Sublime Threshold

The folk and blues musician Feral Foster, known to me as Matt Sturcken, sings narratives to negotiate his position within the dialectic of privileged intellectuals and displaced working classes termed gentrification. His music addresses historical rhythms structuring the terrain of desire embodied by New York.

Matt strives to disengage his body from capitalist relations of production and exchange with admirable, if dubious, results. Dropping out of Hunter College despite a full scholarship, he forsakes academic discourse to sing the “earthy” language of folk. The labor of busking is one form of his intransigence. Accepting recompense for his musical service, Matt offers his art for public consumption. He primarily relies on the material and moral support of his urban kin. He and his friends sustain their lifestyle by capitalizing on their art, engaging in service labor, and renting residences in neighborhoods such as Ocean Hill, Brooklyn or Long Island City, Queens. The bulk of Matt’s livelihood is supported by the weekly Roots ‘n Ruckus music show he organizes in partnership with The Village Ma restaurant on Macdougal Street. His practices epitomize pragmatism in conversation with neoliberal capitalism; Roots ‘n Ruckus constitutes a soapbox to disseminate the voices of diverse New York folk musicians.

Interpreting the palimpsest of low-income neighborhoods to produce his songs, I initially ascribed Matt as a hipster. I define the hipster as one who valorizes deprivation and romanticizes the subaltern, while embodying a gaze complicit with the machinery of his beloved’s displacement. Yet upon closer inspection I recognized the subtlety of his work, for example, his song “Where to Draw the Line”:

Life ain’t it crooked, man, ain’t it strange
Spend it all on anticipation, never get no change
You can bet, you can gamble, you’re bound to lose it all.
Sound of the sweet, the cream of the crop,
While love only one.
If you’ve got something to say,
I’ve made up my mind.
I’ve been wondering where to draw the line. (Feral Foster)

Matt uses the metaphor of cartography to express the functions of his gaze, delimiting a sublime threshold. An asymptotic trajectory of desire for change is barred from realization by structures of loss and lack. Matt addresses the exploitation constituting reality in relation to his own intellectual labor:

There’s an art show way up in the Boogie Down. That’s right tonight.
Tell all your friends to So Bro and we’re gonna turn this place around.
But Lisa of Mott Haven has a daughter the age of four.
Her daughter will be slain tonight by a bullet through her floor.
But Lisa won’t cry, Lisa won’t weep, she won’t live in fright.
Lisa there’s free cheese, there’s free wine, in your home tonight. (Feral Foster)

The antique parchment of Matt’s cartography is engraved with oppositions and inversions of space as he maps a calculated migration of hipsters. When Lisa’s child is murdered by a stray bullet from beneath her feet, the redemptive function of her suppuration is inhibited and overshadowed by the freedom to consume. Matt locates himself through self-critical play with history, drawing on the space of Mott Haven to contextualize his position within processes of gentrification.

Mott Haven was founded in 1850 as an industrial village by the developer Jordan L. Mott who owned the nearby iron works. As elevated railways brought waves of German, Jewish and Italian immigrants through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the neighborhood became vibrant with elegant row-houses and a thriving piano manufacturing industry. The affluent working and middle class immigrant neighborhood declined following World War II when heavy industry diminished and old residencies were demolished in slum clearance programs, displaced with low income public housing concentrating black and Puerto Rican residents. When Matt apprehends the space, he sees vacant lots and abandoned buildings, a fact he reads through a nostalgic lens:

It was June 6th 1944.
A lonesome migrant finds himself again at war.
And he left his home fifteen years ago,
Only to find himself back home.
Wandering around the place he was a boy,
He’s tired of being a …
Only to find his long lost love in the brothel he stayed last night.
Now he’s been wondering where to draw the line. (Feral Foster)

The meandering path—leading away from, and back towards, the home—reflects cyclic rhythms restructuring Mott Haven. Matt locates his avatar in historical coordinates of urban transformation to address a dialectic in which present concerns are articulated through an imagined past. Finding his lost object of desire possessed by an exploitative system of relations, the migrant wonders “where to draw the line.”

Feeding the Fire
by Charles Dickenson

Feral Children & Foundlings

A Thought Experiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_Hauser

Gardens and such

Rousseau’s adjudication of the savage propels him to meditate a riddle that has puzzled humanity through out recorded history, from the Tower of Babel to the formulation of philological discourse. A central problematic yielding little in the way of positivism, the origin of language rather represents a chronic deliberation reflective of historical conditions ordaining the arbiter's vocabulary.

Weighing these matters upon the “scales of impartiality,” Rousseau refutes the ability to explain man’s natural state with the language of civil society; nonetheless, he situates the noble savage with characteristically modern capacities and affects (Rousseau 98). An animal imbued with a soul and a freewill that may guide his actions against the statutes of natural order, Rousseau nostalgically gazes upon a distinctly modern bower erected through apprehension of racial Others.

Temporal Dialectic

“The Egyptians before the reign of Psammetichus used to think that of all races in the world they were the most ancient; Psammetichus, however, when he came to the throne, took it into his head to settle this question of priority, and ever since his time the Egyptians have believed that the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity and that they themselves come second. Psammetichus, finding that mere inquiry failed to reveal which was the original race of mankind, devised an ingenious method of determining the matter. He took at random, from an ordinary family, two newly born infants and gave them to a shepherd to be brought up amongst his flocks, under strict orders that no one should utter a word in their presence. They were to be kept by themselves in a lonely cottage, and the shepherd was to bring in goats from time to time, to see that the babies had enough milk to drink, and to look after them in any other way that was necessary. All these arrangements were made by Psammetichus because he wished to find out what word the children would first utter, once they had grown out of their meaningless baby-talk. The plan succeeded; two years later the shepherd, who during that time had done everything he had been told to do, happened one day to open the door of the cottage and go in, when both children, running up to him with hands outstretched, pronounced the word ‘becos’…Psammetichus ordered the children to be brought to him, and when he himself heard them say ‘becos’ he determined to find out to what language the word belonged. His inquiries revealed that it was the Phrygian for ‘bread’ and in consideration of this the Egyptians yielded their claims and admitted the superior antiquity of the Phrygians.”

-Herotodus, Histories