East Village Research Articles

Private Dancers: Social Media Platforms and Contemporary New York Drag Performance

Father this year I toured the West Coast with some recently discovered videotapes, presenting a posthumous premiere of works by the 1980s video artist Tom Rubnitz. Rubnitz is best remembered for his late-career short, a sandwich tutorial entitled Pickle Surprise (1989, 1 min. 30 sec.), in which drag queens Lady Bunny, RuPaul Charles, Sister Dimension, a gaggle of assorted performers club kids meant a decidedly American recipe (Or the construction of a perfect sandwich--Take an English muffin! Spread sandwich spread! Plop the ham thusly please!--leading Ru Paul to beg the question of the hour, Where's the pickle? Lady Bunny giggles knowingly into the camera. That's the surprise. The figures who performed befbre Rubnitz's lens (Tabboo!, john Sex, John Kelly. Frieda. Hapi Phace, Ann Magnuson, to name a few predominantly peopled the booming East Village art scene of the mid-198.0s. Most of them called i he Pyramid Club home--partieularkt he Sunday night Whispers party, a drag performance review organized by Hapi Phaee that would host visiting perlbrmers like Jayne Count y or Vaginal Davis, in addition to the club's experimental drag pedigree of Ethyl Eichelberger, International Chrysis, Lypsinka, resident DI Sister Dimension, the Funione crew from Atlanta--Larry Tee, Lady Bunny, RuPaul Charles.--and, later, Antony Flegartv's early theater troupe, Blacklips Performance Cult. These acts drew upon pop culture the post-punk. New Wave, N.) Wave scenes du jour, combining them with experimental theater approaches. Some performers even drilled in from Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company. (1) As a haven for outre performance, the Pyramid was remarkable enough to attract the devout attention of not just Rtamitz. but another notable video mediary Nelson Sullivan, who shot hundreds oF hours id rootage in the club, 'vith the cumbersome video technology of the era. Sullivan employed a handheld documentary style that has since found great secondary life on his estate's YouTube channel. 5ninthavenueproject. where his fly-on-t he-wall approach grants access to the period's most vital live arts. Rubnitz also shot various tapes cunt a ini ng doe. style fbotage (such as From the Files qf the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, 1983, 6 min.), though his output is predominantly diegetic. Collahorating with the talents around him evolving live performances into short tapes. Rubnitz created new. subversive worlds vith his flourishing nightclub contemporaries. Presenting a program ofthese titles at the Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles this winter, I was joined by Magnuson who, during the question-and-answer session, spoke to the authorial intent of these collaborations, like her 15-minute tape with Rubnitz, Made For 7-1. (1984). There was no practical application to any of she explained, when asked where these works initially screened. Pausing for a moment's reflection, Magnuson continued, and that's what made the time so magical. Here, Magnuson was not singular; other performers who frequented the club created a diverse range of artistic productions with wild abandon, both independently collaboratively, from 12-inch singles plays at La Ma Nla Experimental Theatre, to large-scale paintings art videos a product of (and beyond) the weekly performance slots that the Pvramid boasted. Magnuson's observation caused me to wonder what figures today occupy this space of creative production playful subversion. And how does that social club component, so essential 10 the Last Village movement, manikst in an age of social media? What are the products that this contemporary out re drag queer performance culture sends out into the world? What will it leave behind? As luck would have it, shortly after I returned from the tour. I was dragged out to a local Brooklyn dive bar to watch the hit reality television shom RuPaul'sl Drag Race a live drag show that immediately followed. …

The Relational in Retrospect

Parallel Presents: Art of Pierre Huyghe By Amelia Barikin MIT Press, 2012 280 pp./$24.59 (hb) In her engaging study Parallel Presents: Art of Pierre Huyghe, author Amelia Barikin details insightfully the wide-ranging interdisciplinary projects of the French artist Pierre Huyghe, arguably one of the most significant artists of his generation. While much of Barikin's text reads as a rather straightforward art historical chronicle, this effort is in fact much needed; while Huyghe's work has been shown globally and has been critically discussed in countless international catalogs, there have been no sustained attempts to contextualize his in this scholarly format. Existing writings on Huyghe, while copious, are both widely dispersed and often published in French, particularly his earlier work. current volume is elegantly designed, synthesizes a wealth of critical and historical material, and features a generous selection of color images. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Huyghe's earliest artworks, discussed evocatively in the first chapter, developed out of street art and collaborative activities conducted in the mid-1980s and, while many of his projects occurred in Paris, they exhibit a keen affinity with New York's East Village art scene of the same era. Barikin relates how Huyghe was initially more influenced by punk music and popular culture than art theory. Considering the number of fleeting, almost ephemeral endeavors with which the artist was involved, Barikin writes in retrospect: What Huyghe kept from this period was the instant appearance of an event in public space, and a mode of collective practice (12). Subsequent events that were key in shaping the emergence of Huyghe's work in the 1990s were his close associations with critic Nicolas Bourriaud, later to become by turns renowned and reviled for his writings on relational aesthetics--which discussed Huyghe's work among others--and with the late Roger Pailhas, his longtime gallerist based in Marseille. In discussing Huyghe's work in connection with several of its major aspects, including its highlighting of temporality, its emphasis on performativity, and the influence of the cinematic, Barikin enlists the theories of both Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze in Chapter Two, titled The Open Present. This is particularly relevant insofar as the artist has consistently negotiated the passage between framed representations of recorded time and actual, experienced time, as in his early billboard projects that replicated a nearby scene, his construction of a pirate television station, and the act of remaking Alfred Hitchcock's film Rear Window (1954) in a provisional, skeletal fashion. This treatment of represented time and space also relates to Huyghe's conception of his art as a continual construction site, inspired by houses along the Mediterranean left partially finished so that their owners could avoid property taxes indefinitely. …

Estimation of WPA Artifact Collection Bias in the East Village at Angel Mounds

The East Village is a densely occupied area spanning 5,700 m2 on the eastern edge of Angel Mounds. The Works Project Administration (WPA) conducted excavations at the East Village from 1939 through 1942. In 2010, the northern boundary of the WPA East Village excavations was relocated, and artifacts were discovered in the excavation backfill. To estimate artifact collection bias during the WPA excavations at Angel Mounds, a sample of backfill was screened and the number and type of artifacts were identified and recorded. From this analysis, it appears that approximately 80 percent of pottery sherds and flakes discovered during WPA-era excavations at Angel Mounds were collected for curation.

"VT Is Not TV": The Raindance Reunion in the Digital Age

A REUNION OF THE RAINDANCE CORPORATION, the early 1970s video collective and think tank, occurred at Loyola University Chicago's Information Commons on 30 November 2010. A majority of the founding members-Ira Schneider, Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan, Michael Shamberg, and Beryl Korot-attended the event. Davidson Gigliotti, a founding member of the VideoFreex and an early video historian, served as moderator, and John Giancola, a funder for Raindance who worked with the New York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), also participated. The reunion brought together Raindance members with Chicago-area academics, students, and artists to discuss the history and ideas of this video collective within the context of the digital revolution and online media distribution sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Twitter. I wish I'd thought of it [YouTube], said video activist and Hollywood producer Michael Shamberg. The reunion was significant at this point in time because of the digital explosion that has occurred with media and the extent to which Raindance anticipated the growth of an information- based society and the need to critique it. Paul Ryan, who studied with Marshall McLuhan at Fordham, wrote in the first issue of Radical Software, VT is not TV. If anything it's TV flipped into itself (12). Raindance members used the portapak to transform closed-circuit video practices into independent documentary videos, forums for community dialogue, and the new field that they helped to create-video art. The concepts of research and development were firmly embedded in the Raindance Corporation's name, as well as in the group's creative strategies to produce critical media work. Frank Gillette, who worked with Ryan in a McLuhan seminar, suggested the idea of a think tank around the newly accessible medium. Gillette chose the title to parody the Rand Corporation, a well-known government-sponsored R and D firm that soon became notorious through Daniel Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon papers in 1971. Gillette incorporated Raindance in 1969 with Ira Schneider and Michael Shamberg's help. Ryan, Beryl Korot, and other members were soon attached. After brainstorming ideas in a New York City loft apartment on 22nd Street, would leave their offices to record interviews with hippies in the East Village or troubled teens in Brooklyn-subjects who were often encouraged to turn the cameras and microphones back onto the camera operators (Boyle 6-12). In addition to these early vox pop experiments, Schneider, Ryan, and Shamberg created a series of Media Primers (1970-71), compilation tapes that would frame sociologists commenting on the facial expression of a news anchor, Abbie Hoffman waiting for his verdict in Chicago, or a composite image of the FCC commissioner holding up a handwritten information sign. Group members would carry their portapaks into classrooms at Antioch College and lecture halls in New York to explore significant ideas about communication-from Gregory Bateson to Buckminster Fuller. Raindancers transcribed these lectures as well as screened and distributed them to other groups. Video experiments happened concurrently with discussions and assessments of the day's recordings, a strategy that emerged as a result of Raindance's creative, investigative process. Direct interaction with recorded subjects, the use of special effects, and the free distribution of content are identifiable strategies in these first independent video recordings from 1968 to 1970. Feedback loops provided opportunities for more research. Because public interest in the subject of video was so widespread after the release of the portapak, Raindance created and published the first journal committed solely to the new medium of video, technology, and art-Radical Software (1970-74). The journal distributed the insights of this political and philosophical group, as well as other thinkers, writers, and artists connected to video, such as Nam June Paik and Gene Youngblood. …

Book Review: Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America

Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and Rise of Alternative Media in America. John McMillian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 304 pp. $27.95 hbk.The first chapter of Smoking Typewriters, John McMillian's historical study of underground newspapers during 1960s, opens with a description of national office of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago as it was in middle part of that decade. Day and night, McMillian writes, amid frequently ringing phones, taptap- tap of perhaps a dozen typewriters, and periodic rumble of a nearby elevated train, young reporters and editors worked and slept and ate in a room that one writer at time described as something between a newsroom and a flophouse. On one wall, a picture of a mimeograph machine was captioned Our Founder.The image seems perfect to capture spirit of this critical era, when very young people were asking very hard questions about meaning of power and role of press. As subtitle suggests, McMillian's book focuses not just on SDS but a variety of alternative newspapers that arose during what he calls the Sixties-the era itself, with all of its implications, as opposed to actual decade of 1960s. Popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain (as one radical journalist put it) or like weeds (as Time wrote), papers such Los Angeles Free Press (aka Freep), Berkeley (California) Barb, New York's East Village Other, East Lansing's (Michigan) The Paper, and Austin (Texas) Rag, were central to changes Sixties are remembered for. As McMillian puts it, Along with new gravitas in rock and roll, rising tide of campus-based activism, and outre countercultural style, underground newspapers began contributing mightily to New Left's sense that it stood at heart of a new society.McMillian's study is important. As he notes in introduction, most of work done on Sixties press has been written retrospectively by who were part of it. Certainly, that work is irreplaceable, but as a younger historian who blends a clear appreciation for era with critical detachment of time, McMillian helps us see underground press movement in broader, clearer terms. An assistant history professor at Georgia State University and founding editor of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture, he knows times well, enabling him to offer an understanding of political and social context with an empathetic-and yet not hagiographic-appreciation.Drawing on archival materials and interviews or correspondence with who were involved, he shows us how underground press emerged in context of those outspoken thinkers and writers who directly challenged American culture and values in 1950s and early 1960s-the beat poets, social critics, novelists, and dramatists who produced work that rested uneasily alongside popular characterizations of Eisenhower era as one of tranquility, optimism, and innocence. Yet study takes us close enough to see motivations and struggles of individual leaders, such as Freep founder Art Kunkin, described as Marxist, half hippie; cherubic teenager Michael Kindman, who helped found Paper at conservative Michigan State; and, particularly, Liberation News Service founders Raymond Mungo of Boston University and Amherst's Marshall Bloom. He also shows us individual activists' contradictions. Thomas King Forcade, national coordinator of Underground Press Syndicate, transformed it from a chaotic and somewhat anemic organization into a legal corporation through increased advertising for member papers. …

Eyeminded: living and writing contemporary art

A daughter of the poets Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, Kellie Jones grew up immersed in a world of artists, musicians, and writers in Manhattan’s East Village and absorbed in black nationalist ideas about art, politics, and social justice across the river in Newark. The activist vision of art and culture that she learned in those two communities, and especially from her family, has shaped her life and work as an art critic and curator. Featuring selections of her writings from the past twenty years, EyeMinded reveals Jones’s role in bringing attention to the work of African American, African, Latin American, and women artists who have challenged established art practices. Interviews that she conducted with the painter Howardena Pindell, the installation and performance artist David Hammons, and the Cuban sculptor Kcho appear along with pieces on the photographers Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, and Pat Ward Williams; the sculptor Martin Puryear; the assemblage artist Betye Saar; and the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat, Norman Lewis, and Al Loving. Reflecting Jones’s curatorial sensibility, this collection is structured as a dialogue between her writings and works by her parents, her sister Lisa Jones, and her husband Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. EyeMinded offers a glimpse into the family conversation that has shaped and sustained Jones, insight into the development of her critical and curatorial vision, and a survey of some of the most important figures in contemporary art.

From Alienation to Hallucination: Peter Whitehead's <i>The Fall</i> and the Politics of Perception in the 1960s

From Alienation to Hallucination:Peter Whitehead's The Fall and the Politics of Perception in the 1960s Tina Rivers (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968 [End Page 420] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 4. Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 5. Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968 [End Page 421] Click for larger view View full resolution Figures 6-8. Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968 [End Page 422] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 9. Robert Kennedy in The Fall, 1969 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 10. The Fall, 1969 [End Page 423] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 11. The Fall, 1969 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 12. The Fall, 1969 [End Page 424] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 13. Title card for The Fall, 1969 [End Page 425] On September 26, 1967, the New York Film Festival screened the program "The London Scene," comprising two documentaries by thirty-year-old British filmmaker Peter Whitehead, who had flown to America for the occasion. Both the rollicking Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, now hailed as the quintessential portrait of Swinging London, and the sober Benefit of the Doubt, a critical examination of a theatrical production about Britain's role in the Vietnam War (both UK, 1967), played to a full house and were favorably reviewed. Somewhat cantankerously, Whitehead refused his accolades, complaining in his journal that the critic for the East Village Other (to name but one of his targets) was "fooled by the superficial obvious exterior commercial trappings of Tonite and the protest value of Benefit," vowing "next time—it must go much farther."1 After the screening, two young New Yorkers suggested to Whitehead that he make a film about their city; this inspired him to return in October with the intention of making a grave documentary about "where power lies at the moment," for which he planned to interview figures including presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, New York mayor John Lindsay, and Black Panther Stokely Carmichael.2 But by the end of November, the project had permutated from an investigative report into an avant-garde feature film: in order to attempt a statement more substantive than that of his earlier work, he would integrate his documentary footage with a fictional story about a man "who decides to translate his despair and his will to protest into an act of premeditated murder" by assassinating a stranger at a rally.3 Returning again to New York in April 1968, Whitehead filmed happenings about town, interviews, and sequences of dialogue; he even joined the infamous student occupation at Columbia University, an event that radicalized his [End Page 426] politics (he subsequently declared himself "ready to take a gun and die," and actually bought one) and precipitated his return to En gland in June, under threat of surveillance and harassment by federal agents.4 In a remarkable coincidence of timing, Robert Kennedy was assassinated the day Whitehead left America, mirroring the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the day of Whitehead's most recent arrival. Unable to "distinguish any more between what was real and what wasn't," Whitehead suffered a breakdown and spent "a harrowing three months" convalescing by editing his footage into The Fall.5 On one level, the resulting chef d'oeuvre is a tripartite allegory of the historical transition from nonviolent protest toward more radical forms of action in the late 1960s, made at a time when widespread social transformation seemed both possible and imminent. On another level, it is an experiment that attempts to "go much farther" than Whitehead's earlier documentaries by asking whether film—a medium that Whitehead described as ideologically compromised by its fundamental ties to the experience of illusion—can effect real change. In overlaying its examination...

Naked city: the death and life of authentic urban places

1 Origins and New Beginnings Uncommon Spaces 2 How Brooklyn Became Cool 3 Why Harlem is Not a Ghetto 4 Living Local in the East Village Common Spaces 5 Union Square and the Paradox of Public Space 6 A Tale of Two Globals: Pupusas and IKEA in Red Hook 7 The Billboard and the Garden: A Struggle for Roots 8 Destination Culture and the Crisis of Authenticity

2.5 Cents (from Conversations over Stolen Food )

From antiquity to the present, social theory has often fused critical and creative discourse, esoteric and exhibitionistic tendencies. Socrates and Diogenes first announced many of their most radical propositions from the Athenian marketplace. Thoreau sowed his solitary beans while remaining (as scholar Stanley Cavell suggests) just barely within his neighbors' view. And now, as archivists of evanescent urban experience, as grazers of the public space (commercial, aural, textual), we have recorded forty-fiveminute conversations for thirty straight days throughout New York City. Half these talks took place at a Union Square health-food store, which we call WF. Other locations included the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera House, Central Park, Prospect Park, and a Tribeca parking garage. For this special issue on the market, we have prepared a WF conversation. 6:43 p.m. Friday, January 26 Union Square WF J: How should we begin tonight? A: Any suggestions? J: The man behind me with heavy eyelids - looks like he had a rough day. A: Yes, it seems hard to have a stiff neck and such loose lips simultaneously. He's tried to stretch himself out of confusion. J: What did he tear to pieces? A: Foil He'd bought late lunch before going under. Does the brown bottle contain beer? Could this be a nervous ... or or chemical reaction from antibiotics? J: I think he bought a ginger beer. Though WF has started stocking a handful of beers near the juices. A: Yeah I remember slipping beer into coat pockets as I'd shop at the Twenty-third Street branch, Twenty-sixth, whatever . . . J: You lifted beers from there? A: I've had one brief shoplifting phase independent of this pro] ect. Before flying to Berlin I'd felt a survivalist need to save every cent. J: Perhaps you hoped to treat Kristin . . . A: But it was in relation to Kristin that I stopped stealing. There's nothing else I don't tell her about - that I withhold, and would want to deny if asked about. Staying dishonest sounds lonely. J: Because you'd get left with who you are. You can't come fully across to meet someone else. Now what would this guy keep in his bag? It appears more stuffed . . . A: Than... J: any bags packed by a cashier downstairs. A: I could only imagine, since it does look stuffed: compressed clothes or paper scraps. Torn-up scraps can always be compacted. J: Or could he have visited from New Haven? A: Last last night I crossed a block entirely covered with goose feathers. Cats had ripped a bedspread. I wonder if he retrieved the ... oh his arms just soared above his head. J: Right, he may realize now and then that he's in public and can't doze off. A: Does it exhaust you to watch eyelids flutter? J: No. A: Approaching someone stylish I'll feel well dressed myself, or horribly self-conscious. J: So did... A: My clothes comment could be subliminal. I heard three cymbal beats while passing the Turkey's Nest (that Bedford bar) and now can't forget the song Sharp Dressed Man. J: May I take a sip of tea? A: Has your cough . . . J: I've, I'm back at 100 percent. A: Okay. I need to avoid a cold right now. This nostril pimple hurts to wipe. J: Did the the man purposely deprive himself of sleep? Could he soon hit his seventy-second hour, at which point people turn clinically insane? A: He started packing his bag, then stopped - much as that drugged guy in the East Village several years ago tried to make a phone call. Both drained themselves instead of rallying. J: Hmm. The East Village guy abandoned that call, yet thought he'd fix his hair in a shop window. He pulled a comb from his pocket and combed his bangs but couldn't get them right. He tried again and again: nearly dozing . …

Automats, taxi dances, and vaudeville: excavating Manhattan's lost places of leisure

List of Illustrations AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. Chinatown, Chatham Square, and the Bowery 1 A Round for the Old Atlantic (The Atlantic Garden) 2 Chinatown Theater (The 1893 Chinese Theater) Part II. Union Square and the East Village 3 A Roof with a View (American Mutoscope Studio) 4 Caretakers of Second Avenue (Hebrew Actors' Union) Part III. The Tenderloin 5 If You Can Make 'Em Cry (Tin Pan Alley) 6 Tenderloin Winners and Losers (Shang Draper's Gambling House)Part IV. Harlem 7 A Theater of Our Own (The Lincoln Theater) 8 Rise and Fall of the Original Swing Street (West 133rd Street) Part V. Times Square 9 The Strike Invisible (Horn & Hardart's Original New York Automat) 10 Last Dance at the Orpheum (The Orpheum Dance Palace) 11 Nights of Gladness (Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe) Epilogue A Note on Sources NotesBibliographyIndex About the Author

Ishle Yi Park's The Temperature of This Water: Anatomy of Korean America

Ishle Yi Park is a unique poet in Asian American literary history. The second-generation Korean American poet has read her poems and taught creative writing in schools, universities, community centers, and prisons across the United States. Unlike most Asian American poets, Park has recited and performed her poems at poetry slams and readings in clubs and cafes. She has been a featured performer uniquely mixing poetry, prose, storytelling, and song at hundreds of cultural venues and festivals in several countries. In 2001, the spoken-word artist became the LoudPoet of the Year and Grand Slam Champion of Bar 13 in the East Village, New York. She was the first Korean American to make the finals in the National Poetry Slam. The hip-hop poet was a touring cast member of the Tony Award-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam show and is a regular on the HBO series. The versatile artist released a CD of twelve poems and songs set to beats, Work Is Love, in 2003. The third Poet Laureate of Queens, Park ha...

Staging the Image: Video in Contemporary Performance

At a post-show Talkback at P.S. 122 in New York City’s East Village in February 2009, director Peter Born addressed the short video sequence that was used in Pent Up:A Revenge Dance, a show written and performed by his wife, Okwui Okpokwasili. He said, “A lot of theatre uses it, but I think, if you can express it another way, then why use video?” It’s a simple rhetorical question, one that betrays Born’s minimalist theory in terms of the medium. But the answers, exposed through a survey of video’s wider use in contemporary live performance, are actually quite deep and varied. In our technology-saturated visual environment, the question is not whether video will be used in performance (it will), or whether this is a trend that may pass (like ever-expanding online culture, it won’t), but rather, how savvy performers and directors can use moving images to create powerful, visually interesting, critical, or otherwise fresh and authentic works on stage. Several recent New York City performances shed light on the positively exploited potential of video in performance, while others serve to reveal common missteps and abuses of the ubiquitous medium.

"Just Enough for the City": Limitations of Space in Baldwin's Another Country

James Baldwin's novel Another Country begins with suicide of Rufus Scott, a young black jazz musician who spends last month of his life alone and homeless, fried with anguish, and roaming Manhattan's streets. Although Rufus dies within novel's first hundred pages, he is Another Country's most important character, structuring narrative through a series of relationships and memories each evoked by his death. Even before Rufus's ultimate month of wandering, he is dispossessed of a permanent home. Having years before left his parents' in Harlem, Rufus finds himself--and eventually, his white Southern girlfriend, Leona--living in a series of increasingly shabby East Village and Lower East Side apartments. Racism, poverty, and violence all thwart Rufus's attempts to claim a permanent home, and condemn him to a life of temporary habitation until last nights of his life, when he sleeps in movie theaters and finds warmth in all-night diners. While Rufus's experience of domestic impermanence is most protracted, all of characters of Another Country find themselves, at some point in novel, moving from one to another, attempting to create life. To say that Rufus Scott is absent protagonist of Another Country is not a unique claim; that his life and death shape everything that occurs afterwards is a point agreed upon by many. My reading argues that Rufus, as absent protagonist, is equally central to framing of novel's spatial logic. His dispossession and eventual homelessness disrupt and interrogate symbolic and material value of home and call into question limitations imposed by available postwar discourses of home and family. This reading of various domestic and public spaces within Another Country relies on distinction between and made by Michel de Certeau's claim that space is a practiced place (117). Certeau allows us to understand that exists on a map or as a proper noun, but is created through lived experience, and while is knowable and mappable in specific geo-political terms, is layered with both visible and veiled histories, signs, symbols, and experiences. (1) Using this language, and building on important literary work that has arisen in last fifteen years in area of cultural geography, this reading of Another Country argues for an understanding of material world occupied by Baldwin's characters as informed by and informing the socio (2) spatial dialectic. This approach to reading Another Country not only allows for a reading of space as a system of meanings--to see ... as text--but also reminds us of important work of literary interventions and multiple possibilities for (re)imagining national, urban, and domestic spaces (Jarvis 4). Another Country was published in 1962, at a time when Baldwin was deeply engaged with larger conversation and debate between black nationalism and civil fights movement. (3) In November 1962 New Yorker article Letter from a Region in My Mind, Baldwin reflects on a dinner he shared with Elijah Muhammad at Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago. (4) Baldwin highlights Muhammad's discussion of land and nation as a moment of particular agreement and enlightened understanding: And I looked again at young faces around table, and looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And table said, Yes, that's right. I could not deny truth of this statement. For everyone else has, is , a nation, with a specific location and a flag--even, these days, Jew. It is only the so-called American Negro who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being. (Region 115-16; original emphasis) Baldwin's prose lends a precision and clarity to ideological, symbolic, and material interrelatedness of land ownership, national belonging, and claims to full citizenship in African American context. …

Duality and the Importance of Canadian Humour in A Complicated Kindness

In A Complicated Kindness, Miriam Toews takes readers into the secluded fictional Mennonite community of East Village, located on the prairies of Manitoba, Canada. For many readers, a Mennonite community is something that is seen from the outside. What remains in view are mere surface features, a presented face to the world. In the case of Toew’s fictional town of East Village, this mask comes in the form of an antiquated, replica, tourist village that lies outside the town proper. The existence of this front turns the real and secluded East Village into “a town that exists in the world based on the idea of it not existing in the world” (48). “People come … from all over the world for a first-hand look at simple living,” and what they see when they get there is not the real, but the ideal (11). Much of the book is built on layers of affecting metaphors, coupled with irony and humour, which serve to illuminate the dynamics of the real and ideal in this religious fundamentalist community. Toews’ peels back the hidden layers of a symbiotic relationship between this real and ideal so that a reader can empathize instead of judge what may seem to outsiders a hypocritical contradictory existence for the people in this Mennonite town. Faculty Mentor: Marie Lo

The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender, and Corrective Eco-Justice in Ruth Ozeki’s <i>My Year of Meats</i> and Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold’s <i>Blue Vinyl</i>

It is winter of discontent for Jane Takagi-Little, protagonist of Ruth L. Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats (1998). Operation Desert Storm is raging in Middle East, and she is an unemployed documentary filmmaker of mixed Japanese and Caucasian descent living in New York City's East Village. A call comes in night, and Jane, who defines herself as an opportunist and idealist, jumps at chance to work on My American Wife, a weekly television series sponsored by Beef Export and Trade Syndicate (BEEF-EX) geared toward Japanese housewives. This national lobby uses show to market meat from US to Japanese consumers who, until recent westernization, ate mostly rice and fish. With advent of global capital, lure of all-American wife and her family preparing and eating nourishing meats signifies wholesome values, according to a tongue-in-cheek memo Jane writes to clarify show's purpose in her role as cultural pimp (9) or mediator between American and Japanese misconceptions of each other. The paradox is, as Jane explains, the average Japanese wife finds a middle- to upper-middle class white American woman with two to three children to be both sufficiently exotic and yet reassuringly familiar (13). But something is rotten in this equation. In fact, this novel shows how failure to make connections between consuming and desiring, whether it is food we eat or ethnic and racial images we exoticize, is dangerously naive. Ozeki makes this connection by illuminating a direct and insidious relationship between meat production and environmental and public health issues, especially for women, children, persons of color, and poor. (1) Ozeki links corrupt market forces to destructive deployment of stereotypes and power relations based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality. In My Year of Meats, Jane narrates her accidental and yet uncanny discovery of widespread use and dangers of hormones such as DES (diethylstilbestrol), which have been easy fixes for medical doctors, who prescribe it to pregnant women even in knowledge that it does not prevent miscarriages, and ranchers, who illegally inject it into cattle on feedlots (part of American factory-farming process novel documents). With pathos and humor, Ozeki's work suggests importance of environmental justice and ecofeminism as social movements and interrelated critiques that have power to bring together seemingly disparate individuals in a global economy; novel also makes a claim for a kind of environmental and social justice citizenship. Moreover, what we consider to be forces of globalization have transcended our sense of local and foreign, as transnational corporations have become increasingly flagless and stateless, weaving global webs of production, commerce, culture and finance virtually unopposed (Karliner 178). Yet consumer culture, writes Inderpal Grewal in her discussion of link between biopolitics and geopolitics within colonial discourses of US and Europe, provided modalities through which national and international belongings could be imagined, and resistant identities recognized (17). What concerns Ozeki, in fact, are ways in which ethical actions are made possible by affect produced (Palumbo-Liu 60, 66) in those who consume media content and then engage in embodied coalitional politics. Just as DES exposure motivates Ozeki's protagonist to become a more environmentally conscious television producer, this same chemical also proves to be toxic rite-of-initiation that prompts Jewish American filmmaker Judith Helfand and codirector Daniel B. Gold to make documentary film Blue Vinyl (2002), a muckraking account of discovery of toxic processes in manufacturing, consumption, and disposal of a common household product, polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Helfand, a DES daughter who had a hysterectomy at age twenty-five, had worked on George Stoney's documentary The Uprising of 1934, which used oral histories to understand textile strikes in southern US, merging issues of workers' rights and family health and safety (Helfand, Connecting 121). …

Without Tongue: 10 Minute Play

Without Tongue: 10 Minute Play Angie Cruz (bio) Produced: Al Doblar La Esquina / Around The Block Fifth Annual Raymond J. Flores Short Play Series: (July 2008) and Metro Works Stage and Screen, Abingdon Theatre Complex (May 15–17 2003) [MONTERO (light skinned, handsome, well built Latino male) and ADRIANA (brown skinned Dominican hipster) are sitting inside a hip Indian restaurant in the East Village, NYC. It’s ADRIANA’S 22nd birthday. MONTERO is anxious and nervously folding and unfolding the cloth napkin on his lap. Dinner has been served. ADRIANA looks around to see if she knows anyone, sitting up straight, looking fabulous and eager. A waiter hovers nearby. (Note: MONTERO’S Spanish is from Spain and ADRIANA’S is Dominican.)] MONTERO: I have something to tell you. ADRIANA: Not with that face. It’s my birthday and I don’t want to be serious right now. Try the banana pakoras, with the green sauce. They remind me of Mami’s reqaitos. MONTERO: If I don’t tell you now I might never tell you. ADRIANA: If you keep pushing in your eyebrows like that you’ll destroy your acting career. Can you please stop looking at me that way? Try the mullagatony. I love it here. Don’t you? MONTERO: I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this for a while. ADRIANA: I can’t believe that today I’m 22. Do you know what that means? That next year I’ll be in my mid-twenties. I’ll be able to wear red lipstick and not feel like I’m trying to prove something. My face will have earned the drama. MONTERO: With what you’ve been through in life, you can do whatever it is that you want. ADRIANA: Do you really think so? [End Page 120] [ADRIANA checks her reflection on the large copper fruit bowl by their table.] MONTERO: You know how I feel about you? Right? ADRIANA: No I don’t, tell me again. [She puts her fingers on his lips.] But before you say anything . . . [to waiter] Can you get us some water? [WAITER nods and turns away to fetch the water.] MONTERO: You’re one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met. ADRIANA: If I’m so great why haven’t you tried to kiss me? Not once. All these years we’ve known each other and I’ve been throwing you indirectas . . . MONTERO: . . . or not so indirectas. ADRIANA: What are you trying to say? MONTERO: When you undress in front of me and slip into something more comfortable, believe me honey, that’s not an indirecta. That’s a full come and fuck me now or else. ADRIANA: You don’t have to be so loud. Can’t you see people are watching us now? You say fuck and the whole world wants to listen. I wonder if I said fuck every other sentence at work, maybe the principle at my school would pay attention to me [ADRIANA looks around for WAITER.] Where’s that water? MONTERO: Paciencia. He’ll be here in a minute. ADRIANA: Fuck! I want some water. [WAITER appears at the table.] You see what I’m saying. Vulgarity is the only thing that gets us what we want. It’s a shame. [MONTERO grabs ADRIANA’S hand from across the table. He's trying to get her undivided attention.] [End Page 121] MONTERO: I really want to tell you something. [ADRIANA looks at him and laughs.] Why are you laughing? I’m trying to be serious here. ADRIANA: Why does anyone laugh? Laughter is one of those things. It’s what we utter when we’re exposed, when we feel uncomfortable. And that look you have as if you could read my mind is weirding me out. MONTERO: I need you to listen. [ADRIANA shoves a piece of paratha bread in MONTERO’S mouth.] ADRIANA: Can you believe I’m 22 today. Feels like yesterday I turned 21. Remember that night we went to the Bahamas for a day for 99 dollars. And we were sitting on the beach and we made a pact that if we weren’t married to anyone...

Embedded stories and the life story

This article explores how tellers, more specifically life writers, embed small stories within larger narratives of significant episodes in their lives. I analyze the way in which a life writer, Ayun Halliday, embeds two smaller stories about ordinary experiences from her own childhood into a lengthier narrative about her daughter’s first case of head lice. The data set includes two versions of the lice narrative: one version appears in the writer’s motherhood memoir (The Big Rumpus) published by Seal Press in 2002, and a later version appears in the writer’s self-published perzine (The East Village Inky) in 2004. I analyze how the embedded story-worlds are presented differently in each context by focusing on openings and closings and level of detail in referrals and event clauses. Studying changes in retellings is one way of unpacking the role of embedded stories in the construction of larger ones. Ultimately, I make the point that both embedded stories play a role in Ayun’s larger discursive move in the lice narrative to share the burden of her daughter’s stigma by positioning herself both within a set of mother figures from her family biography and against a broader cultural backdrop of big “D” discourses (Gee, 1999) about good (or bad) parenting.

“My Place in Judaism”: Geography, Ethnicity, and Sexuality on Sarah Schulman’s Lower East Side

Novelist Sarah Schulman’s characters inhabit southern Manhattan’s lower East Side and the East Village, drawing on real and imagined histories of Jewish and gay activism and creativity in their search for physical and cultural space in which they can experiment with sexuality, art, and politics. Variant sexuality and minority ethnicity inform and amplify each other, as metaphors drawn from Jewish culture find their way into descriptions of queer life, and gay references function as comments on Jewish existence. Even while Schulman’s characters move through streets rich with references to both Jewish and gay communities, those references increasingly nod to the past, as Jews move out of “the city” to the suburbs and to other cities, and gentrification threatens the economic viability of lesbians and gay men living on capitalism’s margins. Schulman’s fictional “tours” of gay and Jewish spaces of lower New York both memorialize and construct these intertwined communities.

The Perpetual Undoing of San Diego’s East Village

The falloff in investment in the blocks adjacent to Petco Park, downtown San Diego’s most recently completed catalyst project, could be attributed to the current national housing market downturn. A number of proposed residential condominium projects have been placed on hold in the East Village neighborhood where the ballpark is located. The nearly one-block long homeless shelter tent erected on one of the ballpark’s surface parking lots, however, suggests an undoing rather than an interruption in investment. The tent’s location is representative of the conflicting frontier of growth and frontier outlet roles the East Village neighborhood plays within the region. This article establishes the context for various decisions made pertaining to land use and investment in the neighborhood, and demonstrates how the inability to fully recognize and reconcile the impacts of the historic frontier outlet legacy enables the perpetual undoing of investment gains within the community.

Causing More Trouble Out There: Mark Russell on P.S. 122

For 21 years, Mark Russell served as the Artistic Director of Performance Space 122 , the New York institution hailed as the mecca of downtown experimental art. Russell looks back on the nascent years of P.S. 122 , discussing his desire to “serve” the experimental performance community, often navigating the “ecology” on the artists' behalf and helping to further their careers. Artists' profiles, images by photographer Dona Ann McAdams, and Russell's short reflection on both the new direction of P.S. 122 and his own life give a multidimensional look at this East Village landmark and the impresario who put it on the artistic map of New York City.