culture – Page 2 – jonathan r. wynn

November 27, 2009Jonathan Wynn No Comments

double crossing

Last week for our culture reading group, I had to lead the discussion on Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style, a classic that many had not read. So, instead of giving a mini-lecture on the book, I thought I would give some of the trans-Atlantic cultural exchanges a little context by going through some of the songs that seeped into my psyche when I was too young to know what it was all about. First, I showed them Toots and the Maytals’ 1968 song, ‘Pressure Drop‘ and then the title track cover of Robert Palmer’s 1975 R&B version, and then to show the link from Reggae to Punk: The Clash’s 1978 B-Side. Then The Specials’ version, which only came out in 1996, but their inter-racial ska-punk was certainly influenced by these movements. (And I hate to say it, but it was only when I read Hebdige’s book that I figured out that The Specials’ ‘A Message to You, Rudy‘ and The Clash’s ‘Rudy Can’t Fail‘ were references to Rude Boy subculture–Jamaican patois for a juvenile delinquent.)

Then, just to show that Toots wasn’t oblivious to the way in which cross-cultural exchanges had their benefits, I played for the group their killer rendition of ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads,’ which replaces ‘West Virginia’ with ‘West Jamaica.’

Update: Not completely disconnected, I came across Daniele Tamagni’s new book The Gentlement of Bacongo, a photo essay of the street style of the Sapeurs, or dandies, of the Congo. ‘Sape’ (the ‘Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance’ or ‘Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes’) is called ‘the religion of clothing.’ According to Dylan Jones, who reviewed the book, Sapeurs ‘fantasise about walking the streets of Paris or Brussels – places most can only dream of visiting – returning to Brazzaville as sartorial aristocrats of ultimate elegance.’ This distinctive style is a rebellion against traditional African costume… There is a strict code of honor and sense of morality as members, and there is no violence or fighting. According to the book, it’s all done with the clothes: Pierre Cardin, Roberto Cavalli, Dior, Fendi, Gaultier, Gucci, Issy Miyake, Prada, Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, Yohji Yamamoto. I would love to see a Hebdige version of this phenomenon.

September 15, 2009Jonathan Wynn No Comments

sampling, copyright, and the world’s most important 6-second break

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac&feature=player_embedded#t=1089]

August 12, 2009Jonathan Wynn 1 Comment

coffee and cities

It’s hard to argue against the relationship between coffee and gentrification. Sharon Zukin, for example, writes about ‘pacification by cappuccino‘ and my new neighbor Andrew Papachristos writes about the interrelationship between crime and coffee. I’ll just say this for now: The Blue Bottle’s Kyoto style cold-brewed chemistry set of a machine made me come back five times in four days. I groveled to get my last cup before I headed out of town.

Finding delicious coffee should be added to either Kieran‘s or Andrew‘s ASA Bingo cards. Although I’m doing my best to reserve judgment on Atlanta’s coffee scene.

Tangentially (although coffeeshop-related), there is something to be said for catching a good museum exhibit. In my case, coming early to the ASA, I made it to a Robert Frank exhibit at the SfMoMA. Four rooms were dedicated to the four sections of The Americans. (Read Anthony Lane’s writeup here.) It was an incredible experience, and the narrative became overwhelming, if a little forced by the placards. I use RF via Howard Becker’s Telling About Society for my Media and Technology class, as his work is clearly sociological. He writes:

Robert Frank’s (…) enormously influential The Americans is in ways reminiscent both of Tocqueville‘s analysis of American institutions and of the analysis of cultural themes by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Frank presents photographs made in scattered places around the country, returning again and again to such themes as the flag, the automobile, race, restaurants—eventually turning those artifacts, by the weight of the associations in which he embeds them, into profound and meaningful symbols of American culture.

Fellow museum compatriot, Patrick Inglis, reminded me of Walker Evans‘ style of taking surreptitious photographs of his subjects, and it got me thinking about technique a little more.

Update: A nice review of the 50 year anniversary of The Americans is here.

August 12, 2009Jonathan Wynn 2 Comments

semi-public, semi-private space

In San Francisco for the ASA, I did a little scouting around and came across a bunch of ‘unaccepted streets’ thanks to a lovely local. She told me about how these are a ‘public right of way’ that has not been built according to city standards and has not been accepted by the city’s Board of Supervisors for maintenance. These are scattered all over the town, and the residents are required to take care of them. According to the San Francisco Public Works Code:

Residents of Penny Lane Arrange a Beautification Day

sec. 400.1. Owners of frontage responsible for removal of rubbish or debris from unaccepted streets that are unpaved. It shall be the duty of the owners of lots or portions of lots immediately adjacent to any portion of the roadway of any unpaved street, avenue, lane, alley, court or place, or any portion of any sidewalk thereof, in the City and County of San Francisco, none of which has been accepted by the Supervisors as by law or as in the Charter of said City and County provided, to maintain said roadways or sidewalks adjacent to their property free and clear of rubbish or debris. (Added by Ord. 16-71, App. 1/26/71)

The San Francisco Public Trust has a plan to make these spaces into ‘street parks,’ but what is interesting is that many locals have enchanted these places into their own: transforming them into public gardens, or making their own mosaic-tiled parking space. I was also fascinated by the little paths and stairs that weave around people’s homes, that have these lovely pockets in which residents have decorated them with flowers, art, and mosaics.

This stands in dramatic contrast with what I have always thought of as ‘privately owned public spaces:’ Corporate-held public plazas–in which landowners could build beyond their envelope due to a 1961 Zoning Plan incentive program–detailed in Jerold Kayden‘s excellent book. The NYC Department of City Planning reports:

Approximately 16 percent of the spaces are actively used as regional destinations or neighborhood gathering spaces, 21 percent are usable as brief resting places, 18 percent are circulation-related, four percent are being renovated or constructed, and 41 percent are of marginal utility.

While in San Francisco, I also hung out with Venice Beach urbanist, Andrew Deener, and he told me that his work touches on the Venice Canals, which exist in a way similar to SF’s unaccepted streets: this one-time aspiring Disneyland/Coney Island neighborhood fell on hard times, but is now a isolated bourgeois citadel thanks to these manufactured canals. Interestingly, like the unaccepted roads in San Fransisco, the City does nothing to maintain the canals, even though they are the only way for residents (and city services) to access their homes.

Update (2/1/10): A nice little example of Urban Alchemy is in Astoria, where residents have built a bridge over ‘Scum River’ using a nearby broken bench. (This actually received an accommodation from the office of NYC Council Member Peter F. Vallone, Jr. January 25th)

April 15, 2009Jonathan Wynn 2 Comments

on television, on #amazonfail

This week we’re up to Bourdieu’s On Television. In one class we talked about unveiling the logics of debate and discourse and I used the now-classic example of Jon Stewart going on CNN’s Crossfire and doing everything shy of dismantling the risers underneath the audience. I thought that his ‘I’m just a comedian, but you’re hurting America’ was weak tea, but they packed it in after the gig was up. When a Vice President of the Associated Press threatens a Nashville radio station for using their content (which is to say linking to the AP’s own YouTube Channel–that encludes the codes to embed the videos with–that they apparently didn’t know they had) only to find out that the radio station is actually an affiliate you really know that the unveiling of the mechanisms of cultural production can be a shock to the leviathans themselves. (See a video discussion of it here.)

The brouhaha this weekend was #amazonfail, in which a supposed filing glitch/algorithm led to hundreds, even thousands of titles to be labeled ‘adult’ and therefore, go unranked. Mary Hodder compares how one book (The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk) lost its sales ranking while another (A Parent’s Guide to Homosexuality) kept it. Amazon claims that it was a ‘glitch’ (see their statement here), but Hodder says that authors (like Craig Seymour) were notified months ago that they had lost their ranking for merely including positive content on LGBT themes/content, and notes that the first five books that come up in a search for ‘homosexuality’ are all anti-gay. Clay Shirky has a slightly divergent opinion. (Thanks KB!)

January 11, 2009Jonathan Wynn No Comments

urban growth

I saw this when it first became news, but you have to applaud Edith Macefield, who turned down $1,000,000 for her home. The picture on the left is her home, the picture on the right is the cover of Logan and Molotch’s Urban Fortunes.

December 28, 2008Jonathan Wynn 2 Comments

‘flyting’

Next term we’ll be reading the classic Subculture: The Meaning of Style, which I always look forward to. It is fun to seek out the hidden sources of punk. I look forward to finding out more from this latest news tidbit: Ferenc Szasz posits a theory that rap is actually from the ancient Caledonian art of ‘flyting,’ carried over from Scottish slave owners. Having trouble finding out more…

November 15, 2008Jonathan Wynn No Comments

global examples of urban alchemy

E.g., Ugandan Public Phone Booth on a Bicycle, Williamsburg Hipster Solar Powered Power Charger Cart, Ugandan Charge Cart, Outdoor Barbers in India, Oaxaca Mobile Stores, London’s Hyde Park Speaker’s Corner, Kenyan Chalk Graffiti, Minnesotean Political Campaign Dolly, Chinese Street Retail, Joshua Callaghan’s infrastructure camouflage public art, Congolese Street Arcade, and (recent favorite) UK ‘Reverse Graffiti.’

October 26, 2008Jonathan Wynn No Comments

while thinking about representation in ethnography…

…I often think of Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. Manohla Dargis, in viewing Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, is reminded of Borges’ On Exactitude of Science. Here:

…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

From Travels of Praiseworthy Men ( 1658 ) by J. A. Suarez Miranda

Borges, J.L. 1999. Collected Fictions. Trans. A.H. Hurley. New York: Penguin.

September 27, 2008Jonathan Wynn No Comments

ville invisible

Oh, the beginnings of the semester, and a hard drive meltdown (to the rescue: Time Capsule) have put a lull in ye ole blogging/posting. Very close to sending out some new work on the transformation of the urban public spaces, and found a translation of Bruno Latour’s Paris: Ville Invisible in both text (pdf), and in a flash/visual representation. Very exciting for me, since translating more than a few sections at a time was too prohibitive. It includes some of the best writing he’s done:

At a certain temperature Society no longer exists. It breaks down like bits of DNA that are heated slightly; it frays like them, becomes stringy. It is no longer a sphere next to other spheres, like grapefruits packed in a box, but a weird way of moving about, tracing figures, like unknown writing on rice paper painted with an invisible brush (p. 11)