Sifting the Inner Belt 篩羅內環 Tamizando el Cinturón Interno

Globe article

For Vietnamese here, hard news on nail salons, and a 
new tack

June 12, 2005

When it comes to dangerous jobs, nail salon worker 
probably doesn't leap to mind. But according to the 
Toxic Use Reduction Institute at the University of 
Massachusetts at Lowell, nail polishes, removers, and 
adhesives for nails contain chemicals that, with long 
exposure, may cause skin irritation, respiratory 
problems, and possibly miscarriages.

That's why TURI is leading the ''Vietnamese Healthy 
Nail Salon Initiative," which began in 2003 and is one
of several TURI-backed projects that will be presented 
to lawmakers at a State House event this Thursday. TURI 
began by surveying the health of nail salon workers, 
focusing on Dorchester due to the high concentration of 
salons operated by members of its large Vietnamese
community.

''In this kind of job, we sit here all day, up to 10 
hours. A lot of people have allergies, and to sit and 
breathe in those chemicals isn't healthy," said Tram Vu, 
who owns the Nail Box salon in Cambridge and whose two 
employees live in Dorchester. Vu helped TURI test less 
toxic nail polish and polish remover. ''I wanted to try 
something, anything different and better. Good for me 
and for other people, my employees, and my customers," 
she explained.

According to the trade publication Nails Magazine, the 
number of nail salons in Massachusetts tripled between 
1993 and 2003 to more than 1,300.

Getting salons to participate was tough, says Tam Doan, 
a project manager for New Ecology, a Cambridge
nonprofit that is working on the project along with 
Dorchester's Viet-AID, because owners worried about 
stigmatizing their businesses as unhealthy.

''The way we approached salon owners about it is, 
here's a chance to distinguish yourself in the market 
as a healthier business," said Doan. ''We wanted 
owners who participate to know that they'll be 
considered leaders."

CHRIS BERDIK  
© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Nevertheless, there are significant recurring themes. An important one is the use of gardening to reintroduce "nature" to the city. Urban garden programs provide a participatory experience that connects people living in cities, especially children, to the soil and plant and animal life. In some cases, the garden has served as a foil to the city by providing an avenue for the expression of agrarian values and ethics. At the start of the twentieth century, the urban garden was often viewed as a transitional space, an opportunity to teach immigrants and urban dwellers to love nature and therefore leave the city for the suburbs and country. In the 1930s, the garden was a testing ground for new ideas on how to integrate nature and the city, as in public housing or cooperative housing proposals that included community garden plots. This reconnection with nature is often associated with improving social and psychological health. Today, gardens are often described as oases of green in a concrete-dominated urban world.
Laura J. Lawson, City Bountiful

Invitation to the garden community at Berkeley Street Community Gardens

THE NAIL SALON EXCHANGE PROJECT invites all gardeners from the Berkeley Street Community Garden to join us this summer for a free manicure  at the Nail salon built in the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, in exchange, we ask you to contribute stories of hands, gardens and homes to the project's archive.

The Nail Salon Exchange Project will take place from June 17 – July 31, 2005, every Thursdays and Fridays, 4pm-8pm, in the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts.

This event is free and open to all gardeners of Berkeley Street Community Gardens.

If change is to be understood at all it is necessary to abandon the view that objects are rigidly opposed to each other. It is necessary to elevate their interrelatedness and the interaction between these "relations" and the "object" to the same plane of reality. The greater the distance from pure immediacy the larger the net encompassing the "relations," and the more complete the integration of the "objects" within the system of relations the sooner it will become comprehensible.
    But this will only be true if the road beyond immediacy leads the direction of greater concreteness...
Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness

It is above all necessary to avoid once more establishing "society" as an abstraction over against the individual. The individual is the social being. His vital expression-even when it does not appear in the direct form of a communal expression, conceived in association with other men-is therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man's individual and species-life are not two distinct things, however much-and this is necessarily so-the mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or more general mode of the species-life, or species-life a more particular or more general individual life.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Philosophy is at once the power of alienated thought and the thought of alienated power, and as such it has never been able to emancipate itself from theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. not that its techniques have dispelled the religious mists in which human beings once located their own powers, the very powers that had been wrenched from them–but those cloud-enshrouded entities  have been brought down to heavens, but finds its place instead within material life itself. The spectacle is hence a technological version of the exiling of human powers in a "world beyond"–and the perfection of separation within human beings.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

...in whatever way we may be conscious of the world as universal horizon, as coherent universe of existing objects, we, each, "I-the-man" and all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this "living together."
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, p.108

Living systems are units of interactions; they exist in an ambiance. From a purely biological point of view they cannot be understood independently of that part of the ambiance with which they interact: the niche; nor can the niche be defined independently of the living system that specifies it.
Humberto Maturana, "Biology of Cognition," p.9
 

Invitation To Participate In The Nail Salon Exchange Project

Hands for gardens. Hands for manicures. Hands to grow, to clean, to cut, to nurture.

THE NAIL SALON EXCHANGE PROJECT invites nail salons from the South End to work with us to explore the relationships between gardening and manicuring as nurturing activities performed by the hands.

The Nail Salon Exchange Project will take place from June 17 – July 31, 2005 at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts.

For Information, Please Contact:

Jeremy Chu
chu_jeremy@yahoo.com/617 304 6287
54 Clarendon Street Level 1 Boston MA 02116

Catherine D'Ignazio a.k.a. kanarinka
kanarinka@ikatun.com/617 501 2441
144 Moody Street Building 4, 4th Floor Waltham, MA 02453

Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract ideas of identity and similarity.
Walter Benjamin, 'On language as such and the language of man'