Pumpkins, Pipes, and Pferg

This Saturday I went to "Pumpkins, Pipes, and Pferg", a Halloween organ performance starring the one and only John Ferguson. Let me tell you, it was the best pink card I've ever earned at St. Olaf. Fergs hilarious antics, the ghost of F. Melius Christiansen, a silent movie, and the David Anderson Quartet all made it the best Halloween event on campus this weekend. Handsdown.

While I was watching this performance, I couldn't help but think of Vaudeville. Honest! The second Christiansen made an appearance, I thought of the wacky antics of the Vaudevillian performers. Nonsensical situations full of silly accents and over-exaggerated motions: F. Melius' questonable Scandanavian accent and Ferg's kowtowing in response, for example. The bizarre musical antics of the 3 David Andersons who were able to make it, including a vacuum powered siren and some bizarre PVC contraption I didn't know the function of could have easily been replaced by a slide whistle and a duck that that quacked on cue. Finally, the silent film. I wish I had kept my program so I could remember the name, but in this film we saw the classic humor involving non-sensical situations like a rotating, non-squared house with reversible walls. Ferg's improvisation behind the film was marvelous, and his use of themes helped tie the noiseless movie together. My favorite moment might have been when the DVD player rejected the DVD because it was scratched. Ferg managed to avoid "getting the hook" however, by continuing his improvisations. Somehow, he managed to make the organ sound sassy, using slow tempos while we were waiting and faster ones when it looked like the DVD was going again.

I'm sort of sad this is my first year in Cantorei (the choir Ferg conducts), and his last. Though I'm really hoping this isn't the last year he does this performance. I'm guessing he'll still be around.

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle...

I know this isn't quite Vaudeville times, but during all this conversation I couldn't help but think about Chicago. You know, in discussing the show business of Vaudeville acts and talking about the city itself, I can't help but bring it up. Not to mention it runs with the theme of showtunes that Beth and I have been discussing.

In case you don't know Chicago , it's about a woman named Roxie Hart. She murders her lover when she finds him in bed with another woman. The story is about her attempts to espcape the death penalty while becoming a minor starlett in the hubub of her trial. Her lawyer pulls out all the stops to make her look like the most innocent woman alive when we al know the truth. Through the play we see her bamboozle her husband, push another woman, Velma Kelly, out of the jailbird spotlight, and rise to the top of the Chicago scene. The song below is "All that Jazz" is the show's oppening number, combining dancing, adultery, and death, which all combine to create quite a spicy exposition.

 

While this is all towards the downfall of the vaudevillian stage, we see its remnants. Ragtime music has morphed into Jazz music, and that emphasis on the off beat has become a lack of emphasis at all, and a free flowing sort of music that changes every night. As far as performances go, there's still singing and dancing. It's appealing to mass audiences, but in a much different manner now. These dancers are hot, steamy, and sultry. No animal acts here; when Velma's describing her choreography there aren't any double joints, but "splits" and "spread eagles". The stereotypical and dry humor has morphed into raunchiness that everyone guiltilly sniggers at. The dirtiness that came along with the tenements, and the dichotomy in Chicago between the immigrant population and the heightiness of the world fair created the perfect storm for a time full of "jazz and liquor". We've reached the jazz age, where vaudevillian, golden chaos has morphed into dirty dancing and sauntry music.

I'm in love with the music in this show, but really just the music standing on its own. The movie didn't really move me plot wise. Quite frankly I would be happy seeing the show simply as a cabaret series. I saw a high school production at an Illinois Theater Exposition, but that was... lacking. In all departments. Perhaps a Broadway production would be better. In the end, the show does a really good job of catching the inauthenticity of the time; songs like "Razzle Dazzle" emphasize the expectation for flair and shallowness, and "Cell Block Tango" reaches for the depths of the darkness looming in the background of the age. Youtube a few of the songs, you won't be dissapointed.

Hauntings of Hull House

When I was younger, another small obsession of mine (besides the Titanic) was ghosts. I had a book on Chicago ghosts that I was so enamored with that it ended up in tatters, I read through it so many times. While I was learning about Hull House I read a story in my book about "Satan's Baby". One resident of the settlement home refused to have a picture of the Virgin Mary hanging in his room, saying something along the lines of "I would rather face Satan himself that have that picture hanging in here." I don't know why, but apparently the picture really upset him. And just was his luck, within a few weeks, his wife gave birth to a boy with hooves and horns. Addams would have none of it, so took the baby up to the attic, away from the public. After a baptism didn't work to remove the child's affliction, she locked him away in there. She never looked back. Rumor is, some nights you can see a light coming from the attic, with the glowering face of the satan baby looking down on you from the top windows in his eternal prison.

Spooky, right?

Apparently this story is one not founded in any sort of reality, and Addams became rather upset about it. Though eventually she got over that and used it as a basis for a book, apparently. There are some other stories as well, originating from when the house was used as a Home for the Aging and patients died of natural causes. Charles Hulls' wife was also said to haunt the attic as well, back when the first residents were there. I wonder how her and the baby get along... The one story Addams corroborated was that a front bedroom was haunted. Her and a friend saw a woman in white hanging out near the window there, and later some young girls saw the same woman while they were changing for a show.

This is a nother narrative, with some creepy images as well. Now I'm going to waste the next half hour re-kindling my paranormal obsession.

Years of Hull House

 As a Chicagoan I've been somewhat exposed to Hull House my whole life. It's been a part of my little Chicago History classes from the gradeschool up, and it culminated in a settlement house project my Junior year during AP US History. We were discussing settlement houses as a solution for the immigration problem in the Turn of the Century America. Addams saw the ills which plagued her Chicago neighborhood and attempted to heal them. Our group found a plot of land in Detroit and tried to aid the struggling Teen population with classes, housing, and cultural renewal. Our settlement would also double as a community center, with facilities available for anyone within the area we covered. Excess land was going to be used as a garden to offset food costs and to make an attempt at sustainability. Residents also helped offset costs by having a set of chores to take care of as part of their reduced rent residence. To raise and continue to produce funds, we hoped that Detroit area musicians would all be part of an annual concert whose proceeds would go right to the center. While our arrangement was quite idealistic, it is a good representation of looking at the issues in a community and having a go at fixing them.

I've actually never been to Hull House, but after learning about Addams so many times I've finally realized how she represents a lot of what I want to be as a person. She humbly addressed injustices within her means, the best she could, with a bias not towards the system, but towards the people she was serving. I think I have a new person to say when someone asks who's a person you admire. I'll also definitely be stopping by the house next time I'm in Chicago.

Riis and Art as Social Change

Looking through Riis' images brought me back to a theme I've touched on a bit since the beginning of Amcon, and that is art as social change. Riis' images, while probably more photo-journalistic in intent than artistic, exposed the destitution of the tennements of New York city. His images coupled with his text introduced one half to how the other half lives. His activism brought awareness to the tennement situation and helped force a change in the lives of those people.

What I find interesting is how we can see the comparable ethnic arabesque (I like using that word as a descriptor) in Chicago as New York, and how that arabesque played out during the Colombian Exposition and the World's fair.  We may not have seen slums like from How the Other Half Lives in Perfect Cities, but we saw a similar clash of cultures.

And here comes the shameless plug! This weekend the student-run theater organization on campus is putting on Romeo and Juliet! (Performances are Friday and Sunday at 7:30 and Saturday at 3, tickets are 1 dollar and will be sold at the door.) I'm stage managing it, and Mike is actually assistant stage managing it! Why, you may ask, should I go? How does this have anything to do with art as social change? Well Amconner, this play has a twist. There are two Romeos and two Juliets, a male and a female each, and this show explores the relationship between love and gender, and how love is boundless in its expression. It doesn't matter whether it's the male Romeo and the Male Juliet crooning to one another from the balcony or garden, or if it's the male Juliet and the female Romeo getting married at the Friar's cell, in both circumstances there is love. So come see it! At the very least we hope that the production will start a conversation. Using a classic work we hope to convey a timeless message.

Perfect Cities

I spent this fall break touring the Midwest with Cantorei. We sang visited three cities (Kansas City, Topeka, and Lincoln) in three beautiful cathedrals with talented choirs from each community. Now of course, I'm struggling to fight off a cold while stage managing a show and preparing for two major tests happening in the next three days. But that's just me whining about my workload. Suffice to say, I'm overwhelmed, but alas, I'll just have to deal with it.

It was interesting reading Perfect Cities while traveling through run down farm towns, staying in villages with populations under 200, and singing in some of the other major cities of the Midwest. I'm sure I could spend a thesis discussing each of their differences. But I'll only highlight a few here:

In Kansas city we stayed in the church we sang at, so at night we were able to go out on the town! Unfortunately, in the neighborhood we were in there was nothing but bars and clubs. Since most of us were under 21, it didn't leave a lot to be done. Eventually were were let into a swanky hotel where they were playing swing music in the lobby. We danced the night away, sipping on Kidie Cocktails and avoiding the few creepers that were at the bar.

In this one portion of the city, there was a booming nightlife, some fancy hotels and the historic district. I was only exposed to this one area, so the conclusion I drew was that most of Kansas City was well off. Our bus driver said otherwise. Where he stayed and what he saw suggested that it was a fairly dirty city, run down, and lacking funds. It's almost as if we each saw the "black" or "white" part of the town, and we need to do more research to find the "grey" area in between.

Topeka and Lincoln are the capitals of Kansas and Nebraska, respectively. While these cities are supposed to be the epicenter of their states, both looked fairly run down. Their capital buildings were in need of repair and the surrounding business districts were rather lacking. This is also comparing to Springfield, IL, which is rather run down itself. It was almost as if the only capitol the capitals could pull in was in the fact they were capitals. It made me wonder about what was missing- what made these cities less prosperous than their more economically-central counterparts, like Omaha or Chicago?

I spent some time with someone aspiring to be an Urban Planner. Maybe she would know better than I would.

Dichotomies in Chicago

One thing I noticed while reading Gilbert's Perfect Cities was his references to the dichotomies in the development of Chicago. It expanded outward into the suburbs while centralizing in the city itself; tourists witnessed the spectacle of modern society while immersed in an arabesque of ethnicities; elitism pervaded in the construction of the marketplace but chaos pervaded in spectacle and awe. Chicago was a busy city, and from the sound of it the city was quite a spectacle to behold. What I took away from these differences, though, as a more enlightened view of how our society works. In reading Gay New York, I spent a lot of time analyzing these social labels and trying to pinpoint their exact accuracies or inaccuracies. But through comments from other Amconers, and through reading this novel, I'm forcing myself to realize that there really isn't ever a black or white definition of any topic we discuss in this class. We come to class to talk about the grey area, and how it effects the black and white in these novels, or in life. By understanding this, we understand perspective.

For example, by realizing Chicago wasn't the golden metropolis it hoped to be, we may understand why large portions of the city were left out of guidebooks. We can also see how the curious interpretations of certain trends within the town are justified. If it were left as black and white, we would just remain in the dark.

Public and Private Spaces in Northfield

As part of our community scholars retreat on Sunday we took a tour of Northfield! It was itneresting to take a look at a few of the facets of this small community, and how each plays a role in how the individual engages with their space. We covered so little, yet the web was so complex. One of the subjects we covered was the us of public space. Public spaces for gathering bring a community together, tying strangers together while their kids play, or while they feed ducks on the river. When a community looses that space as a center, urban sprawl takes over, and decrentralizes everything. Cars become more necessary and neighbors talk less. With less free, open, public space, lives become increasingly private. In Gay New York, prohibition blurred the lines between public and private space, and we saw the gay and straight communities overlapping and interacting more and more. When the enforcement committees struck hard, stratification struck as well. They communities were divided once again.  In Northfield communities, the stratification is between socioeconomic classes, and fissure form between individuals instead.

Way Park was given to the City by a man with the last name of Way. It was given particularly for opening up the community. After the hospital was demolished, Northfielders fought to keep the town from selling off the land again. Now Nate Jacobi, director of Community Scholars, told us about how he would talk to his neighbors while is children play. And now they have been an apitheater into the hill, probably to create a space for even more gathering.

At the very opposite edge of the spectrum, there is Mayflower Heights. That is what is pictured above. It's a sprawling community full of small developments. Because of the way it was funded, there is no center. Its exclusiveness is epitomized by the two streets that will let you in. Here we didn't see any neighbors out. There were no parks, grocery stores, or community centers within walking distance. I didn't see many people out, and the few that were minded their own business. Within this more expensive neighborhood, space has been completely privatized, and community has all together been abandoned.

Where are the Lesbians?

Mike and I were continuing our conversation about Gay New York outside of class, and we were discussing the absence of lesbians throughout the novel. Now what I'm about to say is a rash generalization, but that doesn't mean there isn't some grain of truth in it. Gays at that time performed a feminine gender role to draw attention to their sexuality. In fact, that is how sexuality was understood. Generally, females were more energetic performers. They were dancers and singers and hostesses- they created spectacle for themselves. Men watched. So it made sense that we see gays appear in history if they were performing feminine roles. But perhaps we don't see lesbians because they took the role of the man, understated and observing the spectacle of women. Men had power, but not the eyes. So while the fairies were gallivanting around the balls, the lesbians could have been at more understated events, avoiding the ridicule of the public and fines from the police.

This may be a generalization, but it's a point to think about.

Chauncey's Coherance

From page 23 of Gay New York, the introduction.

This book maps two distinct but interrelated aspects of what I call the sexual topography of the gay world in the half-century before the Second World War the spatial and social organization of that world in a culture that often sought to suppress it, and the boundaries that distinguished the men of that world from other men in a culture in which many more men engaged in homosexual practices than identified themselves as queer. The first project of the book, then, is to reconstruct the topography of gay meeting places, from streets to saloons to boathouses to elegant restaurants, and to explore the significance of that topography for the social organization of the gay world and homosexual relations generally. It analyzes the cultural conditions that made it possible for some gay meeting places to become well known to outsiders and still survive, but it pays more attention to the tactics by which gay men appropriated public spaces not identified as gay- how tehy, in effect, reterritorialized the city in order to construct a gay city in the midst of... the normative city. Indeed, while the book analyzes the complex interaction of social conventions and government policies that endeavored...

 Then the page turns. While this isn't the shortest paragraph isn't the shortest one in the book, it does a fantastic job of demonstrating Williams' point of topics. He clearly lays out the foundation for the rest of the book, all in a very clear format. There are clear transitions that make the blueprint easy to follow. We don't find the enlarged rhetoric that Calvin observes. It makes Chauncey's writing easy to follow, which is true for the book as a whole.

The Nobel Peace Prize

I have to admit, I only knew that the Nobel Peace Prize were awarded through secondary sources, like my sociology professor vaguely mentioning it in an email, and through reading Brian's blog. Of course, if I did a better job following the news like I said I would I would have found it here, at Amnesty International.

Three women won the prize this year: Yemeni activist and journalist, Tawakkol Karma, Liberia president, Johnson Sirleaf, and feminist and women empowerer, Leymah Gbowee. They each played their role in their respective country's fight for human rights. Sireaf was a prisoner of conscious, arrested for her role in apposing the government in 1985. She is Africa's first democratically elected female president. Gbowee gathered women from across ethnic and religious lines to ensure their participation in the elections. Kaman has been active in organizing the mass protests against the government that have been occurring. They have all been integral.

What this prize in particular emphasizes is the growing attention to women and their vital roles in communities around the world. Women have been building and empowering people for centuries; seeing them acknowledged and awarded is satisfying. It is what they deserve.

Social Labels

Once again I find myself toying with the ideas of labels. I quote Chauncey on page 297:

The theater of drag balls enhanced the solidarity of the gay world and symbolized the continuing centrality of gender inversion to gay culture, much as ethnic parades and festivals helped establish the solidarity of the ethnic community by bringing people together and constructing a sense of common culture.

 Obviously in modern times we would view homosexuality as that- a sexuality. But here, in this time period, we've found that sexuality didn't exist. Gays performed a more effeminate gender role. Yet they didn't identify as women. Fairies merely dressed as women to create spectacle. So of the roles that existed, what is left? Class and ethnicity. Being that this is is not an issue of economic status, ethnicity is all that's left. Could one argue that homosexuality is an ethnic label during that time period? In class we talked about how one may choose to be a certain ethnicity. While someone may not be able to choose their sexuality, they may choose to engage in the gay culture of new york. They could attend the drag balls and other events which would bring all the people together in "...a sense of common culture." I realize that homosexuality is not an ethnicity, but it's good just to approach the past from a different lens every once in a while... perhaps always.

Boystown

Chicago is a large city, no doubt. But I've heard what makes Chicago most enjoyable are the small, village-like communities that link together to form a greater city. I want to talk a little bit about a neighborhood in Chicago called Boystown. As you could probably guess from the title as well as the conversations we've been having in class that this area of Chicago is known for its gay population. At its entrances, pillars with rings of the pride colors welcome visitors. Here you'll find vegan restaurants across the street from sex shops, and everything in between. There's a hopping nightlife, primarily for gays but one that is open for anyone to join. There's plenty of signs advertising "underwear parties" on the sides of buildings on the way to the Red Line. A lot of this sounds similar to Gay New York. In the section I have to read for Wednesday Chauncey mentions the cafeterias. Here gays would hang out, and "let their hair down." The bars and restaurant of Boystown mirror this. That is, until harsher laws against "degenerates" fought to remove all gay activity from these locations. Of course with some bribing and good connections, the theatrics continued.
Boystown also houses some organizations that wouldn't have been found the New York Chauncey displays. Organizations like the Center on Halsted house youth and promote gay culture, all the while screening for HIV tests and fighting for gay rights. The Marin Foundation seeks to build bridges between the gay community and evangelical Christians. These and a slew of other organizations seek to integrate the gay community into the greater Chicago area and the nation beyond. As we mentioned in conversation today, that didn't occur in turn of the century New York. There, it was all for show amongst that community. Now, Boystown invites all people in to experience the life of a homosexual.

Gay Labels

I'm amazed at how labels have remained with gay culture. Gay New York intoduces many labels, including queer, fairy, and fag. They each had their own connotation, and even within the community they caused their own fair share of strife. No one wanted to be called a fag, the fairies were extremely proud of their sexual orientation and strongly identified with their femininity. The queers tried to distance themselves from both of those sub labels. They realized that being homosexual didn't mean displaying a feminine persona.

Now let's rush forward to the present. Outside of the community, any of those labels would have been considered offensive, along with other words like dyke, or butch for lesbians. These labels still persist, but they've been re-owned. The gay community has reinvented them to have different connotations. In an exhibit at the Chicago historical society I was surprised to see lesbians proudly displaying the word dyke in their titles. Queer no longer has the negative connotations it did either. Their are even more labels used among gays now; otters, twinks, bears, etc. Of course, to say all gay people accept and tolerate these terms is a bit beyond what I can attest to. But there is definitely a redfiing occuring.

This brings me back to my previous blog post. In order to succeed, I asserted, one must abandon one's label for a more positive one. But now I would like to amend my statement. Succeeding is linked to abandoning one's label or taking the most positive aspects of said label and using them for the best. But who decides what the positive side of a label is? The more I try to make this definition work the less it does. So you know what; forget labels. To define oneself is to limit oneself. There is no way to succeed if you only live by others' definitions. That, is the real access to the American dream. To live freely and truly, choosing your own path.

Hey, that's the thesis to my first semester amcon final.