super interesting interview about oral histories with depressed and bi-polar disordered people

Vieux

daylight savings day on planet brooklyn.

today all i want to do is think about and investigate and learn from the wooster group. the wooster group is one of those things-- like staten island, like the second floor of the house upstate where i rent a room-- that i can't explain why i haven't ever visited before. i have known about the wooster group since at least 1995ish. i remember going to see peggy shaw in menopausal gentleman and realizing that the wooster group was performing across the street and wishing one didn't have to choose between peggy and the woosters. anyhow, the woosters were sold out, and i had a ticket for peggy's show. but then why didn't i go see them another time? it has been 15 years since then. why? why? why?

it turns out that they touched something inside my tiny vital organs. the ones that keep me alive even in the dark moments.

i saw their interpretation of tennessee williams's vieux carre on friday night. now, sometimes avant garde theater is hard to sit through. sometimes it is theoretically interesting but difficult to physically be in the presence of. sometimes it is confusing. this production was none of the above. it was one of the most playful, exciting, involving, delightful, insightful displays of art that i have ever seen. the play, which i guess is a lesser-known williams script, takes place in seedy boarding house in new orleans, during the depression. the setting is apparently based on an actual boarding house where tennessee williams stayed in the 1930s. the characters include a gay writer, his neighbor, an older gay hustler/painter, a woman from new york who lives with her homophobic (but maybe a teensy bit gay) junkie boyfriend, the landlady, and a mysterious beautiful drifter. they are all in some kind of pain-- some are physically dying, some are running from something, some are afraid of their queerness. apart from the explicitly queer characters, the play is pretty much in keeping with what i know of t. williams's other work-- it builds slowly, climaxes violently and desperately at the end (leaving very little in the way of resolution or hope), features a rape, makes a comment on southern cultures, and is beautifully written.

the woosters interpreted it in what i gather is their traditional manner-- many video screens onstage with the actors, a moveable abstracted set on wheels, very physical performances. still, nobody seemed bored, actors included. it didn't seem canned, or affected, or showy. it was just consistently intriguing. why was it so appealingly interesting that when the guy with tb starts spitting up blood, the way the woosters represent it is by having him first drink--right there, on stage, in front of your eyes--from a bottle of red, blood-like liquid, then hold up a white hankerchief and cough a beautiful red-paint design disgustingly beautifully all over it? its not JUST that they break with realism there; its not JUST that it creates a beautiful painted hankerchief; its not JUST that it is simple, direct, and effective. i don't know what it is, or how to explain it. or: how to explain the complexity of the way they represented the character "nursie"-- a black woman who serves as the rooming house's maid. dressing her as a geisha, giving her a valley girl accent, nursie becomes a beautiful, cranky punk-type kid undermining the ghost of williams' mammy-like rendering. and the explicit, unapologetic, forceful way they stage a couple of unusual and explicit sexual acts. the power of it shocked me into an upright position and a smile. i wore a smile for most of the show, and most of the way home-- despite the difficult subject matter of the show. it was just so surprising and playful and smart. i couldn't stop smiling because of it.

there's more, there's tons more, some of it about what was happening on stage, some about what was happening off stage-- my response to the historical nature of the material, for instance; and the queer luminary-filled the audience (holly hughes, emily roysdon, dan hurlin), and Mills, who threw kisses across the theater at them. and the beautiful daily video poems they post online (here). but what sticks with me is the history of the wooster group. thirty-some years of making really really really strong work, developing a process that combines dance and improvisation and text and video and movement and ideas and performance tasks. i am only just really beginning to learn about the nature of the sort of experiments that they and other artists were doing in the 1970s and 1980s. i find that i can't look away. i want to know more.

is that a historical curiosity? i'm not sure. its a creative one, for sure. and its one that has been made more urgent by recent events.

some things i've been meaning to post

its been so long since i last posted i doubt anyone will ever read this, but i will post anyway. its good just to write a blog post, once again. i believe in doing things even when it seems pretty likely that nothing will ever come of it. usually something does, in the end. but even if it doesn't, its still important to do it. hope is, as the punks say, a muscle. one must exercise it.

anyhow, there's a lot i've been thinking to post in the past year. but i'll start with recent things.

First off, I'll just say that i wish i had the time to write a formal response to several of the debates that are raging (re-raging?) about how to reform public education. there's one strand of this debate that i've been thinking about a lot the past week: that is, the recent call to take teacher education out of the university context. the idea is that future teachers need more clinical preparation, less studying in formal classes, more time apprenticing in k-12 classrooms.

For instance, this week, the chronicle of higher education published this article by the policy director for this think tank called "education sector."

In this piece he references another one he published in 2009, wherein he raved about a newly-created clinically-oriented teacher credentialling program created by the founders of two charter school networks. its called Teacher U. Teacher U basically does away with the requirement that future teachers take much in the way of formal classes. Instead, "Students teach full time during the week, then meet one Saturday a month, when they're taught by a combination of Hunter faculty members and master teachers from the charter schools."

Now, I'm all for reforming teacher education. In my years working in teacher education programs, i have seen a lot that could be improved and reworked. But doing away with classes where students learn things like how to think historically, how to think critically about pedagogy, how to make sense of global politics and literature? This is not the change that teacher education programs need. If anything-- and I'm speaking most confidently about future history teachers-- students need MORE classroom time. Seriously, i can't tell you the amount of historical errors my students make on the work they do for me in the history teaching methods class i teach most semesters. One student recently wrote that European settlers developed slavery because they were Catholics. There are so many ways in which this is problematic-- and this student was in her last semester before going off to student teach. That was an especially egregious situation, but its extremely common that my students don't know enough history--or enough about historical methods of thinking-- to do their job well.

I do think we should rethink the clinical aspect of teacher training--perhaps students could graduate and then have a year of apprenticeship working closely with another teacher; or perhaps we should develop a long-term mentorship program in which new teachers have a lighter load, and get to participate in a deep ongoing apprenticeship program, co-teaching with master teachers and visiting other teachers' classrooms. I think its fucking ridiculous to substitute clinical training for coursework in content and critical thinking strategies. omg, seriously. why is education reform always so crappily done? why? why?

don't answer that.

second, i've found a few new podcasts to fall in love with. First, is citizen radio-- allison kilkenny and jason kilstein's project. i think jaime talks a bit too much about his dick, but they're funny and smart and i could spend many many afternoons drinking tea and listening to them do their thing. Second, and this one i found last year sometime and it has helped me cope with many an early morning or late night drive to/from work upstate: law and disorder radio. its basically the national lawyer's guild's heidi bogosian, the center for constititonal rights' michael ratner, and a guy i don't know much about named michael smith talking about legal events from a radical lawyering perspctive. very very good source of info.

third, my pals' new excellent book is out, Queer (In)Justice.

ok, over and out. for now (i hope).

puppet show & protest at a recent NYC Educational Panel Hearing

GO NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC SCHOOL PARENTS. I xxxx you.

NYC Panel for Educational Policy "Puppet Show" from Elizabeth Rodd on Vimeo.

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abandoned school, rubble

here's this photo i took, in new orleans, just a few days ago. i snapped it two stories up, in an abandoned building that i climbed up into via fire escape. the entire place is still totally trashed, as you can see, nothing cleaned up since katrina. there's even some writing still scrawled across one of the chalkboards, including a date: 8/23/05.

rubble is evocative, and disturbingly poetic. it tilts toward metaphor. but whatever metaphors this rubble suggests (about our crumbling national public educational system?) it is also literal. a literal statement-- about public services in new orleans.

so i thought i'd post it.

Blackwater's Erik Prince to Teach High School History

I thought I had hallucinated this fact, but it turns out its true. The founder and executive director of the U.S.'s most notorious multinational mercenary-for-hire corporation, Xe (formerly called Blackwater), has grown tired of being criticized for his organization's extralegal activities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and New Orleans. And so what will he do? Why, teach HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY of course.

This frightens me.

There's a good article about Prince's designs on teaching in a recent issue of Mother Jones; Jeremy Skahill has also written a really thorough book about Prince, his family, and his company's work in a book i am slowly making my way though, entitled Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

I think its a good idea to read about this guy and his company; they are very deeply involved in ruling the world right now.

podcast of the week: On The Media on Detroit and the ideology of photographs

This weekend's On the Media has a good piece (see above) on two subjects that i've been thinking a lot about the past few months: Detroit, and the uses and abuses of photographs. I visited the motor city this summer, in order to participate in the Allied Media Conference with a media activist group i work with. It was a great conference, and it is really really really great that the folks who organize it every year continue to hold it in Detroit-- not only does it bring a little bit of money to the economically troubled city, but also it brings a lot of smart people to Detroit, where they can begin to see how the media (and popular mythology) has distorted our national image of that city. There are some fantastic things happening there; i'll just mention two:

1)urban farming. there are a great deal of people devoting a great deal of energy to reclaiming (sometimes illegally) vacant city lots and turning them into public farms, and then distributing fresh produce around the city. this is especially important because there is, according to my sources, not one major grocery store located within the city limits. that plus a not-so-great public transportation infrastructure means that most folks do their grocery shopping at the local liquor store. so this urban farming thing is filling a really giant need. there's lots more to say about that, but i'll just post a photo and let your imagination do some of the gap-filling.

photo: Earthworks Garden, Detroit, Michigan, July 18, 2009, by Rachel Mattson

2)immigrant justice organizing. did you know that Detroit is a border city? It is-- cause remember Canada? It is just a few miles away. And as a result, Detroit's immigrants --especially Latinos-- face an increasingly well-funded policing infrastructure, willing to use semi-legal tactics to rout out undocumented people. I met a whole bunch of people, mostly Latinas, who are trying to counteract the effects of a new cycle of unsavory police tactics. And let me tell you: the activists in Detroit are some pretty awesome folks.

The other reason i'm posting this On the Media segment is because it does a good job of explaining some things about photographs and ideology. i've been spending a lot of time this fall so far thinking about and trying to teach my students to understand the ways in which photographs (and in my case, i'm usually talking about historical photographs) are ideological documents, texts that tell a story-- not transparent representations of reality. and that we have to understand who created them, and for what purpose, before we can begin to understand what story they are telling, and why. the On the Media segment i've linked to above does an interesting job of making this point, in relation to media representations of Detroit, in a really clear way.

which is helpful.

Presenting....The Butter Presidents

My friend Nina Callaway found this and showed it to me. It seems like an important statement, but I can't really figure out how to explain just what its an important statement about.

Although if I were to try to approximately describe how this kind of history feels, i'd have to say: kind of gross.

Texas is debating adopting new standards for U.S. history instruction

If you thought the debate over U.S. History Standards ended when Lynn Cheney and friends took on the entire historical profession in the 1990s, then you were wrong. Talking Points Memo reports that Texas is currently discussing revising its standards for U.S. history post-1877, and the very right wing board responsible for writing them is proposing some very disturbing stuff. As TPM notes, "Approved textbooks, the standards say, must teach the Texan student to "identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, and the Moral Majority." No analogous liberal figures or groups are required..." Students will also be required to "describe Ronald Reagan's role in restoring national confidence, such as Reaganomics and Peace with Strength."

But its worse than that-- its more of the teach this fact, teach that interpretive idea school-- without any discussion of the import of, or methods for teaching, critical thinking and historical analysis. And because Texas is so big, its standards effect what textbook publishers put into ALL their textbooks.

Perhaps now we can abandon textbooks altogether, once and for all?

Here, courtesy of TPM, is the draft of the document itself. Notice the marginal comments made by members of the committee. Also, here is another, very interesting analysis of these proposed standards by the United Farm Workers.

frightening show of right wing insanity, based on incorrect information about obama and the rules about US citizenship

(hat tip Bint Alshamsa at Feministe.)

Soon i will post a short explanation of the history and current status of US immigration law. but i wanted to put this here before i forgot.

sita sings the blues

an interesting animated version of the ramayana, here.

Information R/evolution

Archives, information, and how we live now.

Teacher at Desk

Very little comment required. From the George Eastman House collection.

An interesting news item.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Monday, February 9, 2009
Senator Feinstein Introduces Bill to Preserve Historic Accounts of Civil Rights Movement


Washington, D.C. – Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today introduced legislation to create a Civil Rights Oral History Project, a joint effort between the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress to collect oral histories of those involved in the Civil Rights Movement and preserve them for future generations.

“Our society today would not be possible without the extraordinary people who dedicated themselves to the Civil Rights Movement,” Senator Feinstein said. “Whether on a bus in Montgomery, at a lunch counter in Greensboro, in a high school in Little Rock, or on a bridge in Selma, these courageous individuals risked their lives to bring real and necessary change to our country. This bill will help ensure that we never forget their stories.”

The legislation is co-sponsored by Senators Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn); Thad Cochran (R-Miss.); Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.); and Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) have introduced a companion bill in the House.

"Over the past few years, we have lost some of our nation's great civil rights leaders, such as Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King. Every day that passes we lose more and more of the pioneers who fought for the freedom and equality that we all enjoy today," said Rep. McCarthy. "While we know so much about the lives of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Congressman John Lewis, and Thurgood Marshall, it is important that we learn about the everyday people of all races who took a stand during a pivotal time in our nation's history. There were so many people who were crucial to the Civil Rights movement, but have not had as much recorded about their experiences for the public record."

The bill would direct the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture to record – in audio and video -- firsthand stories from the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights Oral History Project is similar to the Veterans History Project, which was started by the Library of Congress in 2000 to collect and preserve the remembrances of American war veterans and the civilian workers who supported them.

+ See the original post on Feinstein's website, here +

Favorite Podcast of the Week, Episode 1

Well, yes, the podcasting is going very well. I've discovered quite a number of podcasters that I can rely on, including several who regularly feature historical stories-- American Radio Works, Radio Diaries, Nextbook, The Moth. Though I confess that I have other interests as well! and thus I also like listening to, for instance, Slate's Culture Gabfest, which keeps me up to date on things I can't believe I don't have time to read about anymore in the Arts & Leisure section of the paper.

Anyhow, I had this idea. One week, after listening to two really wonderful podcasts about two completely separate events from 1968, I started thinking that I'd like to curate listening experiences here; that is, to collect, in one place, a set podcasts that either have obvious connections, or not-so-obvious connections, and then annotate them and provide art, and primary documents, and other resources in one spot. And I might still do that, at some point. But I've been wrecked and time-consumed on account of this book I'm writing (its at the publisher's by the way, thanks G-d). So no time for all that. Still, I wanted at least do something, so here's the low-impact first episode version of this idea.

"Mexico 1968." If you click here, you can find both the podcast, and a set of resources that Radio Diaries has compiled about the Mexican student movement of 1968, and the tragic events that, literally and figuratively, killed it. The event is something of a historical mystery, even despite the fact that many people who were there are still alive-- the official reports claimed 4 students were shot dead during the Massacre of Tlatelolco. But others claim that in fact hundreds died. The audio piece is a really well-done oral history-based documentary, one that reminded me, at least, that no matter how much I've read about the 1960s, I still don't know half of the story. Indeed, in the U.S. we tend to think of the protest movements of the '60s as being centered in the U.S. Hardly the case, Europe exploded, Latin America, Africa. The whole world was on fire. And we have to keep trying to find ways to tell those stories, and to combat the left-leaning sort of American exceptionalism.

Here's a nice supportive set of documents: Kate Doyle, of the National Security Archive, has collected recently declassified U.S. documents related to the U.S. government's intelligence about the student movement and the Mexican government's attempts to quell it. They can be found here.

israel/palestine

a short video response to the impossible-to-respond-to horror being loosed on Gaza by Israel right now. entitled "Proportionate Response #2." made by my friend Ariel Federow.

commuting

after one semester of commuting back and forth between the mid-hudson valley and brooklyn, i have exactly two important things to say:

1)podcasts rock

and

2)i still don't know how long soymilk and eggs can stay in a refrigerator before they go bad. but i intend to figure it out, finally, this semester. And how does one STRATEGIZE their refrigerator/food situation when splitting time between two refrigerators?

knowing these two things seem to be crucial to making a commuting academic's life more workable.

my top 4 favorite podcasts, so far/at the moment:

1. Radio Diaries. The other night, I listened to the Radio Diaries piece about the recent efforts to reconstruct what actually happened during the student protests in Mexico City in 1968. I recommend it HIGHLY. its an extremely good piece of oral history, and also has important implications for those of us interested in the political uses and import of both new media and archives.

2. KQED, The Writer's Block Podcast. Features writers reading excerpts from their work. Mostly fiction and playwriting, as far as i can tell. Much of it, stuff i've never heard of before.

3. Radio Without Borders, from WKUT in Austin. Is introducing me to new music. Some of it i absolutely do not like. The Iguanas have such potential, but i JUST don't like them. Then some of it i'm like, ok, nice-- Of Montreal fits into that category. And some of it, deeply important-- such as The Blind Boys of Alabama, doing their version of "Free at Last." WOAH.

4. IndieFeed's Hiphop broadcast. Also introducing me to music i've never heard of. Mostly pretty great, and i'm definitely not going to get any music this good on local radio in the mid-hudson valley. its hard enough to get decent public radio up there; don't even try to get smart hip hop-- or, actually, ANY hip hop. (that reminds me: wtf is up with WAMC radio? why is it so bad? and WHY DID THE PEOPLE LET ALAN CHARTOCK put the kabash on democracy now!? we need democracy now! up there so so so badly.)

4 podcasts i'm super excited to start listening to in the coming weeks:

1. The Yale University Press podcast. interviews with authors. Could suck hard, or could become indispensible. i'll keep you posted.

2. The Moth podcast. Stories; inspired by the no-reading-from-paper-allowed, ongoing, local NYC Moth storytelling events.

3. PRI's World Books podcast. Putting a few little ideas from outside of the U.S. into my brain.

As for the refrigeration situation, i'm not offering ideas yet. i'm SOLICITING ideas. i'll let you know if i hear anything brilliant.

how to be a dissident

its an animated instructable! easy to adapt for use-- in the classroom, for instance.



(hat tip: the Nathan and His Open Ideals blog)

the association of moving image archivists rocks the house

i attended their annual conference this weekend in Savannah, Georgia, and, just as i expected, i emerged totally smitten. i have never emerged smitten from a history conference-- and i've been to MANY of those! but AMIA is a really awesome group of folks doing pretty fantastic work, and also i have long had a fetish for moving image archiving.

highlights:

well, this is really a lowlight: my flight got cancelled on thursday night, so i was rebooked on a flight out on friday morning, and then there was more mishigos friday morning and anyway long and short, i missed all of thursday and all of friday's panels. alas! but i did get to go to the Archival Screenings on Friday night, which was fantastic. Among other things, there i got to see recently restored versions of

--an episode of "Firing Ling from 1968, featuring a priceless one-on-one interview in which William F. Buckley attempts to interview Alan Ginsberg. At one point, in response to a question that Buckley asks, Alan Ginsberg takes out his harmonium and sings "hare krishna" to a nervous, smiley, totally freaked out Buckley. omg.

--a 16mm film called "Roaches" or something like that, from the 1970s that's in the NYPL archival collections, in which three New Yorkers talk about and demonstrate their strategies for killing the roaches that live in their kitchens. hilarious and cathartic.

--a segment from WGTV, the University of Georgia's TV station, from 1965, featuring a performance/presentation by the folksinger Jimmy Driftwood (who i'd never heard of before but of whom i am now a very avid fan). highlights: Jimmy playing the "mouth harp," a giant bow-and-arrow type bow that gets held up to your mouth as you play it; shots of delighted UGA students seated in a large lecture hall; and shots of the ginormous television camera shooting from behind Jimmy.)

--an experimental film commissioned by Sears in 1968, meant to advertise Sears clothing. Psychadelic colors, fluid dancing, multiple images-- as if you were doing acid and then rushing off to buy clothes as Sears.

this is getting really long so i'll just note 2 digital resources i found out about at the conference, for now, and write about some of the other things later:

--i found about about this wonderful digital archive that's been produced by a collaborative team at the University of Georgia, called the Civil Rights Digital Library. It features a lot of material including moving images, available online, from local Civil Rights struggles around Georgia. Not the standard kind wherein Dr. King stands behind a podium. Unusual stuff. Plus lesson ideas and contextual information. A REALLY RICH and wonderful resource-- for teachers, for instance. Check it out here.

--i have now viewed "A Fair(y) Use Tale"-- and i encourage you to view it too. it explains Fair Use and launches a critique of US copyright law via, exclusively, clips from Walt Disney films. Voila:

this thing that's bothering me

i danced and sang and shouted in the streets in brooklyn on tuesday night and hugged total strangers and felt elation and incredulous joy. i knew it wouldn't last, but i also knew it felt right to celebrate wildly.

and now, almost a week later, i'm starting to feel annoyed by this one thing the commentators have been saying a LOT: that this couldn't happen in any other country on earth.

see, for instance, this otherwise genius day-after-the-election conversation between jon stewart and chris wallace.



and notice: it wasn't just chris wallace saying it: jon stewart agrees.

i'm not going to go point by point and country by country and talk about why this is incorrect, i'm just going to say two words, in capital letters: SOUTH AFRICA. a country that did something far more unprecedented, quite a number of years ago. HOW COME NO ONE IS SAYING THAT. i hate this crappy american exceptionalism. its harshing my mellow, majorly.