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| Prague by Oskar Kokoschka |
People interpret and translate Kafka's words in many
ways. Gabriel Garcia Marquez stayed up
all night reading the Metamorphosis the first day he held a copy. For many, he helped define what a modern literature
could be - even if he did want his unpublished manuscripts to be burned, a
request his friend willfully disobeyed, in a move lauded by Borges and
generations of fans. It influenced
movies, stories, and ways of looking at our century.
There is a certain ring to flying to Prague in May. Spasms
of uprisings, turmoil, tragedy, and occupations, followed by liberation, have
characterized the modern - (1918, 38,45,48, 68, 89) - history of this place. Many took place in May. Watching the tumultuous events of 1989 on the
television, reading it in newsprint, reminded me that history could sometimes
shift toward progress, even it dips the other way more often than not. Its been well over two decades since then. Movements have ascended, and descended since
then, but Prague still calls. So, does
that reminder that regular people can impact history.
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| Velvet Revolution Prague 1989 |
Since watching those days of the Velvet Revolution, I wrote as
much as I could about the revolution, studying Prague's police with Mr Liang at
Vassar, tracing Prague's impact on history.
When the police sided with the people, revolution was bound to
happen. This was the lynchpin in
1989. Shortly after the amicable divorce
between the Check Republic and Slovakia, Yugoslavia failed to follow. War raged in Europe after their splits and
not-so-amicable divorces, with those hypothesizing about the "end of
history" were proved bitterly wrong, as the ghosts of European history
raged. History is alive and pulsing
here. Capitalism was not going to prove smooth after the short 20th
Century from 1914-1989. By 2000, the
world would converge on the city for the IMF meetings and subsequent protests in 2000 as a new
movement against capitalism took shape a decade after the of the Soviet
control.
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| IMF Protests in Prague in September 2000, bottom the author with Ron Hayduk in IMF protests in Washington DC earlier in the year. |
In the years to follow, I joined the movements fighting the
AIDS carnage and corporate globalization over the following decades, bringing
kids into this world, just before the start of the Iraq War in 2003. A decade later I was finally going to
Prague. Yet, it was hard to leave town
to get there. Days with the kids are
just too hard to end. Separation from
New York's claws is never easy either... with teaching, grades, to complete, blogs
to write, comic book stores to go to, burritos to enjoy, and rainy afternoons
with the girls.
adventures along the queens waterfront the day before I left
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| date night at 169 bar. pics by caroline shepard |
Needless to say, I missed the flight out. New York
gets a hold of you and doesn’t let go, either.
Finally I caught the 9:30 PM flight to Dusseldorf with a connection to Berlin a few hours later
and the grand chaos started to envelop me.
Being lost in time is just part
of the process of traveling through the clouds, into the night over the ocean.
Flying over I scribbled some notes in the back of a
pad. Waking up on flight, reading Scott
Crow’s Black Flags and Windmills and Derek
Sayer’s Prague: A Surrealist
History, reflecting on the journey to
Prague –feeling a since of kinship spirit with the history, a kindred spirit
with the feeling of freedom, of care for art, the Surrealists who rejected Stalinism, worrying it would consume them. Reflecting in anarchism, imaging it is the
only way bureaucracy or crony capitalism,
enjoying letting go of self… in the plane but wondering why I’m leaving but still going. If not now, when will I go? I missed the Velvet Revolution or Prague Actions in 2000? When will I have time if not now? I’m so
consumed with work or the stories of our Bacchanalian carnival if life
experience… of dancing with Times Up! or
organizing, creating gardens, and fighting back against the pain and oblivion
of our system of profit driven war and prisons and violence and foreclosure and
jail and ethnic cleansing… And imagining where to go while trying to elude the inevitable
violence of our system. At Judson, we
bear witness to it… fighting it… in Times Up! we attempt to defy it. But the pain is still there. But so is the map to another way to be. With each ride, we sketch an ethnography of
people’s resistance… from Passolini’s steps through Rome, through DuBord’s
endless strolls through Paris, tracing an alternate routes of the streets of world
cities , as a new dialectical urbanism takes shape.
Before I leave Prague, I hope to see the street theater Monica
describes, the subterranean Prague, of the surrealists, of Tomas Masaryk, of
the Plastic
People of the Universe, and their story of the collective liberation.
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| Plastic People of the Universe « Shrine of Dreams |
At 11:30 AM we landed in Dusseldorf in the rain. There is still a contact high to walking out
of the airport in a new continent,
seeing newspapers in other languages, hoping for a coffee, but being ok, in the
daze of the middle of the night, middle of the day, in between feeling, catching
a connection to Berlin where I hope to catch a train to Praha. Caroline and I were texting. Maybe I should take the train from there I
wrote her. Nah, just take the train from
Prague she suggested. It will be
quicker.
First a bus, then a train to central station, where I bought
tickets for the 4:48 train to Praha. Waiting
in line for a ticket, the ticket woman scolded me for not getting a ticket for
my place in line. “Welcome to the fatherland,” Caroline texted
back. “Scolding are their way.”
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| Soviet tanks moving in for the Coup. |
Today, much of this drama feels absent from the streets of
Berlin. But they also feel open to
graffiti, wheat posting, and art in ways often absent ours. The city is full of
its invitations to participate in DIY Culture. With an hour and a half before my train, I walked about… enjoying the sites of graffiti, an invitation to a party, a museum, some art, and the feeling of an open city awake in history.
Anxious to get there on time and make it to Praha by 9:30 I
jumped on the train at 4:30, ordered a beer, looked out the countryside, and started
to feel on top of things. What I did not know was there was a 4:38 train to
Munich going in the opposite direction, on which I was riding, instead of the
4:47 to Praha.
Laughing I texted Caroline. “Of for Christ sake. Hope you got off.” she advised.
By this point, the Germans were starting to feel sorry for me. I was still sleep deprived and more than a
little out of it. The fun part of
travelling is allowing things to just happen.
A lovely lady at the next station helped me with an itinerary to travel
through Leipzig and then Dresden and then to Praha, arriving at 11:30 PM,
provided I make all my connections.
So I waited around for my next connection, taking me to
Leipzig, where I looked for my next connection, realizing I had gotten off one
train station too early. There was the Leipzig
stop and then the Leipzig Hbf stop, I
was quick to learn. I had gotten
off one too early. My next train was
not for an hour.
Texts started flowing in full of suggestions – get a car, go
find Marc, our LA friend from the Journal of Aesthetics who lives there. The comedy of errors and suggestions were
many.
“Maybe you should have taken the train from Dusseldorf,”
Caroline noted as I stood stranded at the Leipzig train station drinking a
beer. “The girls think its hysterical. But we can’t understand how you got to Liepzig.”
By the time I got to Dresden I had missed the train to
Praha. I would send up sleeping by the
train somewhere between Dresden and Praha, in a small town called Zittau, hoping to catch
the 4:51 AM train to Liberec , then to Turnov and finally Praha at 8:34. Birds chimed in throughout the night… as I
read, thought and wondered about my life, lost on the train. What about my life had brought me to this
point, lost in my life, looking out into the woods, in ZIttau, texting my kids
in the US, who thought the whole thing was hilarious. And to an extent, so did I. You never knew why a street or trip takes you
where it takes you. What book it brings
along… Scott Crowe’s homage to disaster relief keep me up all night reading,
especially when the pavement became too chilly to sleep on, or the anti
homeless benches kept me from stretching
out. But the psychic energy of all the trains, of all the German trains
traveling, up and down the country with unyielding efficiency, this started to
wear on me, being stuck here.
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| bahnhof-zittau-warten |
The following morning I caught all my trains.
Still it was ok to be lost in my life, in my story. There was something poetic about losing my
way on the way to the city where some many others had found their way to
participate in Surrealist escapades.
In 1926 Andre Breton came to Prague.
"I am very happy to be speaking today in a city outside
of France which yesterday was still unknown to me, but which of all the cities i had not visited, was by
far the leave foreign to me. Prague with its legendary charms is, in fact, one
of those cities that electively pin down
poetic thought which is always more or
less adrift in space. Completely
adrift from the geographical,
historical, and economic considerations that this city and its inhabitants may lend themselves to, when viewed from a distance, by the magic capital of old
Europe.... By the very fact that [Prague]
carefully incubates all the
delights of the past for the imagination..... it seems to me that it would be
less difficult for me to make myself understood in this corner of the world
than any other...."
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| prague writers |
Throughout the lovely train ride through
the countryside, I reflected on the history of the region. My mind trailed back to the late 1930’s as I
looked the gorgeous Sudetenland Chamberlin was more than happy to allow the
Nazi’s to annex without consequence, ushering in a disastrous period. This area would suffer the longest occupation
by the Nazis, 1939-45.
Arriving in Prague, I felt a warm kinship passing the statue
of Good King Wenceslas, and the square I had seen full of throngs of the crowd
two decades prior. I thought of Havel,
of being a kid reading Unbearable
Lightness of Being, of the Prague 1968, when the Dubacek called for a “Socialism
with a human face” only to watch the tanks roll in. Twenty one years later, Havel brought him
back to address the crowd chanting “Chechoslovakia!!!!” All these memories, of my studies of the spasms
of modernity - (1918, 38,45,48, 68, 89) of Prague, it call came flowing back,
looking at the city with my own eyes for the very first time.
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| images of prague spring 1968 |
My hotel was in the lovely Mala Strana neighborhood.
Fortunately, my conference wasn’t for a few hours. So I walked through the town, delighting in
the cobble stones, the pubs, stores, cafes and poetry teeming from the
streets. Cities such as this with a “history
as long and convoluted as Prague’s” they are far more than the bricks and mortar. They are a testament to some idea, a reason people
came here through history. “It is also a dream world of signs and
symbols, memories, and desires, explains Derek
Sayer in Prague: A Surrealist
History. This is a space where Kafka
walked, along side revolutionaries, bureaucrats, anarchists, and anti-Semites,
where tanks rolled, history was make and
the glimpses of something both horrible and wonderful impacted what life
would be, in between occupations, periods of independence, political shifts,
revolutions, battles, and protests. Walking over the Manes Bridge, through Jan
Palach Square, I looked up seeing an image of what looked like angels,
reminders of Benjamin’s angels of history. As
Benjamin wrote in his Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History.
But do we move forward with an arch of justice as MLK
suggests we do? This is never quite
clear. It certainly was not clear
walking through the Jewish Cemetery, looking at the memories to those lost at
the final solution of history.
The first night, Rob, my oldest buddy from college. Back then, he used to drive the van of rugby players across Southern California. Today, he writes and teaches
at Exeter, we stumbled upon a tavern on
Ujezd, between our hotel and the conference site, which seemed to be designed
by Salvidor Dali. With a metallic worm
seemingly crawling from the ceiling, a steel bust on the bar, and the scent of
pot whiffing through the air, and absinth and bir in abundance, the place
quickly became our go to spot. We'd hang
out at klub
ujezd all week long.
Another observer noted.
Another observer noted.
At the conference, folks from Australia to California, New
York to South Africa, told stories, held workshops, drank coffee and wine, and
shared approaches to global storytelling, method and practice.
“Take a look a three pictures of your choice. Write down what they mean to you,” one
instructor told us. So I grabbed a
picture of a college square, reminiscent of the square in Chariots of Fire,
where they raced, scholarship and play, history and bodily experience intermingling. The pictures triggered a memory of hanging
out with my grand mom before she passed three decades prior.
“Identify a story
about yourself and pick a pivotal moment in your life,” she instructed us.
“Spring 1983, I visited my grandparent’s house for a week. It
was one of the last times before they left” I scribbled down.”
“Now circle three
words which resonate with you,” she told us. I circled “before they left”
recalling the old song quote they used to put in high school yearbooks. “Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes now
is time for one of those goodbyes…” A flurry of feelings, a deep resonance of
sadness, thinking of the gals, o f an aging father back home…. We all have
those goodbyes. But they are part of the cycles of our lives, just hopefully
not now. Few of us are ever really
completely friends with sister death.
In between conference days of stories, I walked to and from,
visiting a book store over and over, drinking coffee from the same spots, the
city started feeling more and more familiar.
I started to feel like I was in college again. Rob and I hung out every night, talking
writing, friends, history, marriage, chaos, love, literature and death.
Walking over the Charles Bridge, we saw college huddling in the corners, sharing a bottle of wine, hanging out. Two decades ago I was one of those kids. Time passes but the art still lingers.
Walking over the Charles Bridge, we saw college huddling in the corners, sharing a bottle of wine, hanging out. Two decades ago I was one of those kids. Time passes but the art still lingers.
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| Top Charles Bridge in winter. Middle 17th-century-crucifixion-statue-on-charles-bridge-in-prague-czech-republich. Bottom at night. |
Rob suggested I visit the Kafka museum where I was left
painfully aware of the fragile nature of creativity and our lives and
cities. “This narrow circle encompasses
my whole life…” Kafka reflected, drawing a picture of Prague’s old town. Finishing
the tour, I walked back over the Charles Bridge into the old city neighborhood
which encircled him, seemingly suffocating him, leaving a psychological
geography of pain and a portrait of a twentieth century psyche. Walking through the labyrinthine streets, I
got lost one last time on the trip, finding my way to the Mucha Museum of art
nuveau. Walking back to the Square, someone was playing Mac the Knife and I
thought of the throngs of college students who came here after the revolution,
including Caroline, and my brother Will, walking through Wenceslas Square one
more time.
Looking at the site where the tanks rolled in crushing the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, little did I know bulldozers were moving in on the Nothing Yet Garden we had created over the previous weeks in Williamburg, Brooklyn. Instead of the tanks which crushed “socialism with a human face” bulldozers decimated our little garden, where we hoped to bring a little humanity to our capitalist city.
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| Old Town Square and the tanks rolling in to crush Prague Spring 1968. |
Looking at the site where the tanks rolled in crushing the Prague Spring uprising of 1968, little did I know bulldozers were moving in on the Nothing Yet Garden we had created over the previous weeks in Williamburg, Brooklyn. Instead of the tanks which crushed “socialism with a human face” bulldozers decimated our little garden, where we hoped to bring a little humanity to our capitalist city.
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| photo times up |
·
On May 05, 2013, at 7:01p.m., Paula at 596 Acres said:
Housing Preservation and Development is
the agency handling the Request for Proposals for this site as a housing
development. You can try contacting Jack Hammer and asking for the best person
to speak to about the "LPC Warehouse RFP" to get more information
about when/whether the winning proposal will be announced. Jack Hammer:
212-863-8667
In addition, the community board may
have information: (718) 389-0009
For reference, the RFP again: http://www.nyc.gov/html/hpd/downloads/pdf/LPC-Warehouse-RFP.pdf
·
On May 23, 2013, at 10:03a.m., Richard at 596 Acres
said:
Here's what's going on...
·
On May 23, 2013, at 11:36a.m., Richard at 596 Acres
said:
And here's the Press Release from HPD
·
On May 23, 2013, at 11:42a.m., Paula at 596 Acres said:
(718) 389-9044 http://northbrooklyn.org/
·
On May 23, 2013, at 11:45a.m., Keegan said:
This morning at 7am the sanitation
department showed up at the garden with a bulldozer and dump trucks. They said
that HPD has asked them to "clean up the lot." Two reps from HPD were
with them. When we arrived and tried to talk to them, they told us that we had
"been sqautting just long enough," and to call the commissioner. They
gave me the phone number we have called and left messages on numerous times,
which is still not being answered or returning calls. They destroyed all the
planters and benches rather than giving us a chance to move them, and even
removed all the rocks we had organized as pathways.
· On May 23, 2013, at
11:51a.m., keegan said:
thanks paula, i couldn't find it on
their website
·
On May 23, 2013, at 4:22p.m., Rose said:
It's really too bad that none of the
benches, planters and plant materials couldn't be salvaged and donated. Don't get
discouraged everyone :) Stay positive.
·
On May 24, 2013, at 5:38p.m., Keegan said:
New development: HPD told us that where
we were gardening is not part of the RFP recently won by NBDC. They told us
that HPD is still in charge of it and would be the ones to say we can legally
garden there. They said the only person who could make such a decision is
Charlie Marcus. His number is 212-863-8961. We left a message. He has not yet
returned our calls.
On May 22, 2013 HPD announced that North Brooklyn Development
Corporation had won the RFP and would be developing the lot this year. After
finding out about the RFP announcement, Time’s Up volunteers were eager to talk
to North Brooklyn Development Corporation and find out if they would permit the
garden until development started, or even include a garden in the plans, since
the RFP requires open space. Instead, the next day at 7:00 A.M., the City’s
Department of Sanitation destroyed the raised beds, picnic tables, benches, and
stage, and bulldozed the garden. Volunteers called HPD on the spot. When HPD
finally returned their calls, they were told that the lot was actually not part
of the RFP, still belonged to HPD, and would remain vacant. HPD came in without
any warning, destroyed valuable materials that the organization can never get
back, and reversed hundreds of hours of hard work put into cleaning and
beautifying this lot. If they would have just given us a reasonable amount of
time, we would have moved the raised beds, tables, benches, stage, and beehive
to another location.
Dozens of people approached the gardeners as the
bulldozers demolished the lot, offering their condolences and support. “I’ve
been watching you guys work on this from my office window, and it looked just
great,” one person said. “It doesn’t make any sense, this lot was full of trash
for 20 years and they never cleaned it up until you guys started gardening
here.” If the garden had been destroyed by the developer who had bought the
lot, the gardeners could have understood the impetus to clean the space, but we
are all confused as to why the City spent its own money and resources
destroying a project that had extensive community support and no complaints.
Even though this garden was destroyed, at a huge loss of resources and
volunteer efforts, Time’s Up will continue to struggle to create the open space
that the community so desperately desires, both in this lot and others.
Bulldozing the space, the city worker confessed he felt like
a Nazi, but he was just following orders.
History is really driven by these dialectical forces, increase,
reduce,. We fight for land, but
ownership is illusory. No one owns
it. Still battles over symbolic
ownership churn through history.
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| photo times up! |
I’d make my train back to Berlin easily, catching some kids wheat pasting in the streets on my way to my hotel in Berlin, a city which feels like a friend, its train lines from the Tiergarden to the Zoo.
These days the circle of my life expands and expands from Prague to Berlin to the Lower East Side, to Vieques, California, Texas and Brooklyn, and back again, back over the bridge and back. It was hard leaving Prague once it got its claws in me. But the trip was worth it. So was the journey home, back to New York, to romp around from downtown to Washington Square and the Lower East Side once again.
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| Picture outside Children's Magical Garden, where fences have gone up. Photo by Peter Shapiro |
Visiting my favorite gardens, many have fences in them now, as the city inserts its claims and claws. The encroachment of the private into the public. This is a global problem. Increase, reduce, the dialectics of history offer an opportunity for another velvet revolution around the corner, if we can wait, be patient, persistent, creative, joyous, and industrious.
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| Why not asked members of nothing yet garden on Monday memorial day... back in their garden. |
