Image from Daily Mail about Luca, an animated movie from Disney/Pixar
Since starting work on Quality, I have become obsessed with the history of this tiny corner of Lower East Side, and I’m not even there. I’ve been reading the books, watching the documentaries, trying to understand this neighborhood remotely. I talk about it incessantly, it’s always on my mind; I’m pretty sure I’ve bored all my friends and family by now. And so, I wonder even with everything that is happening in my immediate context here in Colombia, the protests, the strikes, why do I care so much about a couple of Geodesic domes that have been since been taken down?
I’m not entirely sure. The history does have an immersive quality to it; the gentrifiers, the drama, the activism, the losses, the gains, but there is more to it. Even from where I sit, all these years later, all these kilometers away, it still feels relevant.
If anything, I’m afraid of being sucked into the history and being held captive by an uncritical nostalgia for a figment of my own imagination that is only based loosely on a historical place á la Midnight in Paris. For this fear, I blame the piece I’m working on right now, “¿Qué is Loisaida, Anyway?,” a visual history of the neighborhood that seeks to explain the pull of these events and contextualize them as relevant to the modern day, but I’m not entirely sure that they are relevant to anybody that isn’t obsessed by the history like me.
The lovely people at Loisaida have given me a given a fair amount of creative and artistic freedom to create Quality while working mostly-independently. On the one hand, while I really appreciate the creative freedom, on the other, being given very little feedback sometimes makes writing the zine feel like writing into the void.
This kind of freedom has really fed my inner critic, who I call Bruno. He is a cynical little voice in the back of my head that always likes to make me doubt what I’m doing. I like to think that he’s useful to help me look at my own work critically, but sometimes, he can be nasty while also having a valid point.
The facts are there for anybody who wants to find them, he will point out.
The reporting on this source way better than anything you can do, so you might as well reprint the the whole story and call it a day, he taunts.
Sometimes he’s helpful, saying things like this very specific protest you just spent the past two hours reading about doesn’t fit into the flow of the wider story. Cut it out.
He asks, What, if anything, will your re-telling add?
Or, sometimes, he’ll just go for personal insults. This entire zine is tone-deaf and boring. This paragraph makes me gag, it’s so terribly nostalgic.
Are you sure about this? You don’t even know who “the community” you’re writing for is, anyway.
Mostly, he asks, I’d like to know whose brilliant idea was it to name you the editor-in-chief at a community zine about this neighborhood you don’t even live in?
Oh, right, that was my brilliant idea. Yikes.
And so, we forge ahead. Let’s hope this doesn’t go too badly for me.
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