Someone to Speak Up:
The Value of Unions
August 31, 2007
One unsuspected interest that was sparked by my visit to Dearborn, Michigan earlier in August was the landscape of labor activism. Just as the Civil Rights movement has its hallowed sites, so American Labor has its storied places. Walter Reuther, leader of the United Auto Workers, graduated from Fordson High School in Dearborn. As I mad my way to Dearborn's Southend for an interview I drove along Miller Road, bordering the giant Rouge River plant. I later learned that this was the site of the "Battle of the Overpass" in which Reuther and other labor activists were badly beaten by Ford security men. It would not be difficult to put together a Labor pilgrimage (in fact it has been done, see here).
Today over at the Washington Monthly Kevin Drum defends the value of unions.. even if their overall benefit can be overstated:
However, if you're interested in government policies that actively favor the working and middle classes, you need to have some kind of substantial political interest group fighting on their side. That's Politics 101, and right now unions are pretty much all we've got.
A couple of weeks ago when I opened a biography of Reuther (The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit by Nelson Lichtenstein) I came across the photograph that heads this post. That is Reuther testifying before Congress and his chart reads: "Employment Gains Smaller than in Previous Recovery Periods". What an amazing fact! Once there were powerful men in this country who shoved around their weight to get a fairer share for the middle and working classes.
Unions still advocate these things, but they are hardly as visible. I can't even imagine a nation in which unions were genuinely powerful.. but that strikes me as a loss. It is a good thing to have someone like Reuther to speak for your interests.
And for a chart like that demonstrating inequality you would have to turn to.. well, Kevin Drum.. he and other bloggers are getting good at these kinds of graphic presentations. One way to view the net is as a replacement for the genuine places at the table that have been lost to the left.
International Notions of Preservation
August 31, 2007
In an essay written for Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Middle East, Caroline Williams writes scathingly about the efforts of the Egyptian government to turn portions of medieval Cairo into a tourist park. The push to refurbish this area and make it profitable is encouraging shoddy preservation:
The Egyptian authorities in promoting restored buildings full of new marble and landscaped surrounds are expressing an idea of restoration that values the new and the shiny. [279]
The apparent goal of the government is to create an urban landscape that conforms to the expectations of tourists. The idea of keeping a mosque true to what we know about its historic appearance is largely dismissed in the rush to make a building merely attractive.
Williams goes on to make an odd point about the local appreciation of historic structures:
Most Egyptians tend to esteem a site for its religious and associative values rather than for the artistic or historic value of a particular structure... The same Canadian conservator noted with surprise that it was more the spirit of the place than the historic fabric of the building that interested her Egyptian co-workers. [279-80]
This point fits in awkwardly with her essay as a whole. While it is true that elite Egyptian officials generally have poor aesthetic judgment, it is something else altogether to realize that the preservation efforts as understood by UNESCO (which sets the standards for restoration projects) are wholly foreign to the sensibilities of local Egyptians.. the people who actually live in these historic areas.
At the beginning of the essay Williams recalls wistfully the days when Islamic Cairo was virtually ignored:
Neither the people of the quarter, nor our friends in Zamalek or Garden City, seemed to have heard of any of the mosques or buildings for which we were looking. Individually and actively we were forced to find our own way to the monuments we wanted to study. [270]
That sounds fun.. but again what is communicated is that the actual residents of Cairo knew nothing about their historic heritage. I have noted this phenomenon in Cairo. One vivid example is the time I got dropped off at the Islamic Museum by a taxi driver who was clearly a religious conservative (beard, clothes, Qur'an in tape deck). As we got near to the museum I asked whether he had ever visited the Islamic Museum.. and he answered that he had not. The more I thought about that, the more I was floored.
I think this is a variable that is important to deal with when it comes to ideas about preservation: people are not always on the same cognitive page. The UNESCO ideals that underlie restoration as it "should" be done are not universal values.. but historically evolved. The idea of getting back to the most important historic layer (not always the original one) is ingrained in Western scholarship. When I visit a historic site my mind.. unconsciously now.. begins to break down the layers and imagine the building at different points in its history. If the Egyptian people (not the elites who are currently in charge) were to take over the maintenance and restoration of their urban landscape, it would perhaps be a version of restoration that values the "spirit of the place" rather then the "historic fabric".. and it is interesting to think about how that would look.. but it is quite different than what UNESCO expects.
I don't mean to sound hostile to UNESCO standards. The critical perception that allows for historic layers to stand out separately is a central goal of Old Roads. We are here to build that perception.. and the physical preservation of structures and landscapes is a natural outgrowth of this mode of perception. But to some degree it is all a lost cause.. landscapes are being destroyed and any stringent plan that does not have popular acceptance is going to fail. Structures in Cairo are either crumbling or being made up for tourists. It is our conviction that the scholar today will more and more be called on to preserve sites for the imagination by means other than physical preservation.. and that will mean a creative use of technology.
Unacceptable Leadership
August 29, 2007
I sometimes try to imagine what would happen if a CEO at a large corporation made as many errors as the Bush administration. Say a CEO, along with his close advisors, pushed for an aggressive overseas expansion that flopped and caused the reputation of the corporation to nose dive all around the world. Then add disastrous performance on any number of business fronts and several high profile examples of cronyism. This CEO would have been removed a long time ago by the corporate board. But our president continues to muddle along with enough support to stave off a serious call for his resignation.
I don't mean this post simply as a snark.. I really am curious why it works out that a president who performs like Bush is able to continue in his job. Israel offers a counter example with their Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The disastrously run war in Lebanon last summer brought his approval ratings into the single digits. It seems that no matter whether one is liberal or conservative in Israel.. there can at least be agreement over the poor handling of the war.
My sense is that this phenomenon has something to do with the nature of party affiliation as encouraged by Republicans. Among the core party supporters there is not merely an intellectual buy-in to the positions of the party.. but also an identity commitment. Bush as the head of the party is thus more than just a figure to be calmly approved of or disapproved of.. but a representative of the self. Professional and college ball clubs enjoy a similar commitment from fans. I see it here in Wisconsin with respect to the Packers. Last season I read a letter in our paper about how the test of a true fan is that he sticks with the team in bad times as well as good. Bush and his team, with their emphasis on loyalty and party basics, end up constructing a similarly fan-based version of political loyalty.
A second explanation as to why Bush continues to remain in office is his skill at muddying the waters. You can listen to Bush stand in New Orleans after Katrina and say: "We will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives... This great city will rise again." Nothing like this has happened and the continued federal response to New Orleans has been pathetic by all accounts. But the calculation on the part of Bush and Rove seemed to be that a large section of the public will hear the sound bites and then trust that things will go OK. If the public does question the broken promises then the issue can be muddied by blaming this or that local official.. and pretty soon they aren't sure who to blame.
We have witnessed a succession of points at which Bush has walked out onto a stage and pronounced this or that situation "unacceptable". It is a distancing word that makes it sound as if the problem lies out there separate from his own policies. But what is unacceptable for our nation is the leadership of George W. Bush. This second anniversary of the devastation of Hurricanne Katrina is as good a time as any to call for the resignation of this president and his vice president.
The Art of Documenting:
Phantom India by Louis Malle
August 26, 2007
Phantom India (1962) is an obviously youthful work.. youthful in terms of confidence and sentiments. There is nevertheless much to learn here. I am especially intrigued by the possibility of visiting a different culture for a significant amount of time and filming as many details as possible. Louis Malle went through reel after reel of film and searched out every detail of public life. He narrates this series of short films with a voice over technique that places him in the role of critical guide. The best moments occur when scenes play out with no commentary.. and at the end the narrator steps in to offer thoughts. Least effective are the rather helter-skelter interviews which get sandwiched into the episodes.
Of the five episodes that make up this documentary, I found the second the most interesting. It begins with a drawn out rendering of the passage of a shrine through Madras. The crowd throngs its sides.. and the camera is alive with a human sea. The narrator offers the following personal experience:
We got caught up in the madness. We became part of the crowd, shooting reel after reel, jostled like them, drenched like them, joyous like them. For a moment I forgot who I was. I was part of something else. i belonged. I gave myself up to it, heart and soul.
It is not hard to critique that language of personal connection. Malle's experience is different than that of all these thousands of other people if only because he has no idea about the context or meaning of anything that is going on around him. And this is the main weakness of his documentary method: he has no room for interpretation. He gets experience from the outside and interacts with it from the outside.
This point of view is most clearly stated near the beginning of episode four:
With this explicit goal of experiencing but not understanding, Malle offers colorful sequences of rituals.. but without any real insight into the cultural system that lies behind them. That system of Indian culture and religion is famously complex.. and with Malle's travelogue approach to filming it would be almost impossible to explain every detail he encountered. Nevertheless the lack of interpretation is a major weakness.. and an academic approach to documentary work would necessarily take as its central goal the question of understanding.
At the close of episode 2 (returning now to my favorite) we are taken into a dance academy. The young girls here are practicing the traditional dance known as Bharatanatyam.. a dance form that communicates a narrative. Malle gives us long stretches of scenes from dance practice.. and the lithe and dynamic movements of these girls is powerful on film. At one point he informs us: "From outside we judge its aesthetic qualities as a performance." Again, note the hesitancy to get inside the meaning of anything that is happening in front of him. He is watching amazing movements.. but the deeper mysteries of physical communication will not be investigated.
The place where I lost patience with Malle came as the filmmaker turns his attention to two foreign girls who are practicing this traditional dance form. The girl above is American.. and the narrator cuts her down as "pathetic". The lesson drawn from them is that outsiders cannot break into Indian culture. That may be true.. but I would bet that this girl could have explained a few things about Indian dance to Malle. And anyway, if Malle is allowed to "forget himself" in the midst of an Indian ritual, why can't this girl achieve something similar in her dancing?
At the end of the episode we learn that Malle was thrown out of the dance academy. In his description of this event it is possible to glimpse his inability to defend his own documentary project:
We keep filming. We watch them endlessly. Time has stopped. We don't want to leave. We can't tear ourselves away. Then we're suddenly thrown out, like slightly suspect characters come to disturb their perfect order. They sensed something fishy about our presence. When I think back on it now, I think they were right. We were indeed thieves, intruders in a world in which we did not belong.
If it is impossible to understand another culture, then all gazing must be stealing. But if understanding is possible, there is a new rationale for documenting: the affirmation of human connectedness. The method for building that kind of understanding will be the art of interpretation.
Seed Diversity
August 25, 2007
The latest New Yorker features an article by John Seabrook on the creation of a global seed bank (the article is not online, but audio discussion by the author is available here). The New Yorker regularly publishes articles that take a historic perspective on foods and drinks. This concern for preserving odd corners of our shared human past.. even in its details.. is a priority that is shared by Old Roads (see here).
The goal of the global seed bank is to preserve the agricultural diversity of our planet.. a diversity which is fast fading. Seabrook notes:
A survey in 1983 found that, since 1903, the number of readily available varieties of cabbage dropped from five hundred and forty-four to twenty-eight; carrots dropped from two hundred and eighty-seven to twenty-one... [67]
This plummeting of diversity is due in part to the dominance of genetically modified seeds, as well as to the commercial tendency to mass produce. The result is evident in our supermarkets: fruits and vegetables that look exactly as we expect them to. One response to this homogeneity would be to excuse it as a result of consumer preference.. but the better answer is that these are the varieties whose yield is highest.. and which are easiest to ship.
The fact that our taste buds did not drive the centralization of varieties has opened the door for the current resurgence of locally grown foods. Emily is way ahead of me on these things, and she has gotten us a share of a CSA (community supported agriculture) outfit this summer. Plus, she regularly brings home odd looking heirloom tomatoes from the Saturday farmer's market. These are treats that are possible because the taste of locally grown varieties is genuinely better than what is available in supermarkets.
My mind drifts to all those varieties that are being forgotten but which would not be an improvement on the food we eat today. The goal of the seed bank is pragmatic: to prepare for the future by preserving genetic codes that could prove useful in an emergency or in unknown conditions. The goal of farmers markets is clear too: to sell food to consumers that fits their taste. But our interest here at Old Roads is more backward looking. We think it is important for people now to be able to look back and imagine where human beings have come from. When old texts mention wheat or apples or corn.. well, what were they thinking of? Are there ways to keep that kind of traditional knowledge present?
The story of seeds turns out to be the story of many aspects of human experience. On the linguistic and cultural level too, humans are paring down their diversity. Biodiversity at all levels is expected to be challenged in the coming century. This effort at preserving seeds can function as something of a meta-model for the preservation of other things..
Love At Home
August 25, 2007
Leila Ahmed on Becoming Arab
August 23, 2007
At numerous points in her autobiography Crossing Borders Leila Ahmed notes her dislike of Egyptian president (1954-1970) Gamal Abdel Nasser. Her family was clearly on the losing side of the social changes that came to Egypt in those years.. and she had a viscerally hostile response to his rhetorical excesses. In one of her last chapters Ahmed wrestles with Nasser's most enduring contribution to the Middle East: identity as an Arab. The chapter mixes scholarship with personal memories.. and winds up being a standout example of the way identity commitments can be investigated.
Identity is usually taken as a given. People just are women or gays or working class or Irish. But these terms have long histories and develop through time. When reading literature from another period one must keep in mind the way identity commitments.. the very words by which we define ourselves.. are always shifting. "Arab" is an identity which arose and gained influence in a remarkably short period. Ahmed tries to give a sense of what this word sounded like to her:
Imagine what it would be like if, say, the British or French were incessantly told, with nobody allowed to contest, question, or protest, that they were now European, and only European. European! European! European! And endless songs about it. But for us it was actually worse and certainly more complicated. Its equivalent would be if the British or French were being told that they were white. White! White! White! [244]
When you think about it, "Arab" is a very strange grouping. It elides the obvious national and local identities that mark the Middle East. Ahmed asks: "Was I, for instance, really likely to feel more kin, more at home, with someone from Saudi Arabia than with someone, say, from Istanbul?" (254-5). The answer to that question is of course No.
Ahmed writes eloquently about her personal response to the hammering rhetoric of Arabness.. but then turns to an investigation of the historical construction of this identity. It is a complex history which I won't recount.. but the term was always politically charged. T.E. Lawrence and the British want the "Arabs" to throw off Ottoman rule.. so there was clear utility in pushing this identity. Then with the increasing strength of the Zionism and the creation of Israel, being "Arab" was a counter definition to Jewishness. To make things even more confusing, the West imposed its own vision of what it meant to be an "Arab" on people living in these countries. So for Leila Ahmed.. whose family just considered itself Egyptian and accepted the diversity of religions and languages within that identity.. the idea of suddenly being "Arab" was traumatic and wrenching. This is exactly why the chapter is so valuable: it shows the way identity can shift right out from under you at certain points in history.
The climax of the chapter comes when Ahmed, after piecing together the history of "Arab" as an identity, tries to decide where her parents fell in this drama of words and perceptions. She believes that her parents would have been on the side that opposed war against Israel in 1948.. and which generally wanted to stay separated from the Palestinian issue.. although she has no specific memories that this was the case. Her method is to identify the terms by which her parents saw the world and then to reason on that basis about their responses to historical events.
The concept of being "Arab" may seem fixed today.. and it is reinforced by satellite news channels and institutions such as the Arab League.. one would go seriously wrong if Egyptians in the 19th century were understood to be operating with these same commitments. As we push further back in time, the nature of those commitments only shifts further. One interesting angle of scholarly pursuit would be to endeavor to discover the identity commitments of various historical individuals. This would proceed in a manner similar to that exemplified by Ahmed.. and if done well it would lead to a similar re-imagining of the world as perceived and experienced by another person.
Documentary Blogging #3
August 22, 2007
Over the last few days Emily and I have been watching the Godfather films. We just finished the second part. They remind me of why I never wanted to be a filmmaker. The making of a film is an immense collective undertaking, depending on dozens of individuals to make the final product worthwhile. If we conceptualize creative endeavors as falling along a continuum from complete individual control (like a poem) to minimum individual control (a medieval cathedral).. then there is no doubt that a big budget film falls closer to the cathedral than the novel. Which is to say, it is an undertaking that depends upon multiple people.
I have never wanted to work in a large group.. but the miracle of technology is that creative tools of all kinds are suddenly in the hands of everyone.. at least potentially. The expression of ideas in a visual manner has gotten infinitely easier in the past few years. If the Godfather functions as an ideal.. then filmmaking is still in the hands of those who can come up with millions of dollars in funding. But if the ideal is something a little less controlled.. less professional.. then there are not many barriers to creative work.
In Dearborn for my interview at the museum I walked into a couple of guys filming a real documentary. They had equipment that far surpassed what I was carrying.. and an independent light source. I had a moment of jealousy seeing all this equipment. But then I thought about all the programs out there that looks so professional. The world has no lack of well-produced drivel! Needed is actual creative and constructive thinking. All that equipment represents so many constraints on individual expression. Better far (it seems to me) to be the guy walking around with an older and smaller camera.
I have difficulty explaining just how fun it is to work with images and interviews.. and then construct a linear narrative out of all this material. My academic interests have always been strongly correlated to images (witness dissertation with lots of photos and maps).. and so documentary and multi-media work is not an illogical extension of my work. The problems I run into when writing a paper.. such as my desire to show this or that picture.. are suddenly solved when I think of an essay as a visual tour. What I have to say in my Dearborn essay could be partially expressed in a traditional academic essay.. but not as well. And I may add that I find it a much more creatively fulfilling activity.
Flags of Freedom, Neil Young
August 19, 2007
"Flags of Freedom" appropriates a streamlined version of the tune for Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom". (Neil Young's version owes much to the melodic "Chimes" by the Byrds on Mr. Tambourine Man). The similarity stops with the tune. Neil Young's song is a straightforward narrative of a military march down the Main Street of some small town, while Dylan was never more elusive and suggestive than in "Chimes of Freedom". Dylan's chimes are celestial.. and they toll, finally, for:
..the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
..a pretty broad swath of human beings!
This is not the first time that Young has made strategic use of a Dylan tune. "Days that Used to Be" (from Ragged Glory) has a tune strongly reminiscent of Dylan's "My Back Pages".. and recognizing that, the lyrics to "Days that Used to Be" sound as if they are directed right at Dylan:
I wish I could talk to you,
and you could talk to me
'cause there's very few of us left my friend
From the days that used to be.
Dylan thus becomes a distant interlocutor.. someone whose music stands for an ideal to which one aspires, but who stands aloof from the present. In the brief video documentary on the making of the song, Neil Young casually brushes off the Dylan reference in "Flags of Freedom": "It sort of sounds like Bob Dylan so I mention him.." But I think Dylan has a more important role than that.
The song opens with a parade down Main Street:
Today's the day our younger son
Is going off to war
Fightin' in the age old battle
We've sometimes won before
Flags that line old main street
Are blowin' in the wind
These must be the flags of freedom flyin'
The voice does not stay consistent throughout the song, but right away we are inducted into the point of view of a local family.. a family that believes in the American past. The soldiers marching off to our newest war are understood to be "Fightin' in the age old battle/ We've sometimes won before". There is no irony there. American struggles throughout history are grouped together into a single struggle against tyranny or evil.
The flags lining main street are said to be "blowin' in the wind".. and within a song that borrows a Dylan tune, there can be no innocent references to "blowin' in the wind". Dylan's song points to repetitions of injustice.. and lends a measure of hope to the idea that such injustice will come to an end someday. Young implies a new lyric for Dylan's song: "how many times must the soldiers go to war, before they march no more.. the answer my friend is blowin' in the wind.."
Church bells are ringin'
As the families stand and wave
Some of them are cryin'
But the soldiers look so brave
Lookin' straight ahead
Like they know just where they're goin'
Past the flags of freedom flyin'
We move now into a third person description of the march: "the families stand and wave". Young uses this second stanza to reinforce the confidence with which the soldiers are going off to war. The soldiers are secure in their sense of the justice of America's great war. There is of course sorrow at the departure of the soldiers to a dangerous zone, but there are no doubts here.
Sister has her headphones on
She hears the music blasting
She sees her brother marchin' by
Their bond is everlasting
Listening to Bob Dylan singin' in 1963
Watching the flags of freedom flyin'
She sees the president speakin'
On a Flat-screen TV
In the window of the old appliance store
She turns to see her brother again
But he's already walkin' past
The flags of freedom flyin'
The parade scene is complicated by these two stanzas describing the actions of a sister of one of the soldiers. The first stanza takes a moment to get one's mind around: this girl is "blasting" Dylan's music from circa 1963 (which was the height of Dylan as protest singer). There is a disconnect between the music she is listening to and the patriotic event of a military march. Another disconnect lies between the original setting of this political music and the sister's consumption of the music through headphones. A year or so ago the image of a girl listening to music on headpones was a common media images:
Despite the presence of Dylan's songs in her head, the music is rendered unmeaningful, unfelicitous, unreferential in this patriotic setting. We are struck by how little Dylan's music means to the sister.. and that indifference defines the challenge of modern political music.
The second stanza is oddly technological too, as she watches the president on a flat-screen TV in the window of the old appliance store. We know who the president is, of course, since the very next song on Living with War is calling for his impeachment. The juxtaposition of George W. Bush and Bob Dylan is entirely unexpected. She is listening to Dylan while looking at Bush, but instead of dwelling on that strange superimposition Young's interest is dominated by the technological scene: a flat-screen TV playing in an old store on Main Street. Neither protest music nor political rhetoric are able to penetrate the technological mediums and provide meaning for the scene.. and when she turns around her brother is gone.. off to Iraq.
Have you seen the flags of freedom?
What color are they now?
Do you think that you believe in yours
More than they do theirs somehow?
When you see the flags of freedom flyin'
Young uses the bridge to give ask some critical questions. In concert with Crosby, Stills, and Nash the American flag gave way to the Mexican flag at this point.. and then a whole series of other national flags. The point seemed to be that other countries are free too.. and that other legitimate patriotisms exist beside our own. This is an odd point to bring up in a song that calls to mind the Iraq war. It is not as if Young is draping the Iraqi or Egyptian or Saudi flag in the background. The point here careens toward immigration and xenophobia.. and the certainty that America is right and its actions true.
The final stanza repeats the first stanza, which places us back in a local point of view at a military parade. The obvious direction for Young with such a setting would have been to sing about war and the questions it raises. Instead Young's attention has been taken by the Main Street American scene.. and he paints a picture of disconnection and strange technological mediations. He is asking us to consider not the war, but our own closed view of the world.
Varieties of Muslim Experience:
A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed
August 18, 2007
A Border Passage by Leila Ahmed is not a book I had meant to read over the summer. I picked up a library copy, thumbed through it a bit.. then decided to read just a chapter or two. Now I am just about to the end. A chapter entitled "Harem" was particularly insightful. Ahmed begins this chapter by relating stories about the community of women with whom she was raised in Egypt. It was hardly the harem of the western imagination, rather a closed and mutually supporting group of women. Writing about her experience at a women's college in England, Ahmed entitles a later chapter "The Harem Perfected?".. establishing with this parallel her positive view of the sheltered world in which she grew up.
About midway through the chapter on the harem, Ahmed turns her attention to the form of Islam that was cultivated among the group of women she knew:
Islam, as I got it from them, was gentle, generous, pacifist, inclusive, somewhat mystical—just as they themselves were. Mother's pacifism was entirely of a piece with their sense of the religion. Being Muslim was about believing in a world in which life was meaningful and in which all events and happenings were permeated.. with meaning. Religion was above all about inner things...
This the women passed on to us most of all through how they were and by their being and presence, by the way they were in the world, conveying their beliefs, ways, thoughts, and how we should be in the world by a touch, a glance, a word—prohibiting, for instance, or approving. [121]
Ahmed is not describing an ideal version of Islam; she is writing about what she experienced. The text is permeated with details and introspective.. and the reader can have no doubt that this is the Islam she actually knew as a child. Oddly there are plenty of people who would like to tell her that Islam means something else, and these people include fundamentalists and academics. I think we could now add plenty of TV talking heads. All these people have vested interests in defining Islam. According to them Islam is above all a textual religion.. a religion in which authorities by argumentation settle its nature. Ahmed's point is that lived and experienced religion ends up getting left behind. There is no rule book that says the "real" version of Islam is the one that has the most intellectually consistent or rigorously logical framework. No, Islam is what it is to the people who live it.
The second paragraph cited above points to an alternative world of authority. In normative Islam traditions are passed down among scholars.. and multi-volume collections gather and organize knowledge. Ahmed proposes a view of Islam in which knowledge is passed down not by words, but by subtle expressions and nods, approvals and disapprovals. Through this unspoken Islam, a social world is created. Religion becomes not a set of beliefs, but a way of interacting with the world. Over-reliance on the written word and officially constructed versions of a religion will miss lived religious experience.
To some extent this would be true of every religion, but Ahmed wants to say that Islam especially allows for the spread of this informal version of itself:
...beside the fact that women could not read... women in Muslim societies did not attend mosques. Mosque going was not part of the tradition for women at any class level... Women therefore did not hear the sermons that men heard. And they did not get the official (male, of course) orthodox interpretations of religion that men (or some men) got every Friday. They did not have a man trained in the orthodox (male) literary heritage of islam telling them week by week and month by month what it meant to be a Muslim... [124]
Such a situation (in Ahmed's view) gave rise to a parallel tradition of Islam, disconnected from the institutions and knowledge of official Islam. In the absence of authority, individuals could pick and choose from the oral recitations of the Qur'an central values and concepts. A verse from the Qur'an would not have to be run through the battery of past interpretations, but could be taken for itself.. and lodged in the mind as exemplary.
What we are living through now seems to be not merely the erasure of the living oral, ethical, and humane traditions of Islam but the literal destruction and annihilation of the Muslims who are the bearers of those traditions. In Algeria, Iran, Afghanistan, and, alas, in Egypt, this narrow, violent variant of Islam is ravaging its way through the land. [130]
Despite her interest in defining the informal Islam in which she grew up, Ahmed sees that it is a lost cause historically. Oddly enough, in encouraging women to play a more active role in the official religion (going to mosque, studying traditions) fundamentalism is breaking down the private Islam of the harem. For Ahmed, that is a tragedy. For a teacher of Islam, it is a challenge: this informal and oral-based Islam should be represented in classes on Islam.. and that means teaching outside official written texts and trying to capture the lived texts of everyday experience.
Effigy Mounds National Monument
August 15, 2007
Motor City Recording
August 13, 2007
One of the structures that Henry Ford moved to Greenfield Village as a model of American industry was the Menlo Park laboratory of Thomas Edison. Within the laboratory is an example of his original voice recording machine. A person could speak into the horn and the voice would be recorded by a needle upon a strip of metal wound around a drum. That brief voice message could then be replayed. This voice recording machine was a novelty item at fairs.. never before had people been able to listen to their own voices.
The technology on display in this primitive machine would revolutionize music. If we were to write a history of modern American popular music, this machine might well be page one. It is the beginning of the historic shift from music noted on a page and reproduced live—always inevitably live—to music that could be played at will. The experience of music would be possible in the privacy of a teenager's bedroom or the publicness of an automobile on a city street. My history of modern American popular music would emphasize such changing social contexts of music, and those contexts were made possible by this machine.
I could not visit the Detroit area and fail to see the Motown Museum. It turns out that until the early 70s Motown occupied not a boxy building, but a string of houses set along West Grand Avenue. The house pictured above contained the studio where countless Motown songs were recorded through the 60s.. and according to our tour guide the final album to be recorded in this studio was Marvin Gaye's What's Going On (1970). That cramped recording room seemed somehow too small for the expansiveness of What's Going On.. but that is often the case with creative works: their physical origins appear disproportionate to their imaginative depth.
One other interesting point about Motown is the way the automobile industry influenced their business philosophy. Berry Gordy had worked for a while at Ford's Rouge Plant in Dearborn, Michigan, and he picked up Ford's scheme to bring in raw material and put out a finished product in one seamless and controlled work environment. Gordy ran his music business in the same way, picking up talented young people, training and refining them, giving them songs to sing, and finally turning them out as superstars ready to tour the globe. It was an assembly line. That conceptualizing of musical production worked well.. and we all have bopping around in our heads the output of this musical corporation. It became problematic when artists wanted to develop an individual voice, as was the case with Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. You can imagine how Henry Ford would have responded to someone using his factory for a week to produce a different kind of car.. well that was Berry Gordy's position as his artists clamored for more freedom.
I would love to get back to Detroit..
A Tribute to Ozu from Wim Wenders
August 11, 2007
Tokyo-Ga represents an attempt by the German director Wim Wenders to discover traces of the cinematic world of Yasujiro Ozu in the Tokyo of the mid 80s. Wenders shows up in Tokyo knowing little about Japan except what he had picked up from films.. and he is drawn to the visual absurdities of Japan: men sitting around playing colorful and loud games, men and women practicing their golf swing in an immense multi-level driving range, and a small workshop where plastic re-creations of real food are made. Wenders never really comes to terms with the eccentric visual culture of Japan and the conservative households portrayed by Ozu in his films. The easiest conclusion seems to be that the world of Ozu is just gone.
Wenders captures an interesting moment with Chishu Ryu, the actor who shows up in many Ozu films. A small crowd of women notice Ryu and gather around him to get their photos taken. For a moment it seems like the world of Ozu has a genuine constituency.. but then we are told that Ryu attributed this recognition to a television program he had recently appeared in.. and downplayed any contemporary fame from his work with Ozu. The world of Ozu again feels distant and disconnected from modern Tokyo.
I would call this the great failure of Tokyo-Ga: its inability to push beneath the surface of Japanese culture. A film like Yi-Yi by Edward Yang shows how many of the same human dramas exist even now in Japan (and Asia more broadly). Wenders is unable to give us that kind of cultural excavation.. filmmakers do not get training to do this!
Wenders takes us to the grave of Ozu, upon which is inscribed the single character that means "nothingness". Wenders goes on to provide a strong tribute to Ozu:
Each person knows for himself the extreme gap that often exists between personal experience and the depiction of that experience up there on the screen. We have learned to consider the vast distance separating cinema from life as so perfectly natural that we gasp and give a start when we suddenly discover something true or real in a movie, be it nothing more than the gesture of a child in the background or a bird flying across the frame or a cloud casting its shadow over a scene for but an instant. It is a rarity in today's cinema to find such objects of truth, for people or objects to show themselves as they really are. That's what was so unique in Ozu's films, and above all in his later ones. There were such moments of truth... no, not just moments... long range truth lasting from the first image to the last. Films which actually and continuously dealt with life itself, and in which the people and objects, the cities and the countryside, revealed themselves. Such a depiction of reality, such an art, is no longer to be found in the cinema. It was once.
An eloquent testimony to Ozu's art. Old Roads has often echoed this complaint about the way the films one encounters in theaters these days are utterly divorced from the actual world. For anyone sick of Hollywood and its generic reproductions of our world, Ozu is the antidote.
in addition to Chishu Ryu, Wenders interviews the man who became Ozu's cinematographer. In the picture above he is demonstrating the camera position favored by Ozu (a famously low angle). Listening to this interview I was impressed at the way Ozu gathered around himself intensely loyal craftsmen. The director who took up over and over again the dissolution of the Japanese family appears to have been quite good at building something very like a family among those who worked with him on these films. (At least that is the way it appears from the interviews as presented by Wenders.) I am not sure there is a greater tribute to an artist than to say that the humanism which suffuses his work shows up equally well in his daily life.
The Old Road at the Center of Town
August 10, 2007
I found this sign on Adams Street right where it dead ends into the Chicago Art Institute. Today's freeways barely interact with the actual street patterns of a city. It is as if cities have two transportation levels: local access streets and long distance freeways. This sign reminded me that there was a time when major routes did not bypass cities, but ran right to their center. I also noticed this in Detroit where old Route 12 (Michigan Ave.) begins in the heart of the city. I know life was slower then.. but it is hard not to envy the unity of landscape.
Chicago features a parade of old skyscrapers.. all from the days before the sides were cased in windows. A city like Chicago has numerous layers of structures; old city centers lie fossilized. Old Roads is about separating these layers and understanding how the city has been experienced through time. A great place to start that endeavor is with clumps of buildings that are obviously older than neighboring sections.
Oh That Magic Feeing: Chicago
August 8, 2007
I am staying over in Chicago so that in the morning I can visit an exhibit on Medieval Islamic ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago. Tonight I just wandered around downtown for a while. Chicago is certainly a contrast with Detroit.. where I was this morning. I thought Detroit was cool, but Chicago is a "destination" city.
An odd fact: in Dearborn I stopped at Borders to find a guidebook for Detroit, and.. there were none! I found guidebooks for New Orleans, New York.. and tons of them for Chicago. But there was no help for me with Detroit—even in Detroit! The obvious inference is that Detroit is not the hottest city to visit. But there is something to be said about visiting cities that do not have lots of guidebooks.. and I loved exploring Dearborn, and would love to continue exploring Detroit itself. That sense of exploration is what I love about travel.. and it is enervating to see crowds of vacationers on the streets of Chicago. It is obviously a well tracked city.. and I prefer the less well tracked.
Last week the DailyKos convention was held here in Chicago and several of the bloggers that I read regularly were present. Matt Yglesias made the following comment:
[I already] don't understand how I ever walked around an unfamiliar city without by iPhone's google maps function. Also glad nobody's stolen the phone yet.
I had never thought about the way an easily portable version of Google maps could function as a guidebook. I am sure as people accumulate and contribute knowledge about favorite restaurants, hangouts, and museums that this will become a great common guidebook for many cities. But there is a downside: this popular version of the city will become canonical and it will be tough to conceptually break out of this Google version of a city.
I like a good map, but I like to fill in the spaces on that map with my own exploration.. even if that is sometimes inconvenient and time wasting. The "destination" tourist version of the city is limited.. and I would hate to see that version choke out historical, ethnic, or working class patterns of experiencing the city.. and even more personally, I like the sound of that Beatles line, which I often hear in my head: "Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go.."
The Anthology of Henry Ford:
Greenfield Village
August 7, 2007
If I were to cut and paste favorite passages from the books I most enjoy, the final product would be called an anthology. Likewise when musicians collect the tracks that have most influenced them and put them on a CD, we would call that an anthology too (and it might be put on sale at Starbucks). But what happens when a great industrialist collects all the things that most influenced him? It won't work as either a book or a CD.. since it might include railroad tracks and machine shops. But you could put all these things together in a village. We could think of such a village as an industrialist's anthology.. a mix tape for inventors!
Most fascinating about Greenfield Village is the fact that it's not some latter Disney version of Henry Ford's past.. but actually a work conceived of by Ford himself. His personal heroes.. such as Thomas Edison, George Washington Carver, Abraham Lincoln, and the Wright Brothers.. are present in the village by means of the physical relocation of their homes or workplaces. (Think again of the anthology analogy: whereas I would cite passages from their writing in tribute, Ford cites physical structures that embodied their physical work.)
Greenfield Village is filled with structures like this. It looks pretty normal.. so what's the big deal? It's not an architectural gem. These buildings have each been sanctified by work and production.. and therefore have become worthy of preservation. The signs are helpful:
So there you have it. Robert and William Richart worked repair miracles in this shop located in Macon, Michigan. The building was therefore bodily removed from Macon and brought to Greenfield.. where it now stands as one of many physical emblems of work. These are the people that Ford admired.. and their products were always physical.. never intellectual.
The complete machine shop is similar to the wagon shop.. only more elaborate. The building was rebuilt to the same dimensions as one back East and all the metal working machines were brought to Greenfield Village, put into working order, and set up in their original order. The aggregate of these heavy machines represents a kind of knowledge that is pretty much gone. I have to admit that the project of keeping knowledge of these things alive is something that Old Roads strongly supports.. and there was a part of me fascinated by the experience of Greenfield Village.
If you pay a few extra bucks you can get a ride around the expansive village in an old Model T or some other early car! Like many anthologies, Greenfield Village has an unspoken narrative: everything leads to the automobile. In other words, Henry Ford is recreating the world that made possible his great industrial contribution. The fact that Greenfield Village was the brainchild of Henry Ford makes it fascinating as a text in its own right.
This sign crystallized some of my misgivings about Greenfield Village. I suspect that Sinclair Lewis made this Main Street comment with a little more irony than is present here.. but the statement is revealing when cited with seriousness. Remember, Greenfield Village predated Disneyland and its famous Main Street! In 1929 when Greenfield Village was opened (although obviously not everything that is present now was present then) the idea of Main Street would not have been a completely nostalgic concept. This was not a Disneyfied version of Main Street, it was the apotheosis of Main Street as known by all. The automobile was presented in this text as the capstone to this American Main Street.
That reading of the past is convenient.. and one can readily see how Henry Ford could find personal meaning in his work by connecting himself to this past. But the automobile tore the world of Main Street apart! And when you think about Henry Ford introducing the assembly line.. then what becomes of the Richart Brothers who could repair anything in their wagon shop? They and all those like them are done for, of course. Present at Greenfield Village is a fossilized reading of the industrial past.. which may have been tenable in 1929 and for a few years after that, but I doubt it makes a lot of sense to contemporary visitors (I am sure many automatically switch to a Disney mental frame to understand it.. which is an anachronism when applied to Greenfield Village).
The indispensable movie to watch before experiencing Greenfield Village is The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) by Orson Welles. The film is loving when it comes to its evocation of the past.. and in this way is parallel to Greenfield Village and its carefully reproduced sites. But the automobile in The Magnificent Ambersons is the machine that throws a monkey wrench into the old world. Where Henry Ford sees a straight line of development, Welles presents a break.. and the beginning of something new. That break brings an element of tragedy.. something that is wholly lacking at Greenfield Village.
Documentary Blogging #2
August 6, 2007
A central question in documentary making is that of voice. A large percentage of documentaries are aimed at giving unusual or forgotten characters a voice. The unspoken philosophy is that the audience will be enriched by exposure to a voice (of an individual or a group) they otherwise would never have heard. I agree that there is value in hearing such voices, but I also wonder if that is not a limiting philosophy. In other words: if you rely on people to explain themselves, there will be things you can never learn.
That may sound counterintuitive, so let me explain. A culture is a culture precisely because of its all-encompassing nature. Actions and beliefs have an interrelated logic: "Why do we do this? We do that for such and such a reason." Or we could turn this around: "Why do we believe that? Look at how it makes sense in terms of the way we live." The circular nature of culture means that walking up and asking someone about their beliefs or practices is bound to be problematic. The answers will always be generated from within the cultural system.
It is here that I most feel my comparative literature roots, a department in which it is standard practice to dismiss authorial intention. Those intentions are replaced by a stable of counter-intuitive interpretive methods. Freud, Marx, and later post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers all worked with strategies that concentrated on elements of the text that the original author would not talk about were we able to quizz him or her.. in fact the author might be drop-jaw surprised at the interpretations that had sprung up around the text.
There is much in my comparative literature background that I dislike.. and one big issue is the proliferation of interpretations with a complete disregard for cultural contexts.. but some of this thinkin has influenced my approach to documentaries. I define my interest as being in the "cultural landscape" of Dearborn.. and my work is to figure out how Islam and Arab American identity work there way into this landscape. My primary questions thus have a certain "meta" edge to them: "How does this mosque fit in to this particular landscape?" The answer to questions like this will often come back fairly bland: "We built it in this year and chose this spot because it was available". But the key, so far as I am concerned, is to recognize that broader cultural patterns are playing out underneath those conscious decisions. My work is to decipher those patterns and then serve up my findings as interpretations. An interview can give me context, but it cannot deliver an interpretation of a place.. which by its nature requires someone standing outside the cultural system.
The Uses of Kahlil Gibran
August 5, 2007
It was a gray and rainy Sunday in Detroit. Lots of sites were closed and I had no interviews lined up, but I spent a couple of hours in the Arab American National Museum. I will have more to say about the museum at a later time, but for now I just want to note my biggest surprise: the significant presence of Kahlil Gibran (author of The Prophet).
This was a surprise since I have never taken Gibran seriously. He was a Lebanese American (migrating to the US in 1895 when he was 12), but the spiritual cast of his work has led me to think of him in a more abstracted light. I have a feeling that most readers of The Prophet would be hard pressed to say anything concrete about his background.. that is, beyond a vague sense that he comes from some spiritual East. That primary audience for Gibran (which I have witnessed first hand by working at a bookstore) eclipses the fact that he has a real constituency among Arab Americans.
Gibran came up at a number of points in the museum. The model for a sculpture dedicated to Gibran in Washington DC was on display. He had a special display case pointing up his influence on John F. Kennedy's famous line "ask not what your country can do for you.." He had a short biography on the wall of great Arab Americans. In the gift shop there were copies of The Prophet and a biography. Walk over to the small library and once again there were his works. This strong presence in the museum means that I need to think more carefully about Gibran and his place in constructing an Arab American identity.
This short biography points out that Gibran published his first article in the Arab American newspaper Al-Mujawir. That seems good evidence that Gibran is not some after-the-fact adoption on the part of Arab Americans, but genuinely contributed to this identity goup from his earliest work. Perhaps if I can dissociate Gibran from New Agey visions and connect him with a concrete community I will find him more interesting.
What would come of pushing Gibran to the forefront of an Arab American literature? The clearest benefit I can think of is the tendency of his work to mute religious distinctions. As a "spiritual" writer he is neither Christian nor Muslim, and therefore offers a non-sectarian version of Arab American identity. This would fit in well with the exhibits I saw in the museum itself. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths were presented as coming from the Middle East.. and the museum had no interest in adjudicating doctrinal issues. The broader point seemed to be that the Middle East has a rich spiritual tradition. On this point Gibran is an obvious contributor.
Cogitating about Lebanese Restaurants
August 4, 2007
Let's just say there are worse things in life than sitting in a nice Lebanese restaurant and thinking about Arab American identity.. or, to put a narrower point on it.. thinking about how such restaurants fit into the cultural landscape. If I hit upon any unresolvable issues, I can always just take a good long sip from that cold mango juice sitting in front of me.
But seriously.. the Lebanese restaurant has an important place in the landscape. One could consider it a cross-over site. While Middle Eastern markets and bookstores and cultural centers will be frequented almost wholly by immigrants from the Middle East, a Lebanese Restaurant stands out as a site that can attract a wide range of people. This is where Middle Eastern culture can meet American culture. It would be easy, I think, to underestimate the importance of these restaurants in allowing for Americanization. (I think something similar could be said about Mexican food in the US.)
So far I have gotten a good look at two major zones of Arab influence. The first is known as the southend.. and it includes the Dearborn Masjid. I learned today that this area is now largely Yemeni. It is in a secluded corner of Dearborn. In the northeast area of Dearborn is a second Arab zone that follows Warren Avenue. It is along here that I ran into Al-Amir Restaurant. This area appears to be largely composed of Lebanese.. and often quite prosperous ones, judging by the houses.
The central road through Dearborn is Michigan Avenue.. which is part of historic Route 12 running from Detroit to Chicago. Along this main route it is hard to find much in the way of Arab businesses (at least businesses aimed at an Arab audience). Strip malls abound; the usual chain stores are present. Large public structures are inevitably related to Ford. Michigan Avenue represents the official public version of Dearborn.. dominated by Ford and an undistinctive American culture. Arab culture is displaced to the north and south. There are two exceptions to this lack of Arab identity markers along Michigan Avenue. The first is the Arab American National Museum, just across from City Hall. The second is a prominent Lebanese restaurant a little ways down from the museum. This central placement supports my point about the Lebanese Restaurant as a cross-over site.
I ran into this poster (and a couple others like it) in the entrance to the Al-Amir Restaurant. It strengthens my theory that the Arab-American identity is being constructed largely along the lines of a particular version of Lebanon. This makes sense since Lebanon represents a particularly secular version of the Middle East.. one that is easily assimilable to the culture of the US. But this identity is a choice. Lebanon is a small part of the Middle East. I don't see much in the way of Iraqi, Egyptian, or Gulf cultural traditions in the US, and to a large degree they take on a generic Arab-American identity.. and that identity in turn is more shaped by Lebanon than any other place (so goes my theory, at least). This identity represents a narrow slice of Lebanon.. as Hezbollah is arguably a more significant portion of the population than the freewheeling zone in downtown Beirut.. but the secular Lebanon is imaginatively powerful.. and ripe for appropriation.
Documentary Blogging #1
August 3, 2007
Today was one of those dreaded car days.. a full day of navigating the freeway system. But here I am at the destination: Detroit. My goal is to do something I have never done before. I hope to make a short documentary on Islam and Arab-American identity in the US. To that end I will be conducting interviews with people at several different organizations and trying to film scenes of the cultural landscape (i.e. scenes that are layered with cultural information; scenes that can be interpreted).
In the car today, when not zoned out, I was thinking about what it is I want to accomplish in this documentary. I want it to be an educational tool for my class on Islam, of course.. but what are my formal goals? My primary aim is to develop a style that allows for the viewer to see the process of exploring a place.. and thereby gain tools for reading a place.
Such an exploratory style is quite different than the documentaries I commonly watch, which fall into three broad categories: 1) sketch of colorful and challenged character (Werner Herzog), 2) omniscient historical presentation (Ken Burns), and 3) political advocacy (Michael Moore and now many others). I admire Herzog tremendously, but his concentration on characters is just not my bent. The advocacy model is a keen interest of mine, but it is not a model that would be useful in an educational context. So that leaves the Ken Burns model.. and it is easy to imagine a documentary of this style devoted to the Arab-American population in Dearborn. It is, after all, a classic American story.
How would I make a Ken Burns-style documentary of Dearborn? That is easy. I would collect my first hand footage and conduct interviews. Then I would research the hell out of the topic and contact some experts to interview on the topic. Oh, and get as many old photographs as possible with which to illustrate the history. To me this approach devolves into a journalistic endeavor. Ken Burns is there to add style and paste together expert opinions.. but he is hardly a voice in the documentary. Also, the process of putting together the documentary is edited out—and thus arises the illusion of an omniscient text.
My work will be to document the process by which my understanding of place and identity is coming about.. not to let those details disappear. I also happen to think that this is a more honest approach to historical and interpretive material.. to let the audience see the space for interpretation. And forget about experts.. in the sense of college professors sitting in a chair and explaining what we are to think about this or that fact. My open approach will work best when rich visual material is present, as it allows opportunity for viewers to see evidence that is richer than could ever be summarized.
My ideal documentary would be more a personal essay than a journalistic article complete with multiple sources. One result of such an approach will be a more critical and interpretive view of the material. Ken Burns runs his material (so far as I have seen) through a pretty evident "Americana" filter. The goal is to tell a nice story that would fit in on a PBS half-hour. I don't want a PBS special for use in a classroom.. how boring! give me something that speaks its mind and allows students to come up against a genuine point of view.
This approach that I am sketching requires some performative talent.. and how that will work out I don't know. If I am going to capture the exploration of a site then I have to be genuinely filming my own exploration of a site.. and those scenes must be marked by the personal context in which I take the shots. I must constantly think about how to organize my experiences. Are scenes falling into a thematic or chronological framework? But that is what I enjoy about this exploratory process of working on a documentary.. it allows me to think on the fly and actively work to find and construct meaning.. and often I find myself scrapping earlier views in favor of some better framework.
Check back each day this week to get more reflection on making this documentary. (I won't give away much of the material.)
