“…sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points.”
Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire

A few days a week, i walk up Grand Street from the flower shop to the falafel restaurant. I order a sandwich or a date and avocado smoothie and take it back to the store and eat while i’m working. This strip of Grand is one of my favorite streets in Williamsburg, and it looks almost the same as it did 7 years ago when I moved to Brooklyn. Walking back today, i noted again that one of the boutiques has retained a “Save Domino” poster in its front window–a once ubiquitous symbol of one neighborhood’s anti-gentrification polemic that has quickly become an emotional relic. As this blog regularly demonstrates, I am probably over-invested in a few formative nostalgic attachments i evidently cannot undo, so i might seem to have been an obvious participant in the fight to save the old waterfront structure, but every time i see that poster i can’t help thinking: fuck Domino. Why this long, drawn-out fight to save an icon of a product that–as Kara Walker’s installation (full title: At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant) made uncomfortably clear–is such a conspicuous emblem of structural violence? In other words, the transatlantic trade in sugar that triangulated slaves, sugar, and capital and drove the slave trade is a weird thing to, you know, get behind. And yeah, I did want to save it. I wanted to leave it there to rot. You know why? Because otherwise we’re allowed to forget.

Here’s a slight variation on the argument. One night i was driving home, listening to WFMU, and they were playing a live set. In between songs someone yelled “this song is about gentrification in Bushwick!” The band then played a pretty standard 2 or 3 minute punk song about someone whose baby left him for another guy. I live in Bushwick, so this made me chuckle at the nod to the trendiness, not only of moving to Bushwick but also of white people complaining about white people moving to Bushwick. Since I’m also boring and serious, let’s take the joke further. What can we make of this inadvertent, transitional link between displaced nostalgia and desire?

Because Kara Walker’s installation was so smart and so haunting, it’s now a permanent referent for “Domino” for me. Maybe it’s the leftover posters around the neighborhood and maybe it’s because I see the structure whenever I take the JMZ over the bridge, but it has preoccupied me. I honestly have no idea what the pro-Domino side was asking for, but I think it simply should have been left alone. Not neatly refunctioned into a clean new space that will bear polite traces of its sordid history, but taken out of the circuit of capital it so poignantly symbolizes. Better to be able to remember how capital, like the tar baby, like the rat trap, is almost impossible to resist. Why not a memorial to what happens when we don’t resist, rather than a quiet acquiescence to what Nikki Giovanni would curse, under her breath, as “progress”?

As for nostalgia and abandonment, isn’t this also what happens, at a certain point, to desire? I know the push is always to make a clean break; to move on. But why do to your heart what you wouldn’t do to your city? Maybe you like new things for their own sake and that’s cool, but that aligns you with a whole other set of ideologies–whether you’re interested in that information or not. I dream hard of the past because I can’t live there anymore. I don’t even want to be there, but I refuse to remove its scaffolding.