Malick's blog

A Double Sense of Place.
 
No one can understand “place" (sure that I don’t) without running into politics, geography, economics, history, philosophy, literature, physics, etc--but none of these categories can sum ‘place’ up. And no one, I think, can approach 'place' from the few or all of the perspectives I've just named. For my own part, I've focused on history and geography (the latter of which seems a conglomeration of many of the different categories that I’ve just mentioned) but dabbled in each of the others, and Gallatin has provided three chances to learn each: this class, Marie Cruz Soto's "Narrating History, Memory, and Place,” and Becky Amato’s Place and Memory (which i haven't written about). The most challenging part is to put them into dialogue. Here So this is what I'll do with my last post.
 
Narrating History, Memory, and Place.
 
A Sense of Place (of its history, of what defines it, who it belongs to) is implicit in one’s politics. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Unlike this class which in some ways was an examination of places, NHMP was about the stories we tell about them.
 
Marie's class was very much about the intersection of history (of places big and small, socially constructed, socially imagined—no sympathy for Genus Loci here, no searching for an unreal Arcadia), politics, and media  in the defining of places, and of making the implicit claims within those identities known. For example, Robert Moses, backed by his own political machine, wanted revenge for Jacob’s successful defense of Washington Square Park. He planned to eradicate her home, but before he could do so he needed to declare areas of the West Village “blighted.” This is a necessary erasure of a vast magnitude: of the people the homes within that absolute space; of the interconnections in relative space; and of the history of the West Village. He in essence declared it a ‘space’—an area without meaning, without any felt value—and tried to cast New York as the fledgling great modern city in need of highways and high-rises to ascend to the heights of its potential. He declared himself the promethean hero of this story, though perhaps his brand of creative destruction is more like Faust’s. To fight back, Jacobs narrated the West Village as a Place. To do this she re-write the American Urban narrative, and in doing so she made some very populist claims about who should govern the use of space. This is why her vision has been called republican by some. She changed the whole idea of the city in history—it is something that stretches on, always changing, never finished with a final form. Robert Moses felt very differently—that once the modern city was completed, it was done forever.  As we can tell from this story, the narratives that we tell ourselves about places compete with other stories to be the dominate understanding of that place.
 
Another instance when I was happy to have the classes overlap was in reading James Howard Kunstler’s The  Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler is trying to change the history of a familiar place—the United States—by writing a different story, to change what Doreen Massey calls “The Space Time Envelope.” If his version of postwar American history successfully became the dominant narrative against what has been called the Pastoralist of American political and social understanding, the public might be convinced that we have indeed neglected issues of ‘place,’ that the car is responsible for many of our ills, etc.

I've written two posts on packaging books for prisoners. I don't do this at home or by myself—rather, on Sundays around 6pm I travel from wherever I happen to be in Manhattan to 123 Columbia Street in Brooklyn. To be more specific, I take the F train to Bergen; walk west on Wykoff; south on Court Street (where I might spend an more than a few hours perusing "used" books, boutiques, etc, like the flaneur); west again on Warrick, Baltic, or Kane (past lovely brownstones and hidden alley-gardens behind iron fences); eventually crossing over the BQE (a few moments are always spent staring down the street—I find traffic mesmerizing), continuing west until I reach the T-intersection with the Columbia street “promenade,” a north-south stretch that's as close as one can get to the -waterfront in that part of Brooklyn. I put ‘promenade” in quotes because I’m self-conscious of my own idiosyncrasies--I think the view of Manhattan it is an accidental masterpiece, extending ten or so blocks down from the mouth of the BQE, and gently dipping right into Red Hook, soon to encounter the Holland Tunnel.

Now that I'm writing, the view of the area does not seem grand enough for the title 'promenade.' My image of a promenade is a place to lull about, to walk and be seen, filled with dazzling spectacles and distractions. Historically the label is probably incorrect, as 'promenades' belong to a specific era of baroque city building. The sacrilege of my comparison does not end there. On Columbus Street, the architecture (usually houses or offices with commercial space on the ground floor) is nothing spectacular in size (two, three, four stories) or adornment (brick build, just fire escapes in front). For much of the block, the entrances are all on street level (meaning no impressive stoops), there are no benches or places for people to gather. Many of the buildings do have interesting ground-level businesses, but there are just as many empty storefronts. And on the colder nights, only a number of cats is there to watch you. And there is something I haven't mentioned: on the west side of Columbia street, facing the buildings, is a high chain-linked fence, covered with green tarp, meant to separate pedestrians from large piles of salt on the other side (some company bought the title—they say its only temporary) and further down, from the docks which are still running, though far below capacity. Plans are in the works for the city to take over the docks in the development of a park that will run along the Brooklyn Coast line from Greenpoint to Redhook. I'm not sure when this will happen, and neither, it feels like, does the area. When I traveled there at night, the stillness and desolation of the area made me feel like the community was holding its breath. “When will the highrises come that accompany such growth? What will happen to us?”

I then take a short right, then a left through a wooden door, and I'm in Freebird Books. Of the building's history I know little, because the website for the department of buildings says 123 Columbia Street does not exist. The front that most people know is essentially one room, about 250 square feet, with fine wooden bookshelves and a pleasant area in front with a couch in the front where people can enjoy whatever they're thinking of buying. Below this is the basement where we do the packaging (the owner, Peter, lets us use this space for free). It is dusty with low-hanging lights, but it is cozy enough, and certainly not the worst space BooksThroughBars has ever had. Freebird also hosts weekly poetry and short story readings either in-store or on the stellar backyard patio, which we’re very much starting to enjoy with a change in the weather. I wonder if that’s a Brooklyn staple.


 






II. The Flanuer
 
I intended to write more on Freebird Books, but I realized midway through planning this essay that Freebird Books is most important to me as an excuse to be in Brooklyn. I enjoy the little bit of mystery, the time outside my routine to wonder and explore, that my travels provide—enough to make me feel guilty, and to rebuke myself for treating Columbus Street like a 'back' (I don't know what paper to cite for this concept, but it's something I've held onto from your ‘travel fictions’ class). I do not believe in the genus loci (a term that suggests character in and of itself--as Massey said, “places are always-already hybrid”) of what is essentially an imagined geography. Still I permit myself to indulge in these imaginations because they are impossible and perhaps unhealthy to fight, and for the sake of critical reflection later on.

"Imagined Geographies" are the product of the multiple narrators of a place. The Brooklyn I’ve ‘encountered’—the representations, stories, and images that make that space a place, imaginations which facilitate further imaginings—seem to be the product of what some theorists are calling the "era of memory" (Hirsch, 105). They mean several things by this pronouncement, but what the "Era of Memory" comes down to is a self-conscious re-appraisal of western historical practice and perspective, intending to shift historical legitimacy to other narratives, subjects, and methods of knowing. Made possible by the development and dissemination of new media, the change of emphasis is followed by the change in ‘the story’ itself. To return to Brooklyn, the vehicles of memory from that borough (be it oral histories, photographs, festivals and celebrations, memoirs, etc) are creating new subjects of the past, with new narratives--for the neighborhoods, the borough and for the city.

Perhaps the most important set of narrators are Brooklyn writers. I’ve always been under the impression is that Brooklyn has its own literary scene, of which I'm not well acquainted, but one short story sticks out: Thomas Wolfe's "Only the Dead know Brooklyn."  It resonates with me because it is about place and memory.

The story goes like this: there's a chance encounter between the narrator, a Brooklyn native given the voice and the time period; another man of similar credentials; and a heavy-set, anonymous, "wild looking," and lost drunkard. All are waiting for the 'El' when the big drunk asks the narrator for directions. A string of incomprehensible directions follow. The other native, listening in, disagrees about the efficacy of the route, giving rise to a quarrel over who knows Brooklyn best which nearly ends in fisticuffs. The narrator eventually shanghais the stranger onto the train. They begin to speak, and our narrator begins to be disquieted by the stranger’s lack of purpose or direction. The narrator has a particularly strong reaction when he asks about the stranger’s destination.

“Oh,’ duh guy says, ‘I’m just goin’ out to see duh place,’ he says. ‘I like duh sound of duh name - Bensonhoist, y’know - so I t’ought I’d go out an’ have a look at it.” (Wolfe)

Day-tripping seems a silly way to try and ‘know’ Brooklyn. In response, the narrators says:

“Listen!’ I says. ‘You get dat idea outa yoeh head right now,’ I says. ‘You ain’t neveh gonna get to know Brooklyn,’ I says. ‘Not in a hunderd yeahs. I been livin’ heah all my life,’ I says, ‘an’ I don’t even know all deh is to know about it, so how do you expect to know duh town,’ I says, ‘when you don’t even live heah?” (Wolfe)

The story is reminiscent of many personal experiences of being lost in Brooklyn where nobody seems to know directions (maybe not coincidence—I used to ask, “where are the natives?, but perhaps there were never any natives in the first place.) It captures the gritty working class character that parts of Brooklyn were known for, that is still preserved in a way (though increasingly contested) in the texture of Williamsburg and other); and perhaps it’s just me, but not too far in the background I can see the ‘city of churches.’ Wolfe’s tale also seems to be a very ‘modern’ reading of the place—that Brooklyn is bigger and more complicated than a simple history could tell, and that even the locals are somehow alienated from it. What makes it most interesting to me is the title: what does it mean to say, ‘only the dead know Brooklyn?’ I have some ideas:

The dead presumably means people, but it could mean the buildings around as well. All must be made to speak in one way or another.
Because “The Dead” are inaccessible, so is the true past of Brooklyn.
Perhaps Wolfe is suggesting a certain way of listening and knowing the past—memory?
There’s something very proletarian about this statement, like ‘the people’ are the real keepers of their history.  Eastern too—reminds me of memory cults.

These are just VERY preliminary musings of what might be a larger paper later on, the theme of which would be ‘place and  memory,’ and which would be buffered by my experience as a historical researcher in Brooklyn itself.
 
III. Urban Oyster Tours





 
I stayed in New York City last summer to take an internship with a local touring company based in Brooklyn called Urban Oyster Tours. I saw it as a great chance to explore the borough through space and time, and I’ve been trying to apply a very critical frame to my experience. The last part of this post is a great opportunity to share what I did. The experience certainly changed my picture of Brooklyn forever.

Urban Oyster Tours was a startup run by two friends, Dave Nancyez and Cindy Vandinbosch, along with a crew of four or five tour guides and a few marketers, and had been in business for a few years. They were looking for a research intern to craft a weekday variant of their very popular, and incredibly good “Brewed in Brooklyn Tour.” The tours typically features visits to historical sites, interlaced with stops for eating and drinking, and always includes a visit to one of Brooklyn's present day breweries. My job was to insert Green Point Beer works into the script. A basic list of my tasks was such: to research the GPBW building itself, and the block surrounding it; to research the brewing and dairy industry; to find holes in their own stories; and, somehow, to research on Prohibition and Brooklyn. The learning gap was intense. I spent long time in the Municipal archives, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Manhattan municipal Archives, and the Brooklyn Public Library (looking at copies of the BDE) in addition to ‘time in the field.’

All of this was great fun, and great experience. But, having a very black and white view of gentrification at the time, I had to ask myself: would my mission compromise my politics and my ethics? Would my work be used to sell the neighborhood, to Disney-fy it? On whose authority could I tell these stories?  I asked this question to Dave and Cindy at our first interview. In reply they gave me the parable that summed up the Urban Oyster ethos. Here it is, copied from their tour site (which, incidentally, has a great blog post):

"Amazing as it is to imagine now, New York Harbor may have once contained half the world’s oysters. Over time, however, many oyster beds died off due to pollution and over-consumption. Learning from this history, Urban Oyster was founded on the belief that, like oysters, the neighborhoods of New York are treasured resources that require nurturing and cultivation in order to survive and flourish. Through dynamic hands-on tour experiences, Urban Oyster aims to reveal the hidden treasures of this great city, and in doing so, promote an appreciation for the neighborhoods we inherit.  On our tours we explore with you how we can live in neighborhoods today in ways that support and value local production and consumption, cultural diversity, historic preservation, and sustainability for the benefit of generations to come.  We hope you'll join us for a tour.” (Vandinbosch)

That sold me. It was a story about protecting a precious resource from value-free growth, hoping to shape inevitable growth in a more sustainable way. History and tourism were a strategy for a multi-dimensional preservation that looked back as well as forward—really forward, in that their support for local neighborhood businesses and institutions is always framed in a green way. Also, although the story does posit a kind of ‘genus loci’ to a place, it doesn’t fetishize it, if that makes sense. I also felt that it was ‘democratic’—local institutions and people contributed to the stories we told. In that sense this memory work was political, bringing disparate groups together for the purpose of  negotiating the history of the neighborhood with other groups—making a story that could be used to make claims and a power based to make those claims.

I'll have to leave off here, unfinished, but I shall return.

Works Cited:

Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008): 103-128. 
Massey, Doreen. "Places and Their Pasts." HIstory Workshop Journal 39.Sping (1995): 182-92. Print.
Vandinbosch, Cindy. "Sharing and Nurturing the Treasures of New York City's Neighborhoods One Tour at a Time." New York City Tours by Urban Oyster - Home. Urban Oyster Inc., 2010. Web. 07 May 2011. <http://www.urbanoyster.com/>.
 Wolfe, Thomas. “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” Southern Cross Review Nr. 56. Unknown. Web. 07 May 2011. <http://southerncrossreview.org/Ebooks/ebooks.html>
 

Sorkin’s “Block” Chapter reminded me of one of my favorite Cinema montages, which (uncoincidentally) is also one of my favorite depictions of young Urban Life: The Lourve run in Jon Luc Godard’s “Band of Outsiders.”
 
Original Clip:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z74tb51YI8
Bertolucci homage, from ‘The Dreamers:” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg-l-ReMLEs
 
Sorkin writes that “much has been written about the revolutionary effect of cinema in constructing visual narratives of the everyday,” and so I cannot fault him for not wanting to summarize that here. Still, I wish Sorkin had offered more on this ‘perceptual revolution,” the product of a “complex of technologies and events that has radically remade both the way we read the city and the way the city is made.” So this is my attempt to fill in the gaps myself:
 
The everyday has always had a narrative quality to it; was the effect of cinema to change the cast and characters? to add new plots to the everyday?-- I don’t think so (Death of the Author, right?) although both have obviously undergone considerable mutation. It makes more sense to believe that the contribution of the “Man with the Movie Camera” was to capture ‘everyday life’ through a sort of cinematic gaze (I put this in quotes because ‘everyday life’ might be the product of something like this), which changes on the ways we think of space and time, just like the novel did. I’m not saying we ‘think’ in montages, but in our own psychogeographies, is that so far from the truth?And did the new visualization of that narrative make us more conscious of the way we are always performing, not just gender but also ‘characters, etc?”
 
Godard once said that ‘Everything is Cinema.” Sometimes, when I watch this clip, it seems that the three young people (the characters, not the actors) are very conscious of the ‘cinematic nature’ of their derive. It is a hallmark of the French New Wave to blur the lines between art and real life in Cinema.
 
In some ways, this post fails because I wanted to make the connection between the cinematic gaze and the flanuerial behavior in the clip above. Any recommendations on where to go would be very welcome.

"The new space and the new self gave shape to one another. It appears there is a kind of reciprocity between interior and exterior." (Pollan,

Michael Pollan designed a place of his own to work in, to feel sovereign over, and to be his retreat from the nuclear-family ‘franchise home’ he thought his house might become. But the cabin was also the product of a need  "not so rational and much more difficult to name" which Pollan articulated with the help of French Philosophher of Science named Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard described two human senses of space: the “vertical (compelling us to seek the power and rationality of the tower point of view) and the enclosed center, which [Bachelard] sometimes calls the "dream hut.” In the spirit of tree houses and blanket forts Pollan has built an enclosed center space for day dreaming and cultivating the self or selves. Later he writes, “Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others,” (Pollan 7)

Again I'm writing about prisons. The terrible food, the lack of medical care, the unsafe conditions of voluntary (manditory) labor, the lack of personal mobility, the often-abusive guards, etc--all make prisons a physicall unsafe environment. The authors of the Abolitionist Zine World Behind Bars write that "a prison sentence of any length can be a death sentence. In fact 20 years in prison decreases your life expectancy by 16 years. (Silverman and Vega)."Those of us not stigmatized as criminals (we are all ‘criminals,’ we have all broken the law at least once) and who might never experience prison often underestimate how awful it is to have our kinetic freedom taken from us, and what the psychological consequences of that might be for ‘Modern’ human beings who obviously need both kinds of space that Bachelard describes, obviously limited during incarceration. Human beings, as I’m sure Bachelard would say, are creative creatures and for their sanity they will adapt their spatial needs to their new environment in time—a previous post of mine was about ‘place-making’ in prison. But agency can only challenge structure in so many way. Prisons employ technologies of power (spatial, bureaucratic, etc) which discourage any subject from attaining a sense of personal power and rationality through limiting the subjects means of fulfilling their vertical sense of space (Not the least of which is the forming of the subject-criminal-a process which goes on inside and outside of the bars). If power could be fully effective, the daydream, the room and the self become one inescapable, timeless prison.

"Without daydreams the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape and estimation of others.” (Pollan, 7)

Bachelard, and therefore Pollan, relate cozy or enclosed spaces as ideal for daydreams.  But could daydreams also be a medium through which a human being fufills its need for power and rationality? Don't power and rationality, working with idle daydreams, buttress or produce a 'sense of self?' This must be so. And so we might ask: what nourishes day dreams? We can tease out a few elements by just looking at Micheal Pollan’s house: windows, nature, remoteness...and BOOKS! The house is as much a literary idea, the product of a daydream, as it is a physical creation. Books, more than anything, seem to nourish daydreams for self-exploration and personal empowerment. Unfortunately most prisons do not consider access to literature or education a human right. This is why I spend my time sending books to prisoners, in hopes that they may feel as one famous prisoner once did:

“I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.” (Thoreau, Essay on Civil Disobedience)

I haven’t read enough of the literature surrounding Jane Jacobs and Rober Moses to  claim, as one reviewer on Amazon does,  that Anothney Flint’s Wrestling with Moses is “Elaborate a Plan, Too Lame an Execution.” To its credit, the book does provide succinct biographies of two very important historcial figures (fascinating to know how Jacobs developed her ideas, even though she tells you at the very beginning of Death and Life); and interesting presentation of Jacob’s strategies and tactics during her confrontations with Moses; the story surrounding “Death and Life” (though I wish he had spent a little bit more time on how her ideas had evolved though her different books).  I also think its great to read about Washington Square.
My criticisms are related to the feigned ‘impartiality’ that marks Journalism as a discipline.  I feel his goal was to be the impartial chronicler of these events.  The author doesn’t really come out strongly as to why he wrote it—I feel like I never really know where Flint is. I don’t think the book has a clear narrative structure—its like a newspaper article that was 200 pages. I’m waiting for the follow up article, where he should explain quotes like this:
 
 “The business of development in the United Staes has changed compeltey as a result of Jacobs work. Builders and local governmen tofficials alike defere to the conerns of the neighborhood, involving the community in every step of the process.” 186
 
There is no denying that the struggle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses ‘transformationed’ the America City—but that leaves  SO MUCH OPENED, SO MUCH UNEXPLAINED.  I don’t know how true his above words are—he does not not give examples.  Just looking around me, as Jane Jacobs would have done, I find an incredible amount of proof that the Toquivillain-Communitarian city that the above quote suggests does not exist.. “Urban Renewal” does not exist as it once did; and perhaps (certainly for the better, in my opinion) the power to make or break the city is no longer in the hand of the individual. Rather (and this is an oversimplification) that Power seems disseminated between developers—John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch have written, the city is a “Growth Machine.” Though an accurate report requries more nuance, I say without hesitation that NYU and Columbia are not the least among these. Because of their prominent position and resources; because Greenwich village is protected in so many different ways; because Greenwich village is an important ‘american place’ in our national narrative; residents have had more leveraging power as NYU has decided to expand. Those residents in West Harlem who were evicted by the state by means of Eminent Domain, so Columbia could another campus, were not as fortunate.
 
Mr. Flint, how much has the American City Changed? From dictatorship to an oligarchy.

You know a book is great when you can spend an hour on a few paragraphs (all on page 165, here).
 
While reading I likened Pollan’s "A Place of My Own" to a well-documented account of an off-site Gallatin interdisciplinary seminar or tutorial. The participants (I'm counting architect Charlie and all-around handyman Joe, though I am sure there were others whom received little mention) took turns being teacher and student(s). They did not agree on a syllabus but had to work with common (and also 'great') 'texts.' Each brought his own ideas and skills to the task, and Pollan makes it clear that each left the project with a sense of ownership. Through a personal-collective journey they had become “homo faber.”
 
Michael Pollan cites Hannah Arendt, who takes the idea of the Homo Faber from the Ancient Greeks: “Homo Faber is indeed lord and master…not only because he has set himself up as the master of all nature but because he is master of himself and his doings.” The Homo Faber is neither the laborer (whose labor-power is never his own), nor the man of action or the man of words (whom need others to remember their achievements, the importance of their work—and thus themselves--being at once abstract’ and momentary with no endurance of its own). Now these categories are perhaps outdated; perhaps they were never accurate at all. The Homo Faber seems to be more of a myth, a fiction, and a suggested way of being-in-the world, than a real possibility. It all sounds very Thoreuvian, and we know how critical Pollan is of him. But I believe that the archetype (like many such myths) points to a real human need for a “glimmer of mastery” as part of the human condition.
 
Though this is a memoir, I had forgot that Charlie, Joe, and even Pollan himself are characters in a story. They each have their own narrative journeys, which transfigure these men of thought or action (whose who is a necessarily complicated story) into Homo Faberus. As Pollan wrote, “the project offered all three of us some of the same satisfactions”—a poetic experience; self-determination of purpose, design, and time frame; a chance for ‘real work;’ a beginning, middle and end. According to Pollan, these, then, are the stuff of meaningful work in our day and age, which must, because a true homo Faber is a myth, be collaborative and interdisciplinary experience. 

Tallahasse Florida is less St Petersburg Florida then Aiken South Carolina (my father's home).

My parents saw our subdivision grow around us. They remember when the street ended three houses away and the woods began. They remember when new families and new children moved in. The only trace of this wilderness that I have seen was the small (but thick) patch of woods in my back yard, which was torn down when I was sixteen. I have always known my peers. 

My suburb is not like waldie's; Kunstler is guilty of suburban-conflation. waldie writes of suburbs like mine, "they don't have enough of the play between life in public and life in private that I see choreogaphed by design in my suburb." I think this is true for several reasons. The houses are grand and lots large in comparison. Cars are necessary because the firm or the practice or the hospital or (until very recently) the school has not moved closer in the twenty three years that we have been here. The public journey lasts from the house to the car. The sidewalk only stretches a few houses down. I don't know if anyone sees my father drive away in the morning. We are not a city. 

When I am home I enjoy drinking, blasting the radio, and playing pool on a table a family accross the street gave to us when their children left for college. The noise from the radio never reaches across the street. I put on Garrison Keillor and my brother goes inside.

The Homeowners Association (around since the beginning) requires that houses be set back thirty or forty feet from the street. The Homeowners association requires front lawns to be mowed and free of eyesores or obstructions. The frontal exterior of each house must be of brick and of traditional color, and stucco was only recently permitted as a siding. Dad (who plays tennis with the neighbors on occasion) works at the law firm which represents the Homeowner's association.

We (residents, homeowners, dog-walkers, golfers, and runners) also do not like offensive, empty houses. 

In 1964 J.T. Williams, Mallory Horne and Bill Cartee bought 3,800 acres from the Velda Dairy farm.From this they developed Tallahassee's largest suburb, and the furthest (at the time) from the city center. The website for the Home Owners Association lists nine subdivisions, each named an Irish name and landscaped to resemble the Irish country side. This is no humble fronteir vision--it is a garden to make us forget. I have asked which of the nine neighborhoods we belong to, and my parents do not know either.

I-10 developed alongside Killearn, and has expanded several times. Thomasville Road, which linked Killearn to the city center, has grown from two lanes to eight lanes. Sometime in the late seventies Killearn lost its prominence to Golden Eagle, where Jeb Bush plays Golf. Killearn is growing into other developments.

There are few sites of collective memory in my suburb. We are too new for public memorials about Korea or Vietnam (There is one in the capital, but that place is far away). We have not put up a monument for any significant event in our time, like the time our suburb helped vote George Bush into office, or the time we all watched the troops invade Iraq on television. I figure this to be because we do not yet understand our history or our place in it. There were so many young families on this block when I was growing up, and I think we are all waiting to see what will come of this place.

At six my parents restricted my travel domain to three houses on one side of the street, stretching in one direction. Our neighbors in the fourth house were building a pool, and I came home that day with a colored piece of porcelan-a relic that I have kept. 

waldie's second aphorism reads: "In a suburb that is not exactly middle class, the necessary illusion is one of predictability." I don't understand why a less-than-middle class suburb requires such an illlusion or what such an illution has to do with class or ethnicity, but I have only read the book once. But it stirs my thinking none the less and leads me to wonder, on darker days, if in my middle calss suburb, the nieghborhood itself will come to be the necessary illusion. 

There is a silence in this piece (and i'm sure, in every other) which hurts me very much

The Whitney Museum of American Art is one of the defining landmarks of New York City as I know it.  Midway through a course on ‘A Sense of Place” I feel bound to ask: How might I interpret the “sense of place” I feel at the Whitney through Tuan, Jackson, and Kunstler?

What is the Whitney? Succinctly, it is one if not the most prominent museum of ‘American Art’ (‘American’ meaning mostly ‘United States’ here; there is a separate museum for Native Americans, etc). Where is the Whitney? The building where the art is kept is located at the intersection of Madison Avenue and 75th street, but we could easily think of the Whitney as a vast institutional network of storehouses, offices, and mini-galleries where the up and comings of American art battles for a space at the Biennial; with links to other museums where classics being loaned out in courtesy of the Whitney. And who is the Whitney? There must have been a ‘Whitney,’ although the main building doesn’t mention them with any architecture inscription. There are the students or post-grads who look down upon me for only giving a few dollars on give-as-you-please-Fridays; the ethnic janitors (as far as I’ve seen) who might have a different view of the building altogether; the security guards who silently stand guard over the works, then change shifts ever thirty minutes or so; the visitors from all over the world; and the management (where are they? Who are they?) And the acquisition teams constantly searching.

I can’t imagine what Jackson would say about the Whitney, though I feel he would find neither the setting nor the architecture appropriate for a museum of American art, and we might reasonably ask: can we really feel classic American art outside that. He also might disagree with the definition of ‘American’ art as it is represented in The Whitney. What’s more American (or artistic) than a Winnebago?

Kunstler might give the Whitney more of a chance, and not just because it is conveniently located by a subway or currently exhibiting Edward Hopper and the American Moderns. Kunstler narrates America’s crises as a “crises of place,” so understandably he might laud the Whitney’s mission to raise the American Arts; and to use art as a means of cultivating (and problemitizing our definitions/limits of) citizenship, urban life, and the public realm (though the Whitney is a private institution).
Kunstler the Jacobsonian would appreciate the Whitney as an economic stimulus. He would admire how the museum brings customers to neighborhood commercial entities and safety and diversity to neighborhood residents;  he might laud how it works with the park and other local attractions to make the space feel alive. I also think he might appreciate the front of the Whitney—the moat-like entrance is an object of interests for groups often lined up outside (which draws people-watchers, street vendors, as well as artists). But I wonder if he would have thought it wasteful to group The Whitney with so many other world-class museums onto one ‘museum mile,’ whether they could have gone to other parts of the city and performed a similar economc and social functions. And I Wonder if he would resent all that American art being in one place—if he would see that as part of the death of the local.

Kunstler frequently criticizes the blandness, scale, self--aggrandizing disregard for tradition and the public realm that characterizes much of modernist aesthetic and modernist planning. The Whitney was designed by Marcel Breuer in the international and, true to form, the Whitney sticks out even in the fairly eclectic NYC architectural vocabulary. The Whitney’s Modernism remains the anti-vernacular (Though personally I think that much depends much on the time-space envelope (an idea taken from Doreen Massey) that an author uses when speaking of a place and its authentic manifestations. But as previously written, it works well with the other buildings; it is built to a human scale; and I think even Kunstler would say that it is beautiful.

As a side, I think there is a museum in Brooklyn that Kunstler might like more called the City Reliquary.

Regarding the building itself: The Whitney is six stories tall with one level below ground. The front of the building is staggered like an inverted stairway from the third floor onwards the skin is made of rectangular tiles of a lustrous slate-gray color.

Supposing the Whitney had no Master Builder (and thus Breuer does not deserve all the credit), I can think of one other party who might have had a hand in its construction: the curator, or someone standing in herm place or looking out for herm’s interests. The pair (if not one) was necessarily brought together when it became necessary to enclose a museum-space within a building. As exciting as that collaboration must have been, I would imagine that every dedicated curator, if they could, would dream up a different museum for every exhibit, always wanting to build up the experience from scratch and to personalize it as much as one could. In that sense, architecture is an extension of the curator’s vocation, which, besides being a prominent historian of some kind, is a profession of constructing a person’s experience in relation to the work of art, filling in gaps where the artist has left no direction. It is an anthropocentric spatial science of positioning, lighting, accommodation, and juxtaposition. This necessitates that the museum itself—as the collaborative product—be as versatile as a stage, or many stages each room hides or reveals its stage-like character in relation to the demands of the art, the audience, and the vision of the curator. The tone of an exhibition is a bricolage of these different factors on these different sets. Walls, lights, benches are the movable building blocks—the machine-like parts—of the museum experience.

What is the experience of the Whitney museum? As with any built space (particularly the modern ones) there is a tension between the architect-curator’ design for that experience and how people will use the physical space.

Of all the “sensory organs and expediencies [which] enable human beings to have their strong feeling for space and for spatial,” (principally kinesthesia, sight and touch see Tuan, page twelve) sight and kinesthesia are privileged; touch (for the most part) as well sound and smell (when not called for specifically by the exhibit) are not made use of. Anything disturbing the smell or noise-neutral environment might be asked to leave. And while many museums (including the Whitney) make art a ‘standing affair’—presenting the objects of art as upright. Could have easily been done any other way.

One can enter any floor of The Whitney by taking the stairway or an elevator. At the end of both you’re presented with an opening room with an introductory showpiece. There are two, three four ways of leaving the atrium-the curator has left it open to you to choose which way to traverse the space. The space you travel through is defined most obviously by the art—through art space becomes a network of places constructed with care to preserve spaciousness and circulation for the crowd. The individual is meant to feel as alone with the art as possible. This requires solitude. Tuan writes: “solitude is a condition for acquiring a sense of immensity. Alone one’s thoughts wander freely over space. In the presence of others they are pulled back by an awareness of other personalities who project their own worlds onto the same area (Tuan, 59).”

A poor experience resulting from the actions of others is not always the curators fault: one could easily do a Gans-like study about how people behave in museums.
What does the Whitney’s architecture say about art viewing in America? Housing fine art (and having that tradition) is a hallmark of our ‘civilization,’ and we are asked to act appropriately; that art is a semi-public affair, and not something that would be possible without wealth, the good taste, and the patriotism of our upper classes. Their presence is felt through the guards, who add another element to the spatial relationships already present in museums.

Tuan writes, “finally architecture teaches—a planned city, a monument, or even a simple dwelling can be a symbol of the cosmos.” (102) In the first draft of this essay, I tried to relate Tuan’s spatial typology to my subject and treat museum-space as mythic space. This task was difficult for reasons that Tuan has already laid out: “what distinguishes the western environment minimal cosmic or transcendental significance.” Perhaps Tuan would argue that everything has become pragmatic space-even formally religious spaces have, through gradual or explosive reification, become pragmatic space. I still maintain that museum spaces, always tied to some imagined community with some ontology, might be particularly ‘mythic’ when that community is the nation. 

Beneath the humor and anger of Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere is his desperate plea that Americans historicize the ills of our human habitat and that we act to change it with a new vocabulary he develops throughout the book. We haven’t reached his plan for the ultimate re-imagining of the American Landscape, but we needn’t look much further than his introduction, full of small-town nostalgia, to know where he’s going

One of the comments I found most intriguing comes from page 86: "A civilization completely dependent on cars, as ours is now, was not inevitable." As Kunstler narrates it, there were several opportunities to avoid our present catastrophe, and perhaps none better than the Great Depression, when America (and the world) became entangled within capitalist crises produced by unsustainable fordist production and unabsorbable wealth. During those hard years America failed to ditch the car (and, Kunstler wryly notes, the means of production, distribution, and exchange which was the inevitable cause ) because: Gas was cheap; Roads were integral to the WPA; and the car became a symbol that was absorbed into the America Free Range and Mobility philosophy. The Plague that it actually was could not breach the level of cultural myth.

It wouldn’t make sense to say that Americans of my generation have gotten used to modernity, that technological and social changes are less amazing, discomforting, reifying. But certain indexes of ‘modern American’ that came about as a result of the changes Kunstler talks about have become Americana, objects, images, pastimes seeming to belong to a ‘hazy before.’ I quite often forget how new the bridges, the highways, the Coca-Cola bottles seemed to the American Moderns in ‘the moderns’ days.

There were many great documenters of that modern ‘moment of potentiality’ in American Art. Their subject matter ranges from town, city, and country life to portraying new American institutions that came about as a response to the car(93). One painter who worked from the beginning to the mid-century was Edward Hopper. Above is his oil painting "Route 6, Eastham." Of the "Eighty percent of America has been built in the last 50 years" in Kunstler's introduction, I believe that is the other 20%--painted in 1941 when  were not quite "a nation of overfed clowns in a cartoon environment" (10).

“Route 6, Eastham” is one of Hopper’s landscape/architecture portraits-aka, no humans. I shouldn’t generalize on an artist I know little about, but the people in his paintings always strike me as uncomfortable with their surroundings; performing (not for us, maybe for themselves); geographically-existentially lost; trying to be absorbed, or to absorb themselves; blitzed by the New. Their psyches are obviously victims of America’s restructuring, but there’s something else. There is a stillness in the figures, their arrangements, and the light on the buildings, as though the painter knew a stillness before the wheels of America started turning. Hopper was there when America pressed the Gas pedal down.
 
 Regarding the painting itself, we have a large house, placidly sitting (standing; stressfully waiting; idling?) by a New England Highway. A few other houses and a string of transformers stretch in the distance along a two-lane highway. The houses look 'vernacular,' made out of local materials to fit local needs.
One is compelled to ask: Is it morning or twilight on this NE scene? Are we traveling (if we are traveling) east or west? Where is the viewer—are we passing by and thus leaving the culture of agriculture (of NE in particular) behind, or are we approaching the future, guided by a string of transformers (and if it’s a race who will win out).I’m not sure that Hopper ever specified, and I get the feeling that Hopper never gave narratives to the people or places in his portraits; Perhaps he saw that there was too much potential.

 We’re close to the second anniversary of the Kimmel Occupation by Take Back NYU. I was a part of that during my freshmen year and I’ve always maintained that there was much more to the campaign and to the occupation than NYU’s publics gave us credit for. TBNYU first articulated a problem that many student groups who’ve tried to organize campus-wide campaigns have run into: to use JB Jackson’s intriguing/helpful we lack a meaningful political landscape.  
I don’t remember the first postcard or leaflet NYU sent me, but the image of University life in Greenwich Village was exotic, and to one degree or another we all still share that image. But sometimes I’m surprised at how humdrum life @ NYU can feel. I guess I should blame ‘human nature. NYU, although it’s NYU, is an inhabited landscape as well as a political one.

Inhabited: coming to terms with nature, taking care of our personal needs; being part of a (the many) social orders. Inhabited spaces at NYU might be dining halls, dorms, the library; or speaking more broadly the campus as a whole might be inhabited space, if your ‘politics’ takes you elsewhere.

As human beings we are condemned to work out the definitions of right and wrong amongst ourselves. The methodology, epistemology, etc, that humans use to solve that conundrum is called politics. Public space is required for political action, necessitating that every “landscape evolved partly out of…the needs of men and women in their political guise.” (10)  

Jackson gives us elements of the political landscape that (I assume) he means to be as timeless and universal as the political landscape itself: boundaries, public forums, and roads. He also gives it certain ‘universal qualities,’ namely visibility and sacredness.

Given these qualifiers we can point to an obvious political landscape at NYU made of classrooms, the park, Tisch Plaza, Guild Plaza; Kimmel student center. Space seems quite abundant.

Everything I’ve said thus far could have gleaned as much from the brochures, but it’s important to complicate the picture. Jackson gives a good start on page 12, writing: “No group sets out to create a landscape—but to create the community, and the landscape as its visible manifestation is simply the byproduct of people living and working, sometimes coming together, sometimes staying apart, but always recognizing their interdependence.” This is just as applicable to the heads of NYU (the planners, the administration, etc) as to Jackson’s Jeffersonian political landscape of like-minded groups forming frontier communities.
 
Last class we discussed how NYU created a sense of place. Those community-building activities are political from the very first instance, by defining a community that can use NYU’s resources, and creating a world for them. This NYU landscape is partially the results of these efforts, based on a conception of what the student is.  My impression of their impression is as follows:
 
The ‘Student’ community displaces local residents, businesses*, and itself. For structural reasons the community in and of itself is slack; its parks and spaces are for passive enjoyment, to give momentary pleasure and a sense of well being; “other people more often than not in this fleeting urban space seems to mean voices and color and fleeing impressions.” (20) Students are essentially apolitical on campus vis-à-vis the university itself: discourse remains within the classroom, action travels out to NYC or to foreign lands where students are seemingly more empowered, but politics does not to cross the Rubicon. This is an extreme vision, and I’d probably temper it down a bit if there were time. But there is a certain hegemonic ideology of empty space present “in every square” as Jackson writes.
 
It seems to me that underneath Jackson’s ‘death of the political landscape’ narrative was knowledge that the sphere of the traditional properly political was breaking open. Modern processes had destroyed the communities that enabled such places; we present in this “new chapter” (20) are just beginning to take advantage of a landscape that has “ the undreamed of potential for public spaces of an infinite variety.” (20) The college campus is one of these spaces: “I am thinking of how the role of college campuses has changed, even in my own day. A half century ago it was a jealously guarded academic grove…now it plays a leading role in the cultural life of all classes in the community.” Jackson, (20). But I wonder how open to the community college campuses are—are we an oasis welcoming the thirsty, or are we jealously guarded. And is NYU an exception to the rule, or the now-becoming rule itself?
 
TBNYU never published anything without the consent of its members, so I can only give my own impressions of what it was about. Jackson reminds us that landscapes, though real, are human creations and thus can be narrated in more than one way. TBNYU made no distinction between the political and inhabiting subject. All spaces were to have an agora-like character—in this way we would create an image of ourselves through creative discourse. Thus I think it would be a mistake to characterize TBNYU v. NYU as a war between proponents of an inhabited and a political landscape; it was war between two different landscapes.
 

In his prologue, Tuan writes that his book was meant to systematize human insights into “a language of conceptual frames” for reflection as well as action, so the  “tenants of the earth [might be more than] design of a more human habitat.” (4) In the span of thirty years, lessons have carried over in some places, but as Tuan later writes “Most places are not such deliberate creations. They are built to satisfy practical needs (166).” Thus we inherit a landscape with few buildings that really engage/challenge/expand human experience. But (I was thinking this as I read those letters) there is the other side to the spectrum--buildings or “functional realms”) which are meant to discipline and punish and do so (in part I think) through cultivating a sense of selflessness (perhaps, through creating a 'placelessness.')
 
On Sunday I spent a few hours mailing maps, books, and issues of National Geographic to incarcerated persons across the United States. I know very little about penology, prison history, or prison architecture; I have not been to many prisons (they’re often in rural areas); so relaying the few bits of abstract knowledge about such a place (gained though books, and through cultural heritage--there is an element of slavery, and the South, in the modern American Prison system. Writes Tuan “Both the Past and the future can be evoked by a distant scene” 124)) seems inappropriate and incomprehensive for the exercise. This post is rather a test of learning and imagination put to a mind that wonders how those sent objects are felt, how they might create a ‘sense of place or reconstruct a human center.  (150)
 
"Space is transformed into place as it requires meaning"(136)
 
As documented in the opening chapter of Texas Tough, a failed escape attempt and political backlash landed the inmates of Texas’ Death Row in the Polansky Unit outside Livingston, Texas. Their former prison, the Ellis unit, was much more humane. “Inmates worked in a garment factory, helped each other with legal work, played basketball, and worshipped together. (39) Common space meant intimacy between prisoners ("intimate places are places of nurture where our fundamental needs are heed and cared for without fuss." 137) which added the construction of a sense of place. Relatively Ellis was very much a home, as experienced in other people. In my imaginings it had the community/place of a frontier town.
 
Prisoners in the Polansky unit are housed in individual 6‘x9’ cells. They are allowed an hour of solitary exercise a day, the only time out of their cells. Contact at meal times is short and mediated by a wall w/ slot. How might a sense of place emerge?
 
Value might not emerge at all. “Place is a center of felt value." Place might be and remain far away—a home somewhere in the distance. Or those energies might be poured into something else.
 
Tuan writes "Place exists at different scales." (149) If the world becomes smaller, perhaps the prisoner’s senses of space and places reshape themselves. I would not find it hard to believe that the outside world of countries, states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, etc, folds increasingly into space if nothing is there to keep it real. The world might be transformed into mythic space known by the prisoner through his small window—seasons, night and day, all still present but without exactitude
In contrast, markings on the wall, a mouse-hole, are places the eye can settle on: they become distinctions in space, making this cell real as opposed to others.
‘Place’ might shrink to the bed.
 
Thus far, I’m horrified. But
 
Given a few materials—a map, drawing, postcard, or anything with materiality—a prisoner might orient his space in a way that gives it meaning. Given a writing utensil, the prisoner might begin to narrate his space and to make place from within it. Given a book or a map, a prisoner might escape prison space, prison time altogether for a little while. I hope so, anyway.

A Postcard from Joe Strummer. 

 

Julian Temple's documentary "The Future is Unwritten: The Ballad of Joe Strummer" revolved around a theme that brought a lot together for me. Captured in a personal drawing of Strummer's (a Christmas Card depicting a seemingly anonymous landscape of campfires surrounded by rivers), it is as much an example of his mature politics as any Clash or Mescaleros' song. I was not the only one who felt the power of that symbolic landscape. Director Julian Temple had this to say in a 2007 interview:

 

"For Joe Strummer, the idea of a “campfire” - any loose assembly of people bonded by the rising flames and the advancing dawn - became an art form in itself. The campfire was the melting pot, the wisdom stone, the HolyGrail; the essential outdoor forum for constantly evolving ideas and conversations."

 

On his chapter on Mythical Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan writes "Mythical Space of the first kind is a conceptual extension of the familiar and workaday spaces given by direct experience." I think that the drawing on the postcard is a mythical space, a utopia of the artist's imagination (not insignificantly on a Christmas Card), but which comes as a reflection of a lot of different landscapes, of place-space relations, that Joe had felt over time.  I don't mean to parse out Strummer's life details from this picture. But one or two might be fun to explore.

 

To the picture: there is no indication (that I know of) that this is any particular space or time: this could be 10,000 years ago east Asia, or it could be happening somewhere in Vermont (although i suppose you could make some anglo-associations with the hills). There is a vaguely 'pagan' or primal (I hate using those words) wanderlust, given by the moon, the stars, the art direction on the ship (sailing towards an unknown somewhere).

 

"Spaciousness is closely associated with a sense of being free." Space definitely helps convey 'freedom' in Strummer's landscape; but there also a sense a place, a community. The fires give the landscape a communal (though not crowded) life. They are the biolgical centers of life, from which can grow centers of felt value, though which man (Women, Children, Black, White, etc.) can measure the cosmos to themselves. Very DIY. It is something like a city.

 

The dissolution of traditional community and identity in The City is one of Modernity's common narratives. Punk music/culture experienced the city as something falling apart, experienced modernity as full of empty promises.  Joe Strummer lived beyond the Punks to see global Neoliberal citis (the city is only space, the future is only progress) rise from the ashes of the welfare states, and I think that this vision of a campfire landscape, if not taken too literally, is a powerful articulation of hope and dissent. 

 

Interview with Julian Temple:

http://blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/sundance/2007/01/20/the-campfire-–-director-julien-temple-on-joe-strummer/

There's always a $25 dollar gift card for Regal Cinema in my christmas stocking, which I save for that last week of winter vacation. Thursday, Friday, or Saturday; matinee or late show; I'll be at the Miracle Five. 

 

There is no obvious reason to be impressed with the Miracle Five.  Of the four 'legitimate' theaters I grew up in, the nearest closed after Space Jam premiered on my sixth birthday. The furthest two still turn a profit (I believe) through blockbusters and proximity to the malls. Miracle Five scraps by, though I'm not sure how (or by how much). Why?

 

1) It's close to midtown, but not close enough to walk. It's neighbors include a christian bookstore, a church, a Verizon Wireless, and a few vacant lots. There's sort of a hood behind it. 2). There is no split-level lazy-boy-esque block seating like the theaters downtown; rather, Miracle Five has 6 theaters with less than 100 seats at a slight slope facing a small screen.

 

The Miracle five plays the weird films (weird for the South); the Indie Films (kind of); the foreign films (some of them). [I should have mentioned this before] ]"Home" is/was Tallahassee Florida--a mid-sized Florida city, home to the state government, Florida State University, and Florida Agriculture and Mining University. Those institutions bring just enough literati keep the Miracle Five in business. Just enough. There's usually four or five of us in the theater on any given day of the week. Nights ain't much more crowded. 

 

So, why is Miracle Five a Good Place? Am I just escapist? A snob? Do I enjoy being part of a community of strangers?  (I got to NYU, after all). 

 

The Miracle Five is a landmark in many personal geographies: of important family outings; of dates with friends, and lovers. It marks a boundary in town between that which I knew as a child, under my parents guidance, and what I came to know as an adult. I believe my interest in Geography was kindled there (before books or meaningful television could reach me) by a picture about Bhuddist monks playing soccer. But that's hardly the whole answer. At the root of this question is something I can't answer: why I love movies, more than any other kind of art; why I think they're bigger and more important  than just an afternoon away; why I feel an imagined  kinship with those who early viewers for whom movies were not just a distraction--they were an important part of modern life, and were architecturally rendered as such. Most interesting in this case are Movie Palaces--early theaters built in a Hopper-esque America, mixtures of Democratic-National Sentiment and a European or Orientalist artistic inclination.  It's a leap, but the Miracle Five is my movie palace.