I live at one end of a two-block stretch of road in the middle of Savannah's Baldwin Park neighborhood. Since there are only two consecutive blocks, the traffic is minimal. The end I live on dead ends into the back of an abandoned shopping center. There were two extant businesses in there when I moved here three years ago, but they've since closed up like the rest of the place--one in step with the pandemic, the other much more recently. Across the vacant parking lot and the street, a nightclub and a carwash stand empty. The front of the nightclub insists "no drugs," and the carwash sign still advertises "the best hand job in town."
Living adjacent to the blight of these buildings seeps into your psyche. It makes it easy to feel left behind. The closing of another business can feel like the end of the world. The end of a street can feel like the edge of the earth.
All of the cliché descriptors come to mind. It's a ghost town. It's a post-apocalyptic scene. The truth is stranger and almost as dramatic. Without the arrival of sprits or some small armageddon, a once thriving neighborhood and shopping center are now hulls of their former selves, all but abandoned. Maybe new businesses will move in. Maybe commerce will make a comeback. Nature won't reclaim it though. Concrete is forever.
The three houses across the street from mine are also empty. Aside from the midday rendezvous for a lunchtime tryst, the most activity my little corner sees is at night. It's usually just a midnight crack stop, but the end of my street and the backlot of the shopping center are prime places to dump trash. Mounds of it, truckloads, arrive in the night as if deposited by phantoms. The dumpster behind the shops and the one once in the driveway of the partially remodeled house adjacent were open invitations to garbage. Now they're both gone, but the garbage still comes in piles. As soon as one is cleaned up, another arrives in the darkness.
All of these empty structures set at right angles to one another give my surrounding area and eerie sense of absence and erasure. These are the interstices, the liminal spaces, the unseen in between below the surface. They are invisible from the highways and thoroughfares. If you want to visit, you really have to get down in there.
[Photos by me]
BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS is Coming:
A bunch of my friends and colleagues and I have put together a collection of essays called BOOGIE DOWN PREDICTIONS: Hip-Hop, Time, and Afrofuturism. It will be out just in time for fall class adoption and back-to-school reading!
Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist and Media Assassin, says,
“How does hip-hop fold, spindle, or mutilate time? In what ways does it treat technology as, merely, a foil? Are its notions of the future tensed…or are they tenseless? For Boogie Down Predictions, Roy Christopher's trenchant anthology, he's assembled a cluster of curious interlocutors. Here, in their hands, the culture has been intently examined, as though studying for microfractures in a fusion reactor. The result may not only be one of the most unique collections on hip-hop yet produced, but, even more, and of maximum value, a novel set of questions.”
[Cover Art by Savage Pencil.]
Boogie Down Predictions is coming this fall from Strange Attractor, and it's available for preorder from the outlet of your choice! Please preorder it if you can! Preorders set in motion all kinds of good stuff for books and their creators.
If you're still not convinced, here are more details, including the table of contents, back-cover blurbs, and a nice review from The Wire Magazine. The list of contributors to this thing includes Omar Akbar, Juice Aleem, Tiffany E. Barber, Kevin Coval, Samantha Dols, Kodwo Eshun, Chuck Galli, Nettrice Gaskins, Jonathan Hay, Jeff Heinzl, Kembrew McLeod, Rasheedah Phillips, Steven Shaviro, Aram Sinnreich, André Sirois, Erik Steinskog, Dave Tompkins, Tia C.M. Tyree, Joël Vascheron, tobias c. van Veen, K. Ceres Wright, and Ytasha Womack.
Hold tight!
THREE OTHER NEW BOOKS:
Also, in case you haven't snagged them yet, I have three (3!) other new books out:
Follow for Now, Vol. 2: More Interviews with Friends and Heroes (from punctum books)
Fender the Fall (a sci-fi novella from Alien Buddha Press)
Abandoned Accounts (poetry collection from First Cut)
As always, thank your for reading and responding!
More soon,
-royc.
http://roychristopher.com