Decision: Spring 2008

So, I have been away from this gig for a while (you knew it was coming), dealing with school and busy busy busy times. But I have finally decided the subject matter for my two large projects this semester: taxis and photography.












I'll be making a documentary film about St. Louis taxi drivers as a study of transnational subjectivity and mobility, trying to examine immigration and transnationalism as a circular or perpetual experience (like driving a taxi) rather than the more conventional, conservative view of immigration as moving from unidirectionally from point A to point B. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully I'll get in with some driver networks fairly quickly, people who will let me ride along and film interviews while they drive. If not, I'll have to come up with an alternative strategy or else face lots and lots of taxi fares. That won't work. But I have a feeling that some of these guys (and they are mostly guys) are networked with each other, and one relationship will lead to others. Let's hope.

Project #2 is a more traditional seminar paper. I'll be taking a look at the book that resulted from the photo exhibit, here is new york, which opened shortly after September 11, 2001 and is a collection of photographs before, during, and after that day's events in NYC. They were taken by both professional and amateur photographers and represent about a fifth (1,000) of the 5,000 photographs that were originally exhibited in various locales. I'll be developing my visual culture chops, trying to become more fluent with a visual culture methodology while analyzing the content, themes, exceptions, and inclusions of the exhibit. At this point, I'm considering this: why there weren't more photographs of the dead and dying?

If the point of the exhibit was to make the attacks more real, less mediated, and the tragedy we're talking about is the loss of more than 3,000 lives, why are those lives so absent?

It's official!

I received a wonderfully fat envelope from the Journal of Urban History this afternoon. After seven long months of waiting, I finally heard back and the result is...

is...

revise and resubmit!

This is not as bad as it sounds. It was actually the best response I could have realistically hoped for. The alternative was a straight decline to review, which happens to most people, most of the time. This same paper has been declined without review at my ultimate publication destination, but this journal is a very close second. I am so pleased!

At this point, my article has already been peer reviewed and I have received extensive comments and suggestions from my two amazingly dedicated anonymous reviewers. The reviewers had a lot of suggestions, but nothing that will require an extensive re-write and nothing that I can't handle with a few months of work. Once I revise according to their suggestions, I resubmit to the journal and hope for the best. Sometimes a second revision is needed, sometimes it is taken at that point for publication, and sometimes it is declined and the process starts all over again with another journal. This can all take a very, very long time. I'll be lucky to have more than one article published before I get my degree (!).

On a previous note, more ideas for a paper for my Death and Dying class: an examination of urban roadside death memorials, an analysis of the rhetoric of cancer (is it seen as a war or as a misfortune?), or something about the life-threatening levels of urban healthcare options for the poor and working class. Or something having to do with the imagination of death, how we think of it in various forms as brought by various causes, similar in methodology to how we understand the imagination of nation and community. This would have to be much, much narrower. I don't feel any closer to a decision than I did earlier in the week. This is difficult. I haven't thought enough about death to have many ideas that sing.

Sigh.

Death and Taxis

Above is an amazing photo J took at the Obama rally last weekend.
I love it.

So, I spent a lot of time today thinking about topics for the two projects I have to (somehow) complete by the end of this semester: a documentary video and an article. The article is for my Death and Dying in American Culture class and I have no idea, not even a kernel of an idea, of where to go with that one. Death is such a huge subject, and there are so many cultural manifestations of how we as individuals and as cultural subjects feel about it, that I can't seem to narrow anything down. All my ideas feel tired or monumental, neither of which are characteristics of a managable, interesting project. I've thought about doing something with the death penalty, or something having to do with images of cancer patients (think Susan Sontag as captured by Annie Liebowitz), or the cultural nuances of condolence cards...none of these inspire me completely. I will keep working on it, while I shower.

Showers, as if you haven't noticed, are great places for ideas. Every piece I have written in grad school has come to me either in the shower or while on a run. Something about the quiet solitude, the ways both of these situations allow you to tune out from visual stimulation and go rummaging around in your head.

So, while in the shower tonight I thought about making a documentary about taxi drivers for my class on globalization. St. Louis has a diverse immigrant population and, as is the case in many cities with diverse immigrant populations, many of the cab drivers are not native-born Americans. Not sure where this would go, but I like the aesthetic of shooting film from the back seat while conducting interviews. Not everything would be shot in the cab, of course - I don't have enough spare change to spend too many miles riding around town - but it would be a fun way to establish connections for out-of-cab interviews.

I'm interested in the drivers' experiences: whether they encounter overt racism, why they took a job driving a cab, whether there is a network of friends who get each other jobs driving cabs, whether there is division between immigrant drivers and native-born drivers, whether they bring friends or family over from another spot on the globe and get them into a cab as a first job, whether driving the cab provides spatial relief from the phobic spaces described in many globalization narratvies, and whatever else I land on.

There's something very interesting about the metaphor of immigration (as movement) and cab driving (as movement) and the felt lack of permanence in both. This could be good.

Crafty Ladies

Last night my lady friends all gathered for the second installment of craft night. We sat, we knitted, we sewed, we talked politics. Here's K working on a new (appropriately sized) hat:

There were some minor sewing machine entanglements, but these were greatly overshadowed by the great conversation, spiced popcorn, and hard cider. Yum.

And then there was all the wedding talk. Two of the ladies are getting wedded this year (not to each other), and each week there is some new development in the dress, family, dinner, or ceremony department. This week L brought over one of those wedding magazines designed to make most women feel fat, poor, and unhappy: lots of models draped over furniture, sporting come-hither looks and the most expensive, ornate dresses I have ever seen. Not for me, thanks. When my day comes, I will be visiting my good friends at Anthropologie and purchasing that $600 dress whose purchase could not be otherwise justified, a dress that I absolutely love and will wear again and which will (most likely) not be white. And will not (definitely not) have sequins, poufs, or some crazy long train. I think wedding photos look strange with all that white.

(UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I don't detest the white-dress thing. Just big, poufy, taffeta-flounced white dresses, and especially $2,000 white dresses. So white is all right, as they say.)

Anyway, last night K made some valentines hearts for fun and for sending. I will sign off with a photo of one, to curb the quite audible grumbles from the previous paragraph. Happy Friday.

Obama?

I have been so busy with work that I've missed several days worth of posting - oh, dear reader, how I have been busy. I went to the Obama rally here in the Lou over the weekend, one amongst the throng of 20,000 chanting, sweating, sign-waving people packed onto a convention center floor. It was tight. Here's where we were, in relation to the stage:

And this actually looks closer than it was. I may have been zoomed in - we really had to stretch to see the stage, which was so far away that when the crowd at the front cheered it sounded like they were on the other side of town. Seriously. Lots of people, and wonderfully diverse. I think that's what won me over, in the end, to vote for Obama: I have never seen such an alliance of races, classes, and (to a lesser extent) ages gathered for a common cause. It was exciting, and I let that excitement carry the vote. Perhaps against my more pragmatic side, perhaps against my more feminist side...I went with the race vote.

I still miss Edwards. I almost voted for him on Tuesday even though he's no longer in the running. On the upside, Obama and Clinton have actually been acknowledging poverty since he bowed out. And to that, we owe Edwards our thanks, dear reader. If you disagree, I will give him your thanks on your behalf. Trust me, it's for the best. (I am mostly kidding. Mostly.)

It was so crowded and exciting, one young woman passed out right in front of us. Right here, on the floor:

She was carted off, just like in the Superbowl (which I didn't watch, but from past experience I think someone is carted off on one of these exact same flatbed go-carts at least once per game; this is, not surprisingly, a large part of the excitement of the game). She was mostly revived by the time the cart arrived, which was good because Obama was about to take the stage and we all wanted to feel good and excited again.

Do you notice a trend in my vocabulary tonight? How many times have I mentioned excitement? Quite a few, and that is exactly what worries me about Obama. Is he all just excitement and hope? I still struggle with this, two days post-primary. I worry that we are going for the show instead of the substance, for the exciting outsider instead of the seasoned politico. What's a girl to do? I voted. Now, I wait. And worry.

To make matters better, my lady friends gathered here again tonight for another crafty affair. More on that in the morning...

About that snow...

Last night it snowed. A lot. At least six inches. Here is J shoveling our front steps. He is so good.


And here is the excellent work he made of the back yard so we could go out for coffee and scones this morning.



I was glad that my lady friends still made it over here yesterday for the first ever craft night. They braved the elements, steered their little cars through snowy streets to come drink wine and play with yarn. Our man friends got together over beers and acted like men, only to return in time for apple pie and ice cream. They had been driven out of the house for fear of catching a bit of the lady-ness that had taken over the living room.

There is something really nice about a crafty circle, about a bunch of people sitting around and feeling comfortable with the inevitable silences. Knitting can do that. J's grandma just died and one of the fondest memories I have of her is from several Decembers ago, when she and I sat next to each other near the warm wood stove, in recliners with the foot rests up. She talked, I knitted. For hours. While I worked through some scarf or hat or something, she told me about J's early days, about her early days, about the family farm thirty years ago when Kay and Mitch first moved there. She was 97 when she died a couple of weeks ago. The things she had lived through...it gives me hope that life feels longer than you think it will.

The Man We Know as MLK...

...isn't exactly the man you learned about in grade school. I know it's more than a week after MLK day, but part of the problem with giving the man his own day is that most white folk tend to only think about him on the third Monday in January. And considering that many white folks situate thoughts of Civil Rights and race relations on the body of that one man, one day is not enough.

So, in grade school, they get you thinking that King was a man who liked to be posed with American flag, a man who often wore a pensive facial expression, a man who eternally inhabits the space behind a podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. They tell you that he had a dream about white children and black children playing together, about a color-blind America. And they tell you that he was shot.

What you don't learn (unless you attend some pinko lefty school for the children of bohemian intellectual New York Times subscribers) is that King was an anti-poverty, anti-war, anti-corporate radical. He spoke openly against the Vietnam War and American global arrogance, he decried liberal reticence on the subject of poverty, he railed against politicians who claimed to have the best interest of the people (whose people?) at heart and yet still allowed poverty, discrimination, and an endless war to endure. In 1963, he wrote a little paperback manifesto entitled Why We Can't Wait, in which he urged immediate action to cure the immediate crisis of poverty in America. The epigraph reads,

"Freedom is never granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed."

Indeed.

While definitely a man of great peace, King was also one of this century's most vehement rabble-rousers. Check out this great clip from the good people at the video blog, Ill Doctrine.

Well, there goes that...

I have not felt so politically saddened since the moment in 2004 when I saw, to my horror, that Bush, Jr. had indeed stolen another term in office. 

John Edwards is exiting the race for the Democratic presidential nomination at 1 PM today. I didn't even have the chance to vote for him. I didn't have the opportunity to drop my name into the bucket that never quite got to filling, in favor of the only candidate that always addresses poverty, that openly discusses the latent racism affecting the lives of millions, that gave labor, environmental protection, and health care the attention they deserve. 

I don't know whom I'll be voting for next Tuesday. I can't get excited about Clinton and I fear that racism and conservatism (yes, even within the Democratic party) will make Obama a risky candidate in the general election. He's exciting, he's refreshing, but he's also relatively inexperienced and a racial minority. Racism, despite all the efforts to declare it dead, is alive and well and thriving, trouncing opportunities, fueling unemployment lines and housing crises. 

I'm not sure how to conclude this post, dear reader. My bubble of hope has burst. That is a crummy cliche, but I don't care. I miss my bubble.