My video “Beauty for Ashes” will be premiering at the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
‘Beauty for Ashes’ takes its title from the speech given by Robert Moses during the opening ceremonies of Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, a small swath of land near Shea Stadium escaped his development plan. This area became densely populated with family-run automotive shops that thrived despite city neglect and the absence of basic infrastructure like sewage, street maintenance and waste disposal. Now city leaders have deemed it blighted and plan to redevelop the area under eminent domain. Set in the shadow of a new stadium named after an ailing financial giant, ‘Beauty for Ashes’ is a portrait of the area and its laborers anticipating their imminent displacement.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
3:00 pm
Gene Siskel Theater, Chicago
President Obama’s Social Secretary, Desirée Rogers, will be stepping down in April.
I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Rogers when I was a student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I interviewed her for my experimental documentary- 2096: A Lottery Odyssey. The video was based on a story quoted form a Lottery Magazine, about the perils of a futuristic lottery addict.
In looking at the clips today, I find it funny that I had the nerve to bluntly ask Desirée Rogers if the lottery was a regressive tax on the poor. I am not sure I would be so direct today. See the clip below for some snippets (apologies for my experimental sound design, I was 21).
In rehashing her career with the Obama administration, The New York Times’ Peter Baker writes about White House staff’s displeasure in her referring to the “Obama brand” during interviews in glossy fashion magazines in the early days of her assignment.
I think Desirée Rogers was being honest, albeit opening the administration up to criticism from opponents.
Naomi Klein’s piece “No Logo Update,” in a recent issue of The Baffler descibes the top-level marketing behind the Obama campaign. She writes that for the first time corporate brands were upstaged by politics and piggybacked on Obama’s campaign (i.e. Pepsi).
Although David Axelrod scoffed at Desirée Rogers’ comments, her statements were common knowledge.
In the time since the election, the marketing wars have not stopped. The health care debate has seemed like a bad episode of Reality TV. It is depressing, but I find a voice of comfort in the last few paragraphs of Naomi Klein’s article:
Personally, none of this [branding, marketing] makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather, I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns…All of their high-priced market research had found a longing for something more than shopping—for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. …Our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.
While doing research for my video about Willets Point and the area’s eminent redevelopment, I noticed some conceptual public art inside one of the renderings. As as way to memorialize 260 closed businesses and 1,711 lost jobs* – a creative person used an allusion to The Great Gatsby as a placeholder for art that comments on the historical background.
If you look at the sidewalk in the above rendering closely (near the baby stroller), you will see the following caption from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; …where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
I suggest the following quote from one of the business owners featured in the Save Willets Point video: “It’s years that we have sacrificed to be able to have this business, and overnight the city wants to take it all away.” Or perhaps this zinger from Robert Moses who is responsible for the Flushing Meadows Park: “I raise my stein to the builder who can remove ghettos without moving people as I hail the chef who can make omelets without breaking eggs.”
Production is back underway for my video about Willets Point.
Willets Point is the neighborhood of Corona, in the New York City borough of Queens. It has no sidewalks or sewers, and as of 2007 only one resident. Nearby, a new stadium has been built, Citi Stadium (named after the main financier Citibank). Although the mayor has called the area a \”euphemism for blight,\” the immigrant-run businesses in the area are in better standing than the large financial institution forcing their demise. This video is a portrait of the area during its last days before urban renewal.
