amani + king vision ultra - "an unknown infinite" review
winter 2020 chainsmoking up & down 4th every day, the two bp gas stations weren't closed yet, the condos were still just blueprints, key food hadn't been demolished & turned to a combination-wells fargo-cvs-lido yet, my block's tweaker cohort had a few months before a new batch would pit them against each other, Barrel Guy was still on the street spinning his barrel every night, the auto shop wasn't a gym yet, the art studio next door was still in business, zerospace hadn't taken over the warehouse on butler yet, the cubesmart didn't have a bright light-up logo yet, blue spirits were only $9 at the spot next to green ivy, there were no joggers at wyckoff gardens, unemployment hadn't run out yet, rumors about a vaccine, george floyd's summer was everywhere, go up to grand army plaza and remember the guitarist on the bench, and the drum circle. and crossing the bridge with greg holding steady 16ths on his snare drum the whole way. wading through 100 cops at hoyt-schermerhorn. visiting CHAZ to gawk at the activism ren-faire. posting thru it on twitter. entire new social circles on discord. when they issued that fucking curfew and they'd chase you down on your bike and beat you if you were out past 8pm. "where are you going tonight?" right at 8pm the cops sandwiched a huge protest on either side of the manhattan bridge as punishment for breaking curfew. it was fucking crazy! cuomo lifted the curfew a day early as a reward for new yorkers' "good behavior."
(don't forget this either: New York COVID-19 Nursing Home Scandal)
Concrete Slides: "the city killing me like it should be." in the last 5yrs it's been NYPD NYPD NYPD NYPD. everyone else loses funding. everyone else loses, is punished, beaten, gets locked up, dies. "my mind's an island, on some Rikers shit." in 2025 every subway car has security cameras. OMNY has replaced the metrocard--every swipe in & out of the system is more metadata for third parties. entering the subway system and riding a train produces the same digital footprint, the same consumer profile as scrolling instagram reels. in the before-times, at an infamous punk house in philly, pissing in the bathroom, on the tile in front of me a sticker: "data is the new oil, and you are the well." and i took a picture with my smartphone and posted it to instagram.
(don't forget this either: New York MTA Quietly Turns to AI to Predict Crime Before it Happens)
in 2024 MTA appointed NYPD careerist michael kemper to be the subway system's "chief security officer," not even being quiet anymore about the NYPD's total chokehold on every artery of this city. the same year that the ever-capable NYPD SHOT SOMEONE for hopping a turnstile on sutter av, shot a bystander in the head, and shot one of their own officers. new programs: cop-and-doctor teams roaming the system, paid salaries to identify & remove the homeless, "eagle teams" loitering on the buses to enforce fare payment. literally millions of dollars that could be spent on fixing the fucking ceilings. cops playing candy crush on their phones while i'm late for work again because someone overdosed on the 4.
a 2020 silver lining: the sweetgreeners moved out. you could live downtown for 700 a month. everyone took care of each other. we met each other, again. it was outside of time. of course, time started back up, it all rebounded, the condos on 4th av got built and the ghouls moved in and they're utterly confused by my presence on the sidewalk, the blueberries are $8 dollars now, it's Silicon Alley II now, but i can't lose my optimism, i saw what was possible, that's the whole point. it was the beginning of the beginning of the end.
william gibson's foreword to samuel r delany's dhalgren:
"When I think of Dhalgren, I remember this:
A night in Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C., amid conditions of civil riot, when someone, as the police arrived with their staves and plastic shields, tossed a Molotov cocktail up into the shallow stone bowl of the Admiral’s memorial goblet. The District’s lesser monuments were often in decay, and the Circle’s tall fountain had stood dry for however many summers, and I suppose trash had accumulated there, mostly paper, crumpled Dixie cups tossed up by children making baskets in imaginary hoops.
I did not hear the bottle shatter, only the explosive intake of gasoline igniting, flames throwing black shadows against the concrete; our shadows, running. We all were running, and in the eyes of a Kennedy-jawed girl from the Virginia suburbs I would see something I had never seen before: a feral shiver, a bright wet shard of ancient light called Panic, where dread and ecstasy commingled utterly. And then the first canisters fell, trailing gas, and she was off, running, like a deer and in that moment as beautiful. And I ran after her, and lost her, and sometimes I imagine she is running still.
Several years later, settling into the long slough of the pre-punk seventies, when Dhalgren was first published, I remember being simply and frequently grateful to Delany for so powerfully confirming that certain states had ever been experienced at all, by anyone."
Throw The Fear: "the beginning of the end is near" -- 2020 was the prologue to today's prologue to the future. mckenzie wark in 2020 said smth along the lines of "maybe we're not in late-stage capitalism, but early-stage something else." an unknown infinite.