One of the Coney Island series. Yes, and the miners killing each other was the hard core Ashcan School. Notice the similarity to Delacroix Massacre of the Innocents, and other classical works, including Caravaggio's extreme foreshortening.
My theory on violence is that it is in direct proportion to the violence of the society within which people exist. So the Rome of Caravaggio's time was extremely violent in everday terms. Hence his dark and terrible paintings. He was a sexual psychopath and physically brutal. He murdered a guy over a tennis match, seduced boys from Genova to Palermo and ended up dead on a remote beach north of Naples for fucking the Duke of Malta's son.
The series episode of the The Wire where the two older boys turn Bug over to the bourgois Aunt to keep him safe made me cry. What other choice was there? And then they went separately to their doom---one a drug addict the other a killer.
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I keep thinking of the Angela Davis interview I posted the other day, where she expressed disbelief that someone could ask how she feels about violence. As you say, most of us haven't had the experience she's talking about. So what are "most of us" talking about when we talk about violence? Dennis Claxton
I have been thinking about this violence business. Violence is a very slippery word that obiviously means different things to different people. I am guessing that the deep insistance that any form of violence be rejected on principle, probably comes from experiences in a violent family life. Maybe I am projecting here. I was subjected to that kind of homelife and definitely don't recommend it. But it was a two way street. My two stepfathers beat up my mother and me less often. On the other hand, I now can look back and see my mother was not blameless. Her violence was of mostly non-physical, psychological kind, a wildly flithy mouth, a brutal knowledge of how to destory a male ego, and meticulous sense of timing of when, where, and how to deliver her attacks, which usually resulted in taking a beating. I would label these relationships co-dependencies. She would occasionally haul off and slug back. She managed once to break MOC's left back molar and he had to have it pulled. I was kind of proud of mom for that one. Of course I got the don't fight at school lecture, later.
Going to school was sort of a relief only to be confronted with some of the terror of the playground and the classroom, not to mention the blocks along major LA thoroughfairs and intersections. Weirdos, bums, many more office workers off the bus hurrying along, older kids, some of the older girls carried razor blades. One afternoon going home past old Belmont, the girls had a razor fight, blood all over, amublance, squad cars angry Mexican kids standing around.
There was Mexico, with the dead man on our street. When I asked a neighbor lady where he came from. she said, the cantina drunks, over there.
Then the terrors of getting lost in a vast foreign city where off the big streets only a single light bulb lighted the intersections. There always seem to be something dead somewhere. Many parts of the city had that smell of urine, fecies, open sewers something rotten, something dead. Our household burned incense and perfumed kerosene lamps as odor eaters. There are many aspects from the Aztecs to the bloody Christians that permeate Mexican society, in a mysticism of violence and death---or at least there used to be. The dead figures of the drug war, says it is very much alive.
Now that is just one level. In fact violence shouldn't really be seen as a single monolith, but a whole ecology of species and sub-species, and whole spectrums of almost zero to almost infinite. My personal gauge is war is the high range with WWII from Manchuria to Hiroshima, Warsaw and Auschwitz-Birkenau to Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin as the current pinnacle, although the mass collection of post WWII actions may have out distanced those high water marks. 27-30 something million Russians in four years, is a pretty steep goal to meet. The Stepp is brilliant Green, a terrible thought
A broken window or burning trash can is in the way low registers, below, way below ordinary rotten working class domestic violence. Even below their job violence and the much higher abuse in sweat shops.
Yes we certainly do want to get rid of most of it, but frankly that's not going to happen, so I (we) draw personal lines when to fight, when to walk away, when to sit down, when to sing, when to prepare for death. I have only one real law, never call the cops. Even with a break in, just run. Here's the logic. Cops show up after the bad stuff happens, so they are no protection. They do not prevent crime, they manage its aftermath in favor of the political and the rich.
My call is for a much more nuanced discussion of violence as part of the human condition.
CG