gina's blog

Hello From Hollywood: Vintage postcard makes Hollywood look much closer to the Ocean than it actually is. 

Los Angeles: Travel brochures no longer use the freeway system to advertise Los Angeles; in fact the traffic is what tourists and natives alike tend to complain about endlessly.

Being from Los Angeles, I was of course interested in reading what the WPA guides had to say about the Golden State. I was surprised to find that what they advertise as quintessentially Californian is actually how my home state is often still perceived today around the world.

In the section on Hollywood, for instance, the guide explains that numerous celebrities can be seen walking around casually on Sunset Blvd (“Cowboys in chaps and sombreros and extra girls in the traditional slacks and dark glasses, bright kerchiefs protecting their freshly waved hair, lunch at the corner hot dog stands or gossip and talk shop. Even 'featured' players in make-up often cross Sunset to a line of hamburger stands for snacks between shots.” p. 192). To this day, when I travel to other parts of the world, the first response when I say I'm from California is, “Wow, do you see a lot of celebrities?” People generally seem to have the idea that in Southern California, celebrities are everywhere, simply strolling around town, mingling freely with everyone else. Although I've had a few celeb spottings here and there, they are few and far between. It is also interesting that Hollywood is described as a quaint town of window shopping and star gazing, which it may have been closer to in the 30's, whereas now Hollywood might more accurately described as shady, tacky, and/or overrun with tourists (maybe a sign that these guides were a success).

On the subject of Los Angeles, the WPA guide reads, “To some [the city] is a slightly unreal stage set, some elaborate artifice on a movie lot, as they catch a first glimpse of its new buildings gleaming in the sun between the cobalt sea and the purple hills.” (p. 208). Clearly the guides over-idealize LA in order to attract visitors, in much the same way that travel guides do now. One thing that guides now would never touch upon, however, is race. The WPA guide says that LA is home to many Mexicans that live “in some of the worst local slums” and keep mostly to themselves, while “many of them speak only their mother tongue” (p208). Clearly there is a large gap between socially appropriate political correctness then and now. Confirming more broad stereotypes, the guide also describes native Angelenos as eccentric hippies, people who “consult crystal balls for guidance” and go “shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”

All in all, the guide didn't strike me as drastically different from travel guidebooks now, which paint the same pretty picture of all the destinations they describe. The goal is to attract tourists, and in the same vein as the WPA guides, travel guides now usually set the scene of a place and then proceed to list the “points of interest,” which for LA, are for the most part the same as they were in the 30's.

And now to end my last blog with my favorite quote from the California WPA guide: “Negroes comprise the next largest group [in Los Angeles]...At night their clubs and dance spots get 'hot,' as the young and not-so-young 'swing it.'” In conclusion, those WPA guide writers really knew how to party.

Indoor Ski Resort in Dubai: Can glamorous travel destinations like this attract enough visitors in the midst of a recession economy?

Vegas Travel Deals: The Excalibur is one of the many hotels in Vegas that are offering special budget deals to entice visitors (like this all day, all you can eat buffet).  

It seems counterintuitive that the period of extreme poverty in America also witnessed the rise of mass tourism, which is now so ingrained in our society. Labor unions that were fighting for basic rights, such as fair wages and hours, made the leap to achieving paid vacation time, which was instantly commodified. It is interesting that vacation time itself was seen as a business investment, providing middle class workers with a chance to “reinvigorate their character,” and therefore be more productive when returning. A vacation was a chance to get back in touch with nature, to participate in outdoor activity, and to rest the mind, (and to quell desires to unionize) all of which would ultimately boost American industry.

The advertising strategies used were so successful that still today, travel is seen as an essential element of leisure. Tourism is a major goal of Americans, who see it as all the things that it was advertised as: a chance to escape, a chance to re-connect with nature, a chance to clear the mind, body and soul. It has become such a massive industry now, that many local economies depend on it to survive; it is necessary to support local business as well as international companies. Many cities now have entire areas that seem to exist solely for the sake of attracting tourism; i.e. Times Square in NYC, the Walk of Fame in Hollywood, and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Travelers choose a destination, buy a guide book, and can virtually do anything, anywhere. The industry has grown so huge that in places like Dubai, indoor ski resorts are being built, along with palm tree-shaped islands, and massive theme parks for adults. Even the education system has capitalized on the travel habit, by making study abroad programs so widespread and seem to be an essential part of the college experience, using it as a selling point for applying to certain schools.

Travel has become extremely glamorized and luxurious in this day of age, yet in the midst of the recession, budget travel is the new trend. With so many airlines and travel companies going out of business, and with tourists less pocket money, it has become a challenge to get the best vacation for your buck. Places that usually capitalize on opulent vacations are now trying to appeal to low budget vacationers. I was in Las Vegas recently and was shocked to find that many of the hotels are offering extremely cheap rates to entice visitors. I stayed at the Excalibur for about 30 dollars a night and many of the other resorts had similar strategies: entice tourists with cheap rates and then get them to spend the difference on gambling and food. The surviving airlines are cutting fares as well, trying to get people to buy more plane tickets. Just yesterday, the NY Times published an article about the cheap travel deals that are popping up now to entice tourists: http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/travel/18pracbargains.html?scp=1&sq...

I wonder if the recession will change the way we travel. Maybe more people will start reverting back to the road trip as a way to see America, rather than spending thousands on cruises and glamorous getaways around the world. As the travel industry continues to lower prices, travel will become a lot more accessible (good news, college students!) and I'm interested to see how it all plays out.

How did we go from this...A Cool Million is like a childhood fairytale, gone horribly, horribly wrong. We are first introduced to Lem Pitkin, “our hero,” the brave knight in shining armor, reminiscent of Lancelot, embarking on the quintessential American journey, to go into the world and make his fortune. His goals are noble, to save his mother from hardship, to make an honest living, to rescue the damsel in distress...he is a simple boy with a simple goal, encouraged by a man who used to be president.However, things do not go as planned, to say the least. Our hero ends up losing an eye, having a leg amputated after a bear trap attack, having his thumb cut off, getting scalped by wild Indians, paid to be beaten and laughed at by audiences and, in the end, being assassinated. Yet, throughout he maintains a sense of gullible optimism that only gets him into more trouble. Our damsel, Betty Prail's story is somewhat like a depression version of Cinderella. An orphan girl on a farm, she is taken in by a family with two ugly sisters and a step mother who make her cook and clean. But poor Betty does not get to go to the ball. Instead, she is repeatedly raped, beaten, and sold into prostitution (why the obsession during this period with innocent girls constantly getting raped?). This is not a fairytale with a happy ending. So, what is the point of all this? to this?Our hero, in life, is made a fool, manipulated by everyone he meets, and completely incapable of achieving an American Dream that certainly does not seem to exist. Even after his death, he is made into a figurehead for a racist, anti-Communist party, spearheaded by the corrupt, poor, hypocritical ex-president himself, Whipple, who is to blame for inspiring the disastrous quest from the beginning. The party's noble goals include getting rid of all the inferior races, yet they are too stupid to figure out how to do so in an organized fashion.

We are introduced throughout the story to money grubbing Jews, shady “Chinamen,” and savage Indians, all of whom are only slightly more evil than everyone else. The only message that I could extract from this book, which is clearly a political satire, justified by its unabashed ridiculousness, is that America is corrupt, Americans are incompetent and manipulative, and Capitalism is a complete and total failure. Americans are racist, rude, easily persuaded by the mob, and a man whom they themselves elected president is the worst of them all. All of our ideas of self determination and social mobility are delusional and based on ignorance. So what is the moral of this fairytale? I'm not entirely sure, to be honest. But I do know that this is not a good one to read to your children.

I was recently struck by two current trends that seem to tie in directly to what we've been talking about. The first is the new surge in tent cities, reminiscent of the Shantytowns in the Depression. We might not know it in an urban environment like New York City, where homeless is wide spread, yet scattered, but in many smaller cities, most notably Fresno, Sacramento, Nashville and Seattle, tent cities are rapidly appearing as homeless rates rise in the midst of the recession. These illegal, make-shift homeless communities have popped up in at least a dozen cities across the country and are becoming known as modern-day Hoovervilles.

Shantytown 2009: Sacramento homeless camp by the highway.

In Fresno, there are five major encampments downtown and along the highways, plagued by violence, drug use, and even prostitution. The city has even sent in security guards and portable toilets to keep the situation under control, which only attracted more homeless residents. One of the encampments, called Taco Flats, is filled with a large number of Latino residents, who moved up to Fresno with the promise of agricultural jobs, only to find that the positions had all evaporated as a result of the state of the economy and a 3 year drought (not so different from the Oakies).

Check out the NY Time's slideshow: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/03/25/us/20090326-TENTS_index.html.

It's interesting that a lot of us, in such a large coastal city, have not experienced seeing this new kind of poverty at such an extreme level. As more and more homeless families enter New York City everyday, maybe things will change and these kinds of living environments will become more eminent. Yet, unlike the Oakies, there is no where for these people to go, no promise of something better out West. Many of them are already in California, where they can't even land minimum wage jobs at Fast Food Restaurants, because with the economy in this state, those are harder to find then ever. The other trend that instantly grabbed my attention from what we've briefly talked about in the Ralph Lauren line, is the new trend to use homelessness as an inspiration for fashion. The September issue of W Magazine features a 28 page photo spread which features dresses made out designer shopping bags, such as Chanel and Dior. Russian model Sasha Pivovarova is shown slumped on a park bench with a Prada bag. Last week Scott Shuman posted a photo of a homeless man on his popular fashion blog, saying that he doesn't usually photograph homeless people, but it was clear form the man's jean shorts over sweat pants look, gloves and glasses, that he wanted to “communicate and express himself through style.”

W Magazine: September issue features this model in a dress made of shopping bags taking an afternoon nap on a park bench.

The worst of them all is model turned designer, Erin Wasson, who defended the remarks she made last year to Nylon Magazine: “The people with the best style for me are the people that are the poorest,” she said, “It's not like I'm saying, 'Oh God, that's so inspiring–you got your clothes from a garbage can. When I moved down to Venice Beach, I found these people with this amazing mentality, this gypsy mentality – people that you couldn't label and put in a box.” What she forgot, mentions the writer of the article, is that some of those people actually do live in a box.

Hobo-Chic: John Galliano's "Clochard" collection, inspired by tent dwellers in Paris.

It's ridiculous that this fashion trend has evolved in the midst of a rise in homelessness due to the recession. How can these people derive inspiration from the homeless and say that people without a home care about being stylish? The worst part is that they're not joking.

(Here are the two NY Times articles that I used as sources: Fashion: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/fashion/12DIARY.html?scp=8&sq=homeless... Tent City: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us/26tents.html )

Waiting for Nothing is real in that it challenges the stereotypes we tell ourselves about the homeless. I remember my mom giving one homeless man in our neighborhood bags of dried food when we passed the intersection where he lived, but warning me to never give homeless people money, “because you never know how they'll spend it.” Another common perception is that giving a homeless person money only worsens the situation, because they'll probably just spend it on drugs or alcohol. Or that they are mentally unstable and don't know how to help themselves, that they're beyond help, that if they really needed to, they could clean themselves up and get a job or go to a shelter.

Food: What would we do for it?

These are all stereotypes that we tell ourselves to ease our guilt about not giving. Of course, we can't give money or food to all of the homeless people that we pass on the street, so we make these mental justifications so that we can walk by with a full wallet, say sorry, and move on without having it weight on our conscience.

Tom Kromer's experience defies these justifications, however. He was not a drug addict or an alcoholic or mentally unequipped for normal life. He was a college educated man who just couldn't make ends meet. He doesn't resort to violence, even though he wishes he could. He remains humble and doesn't let his anger take a hold of him. He is, above all, an honest, decent, person who doesn't deserve to go hungry. Maybe that is why this book didn't see well in America. The public doesn't want to read something like this because it makes the homeless too real, makes it harder to justify not helping those in need.

This book is unique in that it also gives a glimpse of the bare essentials of life, living day to day in search of food, water, and shelter, all things that so many people in this country now, even in the midst of the recession, take for granted. The prose reflects this scarcity. There are no frills, no extra description. Just the facts. The punchy sentences can make it hard to read, but they fit the bare tone of the novel, which seeks only those essentials necessary to sustain human life.

It is also interesting that there is no love in the prose. The sexual acts that Kromer engages in are a necessity for survival, not a privilege or even a goal. When a person is hungry and in need of shelter, they will do to any length to attain those elements they need to survive. It's good to be reminded of that, at the very least, and although it sounds cheesy, because it makes us appreciate the fact that we don't have to go hungry. The knowledge that Kromer attempted suicide makes his tale of survival all the more thought provoking.

On a side note, I also wonder if there is a relation with the title to "Waiting for Godot" because they are both about people who are down on their luck, tramps or vagrants, who are waiting for something that never comes, or in this case, not waiting at all, simply trying to stay alive.

While I was reading Box Car Bertha (what a clever name), I decided that it had been a long time since I had read something so ridiculous. Being homeless is probably not fun, but Bertha makes living out of a boxcar with no food or money seem better than Disneyland. All this from Ben Reitman, the self-described “hobo, gynecologist, writer, anarchist agitator and birth control activist” who learned about the joys of life after spending quality time listening and learning from “gamblers, muggers, prostitutes and thieves.” Unfortunately, I don't know a lot of hobo/gynecologists, especially ones that seem so happy and well adjusted after being imprisoned, beaten brutally, and forced to be, well, homeless.

Ben L. Reitman: Anarchist/Hobo/Gynecologist extraordinaire

I don't know for certain, but it seems like Reitman himself wrote the afterword to the book, which is not so much an afterword, as an upbeat retelling of his life story. He basically praises himself for seeing the good in people and having such an adventurous life. I found this part especially enlightening: “Reitman loved to hear the life stories of the people who visited his practice or whom he met in the bars and clubs: the gay hoboes who tried to hide their sexuality, the tramp who loved children yet murdered a young girl, but also of the humor and quirkiness of road life.” I can think of a lot of people who may demonstrate the humor and quirkiness of road life, but a tramp who murders young girls doesn't really strike me as one of the. I don't know about you.

So, after reading this delightful romp in hobo funland, I felt inspired to create this list:

Reasons Why Being Homeless is Fun! (According to the lovely Boxcar Bertha)
1.Spending quality childhood time with prostitutes and pimps!
2.Having a mom in jail and brother and sisters from different fathers!
3.Bathing in the river!
4.Learning how to spell from reading boxcars!
5.Making toys out of train yard scraps!
6.Wearing hand-me-down overalls! YAY!

As you can see, from the list, Bertha is either delusional or way too positive. I really don't understand why publishers would market a book to the public like this that claims to be an autobiography but is actually fictional. It really is a blatant misinterpretation of homelessness. Maybe it was created to make upper class people feel better about not donating money to the homeless, because obviously they are having too much fun as it is.

I think that out of all the FSA photographer's work, “You Have Seen Their Faces” is the most interesting. Every time the work is brought up, we hear all about Agee, Evans, and Dorothea Lange, but Margaret Bourke-White for some reason isn't mentioned as frequently in the same category.

Margaret Bourke-White: The photographer posing with her camera.

When I fist saw, “You Have Seen Their Faces,” I admired the way it seemed to give the subjects a voice. I liked the use of quotes and of personal stories next to the photographs, so that the people become more humanized and engaging to the viewer. It is often difficult to relate to a photograph of a subject in need when we know nothing about them and seem to have no connection to them. The use of quotes is very much lacking in a lot of current photojournalism, which will include a photograph of the person and a caption written by the journalist, but no quotes or simply short ones that don't really convey a point of view or personal anecdote. HOWEVER, when I learned that the quotes were made up by the authors/editors, I was shocked. My entire conception of the book was turned on it's head and suddenly I found it offensive, distasteful, and completely ridiculous. I wondered if readers at the time had any idea that these quotes were fabricated and the images set up...

I also wonder with all of the FSA images how much of the subject's action/pose were unplanned and spontaneous, as opposed to set up or influenced by the photographer. Of course the photographer's eye plays a role, as no photographs are entirely subjective. But there are definite ways for a photographer to get a subject to behave differently or react to the camera in a certain way. Although I couldn't find the article and am still searching for it, I was told by one of my photography professors that Dorothea Lange told the children in “Migrant Mother” to look away from the camera to increase the dramatic effect. With their faces turned away, the children came to represent a wider public, becoming icons for all children of the depression. In a way this is a good thing, but on the other hand, it also dehumanizes and depersonalizes them more than they would have been, had we seen their facial expressions. I don't know how true this claim is, but I suppose all of the photographers did direct their subjects to an extent, at least in some of the images, to get their point across.

I think it is important to remember that all of these photographers had a very specific agenda that is reflected in their images intentionally. They set out to prove a point about the effects of the Depression and returned with images that did so. I appreciated Agee's honesty in feeling conflicted about the project, worrying about objectifying his subjects and how his images would affect their situation. I wonder if the other photographers had similar thoughts...

The Open Road: A photo that I took on the my road trip from Los Angeles to Sedona, Arizona.   I could relate the most to the last chapter of Asch's The Road, when he returns to New York City with a different perspective, after traveling around America on a bus and witnessing the hardship and suffering in his own country that he had never before been exposed to. He comes back to New York City and and feels almost claustrophobic in the crowds, the dirt, and the noise. He writes, “this after the frankness of the Coast, the kindness of the mountains, the friendliness of the Middle West.” Even the simple adjectives that he uses to describe New York are negative: “black and noisy,” “dirty, “hurt, senseless, dead,” “pushed and pushing.” This past summer, I went on a road trip from Los Angeles to Arizona and Las Vegas and back. I definitely experienced this sense of pressure and of a new perspective when I returned to California. On the road in the dessert, I was surrounded by open skies, endless farming fields, groves of Joshua trees, and distant mountains. Living in cities all my life, I love being in this much pure space, where I can really breathe. It's a relief, in a way, an definite contrast from the New York City crowds. The people that I met along my trip were also always friendly. Even when we got a flat tire in the middle of a desert road between Flagstaff and Phoenix, a old couple stopped to help us change the tire and make sure that we were ok, something that I'm not sure would have happened on a crowded Los Angeles freeway. We talked to gas station attendants, met some new friends at a red rock river in Sedona, shared a camp fire at our site, under an empty sky, where you could actually see stars. Frolicking in the Fields: We stopped on the side of the highway to run through an empty field, one advantage the road trip has over a cross country flight.   When I arrived back in Los Angeles, I felt that something was missing, a sense of adventure, a willingness to talk to strangers and of those strangers to actually engage and talk back. It's a similar sensation when I come back to New York City after being gone for a long time. Like Asch, I am always initially shocked by just how crowded it is, how many people exist, crammed into such small spaces, people who pay a fortune to share tiny studio apartments, which seem ridiculous in comparison to the miles and miles of developmental suburbs that I passed again and again on the roads in the South west. While I think people in the major coastal cities tend to look down upon a lifestyle in “the middle of nowhere,” maybe we are the ones that tend to miss out on actually being able to appreciate the natural world around us, to breathe fresh air, and truly live on the land.

Fresh air, fresh view: Stopped in Sedona and climbed a mountain vortex to enjoy breathtaking views.

I think the beauty of the road trip is that it really does force you to interact with the people that you meet along the way. It forces you to see everything you pass, to have the luxury of being able to make small stops at places you wouldn't ordinarily know exist. Although plane travel has broadened the distances of where we can travel and made going to the far corners of the earth readily accessible, we have lost the desire to see our own country in a lot of ways. I frequently hear people my age talking about traveling to Cambodia or South America; it seems like everyone wants to go as far away from America as possible. Although I would love to travel far away and see the “exotic,” I have just as much of a desire to do what a lot of these authors have done and actually see America, by car. It's a shame that more people don't continue the tradition of the road trip. I love driving along long stretches of highway and experiencing that sense of utter freedom that makes traveling on the open road so enticing.

A less well known image of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother": Are documentary images more influential in raising social awareness than works of fiction?In “The Mother of Literature: Journalism and The Grapes of Wrath,” William Howarth writes about Steinbeck's novel as a form of social documentary. I started to wonder what my own conception of documentary art is...can fiction be a form of documentary? Can it help to fuel social change? It's an interesting question, one which I've thought a lot about, since I do a lot of my own writing and photography. According to Howarth, documentary style tends to flourish in periods of social crisis. The Depression marked a change in expression, signaling the rise of the “documentary imagination,” the idea that individuals could use documentary as a way to spread truth, right wrongs, and shape a new social order. Apparently, the final chapters of the novel actually do stem from real events that Steinbeck witnessed in 1938 near Visalia, CA. That winter, local streams flooded, leaving thousands of migrant families homeless and starving. Steinbeck joined relief efforts there for several days, but felt guilty due to the fact that he was wealthy from writing books that reflected other people's pain. “Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies,” he said. He was actually in Visalia at the time to gather material for a text and picture book about farm migrants, one photo of which was of a mother nursing her baby, which was assumed to influence the creation of Rose of Sharon's character. He later revealed to his photographic partner, who had selected the images to be published, “I'm sorry to tell you, but I've decided it's too big a story to be just a photographic book. I'm going to write it as a novel” (hence, Grapes of Wrath). For more research, Steinbeck made extensive trips through the Central Valley, visiting squatter's camps, working as a field hand, and talking to people along the way. But he intentionally chose fiction as a method to bring attention to the plight of the migrant worker. Howarth writes, “he chose fiction to make his story more artful, not truthful. In fiction he could fabricate at will, making up people and events by splicing and reshaping materials garnered from research.” He goes on to argue that many other documentaries of the time did the same thing in order to dramatize social history. It's interesting to think that fiction could be a better way of drawing attention to a cause than making a documentary film, or publishing a news article. We tend to assume that the former leads to more awareness about an issue and ends up promoting more social activism, but maybe fiction and other creative, more interpretive art in general, can sometimes be more powerful in telling a real story. I wonder if Dorothea Lange's photographs raised more awareness about the plight of the migrant worker than Steinbeck's novel. Do we respond with more empathy to real people or fictional ones? It's an interesting push and pull that I think still affects a lot of writers and artists today who struggle with choosing the right media in which to tell their story. We often view documentary and fiction as two opposing methods, but maybe they are more similar than we think.

The Boxcar kids make dumpster diving and homelessness look so fun!While reading the last couple chapters of Grapes of Wrath, when the Joad family is given a boxcar to live in, but forced to share it with another family, struggling to get enough money to buy food and clothing, I was reminded of a childhood book series that I used to read, the Boxcar Children. Living in a boxcar is not exactly a fun experience, given the description of the Joad family's hardships, especially during heavy rains, when the most of the cars flood. Running out of food, building a dam, giving birth to a stillborn child, and watching it's homemade coffin float down the river do not exactly make for light reading.

Yet, the Boxcar Children represented made living in a boxcar seem like a children's paradise. I remember reading the book and wishing that I didn't have to live in a house, which suddenly seemed incredibly boring. I became jealous of families that got to live in abandoned box cars and even regular cars. The books, originally published in 1924 by Rand McNally, tell the story of four orphaned children who run away from the orphanage and move into an abandoned box car in the forrest, which they furnish from searching through an abandoned dump (fun!). The boys spend the day going out to hunt and search for food, while the girls stay in the box car, cook, and sew. And in the meantime, all the kids would team up to solve mysteries! It's interesting that these stories are so popular with children. I remember as a kid wanting so badly to be an orphan so that I could be just like Annie, and homeless so that I could be just like the boxcar kids.

Why are so many children's books written to make poverty seem so fun and glamorous? Is it to cheer up kids who actually live in destitute situations or is it a way to exoticize that lifestyle for the more privileged classes? I think it's most likely the latter, since orphaned children who actually live in boxcars unfortunately don't have too many people buying them popular book series. So why are middle class kids brought up reading these books? If it's to make them feel lucky to have parents with jobs and real homes to live in, that certainly did work with my friends and I, who proudly told our parents that we wished we were orphans. There must be something innately fascinating about living in poverty and hardship or there wouldn't be so many popular books about it. Many critics argue that Grapes of Wrath was written to make the upper classes more aware of what was really going on in America during the Depression, but maybe it was also made to appeal to our attraction to reading about struggling families. Maybe there is something that makes us want to imagine ourselves in these tight situations, where obtaining food and shelter is so immediately necessary to stay alive. Maybe that is part of the appeal of Great Depression literature in general, the real reason why so many writers and photographers took to the road to tell stories of being down and out...