TOMORROW is the night. Join us at the launch party where you can buy a copy of the zine, hear Valerie Stivers, , , and Jonah Howell read, and meet some cool people. RSVP here.
And if you can’t join us, then order a copy here.
For now, we will leave you with the intro to the zine vol. iii.
In a letter written to one of his [rough trade] boytoys, Pier Paolo Pasolini expressed that it was easier for him to get down with the uncouth, rough-and-tumble [deplorable] Neapolitans than with the very cultured, open-minded Romans. Unlike the cosmopolitan Romans, the Neopolitans were chill, fun to be around, and—for lack of a better term—“real.” You could have an actual conversation with them. They would tell you to your face (and sometimes punch you in the face) if they were mad at you. And they had a vivacious sense of spontaneity. There was nothing manufactured, mass produced, or algorithmic about them. He attributed this to the fact that their distinctive local culture had yet to be steam-rolled out of them by what he called the spirit of “Development” (aka “globohomo”).
Pasolini—being the consummate contrarian that he was—was not content to “do as the [homogenized] Romans do.”
As I went for my daily errands around Bay Ridge, Brooklyn this week, I couldn’t help but think that Pasolini would be encouraged by the cast of characters I encountered. On my way to Mass, I passed a middle-aged guido cursing at the top of his lungs to some poor unfortunate soul on the other end of the phone. Upon making my way out of the church, I said goodbye to the self-proclaimed “crazy Italian lady” who reminded me that God loves me and told me to watch out for the rats running amok on the streets, as she “wouldn’t want anything to happen” to me. I got a cawfee at the deli nearby and plopped down on the bench out front to sip, light up, and check my phone. While I was busy doomscrolling away, the owner came out and put a “be back in an hour” sign on the door. Five minutes later, a lady attempted to enter before noticing the sign.
“Yeah he just stepped out like a few minutes ago.” I told her. “What? You gotta be kidding me! What am I gonna do without my cawfee? I may as well go kill myself!” she lamented. “The guy down the block’s cawfee isn’t that bad tho.” I told her, in an attempt to console her. “Yeah, yeah, ok. You’re right. He ain’t half bad.”
I wouldn’t call Bay Ridge residents “friendly”—at least not in the conventional sense. They will rarely acknowledge you if you pass them by on the sidewalk (and if you do, they’ll think there’s something wrong with you). But when the circumstances compel us to make conversation, it’s always genuine—and never for the sake of propriety itself.
Just a little while later, the guy at the baklava store started making small-talk with me while bagging my box of pistachio maamoul—I’m assuming the weather, soccer stats, the grim fate of geopolitics…I can’t exactly be sure, as he was speaking in Arabic. When I indicated that I didn’t understand a word of what he was saying, he warmly replied, “ah, that’s ok habibi.” The owner of the bookshop where I buy my books (#BoycottAmazon) kvetched to me for 10 full minutes about having to fire a 22 year old employee because she kept coming late to work, using her #mentalhealth as an excuse. Upon telling her she had to let her go, the girl pulled the feminist card, insisting—between sobs—that it meant so much to her to “work for a woman-owned business.” “The hell is wrong with these kids today? None of them wanna work.”
Bay Ridge-native
writes that there exists a “psychological chasm” between the parts of New York City’s outer boroughs that have taken on the lifestyle and mentality of Manhattan’s “professional class” and the “deep” parts that retain the borough’s local flavor. Barkan remembers a time when Brooklyn neighborhoods that are now heavily gentrified were strongly ethnic “industrial outposts,” where the sense of neighborliness was more organic and spontaneous than artificial and put-on.One is unlikely to find many rainbow flags or “In this house…” yard signs in deep Brooklyn neighborhoods like Bay Ridge (one middle-aged lesbian resident complained to me that—despite being “all for gay rights”—she’s “had enough with all this rainbow bs”). Surely, the inhabitants of these neighborhoods hold a variety of “problematic” views. But in the least, one is certain to find diversity in these hoods—and not the kind that the denizens of Williamsburg and Bushwick claim to champion. I’m talking about the kind of diversity with roots that reach way beyond the surface of one’s identity…that constitutes the real stuff of their personality, beliefs, customs, and way of perceiving the world around them. The Arabs, Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, Koreans, Irish, Norwegians, and Eastern Europeans of Bay Ridge still retain their distinctive cultural markers, thus making the neighborhood more rife for conflict…as well as for enriching cultural exchanges.
The rootedness, the lack of polish and pretension in the depths of the boroughs dispose their residents to being able to forge a community that is as raunchy and caustic as it is organic and spontaneous. There exists an air of originality, conviviality, diversity, and countercultural energy—precisely because they do not try to make it so. Their culture is much greater than anything they could have fabricated by their own individual effort: It is the fruit of something passed down through generations by people with a real commitment to the place, and to the people and institutions it is home to.
Despite being a queer artist-type, I don’t think Pasolini would’ve liked living in Bushwick very much. He feared that the youth counterculture—which prized originality and authenticity—was at risk of becoming what it claimed to most despise: conformist. Their naive understanding of individual agency made it difficult for them to recognize its capacity to be covertly manipulated by the “abstract” powers-that-be, thus making them increasingly vulnerable to becoming consumerist robots under the guise of being “liberated individuals.”
Deep Brooklyn is far from a utopia. But at least the strong personality types one finds there—with their roots in that which transcends themselves—are less amenable to being turned into homogenized automatons.
Why, you may ask, does Cracks in PoMo insist on continuing to go on about ethnic roots and local culcha? As
(who seems to be the only one who truly gets what we’re about) wrote in response to our Friday Night Talk at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse:The mission of Cracks is not to affirm a studied neutrality, hiding from political commitments in aestheticism, but to create the preconditions for free thought and action. It challenges the ethical and political assumptions of garden variety leftism, but it does so in the service of actually disrupting the existing system. And when I say “system” I don't just mean it in the external “filthy rotten” sense of our governmental and economic systems, but the internal ideological and psychological systems that structure our experience in the secular world.
As we keep trying to tell you, we love ethics, we’re all for political engagement. But without first establishing a solid foundation in aesthetics (culcha) and a sense of metaphysical enchantment, we will never get anywhere. (Also peep the fact that we’ve done all of our photo shoots for the zine in the same ethnic barrio in NJ.) And in Nathan’s words, “opening up these aesthetic cracks is itself a form of resistance, resistance against the ideological constraints of our time.”
So crack open this issue and savor all the morsels of wisdom it contains within—as it may be your last hope to resist the onslaught of the “Roman” conquest.