Baggy Pants Research Articles

THE LINDA CRANE MEMORIAL LECTURE The Patient Puzzle: Piecing it Together

Time precludes me from going into more detail. I used Danny's case to illustrate the fact that motor impairments are never “just” a musculoskeletal problem or “just” a neuromotor problem, etc. We were not born with a single system. We were born with systems that interact to give us the control that we need for health and for participation. If Danny's motor deficits and the immobility of his trunk was treated from a single system perspective, would he be as healthy and functional as he is today? After 34 surgeries and 15 years, Danny's story is nothing short of a miracle. The doctors never, ever, thought he would be decannulated (trach tube removed) because his airway kept rejecting all the reconstruction efforts by the surgeons, but eventually he was successful; a miracle. The fact that he ever got his G-tube removed and that he can eat by mouth is even more of a miracle. The fact that he can walk and talk and chew gum, be a normal high school freshman and go to a big public high school, I think is another miracle as well. But what about tomorrow? Look at Danny's journey. He has come so far in 15 years and if you were a teacher or a PT in his high school, you would not be able to tell that he is not just another normal boy with baggy pants that fall off his hips. But watch out, because I will soon be turning him over to you for therapy as an adult. He will still need to be assessed and treated from a multisystem perspective. He will never be a single system patient. In fact, I would challenge you to find me any patient that is a single system patient. I challenge all of you to find the problem. I used the concept of a puzzle because I wanted you to see the body's multiple systems as interlocked. Find the problem! Ask, “Why do I see that motor presentation?” Don't simply identify that someone has a shoulder problem or other motor impairment, but ask why is the shoulder problem there? Find the real impairment to the motor performance needed for participation and health. Learn to identify all the body systems, to look at their interactions and to look at which ones are contributing to the problem or the solution. As an infant, Danny's musculoskeletal and integumentary systems played a very minor role, thus, because you looked at all 5 systems, you could overtly rule out the need to treat those systems at the moment. Determine which body system is the primary limitation to motor performance initially and which one is the problem now. I want you to think about surviving and thriving. I am in pediatrics, but think about the application to patients in acute care. Most of you can tell me the day that “Mr. Jones” changed from surviving to thriving. It is usually the day that he laughed at your joke, or that he told you a joke. It is when they are no longer worried about their physiologic state and they can safely allow themselves to think about thriving. Prioritize your interventions. Integrate a multisystem perspective into your daily practice for all motor dysfunctions, low back pain, shoulder problems, spinal cord injuries, stroke… What is in the future? I think we can do even a better job at differential diagnoses and referrals for every “Danny.” We need to recognize not only where the problem is, but when it is beyond our scope. When should we refer to that plastic surgeon? When should we call in the pediatric GI doctor or when should we call in one of our colleagues who has more expertise in a specialty area than us? I would like to challenge every PT in this room to become a better problem solver, a better puzzle solver en route to becoming that autonomous practitioner. I believe that when we are good at that, the consumers will see us as the practitioners of choice. We will not need to tell them. If we are effective as diagnosticians, we will be better able to plan correct interventions. Thank you.

Words

POETRY librarieshas been down by 30 percent during the same period. The local government and "professional" Frisians have launched all kinds of language initiatives. When a newborn baby is registered, for instance, parents are given a "language bag" containing information about the advantages of a bilingual upbringing. There are freemagazines promoting Frisian in child-rearing or with infor mation about books and writers. You can now learnFrisian online at different levels, and there is even a section that targets Frisian emigrants and their children. There are also websites geared to the young, with all sorts of information,dishing up fastrap,hip-hop, and sexy talk inan attempt to tap into teen culture and coaxing a new generation intousing the language. There isan organization thatsubsidizes books and magazines, and another that does all the pro motion. Don't laugh, but some 1,700 volunteers are sent from door to door with?believe it or not?wheelbarrows laden with Frisian books, CDs, and DVDs! Frisian poets appear at international poetry festivals, and a number of their works are published with Dutch and Frisian on facingpages. Iwonder whether this trendof publishing poetry books and anthologies in bilingual editions will not ultimately damage Frisian literature. The fact that Frisian is an official language means thatpublishers andmagazines inFriesland have the same opportunities for funding as the rest of the Netherlands and Flanders. For Fri sian writers thismeans that they can get grants and support. Publishers can apply for subsidies to cover production costs forworks that are of high quality but attract a limited reading public. I received a grant formy next novel, and find myself, in this sense, not in the least discouraged or held back fromwriting inmy mother tongue. At the same time, this means that Iundertake this venture knowing thatonly a fewhundred people will read my book. Furthermore, the Frisian read ing public has aged significantly,which means that young, new, more experimental writers of Fri sian find few or no readers at all. Frisian literature is blossoming, but blossoming on parched earth. February200g Translationfrom the Dutch By PeterConstantine Words JazraKhaleed Ihave no fatherland I livewithin words That are shrouded inblack And held hostage Mustapha Khayati, can you hear me? The seat ofpower is in language Where thepolice patrol No more poetry cycles! No more poet laureates! Inmy neighborhood virgin poets are sacrificed Rappers with dust-blown eyes and baggy pants Push rhymeson kids sniffing words Fall and get back up again: theartof thepoet JeanGenet, can you hearme? My words are homeless They sleep on thebenches ofKladmon Square Covered in ikea cartons My words do not speak on thenews They're out hustling every night My words are proletarian, slaves like me They work in sweatshops night and day Iwant nomore dirges Iwant nomore verbs belonging to thenoncombatants Ineed a new language, not pimping I'mwaiting fora revolution to invent me Hungering forthe language of classwar A language thathas tasted insurgency I shall create it! Ah, what arrogance! Okay, I'll be off But take a look: in my face thedawn of a new poetry isbreaking No word will be left behind, held hostage I'm seeking a new passage. Translationfrom the Greek By PeterConstantine Jazra Khaleed was born inGrozny, Chechnya, in 1979. He lives inGreece, writes and publishes poetry inGreek, and isknown both as a poet and boxer. "Words" (Woerter) was originally published in the Athenian literary magazine Teflon. PeterConstantine iscurrently coediting theanthology TheGreekPoets: Homer tothePresent, whichwillbe published by W.W. Nortonthisfall. As a juror for the 2008 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, he nomi nated Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke for the award. July-August 2009 i23 ...

The Thin Man

The Thin Man Eugene Goodheart (bio) He was losing weight—not continuously but periodically. At age 76 and 6 feet 3 inches tall, he was only 153 pounds. The Merck Manual, which he had taken to consulting, gives the normal weight range for his height as 153 to 192 pounds, so he was technically within the normal range. But he had become un-American in his thinness. He would look at himself in the mirror and see the strong outline of his ribcage, his legs as long strings, his face gaunt and angular. He had the long mournful face of a basset hound, increasingly resembling his mother, who had died at the age of 101. He consumed vast amounts of food, but his metabolism refused to convert it to additional weight. Not a single commercial on TV told him how to gain weight. Since obesity is the American plague, there is little commercial interest in helping people to gain weight. Everyone suggested milkshakes, rich cookies and cakes, meals of meat and potatoes; but he was of an age when his body could be threatened by high cholesterol and high blood pressure. The fates that controlled his body had him coming and going. After every significant weight loss he submitted himself to X–rays, CAT scans, and MRI’s, hoping not to find a reason in their results, and his hopes were realized. A friend told him that he saw him as an El Greco, but at the rate he was going he would wind up a Giacometti. Like an old soldier he would simply fade away. Someone who ran into him after a long time in which they had not seen each other remarked how thin he had become: a tactless woman, she said “You look like a cadaver.” He should have replied, “And you look like shit.” But he kept the remark to himself. In a rare newspaper article on the subject of thinness, a thin man reported his experience with a woman who refused to have sex with him for fear that she would break him in two. He had taken defensively to wearing turtlenecks and long pants to conceal his anatomy. His belts required periodic revision to secure his baggy pants around his waist. New holes had to be added from time to time. His wife, who loved him in spite [End Page 223] of everything and anything that might happen to him, assured him that thin rats lived longer than fat rats and that he had secured for himself a long life. He would not be consoled: “But I am not a rat.” So she reminded him of the childhood rhyme in which skinny always wins the race. A heavyset friend, the same age as he, had a large belly that he tried in vain to lose. If he could, he said, the heavy-set man would trade places with him. If a procedure could be found for transferring weight, he would eagerly submit to it. He assured his friend that he was good looking despite his belly, and the friend returned the compliment, saying that his face was interesting. Wintertime made him vulnerable to the cold. His body was like a poorly insulated house, and in fact his own house was poorly insulated. It was an interesting house (vintage Craftsman), the walls of the living room framed by gum and cherry wood and painted white, the kitchen also white with an oven encased in brick. The dining-room table was golden oak, as were the chairs. There were no paintings on the wall—like himself, stripped of ornament. As the days grew colder and the heating system was less effective, he layered himself with a sweater and bathrobe to cope with the pervasive chill. When the outside was bitter cold and he needed exercise, he would walk up and down the stairs. Summertime exposed him to the look of others; he thought twice about wearing short pants and collarless shirts. He felt an odd kinship with the obese who cannot escape bodily awareness. They see their corpulence as disfigurement. They want to rid themselves of excess. In the eyes of others they are heaps of...

Tracing the essay: through experience to truth

A fresh look at a venerable, resurgent literary form. essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a greased pig, for example, or a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit. In Tracing Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces very qualities that have moved others to accord essay second-class citizenship in world of letters. Drawing from work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what essay means - and how it comes to mean. essay, related to essaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. The essay was, historically, notes Atkins, the first form to take experience of individual and make it stuff of literature. Atkins also considers essay's basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is home-cosmography, to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of essay's supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that essay exhibits a certain sneakiness as it proceeds in, through, and by means of small and mundane toward spiritual and revelatory.

The Vulture Tree

The Vulture Tree Katie Fallon (bio) To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes— What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after death. Robinson Jeffers, "Vulture" The tree's bleached branches twist like misshapen arms, skeletal and bowed as they reach towards the cloud cover. It stands stark along Interstate 79 as I drive past; behind it billows a green curtain of leaves and pastures. Vultures hunch in crooks of the tree's elbows, talons wrapped around knots in the dead wood. There isn't an official term for a group of vultures, and flock seems too gentle—I call them a hunch of vultures. Hunch describes them best. They hunch together in the tree, they even seem to hunch when they soar. The vultures scan the highway as a light rain begins to fall. One spreads its wings. Another shivers and shakes drops from its feathers. Perched like black gargoyles they hunch and wait for something to die. I turn off the interstate and pull into the West Virginia Raptor Rehabilitation Center. My husband, Jesse, has already arrived; his silver car parked between poplar trees in the gravel driveway. Earlier the center received a call about an injured turkey vulture. It had been limping around on the ground behind a shopping center, trying to hide amid dumpsters and piles of scrap metal. An army of feral cats had kept their distance, but hissed and growled when the bird dragged itself from one filthy crevice to another. Jesse rescued the bird and transported it here for treatment. Inside the raptor center, Jesse has already begun to examine our patient. The vulture is weak. Jesse wraps his hands around the bird's emaciated body; its red head droops as it tries to struggle out of his grasp. The feathers of the vulture's underside are matted with dried feces; it must have been on [End Page 113] the ground for days. We weigh the bird, shine a flashlight in its brown eyes, and gently stretch each wing. Besides being very thin it has no obvious injuries. We put the vulture in an ICU cage, and I split the belly of a deadrat and slide it toward the bird. It tears the rodent from me with its beak, turns its back to us and silently strips the meat from the rat's bones. A vulture is primal. It lives by the deaths of other creatures, but it's not a predator. A hawk, for example, hunts—stalks, stoops, and squeezes the life from its prey, rips through bodies with razor talons. A turkey vulture waits. It isn't a murderer, and it doesn't kill, but it's impossible not to think about death with a vulture nearby. Through the steel cage bars, I watch the starved bird devour its meal, skinning meat and sinew from wet bones. It turns the rat almost inside out, holds a corner of pelt under a toenail and skillfully cleans the hide. The end of this bird's beak is curved like a crochet hook, a delicate tool for knitting through organs, separating muscle from bone, from skin. The vulture is an intricate and meticulous artist. In a few minutes the rat is empty. Its skin folds like baggy pants in a loose pile around its large thigh bones. The bird seems satisfied and drags what remains of the rat to a back corner of the cage to save for later. It looks over its hunched shoulder at me, cautiously turns, and steps onto a rope-wrapped perch. We don't treat many turkey vultures at the raptor center. I would like to believe that their intelligence allows them to avoid moving cars and humans; it seems more likely though that people have greater respect and pity for injured hawks and eagles. Eagles are symbols of nations; we see them as majestic birds to be proud of, and we put their likeness on currency and leather jackets. Vultures have become greedy, sneaky undertakers. I think injured vultures might be left to die. A few weeks ago Jesse and I...

Double Exposure

Double Exposure

Brave new world of rheumatology

In the past few years great strides have been made in rheumatology, particularly in the therapeutic field. The advent of the biological agents have revolutionized the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis and psoriatic arthritis. Thousands of people and hundreds of millions of dollars have brought this about, culminating in the award of a knighthood to Professor Ravinder Maini for his work in rheumatoid arthritis. Though not so spectacular, new therapeutic agents for SLE are also appearing on the horizon. This topic has been reviewed by Yehuda Shoenfeld in his elegant paper published in this issue. A case in point is mycophenolate mofetil (Cellcept). Recent data from the ACR meeting in Orlando suggest that with greater experience it may replace pulse intravenous cyclophosphamide as the gold standard in the treatment of proliferative lupus nephritis, a disease still with considerable morbidity and mortality, particularly in the developing countries. Pulse cyclophosphamide has been used over the past three decades. Yet there is a darker side to this happy scenario. Most of these new drugs are expensive and beyond the reach of the ordinary patient who does not have health insurance in this part of the world. Many of us are familiar with the book Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley in 1932, one of the most bewitching and insidious works of literature ever produced. Its centre-piece is a loveless and sinister place where society is stratified by genetically predestined caste. Intellectually superior Alphas are the top-dogs. Serviles, purposely brain-damaged Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons toil away at the bottom of the heap. Though supposedly a totalitarian welfare-state, it would not stretch the imagination too far if the Alphas with their superior intelligence (read economic power) have greater access to services than the Gammas and Deltas. It is said that in Maoist China, everyone wears a blue jacket and baggy pants but members of the Politburo have their jackets and trousers lined with fur. Hence if the rheumatological community does not take appropriate action now, we will soon witness a great therapeutic divide where rich nations can get access to the latest and most effective drugs. We are already witnessing such a phenonmenon in the AIDs epidemic. Some way must be found to narrow this gap. To do this, one will need to study and turn to the Clinton initiative in making AIDs drugs available to the developing countries. The drug industry, governmental and non-governmental organizations, private initiatives and patient groups must work together to reduce this therapeutic gap. Everyone can do much more. The drug industry should recast itself as a socially responsible model rather than a purely financially driven one. It is telling that Dr Allen Roses, Vice-president of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline told a scientific meeting in London that less than half of the patients taking prescribed medicines actually derived benefits from them. Also much more should be done to promote public and patient education and healthy lifestyle rather than simply providing more drugs. We all know that simple lifestyle measures like weight control and regular exercise can reduce considerably the burden of arthritis. Too much focus has been put on developing new medicinal products to the detriment of other forms of treatment, including alternative remedies like acupuncture, manipulative therapy, massage and mind–body medicine. Finally as we all are aware, ration of medical treatment has always existed depending on ability to pay, the type and severity of disease and the people you know. However, we as doctors must ensure that money does not become the final arbiter in this equation and must do more to help our poorer patients who need such drugs. This is one of the challenges facing APLAR in the coming years.

Situational Stratification: A Micro-Macro Theory of Inequality

Are received sociological theories capable of grasping the realities of contemporary stratification? We think in terms of a structured hierarchy of inequality. A prominent imagery is Bourdieu's (1984) field of economic power and a hierarchy of cultural tastes internalized in individuals, with these two hierarchies mutually reproducing one another; the image helps explain the frustrations of reformers attacking inequality by attempting to change educational attainment. Empirical researchers report on inequalities in income and wealth, education and occupation, as changing slices of a pie, and as distributional shares for races, ethnicities, genders and ages. We see an abstract scaffolding of hierarchy manifested in a shell of objective-looking quantitative data. Does this image of fixed, objective hierarchy come to grips with the realities of lived experience? The distribution of income and wealth has become increasingly unequal since 1970 (Morris and Western 1999). Yet observe a typical scene in an expensive restaurant, where the wealthy go to spend their money: Waiters greet customers informally, introducing themselves by name and assuming the manners of an equal inviting a guest into their home; they interrupt the customers to announce menu specials and advise what they should order; as Goffmanian ritual, it is the waiters who command attention for their performance while the customers are constrained to act as polite audience. Other examples: Celebrities of the entertainment world appear on ceremonial occasions in deliberately attire, unshaven, or in torn clothes; far from a demeanor giving ritual honor to the occasion, they adopt a style that a previous generation would have associated with laborers or beggars; this style, widely adopted among youth and others when occasions allow (e.g., casual Fridays at work), constitutes a historically unprecedented form of anti-status or reverse snobbery. High-ranking government officials, corporation executives, and entertainment celebrities are targets of public scandals involving their sexual lives, employment of housekeepers, use of intoxicants, and efforts at privacy; social eminence, far from providing immunity for petty derelictions, opens up the high-ranking to attacks by lower-ranking functionaries. A muscular black youth, wearing baggy pants and hat turned backwards and carrying a boom box loudly playing angry-voiced rap music, dominates the sidewalk space of a public shopping area while middle-class whites palpably shrink back in deference. In public meetings, when women and ethnic minorities take the role of spokespersons and denounce social discrimination against their group, white men of the higher social classes sit in embarrassed silence or join in a chorus of support; in public opinion-expressing and policy-making settings, it is the voice of the underdog that carries moral authority. How are we to conceptualize these kinds of events? The examples given are microevidence; my contention is that they characterize the flow of everyday life in sharp contrast to the ideal type of a macrohierarchy. The hierarchic image dominates our theories, as well as our folk concepts for talking about stratification; indeed, the rhetorical tactic of taking the morally superior stance of the underdog depends upon asserting the existence of a macrohierarchy while tacitly assuming underdog dominance in the immediate speech situation. Conflicts over the issue of so-called political correctness, which might be called authoritative imposition of special consideration for the underdog, hinge upon this unrecognized disjunction between micro and macro. In social science, we generally accord

HIGH ENTHUSIASM AND LOWR-SQUARED

Asymmetry, Developmental Stability, and Evolution, by Anders P M0ller and John P Swaddle, is an enthusiast's guide to the idea that subtle deviations from perfect symmetry can indicate the quality of individuals, or of the environments they inhabit. M0ller and Swaddle argue that the value of these deviations as indicators of fitness is considerable, despite a body of evidence that the relationship is usually weak when it occurs, and is often undetectable. Population biology is periodically swept by such enthusiasms, by which I mean an idea which captures our imagination because it seems to explain a great deal, although it is supported by little confirmatory evidence. This jump to conclusions would not be a bad thing if our enthusiasms panned out more often, the way that, for example, the enthusiasm which greeted Watson and Crick has. However, in our field, yesterday's enthusiasm is more often today's cautionary tale about the complexity of the phenomena we try to explain. My own field of evolutionary genetics is unfortunately an example of this process. The central problem of what maintains the genetic variation essential to all evolutionary change is unsolved, despite more than century of work. Enthusiasms have arisen for mutation as the major source, then for genetic drift, then for overdominant selection, then for coadapted gene complexes, then for mutation-drift balance, for marginal overdominance, for mutation-selection balance, and well, you get the idea. Although this list is peculiar to my field, I trust that its recitation may bring a shudder of recognition to those in other fields. All this meandering is not without its good points. Enthusiasm can inspire critical tests of the new idea, or informative theorizing, increasing our understanding of the options. However, too many scientists are prepared to assume the validity of the latest idea rather than seek such critical tests. The result is that enthusiasm can have a distorting effect on a whole field, as it frequently leads to shoddy thinking and illmotivated research. There are always more people ready to don skinny ties or baggy pants when others do so than to take a hard look at their fit. My experience with scientific enthusiasm dates to my first days in graduate school, where I found my advisor in the grip of an enthusiasm for marginal overdominance as an explanation for allozyme polymorphisms. The data from some of the most active labs in the field was consistently revealing significant correlations between heterozygosity and whatever

Subculture, Parody, and the Carnivalesque: A Bakhtinian Reading of Mary Helen Ponce's The Wedding

As part of the current fashion of multiculturalism, certain U.S. Latina writers such as Sandra Cisneros, Cristina Garcia, Julia Alvarez, and Ana Castillo have received the mainstream recognition and accompanying reification of what might be termed postmodern ethnic commodities.(1) In contrast, Mary Helen Ponce's 1989 novel The Wedding has been the subject of only few very mixed reviews. Alejandro Morales, novelist and critic himself, deems Ponce's characters stereotypical, unidimensional, and lacking in history. Another critic accuses the novel of insincerity, being laden with cliches and Chicano stereotypes and crippled by bad writing; in authoritarian fashion, he insists that the novel doesn't belong in most bookstores (Lazaroff 28). The Albuquerque Journal accuses Ponce of employing condescending tone and of being embarrassed by her characters, and Kirkus Reviews argues that the speech of Ponce's characters is not only flat but of the wrong ethnicity.(2) I would like to suggest another way of reading the novel, however, that both incorporates and goes beyond these criticisms. To certain degree, these reviewers engage in monological appropriations of the book. In fact, throughout much of The Wedding, Ponce engages in double-voiced quotation of the speech and gestures of Pachuco subculture and ends the book with carnivalesque parody of the traditional mainstream wedding as it is reconfigured by this subcultural group. Bakhtinian theory, in conjunction with the Birmingham school's theories of subculture and feminist responses to subcultural studies enable more dialogic understanding of Ponce's novel. Ponce reveals the modes in which Pachuco subcultural expression constititues leak or rupture in the mainstream culture that it sometimes parodies. The contestatory figure of la in the novel parodies the social intertext of male Pachuco culture, as do the other gender issues and the bodily functions that surface in the final wedding scene. I will not insist that this alternate reading of The Wedding informed by Bakhtinian and cultural studies theory is more correct than the others; rather, I wish to argue that the dominant reading formation that currently canonizes the narratives of Cisneros, Alvarez, Garcia, and Castillo often works to exoticize the culture of the Latina Other within such preconceived categories as magical realism, lush language, .... land of enchantment, or a particularly spicy brand of text mex.(3) Such reading formation, although ostensibly praiseworthy and supportive, at the same time functions to exclude other important elaborations of Latino culture in the U.S. Critics dismiss texts that do not fit the model that the new multiculturalist canon proposes of the ideal Latina narrativist, often after only cursory reading. Reading publics are fashioned and tastes for certain postmodernist style are encouraged, while important elements of Latino culture remain outside the contemporary national discussion. Pachucos have long been stigmatized in the press, in academic studies of deviance, and in large sectors of the popular imagination. In interviews Laura Cummings conducted, however, older Mexican-Americans in the southwest remember the Pachuco culture of their day in different terms; pachuquismo for them involved clothing styles, music and dances, good times, occasional fights, work and jobs, police roundups and beatings, incarceration in prisons and reformatories, and punitive shaving of duck-tail hairstyles. Further, the negative media images of the Pachuco affected the family life of those interviewed; sons were forbidden to wear baggy pants, and sometimes parents cut up their zoot suits with scissors; one woman's uncle called her pachuca to belittle her to other family members.(4) Like the interviews Cummings conducted, Ponce's novel offers an alternative view of Pachuco subculture; in contrast to the academic models and popular images of deviance and stigmatized identity, Ponce humorously critiques from within the subculture she grew up with, presenting what might be termed narrational thick description that reveals both the pleasures and internal contradictions of Pachuco subcultural practices. …

Gang identity or self-expression? Researchers look beyond the surface of “gang clothing” and appearance

Baggy pants, a red bandana, a long belt hanging from the waist: Signs of gang identity or merely expressions of emerging identity? As problems of gang behavior escalate and spread, the need to understand gang identity through clothing and appearance becomes critical. Do dress codes alleviate gang-related problems? Or do they create other problems? The way we present ourselves is a silent form of communication that is as often creatively benign as it is potentially dangerous.

Portents, he said, would make me sure of this

I follow the photographer up the stairs. He is a white boy from another country with a braided beard down to his navel. I try not to hate him as we climb, one flight and then another and another, stopping on each landing for breath where the narrow stairwell opens two directions to flats on either side. He smells like he sleeps in his clothes so I keep my distance batting up narrow steps behind him, wondering if someone loves him and how long it takes to get past the stink, if stink's still stink after you live with it and you're part of what's high and rotten in his clownish drawers. He clanks. Like he's wearing armor under his baggy shirt and baggy pants. The strap of his camera is beaded many bright colors-cherry red, blue, yellow, black, green. An Indian design I think, the heads of snakes or fish or -birds repeated. And we are single-file, Indian style. Barely room for that up these steps. One, two, three landings where we pause and listen and count to ourselves so we don't make a mistake. A deep breath on each floor, pause to stare in both directions down halls where scarred, numberless doors are locked tight. October but summer heat's still bottled up inside the building. Old heat. Stale heat. I remember the stifling basement of my mother's house, full of wet wash hanging on clotheslines you have to duck and drag your face through on a trip to empty the potty. You hope for the surprise of someone cooking something good on one of these floors. The luck to catch the odors of good food simmering to drown out the stink. His. All the bodies like yours that have penetrated the front door and pounded up these steps and scuffed off layers of skin that decompose in the stinking air. Dying skins of animals. A tub in the basement full of your brothers' and sisters' diapers only halfway clean soaking in ammonia. He guides you because he's the one who thought of coming here, he asked the questions of the little boys on the stoop who shook their heads, each crowned with a different hippy-dip cap, and didn't know what shooting he was talking about here in their building, but pointed across the street where two dudes were wasted last week. No. No. Here. On the fifth floor, two floors above the apartment where it turns out one of them lives, but they don't know. He knew. I know now. They don't know nothing mister and dropped their eyes as if they were ashamed of him for asking. He's a tall ship listing, billowing, a swaying sea smacked lurch and glide, driven crazy by the wind. My leader and congregation. Rock I want to squeeze till blood runs out. How long had he been on the road? Vagabonding he calls it. His funk says years. A lifetime ripening. Should I believe what he says:

Teacher Perceptions of Principal Dress

T secondary principal projects an image to all people he or she encounters during a school day. Students may remember the smooth and efficient operation of a school while reminiscing at school reunions. But more often, students recall 01' Baggy Pants Bailey, and can accurately describe the attire and mimic the mannerisms. And what is the impression created by those baggy pants in the minds of students, parents, the community, and especially the teachers with whom Bailey works daily? What professional image does Bailey create? Though the pound of performance may be valued more than the ounce of image, the importance of dress and the reactions to that dress may be more significant than many of us are willing to admit. Emily Cho and Linda Grove have developed this thought in their theory of one free moment:

Marginality, Leadership, and Directed Change

One afternoon several years ago the second-year law students in a certain Middle-Eastern university gathered to hear a former professor who, a few months before, had left to become the Imam, or the religious leader of the city. Most of the students were frankly motivated by curiosity and amusement. They wanted to see how this Swiss-educated Ph.D., who had always dressed smartly in Western-style suits, would look in the baggy pants, long coat, robe and turban of a religious leader. And they greeted him with both laughter and applause.