Month: September 2020 (Page 10 of 12)

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St. Louis

‘It was once the trash heap of local industry. An abandoned and run down former cement factory, the decrepit lot on Riverview Drive had become a common site for local construction crews to dump truckloads of excess dirt and rock. The old factory meant so little, no one cared or tried to reroute them.

‘But when sculptor and visionary Bob Cassilly looked at the site, he saw something more. He saw an art amusement park celebrating the history of cement production in St. Louis, filled with statues and sculptures and old machinery turned into fascinating attractions, and that’s what he began to build in the space.

‘So he got a bulldozer and combined it with his artistic ambition. Cementland, as he named it, would fit right in with his long history of whimsical, playful sculptures and projects, all hinging on the intersection between childhood nostalgia and subversive counterculture. He invited the construction crews to keep dumping their leftover dirt — it was simply more material for him to play with. To create with.

‘Before long he had created a castle of sorts out of the old factory, with a courtyard of sculpted creations made of cement, rock, metal and antique machinery. Bridges spanned spillways and depressions where water would collect into pools to form moats and ponds. In short order, people caught notice, and couldn’t wait to see what the project, still in its infancy, would eventually become.

‘Unfortunately, in 2011, Cassilly tragically died when the bulldozer he was operating allegedly tipped off of an unstable ledge and rolled over, although his widow and several medical experts believe he was intentionally beaten to death, the bulldozer accident simply being a cover-up. Regardless, he died doing what he loved, but what he loved was far from finished.’ — atlas obscura

 

Managua

‘After a week of huffing and puffing, the Sandinista government finally managed to blow down Managua’s iconic “Concha Acústica,” the elegant shell-shaped structure that for the past decade overlooked the lakeshore Plaza de la Fe and served as a backdrop for free outdoor concerts and July 19 political rallies. Originally commissioned by popular Managua Mayor Herty Lewites, a Sandinista dissident who died of a heart attack while challenging Daniel Ortega for the presidency in 2006, the Concha Acústica was one of most graceful and apolitical monuments in Nicaragua. The government’s official excuse for the demolition was that the steel-and-concrete monument, which sat alone in an oft-empty concrete field, was a shaky contraption at risk of falling in the next earthquake. That theory was quickly debunked when the Sandinista wrecking crew spent several exhausting days banging on the structure to little effect, and repeatedly snapping steel cables as they tried to pull it down with a crane. Finally, after five days of undeterred destructiveness, the demolition team managed to wrestle the resilient structure to the ground, where it can never threaten anyone ever again.’ — World Architecture

 

Tsibli

‘The concrete arches known as Andropov’s Ears were built in 1983 by O. Kalandarishvili and G. Potskhishvili in Tbilisi for an official visit by the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. They were demolished after independence in April 2005 and the President Saakashivili inaugurated himself their destruction. However, the foundations and some parts of the concrete arches are still visible today, because the complete demolition had to be stopped for static reasons.’ — architectuul

 

Toronto

‘Honest Ed’s was located at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst Streets, extended the full length of the block west to Markham Street. The exterior was covered with huge red and yellow signs advertising the store’s name, lit up like a theatre marquee. The store sign used 23,000 light bulbs. The outside facade was covered with puns and slogans such as “Come in and get lost!” and “Only the floors are crooked!” The store consisted of two buildings connected by a walkway that links up the west building on Markham Street and the east building on Bathurst Street. The interior was modest, with simple displays of low-priced merchandise from vacuum cleaners and winter coats to kitchenware, toys and grocery items. Much of the store’s decor consisted of posters and photos from old films and stage productions from Mirvish’s theatres in Toronto and London, England, and of actors and musicians who performed in them (many inscribed to Ed Mirvish). Every piece of store signage was hand-painted. The new owners have demolished the structure as of March 2018.’ — wiki

 

Manchester

‘Harpurhey Baths in Manchester, UK were shut immediately during a routine inspection in 2001 amid major health and safety fears when it was discovered there were serious defects in the building’s walls and machinery. Cracks in the baths’ walls repaired five years earlier had widened beyond repair, and the walls were bowing. There was also problems with the baths’ steam boilers and the drainage system. On seeing the consultants’ report the council then asked there own architects to carry out an examination. Their conclusion was that the building should be closed as It had gone beyond the point of being tired and was at the stage where it could be considered a danger to public safety.’ — 28dayslater.co.uk

 

The Balkan Mountains

‘From far, it looks like an abandoned flying saucer sitting on top of the hill but the Buzludzha monument is an enormous construction built on Bulgaria’s Balkan mountains to mark the site where the Bulgarian Communist party was founded in 1891. Buzludzha opened in 1981 but after the fall of communism it was left abandoned by the Bulgarian government. Since then it has been heavily vandalized.’ — collaged

 

Okayama

‘This abandoned Japanese strip club was discovered somewhere around Okayama prefecture by blogger and urban explorer abandonedkansai. Little are known about the place besides its name “Sightiseeing Theater”, an euphemism. The photographer describes his exploration: “It seems like the entrance fee was 3000 Yen […] To the right was a side entrance that lead directly to the oh so known strip room with its orange stage and the countless tine stool bolted to the ground. Well, countless, I guess there were about 150 of them, sometimes as little as maybe 15 centimeters between them. […] Behind the stage was a small room with a bed and from there a dark, narrow hallway with an uncomfortably soft floor lead to another part of the building, a part that was actually even closer to the locked main entrance. When I got out of the dark I stepped directly… onto a stage. A stage way bigger in a room way bigger than I just left. While the first location was a little bit shabby and tacky with plastic flowers everywhere and gigantic eagles painted on the wall the second room was… actually pretty similar; just bigger, more spacious and in better condition, probably thanks to the wallpaper that was missing in the other room. Close to the stage were the same tiny little stools bolted to the ground, but with a little bit more distance between them. The last three rows reminded me of old cinema seats – of way better quality […] This room was so cliché 70s porn it was tough to wrap my mind around it. The cheap pink plastic decoration was so horrible I felt a little bit embarrassed just looking at it, but I guess when it was dark and you focused on the stage it didn’t matter. Sadly it wasn’t completely dark in there. Just almost, with bright light coming in from a door leading outside.”‘ — abandonedkansai

 

Bedrock City

‘This abandoned Flintstones amusement park is located in Bedrock City, Arizona. There are weirdly distorted statues of all the main characters, and everything looks like it was done in the 1960’s-1970’s. After doing some research, this place opened in 1972, and it shows. I crawled through the giant snake on my hands and knees, only to discover that the exit was essentially me being pooped out of the backside of said giant snake. There were a ton of pebbles in there (and not the baby or cereal kind), and I cut my knee.’ — collaged

 

Pyongyang

‘The Ryugyung Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea is one of the 20th century’s greatest architectural failures. Initially designed as a beacon of progress and power for this misunderstood peninsula nation, the Ryugyung Hotel was unable to sustain construction when the North Korean government simply ran out of money. Ground was broken in 1987, construction was halted in 1992, and the pyramid-style spire sat dormant and empty for sixteen years.’ — TCL

 

Gaffney

‘The location used for the filming of the 1989 science fiction film ‘The Abyss’ was Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant, an uncompleted nuclear power plant on Owensby Road, near Gaffney, South Carolina. There, director James Cameron constracted the largest underwater filming set ever built. It took 7 million US gallons (26,000 m3) of water to fill the tank to a depth of 40 feet (12 m). After filming, the set was left abandoned, as the cost of deconstruction was considered too high.’ — DP

 

Los Angeles

‘Japanese Village and Deer Park (top) first opened at 6122 Knott Ave in Buena Park. It was a Japanese-themed amusement park that featured shows and traditional Japanese buildings in an environment where deer roamed free (inspired by Nara Park). The park’s gate featured a torii. The park closed in 1975. Facing mounting red ink, the owners began giving the park’s deer lethal injections, claiming the animals had tuberculosis. Almost 200 deer were euthanized before authorities ended the practice. After the park closed, a second amusement park, called Enchanted Village (bottom), opened on the site in 1976. Animal trainer Ralph Helfer was a partner and served as chair. The park was, for a time, home to Oliver the “human” chimp. The 32-acre park was South Pacific-Tiki themed and featured trained animal shows, a traditional-styled Polynesian show, and a few ride attractions. Enchanted Village closed in fall, 1977. The area has been developed into a business park and nothing remains of the ponds and locations of the successive parks.’ — Wiki

‘The Toed Inn, shaped like a frog, was originally located on on Channel Road in Santa Monica. After it was damaged by a flood in 1938, it was moved to 12008 Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. (1920)’ — LAist

‘Shaped like an owl, the Hoot Owl Cafe had a head that rotated, blinking eyes made from Buick headlamps and a sign that read: “Hoot hoot, I scream.” It was designed by Roy Hattrup in 1926 – 27 and for more than 50 years, his wife, Tillie, ran it. It was originally located in Rosemead but was moved to two subsequent locations, both in South Gate, before being demolished in 1979.’ — LAist

‘Located at 1124 Vine St. in Hollywood, the Hollywood Flower Pot is both the name of this flower shop and an accurate description of its facade. (1930).’ — LAist

‘This photo of the Sphinx Realty Company, located at 537 N. Fairfax Ave. across from where Fairfax High School now stands, supposedly dates to 1920, so it’s too early for it to have been inspired by the Egyptology craze that swept the U.S. after Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered in 1922. Notice the signs listing nearby properties for sale. Back then you could buy a six-bedroom, corner stucco house for $7,200.’ — LAist

‘Gay’s Lion Farm, once a defining symbol of El Monte, has left relatively few traces in today’s city. El Monte High School may be the home of the Lions, boasting a statue of a lion that was once part of the Farm, but a perfectly unexotic McDonald’s now stands on Valley Boulevard, where the entrance to the Farm once saw fancy cars and tour buses disgorging their passengers to visit the tourist attraction. About three hundred yards west, on the southeast corner of Valley and Peck Road, an overpass of Interstate 10 looms like a conqueror over a memorial to the fallen Farm. (The construction of the freeway paved over the erstwhile Farm’s vacant land in the 1950s.) The memorial is easy to miss for drivers hurrying through the intersection; it’s also unlikely to be visited by pedestrians since the space is next to a busy intersection and below a freeway with no convenient parking nearby. The lion stands behind the fence, neglected by contemporary El Monte. Across the intersection, near a bus shelter on the northeast corner, is another ignored commemoration of the Lion Farm in the form of a marker placed by the city. The glass plating on the marker is scraped so badly that it renders the text almost entirely illegible.’ — ket.org

 

Glasgow

‘Tait Tower was a tower in the art deco style constructed at the summit of Bellahouston Hill in Bellahouston Park in Glasgow in Scotland as part of the Empire Exhibition, Scotland 1938. It was designed by Thomas S. Tait, stood 300 feet high (91.44 metres) and had three separate observation decks which provided a view of the surrounding gardens and city. Due to both the height of the tower and the hill it was built on, it could be seen 100 miles (160 km) away. Although it was to have been a permanent monument to the exhibition, orders were given to demolish the tower in July 1939, allegedly because it would provide a beacon for enemy bombers in the expected war with Germany. Only the foundations now remain.’ — Wiki

 

Wall Township

‘The Circus Drive-In was a fast food hamburger drive-in restaurant located in Wall Township, New Jersey that opened in 1954, and operated until 2017. Cars originally pulled up and parked around the round building, which remained until its closing as an open-air indoor seating area. There was also a partially covered drive-in aisle where cars could pull up to experience classic drive-in service. Besides standard hamburger fare, the Circus was known for its batter-dipped onion rings, fried Maryland softshell crab, and a newer addition of New England Lobster roll.’ — Wiki

 

Buffalo

‘The Pan-American Exposition was a celebration of many sorts. It opened its gates on May 1, 1901. The most prominent of its buildings was the Electric Tower which rose to a height of 391 feet. It was said that the Electric Tower could be seen from downtown Buffalo. The Electric Tower was colored deep green, with details of cream white, blue and gold.’ — buffalohistory.com

‘The Larkin Building was designed in 1904 by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1906 for the Larkin Soap Company of Buffalo, New York. The five story dark red brick building used pink tinted mortar and utilized steel frame construction. It was noted for many innovations, including air conditioning, stained glass windows, built-in desk furniture, and suspended toilet bowls. Located at 680 Seneca Street, the Larkin Building was demolished in 1950.’ — Wiki

‘Erie County Savings Bank was constructed between September 11, 1890, to June, 1893 and was designed by George B. Post – the winning architect in a competition among twenty-four architects. As with most of Buffalo’s great architectural masterpieces, the Erie County Savings Bank was demolished in 1968 to make way for a truly spectacular, agem, piece of architecture – the Main Place Mall.’ — The Buffalo History Works

 

Tokyo

‘The red-light district Yoshiwara [Good Luck Meadow] was “established in 1617 on the edge of the city [Edo now known as Tokyo] to gather all legal brothels in an out-of-the-way spot, the Yoshiwara was relocated in 1656 following Edo’s rapid expansion. It burned down a year later in the Meireki Fire and was rebuilt in 1659, this time out past Asakusa. Officially renamed Shin (New) Yoshiwara, it was now permitted to carry on night time operations, which were prohibited in the old quarter. It existed in one form or another until the early 20th century when the area was demolished.’ — procon.org

 

Rotterdam

‘The German bombing of Rotterdam, also known as the Rotterdam Blitz, was the aerial bombardment of Rotterdam by the Luftwaffe on 14 May 1940, during the German invasion of the Netherlands in World War II. The objective was to support the German troops fighting in the city, break Dutch resistance and force the Dutch army to surrender. Almost the entire historic city centre was destroyed, nearly 900 people were killed and 85,000 more were left homeless. The psychological and physical success of the raid, from the German perspective, led the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (OKL) to threaten to destroy the city of Utrecht if the Dutch command did not surrender. The Dutch surrendered in the late afternoon of 14 May, signing the capitulation early the next morning.’ — Wiki

 

Monaco

‘The same architectural group that brought us a Monaco-Shaped yacht, later presented the Floating Desert Island. A billionaire eccentric from the United Arab Emirates with doubtful exquisite taste purchased the private island yacht in 2016 for $250M and got more lost at sea than he bargained for when the yacht sank to the irretrievable depths of the Atlantic Ocean.’ — Architect Journal

 

Sydney

‘The Garden Palace was a large purpose-built exhibition building constructed to house the Sydney International Exhibition (1879). It was designed by James Barnet and was constructed at a cost of 191,800 Pounds in only eight months. A reworking of London’s Crystal Palace, the building consisted of three turreted wings meeting beneath a central dome. The dome was 100 feet (30.4 metres) in diameter and 210 feet (65.5 metres) in height. It was constructed primarily from timber, which was to assure its complete destruction when engulfed by fire in the early morning of September 22, 1882.’ — absoluteastrononmy.com

‘Anthony Horderns was the largest department store in Sydney, Australia, which was originally established by a free immigrant from England, Anthony Hordern, in 1823, as a drapery shop. By the early 1960’s Anthony Hordern and Sons, began to accumulate yearly losses instead of profits. The development of American-style suburban shopping malls during the later 1960s, coupled with fiercer competition in the city, is said to have sealed the fate of the store. For many years it stood idle, and eventually part of it was made into a car park. It (and surrounding buildings) was controversially demolished in 1986 for the infamous ‘World Square’ development, which remained a hole in the ground for nearly twenty years, before finally being completed in 2004.’ — Wiki

 

Miami

‘In 1967, architect Chayo Frank was tasked with designing an office building for his father’s architectural woodworking and store fixture manufacturing business, Amertec-Granada Inc. With the use of sprayed concrete construction, he was able to have his design plan realized which involved a combination of free-form aesthetics; parts of the building were completely free-form such as the water flumes on the exterior while curved rebars were used to form the large geometric shapes. Chayo Frank had a love for nature and while the building was being painted, he began developing an idea. He wanted his design to transcend architecture as a building and become what he called, an “organic entity” which involved a combination of all aspects of design to resemble an object of nature. To achieve this, he used metallic paints that enabled sunlight to reflect off the textures on the exterior of the building, giving it a more life-like quality to it. The building was demolished in February 2017 to be replaced with a medical clinic.’ — abandoned.fl

 

New York

‘The Singer Tower (or Singer Building) (top) was located at 149 Broadway in Lower Manhattan and was completed in 1908. This building was designed by Ernest Flagg and stood 612 feet tall with 47 floors. Singer held title of World’s Tallest for 18 months until Met Life Insurance Company Tower was built. Singer Tower was demolished in the late 1960’s to make way for 1 Liberty Plaza (bottom).’ — replicabuildings.com

‘Lewisohn Stadium was built in 1915 between Amsterdam and Convent Avenue and 136th and 138th Streets in Harlem. It served as home field for CUNY’s sport teams and was also a concert venue featuring performers from George Gershwin to Pete Seeger. It was demolished in 1973 and replaced by a large, architecturally bland academic center.’ — Ephemeral New York

Snippet from Serpico (1973)

‘Probably the world’s very first voluntarily demolished skyscraper, the 22 storey Gillender Building. When built in 1897 it was the fourth tallest building in New York City. As a testment to the incredible growth of NYC, demolition of the Gillender Building began in 1910! One of the tallest buildings in NYC had only stood for 12 years! It would be replaced by the 41 storey Bankers Trust Building.’ — skyscraperforum

 

Cantwell

‘Igloo City was built as a hotel. As suggested in its name, the facility is built to resemble a giant igloo. The building is fairly recent, having only been built in the 1970s. However, the hotel never got into business due to it not conforming to building codes. Today, it sits completely abandoned and really creepy due to the remoteness of the location.’ — ghostsngghouls

 

Rome

Stabilimenti Balneari Beach Club

 

Beijing

‘Wonderland was supposed to be the Chinese version of Disneyworld. The ruins of what would be the biggest theme park in Asia are situated just 45 minutes outside the center of Beijing, on a 100-acre plot of land. Construction begun in 1998 by the Reignwood Group (a Thai-owned property developer) but it stopped around the year 2000 after disagreements with the local government and farmers over property prices. Developers briefly tried to restart construction in 2008, but without success. Property prices in China have risen 140% since 1998. Today, the abandoned theme park lies surrounded by fields of corn while signs warn visitors to proceed at their own risk.’ — collaged

 

Guadalajara

Various

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Paris

Did you know there’s an abandoned ‘human zoo’ in Paris? Over a century ago – in 1907 to be exact – the French opened an attraction at the far eastern edge of the Bois de Vincennes forest that brought curious onlookers flocking. It was the Exposition Coloniale in the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale and appears to have been the exhibition of the decade. At this exhibition, there were buildings in the style of at least six former French colonies such as Morocco and Madagascar, and they housed people from the respective colonies who had been plucked from their homelands and paraded in front of the visitors. These people were made to dress, eat, and live like they supposedly did back at home, all as a kind of live art exhibition so Parisians could get a glimpse into life in the colonies. And the Parisians loved it. One historian says that up to a million people came to see the spectacle in the single summer that it was open. The “zoo”, as some refer to it today, was closed down at the end of the season and left to ruin. And it stayed this way for almost 100 years, way out at the edge of the woods getting slowly swallowed by the undergrowth and the shame.’ — The Earful Tower

‘The Trocadéro Palace (top) was built in order to accomodate meetings of International Organizations that participated in the 1878 International Exhibition. The shape of the palace was that of a large concert hall: its style was a mix between a genre normally called “Moresco” (with historical and exotic references) and Byzantine elements by the architect Gabriel Davioud. Despite the high costs incurred for its construction, the building was not welcomed by the population and was demolished after only 50 years and replaced by the Palais de Chaillot (bottom).’ — halldis

‘Gare de La Bastille (top, right) was a station in Paris. The station was opened in 1858 and served as the terminus of the 54.1 km long line to Vincennes and Verneuil-l’Étang. The line was opened only to serve the Fort de Vincennes and was extended in 1859 to La Varenne and in 1874 to Brie-Comte-Robert. Part of the line was included into the RER A on 14 December 1969. The station was demolished in 1984 so that the Opéra Bastille (bottom) could be built.’ — RightHealth

‘The Gaumont Palace was the biggest movie theatre in Europe. Located in the Clichy district of Paris, t was a re-construction of the Hippodrome Theatre (1900) which had 5,500 seats. Another re-construction of the Hippodrome took place in 1930 when architect Henri Belloc created a fantastic super cinema in an Art Deco style, named Gaumont Palace (middle). Seating was provided in orchestra and two balcony levels. It was converted into a 3-strip Cinerama theatre from 17th September 1963 until 13th October 1964, after which it was a 70mm cinema. The Gaumont Palace closed in 1970, the last film to play was Martin Balsam in “Tora, Tora, Tora”. It was torn down in 1972 and replaced by an outlet of the Castorama chain (bottom).’ — Cinema Treasures

‘100 artists were given the opportunity to paint the interior of a soon to be demolished student residence at the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris, making it their canvas. Although the dormitory and all the works were destroyed when the dormitory wass renovated, several photographers extensively documented the space, creating a lasting visual document.’ — Art Fido

 

Witley Park

‘As awesome additions to your home go, a billiard room hidden under a lake sounds like the kind of place any self-respecting geek should covet. Turns out, the concept isn’t new; J. Whitaker Wright, a trader, engineer and convicted fraudster, lavished masses of money on Witley Park back in the 19th century, a 32 bedroom mansion which extended into various labyrinthine underground passages and a beautiful underwater room. Unfortunately the house – once owned by the UK National Trust, but then sold off privately – isn’t open to the public, but that hasn’t stopped some photographers from getting in and taking photos of the eerie mansion.’ — Slash Gear

 

Seattle

‘The Denny Hotel (top, circled in red) was built in 1889 by developers including Arthur Denny but in-fighting and market woes kept it unfinished until 1903. That year (renamed the Washington Hotel) it had a remarkable guest in Teddy Roosevelt and enjoyed brief success before being torn down for the Denny Regrade in 1907 in which the hill was literally flattened. The hotel stood where the Moore Theater (bottom) is today.

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Ferdinand, Well, you had a Friday of note all ready to go there. Give it time: the car crash piece. Let yourself figure it out. You’ll learn stuff you can use over and over again. Angling for safety over here, yes, you too. ** David Ehrenstein, I hope you get some big bites. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey, B-man. Glad you dug it. Have an eventful and uneventful weekend. ** G, Hi, pal. It’s a lovely book. And it looks exciting on the page too, as I guess you could see from the facsimiles. Hooray about Evan accepting your poems! That’s awesome! Use at least a little bit of your weekend to celebrate, no? ** Bill, Hi. Thanks. It should be fine: Rennes. Two hours train ride, watch rehearsals and a run-through for four hours, two hour train ride back. As much train as Rennes. I stocked up on magazines to read on the journey yesterday. That book is hard to find? Huh. She’s really good pretty much always, but I do like the pre-‘Citizen’ ones best, a bit more playful. Oh, right, the bandcamp weekend thing. I didn’t take advantage last time. Thanks for the tweak. Fun, some kind of fun, any kind of fun in your neck and future this Saturday/Sunday? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Oh, if I’d known that about the Atlantic thing I probably would have delayed that post. I aways prefer the blog to be at least slightly out of step. I don’t know if this is appropriate under those circumstances, but you know the old trick that if you have a fan turned on, even in the lowest mode, and if you’re in the the area the fan is blowing towards, you won’t get mosquito-ed because they can’t fly in even the mildest breeze? Everyone, Steve Erickson types/speaks: ‘Here’s my review of FEELS GOOD MAN, which traces Pepe the Frog’s transformation from benign cartoon character to malevolent meme.’ I just read something promising somewhere about Drakeo the Ruler’s new album that made me inclined to test it which surprised me. Now with your ‘up’ too, okey-doke. Yeah, Rennes is close to Paris, so I’m training. I’ll be taking my first COVID-era flight next weekend to Marseilles and back. Dreamy weekend! ** Okay. I’ve restored this old post consisting of a very tall stack of ex-buildings and attractions from around the world for you to peruse and respond accordingly. Enjoy maybe, ideally. See you on Monday.

 

‘Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric  is a book-length prose poem filled with photographs and a few non-photographic images. It toggles between meditation and anger on a wide range of subjects, including death, cancer, depression (and anti-depressants), suicide, rape, 9/11, racism, history, politics, and literature, but the central trope is the ubiquitous television set. A repeated image of a static-filled television screen serves to separate the segments of the poem, signalling that Rankine is about to change the channel on us. The book’s epigraph from Aime Cesaire is an admonition to not be a spectator: “And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator,for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear…” In Rankine’s poem, the television is so much a symbol for the media, it’s simply the biggest source of bad news and despair. In one section, with the controversial vote count over the reelection of George W. Bush as the backdrop, Rankine writes: “I stop watching the news. I want to continue, watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope.”

‘As the title implies, this is a very personal poem sequence, with a narrator who faces family deaths, takes an ever-changing menu of anti-depressants, and speaks directly to the reader. Whether this narrator bears any relationship to Rankine, though, is both unclear and irrelevant, because, in a very real sense, this narrator is narrating our own lives back to us. At first, I thought Rankine’s rather routine mixture of snapshots and media images imagery was rather mundane. But on closer inspection, it strikes me that her choice and use of imagery is crucial to the book’s tone. She often encloses photographs within her standard frame of a television set, which, in an odd way, makes them feel more familiar. Televised images are immediately, even if inadequately, contextualized. Collectively, the images tilt the book toward an informality, as if someone were talking to us while the television set drones in the background and we flip the pages of a newspaper. These are the images we are confronted with daily – images of politicians, press conferences, crime victims, celebrities – a relentless tide of insults and tragedies and deaths that threatens to benumb us. But however much the narrator might like to turn off the television and shut out the world, much of the impact of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely comes from the way in which we come to understand the persistent underlying interconnection of the personal, the social, the civic, and the economic.

‘One of these images, however, has haunted me for days. It’s one of the most arresting and enigmatic uses of embedded imagery that I’ve yet to run across. The image is located in the midst of a brief reference to the 1998 murder of James Byrd, Jr., an African American man who was beaten by three white men in Jasper, Texas, chained to the back of a pickup truck, and then dragged for miles until his body was literally torn to pieces. The narrator notes that President George W. Bush could not correctly recall the facts of the story. “You don’t remember because you don’t care,” the narrator pointedly tells Bush via the television screen. The unidentified image may or may not have anything to do with the murder or with Bush, it simply shows four sets of legs (from the knees down) standing around a shiny spot on a hard, paved surface of some kind. It’s not clear who the people represent, although a woman wearing a skirt either has black skin or very dark stockings. Does the shiny surface represent blood? Are the four figures all looking at the ground or is only the photographer fixated on the spot surrounded by their feet where the reflected heads of the figures seem to blend into each other? Are we to think of these people as connected with President Bush or with the victim or with one of his murderers? Each of these little puzzles and possibilities passed through my mind more or less simultaneously, making each of them equally plausible. It’s an inspired choice of image.

‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely feels more like a dirge than a lyric. It is a powerful book about the struggle to find and maintain a moral position, to stave off loneliness and hopelessness, to not fall prey to the blind and blinding “American optimism” (she’s quoting Cornel West here). Only at the very end does Rankine’s narrator begin to address the ability of poetry to bridge the chasm between one person and another. On the penultimate page, Rankine writes this:

Or Paul Celan said that the poem was no different from a handshake. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem – is how Rosemary Waldrop translated his German. The handshake is our decided ritual of both asserting (I am here) and handshaking over (here) a self to another. Hence the poem is that – Here. I am here. This conflation of the solidity of presence with the offering of this same presence perhaps has everything to do with being alive.

‘The poem then ends with these lines:

In order for something to be handed over a hand must extend and a hand must receive. We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of.

— Vertigo

 

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Further

Claudia Rankine Site
Claudia Rankine @ Poetry Foundation
Claudia Rankine, The Art of Poetry No. 102 @ The Paris Review
Podcast: How Can I Say This So We Can Stay in This Car Together?
‘We Have No Practice Talking About Race in This Country.’
Claudia Rankine @ goodreads
Podcast: Understand Systems Of Oppression By Interrogating Whiteness
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE FEELING: A CONVERSATION WITH CLAUDIA RANKINE
“I Think We Need to Be Frightened”
Black Bodies In White Words, Or: Why We Need Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine on using art to see bias in the arts
INTERVIEW WITH CLAUDIA RANKINE @ The White Review
Racism’s Metre and Rhyme: Kayombo Chingonyi on Claudia Rankine
Podcast: What Happened When Claudia Rankine Talked to White Men About Privilege
Towards a Poetics of Racial Trauma: Lyric Hybridity in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen
HOW TO WRITE LIKE CLAUDIA RANKINE
Claudia Rankine’s poetic reflections on “invisible racism”
One side or the other of that ‘you’
A Conversation With Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine on Black Glamour
Claudia Rankine by ​Lauren Berlant​

 

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Facsimile pages

 

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Extras

Claudia Rankine with Saskia Hamilton, Conversation, 6 May 2015

Claudia Rankine: The Blaney Lecture, 2017

Claudia Rankine: On Whiteness—Friday, March 24, 2017

Claudia Rankine at The Poetry Project, 2014

 

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Interview
from Poets.org

 

Although you identify more or less as a poet, your work is notorious for its tackling of multiple genres—I’m thinking of the way you incorporate photography in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, or, more recently, with the genre-bending work of The Provenance of Beauty. A guided bus tour through the Bronx, combining pre-recorded and live elements, this piece is presented as a “poetic travelogue,” though it also seems part-radioplay, part-happening, part-sightseeing tour. How does one genre inform another in your work?

Claudia Rankine: I’m beginning to think less in terms of genre and just in terms of writing in general. My background, my education, has been in poetry, so I feel that many of the layers in whatever I’m doing are coming out of a world of allusions that are located in poets. So, no matter what I’m working on, I like to call it poetic in some way, because the poets that I’ve read and that I love, their work tends to infuse it.

For instance, we had a line in the play that referred to “getting and spending,” (it was in an earlier draft of the play—it’s no longer there). I wanted it there because it sort of worked against the industrialization of the landscape, and for me, it was a sort of private joke, to throw in that phrase. The director, Melanie Joseph, said, “What is reminding me of college from this?” I said, it must be “getting and spending.” And it was; she remembered the Wordsworth. For me, that is sort of my private cache. But when I’m writing, I just feel like I’m writing. I don’t really think that I’m writing in this genre or that genre. That might be a problem, but it seems very integrated to me.

Very early in the play, the narrator says: “Are you wondering why we’re here? Where we’re going? When we get there will you think, This is nice. This is new. This is old. This is urban. These are the real people. These are the other people.” What is your relationship with the South Bronx, and, more generally, how do you feel geography, setting, space informs your writing?

Rankine: I grew up in the Bronx, so [the director and I] went and checked out different neighborhoods in the Bronx, and we ended up, for many reasons, in the south Bronx.

I believe that where we are, how we are allowed to live, is determined by the politics of the land—the big politics and the little politics. And it varies depending on where you’re located. I’m very interested in the landscape in general as the site of living, of a place created out of lives, and those lives having a kind of politics and a kind of being that is consciously and unconsciously shaped. Decisions are made that allow us to do certain things, that give us certain freedoms and ‘unfreedoms.’

Another statement early in the play: “Identity is time passing. Every moment of what we call life is life in the shadow of choice.” Do you consciously resist assumed notions of identity and identity politics? If so, what value is gained or lost in such resistance?

Rankine: Well, I don’t know if it’s resistance, but I do think that the more we are conscious of the limits that are put on us or that we put on each other and the ways in which we try to code the existence of others—the more we understand that—the more we are able to work with it, to make conscious choices about how we live.

You know—I do it, you do it, I’m sure we all do it, and it’s a kind of shortcut to living. And I think if we can sort of back up from that at least and begin to see people as individuals and to not take the mechanisms that society has handed us to get past people very quickly. If we can just slow down a bit, I think we would begin to treat each other a little better. I really feel that way.

What do you consider the role of collaboration in poetry? Particularly in theatre, this is often an obligatory part of the medium. To what extent do you consider a completely singular work possible or attractive? What does the collaborator gain or lose in that sort of a project?

Rankine: I know that the making of the play is tremendously collaborative, and I have been living it for the past two years. But still, in the end, the writing you do on your own. You still are writing at your desk by yourself. What is more collaborative, perhaps, is the editing process. In some ways, things can go faster, because you have many eyes responding and looking and feeling, and the actress being in the language, and if it doesn’t hold, everybody sees that very quickly.

I have learned to be very clear about what’s not ‘just language,’—things that I am very committed to and that cannot be edited out just because somebody doesn’t like the feel of that. I’d be willing to revise maybe syntactically the way something happens, but I’m not willing to cut certain things that are part of what I feel is the meaning of the piece. And so the process is a good one in that you have to lay claim to your commitments early on, or else somebody else’s view gets laid over yours. And, you know, that might be okay. But for me, it’s not okay most of the time. And so you have to be very willing to articulate why things are necessary and to convince a number of people that that’s the case. And that’s been a great process to be involved in. It’s like the ideal marriage—where you’re constantly negotiating, but you win many of the battles.

With Juliana Spahr, you co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Can you tell us how the two of you worked together? Did you struggle with the idea of defining a contemporary moment in American poetry? And how did disagreements and compromise shape the collection?

Rankine: The reason I wanted to work with Juliana on that was: her training was very different from mine. She had studied with a lot of the language poets and what is in a sense the next generation. And I had worked more with lyric-based poets—people like Louise Glück and Bob Hass. And I admired Juliana’s work so much. I love her work. And I also loved her vision—sort of the politics of her work, the connectedness that she advocates in her critical work and that is demonstrated in her creative work. And so I wanted that approach to help shape the book. So I don’t think there was any conflict per se in the collaboration with the collection, because I so admired what she had done both critically and poetically that I could stay hungry for her point of view.

What about conflicts with yourself?

Rankine: In terms of deciding on the poets—that’s tough. Because for everyone you include, there’s another you’re not including who you should be including. So in a way you come up with these rules, and you make rules only to narrow the field, not to judge, not to create a hierarchical structure at all, only because you have to narrow the field, so you do that. But luckily we are now in the process of making volume two, so a lot of the people who should’ve been in volume one, like C. D. Wright, Leslie Scalapino, Laura Mullen—many, many people are now going to be in volume two, so that is incredibly satisfying. And this volume I’m co-editing with Lisa Sewell. She’s writing the introduction as we speak.

Glancing quickly at the extensive notes for Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, the sources include Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Lear, the television show Murder, She Wrote, and pharmaceutical pamphlets, to name a few. What is your process for collecting and seeking out these materials—were they gathered over the years and selected when the writing called for them, or did you actively seek them out for the book?

Rankine: They’re not even gathered, they’re just lived, and when you need them they come to you. But I think somebody like John Ashbery gives you permission to pull from everywhere. From all the bits of your life, when you need it—and before him Eliot, obviously, and the Modernists. But there’s no conscious sense that I’m engaging in this because I will use it later. You’re just living it. You just happened to see it on television, you just happened to see it in the paper, and you just happened to have read that book and loved it. And I think, on some level, all of those things must have touched me in some way, because they did come back to me. So, on some level, I connect with everything that I end up using.

Are certain subjects more conducive to poetry than others?

Rankine: One way of thinking about it is—something like ecopoetics. When somebody like Gary Snyder is very interested in engagement with the landscape as it exists rather than in a romantic way, that speaks to me. That’s a sensibility that I understand. At a certain level, all poetry seeks something, is looking, is in conversation with something. I just think there are certain poets that speak to me more because they are engaged in the world in a way that I am engaged in the world.

But it’s not even a linguistic thing, it’s a bodily thing. And so I feel very close to Yeats, partly because I think Yeats—even though I don’t agree with his politics—was very interested in the politics of the world he was living in. He was affected by it; he had to address it. And that’s something I feel like I understand. I also feel very moved by the work of Emily Dickinson, for the same reason, though the work is very different.

Can you give us any insight into the notion of a book as unit of writing, as opposed to a collection of singular poems?

Rankine: Somebody once said to me: you’re not a magazine poet, because you don’t write single poems, you write in whole books. I think it was Richard Howard who told me that actually—after he rejected one of my poems from the Paris Review. But I think he’s right. I tend to be interested in a subject and the world around that, so once I get started on something, I can go years circling it.

I definitely start with the idea of something, and then I begin to investigate it. I really see it as an investigation, an interrogation that goes on on the page for me, for a long time, until something gets resolved. Not that questions get answers. I think that after a while, I come to an end, because I come to an end. I’ve always admired, but never understood, the ability to write a single poem and then be done with it.

Your collections Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Plot feature personae that are at once intensely personal and noticeably distanced. More recently, in The Provenance of Beauty, there is an insistent, though disembodied, first-person speaker, that guides the trip. In what ways do you identify with these voices? What is your relationship to autobiography in your writing?

Rankine: I think a lot of people assume that Don’t Let Me Be Lonely was autobiographical because of the “I,” the use of the first-person. It’s not—and it is. I feel that when I’m working on something, I will take from anywhere I know to get at the place that I’m going. Anything I know about you is mine now. And everything I know about me is also mine now. And I will use whatever I can to investigate whatever it is that I’m investigating.

Should I be worried?

Rankine: No, you shouldn’t be worried—you’d never notice. For me, those lines are not hard and fast. But I’m not writing nonfiction. Until I say I’m writing nonfiction, I’m not writing nonfiction. I feel like I should be responsible textually. And I am. That’s why notes are in the back of Lonely and will be in the back of any other text that I write, but I don’t feel any commitment to any external idea of the truth. I feel like the making of the thing is the truth, will make its own truth. And I do really feel like what I know through living is material for the making of whatever it is that I’m making.

How do you think one project leads into the next? Can you tell us, are there connections between your play and what you’ve previously published—and to what you’ll publish next?

Rankine: Definitely. I think it’s organic. I think life’s organic. And I don’t think I would have been commissioned to do the play had I not written Lonely. And I don’t think I would have been prepared for the play had I not done the films that I had been doing, with my husband, John Lucas, recently. I definitely see my life unfolding in a very organic fashion. Each time it’s a little more difficult, it’s a little bit more collaborative, because it becomes a little bit more unbanded, but I do feel that I’m being prepared each time for the next thing.

You should feel lucky.

Rankine: I do.

 

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Book

Claudia Rankine Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
Graywolf Press

‘Award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multi-genre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while always arguing that complex thinking is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.

‘Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture right now, with a voice at its heart bewildered by the anxieties of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won’t leave us alone.’ — Graywolf Press

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Excerpts

There was a time I could say no one I knew well had died. This is not to suggest no one died. When I was eight my mother became pregnant. She went to the hospital to give birth and returned without the baby. Where’s the baby? we asked. Did she shrug? She was the kind of woman who liked to shrug; deep within her was an everlasting shrug. That didn’t seem like a death. The years went by and people only died on television—if they weren’t Black, they were wearing black or were terminally ill. Then I returned home from school one day and saw my father sitting on the steps of our home. He had a look that was unfamiliar; it was flooded, so leaking. I climbed the steps as far away from him as I could get. He was breaking or broken. Or, to be more precise, he looked to me like someone understanding his aloneness. Loneliness. His mother was dead. I’d never met her. It meant a trip back home for him. When he returned he spoke neither about the airplane nor the funeral.

Every movie I saw while in the third grade compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead? Because the characters often live against all odds it is the actors whose mortality concerned me. If it were an old, black-and-white film, whoever was around would answer yes. Months later the actor would show up on some latenight talk show to promote his latest efforts. I would turn and say—one always turns to say—You said he was dead. And the misinformed would claim, I never said he was dead. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Inevitably we get older; whoever is still with us says, Stop asking me that.

Or one begins asking oneself that same question differently. Am I dead? Though this question at no time explicitly translates into Should I be dead, eventually the suicide hotline is called. You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o’clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: I-800-SUICIDE. You dial the number. Do you feel like killing yourself? the man on the other end of the receiver asks. You tell him, I feel like I am already dead. When he makes no response you add, I am in death’s position. He finally says, Don’t believe what you are thinking and feeling. Then he asks, Where do you live?

Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rings. You explain to the ambulance attendant that you had a momentary lapse of happily. The noun, happiness, is a static state of some Platonic ideal you know better than to pursue. Your modifying process had happily or unhappily experienced a momentary pause. This kind of thing happens, perhaps is still happening. He shrugs and in turn explains that you need to come quietly or he will have to restrain you. If he is forced to restrain you, he will have to report that he is forced to restrain you. It is this simple: Resistance will only make matters more difficult. Any resistance will only make matters worse. By law, I will have to restrain you. His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. This is further disorienting. I am fine! Can’t you see that! You climb into the ambulance unassisted.

 

*

On the bus two women argue about whether Rudy Giuliani had to kneel before the Queen of England when he was knighted. One says she is sure he had to. They all had to, Sean Connery, John Gielgud, Mick Jagger. They all had to. The other one says that if Giuliani did they would have seen it on television. We would have seen him do it. I am telling you we would have seen it happen.

When my stop arrives I am still considering Giuliani as nobility. It is difficult to separate him out from the extremes connected to the city over the years of his mayorship. Still, a day after the attack on the World Trade Center a reporter asked him to estimate the number of dead. His reply—More than we can bear—caused me to turn and look at him as if for the first time. It is true that we carry the idea of us along with us. And then there are three thousand of us dead and it is incomprehensible and ungraspable. Physically and emotionally we cannot bear it, should in fact never have this capacity. So when the number is released it is a sieve that cannot hold the loss of us, the loss Giuliani recognized and answered for.

Wallace Stevens wrote that “the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility . . . nobility which is our spiritual height and depth; and while I know how difficult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presentation a horror of it. But there it is.”

Sir Giuliani kneeling. It was apparently not something to be seen on television, but rather a moment to be heard and experienced; a moment that allowed his imagination’s encounter with death to kneel under the weight of the real.

 

*

Cornel West makes the point that hope is different from American optimism. After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news. I want to continue watching, charting, and discussing the counts, the recounts, the hand counts, but I cannot. I lose hope. However Bush came to have won, he would still be winning ten days later and we would still be in the throes of our American optimism. All the non-reporting is a distraction from Bush himself, the same Bush who can’t remember if two or three people were convicted for dragging a black man to his death in his home state of Texas.

You don’t remember because you don’t care. Sometimes my mother’s voice swells and fills my forehead. Mostly I resist the flooding, but in Bush’s case I find myself talking to the television screen: You don’t remember because you don’t care.

Then, like all things impassioned, this voice takes on a life of its own: You don’t know because you don’t fucking care. Fuck you.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive inside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I don’t know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. The writer Chris Kelso whose ‘Dregs Trilogy’ triple novel was featured here in the most recent ‘4 books I read & …’ post has written a beautiful piece about Diarmuid Hester’s WRONG if you’re interested. Here ** David Ehrenstein, Jean-Pierre. As always, what films get in the Days depends on what films have clips online. I’ll hunt hard for signs of the early ones you mentioned. Okay, your list of things you have available to sell is too massive to cut and paste here so I’ll direct people to yesterday’s comments. That ManWhore thing can’t not be a parody, and yet, yeah, nothing seems too extremely far fetched to become believable in the US of A. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has created a humongous list of books, CDs, etc. that he has on offer in his ever more legendary house/yard fire sale. Lots of primo stuff at bargain prices. The list is far too gigantic to paste here, but go back a day, i.e. here and you’ll see it in the comments. Then, if you see a goodie you need, whether you’re near to David’s locale or far, contact him at [email protected], ideally this weekend. Thank you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Nice album cover there, obviously. I look forward to my audio introduction via you next week! ** G, Hi, G! Relaxation is kind of like a golden treasure these days, so it’s cool the post pried open that aspect of you. Chris’s piece is really nice, yeah. I’m honoured by it. I’m happy you’re going to start getting out to exhibitions. Having them up and running here is a huge help to the mind and even kind of the soul. Nothing like a heavy rain. Well, heavy snowfall is pretty ace too, but that phenom seems to be going the way of the dinosaur sadly. A Friday of total excellence to you! ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff! Welcome back to unciviliation and to my blog little portion of it too. That residency sounds so, so nice. If I was less curious/ stressed I would black out every form of media until after your election. Obviously I’m thrilled you made productive headway on the novel and feel that great combo of jazzed and level headed about it. Yeah, I was happy to finally be able to do a Pat O’Neill Day after years of wanting to. I haven’t seen the Other Music doc yet. It’s high on my agenda though. My ears will be trained on your bandcamp tomorrow, or, wait, today? Great! I’m good. Glad August is over. It was kind of boring. I’m mainly working on the reinvention of the TV series script into a film script, and I’m actually quite excited by how that’s going, and I’m off to Rennes tomorrow for a day to help Gisele with her Robert Walser theater piece. And some prose fiddling. Not bad. Again, excellent to see you! ** JM, Hi. Thanks for the happiness about my related stuff. I do know the Dead C, yes. Sweet spot. Oh, wow, very soon for ‘Circles’. I understand about the one-man operation. Little Caesar was a solo act too. I’ll be patient for the package and just hope the US’s and Frances’s P.O.s cooperate with one another. You aren’t going to do a Zoom launch thing or anything like that, I guess? Thanks for feeding here with you, much appreciated. And carry on, sir. ** Bill, Thanks, B. Me too, re: the Marseilles event. Marseilles, like Paris, is a ‘red zone’ meaning where the cases are especially up. But the French are hugely dutiful about the protocols, so I think it’ll be fine, socially distanced, the usual. I’m so looking forward to just the travelling/getting out of town aspect. Very tired of being stuck here. Zac’s and my plans to go to Germany any minute to hit our favourite theme park Phantasialand just got trounced because Germany just decided that travellers from Paris to their country require a two week quarantine. Ugh. Did I turn you on to Sauna Youth? Quite possible. I didn’t know they have a newbie, so thanks a lot for that tip. Fun day? Fun day! ** Okay. Before Claudia Rankine’s work went viral with her book ‘Citizen’, she wrote a few books that are more adventurous formally and visually and that I like even more, and the book I’ve spotlit today is my favourite of all of hers. Know it? Get to know it? See you tomorrow.