… with fear and wonder ushers me through a labyrinth intersecting early Hip Hop and urban blight, with the legacy of Robert Moses in search of redemption.  This junction seems recently reopened with replaced roads to the darkest periods of our contemporary history and beyond.  Beyond borders both natural and man-made; virtual and physical; mythological and legendary.  Whatever was rotten in Denmark has now become rancid within a worldwide system morally choking while feeding off its regurgitated past evils.  Evils, borne of human greed and oppression, through an alchemy of technology now embedded into the human experience as some insidious new additions to the table of elements.

My testimony to this battle royale over the soul of the Royal Dane comes in the form of paintings made on crumbling walls evoking those condemning King Belshazzar; installations with the striking scent of fainting abuelitas praying their sons not fall prey to the American Dream serenades of Spanglish crooning sirens; spoken morse code prose interrupted by dissonant Bowery melodies; and On 2 Salsa  choreography riddled with spastic movements meant to ward off the psychological paralysis inflicted by the Titan of economic uncertainty.

Doomed to walk nights for an untold age through the pre-war buildings south of the I-95 spared the bulldozing of the late 40s and the flames of the 70s, my grizzle-bearded host guides me toward the flood, the summit of the cliff that beetles over the breaking point of Queen Hecuba and her fatherless twelve.  Confined to the memories of the fire, during the day I’m pulled further down its scorched past when I visit the tenants that have lived there since and for that short time commune with the late king, once betrayed and twice killed awaiting divine absolution and a rooster’s crow as we sip café Bustelo in purgatory.