intermission

I heard a story about an all-too-familiar argument between a professor and a graduate student. Student is fluent in his language area, can conduct his interviews effectively, and certainly is intelligent, but is resistant to reading theory. The professor chides and cajoles, hoping to pique student's interest. The power dynamics of this office are being kept carefully concealed in the walls and drawers. Prof knows from experience that little will come of a forced, disaffected first tromp through a theoretical text, so no open threats grace the table. Anyway prof is worried he might have forgotten them at the bottom of a drawer in his last move. Finally, cleverly, professor brings student around through a proverbial ordering of the situation. He says: "If you're sure you want to do it without any theory I suppose you can just write it like a journalist."
And everything was put in perspective. Prof may have played on student's haughtiness instead of his dedication to scholarship, but everyone is happy with the results. Readings were assigned, understood, and absorbed into student's work. It reads no longer like a report or a news feed, but takes on weight in the corners of the pages. Strange etchings appear in watermark, zags cut the paper like novelty papyrus, fibers are drudged together like felt to all-but-obscure some of the footnotes. The pages feel to thicken and sag heavy with every turn. It would make a much better blanket than newspaper, to capture warmth and block the wind, but it has lost its function as a fire starter. This tome will not light until a house is burning down around it. We wonder if it burned at all, or instead was muted first to dust.

NO EVENING CLASSES

i definitely cannot sign up for evening classes on TR next quarter. I think I've made it to Beatty three times this quarter - definitely not twice a week. How can an unemployed uni kid have anything but time to kill? (how can i possibly be so busy??)
I wonder if moving to a bubble school would be as depressing as it was my freshman year. Sometimes I'm jealous of all the students who grumble at any thought of interrupting their perpetual movement between drinking and reading. You know, all of us who've left home in another state in order to study. nomads fashioning social tee-pees in town just to keep from going crazy. tee-pees, lean-tos, disaster relief zones (we do seem to cross paths with the red cross a lot)

Sanctuary - Security

Imminent dangers are a loose bundle of tropes consistently deployed to index the public recreation center and mark its territory apart from other kinds of public space. The liberalist conception of uplifting and liberating centers is predicated on the imminent danger and violence of the streets. They are last bastions within under-determined and otherwise-determined streets, parks, and yards: unbounded and unsupervised corridors - full of bullets and black holes - where "anything can happen." The public out there is ready for you with a knife. "If you don't buy their drugs they think you're insulting them." If you stop for too long you are looking to be had. "They're crazy, they're stupid, and they can't drive." The spaces themselves are for something and against something and, while those exact things have undergone shifts and conjugations - while the very same spaces are threatened by infiltration and subversion at any time - centers offer public Sanctuary and public Security. From the public.
The Neoliberalization of public space does not account for the public. It does not factor the public or solve for the public or make attempts to locate public opinion. The Neoliberalization of public space solves along the affective axis for place-making and drive-by cohesion. Community Development Corporations illustrate street scenes and order business owners and landlords to redecorate. A decades-old family-owned Korean restaurant is demolished for its insufficiency as a gateway to the university district. It is replaced by a three-story Buffalo Wild Wings franchise assembled of tinted glass and flat-screen TVs. Buckeye Donuts (the most-popular venue on campus) is ordered to make its windows smaller and replace its neon sign because it just doesn't flow with the neighborhood. Repaving the streets takes so long that locally-owned businesses shut their doors. A similar process just took place in the Short North (led by Community Properties of Ohio). The city's focus has shifted from treating neighborhoods with liberal injections of resources and federal welfare to the allocation of federal funds to these very CDCs. Such CDCs are intent on edging undesirables out of neighborhoods by their pocketbooks and police records. They're kept out through affective place-making techniques that grab you by the brain stem like you're a pet with a shock collar inside an invisible fence.
Centers share attributes with the bygone fortress urbanism of massive windowless downtown shopping malls. They are enclosures to wall in the subjects who consent to the determinations of the indoor environment. Shopping malls are for shopping, you may be asked to leave if you are disturbing others' shopping experience. Strolling under the arbor of a recreation center one consents to recreate, at least to observe the rules (of dress, behavior, association). Of course these things always slide, but built into the space is a tacit agreement between center and occupant - sanctuary for selectivity or security for determination. As liberal institutions like rec centers and publicly funded fortress malls are being dismantled (physically and discursively), new centers are being constructed exclusively as "community assets" and "investments" in affluent neighborhoods, while city-wide, centralized institutions are regularly failing and struggling to serve their constituents. Examples of new fortress-centers are slim-to-none. The only one I've found is illustrative of the material conditions necessary for the proliferation of recreation space within a neoliberal state.
Sderot is a town in Israel that lies less than 1 Km from the Israeli-recognized border with Gaza. Rockets fall there often enough that children are rarely allowed to play in the street. Bullets and black holes and blind rockets fall. Everyone is at risk in an outdoor environment that circulates imminent, unpredictable danger. Holdovers holdover. I'm reminded of my unusual admission to the usually-locked lounge of Thompson Rec Center when the employee thought I needed "to lay low for a while." Watch this video made during the construction of the Sderot Secure Recreation Center. It's filled with reverberations of the welfare-state lingo once common in the US. Specifically, that our children will grow up healthy in the midst of the impossible violence owned by urban incorrigibles or terrorists. I'm using the example just to show the the extremes necessary for the production of a fortress-center in this day and age, but several other comments made in the video can be extrapolated upon to illuminate interesting facets of Neoliberalism and defended public spaces.

it gets poppin

**draft**

"It gets poppin in here once the weather gets cold, don't it, Mr. D?"

"Man. It gets crackin, is what. I wish it got poppin; it gets crackin."

We're laughing now. I know what he means: popping is too tame a word to use for the tension outside the custodial closet that I hide my bike in. The center lobby/game room is packed with the 13+ crowd. It's like a bar with no booze inspired by a highschool cafeteria without food: There's more space between the people here, but less to insulate one from another. I remember the boxing coach's words as I hoist my bike down the front stairs. "You be careful now, y'hear? They're crazy, they're stupid, and they can't drive!"

After months of regular attendance, this is the first time I've noticed the outside coming into this space. For the first time I feel the weight of peoples' eyes on me - in a moment I'm transmuted from "that boxer" or "Mr. Alex" into "that white guy." Feels like lots of these new faces brought the cold in with them.

But this still isn't about me. It's about new angles in big bare rooms, and seein how much torque we can put on these big bare walls.