March 2012
4 posts
When the urban revolution comes, will there be...
Photo: Matthew Sharp
Coming back to the story of Nino and his father, what Nino offered his papa was a kind of gift. By telling the authorities that the bodies were buried in his father’s back yard he offered the very means of lending a hand that his imprisonment seemed to make impossible. At the beginning there seemed to be no way that Nino would be able to help his father—the crime, the...
When the urban revolution comes, will there be...
The following is a story that has been circulating across the internet for some months, and from which I build some observations on urban lives:
An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey. He wanted to plan his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work as the ground was hard. His only son, Nino, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described...
Prayers in Berlin--part two
While most will talk about fundamentalism as the return to and adherence to a set of unchanging truths about life and how to act within it, I want to read urban fundamentalism as opening up a space and time of the miraculous. By the miraculous I means the ability of urban residents to act without being eligible to act—where something is put in motion, put in place regardless of whether...
prayers in berlin--part one
In the run up to the contentious Senegalese elections on February 26, thousands of mostly young people have taken to the street under the umbrella of the M-23 movement. In the process of the army trying to control the situation, there was an attack on a zawiyah, a religious gathering place in Senegal. Looking at some of the Dakar blogs in the afermath of the attack, interesting reference is...
