City of expectation.b copy

PHILLIP.BALDWIN@GMAIL.COM
CITY OF EXPECTATION
1Thursday, August 8, 2013

CITY OF EXPECTATION
CITY OF EXPECTATION: real estate, markets, race, alterity and the stories people tell themselves about nesting.
Keywords: real estate, spatial practices, narratology, markets, race, identity, liberalism, peak oil, welfare state, suburbs vs. inner city projects, modernism,
post-modernism, urbanism, architecture, nesting, mammalian psychology, wastelands, human wastelands, post-industrialism, speculation, bubble
schemes, utility, use value, entitlements, climate, telematic society, work, internet, cell phones, mobility, slums, alienation, commuting, anomie, middle
landscape, wilderness, Thoreau, commuting, food, agriculture, DIY society, youth, interconnected global urbanism.
This is a film about spatial practices, lifestyles, identity, and markets.
This is a film about expectations of lifestyle of the future as compared to the market expectations of that in the present.
This is a film about mammalian psychology and behavior: how do humans acquire territory, maintain an idea of nesting, replication, and destiny; how they
align an aesthetic concept of ‘use’ and the usefulness of their contingent lives. It is a film about the encroachment of ‘exchange value’ onto those things
we assumed to be of ultimate use: loved ones, family, shelter from the elements, the ability to make use of their skills. This is a film of the urban spaces of
‘alterity’ that exist outside of ‘space as identity’ practices within the suburbs and inner city projects. This is a film on how these ‘rational’ mammals defend
these spaces from present or future ‘danger’…or ‘the other’.
Damon is a young man who has just graduated from Bennington College. He is of mixed black and white races, he got a degree in writing and literature,
and, because he fulfilled some aspect of a minority requirement, only has 80k in debt. His classmates have over 140k in debt. He grew up in a sheltered
suburb of Boston and wishes to become a writer. Growing up he had experienced types of racism from both black and white cultures. Personally he
wishes not to be identified as either. He did well in high school and did well in college. He was popular and could also spend many days in solitude
writing. He considers himself socially ambidextrous. He was liked by his New England professors but suspected that they gave him higher grades
because of his ‘identity’. If his classmates suspected this they never held this against him. He had a preference in dating white or Asian American women
but had nothing against dating black women if he could find them in rural New England or his college. He knew he would like to earn a living at writing
fiction. He knew that his experiences at the college where hermetically contained with money and time. He also knew that this college has degenerated
into a permissive spa. He considered that one of his gifts was that he could ‘keep it real’ unlike the other suburban white kids with tattoos.
Now he is in Brooklyn and he must find a job. He must determine an aesthetic way to ‘turn a buck’. This is all he knows about how to precede at this.
There are no trails of breadcrumbs, and none of his professors could start to help him. He was told to go into copywriting in advertisement. This is not an
option for him. He knows that some of the greatest writers in American society had made some ‘time’ for themselves to experience things a typical middle
class individual can’t or wont’ experience in order to refine their writing. To Damon writing is about experiences. He moves to Brooklyn to continue his
‘research’ on his only hunch for starting to live and work outside of spending and making debt with his education.
In order to make some time for his capacity to experience the world, ‘life’, as any petite bourgeois wouldn’t out of inclination Damon sets in some
‘freedom’ from a career path that would make him exclude travel, and the ability to use his free time. He becomes a barista at a hip, local coffee shop in a
‘turning over’ neighborhood. He knows that he would like to spend a few months in Europe and in Asia but his parents said that they are done spending
money on him. He is free. Before his loans kick in he needs to make money fast to travel really rough. While he is living in this neighborhood where
many of his friends and many from colleges very similar to his have dumped them he is open to experience a great variety of social and sexual
circumstances. He never really gets into hard drugs though he has dabbled in them, and he has no interest in taking on a permanent girlfriend although
he has ‘maintained’ regular booty call with two women that he visits ritually on different days of the week.
How is Damon using this space he lives in? Is this a ‘temporary’ spatial practice for him, or will he have greater demands of space, money, a career, so
that he becomes ‘locked into’ this neighbor hood that he chose? He has to have roommate because even his edgy ghetto is much too pricy for his $8 and
hour that he earns as a barista. He has been mugged twice and one at knife point where he received a cut on his hands. He had gotten one of his
girlfriends pregnant and she had wanted to have the baby because it would ‘start their lives’. He was only out of college a year and all of this had
happened to him he convinced this ‘booty call’ girlfriend to have an abortion and for this he had to borrow $1500 dollars. He wrote a short story about
this and it was published. He is no closer to his travels and he is locked in a space that is changing rapidly because of the expectations of the realtors to
start to gentrify it with newly graduated college students who wish to maintain a bohemian lifestyle. They open more coffee shops.
Damon is one assigned piece on a chessboard. Around him many other pieces move in unison and play a ‘non-zero-sum’ game of living harmoniously
and affordably. But are they? Some of the other pieces on the board are the realtors/developers, the African Americans who have lived in these
neighborhoods since coming from the south and Caribbean two generations ago for service and industrial jobs. There are cops for the drug lords who
push temporary ecstasy to the misery of existing in slums. They cycle criminals out quickly with the hope that they die off sooner.

CITY OF EXPECTATION
There are the loving parents of recent graduates who are emptying their pensions to help their kids with rent. There are Manhattan realtors making a lot
of money developing slums and leaving them fallow for twenty years or so as a loss until the first ‘hip’ café’s show up. There are women in their mid
thirties who are trying to line up ‘reliable’ men as supporting fathers for their children. We see cycles of mammalian behavior that have continued on for
millions of years, yet, we see a heat under the bit cities of the world: every aspect of this animal’s life comes with a price, and a speculation. Love, food,
babies, shelter from the storm is never and ‘entitlement’ as when the hominid lived in small tribes. Every step, every inch of Damon’s waking life is spent
in speculation that he will complete his destiny as a writer of ‘experience’, and, possibly, make some money at what he loves to do especially in this space
of Brooklyn.
Meanwhile the dynamics of this forest provides him with experiences of all sorts.
This is a documentary film that looks beyond the modernist construction of villains and victims, and takes a position that human ‘culture’ is adaptive to hide
some of the brutalities of mammalian behavior in highly concentrated places. It entertains the ‘materialistic’ approach in a cut and paste phenomenological
(anti-essentialist view of victims and victors) manner on how space is used when every aspect of a human’s perceived life span and space is
commoditized. It is a film that is critical of the NIMBY liberal ‘modernist’ view of constructing historical victims as victims of the dominant culture of
commodity consumption. It is an inspection of a type of hatred of the very middle class that is evaporating in economic disparity.

CITY OF EXPECTATION

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