Because I am otherwise blank headed...

"The photograph is always more than an image: it is the site of a gap, a sublime breach between the sensible and the intelligible, between copy and reality, between a memory and a hope."

Georgio Agamben
"Judgment Day"
From Profanations

A Bit About Cantelmi's and Other Such Things

"Well I think what’s happening uh, take the auto industry.  It’s a very similar thing to what Bethlehem Steel went through.  In the day that Bethlehem Steel went through it, there weren’t certain funds, nobody was lining up to say ‘we’ll bail you out!’  And what happened was we had bankruptcy, but under the old style where you went through the process.  You know, when you go into bankruptcy, the initial purpose is to reorganize, get rid of your debt, and come out as a reorganized company that’s stronger financially and ready to go.  That didn’t work, and Bethlehem ended up being liquidated.  And all the existing plants that were operating when we went into bankruptcy, they are now still functioning.  But they don’t have all the costs and labor agreements, different things that the Bethlehem Steel Corporation had, so they’re able to function at different cost levels and be profitable.  Detroit has been going through it for many, many years.  A bigger city, but the dominance of three major companies in that city, you probably have very much the same kind of impact, and when you watch the news, you would put a face from a steelworker in Bethlehem on an auto worker in Detriot, y’know you can interchange it, and it’s pretty much the same.  The difference is that the government’s trying to bail out a lot of organizations.  The auto industry’s impact across the country is so extensive that I think it had to be saved.  But the question would be, if you’re Ford, you’re doing it on your own and you’re doing it against the United States, somehow that has to be equalized.  But you can take industries like textiles, which were a subject of import and had a great impact to the steel industry... but y’know, I think it gets repeated over and over again, and twenty years from now, thirty years from now, communities will be going through the same thing that Bethlehem Pennsylvania went through, Detriot... y’know, throughout the country.  Y’know, Bethlehem Steel lasted almost a hundred years, ninety-nine years.  It went out of existence and into bankruptcy and sold for a billion and a half out of bankruptcy.  I think about how little it would have taken to save that.

But with a lot of other things that had to be changed... and even if it had survived another year or so, without bankruptcy, it would probably be going very well today.  Because from 2003 to 2007, right before disaster struck, the steel industry... if you measured it by the price of the stock, when Bethlehem was three and four dollars, about to go out of existence, US Steel was about ten bucks a share.  US Steel when from ten to a hundred and ninety five in that four or five year period.  Because China began to chew up all the steel it could chew up and India became very active, and so the domestic steel industry in the United States went from three or four bucks a share to forty maybe.  It went very high... maybe even eighty.  And so, if Bethlehem had made it through the trough, it’s very cyclical in the steel industry.  If we had gotten by that period, we would have had four of five years to generate a lot of cash to get us through the next period.  But... if.  It didn’t make it.  Communities will always experience this.  Time and memorial.  Products will stop being of interest, new products will replace them or new processes.  Even here in Bethlehem if, y’know, if you place yourself back at the turn of the nineteen hundreds, there was a Bethlehem Iron Company and along comes Charles Schwab, the big timer from Pittsburgh.  Buys up the company.  How do people feel back then?  It was probably fear of change.  What’s going to happen to our community?  And yeah, if you look at it over a period of the whole existence, wow, what a great, colorful community.  What would Bethlehem have been if, for example, Bethlehem Iron Company in 1900, and there was no replacement?  And it just had to limp along.  Y’know, would the three boroughs have been merged?  Would it have remained separate, would it have been agricultural, who knows?  So change occurs, and sometimes it’s for the good, and sometimes it isn’t.  As judged by individuals.  How does it impact the community, well, you could have one person on one side of the street doing very well and the one on the other side is out of a job.  So, not an easy thing to go through because when you’re going through it, it’s the hardest thing in the world.  If you could step back and look at what was going on before, change will always be happening, some good, some not so good."

" And the other thing you have to look at is, I’ll use as an example, right up the street here, Cantelmi’s Hardware Store.  It’s been in existence three generations, at least, does well by all accounts.  And when you look at the people coming in the front door, the retail and sales going on, you say ‘oh they’re doing pretty well,’ which is probably true.  But often times what we don’t think about is what’s going out the back door, in bulk, to a place like the Bethlehem plant.  Or the casino.  The amount of money that was spent here in all kinds of different ways, at any given moment they’d run up to Cantelmi’s and have to have wheelbarrows and shovels and tape and screws, nuts, bolts, whatever.  When the big company shuts down, that multiplier effect is really what becomes devastating because then you take out the small businesses.  I often, one last thought, listen to the comments from people that small business creates the most jobs in the United States.  Yeah when taken as a whole.  And then when you ask the question well, who does small business serve?  Well like at Bethlehem Steel, we supported so many suppliers and vendors like Cantelmi’s or, you name it, if that big business goes out, small business doesn’t have reason to exist.  So the interrelationship of all businesses and all communities to one another in the end is probably what you have to measure.  How does everyone live together and benefit from one another?" 

Quoted from Stephen Donches

Currently, I am in Hanover, New Hampshire, although I keep thinking I am in Vermont, easily forgetting that the Connecticut River is the state line.  Saying hello to all the rugged-faced Appalachian Trail hikers.  The upper valley.  

My car is in the sticks of the Pioneer Valley (Leverett), packed and ready to haul to Hampshire for move-in on Monday.  My thoughts are then obviously wandering down to the Lehigh Valley as I stressfully consider my division three.  Too many valleys!

The nights are getting cooler and I have a box full of possible negatives to begin printing as soon as Monday night.  I can't complain.

Cup of Inspiration

Erika Svensson
http://erikasvensson.com/

Todd Hido
http://www.toddhido.com/

Justin James Reed
http://www.justinjamesreed.com/

I am thinking about incorporating color photographs into my show. Yes, no?

On Getting Fired

I am home, in New Jersey.
Lately, I've had the funny idea to write small vignettes about the people who I had encountered in Bethlehem regarding how I understood them in the context of work, jobs, employment, whatever, or how they understood themselves in such situations. It seemed natural to start with my boss from the Hard Bean, Dan. So here's an excerpt, rough, unpolished and truthful to my point of view.

------

Outside the shop are fliers written in bold, black capitals: “RESTROOMS ARE FOR CUSTOMERS ONLY” or “NO LOITERING OR SOLICITING.” Dan speaks like his signs: loudly in your face and bordering on rude. I used to tell him he needed more signs. Like how about one that plainly says “NO COFFEE, NO INTERNET” or “DON’T TALK TO ME ABOUT YOUR RELIGION; I DON’T CARE.”
The coffee shop is Dan’s money making venture, not his curiosity, passion or project. It shows. He almost threw a guy out who asked for a glass of water. When Dan told him bottles of water sold for a dollar, the guy (who was actually just a kid in the evening’s band) took a friend’s empty coffee cup and filled it from the bathroom tap. He snuck upstairs with his checkered cap pulled low over his brow.
“I don’t care if fuckin’ Jesus Christ walked in here! Water’s a dollar!” Dan hollered, his voice dampened by the ska/punk band screaming and thumping upstairs.
“They’re just kids, and it’s just water,” I cajoled, leaning my arms against the counter as several syrup bottles clinked tops.
“Yeah but my cups ain’t fuckin’ free, y’know?” he answered somewhere between whining and demanding.

When Dan fired me, he told me in response to my prompting question. “Am I fired?” He hadn’t called me that whole week. I left him several messages asking for my hours, and when I got him on the phone on a Saturday, he mumbled that he was busy and would call back with my schedule. Never an answer. I was in Vermont at the time, wholly thrilled with flora, fauna, red wine and blueberry picking. I rushed to get back like sap ran to greet the roots of a maple.
When I came in a few days later, Dan handed me an envelope with check for two hundred and sixty-eight dollars.
“Yeah you’re fired,” he said, rifling through his drawers, rearranging his pens. “You know the hours. You didn’t come in.”
Petty or not, I took the money and stayed for the night’s show. (The band that played for honking cars, some stragglers, and this one guy who looked like Hyde from That Seventies Show.) I told myself, “hey this might be useful for my project,” and “well at least it’s more money than I thought,” or “well this just goes to prove that turnover is expected and people replaceable in this town.” (But maybe the latter is a bit sinister.)

Page 100

..."how, looking thus into your eyes and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other and which has the grand stature and natural warmth of every other and whose existence is all measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I to speak of you as 'tenant' 'farmers,' as 'representatives' of your 'class,' as social integers in a criminal economy, or as individuals, fathers, wives, sons, daughters, and as my friends and as I 'know' you?  Granted - more, insisted upon - that is all in these particularities that each of you is that which he is; that particularities, and matters ordinary and obvious, are exactly themselves beyond designation of words, are the members of your sum total most obligatory to human searching of perception: nevertheless to name these things and fail to yield their stature, meaning, power of hurt, seems impious, seems criminal, seems impudent, seems traitorous in the deepest: and to do less badly seems impossible: yet in withholdings of specification I could but betray you still worse..."

"...The heart, nerve, center of each of these, is an individual human life."

-James Agee

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

In 1941

Excerpt from an interview with Mary Stolysiak by Andrew Krause for Beyond 

Steel:  An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture on March 

30, 2006. 

JOHN:  He was a big union man. 

MS: He started the union down at the steel. 

JOHN:  He was a staff man. 

MS: Yeah, he was a staff man. 

AK: So he worked in the offices or the plant? 

MS: No, he worked in a plant but then when he became a union man, 

then he got the union job and he quit the steel. 

AK: Oh, I see.  So he was involved in 1940-41 with the strike and 

everything? 

MS: Yeah, yeah.  Big strike.  In all of that.  Yeah 3930. 

AK: What do you remember from the strike?  What are your 

recollections of that? 

MS: Well, I remember when the strike was because it was 1941.  We 

got married in 1941 and then I became pregnant.  And I was like 

four months and we went, and my brother come running up and he 

came running up here to get a baseball bat because he said-- 

JOHN:  I went with him. 

MS: Yeah, you went with him.  My brother came up here and he quick 

got a baseball bat and he took my husband with him because he 

said the police are coming down.  There’s a strike down, at the 

steel.  So I went down with them, you know.  But I was pregnant, 

like four months.  And here when we got down on Third Street, 

there was a colonial, a hotel right on the corner, colonial.  There 

was a hotel there.  I was standing on the steps there and here the 

police on the big horses, they came right for us.  Oh, I ran. 

JOHN:  Yeah, yeah.  There was a bank down there on Third Street that 

[unclear] Gustonies. 

AK: Gustonies.  Yeah. 

JOHN:  I was walking along there and one of them Cossacks hit me right 

in the behind with a club at Gustonies.   

MS:  Oh, they were mean.  With the horses and all. 

JOHN:  They had a big gas tank, I remember.  

MS: Yeah.  Yeah. 

JOHN:  Hundreds of thousands of people were milling around.  And 

them Cossacks--  

AK: Cossacks. 

JOHN:  And one was amongst the crowd and it was a guy about my size.  

He couldn’t take it no more.  The Cossack was walking [unclear] 

That guy had a lot of nerve.  You know what he did?  He hit that 

cop right underneath the chin and the cop’s helmet fell off and he 

went down the line.  They never caught him.  If they had caught 

him, they would have killed him. 

AK: Wow. 

MS: The strike was real bad at that time, ’41.  That was a bad strike.  

The cars, they were turning cars over and everything. 

JOHN:  [Unclear] was the worst. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  What was the name of that marathon that was up there? 

MS: That was-- 

AK: Was it Smodishes? 

JOHN:  No, no. 

MS: Well, Smodishes was up there, but, Eagle.  Wasn’t it the Eagle? 

JOHN:  Right near the steelworks, it was.   

MS: Hoffage. 

JOHN:  Hoffage.  Yeah.  That’s where it--  

MS: Hoffage, yeah.  That was a beer garden, yeah. 

JOHN:  So Jack Thurner, remember he was a police when he come up 

with a car. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  And oh, he’s a wise guy.  When he come up, the cops, no the 

strikers. 

MS: The strikers turned him over--  

JOHN:  The strikers got a hold of the car--  

MS: And turned it over. 

JOHN:  No, wait.  Didn’t turn them over.  They were ready to turn him 

over and he got away. 

MS: Yeah.  Oh yeah, he got away, oh yeah.  And then a little girl was 

on the steps and remember the horse went right for her.  They 

knocked her over.  She’s all bloody and everything. 

AK: A little girl? 

MS: Twelve year old. 

AK: Twelve year old, oh my. 

JOHN:  They didn’t care what they did. 

MS: They were bad, real bad.  The strike was extra bad.   

JOHN:  I remember at that time the Governor was Governor James. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  The reason that I can remember that is because they gave him a 

nickname.  They called him Jesse James.   

AK: Because he was so forceful. 

JOHN:  That’s why I remember that. 

AK: And were you in the pickets, John? 

STOLYSIAK 30 

JOHN:  I was, sure. 

MS: There were scabs too.  A lot of guys that went in.  They jumped the 

fence and went in. 

JOHN:  Did they climb ladders?  I’ve heard that story that they climbed 

ladders --  

MS: Yes, they did. 

JOHN:  I climbed over the fence to get in my pay [unclear] during the 

strike.  Yeah, I climbed in.  And the superintendent came over, and 

what do you want?  And I looked down and I said, all the scabs, I 

seen them.  I said, I came in for my pay.  Well, he said, you don’t 

get it unless you stay here.  I said, no, I’m not going to stay here. 

MS: Yeah. 

JOHN:  So I left without it. 

AK: So you left. 

JOHN:  He wouldn’t give it to me. 

MS: There were a lot of scabs, you know.  Like now, you know.   

Courtesy of Lehigh University

http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/beyondsteel/

The Right To Strike

C.I.O. HEAD INSISTS ON RIGHT TO STRIKE

Labor Should Not Be Asked to Give Up Method of Fighting Wrongs, Murray Says

PLEDGES PEACEFUL MOVES

Award of Defense Contracts to Alleged Wagner Act Violators Is Criticized Anew

WASHINGTON, Jan. 8 - Philip Murray, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, declared today that labor should not be asked to lay aside the right to strike during the defense emergency for redress of wrongs perpetrated by employers, but he gave a pledge that his organization would do everything possible to adjust disputes by peaceful means.

In the last few days, the metal trades and building trades unions of the American Federation of Labor have announced a o-strike policy on defense projects, stating that they would abide by arbitration in those cases wherein direct negotiation and mediation by government agencies failed.

Mr. Murray's statement today came at a press conference after a meeting of the general executive board of the C.I.O.  He had reiterated his organization's grievances against the award by the government of defense contracts to violators of labor laws.

A reporter inquired whether the C.I.O. would be willing to forego the right to strike during the present period if the newly created central defense organization should side with the labor view and adopt a policy to withhold defense contracts from concerns violating the Wagner act and other labor statutes.

In declining to agree on a ban against strikes at this time, Mr. Murray said that the C.I.O., "operating intelligently and constructively, by the use of reason, logic, and sound judgment." would do everything possible to end disputes before strikes were called.

"We are not prepared and we are not going to yield the right of the workers of the nation to strike to remedy a definite act of injustice," he added.

The C.I.O. president, who is also chairman of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, reiterated previous assertions that the Bethlehem Steel Corporation had received contracts which it could not fill for three years, and that contracts were still being awarded to the Ford Motor Company.  Both organizations, he said, had been held to be Wagner Act violators.  The Steel Workers' plan for maximum utilization of the steel industry by farming out contracts to companies lacking them, he said, would be given to President Roosevelt and the defense authorities in ten days.

Mr. Murray declined to express a definite opinion on the four-man defense set-up in which W. S. Knudsen and Sidney Hillman have coordinate powers with Secretaries Knox and Stimson.

The New York Times

January 9, 1941