companies to string cable over trees and lampposts directly from high-speed access points to one’s office or living room, thus skirting around bandwidth limitations ala Comcast. In Russia and China, moves to register domain names using local scripts are on their way to fragmenting the worldwide web into three or more mutually exclusive linguistic-and political-empire webs. In the EU, a rational regulatory environment and a century-long social democratic-rooted public willingness to pay for the infrastructure that benefits society at large keeps seems to keep US-style crises at bay. (Note: Over the last decade, Europe has quietly sailed past America in almost all things telecom- and web-access- related — not least, witness the low key impact the seemingly innovative iPhone has made outside in the EU market).

R. Crumb, NPR, and Weblog Links

During a long Istanbul-Boston Skype kick-off meeting with Doc yesterday, I mentioned a link that has graced my alter-ego weblog site Bubkes.Org since its inception. The link is to legendary cartoonist R. Crumb’s 12-panel cartoon A Short History of America. Crumb’s twelve drawings document and clarify the concept, development ( or, better said, random accretion), and outcome of what passes for infrastructure in the USA.*

Great minds think alike, it seems. I lifted the R. Crumb link from the insightful, rightfully enraged, and excellently researched weblog Clusterfucknation. At Clusterfucknation, Jim Kunstler has been writing for years on America’s automobile-highway-suburb dependency, the politics and consequences of an oil-and-gas-based world, and a host of other transportation and infrastructural issues. Kunstler’s political insights and passions are also spot-on and searing (e.g. see Kunstler’s recent take on the democratic primary campaign Slip of the Tongue).

NPR’s ( the US’s independent non-commercial, listener- and grant-supported public radio system’s) On the Media program over the last months has featured a number of guests at the center of debates on web access and governance. These include Harvard’s and Oxford’s Jonathon Zittrain, Columbia’s Tim Wu, and San Francisco’s free-high-speed-access activist Brewster Kahle (click here for MP3s and/or transcripts of interviews all three and of other relevant actors as well). Despite the years I have been working in and around the worlds of telecommunications and the internet, I must confess that all these names are new ones to me. I am especially impressed by the introduction to Tim Wu’s and Jack Goldsmith’s book Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World (excerpt available via Amazon.Com) which begins with the conundrum of the French legal action against Yahoo some years for facilitating violations of French laws against rascism and antisemitism. I look forward to reading Wu and Goldsmith, and Zittrain, in full.

Former colleague, close friend, and frequent sounding-board Naomi Yoder-Harris recently pointed me to the weblog of NYC-based web and tech specialist Hank Williams (in no way to be confused with the eponymous legendary country singer). Naomi had seen Williams interviewed by Brian Lehrer on the cable station of the City University of New York. Williams casts light on the negative commercial effects for freelancers and small entrepreneurs of too much venture capital and too many free services on the internet.**

New York, Rage, Social Democracy, and Infrastructure

Williams’s words give me an opportunity to link together Doc and my nascent conversations on infrastructure with the piece I recently wrote on Rev. Wright and the Hyperbole of Rage. As a born-and-raised New Yorker, I recognize in Williams’s piece on venture capital a distinctly New York state of mind. New Yorkers have their work-roots in small struggling niche companies and the lumpen-bourgeoisie, in versatile skilled and unskilled labor, and in the pre-financial and pre-information economy of craft, ingenuity, sweat, and heavy lifting. We know how easy it is to be drowned, crushed, or exploited by the big guys and know how to fight against this. We know the power of and need for collective action. We also have a demonstrated willingness to pay for the physical and social infrastructure that enables us to do what we do and to live as we want. Such willingness to spend is equally grounded in knowing that social and economic infrastructure is worth the investment and in a distinctly non-Calvinist flare for grand gestures and extravagance.*** (California “libertarians” take note: WE and PAYING are two of the operative words behind infrastructure).

In his Linux Journal piece, Doc reprinted a quote I had taken from the introduction to Joshua Freeman’s brilliant book Working Class New York. Freeman shows how the specialized and agglomeration-dependent nature of crafts, manufacturing, and transshipment in 19th- and early-to-mid-20th-century New York, together with the shared experience and collectivist nature of a the City’s largely-immigrant workforce, led to New York’s development of a voluntary- and governmental-sponsored infrastructure atypical of the rest of America and at the fore of the European social democratic mold. Up to the 1970s, New York boasted a unique infrastructure of low-cost public transportation, free water supply, free public hospitals, free public schools, free libraries, and free universities; public, confessional and union social welfare institutions; and public housing and union-sponsored cooperative housing found nowhere else in the US. The denouement of collective New York, due in part to the conjunction of the emergence of the so-called financial economy with the fiscal crises of the 1970s and the vengeance of Republicans in power in Washington at the time is also treated in Freeman’s book.

One of the drivers of New York’s collective ethos and energies and of New Yorkers willingness to press for, build, and pay for infrastructure is the very rage of the sort that animated Obama’s former pastor’s now-infamous “God Damn America” pun and the Yiddish folksong “Grine Kuzine.” The rage that bubbled over during events such as the now-forgotten kosher meat riots of 1902 and following the senseless deaths of scores of female garment workers at the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 accelerated the formation of labor unions and confession-based, charitable, and governmental institutions and infrastructure that made New York an egalitarian and socially mobile city with the collective intellect, excellence, and creativity that was to play an out-sized role in America and the world in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

More to follow…

Notes:

* For anyone who does not know who R. Crumb was (is), I offer to this quote from Crumb’s magnificent 1960s cartoon hero, the white-robed, white-bearded guru Mr. Natural. When asked by a conservatively dressed elderly woman the meaning of the phrase “do-wha-diddee,” Mr. Natural replied: “Lady, if you don’t know by now, don’t mess with it!”)

** For all of Williams insight I am puzzled by his site’s name. Why do American tech types overuse and render banal the word “suck”? We New Yorkers traditionally used this word in an non-delicately outspoken sexual way and in the lyrical macho aggressiveness of “sounding” and “the dozens.” How dispiriting silly to hear the word applied to ennui, the internet, and gadgetry.

*** In the discussion following a recent meeting in New York in honor of the 10th anniversary of the conception of the business best-seller Cluetrain Manifesto (see the final paragraphs of this post) I suggested that people who are obsessed with free and unwilling to support public radio, small companies (see Williams’s arguments above), big infrastructure, etc., should attend more Roma (Gypsy) weddings and Turkish night clubs and join in showering musicians and dancers with cascades of banknotes — a non-transaction tribute to the excellence of the performers as well as a statement of ones own grandiosity. Grandiosity also played a role in the development of infrastructure throughout history. To restrict the subject to New York alone, the building projects of Tammany Hall put accented regal monumentality over utility. Self-congratulatory futuristic monumentality was inherent in the works of Robert Moses, the public works czar who shaped the parks, neighborhoods, bridges, highways, and suburban sprawl of 20th century New York.

Rev. Wright and a Yiddish Song: The Hyperbole of Rage, The Banality of Apologies, the Absurdity of Race

Sometimes, when I am alone, I sing. I croon in the style of Billy Eckstine and imitate bass lines from the Orioles and the Cadillacs. I also sing inter-war cabaret songs in Dutch and German and old Yiddish theater tunes in the original: Aaron Lebedev’s Romania, Romania, Molly Picon’s Abi Gezund, and the bitter ballad of early-20th-century New York immigrant life, Grine Kuzine.

In Grine Kuzine a narrator tells of a newly arrived “green” immigrant cousin, a bright-eyed happy girl with “… cheeks like pomegranates and feet that beg to dance.” In America the cousin will surely find work and a new life and, so, the first chorus of Grine Kuzine ends with the words: “Long live the land of Columbus!” But as the song continue its narrator describes how, as the years pass and as the cousin moves from one slavish dead-end job to another in sweat-shops and neighborhood stores, her hopes fade and she turns gray-skinned, stooped, and dull-eyed. The song ends with the bitter curse: “May Columbus’s land go up in flames!”

America in flames? Sound familiar? The closing lines of Grine Kuzine are really no different from Barack Obama’s former pastor Jeremiah Wright’s “God Damn America” paraphrase of Irving Berlin’s maudlin patriotic tune God Bless America. As a singer of Grine Kuzine, and as a not-too-distant descendant of her fellow immigrant workers, I do not understand the recent hysteria over the U-Tube posting of an out-of-context video excerpt of one of Wright’s old sermons. Jews and Blacks and even the whitest-of-white Americans have the right — and maybe the obligation — to be enraged at polities and policies that misuse or deceive them or that fail to live up to their potential or rhetoric. The hyperbole of songs and of sermons generates reflection and vents steam and diffuses rage even as it broadcasts it.

The rebroadcasting of Wright’s controversial pun led to agitated calls from fellow-Democratics for Barack Obama to disown and condemn his former pastor. This is the second such demand. Some time before, Obama had been challenged to reject the support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan may be a compulsive bigot (forgive the value judgment, but I belong to an ethnos Farrakhan once called adherents of a “gutter religion”) but if candidates were to reject supporters and voters on the basis of their prejudices and ill-considered words there would be few voters and supporters left to go around. And, to quote Lyndon Johnson’s reputed response to a journalist who him asked why he did not fire FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, maybe it makes better sense and is better policy, to have Farrakhan “… inside the tent pissing out, rather than outside the tent pissing in.”

Far more interesting and insidious than the slips-of-the-lips of members of Obama’s confessional circles is Hillary Clinton’s decades-long involvement in an oligarchical right-wing prayer breakfast group called The Fellowship, Sound like the stuff of crank conspiracy theories? Writer Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer, a New York University weblog covering religion and the media, has just completed a book on the subject. Will apologies and statements of distancing and denunciation of The Fellowship be forthcoming from the Clinton campaign? I doubt it.

The positive side of the Wright affair is that it led Obama to give his speech on race — and rage — in America. Over the last year, I have been researching the origins and artificiality of national identities and the havoc caused by the emergence of modern nationalism and nation-states (more on this is future posts). Race is an equally suspect concept, a product of the intersection of European imperialism and early-modern science’s obsession with classification. And yet, in America, three centuries of slavery turned the concept of race into an enduring and divisive reality. For an incisive take on the legacy of slavery, poverty in America, and the present-day problems of America’s cities, listen to this recent broadcast of Bill Moyers’s Journal, a look back on the urban riots — or uprisings, as Moyers’s occasional guest, nonagenarian activist Grace Lee Boggs, points out — of the 1960s and the insightful but largely ignored findings of the congressional inquiry (the Kerner Commission) that investigated their causes and consequences.

Afterthought: The Murder of Dr. King and a Song by Nina Simone

It was 40 years ago this weekend that Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee. I was working and studying in Greensboro, North Carolina at the time. In the days following Dr. King’s assassination, Greensboro, like numerous other American cities, was placed under curfew and de facto marshal law. At night, along with other people, black and white, I made my way home from work and political rallies in stealth, dodging police patrols and helicopter overflights. These next days, as I think back on the shock and tension of the days after Dr. King’s death and on the civil rights struggle, the plight of US cities, and the tempests-in-a-teapot of the current presidential election, I’ll not only sing Grine Kuzine but I’ll add Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam to my repertoire as well.

42nd and 5th: Architectural Photography, Global Cities, and Working Class New York

Last week, in this weblog post, photographer Brian Rose described our recent chance late-winter-afternoon meeting on the corner of 42nd St and 5th Ave. and our follow-up conversations some days later. Brian Rose is a superlative large-format photographer (click here for an overview of his work) with a unique understanding not only of buildings but of the natures of the cities they comprise and of the people who create them, use them, and imbue them with meaning. Our meeting was laden with coincidence. We are both die-hard “analogue” photographers. Brian has lived most of his adult life on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side — the place where I grew up and that shaped me indelibly — and we both spent years working and living in Netherlands. By chance, I had seen an exhibition of Brian’s work more than two decades ago at the Henry Street Settlement House and had also chanced upon his masterful photographs of the Essex County Courthouse, embodiments of the ways I’d but imagined portraying the interiors of Islamic monuments during the several periods of my life in which I have been involved in documenting the Ottoman architectural patrimony of southeast Europe (see numerous entries on Bubkes.Org).

Brian’s stunning day-end photograph featured in his blog post also comprises a coincidence. In it, Brian attempts to visually anchor the glass and steel corner store of a the international clothing retailer H&M into an iconic “signature” New York location, the corner of 42nd and 5th. His photograph combines end-of-day light, the delicacy of large-format negative film, and an impeccable composition placing the store between trees adjacent to the Public Library in the foreground and the towering spire of the Chrysler Building in the background. The task Brian confronts in his photograph is one that I have been trying to deal with conceptually as I try to locate the continuity of what had once made New York unique in the increasingly bland and seemingly cloned international shopping-mall-, tourism-, and chain-store-like nature of much of (Manhattan’s) retail sector and entertainment and night life.

As a starting point in tracing this uniqueness, I’ll begin with this quote from the introduction to Joshua B. Freeman’s “Working Class New York” (New York 2000) a penetrating examination of the unique ethos, economic history, and social and physical infrastructure of the City from the shaping of its one-time entrepot- and specialized-manufacturing-based economy in the 19th-century, through its creation of America’s only social-democratic society in the 20th, and through the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and the subsequent rise of the so-called financial and information economy from the 1980s on. This winter, Freeman’s book helped me begin to articulate a vision of New York that had been up until now beyond my reach, this despite my one-time education in “Urban Affairs” and my visceral, indelible knowledge of New York work and street life. At the outset of his book, Freeman eloquently anchors New York in the intangible, in the collective tone of its people:

“Endlessly frustrated by its difficulties and brutalities, try as I may I find it difficult to imagine living elsewhere. What keeps me in New York is neither the high culture of museums and concert halls nor the unrivaled opportunities for working, eating, and spending that New Yorkers revel in. Rather it is a sensibility that is distinctly working-class — generous; open-minded but skeptical; idealistic but deflating of pretension; bursting with energy and a commitment to doing.”

More on the interplay of New York’s people, economy, infrastructure, and unique sensibility — as well as on Freeman’s powerful book — in future entries.

Note: For the next several weeks I will be in Istanbul, Turkey. Because of the Turkish ban on WordPress.Com I might not be able to post to this site while there. I will certainly be posting to Bubkes.Org, so do look for new material there.

Books and Beer, Soft-Soap and a Wooden Leg, Content and Clients, and ‘Cluetrain’+10

During the years that I lived in the Netherlands, a few hours free from work in Amsterdam meant an opportunity for lunch at Solly Meier’s sandwich shop on the Nieuwemarkt — split-pea soup and pekelvlees (homemade corned beef) on a roll — followed by a canal-side stroll across town to browse in the bookstores clustered near the Spui and Nieuwezijdsvoorburgwaal, inner-city streets that were once the center of the Holland’s newspaper publishing industry. Afterwards, I’d retreat to the IJsbreker Cafe, with its magnificent view of the Amstel river, to skim through my purchases over a glass of beer.

Browsing

My method for bookstore browsing involved turning off all preconceptions of what I might want to read or felt I should read and opening myself to the associative logic and randomly arranged contents of shelves and bins. The resulting finds ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, some introduced me to authors and insights I would not have discovered otherwise and a few changed the course of my life.

At the sublime end of the spectrum was a paperback copy of Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities,” an historical study of the artificiality of present-day national identities and the roles of printing, publishing, and the standardization of languages in their creation. Anderson’s book helped to begin to understand the origins and pathology of the hysterical rage towards the remaining signs of Turkish and Muslim life in the Balkans that I had encountered during my involvement in documenting the remaining infrastructure of Ottoman and Islamic society in the region. “Imagined Communities” — together with other works that followed in its wake, most notably Patrick Geary’s excellent “The Myth of Nations: the Medieval Origins of Europe” — are the underpinnings of my present research and writing on the dynamics of national identities and their reflection in the ways minorities are accepted or marginalized and their architectural monuments remembered or wiped away.

At the ridiculous end was a remaindered hardback copy of “The Aggravations of Minnie Ashe” by Cyril Kersh, a British journalist’s stylized humorous reminiscences of his childhood in the East End of London during the 1930s. The book opens with a description of the run-down East End streets and and dusty lots that served as his playgrounds: “… for me a splendid place for games and make-believes, for my mother yet further proof (not that any was needed) that life was a vast and cunning plot aimed at the humiliation and ultimate destruction of herself and her family.” It proceeds to relate Kersh’s widowed mother’s desperate struggles to raise her children and realize her lifelong dream of one day returning to the place where she had spent her honeymoon, the working-class beach resort of Westcliff-on-Sea.

Soft Soap and a Wooden Leg, Content and Clients

Spanning both the sublime and the ridiculous was a single-volume hardback reprint of a 1923 Belgian novel “Lijmen” (”Soft-Soap”) and its 1938 sequel “Het Been” (”The Wooden Leg”) both by Flemish-language writer Willem Elsschot. I had first read “Lijmen” and “Het Been” in English-language translation over thirty years ago. Had I read a better translation or been a more careful reader at the time, the books might have spared me the agony of decades of work in the communications field or at least sharpened my sense of humor while doing so. Last month, I reread “Lijmen” and “Het Been” in the original Dutch/Flemish and realized to my shock how delightfully and accurately they captured the absurdity of much of the content of my work life and portrayed the pomposity and dubious worth of business communications and the cynicism of client-supplier “relations.” The two books remain as much to the point in the age of the internet as they were in the age of print.

The plot of “Lijmen” is simple enough. Indeed, many who have worked in the murky worlds where advertising and journalism mix will recognize it immediately. Laarmans, a fiery young activist in the struggle for Flemish independence, disillusioned and depressed at the realization that both he and the movement are headed nowhere, goes out for a night of serious drinking. In a bar, he meets Boorman, a portly, elegantly dressed man, obviously wealthy, who makes him a tempting offer. If Laarmans will shave his beard, trade his bohemian clothes for a conservative suit and agree to go by the patrician-sounding Portuguese Marrano name of Teixera de Mattos, Boorman will make him his secretary and groom him as his successor at his two prestigious-sounding enterprises: The International Illustrated Journal of Finance, Trade, Industry, Art, and Science and The Museum of Domestic and Foreign Production and Trade.

The Journal, Boorman boasts, has print runs in the millions despite its paid circulation of zero and a full-time staff of nobody. In fact, the publication is an archetypal promotional magazine. Customers can place glowing written and visual portraits of their companies and products in the journal merely by committing themselves to purchasing tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies of off-prints which they pay for in cash or in kind. Boorman’s technique for closing deals is lijmen, literally “to glue” but figurative “soft-soap,” the knack of playing on potential victims’ dreams or vanities or, if their enterprises are fraudulent or products substandard, their guilt or desire to stay clear of the law.

Boorman’s glowing superlative-filled articles are written to order for each client by cutting-and-pasting sentences and paragraphs from a half-dozen articles he plagiarized and filed away years before, one describing a shipyard, the second a cement factory, the third a piano maker’s atelier, and so on. Editing consists of double-checking that all instances of the words “piano” or “cement” or “shipyard” are excised from articles treating, say, a clothing factory or a printing plant. The articles are lavishly illustrated with photographs taken with the glass-plate view-camera of Boorman’s budget-rate freelance photographer, Piepers. Boorman’s museum, visitable by appointment only, is little more than a warehouse of goods he has received as payment-in-kind from hard-pressed customers who no longer have the cash to pay their contractual obligations. Exhibitions at the museum range from canned fruit to mass-produced busts of the King of Belgium. The museum’s most frequent visitor is Mme. Boorman who occasionally restocks her kitchen from the museum’s shelves.

Boorman’s favorite clients are those who, in his flamboyant speech, “… behoort tot een zeldzaam geslacht, dat slechts te lijmen is met eenvoud en oprechtheid,” i.e. “… who belong to that rare species that can be ‘taken-to-the-cleaners’ simply and justly.” But not all clients merit a fleecing. Boorman’s sale of 100,000 off-prints to the gullible Mme. Lauwereyssen of the Lauwereyssen Artistic Iron Foundry, down-at-the-heels manufacturers of wrought-iron dumbwaiters, leads to a crisis of conscience that is resolved in the sequel novel “Het Been.”

Early in the course of “Lijmen”, Boorman lectures Laarmans on the nature of clients and the ethics and tactics of dealing with them. His observations cut to a sad truth that underlies most commercial relationships and the ever-enduring propensity to manipulate and hedge rather than add value or be willing to pay for it. Boorman’s soliloquy ends with these words (my translation):

“Above all, be courageous, even if things are going against you for weeks at a time. Never trust in God, de Mattos. And, be polite to your clients. They are your enemies, never forget this. They’ll give you only what you wrench from them and will hold back all that you do not fight for with your life.”

Some of us sincerely wish there were other ways … and stubbornly live our lives behaving as if there were.

Apropos: ‘Cluetrain’+10

Apropos of the subject matter of “Lijmen” and “Het Been,” tomorrow I will be joining my friend and colleague Doc Searls for a conference on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the conception of the business best-seller “Cluetrain Manifesto,” a prognosis of the changes Doc and his co-authors expected the internet to effect. It was in “Cluetrain” that Doc coined the chestnut “Markets are Conversations” and called for a Copernican revolution in which individuals would cease to be mere “consumers” controlled by corporate marketing and would realize their power to influence and control markets themselves instead. Whether Doc still thinks markets were, have become, or ever will be conversations, and whether the present substance of such conversations is worthy or deceptive, are subjects I look forward to hearing him address. Has the internet effected a change in the nature of our personal and commercial interactions — or has it just brought us more of the same old “soft-soap” but hyperlinked and faster? Whatever the answer… happy “10th” and continued success to the “Cluetrain” authors!

 

Dizzy Gillespie, Ignacz Paderewski, Sonny Rollins, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Vito Marcantonio, and the Benjamin Franklin High School Riots of 1946

Further to “Vote for Jordan for President!” …

Dizzy for President

During the 1964 US presidential election, I spent a few days handing out leaflets urging voters to bypass Democratic and Republican candidates Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater and write in the name of be-bop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie as their choice for president instead. Promoting “Dizzy for President” was a late-beat-era fringe protest against the the dryness of mainstream politics but, as I look back, Dizzy’s beret-in-the-ring might well have augmented the political field. A brilliant innovator, a disciplined and inspiring orchestra leader, and an African -American whose adopted Baha’i faith strengthened his inherent humanism, Dizzy had much to offer.

Should musicians run for president? Legendary classical pianist Ignacz Paderewski, the only musician I am aware of ever having been a head-of-state, served only a single year, 1919, as the premier of newly-independent Poland before he was pressured to resign — but Paderewski was a soloist and not a seasoned band leader like Dizzy.

For me, a musician in the White House would be no less unthinkable than an aging B-movie actor as president or a one-tine professional body-builder as governor of California. In contemporary Russia, even former chess grandmasters entertain political careers. Musicianship, like other endeavors, can generate requisite empathy and responsibility. My friend Ben Salzano — himself one of the generation of young Italian-American jazz musicians that flourished in the 1950s in the Rochester, New York — relates the following anecdote about how jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins discovered the social responsibility of musicianship while a high school student in New York in 1946.

East Harlem 1946

1946 saw the opening of an immense new high school building in working-class Italian East Harlem just north of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The school, Benjamin Franklin High School, like much of the infrastructure and services of East Harlem, was a product of the perspicacity and idealism of the neighborhood’s long-time congressman, Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio’s power-base was rooted in East Harlem’s insular Italian-American community and also in the neighborhood’s growing Puerto Rican and African American populations. A socialist, an egalitarian, and a political realist, Marcantonio ensured that Benjamin Franklin High would admit both local white students and black and Hispanic students from throughout Harlem, in the process accelerating racial integration of schools city-wide. Residents of Italian East Harlem, however, thought otherwise. When the first black students (Sonny Rollins among them) showed up at Benjamin Franklin for the start of the school year they were greeted with catcalls and a rain of bricks, bottles, and garbage thrown from the roofs of neighborhood tenements. Fracases erupted between Italian and black teenagers and the atmosphere remained tense for weeks. To calm the situation, Marcantonio and the principal of Benjamin Franklin High invited Frank Sinatra to perform at the school.

Sinatra and Nat King Cole

In 1946, Frank Sinatra was not yet the cynical rat-packer and Nixon hanger-on of later decades. He still had the crystal-clear voice and dark good looks of a young working-class urban crooner. He also had ideals and didn’t hesitate to express them. He had just recorded and performed in a film short of him singing “The House I live In,” New York City leftist school teacher Abel Meeropool’s ode to an egalitarian vision of post-war America, a country-wide hit that came to be an unofficial second US national anthem in the years between the defeat of fascism in Europe and the chill of the McCarthy era back home. From the stage of the auditorium at Benjamin Franklin High, Sinatra told the students, white and black, to knock off the violence and learn to live together, advising, as Sonny recalled it: “… you don’t have to love everybody but you don’t have to kill them either.” A few days later, according to Rollins, Nat King Cole showed up at the school to give a concert of his own and make the same appeal for peace. The violence soon ended and integration of Benjamin Franklin High School was underway. This, Rollins claims, taught him what musicians can and should accomplish.

Coda

Recently, Ben Salzano told me that he had recounted Sonny Rollins’s tale to a fellow musician, a native of Italian East Harlem who attended Benjamin Franklin High School at the same time as Sonny and who remembered the 1946 disturbances clearly. Was Sonny Rollin’s narrative accurate? Salzano asked. His colleague answered in an accent and tone once characteristic of the neighborhood: “Sonny? Nah! Sonny’s full-a-shit; Sinatra and Nat played Benjamin Franklin on the same day.”

More…

Additional entries on Vito Marcantonio and on the social, economic, and ideological roots of the ethos and infrastructure of New York will follow in subsequent postings.

For more on the life and music of Sonny Rollins including, I am told, a tighter retelling of his recollections of Benjamin Franklin High School anno 1946, see Eric Nisenson’s “Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation”, St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

For a timely posting by my friend and colleague Doc Searls, a long-time independent-voter, on his decision to support Barack Obama in the present primary elections click here.

Byzantine Walls, Ottoman Dungeons, Genoese Towers, and a Little-Known Firewall: Turkey’s Ban on WordPress and HakPakSak

Above: An unrestored section of the great Byzantine defensive walls of Istanbul.

One of the pleasures of traveling by night train from the Balkans to Istanbul is the wonder of approaching this 1,700 year-old metropolis at dawn. The Turkish, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian sleeping carriages that make up the Istanbul-bound Balkan Express rattle alongside the Sea of Marmara and then suddenly enter the historic core of the city through a gap in the Istanbul’s famed Byzantine-era walls not far from Yedikule, the Byzantine and Turkish tower enclosure that during Ottoman times had served as a quarantine for diplomatic missions arriving in the Ottoman capital from the West. The train continues around the edge of Istanbul’s historic peninsula past fragments of Byzantine and Ottoman sea walls, rickety 19-th century wooden dwellings, and the faceless concrete buildings that make up much of the city’s urban landscape. Finally, after the rounding the promontory below the Topkapi Palace, the train suddenly pulls in to its final terminus, the late-19th-century Moorish-Revival style railway station at Sirkeci.

The Great Walls of Istanbul

I spent this most of this past October in Istanbul. Before getting down to work, I devoted the first days of my stay to revisiting the city’s historic walls. The day of my arrival I took advantage of Sunday stillness to duck in and out of empty parking lots and clamber through deserted demolition sites in the usually crowded and hectic quarter of Galata in search of remaining lengths of the defensive walls of this one-time Genoese commercial settlement. Later that day, from the deck of a boat cruising the Golden Horn, I watched the sun set behind restored sections of Istanbul’s great Byzantine lands walls, from their water-side anchor at Ayvansaray upward towards the heights of the city near the Edirne Gate, Istanbul’s long-ago portal for armies and caravans leaving for the Balkans and Central Europe. The next day, with friends Grigor Boykov and Mariya Kiprovska (Ottomanist scholars presently resident at the Koς Institute in Istanbul) I traversed the full length of the Byzantine walls from the Marmara all the way back to the Golden Horn. Our walk took us from Yedikule past walled-in Greek and Armenian churches and former dervish Tekkes that dot what until very recently had been the near-rural backwaters of the city (indeed neither Byzantine Constantinople nor Ottoman Istanbul , even at their apogees, had ever grown to totally fill the city limits charted by the great land walls). On our way, we passed the centuries-old Roma (Gypsy) quarter at Sulukule, now threatened by planned urban redevelopment, the delicate filigree-like walls of the great Ottoman architect Sinan’s Mihrimah mosque, severely damaged in the earthquake of 1999, and the restored remains of the Tekfursaray, the Byzantine palace of Porphyrogenitus. In all, it took us only a little over three hours to stroll the full 6 kilometer length of the walls. A decade ago, the very same walk had taken me much longer. These last years, roadways have been cleared adjacent to restored sections the walls, channeling into near-straight lines what was once a zig-zagging route that in places challenged even the best map readers. The clearing of streets, neighborhoods, and shanty-towns abutting the walls marks a new axis of touristic development and gentrification in what throughout Byzantine and Ottoman times had been the barely-settled edge of the city’s historic peninsula. The restoration of the walls themselves has transformed a chain of crumbling but real ruins into a bright but artificial-looking anchor for future redevelopment.

Turkey’s Ham-Fisted Firewall

Alas, historic town walls were not the only walls I encountered on the first days of my latest stay in Istanbul. I also came up against a new, intangible, and far-less-well-known wall that has the potential of isolating the people of Turkey from contact, information exchange, and commercial transactions with the rest of the world. The government of Turkey, it appears, has chosen to join the ranks of China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan in deploying and setting to work a firewall capable of filtering-out and blocking any and all internet content deemed objectionable by civil authorities. Earlier this year, Turkey had blocked access to YouTube and, since this summer has also blocked all content hosted by WordPress.Com, including as many as 1.5 million weblog sites, this very site amongst them. Despite its scope and potential impact, the face of Turkey’s great firewall manifests itself quite modestly. When I attempted to log-on to this site from Istanbul, I was greeted with a white screen containing a simple red-headlined paragraph stating in Turkish and English that the site is banned by order of an injunction issued by the district court of Fatih, Istanbul’s most markedly religious and conservative quarter. The exact wording: “Site Closed: Access to this site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/195 of T.C. Fatih 2.Civil Court of First Instance.” The full story of how this came about can be read in this article — Shooting the Messenger – on the weblog of the Guardian (my thanks to Max Hartmuth for the reference). The summary version: Harun Yahya, a Turkish full-time “creationist” and anti-Zionist, brought suit against one of his competitors and detractors who allegedly was using a number of WordPress-hosted weblogs to libel him. In ham-fisted fashion, the Fatih court granted Harun Yahya’s attorney’s an injunction for the blocking of not only the offending blogs but of every other site whose URL identifies it as being hosted by WordPress. The injunction was implemented in equally ham-fisted fashion by the appropriate communications authorities. Anyone in Turkey who wants to read WordPress press can do so via a proxy server (kproxy.com, for example, or, for those who are gadgetry-minded and capable of reading fine print, Opera’s website-based simulator of its OperaMini mobile phone-browser). My attempts to post to this site, however, even via proxies, were unsuccessful.

Turkey’s Open-Armed Friends

Those of us who, like this writer, are friends of Turkey and who support the country on a number of crucial historical and political issues, including Turkey’s bid for EU membership, are put in an odd position by the WordPress ban. Although life will go on just fine without access to a million or so weblogs, the precedent of internet censorship and blockage of internet communication on this scale should be extremely disturbing for foreigners and Turks alike. It is also symptomatic of Turkey’s unfortunate propensity to quash debates and controversies when it would be better simply to let them aired. As a number of the military and diplomatic events that confronted Turkey in October seem to demonstrate, pushing debates and arguments into the future only causes them to fester. More on this in a subsequent entry.

Footnote: Strange Bedfellows

An interesting side-issue raised by the writer of the Shoot the Messenger posting on the Guardian website is the possible link between fundementalist Protestant “creationists” is the US and their Muslim fellow-”creationists” in Turkey. The US fundamentalist Christian right is quick to rant about imagined “culture wars” and so-called “Islamofascism” when it suits them but are all-too-willing to lay down with the “enemy” when doing so advances their own narrow interpretation of revealed religion and the subjugation of liberal education and free inquiry to enforced adherence to arbitrarily defined dogma.

Below left: An Ottoman tower at Yedikule at the Sea of Marmara end of Istanbul’s great defensive walls. Center: The interior of the tower, a one time detention-place for foreign envoys. Right: The 14th-century Galata tower, emblematic of the eponymous medieval Genoese trading colony, 19th-century Jewish neighborhood, and present-day center of gentrification.

Digital snapshots copyright Stephen Lewis, 2007.

America’s Labor Day, The Right to Be Lazy, the Photocopy Shops of Istanbul, and the Democratization of Knowledge

Last Monday was Labor Day, the annual U.S. holiday marking the end of the summer season. The origins of Labor Day date to the early 1880’s when a New York City carpenters’ union proposed a day honoring the city’s craftsmen and laborers. In 1882, New York was the site of the country’s first Labor Day parade, sponsored by the Knights of Labor, a forerunner of the AFL-CIO. Labor Day was soon taken up in other US cities and states and in 1894, in the aftermath of the breaking of the great Pullman and railway workers’ strike, was declared a nation-wide holiday — possibly as a bone thrown to the less radical side of the nascent U.S. labor movement.

Labor Day vs. May Day

In the 20th century, Labor Day celebrations were contrasted with their more radical European equivalents, the enthusiastic and often explosive mass rallies and demonstrations held on May 1. In the U.S., Labor Day was touted as the non-revolutionary workingman’s holiday and May Day as radical, foreign, anti-American. Ironically, however, May Day had been declared the official holiday of the world socialist movement by a convocation of the Second International in Paris in 1890 in tribute to the victims of a purely American tragedy: the Chicago Haymarket riots of 1886 and the subsequent round-up, show trials, and execution of local German-American craftsmen and anarchists. While European May Day celebrations reflected their radical origins well into the last third of the 20th century, America’s Labor Day celebrations ground to a halt and the holiday devolved into a wistful day off in the fading warmth of summer … and, more recently, into another occasion for the retail store sales and compulsive shopping that accompany most American celebrations, secular and religious.

The Right to Be Lazy

Some weeks ago, a friend who I knew from the 1960s asked me whether four decades after I’d first read Marx — in the process squandering an irreclaimable chunk of the sexual revolution to wade through Das Kapital — I could consider myself a Marxist. My response was to ask: What kind of Marxist? A Stalinist? No way. A Trotskyite? Out of romantic fantasy and ethnic solidarity, maybe. A Western-European-style democratic socialist? Most certainly. A La Fargue-ist? With enthusiasm and a smile!

This Labor Day, I blew the dust off of one the most treasured volumes on my bookshelves, one of the most underrated social and economic manifestos of the 19th-century, Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy. And, in the spirits of Labor Day and May 1 both, I took the leisure to reread it.

Cuban-born Lafargue (1842-1911) was Karl Marx’s very own son-in-law but family ties did not prevent Lafargue from giving Marx’s work a needed tweak. Whereas Marx rails about the necessity of transferring ownership of the means of production from capitalists to the proletariat, Lafargue takes aim at production itself. The real enemy of all mankind, according to Lafargue, is its own senseless compulsion to produce, the self-destructive compulsion to work. Forget about fighting for the right to work, Lafargue argues, one should struggle for the right to be lazy!

Marx’s famed Communist Manifesto begins with the warning that the specter of class-based violence is haunting Europe but the opening paragraph of Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy warns us against a more insidious danger from within, our own supposed industriousness:

“A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds sway. This delusion is the love of work. The proletariat, the great class embracing all the producers of civilized nations, has let itself be perverted by the dogma of work. Rude and terrible has been its punishment! All its individual and social woes are born of its passion for work.”

For Lafargue, work is, at best, a mere prelude to leisure and to the creativity, inventiveness, and satisfaction that only leisure can yield. To portray the benefits of leisure over labor Lafargue asks us to consider two horses, a pampered and groomed racehorse from the stables of the Rothschilds and a worn dray horse that spends its days pulling endless heavy loads. Which creature, he asks us, is more magnificent, more worthy of emulation?

The Three-Hour Day

Lafargue uses a complex set of calculations to prove that three hours of labor per person per day would suffice to satisfy the needs of most individuals and all of mankind. More than three hours, he cautions, is detrimental to ourselves and to the world at large, leading to overproduction, wasting of resources, adulteration of goods and services, imperial and colonial adventures, and, worst of all, economies that are driven by what we would now call … marketing.

I would dispute Lafargue’s results. Almost a half century of work has taught me that daily bursts of four to five hours of labor are more than sufficient, providing one is rested and relaxed and at least somewhat motivated and dedicated. Additional hours are padding — needless meetings, gossip and make-work, real and virtual trips to the water cooler (including the contemporary equivalents of compulsive email checks, web searches, and online gaming), avoidance of going home, or expressions of managers’ sadistic desires to make employees endure needlessly long days as punishment for being paid. And, padding is not without cost, compromised quality and declining productivity being among the obvious over the long run.

Lafargue is oddly prescient. He foresaw the near suicidal overwork that characterized sweatshops, Soviet idealization of “Stakhanovites,” U.S. misadventures in “scientific management,” and the expansion of the American workweek over the past few decades from a hard-won forty hour week back up to a nerve-fraying fifty to sixty hours or more. Lafargue also anticipated the waste and environmental damage of economies based on continuous expansion of production, the conflicts caused by continuous seeking out of new markets, and the torpor and perennial dissatisfaction occasioned by cajoling existing markets into ever-increasing consumption. His model also provides insight into the short-sighted moves of the present-day newly elected right-of-center government of his adopted country, France, against its 35-hour work week and strong social services and towards the American model of lower pay, less security, and longer hours for those not at the top and tax breaks for those who are.

Syphilis and Production

The Right to Be Lazy, by the way, merits a reading not only for Lafargue’s analysis and prescriptions but also for his (and 19th century translator Charles H. Kerr’s) delightfully ironic style, another way in which Lafargue sets himself apart from his father-in-law. For example, in the midst of a pointing out how the middle-class moved over the centuries from industriousness to a life of indulgence built upon the overwork of wage earners Lafargue posits this paradox:

“Today every son of the newly rich makes it incumbent upon himself to cultivate the disease for which quicksilver is a specific in order to justify the labors imposed on the the workmen in quicksilver mines.”

The Photocopy Shops of Istanbul

The full text of The Right to Be Lazy is available on the internet but I prefer to read it in hard copy, a medium more conducive to a leisurely afternoon on a park bench or a peaceful coffee or beer at an outdoor cafe. My own copy of The Right to Be Lazy is hardcover, bound in embossed imitation leather and gold-stamped with the title and author’s name. It even has a ribbon (more of a shoelace actually) sewn into the binding for marking one’s place.

My personal edition Lafargue’s book is one of many volumes that I have bought over the years at a category of institution that occupies a minuscule but important niche in world’s information infrastructure: the photocopy shops of Istanbul.

Istanbul’s photocopy shops copy are crowded storefront affairs crammed with photocopy machines, bookshelves, and hundreds or thousands of bound and unbound volumes. They smell of paper, xerox toner, bookbinder’s glue, and cheap take-out lunches and are usually silent but for the shuttling of photocopier lamp heads, the rattling of automatic collating racks and the occasional ringing of old fashioned telephones.

A typical photocopy shop works as follows: A customer comes in to have a book photocopied. The shop photocopies and binds the book’s pages but also produces as second set of photocopies that it keeps as a master for preparing additional volumes for shelf display or for order from the shop’s catalog (as often as not available in pamphlet form or on 3.5″ floppies as a grudging concession to the digital age).

The shop I patronize is located in the warren of streets bounded by the immense Byzantine-period underground cisterns of the Yerebatan Saray and by the Divan Yolu, the ancient main thoroughfare and axis of old Istanbul. The shop is just around the corner from the Turkey’s central archives housing the tens of millions of documents that are the administrative patrimony of the Ottoman period and only minutes from the tourist magnets of Haghia Sofia and the Mosque of Sultan Ahmet. The shop’s stock varies from historical and literary works in Turkish and Islamic religious volumes to an erratic variety of historical and lingusitic arcana in English. A small sampling of my own purchases over the years reflect the scope of the shop’s usual contents: Gibbs’s six-volume A History of Ottoman Poetry, F.W. Hasluck’s classic Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans, Mason’s Passion of Al-Hallaj, Millingen’s books on Byzantine Constantinople and its churches, Galante’s 1930s monograph on the synagogues of Istanbul, and a number of memoirs by now-forgotten 19th-century Protestant missionaries to Anatolia and the Balkans, as well as, of course, Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy.

Photocopies and the Democratization of Knowledge

At first glance, Istanbul’s photocopy shops appear to be involved in blatant copyright violation and theft of intellectual property. But the situation is far more complex, an analogue precursor of contemporary issues facing the internet, libraries, and the publishing industry. Many of the works available at photocopy shops at $10 -$20 per volume are long out of print and otherwise available only through antiquarians or in low-run limited-edition reprints at prices in the $100 - $200 range, via high-priced subscriptions to online data bases, and, of course, to those with the credentials and sufficient leisure, at specialized libraries. The effect of this is magnified in Turkey, a country in which income distribution is decided unequal and most people’s disposable incomes are far below Western European and even American levels.

Photocopy shops also provided a physical and spatial means for expanding one’s knowledge of the world and of the millennia of discourse examining it. Photocopy shops offer the curious an opportunity to browse through categories of books — volumes at the edges of mainstream of knowledge and rarefied areas of specialized research — and thumb through titles they most likely would not find in Istanbul’s otherwise excellent Turkish- and English-language bookstores and would not otherwise encounter unless they have the luxury to be involved in full-time studies or research.

As haphazard as the collections of photocopy shops maybe, they do have their logic. In the case of my own favorite shop, that logic is a function of its spatial location, which serves as filter for its stock. What photocopy shops offer for sale is determined the books that are brought it for copying in the first place and the tastes and interests of the people who bring them. The location of my favorite shop, only tens of meters from the Ottoman archives and a little more than a kilometer from Istanbul University, gives it an academic and Ottoman-period focus. This reflects the intellectual lives of its copy service and book buying customers and their daily trajectories, through their inner selves as well as through the physical complexity of Istanbul. It also forms a case study in the dynamics of traditional cities and is an analogue mirror of concepts of community and social networking that we now associate with the internet, including my old friend and sometimes colleague Doc Searls’s Harvard-based quest for systems of Vendor Relations Management.

Afterthought: Lafargue, the Future of the Copy Shop, and Reclaiming the Leisure and Focus to Read

The photocopy copy shop in which I bought Lafargue’s manifesto in praise of the three-hour workday is open eleven hours a day, seven days a week — a function of low margins, high rents, increasing paper and toner costs, skyrocketing cost of living, and, maybe, as Lafargue would have it, a dose of misplaced industriousness as well. Most of the shop’s customers work equally long days. In a more Lafargue-ian world would the store survive and its customer’s reclaim the leisure and focus to read more? I’m willing to gamble on it.

R.I.P. Copeland’s, Farewell Reliable’s: Collard Greens, Turkey Wings, Gentrification, Urban Infrastructure, and a Final Word of Thanks to a Harlem Entrepreneur

This weekend, Copeland’s Restaurant on West 145th Street in New York City’s Harlem will close its doors forever. The demise of this upscale “soul food” restaurant — a favorite of local residents, African-American celebrities, and atmosphere-seeking European tourist groups alike — was reported this past Monday in the New York Times. Although the Times article paid adequate respect to the restaurant and to its founder, Mr. Calvin Copeland, it neglected Copeland’s no-less-worthy stepchild, the restaurant’s neighboring storefront cafeteria and take-out, known for decades to locals simply as Reliable’s (a diminutive of its original name, The Reliable Catering Co.). Reliable’s served the same delicious food as Copeland’s but from steam tables manned by affable white-uniformed, hairnetted serving personel rather than off the arms of uniformed waiters and onto linen-covered tables as at Copeland’s. Reliables was also far more affordable than Copeland’s and thus attracted ordinary residents of Harlem on their ways to and from work plus a sprinkling of good-food-at-budget-prices-seeking New Yorkers, black and white both, fleeing the stiffness, artificiality, and high prices of restaurants in more high-toned neighborhoods downtown. On Sunday afternoons, while tour goups enjoyed staged gospel-music concert brunches at Copeland’s, ordinary Harlemites returning home from the neighborhood’s churches shared informal lunches at Reliable’s formica tables or waited in line for their take-out orders. Daytime and evenings, one could linger at Reliable’s for hours chatting with friends, watching fellow diners stream in and out, and, of course, savoring the wonderful food — mildly-seasoned smothered chicken, immense turkey wings, vegetable plates of collards, black-eyed-peas and rice, and, for desert, Reliable’s inimitable bread pudding.

“Like a Tornado…”

Reliables flourished for decades despite, or maybe because of, its setting in one of New York City’s most underserved and economically stagnant neighborhoods. Ironically, the neighborhood’s recent upswing is exactly what caused Reliable’s demise. Sadly, the upswing was not rooted in a regeneration of black Harlem or in a change for the better in the lives and prospects of its longtime, mostly black, inhabitants. Rather, it was a blitzkrieg-paced case of “gentrification,” a massive influx of mostly white and very much better-off luxury housing hunters. This was spurred in large part by developers buying up substantial amounts of what since the 1920s had been low-priced rental stock and rapidly converting it into high-end cooperative apartments and staggeringly expensive single-family townhouses. The outcome: A flight of lower-income Harlemites and a sudden demographic turnover that caught Calvin Copeland and most other non-real-estate-savvy New Yorkers by surprise. Referring to the sudden exodus of African-Americans from a neighborhood that had been emblematic of Black America for more than 80 years, the Times article quotes Mr. Copeland as saying: “The white people who took their place don’t like or don’t care for the food I cook … the transformation snuck up on me like a tornado.”

It’s All in the Infrastructure

New York is a city in which the neighborhoods of the rich, poor and middle-class traditionally abut, and in which people of all backgrounds and walks of life are hyper-aware of each other’s existence, like it or not. Such proximity and agglomeration have contributed to the economic mobility of the City’s residents and has shaped the traditional liberality and egalitarian nature of New York politics. A variegated population has also ensured that New York is continuously supplied with a work force adequate to the performance and competitiveness its economy. Part of New York’s greatness is that it has avoided the tradition malaise of American cities, i.e. the impoverishment and death of inner cities and flight of the middle class and the rich to bedroom communities and distant suburbs. Until recently, New York has also avoided the European equivalent of this syndrome, i.e. the takeover of the inner cities by the young and the wealthy and the banishment of the poor and lower-income to oppressive housing estates and violent banlieue. New York’s relative demographic balance did not emerge by accident. It has been shaped and shepherded by public policy, from the rent control decrees of World War II and subsequent rent stabilization laws to the massive “slum-clearance” and public housing projects of the 1930s through 1960s. (How public housing destabilized neighborhoods will be treated in future entries).

New York had always been a city that has realized the importance of its human and physical infrastructure — housing, public transportation, universities, museums and concert halls, hospitals, and one of the world’s highest quality and most reliable water supply systems — and had been willing to invest accordingly. Still, there have been exceptions. One particularly acerbic recent mayor is reputed to have said: “This is the world’s most expensive real estate; if you can’t afford to live here, get out.” Such an outburst is easy to make but harder to live up to the consequences of. To be blunt, without affordable housing for the lower income people who serve them, New York’s rich would have to do their own cooking and eat from dirty plates in the exorbitantly-priced restaurants they patronize, not to mention having to change their own sheets and empty their own bedpans in the hospitals that are there for them when they fall ill. This year, issues such as the sudden encroachment on affordable housing in Harlem, the seeds of gentrification in long-dormant neighborhoods such as Brooklyn’s Bushwick, and the surprise conversion of lower Manhattan’s Stuyvesant Town from fixed-rent lower-middle-class housing into luxury housing at “market” rates have revived full-force the debate over New York City’s housing policies. This debate is made even more timely and intense as New York’s revived role as a world economic and cultural center continues to work like a magnet, attracting wealthy new arrivals as well as the City’s traditional “huddled masses yearning to breath free.” (Over the next months, I plan to post a number of entries on these issues and other facets of urban change and public infrastructure, both on this site and, in a more anecdotal and visual way, on my alter-ego site Bubkes.Org.)

New Vegetables and New Names: “Branding” Comes to Harlem

A dearth of black-eyed peas and collard greens is not the only change gentrification brings to Harlem. The name Harlem itself is threatened. To make luxury housing more palatable to white investors and buyers and to disassociate the neighborhood from its 20th-century African-American and proletarian antecedents, real estate developers turn to the flim-flam of “branding.” To “spin” Harlem’s image, they have resurrected the name “Hamilton Heights” (previously familiar only to NYC historians, cartographers, and city planners) as an appellation for that section of Harlem in which Copeland’s is located. Sadly, so it seems, the white Midwestern, New England, and European corporate-types and professionals moving into and transforming the neighborhood find it more attractive to tell the folks back home and their colleagues at the office that they live in Hamilton Heights rather than simply to say that have landed in Harlem.

Finally: Thank you, Mr. Copeland

As a long-time customer of Reliables’ and a sometime patron of Copeland’s, I want to thank Calvin Copeland for years of fine cooking, sincere welcome, and good service to me and to people of all races. In flush years, an occasional meal at Copeland’s enabled me to feel quite flush indeed, and, in lean years, Reliable’s enabled me to eat very well for very little. And, not to forget, the ample tables, leisurely pace, and relaxed atmosphere at Reliables’ were the comfortable backdrop for hours of serious conversation and laughter with my closest friends.

In his family life, employment policies, and hospitality Mr. Copeland had the humanity, wisdom, and courage to cross the absurd and regrettable color lines that still divide and mar much of life in America. Thank you, Mr. Copeland, for enabling this “white” New Yorker to gain so much physical sustenance, aesthetic fulfillment, and human warmth in Harlem. I wish you continued good health and success in all you still plan to undertake. And … I’ll never forget the bread pudding!