Focus group

The mayoral race & a good art show

Photo by nrd on Unsplash

Morning albums: Started out by listening to Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, got tired of it partway through, and put on the new Panda Bear album, Sinister Grift, instead. It’s so good!

I have been jolted by Zohran Mamdani’s resounding victory in the Democratic primary for the NYC mayoral race this week. Putting aside even any policy¹, I am galvanized by what it represents—a totally grassroots campaign beating the sclerotic and corrupt machine of the Democratic Party. Sometimes in this country you forget that this is a place where our votes theoretically matter, because every candidate we gets seems anointed by some ghoul on high; I remain a bit haunted by the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign, which, if he had been a centrist Democrat, would have resulted in the party getting in line as soon as he won Nevada.

You can’t get complacent in this situation. If Andrew Cuomo had won and implemented his agenda (the Let Andrew Yell Act), you could comfortably tune out until the next election. None of this stuff would involve you; at most you could watch on TV as a bunch of rich people passed money around. But Mamdani will fail if his supporters don’t continually remind the machine that we have power, too; that there are consequences to sabotaging his general election campaign or his mayoral tenure—or, for that matter, for spreading racist lies about him, as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand still has not apologized for (her office said she “misspoke”). I plan to campaign for him this year, and, after he is elected, to personally try to push for his agenda, which on the whole I think would make my city a place in which I could raise my family. Please hold me to that, and if you are in NYC and would like to do a volunteer shift together, please comment or respond to this email and I’ll get a group together.

Look, I do not want to be a pundit. I do not want to be getting into Twitter fights with Matt Yglesias and Charlie Kirk or whatever. (Notice how I immediately have delusions of grandeur here…) This is a place to be wacky, as far as I’m concerned. Let me talk about something else.

On Juneteenth, with my day off from work, Spencer and I went to see Jack Whitten: The Messenger at MoMA. You simply need to see it. Whitten was an abstractionist painter who said things like “the purpose of art is to expand consciousness.” Looking at his work, you see, yes, this is the point of art. There were paintings that seemed to vibrate. At times it felt like being at an optometrist’s office, with some force clicking newer and newer lenses into place, until suddenly, with scientific precision, there it was: clarity. Afterward, my eyes felt exhausted, like I had won a staring contest in a chlorine pool. As The New Yorker put it in the headline of their review: “Jack Whitten Went Hard in the Paint.”

“The more I paint, the more I see,” Whitten once wrote in his studio log. He felt like his paintings were transmitting something beyond his intentions: “The paintings have changed. It is impossible for me to control them. Sometimes I wonder who are what is doing the controlling.”

“The purpose of art is to expand consciousness.” This is an idea that, at one point in my life, I would have considered hippie shit. But that was before I began to feel my consciousness contract! Lenses clicking into place: there are levels to focus, too. I have read articles where I take in one word at a time and I have read articles where I have taken in whole paragraphs at a time. I am trying to get back to the level of the word. Some people have it worse: I have heard people, people who love books, say that they cannot focus on books anymore, and it makes me go, mentally, I am so afraid for you hahaha what the fuck?

But where does the consciousness expand: in the considering art, or the making of art? Both? How — how can consciousness expand just from looking at something?

It must have to do with focus — how much we invest in making something, and how much concentration we can give to appreciating it. How much we actually let ourselves see, and how much we skim.

You may be under the impression Mamdani has said, at some point, the words “globalize the intifada.”² This is what Hakeem Jeffries seemed to imply this weekend. Sen. Gillibrand went one step further, and said that Mamdani was calling for a “global jihad.” In fact, Mamdani did not say either of those things.

(Note that the “those are different” and “those are like different genres” comments are by a co-host, not by Mamdani, who spoke in longer paragraphs.)

On Brian Leher and on “Meet the Press” yesterday, Mamdani said that he doesn’t use the phrase “globalize the intifada,” because “the language that I use and the language that I will continue to use to lead the city is that which speaks clearly to my intent, which is an intent grounded in a belief in universal human rights."

"I don't believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech," he said when pressed, later adding, “My concern is to start to walk down the line of language and making clear what language I believe is permissible or impermissible takes me into a place similar to that of the president." He pointed out students like Rumeysa Öztürk, detained by ICE for signing her name to an op-ed critical of Israel.

The difference between what you skim, and what you can see. “The psychology of vision,” Jack Whitten wrote, “deals with being able to dissolve dualities.”

1. I personally wanted him to win because I thought he would fight to preserve and expand 3K. (For those of you not in the city, we have a wonderful program here that starts public school at age 3, something which, combined with Pre-K, will save me about $60,000. Greatest city on the fucking planet.) Also quite like the Department of Community Safety idea, which seems like it could actually make the subways “feel” safer to many people (the subways are already extremely safe, but there are occasionally people on them who are not breaking any laws [so no, adding 100,000 cops doesn’t do anything] but are behaving oddly and are probably best addressed by a mental health professional).

2. The word “intifada” means “uprising” in Arabic and in the context of Israel and Palestine it refers to two separate events—one quite violent, one a largely nonviolent series of protests, according to Forward. What people mean when they say this phrase does seem to vary a lot, which seems like a good reason for Western protestors not to use it. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that any nonviolent protest movement of Palestinians… would probably also be, quite naturally, referred to as an intifada by all involved.