In memoriam...

A Memorial Fund has been set up to benefit the 3 children of Antonio Gilmore, the slain manager of the Blockbuster store in Waverly. Donations, which are not tax deductable, will be accepted until October 22, 2006.

Checks should be made payable to the "Antonio Gilmore Memorial Fund" and drop it off at any local Provident Bank location. Or mail the check to:

Attn: Antonio Gilmore Memorial Fund
c/o Provident Bank
Govans Branch
5234 York Road
Baltimore, MD 21212

Walking 'The Wire' ? - Life is not Art - Life is Real

The Wire is "of course" or rather was, I just discovered today, it's now been canceled, HBO's critically acclaimed yet not well watched, television show about Baltimore's "gritty" urban life. From the Chicago Tribune they note:

• “The Wire” steers clear of preaching, but it’s impossible not to see the graft and wheeling and dealing that goes on in the higher echelons of Baltimore’s power structure without also seeing parallels in the petty larceny on the street corners and the theft and betrayals among the city’s drug dealers. What we see in “The Wire” is how all of these pieces of the city fit together -- and, in a way, depend on each other to survive.
• “Every dying institution, like a dying animal, seeks to protect itself,” says Ed Burns, a cop and schoolteacher turned “Wire” writer/producer in an interview on HBO’s Web site. “The schools and [the] police department [are] unresponsive, because it’s about keeping the world as is, so you’re on top of it.”
  

That's all well and fine. But I see relatively little criticism about how, perhaps, the show exploits reality, the lives of these people "depend(ing) on each other to survive". Isn't it odd, think for a moment, that a show that purports to show reality in all its hopelessness is considered an "art form". Well then holy shit! Don't I just have the National Gallery of Hopelessness on my fucking doorstep then don't I? I've been interested in The Wire for sometime. But I can't afford to watch it. And who of Baltimore's tens of thousands of others or poor can as well.

It's all very Baudrillardian on some level - Baltimore is shown as hyperreal. It's not enough for people to see shootings and murders, drug crime and beatings in some news clip, or more high brow perhaps in a documentary. No, instead we have to have it repackaged as drama with characters and plots that are based on reality sold back to us as really realistic. So how does that de-base the local riff-raff's lives then? Well it commodifies their experiences as objects to be refigured and sold back to the highest bidder . It makes their realities into fantasies by distancing the viewer from the object and instead exoticizing their richness of the show's characters.

To their credit the show has offered some integrated support of the Baltimore communities it supposedly is so wonderfully realistic in portraying (see some of their press releases here). But let's face it - like the cop characters in Simon's show, those that are so driven by 'reality' of their own desires that they simply stay the course, often discouraged, blind and bitter along the way - they're not doing all this just out of the goodness of their hearts. If it was a) they wouldn't adverstise their good works and would quietly claim it on a tax return, or, b) they would be giving all the receipts to of EVERYTHING to community development. No, this is BUSINESS, make no mistake about it. If you're unclear then try to travel through Baltimore while they film The Wire. You're treated as intruder, not resident. And part of Greenmount Ave. has been turned into a huge empty lot where they park their production equipment with signs everywhere screaming "PRIVATE PROPERTY" and "KEEP OUT". Of course maybe the lot is better than a burned out building but my point is that the city considers The Wire like a revenue stream - and I highly doubt that the monies from that lot are going into that community: Art imitates life in this case about the inability of the City to function and in the course of doing so perpetuates the issues it supposedly wants to eviscerate and change.

David Simon is also the producer of the acclaimed mini-series (is there another word?) of The Corner (2000, HBO) and noted for producing Baltimore's other crime drama Homicide (1993-1999, NBC) which people "remember (it) fondly". I was told by my partner that the producer ought be given more slack. I don't know. Mr. Simon, previously a writter for the Baltimore Sun has his own ideas about the visual and dramatic portrayal of these worlds and he and co-worker Pelecanos waxes nostalgic about their ability to capture a visual history of Baltimore that's disappearing, bemoaning the yuppification of neighborhoods. I'm sorry but those shitty neighborhoods are hardly something to be grieving. Now, what happens to those displaced by such events - for example when a movie production company squats on land that isn't theirs in the first place and leaves it empty when they're gone, those are issues, things to ruminate on. (Hear the interview with Simon and Pelacanos on NPR's Fresh Air here: "'The Wire's' David Simon and George Pelecanos")

The Chicago Tribune says in its review: "And once you’ve seen the season’s closing image, you won’t be able to stop thinking about what it all means." Ooooooo! Gee! What does it all mean!!!! Here, let me sum it up for viewers:

It means we live in a privileged fucking society that is more interested in watching the 'reality' of the miserable moments of others' live - as long as they're held away, at arms length, or 'TV's length' if you wil, and they're not expected to do anything about it then they can indulge in others' misery and then go to work and talk about how 'fascinating' the writing is, what 'interesting' plot twists in that last episode. Try asking the Blockbuster clerk who was shot dead last week a block from my house how much 'depth of character' his assasins had, or how 'bleakly listful' they portrayed their own horrific lives before blowing him away.

Maybe Simon and others were finally successful...maybe it was so real people finally felt nauseous watching people kill, maim, screw and fuck each other over - because they know that's what O'Malley, his police department, Erhlich and so many others are doing. Betcha they never watched much in Baltimore - all we had to do was look out our window to see the 'real deal' - and save ourselves at least 78.95 a month from Comcast. Yeah, there's enough slack in The Wire - enough to hang one's self with. Good riddance.

Death doesn't take the weekend off...in fact it visited Waverly twice

It's been a particularly shitty weekend for me in Waverly. First late Thursday evening at the area Blockbuster on Homestead an irrate, would be, robber and his assistant gunned down the manager clerk because he didn't have any money for them (it says so on the door your IDIOTS).

This was a first in my life. I've never known anyone who was subsequently "murdered". That might seem like a stupid comment, since here (in the U.S.) it's such a common place occurence. But it's more telling that my grappling with this event has heard comments back like "This is the city", "This happens all the time" etc. as I try to come to grips with it. Don't get me wrong, people are supportive - but they've already acquiesed at some level to this as "business as usual".

And so it was that I was lying in bed, trying to sleep late Sat. into Sunday morning and I heard a "shot"(and I've learned to distinguish between "shot" and fireworks since i moved to the U.S. - who knew I would be such an aural connoisseur...). I jolted awake from that nether land of neither sleep now wake and cussed "Jezzuh fucking christ..." heard nothing, so lay back down. RAT...RAT! TAT! TAT! TAT! TAT! TAT! - I shot upright in bed, shaking my partner - "THEY"RE SHOOTING GUNS!" I said... he hadn't heard it (like I said above).

I ran down and dialed 911 and called in "shots fired in 3000 block of Frisby". That was it. The operator asked me nothing more - not from where, how many nothing. Blase and chilled - bored even with the constancy of death at her console.

I thought I was imagining it but about 15 minutes later, at 5:44am, the ambulance taking victims of what I would learn late Sunday night was a double shooting to the hospital (morgue?). This is the actual ambulance going to where ever they were being taken ...



This was another first - the first time I've called in something that turned out to be so bloody violent on my doorstep. Sure there've been domestic fights and craziness in my life that have required police being called to neighbors, even close to home. But none like these events. Brutal. Cold. Calculated death. Death on your doorstop.

Oh, and where are the Baltimore police in all of this? Good question. No one has canvassed our neighborhood about suspects in the Blockbuster murder - even though the suspects supposedly fled into our neighborhood. No one from BPD has called me about my emergency call to 911 to ask about when I heard what I heard, how many shots, where I was etc. It's all like - and I think it's true after being here a year - that they can't won't or don't give a shit about crime, death and decay in Baltimore. Witness instead the reaction to the "horrific" murders in Baltimore County over the weekend. Detectives shown in the news going door to door, asking people for help. Here? Not a fucking chance. And what about Frisby? Me and another neighbordhood friend had been asking for more help and presence after a highspeed chase ended up in a person shot and killed at the corner of Montpelier and Frisby - a half a block from 3033 Frisby where the double shooting happened Sunday morning (and you won't find any news about that in the press either - just another shooting, ho hum, la dee da... back to Fells Point and Whole Foods for my nutrigrain bagel....)

So I basically feel like I want to puke. Can't sleep. Can't eat. Sullen and confused with not dread, but some other feeling, like I've had the soul ripped out of me - and not by the shooters - but more by the lack of reaction by those around it (many do have a reaction but most don't. This has got to end....

Simple is good...

I came across this person's blog when I was madly clicking away trying to "solve" the widget puzzle that they had created. He/she created something called "RouteWord" - a kind of simple network of letters jumbled that you have to figure out what their connection is (tracing only the available paths) after given a clue.






I, apparently like others, had figured the answer but somehow we were "incomplete" without the picture changing, it giving us feedback, or otherwise saying "CONGRATULATIONS!" (perhaps we were looking for some kind of reward?) Well, Andrew explained his reasoning on his entry "Confusingly Simple". He says:

"We've come to so expect that everything -- online and off -- demand our attention with squawking, dancing, popping, zapping, clicking, shrieking, streaking, bleating, yammering, clamoring, or beeping that the idea of "You just look at it" seems from another era."

My own mashing actions (and even weirder the unsettled feeling of "not being done yet" that pushed me even to search more about this "broken game" and Andrew's explanation of why he made it they way he did (read his blog, I'm not telling) say more about us as slave-animals to 21st Century technology age rather than evolved masters. Andrew makes this rather profound observation with something incredibly facile, once again proving less can be more. Pavlov himself would salivate no doubt.

When a pending truce means "kill while you can"

Israel's wanton disregard for the safety of civilians in their dispute with Hezbollah is one thing. Their thumbed noses at international organizations, like the Red Cross, the UN outpost they bombed etc. is now history. But now, on the eve of a U.S. and France-brokered truce what does Israel do? They escalate their attacks as if to say "We're running out of time before the truce happens lets kick the shit out of Hezbollah before the international community says we shouldn't be (since we agreed ourselves)".

Since the altercation escalated - and I am hardly alone to think Israel's reaction was more than out of scale with the kidnappings that launched their offensive into southern Lebanon in the first place - Israel has consistently acted out what I expect are its desires - to crush and terminate the Lebanese state.

The argument could be made that it is about ridding the world of terrorists but no one attempted to deal with the sour reality that was Lebanon's democratically elected government - dominated by Hezbollah members. And here Israel took a page from the U.S.'s foreign policy of late - "If it moves, toward you, kill it" - and especially because such a policy itself defines what a move towards one's state is, or can be - no matter how obliquely seen, construed, or, in the case of Iraq and more recently Iran, politically motivated rather than truly about a state's safety and sovereignty.

Hezbollah is not to be excused in this mess, to be clear. However Israel's actions are is simply out of line - they don't even hold support at home as polling in their own country shows. The staggering scope of their actions speaks volumes of what they believe to their own self-imposed superiority. Monday morning at 8 am EST will tell the world where their minds truly lie.

And one it not an anti-Semite to speak out over Israel's actions. Here, in the U.S., I've learned it's fine to blaspheme every other religion except "the Christians" (read "neo-con Christian) and the Jewish faith. Islamic? Sure! Call 'em fascist! Haitian? Sure! Call 'em weird and creepy voodoo ritualists! But whenever anyone says anything critical about Israel they are anti-Semites. What a crock. If I said something about Canada being bad does that instantly make me "anti-French"? Or about France - does that make me "anti-Catholic"? Israel uses the charge of "anti-semitism" as it's own shield, as Teflon to any criticisms levied towards them for their (often) precarious actions, land grabbing in the West Bank etc.

It has become such a "natural" state of affairs that the international community operates in a knee-jerk mentality now when it comes to dealing with Israel and the mid-east - First, see how Israel wants it, Second, Identify the threats to that, Third, construct them as threats to a Judaic state, Four, identify any other responses as rantings of "Islamic" or "Muslim" radicals - in need of obliteration.

And so its gone this round. Recently, Prime Minister "I want a vote from the Jews because I won't win the next election without them" Steven Harper, of Canada, jumped on board defending Israel - after a long and careful history of neutrality that has meant Canada could speak objectively about the mid-east it was dashed in a moment of self-absorbed politicking. It was NOT about Jewish persons or Israel - it was about getting elected. And Bush is just as bad. So Israel perhaps ought look beyond its own doorstep to see how nations are using their plight as the window dressing of support when in actuality it's about self-serving politics. But then again maybe it's monkey see, monkey do...

Dead people were bad people too...

OK... This will seem a little random to people but as a genealogy researcher I found it interesting enough to share...

Over the past few years I've been intensely researching my family's roots and branches (that's my great great grandmother and her kids, left). There more and more sites that help one accomplish for example FamilySearch.org (brought to you by those busy Mormons who collect church members for their pews long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil) and RootsWeb (a free service that permits members to share lineage databases and info). All of this has in fact become big business as the Wall Street Journal reported in July of this year. But the business aspects I leave for another day. What about those old, lost souls?

Well if there is one thing that became apparent to me in my searching is that people are wont to see their own histories, no matter how pedantic and dull, as anything ... so long as it's positive and uplifting. Gleaned from the annals of collected lore and in many cases written texts (both professional and familial) they bristle with words like "achieved", "overcame", "survived", "settled", "founded", "built" and more superlatives for growth and augmentation then one can shake a stick at. But where though is the tragedy in those lives then? Why bury it with their best clothes in a box in the ground?

The software programs that help people collect the information on one's relatives, like Family Tree Maker, contain all the usual "slots" for personal particulars, like birth, marriage, and death, and then other "milestone" headings like "christening/baptism/Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah", "military", "political" etc. True, you can enter any other title in this field area as a label but it sure doesn't come with... "Criminality", "Faithfulness" or "Lunatic". This might sound stupid but the fact of the matter is, is that our families are made up of all these things.

A couple of "cases in point"...

One of our relatives "went missing" in the censuses and we eventually found her living with, oh, some 60 other people. Scanning to the top of the census page we see it was a large building - the asylum in London, ON (see picture). Now one wouldn't go looking for one's relatives in the loony bin though would one? And then there's my great-great grandfather who recently showed up in a Library and Archives Canada search as being convicted and held at Kingston Penitentiary in 1847 - hell it had only been open for a few years and he'd already found a room?

But what's missing here is why either of these relatives were in these places. Were they crazy? Murderers? Don't we disservice their past by ignoring these things by pretending they don't matter? It seems to me that we want to sanitize our lives - a micro version of what we do to all but the largest and most heinous events in "world history" perhaps. No husband in our genealogies ever hit a wife. No great aunt never raised a bottle too often until it put her in a grave. All of their business and land transactions were scrupulous and for the greater good - never selfish or self-serving. What a crock. What in fact might be important too is to recognize, in the case of my great aunt for instance, is that she may not have been crazy but "put away" because she was "old" - not crazy, but just old. Seeing history as a fabrication and not just what it seems to be is important as well then.

Our romanticized view of our pasts has cauterized our ability to see our families as entities, warts and all. Instead of reveling in the sometimes questionable, but more often than not forgiven, or at least empathized-with, sadder sides of them we are missing out on our own strengths. The strength to be compassionate, to help, to hold up when all is lost. Sometimes the bleakest moments of lives tell the most about the mettle of those living them. Not the awards and accolades. And certainly not the Disneyified pasts many of us have created as foundations for our own greatness.

My family (this is my great, great, great grandfather in Manitoba, c. 1880-1890, his first house there), I've learned, were mostly farmers. And then some farmers. And for good measure... more f-ing farmers. I was shocked at the banality of it. In some 3000 relatives over 300 years almost 90% were farmers, 5% were preachers of some sort and the rest a mixed bag (counting males because of course what women did wasn't important - ugh!). The closest to greatness we came was 2 mayors of two dinky towns. But so what? I like the fact (now I've digested it) that we were, well, "just people". These people lived, loved, cried, fought, hated, killed (probably at least a few), despaired, hoped, you name - the whole spectrum of human lived emotion made up complete lives - not patch-worked database lives. We need to remember them for all that they were and hope when we shuffle off that some one will pay us that same honor.

Update "Faked News is Not News"

From the REUTERS News Room (and they did respond to me directly):

"There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image", said Tom Szlukovenyi, Reuters Global Picture Editor. "Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy".

Reuters terminated its relationship with Hajj on Sunday after a review of a photograph he had taken of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on suburban Beirut the previous day found it had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more and darker smoke rising from buildings."

It turns out that this photographer had in fact doctored not one, but two photos (the other to show an Israeli jet dropping not one flare, but three, and then mislabelling those as "missiles"). See also Reuters drops Lebanese photographer over doctored image

I still think it's pretty damn egregious that one photo got by, never mind a second...

Faked News is not news

On Aug. 6th I was purusing the news du moment when the Yahoo! headline of bombing in Beruit caught my eye. Actually what caught my eye more was the photo. Now I play with macs and do Photoshop from time to time and what I saw, even at about 120 x 120 pixels, was some of the worst photo manipulation ever seen. Here's the pic:



It doesn't take a particle physics major to understand and recognize the duplicate smoke plume patterns - stamped four times over, from left to right. If you look closely at the bottom of the pic you'll also see apartment buildings that are duplicated, along the bottom edge. This is wholly intentional. It's not an artifact of sending the photo in bits and bytes across the ether - otherwise the whole photo would be equally scrambled.

But what was more distressing is that I found it incredibly hard to report this to anyone. Not hard, like "Should I?", but hard like "Where the hell do I find a person to take this up and investigate? Where is CNN's contact info?" etc. In the end I sent a comment to REUTERS (who published it), CNN (as a news tip) and flickr (so I could at least get it "public"). Haven't heard a peep from anyone. So faking news isn't news anymore.

News has gotten so bad, so sensationalistic that even it outdoes itself in its own moribund blindness, its manipulation of fact as fiction - "Hey Adam, What do you think? Is this bombing picture really not showing enough violence? Let's amp up that smoke!!!" (click, click, click...) Ta da! But what does this mean when looking at the news then? News as product only? Does the backstory mean so little that dead Lebanese don't matter so much as how dead they might look or how violently they died. And it seems we are so immune to the idea of peace in the world that in order for us to care we have to take something as horrific as war and ENHANCE its horrors just to get our attention. There's something Baudriallardian going on here but I'll leave that "uber blah blah" for another day. I think I'll puke in an envelope and send it to REUTERS to make it more clear how disgusted I am with them.

Hot time, summer in the city... Life and Death in B-more

Photo credit: Jefferson Jackson Steele, Citypaper, Baltimore, 2000

There has been much bruhaha about the "crime spree " in Washington D.C. lately with 14 dead in 13 days and now a curfew for teens and older has been put in place. But what continues to floor me is the relative lack of attention given to Baltimore which has roughly the same stats and about 100,000 less population. As of July 11th Baltimore had 10 murders in seven days - roughly double the "crime spree" rate that D.C. is so worried about - for a 6 month total of 147. At this rate Baltimore, according to Baltimore police homicide statistics, is on its way to surpassing 290 murders for the year - it's worst record since 1999 when 305 were tallied. The only crime stat lower on national averages is rape (2004) - maybe it's because we're all killing one another first?

But why does no one seem to care about this? Baltimore remains one of the top tourist draws in the country - so D.C. can't take that as the express reason for the attention - so why is there no "crime emergency"?

Well the most obvious reason is demographics probably - which I'll leave for a future post. D.C. and Baltimore share some interesting aspects about racial divisions and poverty, loss of jobs due to deindustrialization etc. but, more and more it seems to me that Baltimore is basically D.C.'s "bitch" (pardon the misogynist term - it carries the meaning more completely I think). It can remain home to the thousands of people that can't afford to live in D.C. but who have to work there because there's no jobs here in B-more. Again, more on that another day.

Here in Baltimore it's not that different either when it comes to race and class dividing a city already reeling from losses....Suffice to say when the rich, white, Federal Hill area of town was upset it was getting surveillance cameras installed in their rich-ass area of south Baltimore neighborhood they got plenty of press time for their rants - on television in particular - the same could hardly be said about the cameras installed say in my neighborhood in Waverly/Greenmount , a predominantly black and poor neighborhood, far flung from the snooty harbor condo-castles of Baltimore. If it works for O'Malley's plan to develop the city's white neighborhoods - oops, rich white neighborhoods, then concerns about crime get vetted publicly. In shitty hoods... nah uh.