Coney Island

"Disneyification" happened way before Disney because themed parks happened nearly 50 years before Disney tried his hand at one. Part of the appeal for themed parks has to do with a cultural change at the beginning of the 20th Century.  Parks, amusements, city green areas and yes, turn of the century themed areas changed peoples attitudes on going out of the home for entertainment.  Like the department store that catered to women as well as men for their shopping needs and changed women's attitudes about traveling outside the home for shopping, themed parks change social attitudes on women traveling outside the home for entertainment.

Resumen: Este estudio analiza la relación inversamente proporcional que, según José Martí, existe entre modernización y desarrollo humano. Por consiguiente, estudia el encuentro/desencuentro entre el espacio moderno (la ciudad), la modernización (sistema económico marcado por el desarrollo tecnológico e industrial) y la alienación del individuo desde la perspectiva del “flâneur martiano” que observa con admiración-repulsión el espectáculo urbano-festivo en “Coney Island” y desde la perplejidad que invade la voz poética de “Amor de ciudad grande”. Para llevar a cabo este estudio, se ha tomado como punto de partida el topos descriptivo del locus horribilis. El cual ha servido como marco estructural para explicar la manera cómo José Martí describe Nueva York como un símbolo de la degradación humana creada por la modernización. En lugar de abordar directamente los motivos que hacen de la ciudad modernizada un locus horribilis, este ensayo examina los elementos que sugieren que la modernización ha hecho de la urbe un lugar en el que domina la tergiversación de los conceptos de carpe diem, hedonismo y locus amoenus y la afirmación de los conceptos de fasto y tempus fugit.
Palabras clave: José Martí; modernización; ciudad; locus horribilis

Abstract: This article analyzes the inversely proportional relationship that, according to José Martí, exists between modernization and human development. Therefore, this paper studies the way how the Martinian- flâneur perceives, by observing the urban-frenetic atmosphere in “Coney Island” and “Amor de ciudad grande”, the encounter and disagreement between modern space (the city), modernization (economic system marked by the industrial and technological development) and social alienation. In order to carry out this research, I took as starting point the descriptive topos of locus horribilis, which constitutes a useful tool to explain how José Martí describes New York as a symbol of the human degradation created by the process of modernization. Instead of analyzing the motifs that make the modernized city a locus horribilis, this paper examines the motifs that suggest that the modernization has turned the city into a place dominated by the distortion of the concepts of carpe diem, hedonism, locus amoenus and the affirmation of the concepts of splendor and tempus fugit.
Keywords: José Martí; modernization; city; locus horribilis

Since July 2009, Brooklyn’s Coney Island Museum houses an exhibition about the American entrepreneur and visionary amusement park designer Albert Grass. The show documents how, since 1918, Grass, who has encountered Sigmund Freud’s writings on his tour of duty in France, tries to establish Dreamland, a new Coney Island amusement park according to strict Freudian principles and accommodating attractions such as the “Libido Pavilion” in the form of a naked prepubescent girl, looking out to sea, or the “Consciousness Globe Tower.” However, due to a lack of funding this rather utopian project of materializing abstract psychoanalytical concepts in fairground rides and thereby making them accessible to a broader public in the United States is never put into practice. Thus, in 1926 Grass finds another way of transferring the immaterial expressions of the soul into media spectacles: He inaugurates the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society whose members recreate their dreams on film and analyze them in monthly gatherings, a scheme that is made possible by the introduction of Kodak’s first 16mm camera and “safety film” in 1923. Their enterprise is inspired by Freud’s proposition in The Interpretation of Dreams that in dreams, ideas and wishes are dramatized as “mental pictures.” Grass’s ventures strikingly illustrate modernism’s regime of the visual: While Freudian theory itself can be seen as a process of detection which relies mainly on narrative, Dreamland as well as the Society’s amateur films reveal a strong impulse to convert the linear structure of “case history” into paradigms of visual or even optical representation. On the one hand, my paper therefore engages in the connection between psychoanalytic concepts, popular culture, and the Coney Island Society’s amateur movies as a decidedly modern and multilayered complex of visualization. On the other hand, it tries to introduce the above mentioned exhibition on Grass as a historic and systematic extension of this complex. The curator Zoe Beloff herself is a filmmaker and digital installation artist who, like Grass, is interested in ways to graphically manifest the unconscious or produce “mental images.” Since her work constantly explores the roots of cinematic technologies and new media through their relationship to hallucination and the projection of dreams, the exhibition appears to be a logical sequel to her overall artistic activities.

Original music for Reynolds' lyrics was written and produced by Michael Hooker.

Inspired by Georg Büchner’s famous 19th-century play Woyeck, and combining typically distinct theatrical styles, from satiric comedy to abstract expressionism to musical surrealism, Blue Shade is about a young mafioso from Brooklyn, Joey Mazzoni, who, as a distraction from trying to deal with his too-hot-to-handle wife and the inhumane demands of “the business,” overindulges in today’s freaky fast-track self-help ethos on which daytime talk shows and the pharmaceutical industry thrive. In Blue Shade civilization risks absolute explanation through the all-too sobering ingestion of a breakthrough drug that inspires a logic necessary to create order out of chaos in a warped economy where the means supersede the ends. Whereas making sense is privileged in this sexy, double-edged world on-the-loose, Joey’s enlightenment may not be just what the doctor ordered.

Director & Playwright, Blue Shade, Transversal Theater project:

• Severins-Burg-Theater, Köln, Germany, May 2010.
• HIGH FEST, International Performing Arts Festival, Yerevan, Armenia, October 2009.
• U-Theater Studio T, Utrecht University, Netherlands, September 2009.
• Amsterdam Fringe Festival (TF2), part of Dutch and Flemish National Theater Festival (TF1), Rozentheater, September 2009.

Playwright, Umbra albastră (Blue Shade), Dir. Răzvan Mureşan, The National Theatre, Lucian Blaga, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2008 (in repertory).

Playwright, Umbra albastră (Blue Shade), Dir. Răzvan Mureşan, Romanian National Theater, Bucharest, 18th Annual National Theater Festival, November 2008.

Playwright, Umbra albastră (Blue Shade), Dir. Răzvan Mureşan, Teatrul Tineretului, 23rd Annual Festival of Theater at Piatra Neamţ, Romania, October 2008.

Playwright, Umbra albastră (Blue Shade), Dir. Răzvan Mureşan, Romanian language premiere, The National Theatre, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, April 2008.

Playwright, Blue Shade, Dir. Robert Cohen, Transversal Theater project:

• National Theatre Festival, Teatrul Mic, Bucharest, Romania, November 2007.
• Teatr Lalek, Wrocław, Poland, June 2007.
• Teatr Modjeska, Legnica, Poland, June 2007.
• Teatr 77, Łódź, Poland, May 2007.
• Divadlo DISK, Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU), Prague, Czech Republic, May 2007.
• Little Theatre, UC Irvine, May 2007.

Este estudio analiza la relación inversamente proporcional que, según José Martí, existe entre modernización y desarrollo humano. Por consiguiente, estudia el encuentro/desencuentro entre el espacio moderno (la ciudad), la modernización (sistema económico marcado por el desarrollo tecnológico e industrial) y la alienación del individuo desde la perspectiva del "flâneur martiano" que observa con admiraciónrepulsión el espectáculo urbano-festivo en "Coney Island" y desde la perplejidad que invade la voz poética de "Amor de ciudad grande". Para llevar a cabo este estudio, se ha tomado como punto de partida el topos descriptivo del locus horribilis. El cual ha servido como marco estructural para explicar la manera cómo José Martí describe Nueva York como un símbolo de la degradación humana creada por la modernización. En lugar de abordar directamente los motivos que hacen de la ciudad modernizada un locus horribilis, este ensayo examina los elementos que sugieren que la modernización ha hecho de la urbe un lugar en el que domina la tergiversación de los conceptos de carpe diem, hedonismo y locus amoenus y la afirmación de los conceptos de fasto y tempus fugit.

Con escasa excepcion, los modernistas vivieron en las grandes urbes de sus paises o de los paises europeos donde se auto-exiliaron: un fenomeno que se refleja en las criticas modernistas del utilitarismo de la modernidad (como en Rodo et al). No obstante, a diferencia de modernistas como Dario que poetizaron a Paris y sus lujos, para luego desenganarse, otros como Jose Marti, y aun Sarmiento, entendieron lo que significaba vivir en una ciudad industrializada; y en el caso de Marti, en Nueva York, para quien Nueva York representaba todas las contradicciones de la modernidad. Por lo tanto, este articulo se enfoca en la critica ambivalente de Jose Marti de la ciudad donde vivio, llevo una vida politica y escribio por varios anos antes de regresar a Cuba

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