behind the walls/of the white house/there's a lot of things/that we should know about

Just saw Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings' free show in Battery Park, which was pretty good and did a great deal to save a day that was heavily and inexplicably sucking. New album coming out in october should be interesting. I have issues with the politics of retro and hipster investments in "antique" black cultural politics, but I also think Jones's music is more than that and her audience is as well. And the band is freaking awesome.

Walking down a street Fulton Ave in Clinton Hill yesterday on my way home to sunset park from where i am catsitting i passed a woman on the street who started yelling at me - something to the effect of "fucking white motherfucker, go where you fucking belong." I'm pretty sure she was addicted to some form of powerful coca-based narcotics and/pr mentally ill, but, more importantly, I also think she has a point. Clinton Hill is a heavily gentrified neighborhood with a large middle and working class African American community whose presence in the neighborhood long precedes the current brooklyn real estate boom. The forms of displacement and trasnformation wrought by skyrocketing rents and new construction are visible everywhere and sometimes/often legible as racialized violence. I don't live in Clinton Hill, but my presence on Fulton Street, catsitting for folks who live in a doorman building a block from the C on the avenue that, further down, city councilfolk from Bed-Stuy are fighting pitch battles over to name after Sonny Carson (for better or worse), is both a sign of that displacement and an invitation for further changes. Being a walking billboard for gentrification is not how i like to either spend my time or interact with the world. "Oh, the burdens of white privilege," you exclaim sarcastically, and I offer no response.

I finished Deathly Hallows yesterday. I am not going to get into it here, at least not yet, but i will say that the plot element i have been wanting to see more than anything else actually sort of happens. Five points to you if you've read it and can guess to which development i refer.

That's all for now.