Grad Research: Mystery Spot Books
One of the most exciting projects I have had the opportunity to work on in the past few years is a collaboration with an artist and good friend in Minneapolis. Due to our shared interest in cultural geography and the weird and wonderful tourist landscape, we began to create book-length publications that explore ideas of land, site, history, and American material culture. These publications are printed in limited editions of 100-250 and include photography, drawings, essays, documentation of site-specific installations, and other artifacts from our travels. We currently have four titles in print, made possible by a generous grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board. The following is a short piece I wrote for our first book project, Mystery Spot, which has become the first volume in an ongoing series.
Preservation and EntropyThe Winchester mansion in San Jose, California, was once an eight-room farmhouse. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, purchased the property in 1884. By 1906, the year of the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake, the house had grown into a seven-story mansion. After the earthquake it was reduced to its current four-story height, but construction continued for as long as Sarah Winchester was alive. It is said that on the day of her death in 1922, when carpenters heard the news, nails were left half-driven. In a house with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens, this is just one of the apocryphal stories that has accumulated at the four-acre property in the Silicon Valley.Tours of the Winchester mansion are offered to the public every day of the year save Christmas. The preservation process, like the building process, is perpetual. 20,000 gallons of paint are required to cover the exterior of the house, and the painting process takes so long to complete that by the time work has finished it is time to begin again. Much of the woodwork and many of the original fixtures are cordoned off or behind glass, and various collections of period furniture have been brought in to replace Sarah Winchester’s belongings, which were auctioned off after her death. One wing of the house, however, has been kept empty and in the state of disrepair brought on by the 1906 earthquake. Here, as in the rest of the house, guide ropes and carpeted paths maintain the distance between visitors and the attraction. Unlike the rest of the house, however, these rooms are billed as a “frozen moment in time,” as if entropy itself could be preserved.The Winchester tour guide monologue focuses on the peculiarities of the owner’s ever-changing and enigmatic design and on the incredible arithmetic of the house itself. But something is missing from the hour-long tour. The eight-room farmhouse that stood on the site in 1884 has been all but lost in the process of building and rebuilding. While standing in one of the mansion’s many kitchens toward the end of the tour, visitors are informed that they may be standing in a section of the house near where the farmhouse once stood, but the location and dimensions of the oldest rooms are unknown. In a house that was renovated upwards of 600 times, a set of steps and a sentence of tour monologue are all that remain to represent the original structure.The Mystery Spot Books website is in the works, but you can get updates on new projects (and see more images from the books) here.
Grad Research: JFK, Reality, and Mediation at the Sixth Floor Museum
I probably don't have to tell you that Austin is a vibrant, exciting place to live and work: with a killer live music scene, ubiquitous tacos, and barbecue that'll make you weak in the knees, it certainly ranks near the top of my favorite cities in America list.That said, one of the benefits of living in Austin has also been having opportunities to explore other parts of Texas, from Marfa to Houston. This past weekend, I decided to venture out of the Austin city limits to Dallas, a city I had only ever experienced through way too many layovers at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.Though Dallas has its share of tourist destinations, my motivation was research-related. At the moment, I'm knee-deep in my Master's Report, which explores representations of John F. Kennedy's assassination in two video games, and how their odd, perhaps ethically questionable gamification of the event - an incredibly traumatic moment in American history - reconfigures and negotiates our understanding of history and politics. What kind of residue is left in our historical memory if we play these games? What do they do to our imaginations of power, official state accounts of history, our ability to interact with history and meaning-making? How do we understand history if we only experience it virtually?But to me, a 25-year old, Kennedy's assassination always felt remote, a moment in a textbook rather than a lived, traumatic experience. So I embarked on a journey to the place where it happened, to make it feel as real as it probably could to someone who was never there: Dealey Plaza, and the Texas State Book Depository, now a museum dedicated to Kennedy and the assassination.
The Sixth Floor Museum relies on an audio tour that guides you through various points of the exhibit, offering both pure narration of the museum's holdings (mostly documents, photographs, and videos) and first-hand accounts from witnesses and public officials. After learning about Kennedy's early life and initial moments of the presidency, I found myself standing in front of the window believed to have been Lee Harvey Oswald's vantage point from where he fired three shots. But the museum does not permit visitors to approach or glance out that window at the street below: it is blockaded by glass, meaning I could not come within fifteen feet of the storied spot. Rats.The second half of the museum explores the aftermath of the assassination through a relatively homogenous collection of artifacts - photographs, stills from the few films we have, newscasts - relayed largely through the media. And, based on those holdings, I really got a sense of how mediated the assassination was even for people living in 1963. This was partially out of necessity, as there was no quicker way to spread the word about the tragedy than over the wire and through news programs. But it's also because several people in the crowd were snapping photographs to document the President's presence in Dallas, a signifier of having been there when Kennedy was, too. They saw the president and the assassination through lenses; so do we.The compulsion to document through photography and, in a few cases, through film, has invigorated debates about the true story of the assassination since 1963. The only reason folks have come up with detailed alternate theories and accounts of how Kennedy was killed - and why such theories remain contested, hashed over, pervasive - is because we can continually pore over photographs and film made by everyday citizens in Dallas.Ironically, the museum does not permit photography or recording indoors, so a moment in history that remains salient in public consciousness due to those media halts further documentation through visual and aural media. After leaving the museum, I felt a sense of anxious incompleteness: I hadn't documented my presence at this very fraught place except in scrawling a few notes in my notebook. I wanted to photograph, as a means of remembering the details of the exhibition and of signifying to myself and others that I had been to the actual place.Of course, once I left the building, I spent some time photographing its exterior. I was struck by how moving being there was, but also how utterly familiar it was: I had seen all of it countless times before in the Zapruder film, in photographs, in the video games that I'm studying. And it was exactly as expected.But in spite of that familiarity, there was also a pall cast over my experience of Dealey Plaza, the depository, the grassy knoll. At no point did I feel a stronger sense of sadness than I did when I first saw the white Xs painted on the street, signifying, "Kennedy was shot here and here." Those Xs connected the assassination with actuality - it happened in this space, on this concrete, not in the virtuality of film and television and photography and video game. I did not expect to feel distressed, but the reality of the assassination was striking.
The significance wasn't lost on the tourists who visited the area, too: several visitors asked to have their picture taken over or near the X, ostensibly to signify presence: "I was at this place. This is where it happened." I was initially troubled by that impulse; who would want a memento of visiting the spot of a deeply tragic moment? Isn't such a practice crass at best and unethical at worst?But considering my similar impulse within the museum, and my motivations for coming to Dallas in the first place, I can't judge these people. Documenting their presence there could be a means of connecting, of making the assassination more real to them. And in a cultural moment where mediation and removal from history and politics is the norm rather than the exception, an impulse to make history more personal is laudable.At dusk, only 5 hours after I arrived in Dallas, I returned to Austin. But Austin lacks the aura of weighty historical trauma that permeates Dallas for me. Nevertheless, I find myself thinking back to the museum and the plaza with a measurable degree of real sadness.
Grad Research: Histories and Highways in Washington, DC
Once the holiday festivities, post-Christmas sale shopping, family fun and new year's shenanigans quieted down, I snuck off to the MLK library down in Gallery Place in Washington, DC, to spend a few days digging around in their voluminous community archives collection. It was awesome. I'm working on a piece on DC's anti-freeway movement, and hoo boy does the DC Public Library have a lot of great stuff! Not only do they have an incredible collection of photographs, DC City Council records, and DC-area newspapers large and small - they also have 42.5 linear feet worth of clippings, flyers, hearing transcripts, correspondence, maps, picket signs and all manner of other goodies donated by the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), an interracial anti-freeway group that leveraged the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight freeways in DC and to rewrite eminent domain legislation in the process. Needless to say, I was psyched.The ECTC formed in the mid-1960s, when DC and Maryland attempted to build the ten-lane North Central Freeway right through the heart of DC's Northeast quadrant. The Freeway was purportedly part of a much larger interstate project. Back in the mid-1950s, fueled by some alchemical combination of increased economic prosperity, a WWII-era "mega-project" mindset, and various automobile-oriented advocacy groups, Eisenhower's "highwaymen" had begun to draw up and build what we know today as the National Interstate System - that vast network of highways that connects the nation and allows high-speed traffic to flow seamlessly from one city to the next nation-wide. By the early 1960s, many of the rural stretches had been completed, and some cities - like Austin - even featured highways cutting right through the center of town.Not so in DC. By 1964, I-95, the major highway that runs the length of the East Coast, approached DC from both Virginia and Maryland, but on both sides it stopped abruptly ten miles outside of town at the newly completed Capital Beltway. Drivers wanting to enter the city itself had to leave the highway and navigate its surface streets, which, as DC's burgeoning population began to spill out into the Maryland and Virginia suburbs and long-distance road travel to and from the city became more common, was causing more than a little congestion. And nothing makes a highway engineer more frustrated than congestion. So the District Highway Department began to plan a network of intra-city freeways. And, when the wealthy, white, well-connected residents of DC's Northwest quadrant flat-out rejected any proposals to put freeways in their neck of the woods, highway planners slyly relocated freeway plans to Northeast, where the population was poorer, more diverse, less-connected to the usual channels, and thus supposedly less able to resist the overtures of the highwaymen. In late 1964, expecting an open-and-shut case, the Maryland and DC highway departments drew up plans for a ten-lane North Central Freeway through Northeast and hid a small announcement about a public hearing in the back pages of the Washington Post.Thank god for all those crazy old people with nothing to do but sit around and read back pages of the Washington Post! That first public hearing drew more than 700 furious residents, nearly all of whom were vehemently opposed to the freeway - or any freeway, for that matter. As it turned out, it also kicked off a ten year long struggle to keep the freeway out and bring rapid transit in instead.This is where the ECTC comes in. Building on pre-existing neighborhood organizations and leveraging national movements like black power and environmentalism, they mobilized DC residents to protest the freeway, to fight the highwaymen, to testify before congress and to harass the crap out of DC's Mayor and City Council. They also had some pretty amazing graphic designers on their side. Check this out:Pigs eating at a trough of highway-related exploitation! Downtown Progress was a business organization that supported building freeways in DC in hopes of bringing suburban dollars back to the city's central business district:
Those same exploiters doing a number on "This Land is Your Land!" This one vents their frustration at the collusion between big business and politics and the expense of the lives of the people in the path of the highway. And yes, they had lyrics for the entire song.
And this on is one of the ECTC's more famous posters, at least locally, featuring their slogan:
What's particularly interesting about this last one is that the ECTC quickly grasped the racial implications of moving a freeway from Northwest to Northeast and made race a central part of its campaign against the freeway from the get-go, but it wasn't until the 1968 riots that the Federal government was willing to admit that a) the ECTC was right and b) in the late 1960s, DC's integrated neighborhoods had at least as much political clout as its white ones because they had the weight of the entire Civil Rights movement behind them. Really, a genius move on the part of the ECTC.And, together with all of their other mobilization and communication tactics, an effective one: the North Central Freeway was never built, the Metro's Red Line runs along the CSX tracks near where the freeway would have been, and the Federal government has long since stopped trying to build highways anywhere near our fine nation's capital - or in any other major city, for that matter.These days, it's better to put those highway funds to good use in building a bicycle network, anyway.
List: 7 Films from 2011 that American Studies Scholars Should See
Somehow, it’s already December, and you know what that means: a million year-end lists of the best (and worst) 2011 had to offer. So we’re throwing our collective hat in the ring with this list of the best movies from 2011 that are of particular interest to American Studies scholars of all stripes. We can’t vouch for the quality of all these, of course, but they at least provide some fodder for folks to potentially research and write about.Quick note: there are a ton of worthwhile documentary films that were released this year that are worth a look, but this list only highlights fictional films. Have fun!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWX34ShfcsE]
Drive
Ryan Gosling stars in this intense homage to a very gritty Los Angeles. He plays a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a getaway driver, but a botched heist leaves him with a contract on his head. Though the film’s storyline is predominantly a tale of the unnamed driver dealing with a variety of folks who try to kill him, Drive also offers a fascinating and dark portrayal of the city. Visually and musically, it’s 1980s-style noir at its best (but caveat emptor: the violence is sporadic but incredibly graphic).
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH7KZD5vGBY]
Cowboys and Aliens
This is definitely not an Oscar winner, but for anyone who loves western-science fiction crossovers, it’s a must. Cowboys and Aliens is based on a graphic novel of the same name, centering on a no-holds-barred battle between man and alien in the Arizona territory, back in 1873. Bombastic visuals aside, the film also boasts a great cast and crew: it was directed by Jon Favreau and written by a crew that includes Lost scribe Damon Lindelof. And it stars Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig, and Olivia Wilde.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_ajv_6pUnI]
The Help
Based on a novel of the same name, The Help tracks the relationship of a white woman with her black maids during the 1960s in Mississippi. Though the film has received generally positive reviews, it’s also earned some criticism for its problematic and stereotypical portrayal of black women. The Help even prompted the Association of Black Women Historians to release a public statement critiquing its treatment of the historical moment.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JerVrbLldXw]
Captain America: The First Avenger
Comic books are often very political works, and the films that are based on these stories are no different. Captain America: The First Avenger stars Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Tommy Lee Jones, and a bunch of other heavy-hitters, and features the super hero in a battle with the U.S. military against a power hungry subset of the Nazi Party called HYDRA. The film is a hell of a lot of fun, but it also comments on military technology, bodily enhancement, patriotism, and the importance of PR in fighting wars. Plus it has "America" in the title - there's lots of America.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rhNrz2hX_o]
Meek’s Cutoff
Back to the West. Meek’s Cutoff centers on a small group of settlers heading west before the Civil War. They end up lost in the wilderness thanks to guide Stephen Meek, who doesn't quite know where he's going. The desperation of the situation leaves the settlers both at each others' throats and struggling to deal with their depleting resources and energy. The narrative is intense and captivating, but what really resonates is the stunning camerawork highlighting the landscape – it really is a beautiful, deadly, painful frontier.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DqFRsPrns]
Margin Call
Margin Call examines an investment bank (based loosely upon the now-defunct Lehman Brothers) in the throes of a financial crisis that threatens both the company and the national economy. Sound familiar? The star-studded cast, which includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, ZacharyQuinto, and Stanley Tucci, highlights the personal stakes of the decisions made by Wall Street, so it’s worth a look if your understanding of the financial calamity that began a few years ago is centered more on numbers and formulas than on people.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdzWcrXVtwg]
Contagion
At first glance, Contagion is just another apocalyptic viral outbreak film. The real story, though, lies in the human response to an international threat. You’ll see a society deteriorate in the face of panic and fear, you’ll see how quickly information – right or wrong – can spread, thanks to new media, you’ll see the impotence of a government responding to an international disaster. It’s an upper, to say the least – but stellar performances by Marion Cotillard, Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow make the film worth the inevitable uneasy paranoia you'll feel after seeing it.That's all, folks! Did we miss anything? Leave a comment if you know another film that American Studies folks might find interesting!