Streets Of New York Research Articles

ISOLATED IN THE BIG CITY: (RE)FORMING THE IDENTITY OF THE PROTAGONIST-FLÂNEUR IN TEJU COLE’S OPEN CITY AND SRĐAN VALJAREVIĆ’S PEOPLE AT THE TABLE

The goal of this paper is to establish a connection between the ways identity is formed in the novels Open City by Nigerian-American author Teju Cole and People at the Table by Serbian author Srđan Valjarević. The protagonists of the aforementioned novels are immigrants who have found themselves in the isolated and urban space of the metropolis and are now trying to establish their place within it. We shall explore Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the flȃneur in an urban environment that greatly differs from the narrators’ previous homes. A reconfiguration of identity is necessary and this is accomplished through walking – an unconscious search for identity and its roots. We may ask ourselves: Is the city a constitutive element of the subject, or is the subject a social product of the city? The streets of New York and Amsterdam present the protagonists with opportunities to think about not only their current positions but their pasts. Confused and dissatisfied, they move within the big city searching for ways to accept their fates. A common element of both novels is the continual reflection of the past and social positions. The city forms the protagonists’ identities to the point that it creates a sense of disorientation and helplessness, thus destroying them. Walking is the most significant aspect of both novels, as only in movement can the identity of these flȃneurs come to light.

Biotechnological Invention and IPR: Patent Waiver for Covid-19 Vaccine

For as long as one can remember, Intellectual Property Rights or rather the protection conferred by virtue of Intellectual Property Rights has enabled innovators to come up with exciting new inventions and discoveries which have had a significant impact on the human society in order for it to make strides in innovation and development. For instance, the invention of the Light Bulb by Thomas Edison and securing its patent helped him manufacture the light bulb and market it easily. As a consequence of which, the light bulb can now be found in each house and the patent protection ensures the right of the inventor over its discovery and prevents others from copying it. However, the other viewpoint is that had it not been for patent protection, the light bulb would have been more common in the streets of New York when it was invented and owing to the high market competition, it would even lead to being sold at cheaper prices. From this vantage point, the conscious decision of not patenting the Polio vaccine was taken, for it was a biotechnological invention that eventually helped in the eradication of Polio from the world. Had the makers of the Polio vaccine decided to patent the invention, it would not have been as accessible as it is. This paper attempts to focus on theories of social justice and ascertain the philosophy behind the Intellectual Property Rights in terms of biotechnological inventions tracing their journey from where it started to how far along it is in the process of making human lives simpler in the present times. Furthermore, the paper attempts to bring forth the repercussions of patenting the Covid-19 Vaccine and the implications, both social and legal, of the “Covid-19 vaccine waiver” trend which seems like a promising avenue amidst these times when a global pandemic is wreaking havoc on the entire world.

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Fides et ratio – naturalny konflikt czy symbioza?

Contrary to the metaphor of Fides et ratio included in the encyclical and meaning that faith and mind are like two wings, on which a human spirit is carried up to contemplation of the truth, there seems to be a dominant trend in the contemporary mentality, namely that of opposing the two realities, which was manifested in a famous billboard war on one of the streets of New York. You KNOW it’s a MYTH. This Season Celebrate REASON – called the American Atheists association just before Christmas. You know it’s real. This season celebrate Jesus – the Catholic League responded with its own poster. Opposing the faith and reason, religion and science is a sign of ideology, which is blind to common human experience of the necessity to accept a series of truths as true, including those, which individuals cannot verify themselves. Believing, which, within the meaning of the classical definition, is „thinking under the pressure of will”, relates both to trivial and everyday matters as well as grand matters extending horizons of human cognition disproportionately. The reason is open to fate and it “sees” more and more and the faith is free of any overgrown credulity or superstitions.

"Just to Be , and Dance ": Jerome Robbins, J. S. Bach, and Late Style

Abstract: Jerome Robbins (1918–1998), known as the first important American-born ballet choreographer, set over sixty ballets and numerous pieces for Broadway during his lifetime. His success can be attributed not only to his assimilation of different choreographic styles, but also to his attentiveness to the music. He was equally adept at setting a wide variety of musical styles, ranging from Frédéric Chopin (viz., The Concert 1956), Leonard Bernstein (viz., West Side Story 1957), and J. S. Bach (viz., The Goldberg Variations 1971) to Alban Berg (viz., In Memory Of … 1985). If he excelled at realistic character portrayals in some settings, in others he created abstract visual realizations of the music. Although Robbins choreographed many musical styles throughout his career, he developed a special affinity for the music of Bach at the end of his life. It is notable that his final three new choreographies were all based on the music of Bach: A Suite of Dances (1994); Two& Three-Part Inventions (1994); and Brandenburg (1997). Moreover, Bach's music was the last that he heard before he died; the soft strains of a recording of Bach's French Suites reportedly filled the air as Robbins lay dying at his house on 81st Street in New York in 1998. Based on recordings, letters, essays, and other choreographic sketches, some unpublished, this essay examines Robbins's littlediscussed late Bach settings in relation to concepts of Late Style. While Robbins's settings of three final pieces by Bach might not be summative—that is, they might not be as epic, lengthy, and encyclopedic as his The Goldberg Variations from 1971—they can be seen as synthesizing a lifetime of choreographic styles, including ballet, modern dance, theater, and folk. Since they were all abstract realizations of Bach's music through movement, as opposed to narrative settings, Bach's music seems directly to have inspired Robbins's contrapuntal choreography. In turning to Bach for his final creative projects, Robbins was thus participating in certain ways of thinking about art that Edward Said has claimed can be associated with artistic Late Style, including counterpoint and fragmentation. In addition, aspects of the rhythmic energy and stylistic pluralism so central to Bach's music became muses for Robbins's multi-stylistic choreographies late in life, even as he displayed both nostalgia for the past and a newfound interest in youth and youthfulness. In drawing connections among the last works of Robbins, the music of Bach, and theories of Late Style, this essay provides one of the first explorations of concepts of Late Style in relation to choreography, an art form in which the aging body and the artistic work are closely linked. In addition, it contributes new knowledge not only about the late choreographies of Robbins, but also about movement responses to Bach's music, and ways in which Bach reception has intersected with characteristics of Late Style.

Gallop to Freedom: On the Importance of the Classical Sources for Gérôme’s Circus Maximus

Gallop to Freedom: On the Importance of the Classical Sources for Gérôme’s Circus Maximus Joan Mut Arbós (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pollice Verso, 1872. Phoenix Art Museum. One of the most important American private collections of the nineteenth century was that of Alexander Turney Stewart at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street in New York. In it, beginning in 1874, hung the spectacular work of the French academic artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (Vesoul, 1824–Paris, 1904): Pollice Verso (fig. 1), a painting which, thanks to the reproductions and photo engravings of Adolphe Goupil (dealer and later father-in-law of the artist), became so tremendously popular that it was the most prized possession of the valuable collection. Perhaps because of this, the educated patron—who, as it happens, had briefly made a living as a tutor of Greek and Latin literature before becoming immensely rich with his business1—commissioned another painting directly from the artist that could serve as a pendant to his famous painting. [End Page 55] This is how the dazzling Circus Maximus, also known as The Chariot Race (tt) was born, a work that completed the vision of the Roman ludi by Gérôme and for which Stewart paid the incredible sum of $29,000, a figure that remained a record never exceeded in the artist’s lifetime.2 Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 2. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Circus Maximus, 1876. The Art Institute of Chicago. George F. Harding Collection. The painting knew a wide diffusion thanks to the postcards and photogravures of Goupil,3 giving rise to numerous imitations, such as the famous Chariot Race in the Circus Maximus in the Presence of the Emperor Domitian by Alexander von Wagner.4 After a short time, moreover, its diffusion would also increase with the enormous success (to which its proto-cinematic nature undoubtedly contributed) of the novel Ben-Hur by Lewis Wallace (1880) and its famous scene of the chariot race, later consecrated in cinema as one of the landmarks of the contemporary imagination about the Roman world.5 Yet, despite the high figure that its owner paid for it and its influence on subsequent painting and cinema, Circus Maximus did not achieve anywhere near the critical success that Pollice Verso had garnered. In fact, of Gérôme’s entire series on the Roman ludi,6 this painting has aroused the least interest among critics and specialists. None other than Henry James, then a young journalist, wrote the following upon seeing the painting: Mr. A. T. Stewart has made a less brilliant acquisition. […] It is a capital example of the artist’s archaeological skill though it would require a specialist [End Page 56] to determine, on this line, its triumphs and its shortcomings. What the ordinary observer sees is that the painter has mastered a vast amount of curious detail, and after all, unless the ghost of some old Roman man about town comes back for the purpose, I do not see who is to prove that M. Gerome’s ingenious reconstruction is either a good likeness of the actual scene or a poor one.7 Such unfavorable receptions have persisted up to today. In its attention to fulfilling its patron’s commission, Circus Maximus has been seen as an example of what Ivo Blom defines as Gérôme’s “clinical approach to Antiquity.”8 Howard Oakley claims that this is one of the few canvases by Gérôme that leaves him cold.9 The great remoteness of the figures may, indeed, leave the viewer with such a feeling. Yet, Gérôme’s attention to “a vast amount of curious detail,” as James critically observed, is precisely why the painting deserves more attention for its “ingenious reconstruction.” It is in these curious details and in its clinical approach that a complex narrative might be better understood and those remote figures might come to life. ________ when the work crossed the Atlantic Ocean, it was followed by a small explanatory letter that would...

Connecting Smart Cities and Smart Villages: Providing Safe, Reliable Energy Delivery [In My View

As this issue of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IEEE Power &amp; Energy Magazine</i> addresses smart cities and smart villages, let us first address the connection between them. One lies in the history of electrical energy delivery. The first electrical systems were distributed, with electric power plants delivering power to local loads. Thomas Edison opened his first commercial electric power plant in 1882 on Pearl Street in New York, serving emerging city lighting. Within a decade, electric power had spread across the globe with many new applications. This expansion was accomplished by the construction of a reliable power pool or interconnected power system that focused on generating power from central generating stations.

A Library of One's Own

A Library of One's Own

The Image as Double-edged Sword – Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Non-violent Resistance to Fundamentalist Ideologies

ABSTRACT Both Don DeLillo and Jean Baudrillard have been critical of American culture, presenting it as a vapid culture fixated on the image – whether that means the actual products disseminated by film, television, print media and advertising, or the erecting of the imagined edifice of American exceptionalism and superiority that these products support. However, this article aims to show, through an analysis of DeLillo´s approach to the image in the novel Falling Man, that his relationship to the work of Jean Baudrillard is, in fact, a complicated and antagonistic one. Central to this complication and antagonism is DeLillo´s conception of the crucial role of the radical artist, particularly in times of historical upheaval, and his view of the ambivalent place America found itself in the days and years that followed the attacks of September 11. This article argues that the figure of his titular hero, Falling Man – the performance artist that haunts the streets of New York in the wake of the attacks – is presented as something Baudrillard would have seen as an impossibility; that is to say, as a source of orientation and unity in divisive times.

Irish outsiders: Performing Irish heritage on the streets of New York

This article analyses how the Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street in Lower Manhattan uses immersive techniques to provide visitors with an opportunity to engage with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant experiences. My specific focus is the apartment tour entitled, Irish Outsiders, a living history installation curated as part of the Museum’s Hard Times exhibit that recreates the cramped apartment of Joseph and Bridget Moore, real-life residents of 97 Orchard Street in 1869. The Moores left an Ireland traumatized by the Great Famine only to arrive at the challenges of New York City immigrant living. This immersive recreation of Joseph and Bridget Moore’s apartment staged for a Catholic wake links this specific Irish immigrant experience with that of loss, suffering, poverty and trauma. Drawing on Alison Landsberg’s concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ alongside frameworks of heritage performance, this article examines the Irish Outsiders as an immersive performance curated to reflect and shape the narrative tropes essential to the Irish immigrant experience implicit within an Irish-American heritage identity.

A Survey of Blockchain Solutions for Autonomous Vehicles Ecosystems

Since the beginning of the 2010s major car manufacturers progressively started to invest in Autonomous Vehicles(AV). Notable examples are Tesla, Ford, and Toyota. Small startups and tech giants like Google and Yandex are now also entering the competition to propose new solutions. Most of them have already developed their prototypes of driverless vehicles that you can normally observe in the streets of New-York, USA, or Innopolis, Russia. Despite the significant hype on this technology, current solutions are not always optimal and multiple challenges are left open in a domain such as security, data integrity, privacy, and communication. Blockchain is one of the most appealing technologies to be used in this domain since it provides solutions for some of these challenges. In this paper, we describe, categorize, and evaluate different solutions of the Autonomous Vehicles Industry that makes use of Blockchain. We use a software engineering approach to organize the existing work in multiple categories such as challenges addressed, quality attributes promoted. This work is intended to provide researchers in the field with a well-defined and structured categorization, plus insights into the existing literature.

Justifying the protest camp: How Occupy movements’ ‘intimate protest’ challenged ideas about legitimate manifestation

ABSTRACT The occupation of public space has become a key part of the repertoire of contention of contemporary social movements, at the heart of Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, Nuit Debout, and revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring. Despite the enormous resonance that these movements have had, they have also engendered criticism. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork of two Occupy movements–Occupy Wall Street in New York and Occupy Utrecht in the Netherlands–we show how media and other outsiders accused protesters of being insufficiently politically motivated, and overly concerned with what they considered to be ‘private matters’ such as sleeping and partying. By analysing debates and negotiations between protesters and outsiders over their right to occupy public space, we show how these encampments put received ideas on what constitutes a legitimate ‘political’ act of protest to the test. We propose the notion of ‘test’ from pragmatic sociology as a useful methodological and conceptual tool for social movement studies.

‘Unsung heroes of urban transportation’: architecture as environmental design in Emilio Ambasz’s Taxi Project

Curated by architect and industrial designer Emilio Ambasz, The Museum of Modern Art’s 1976 exhibition ‘The Taxi Project: Realistic Solutions for Today’ involved the development and display of five taxi prototypes from local and international automobile manufacturers. ‘The Taxi Project’ appears as a curious final act to Ambasz’s time as Curator of Design at the Museum. The taxis attracted significant criticism for both utilitarian and aesthetic aspects of their design, while the location of the vehicles within the gallery space of the Museum put them quite literally beyond reach for the general public. When the prototypes failed to appear on the streets of New York after the exhibition, ‘The Taxi Project’ would be remembered as an ambitious, if somewhat naïve, automobile show. By circling back on Ambasz’s written and exhibition-based outputs from the late 1960s, this article posits an alternative view of ‘The Taxi Project’ and, with it, Ambasz’s approach to environmental design. It situates ‘The Taxi Project’ within Ambasz’s almost decade-long project to reconfigure architectural production in relation to the urban environment after modernism. While the taxi was an important and effective lens through which to examine such problems, ‘The Taxi Project’ was never really about the cab.

Social media and hyper‐masculine work cultures

In this article, we aim to contribute to research on social media as an arena for gender relations and inequality by elucidating how social media and hyper‐masculine work cultures are interconnected. We focus empirically on the fiery social media commentary #MeToo sparked on Wall Street in New York. While the possibility of this movement backfiring has received relatively little research attention, we argue that online reactions illustrate the unpredictable nature of social media movements and their reception in organizations. Our analysis shows how they work to naturalize gender differences and polarize opinions, often with highly suspect humour. Focusing on interconnections of hyper‐masculine work cultures, on the one hand, and popular misogyny gaining ground online, on the other, offers ways to critically explore the constitutive role of social media as a medium in shaping contemporary workplaces and society. More research on social relations and technology is needed in organizations that are less obviously hyper‐masculine but deeply gendered nevertheless.

Cruising Devotion: On Carl Phillips

Cruising Devotion: On Carl Phillips Garth Greenwell (bio) The most beautiful bathroom in America is located at 208 West Thirteenth Street in New York, on the second floor of Manhattan’s LGBT Community Center. In 1989, just nine months before he would die of AIDS-related complications, the artist Keith Haring covered the bathroom’s walls with one of the great works of twentieth-century visual art, a mural entitled Once Upon a Time. In his cartoonishly thick black lines, Haring created a joyously obscene phantasmagoria of unleashed gay male promiscuity: men fucking each other and sucking each other off, but also men with penises for hands and feet and heads, anthropomorphic penises sprouting their own arms and legs, men riding huge cocks like rockets, their arms raised in triumph, a group of four men climbing—or maybe they’re humping it—the long neck of a penis-dinosaur. Male bodies penetrate and are penetrated in possible and impossible ways, to such an extent that it’s often difficult to know where one body ends and another begins. There’s no protection; everyone rides bareback. Men are ejaculated from penises, [End Page 166] parthenogenetic, engendered by jouissance. The mural is often seen as an ebullient celebration of sexual liberation, and of the defiant, resilient, heroic sexual communities that would be decimated by and survive AIDS, and it is. It’s also a celebration of gay male folk art, pornographic bathroom graffiti as dreamed by Picasso and Dalí. But it’s not only a celebration. It’s also a lament, as signaled by its title, equal parts fairy tale and elegy; it’s also a nightmare. The space around Haring’s penises is filled not just with his usual wavy lines signaling motion or vibrating energy, but with drops of semen, which shoot out of cocks maybe a little like machine gun fire (though are those bullets or hearts?), and by gargantuan tadpoles of sperm, at least one of which has a single X for an eye, that stick-figure sign of death; a sign too, surely, of the viral load it bears. The human figures are ecstatic, bacchanalian, enraptured; they’re also, at least some of them, sacrificial, as agonized as any lost soul in Bosch; whether they’re suffering transfiguration or disfigurement, it’s hard to say. A work of joy, yes, and also a work of rage, at the fact of AIDS and at America’s criminal indifference in the face of it, which would ensure, which continues to ensure, the deaths of hundreds of thousands; and also, it has seemed to me, a work of terror in the face of desire itself, which both exalts and deforms us. As one stands in the little room they adorn, the initial shock Haring’s images may cause is replaced by a profound feeling of awe, of being face to face with something bottomless, overwhelming, infinite, something that at once dwarfs us and shows us the immense scale of ourselves. Many gay men I know call the bathroom at the LGBT Center our Sistine Chapel, and that seems to me pretty much right, both in the company it claims for Haring’s genius and in the sense of the sacred I feel there. The terror Haring’s mural captures is a religious terror, I think, its joy a religious joy, by which I mean that they respond to forces that exhaust our reason and master our will. [End Page 167] Over more than three decades and thirteen books of poems, Carl Phillips has been conducting an inquiry into intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, that is as daring, as wild, and as reverent—as unflinching—as the inquiry I read in Haring’s mural. Central to this inquiry has been an analogy drawn repeatedly between what one might call marginalized sexual practices, especially cruising and gay male promiscuity, but also sadomasochism, and religious devotion. This analogy is made in several ways, at least three of which are evident in a famous early poem, “Hymn,” from Pastoral, Phillips’s fourth book. The first mode of analogy is the drawing of what we might call imagistic likenesses, which I think we see in...

Earthquake Forecast and Niels Bohr Postulates

People live, love, create families, build flowering cities, but earthquakes come and cities with all the inhabitants turn to dust. People are doing everything possible to protect themselves from underground catastrophes, but time is running out, and no progress has been made in the forecast of underground cataclysms, which could be gave people hope for a bright future. Scientists do not give up [1-5], and every year they develop more and more new methods of earthquake prediction, but all in vain. The problem, which seemed simple and understandable within the theory of the occurrence of earthquakes in the interpretation of Mr. Reid in which two tectonic plates (blocks) rub against each other and ”carves sparks” in harsh reality turned into an unsolvable mystery of nature. No matter how many seismologists struggle to solve it, no matter how much money the governments of many countries donate, geophysicists haven’t invented anything that deserves serious attention, and every next destructive earthquake turns out to be discouraged by researchers, like snow on the streets of New York in July. People tired of the promises of scientists, and they have suspicions crept: - Is there a solution to this puzzle in principle? In search of the answer to these questions, we came to the conclusion that the accurate forecast of earthquakes, unfortunately, contradicts the fundamental laws of physics, but thanks to the postulates of Niels Bohr, humanity has a great chance not to predict, but to prevent (!!!) seismic phenomena in densely populated areas or around technically important facilities.

Melville and the Question of Meaning by David Faflik

Reviewed by: Melville and the Question of Meaning by David Faflik Jaime Campomar david faflik Melville and the Question of Meaning New York: Routledge, 2018. 153 pp. David Faflik’s Melville and the Question of Meaning explores the unusual and sometimes oblique ways in which Melville generates meaning for his readers. Its chapters draw on various theoretical and methodological perspectives, including sociolinguistics, formalism, cultural studies, and historicism, to guide readers through Melville’s writings: Moby-Dick, Pierre, Israel Potter, “Bartleby,” and others. Without being flagged as such, chapters seem paired. The first diptych focuses on the minute, unsuspected ways that Melville produces meaning; the second on his resistance to conveying meaning at all; and the third on the ways in which contemporary critics and artists appropriate his meanings and his strategies for conveying them. In the first chapter, “Young American Puns: Antebellum Wordplay and Democratic Manhattan,” Faflik portrays antebellum New York City as a dynamic linguistic environment that featured punning as a central aspect of everyday language. He establishes that punning offered an opportunity for disrupting and upending speech, one that cosmopolites seized. Faflik sees a relationship between the rise of punning in the streets of New York and the literary interests of writers of the Young America group, who became aware of the democratizing potential of punning in their own works. He notes that within the Young America circle, some ways of punning were more democratic than others. For instance, he contrasts the punning of an established figure like Cornelius Mathews with less established ones like Melville. He argues that Mathews’s attempts to garner the Shakespearean pun for subversive purposes were ineffective because they merged two dissonant linguistic registers—lower-class pronunciation and upper-class prosody—and so ended up solidifying the aristocratic structures Mathews sought to dismantle (19). Faflik regards Melville’s ear as much more attuned to the multilingual sounds of downtown New York. He tracks instances of “city speech” in Moby-Dick, Pierre, and “Bartleby” in which Melville puns in ruthlessly democratizing ways. For example, in “Loomings,” Faflik finds allusions to alcohol in words like “belted” and “dive,” slang for drinking and a basement bar, respectively. These hidden references [End Page 97] find thematic resonance in the multitudes’ thirst for water and situate readers within the raucous atmosphere of the antebellum saloon. Through similar examples in Pierre and “Bartleby,” Faflik shows how the pun becomes Melville’s minimalist mode of signifying the archetypal urban space of the 1850s. In chapter 2, “Melville’s Little Historical Method,” Faflik shifts to analyzing the meaning of narrative form in Melville’s only historical novel, Israel Potter. He argues that here Melville writes against the traditional panoramic modes of history writing exemplified in George Bancroft and William H. Prescott, among others, in which national events are organized around teleological masterplots. Israel Potter, in contrast, narrates a different kind of history that anticipates New Historicist preferences for what Faflik calls “little history” (35). Melville’s little historical mode is manifest in different aspects of the novel’s form. The most apparent are the protagonist’s geographical waywardness and the truncated nature of the story’s serialized episodes, which undermine popular teleological plotlines. However, the aspect of this mode that Faflik emphasizes is the anecdote as an essential narrative unit. In the predilection for the anecdotal, Faflik sees the realization of Melville’s theory of little history, a “formal indicator” that signals to readers that any macrohistorical narrative can be “reduced” to the microlevel of everyday occurrence (50). Faflik argues that for Melville these minor incidents are full of historical significance and meaning as well, and that they demand readers to reflect on them rather than on the grand schemes of history. Thus, anecdotes become disruptors of “the complacent perpetuation” of the historical panoramic form and instead favor a democratic mode that Faflik sees as Melville’s “ethical purpose”: a disposition to write a history “for and from” the masses (52–53). In chapters 3 and 4, Faflik directs our attention to a different kind of rhetorical strategy: the withholding of meaning as a productive type of otherness. In chapter 3, “Antebellum Apathy: A Study of Indifference in Melville,” Faflik...

A Walk Up Nassau Street: Poe's Literary New York in the 1840s

Abstract As a member of the literary community of Nassau Street in New York in the 1840s, Poe achieved many lifelong career goals, benefiting from its many opportunities to achieve prominence through new publication, reflecting relative freedom from didactic restraints and greater toleration for experimentation in subject matter, tone, and aesthetic form.

New York Drifters

This article examines the legacy of the 'drift' in the work of two artists based in New York in the 1980s: Tehching Hsieh and David Wojnarowicz. Although distinctive in their methods and practices, both Hsieh and Wojnarowicz interrogate vagrancy as an extreme of urban walking, the unspoken endpoint of drifting. Wojnarowicz, who lived on the streets as an adolescent, reworks his experience of aimlessness into his fragmented, autobiographical prose work and his photographic project 'Arthur Rimbaud in New York'. Hsieh, a performance artist, embarked upon a durational work for which he vowed not to enter an interior of any kind for one year, and was thus forced to live on the streets of New York during this time. This article argues that these works re-assert the experience of the homeless, which is often elided or glossed over in accounts of urban walking and the traditions of thought that stem from Walter Benjamin's work on the flâneur and Guy Debord's theory of the dérive. Hsieh and Wojnarowicz also cast light upon the theatricality of the street, where social deviance or alterity is inferred according to outward appearances, and upon the mythologised figure of the 'drifter'. The article concludes by addressing tensions surrounding the ways that evanescent performance works like Hsieh's come to be immortalised, as well as the domesticating of once provocative works in gallery spaces caught up in networks of gentrification and/or erasure. It suggests that 'haunting' offers a way to conceive of the relationship between walking and vagrancy and the drift and its ghosts, obscured from view.

Dial P for psychiatry: two short essays about Alfred Hitchcock

Dial P for psychiatry: two short essays about Alfred Hitchcock