Front Stoop Politics in Brooklyn

I have posted here a number of times about the anonymous artist JR and his work. In The New York Times today there is a story about a current project of his in Park Slope, Brooklyn celebrating local shop keepers in the face of what passes for economic development.* I am not so convinced that the imagery transcends class - it seems that the pressures on the shopkeepers reflect deep class divisions, with the less well off pressured by larger economic forces working to the benefit of the better off. And I am not sure that the project will mitigate the displacement caused by the development project in the neighborhood.

But I am impressed by the way the project brings voices and faces into public, indeed by the way that seemingly private concerns are re-framed as a public matter. And in that sense, while the project is not in itself directly political, it may afford some basis on which people in this neighborhood might, in the words of C. Wright Mills, more successfully translate their "personal troubles" into "public issues."** In fact, as the report in The Times makes clear, the images and the people installing them seem to have actually established public space, however fleeting, in which people can interact in new ways. And that is political to the core.
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* The actual execution here seems to be by Inside Out. The images here are lifted from this post by Emily Nonko.
** In that sense the images here bring to mind those that I note in this post.

Small Worlds

Upon graduation from college in the late 1970s I was singularly unprepared for graduate school; as an undergraduate I had been - more or less - what is now known as a 'slacker.' I read what I wanted, attended class sporadically, and squeaked by as a middling student. In lieu of a job or any desire for one, I ended up moving back to Massachusetts and eventually ended up working at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where part of my compensation consisted in some now forgotten number of free tuition credits per term. I set about taking courses in social and political theory. Among the faculty I encountered was Norman Birnbaum who was then teaching at Amherst College and who offered a graduate course in social theory at UMass. This was an intimidating experience since Birnbaum seemed to have read and have smart things to say about pretty much everything. Eventually I wrote a passable paper for the seminar and Birnbaum kindly wrote a letter of recommendation to accompany my applications to proper graduate programs. This week The Nation includes this review by Birnbaum of a collection of essays by the late radical sociologist C. Wright Mills edited by John Summers a young intellectual historian who took classes with me here at Rochester. Small world. John is a smart, decent fellow. Birnbaum praises the volume and notes John's deft work on it too. Neither the gracious review nor the fact that is is surely deserved surprises me.