I met a woman with a petition. This was something I could do. Get people to sign her petition. Her petition to get money from the government to build more schools and parks. I went to El Superior, the market on Figueroa in LA, and stood out in the hot sun. I drank pink and white and green Agua Frescas, and had folks sign my petition. One hundred. I wanted to get one hundred signatures a day, I decided. That would be magnificent.
Books
Italy: ‘Whoever Wins Won’t Govern’
The Italians go to the polls on March 4, and from outside, it might look as though there are major, exciting, and, above all, dangerous developments in the offing: the return of the octogenarian Silvio Berlusconi, the rapid rise of anti-establishment Five Star Movement, the ever more aggressive rhetoric of the xenophobic Northern League. Yet the perception among most Italians is that the political system is simply too dysfunctional and blocked for much to happen at all.
Kingdom Come: Millenarianism’s Deadly Allure, from Lenin to ISIS
A belief in predestination animated both the Bolsheviks and ISIS: the inexorability of the future, and thus of victory, as foretold in the sacred prophesies of Marx or Mohammad. They could not fail. Alive or dead, they won. Napoleon used to say that a battle was won or lost in the minds of the combatants before the first shot was fired. Is there an energy more powerful or a cause more mesmerizing and irresistible, or confidence in the inevitability of victory greater than the one generated by the ecstatic hope of liberating humanity from the miseries of daily life and ushering it into a conflictless Eden?
Latoya Ruby Frazier: Documenting the American Family
Like the camera’s technical process of exposure, Frazier brings things to light that would otherwise remain obscured. “I create visibility through images and storytelling,” she says in the show’s materials, in order “to expose the violation of… human rights.” Her black-and-white photographs are unsentimental witnesses to the furloughed American dream.
When Government Drew the Color Line
Government agencies used public housing to clear mixed neighborhoods and create segregated ones. Governments built highways as buffers to keep the races apart. They used federal mortgage insurance to usher in an era of suburbanization on the condition that developers keep blacks out. From New Dealers to county sheriffs, government agencies at every level helped impose segregation.
Love, It’s What Makes ‘Suburra’
Suburra: Blood on Rome, an excellent new crime series from Netflix and RAI, manages to combine the pacing of a thriller with an almost sociological diorama of Roman society, a slicker, abbreviated version of The Wire’s portrait of Baltimore. Even amidst Rome’s gaudy beauty, the staccato bursts of violence, and the elaborately choreographed sex scenes—particularly the show’s opening orgy, which resembles a tangle of deviant, writhing Bernini sculptures—the surprising and ultimately tragic intimacy that develops between Aureliano and Spadino stands out as one of Suburra’s great pleasures, setting it apart from the plodding, grisly portentousness of contemporary prestige crime dramas such as Narcos.
The Photographs I’ve Never Seen
Today, behind the computerized shutter-click of a smartphone camera, I still sometimes sense in myself and in others the impulse to remember something before it’s over—to make some use of an experience even as it’s still happening. Some might explain this as the artist’s instinct to capture and transform. From another perspective, it’s the intellectual’s urge to analyze, to further experience the experience. Or is it a kind of compulsion—in its most cynical form, the capitalist’s need to consume the moment, to own it? One thinks of the tourist too busy photographing to see the actual living that is occurring all around him. He forces a fleeting present more quickly into the realm of that-has-been, and the local passersby laugh at his shortsightedness.
Iraq & the Wounds That Never Heal
The purpose of documentaries is often to bring us a step closer to understanding distant or alien realities, to give us a nuanced sense of what is going on in some particularly knotted human relations and complicated unfolding events. But Nowhere to Hide does more than that, pulling its viewers into the war, making us stumble over burned body parts. It’s not an explanatory lesson about war, it does not provide answers; rather, it deepens the questions.
Trump: Making Golf Horrible Again
Golf’s leading figures have run straight into the arms of Trump, a man who embodies the culture that so narrowed the game’s appeal in the first place. There will be a price to pay for such stupidity and cowardice. A broad swath of America simply rolls its eyes at Trump’s golfing obsession. But if the indifference of non-golf-playing public is understandable, the complicity of the golfing elite is unforgivable.
The Heart of Conrad
Joseph Conrad’s heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and danger. Sometimes, when Conrad’s imagination was at its most fertile and his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.
Sig Nordal 