All about this guy

As far as I can tell, I've always been particularly attentive to place in the sense of a physical environment, often to the exclusion of any other people present within it. This can be quite problematic, as an attentiveness to one thing can lead to a total obliviousness of others, easily misinterpreted as hatred or disdain. But it is this awareness of environment that led me to take this course, because that awareness was largely a kind of appreciation that I had no language for and no way to communicate. A Sense of Place has truly helped me begin to organize my thoughts on the subject, and find a way to communicate what was previously an acutely internal feeling, incredibly frustrating to explain to others. It's also helped me explore the topic  On the other hand, the course has also illuminated the relationship between places and the people that inhabit them, and has begun to make me more aware of the effects others have on places and each other, in addition to the effects places have on us. 

Yi-Fu Tuan's Space and Place was for me probably the most useful and straightforwardly informative book we read for this course. Among his many insights, Tuan describes the dangers of being unable to articulate experience, that we inevitably fall back on hollow cliché, and effectively say nothing at all. This course, our readings, projects and discussions, have helped me begin to overcome this and approach Tuan's ultimate goal, "to increase the burden of awareness", and I'm glad for it. I know that this class will stick with me for a long time.

Thanks!

Steve, TruthNugget, et Moi

I do not know where to begin. I guess that’s always hard when you’re at the end. This is my last assignment unchecked on my to do list for college. The last thing to write before I pick up my cap and gown and head to Avery Fisher Hall to graduate. This post is also my final post for five classes with Steve Hutkins, the last post of four different blogged courses over the course of my academic career.

I have enjoyed blogging for these classes because I love writing, and this site has given me the perfect forum to reflect on both readings and my personal experiences of place, space, Manhattan, and Paris. I have tried to use this space as an academic and intellectual journal to document what I have learned, to capture ephemeral experiential knowledge I have gained over the years so that I may look back on it and remember. The act of blogging proved most useful for me for the abroad tutorial The Art of Travel. When preparing for my Colloquium, I looked back to my thoughts on books and films I covered in past blog posts. I was also able to remember the nearly indescribable feeling of living in Paris for four months, to remember how turned on I was by life and learning. All of these courses have enabled me to think and keep track on a serious academic level as well as a very personal, creative level. And already looking back on my time in college, I know these five classes have changed me and shaped me into who I am today.

As I have probably said many times before, I want to be a film editor. As I head out into an unscheduled, unplanned life of opportunity – the real world- I am taking my understanding of place, the concept of the city, and the artist within his or her surroundings with me. For now, I will edit anything, I just want to be better, to have this key filmmaking skill down. But in the end, or hopefully the middle, I hope to work on features that capture the essence of the city, just as Jean-Luc Godard’s “A Bout de Souffle” and John Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy” and so so many others managed to do. I have always loved to travel and experience new cities, but studying with Steve enabled me to hone in on my true passion for cities, and living in Manhattan and Paris during my time at NYU showed me how I wanted to process my passion and turn it into a career and life goal.

I am inspired and eternally grateful.

MY SUNSET

Maybe we really do become New Yorkers. In my FINAL post, I covered many of the poignant aspects of Colson Whitehead’s “The Colossus of New York,” at least moments that moved me. He writes so candidly and honestly, it is as if he’s following YOU around and reading YOUR thoughts. Then you realize it is because as New Yorkers we have the same thoughts, experiences, etc. Even though we will not make eye contact with anyone on the subway, everyone around us is thinking, “if (I) had acted differently everything would be better,” and the train would be here already, whereas “on the opposite track, you gotta beat off trains with a stick,” (49). Once on the train, we all move to the same beat together, never acknowledging our synchronicity (57). We are a disjointed community, but in the end, we are a cohesive group with our little big city. We have the same little joys as well as the same great sadness, such as: “Forming an attachment to an umbrella is the shortest route to heartbreak in this town… We learn loss from umbrellas” (62). Sure this line may sound silly to others from elsewhere who have not experienced a wet downpour/windstorm with 300% humidity and a chance of hail. Just another day in old New York.

As Whitehead begins the book, “I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you.… Maybe you came here for school… The city has spent a considerable amount of time and money putting the brochure together, what with all the movies, TV shows and songs—the whole If You Can Make It There Business” (3). So yes, I came here for school. I am finishing school today, right now; these blogs are all I have left before graduations tonight and tomorrow. While I’ve been here I have studied the movies and literature of New York, among other things, and helped create my own mythic Manhattan, rooted in reality as well as artistic renderings. I have my own New York, but I am not ready to leave and perhaps New York is the one that has me. I keep quoting Whitehead’s line, “maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us” and maybe I am just trying to hammer into my own head that despite my best efforts to capture New York for myself, I am the one captivated and not wanting to say goodbye (10). No matter why you come, if you stay long enough, you become a part of it. You become just like the rest of the people you don’t say HI to on the train; like the broken, twisted rainbow of umbrellas littering the sidewalk on a damp and gray afternoon. New York is a mighty metropolis and I am hoping to take some of it with me, but even more so wishing that I could leave some of myself behind.

Monday (Spencer Avenue)
His toddler bangs out notes on the child cage. A symphony of flailing fists accompanied by Hebrew reprimands. The anti-theft cages protect each window of each identical apartment building. Also their personal in-house nanny. Jon and Kate Plus Eight on every block, in every building, every home. Three more join in the music lesson playing makeshift instruments. Clack, ring, reverberation. Shouts and screams. Children ride bicycles on the sidewalk but gawk at mine. Enjoy it while you can. After you outgrow your 24" wheels, they will not buy you another set. Toys are not transportation.

Tuesday (Kent Avenue)
Vibrations. DOT's allocation collapsed with Bear Sterns and you've been waiting for the pavement roller for two years. The sound of its exhaust pipe will spout rejoice into your bedroom window one morning. Until then, what's another day? Your headset quivers, groans at the abuse. A uniformed man is the kuma hula and the cars follow his lead. Out of sync, you leap through oncoming traffic, he ponders the impact on his life if your timing had been just a half a second off. Unemployment is only funemployment for trust fund hipsters and recent college graduates.

Wednesday (Ryerson Street)
Forget the flu, I'm suffering from "The Fear." The recipe: a pinch of sleep, a cup of liquor, and a dash of anxiety. Let sit until morning. The pavement stumbles beneath me and my front wheel pitches from side to side. Your favorite bartender bought all the rounds as well as my cab ride home. Sweet syrup of whiskey and ginger ale poured past bar time. Speech travels, choosing its own path uncontrollable, unpredictable. Liquid courage. You danced on the bar and became one of those girls. Later, you fucked the bartender behind the counter. Even later, you deny it. My roommate woke up this morning face down on his floor surrounded by White Castle containers. At least I made it to my bed. Double yellow line provides a straight path. Follow.

Thursday (N Elliott Place)
"We used to launch ships, now we launch businesses." Rumor: The borough president promised a developer. The juxtaposition of industrial relics and over priced water views would have been a bourgeois dream. Fact: Decrepit row houses leak glass and asbestos just the same. Their ghosts fade into the jungled greenery as the vines inch closer to the sun. Admirals abandoned long ago. Bricks slide off the barrier wall forming sidewalk jetties. Climb over. Don't get caught, the skeletons beckon. Gliding, pedaling, spinning, she wishes for the details. Murderous filigrees suspended from caved in ceilings--she saw it in a photo once.

Friday (Gold Street)
Shit. I missed my bridge exit. Flushing turns into Nassau and Navy plays hide and seek.

...space...Once, when I was younger, I took a topical film class and was never able to watch even the most mindless film without considering framing decisions, pace of editing, shot variation, lighting, and art direction, ever again. Then, I took a class about the partner concepts of space and place, and I was never able to be anywhere at any time without considering how my surroundings were acting upon me, and how I was behaving in them.

It seems strange I lived most of a whole life, having scarcely considered an idea so pervasive and omnipresent. It seems futile now to consider other countries a foreign entity, or my own so familiar. To think of my room as a rectangular space filled with my belongings, and not a place ridden with energy and happenings, seems just as misguided. I see now that we govern the role our familiar spaces play in our lives, the acts we perform in them. I see also that a place, and my sense and understanding of it, is informed—even created—by the extent to which my person remains intact in it.

If you go somewhere unfamiliar to you, and find you feel more yourself than ever, that there’s a strange and metaphysical force working on you…it may be the way the buildings are stacked, or the way the buildings are sprawled, or the ratio of green to gray, or the amount of sparkly mineral in the pavement that reminds you of a certain stretch nearby your house, or the way the people glare as you pass, or the way they give you the sensation the same language is being spoken, or the complete and utter lack of resources, or an abundance of them…there’s likely to be more of you in that sensation than the place itself.

I’m grateful that this class served as my goodbye to Gallatin, as I attempt the oh-so-collegiate move to another country. It has helped me to see the move as merely a concrete shift of location, and to not assume that certain emotions and events will have any bearing on the new. The lighthearted participatory and conversational component in our class was an educational merit and privilege that was not lost on me. Voluminous gratitude to Steve, and all you radical people.

SPINterviewed by Z: my 15 seconds of fame

What inspired your written project?

I’m sill developing a writing style, and it was fun to play around with elements from both Frazier and Whitehead. Also, using digits instead of numbers written out (13 vs. thirteen) was an homage to Auster’s City of Glass. I wanted to paint a picture of a whole little world, similar to Ian Frazier’s essay “Canal Street.” You see all these different people but they are just in the background until an insider creates a moving picture of a location. Like Frazier regarding his immediate neighbors, I wanted to share a little background information on some people on my block, mixed with a little Whitehead flare- we are all experiencing the same things, why don’t we know each other? The way that people responded to the fire made us feel like maybe people DO care—kind of like Daniel Quinn in City of Glass.

Why did you decide to make a video?

As an aspiring film editor, I thought it would be great to play around with editing all these little Manhattan moments into one larger one, as all these small events are occurring at the same time. Yi-Fu Tuan discusses writers and artists evoking a sense of place more accurately than anyone. I guess I was trying to be an artist and portray MY New York.

What program did you use to edit the video?

Final Cut Pro

Where can I find the video?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpHx5qH4Ls4

or

http://www.placestudies.com/blog/a-manhattan-moment

Where did you get the footage for the video?

I decided I wanted to use “found “ footage instead of shooting a whole new project so that it would be more organic. I used videos from my Sony Cybershot digital camera as well as some footage from my class in Tisch Open Arts – Fundamentals of Filmmaking 1. Since I’ve only had my current computer since late June 2008, the videos are pretty representative of my final year in Gallatin. I only used footage from Manhattan, but you see everything from Rockefeller Center to my house in Chelsea to Tompkins Square Park and the East River. It is certainly not a portrait of all of Manhattan, or even all of my Manhattan, but I feel that it evokes a sense of MY MANHATTAN, the feeling of my life here in some way. Or maybe in more than one way. I was hoping for it to be a cohesive montage.

Why did you use such a long Pearl Jam clip at the end?

Last summer my old friend Zack Newman followed Pearl Jam’s east coast tour for SPIN Magazine. I joined him for the Madison Square Garden shows. When Eddie Vedder began to sing “Better Man,” the energy and voices of the crowd overpowered him to the extent that he messed up the words and asking, “With your permission…” started the song from the beginning. It was a very powerful moment for me, and I felt that it best captured thousands of New Yorkers coming together in one common mindset, even for only a few too-short minutes. Click here for my embarassing video commentary shortly after the concert.

Pearl Jam @ MSG

Photo by Budi Akbarsjah on flickr

Colson Whitehead's The Colossus of New York is hard to pin down as something in particular—fact or fiction, poetry or prose, novel or ethnography, celebratory or scathing—we can certainly say it is about at least a few things: New York City, and people that live there. We can imagine the book as a single consciousness, coursing through the city's denizens at random, seeing through one's eyes for a moment, a thought, a sentence or two, and then moving on, jumping too quick to get caught up in who they are individually, so as not to distract from the city. We can only begin to come to grips with New York City (or any city, or any place) on the human scale of experience. Humans intuitively understand by imagining entities to be human in some way, having motives, and a consciousness. The city takes on radically different qualities from each of these perspectives, often personified, uncooperative, even antagonistic. They see the city as monstrous and hungering, and at times unexpectedly friendly and even caring—but they don't let their guard down, who knows what it's playing at. Its motives are inscrutable, it is too vast, too complex to be understood. Its power is beyond our comprehension, this Colossus.

Living in New York City ourselves, we pass these people, or people like them, sometimes too close, bumping up against each other on the subway or in the street. We resent them or don't notice them or wonder or worry about them or feel attracted to them, but we don't know them, and we don't know what they feel and think, we don't know about their personal relationships with the Colossus. Whitehead draws us into the minds of those people we never connect to, and we find that they are in many ways like us, and in fact we are all connected: each person is a part of NYC, and each person has NYC within themselves. In this way the book is also about empathy, our creative ability to put ourselves in each others' positions, to suspend judgement and attempt to understand their perspectives, ultimately discovering that in so doing we have transformed our own.

Sense of PlaceOff the grid vs. on the grid

Clusterfuck nation vs. quant European towns

NYU vs. other schools (with the community-feel)

The idea of Home……

These are just some of the memorable topics from class.

It has certainly been one of my favorites at NYU, and sadly, Sense of Place is my last class at NYU. I loved the setup of the class, from the class size to the actual material tought, and I especially loved our class discussions. Everyone seemed to have a lot of interesting things to say, and it only made me love Gallatin more for that opportunity.

Place has always been something I’ve been sensitive to. I’m always aware of how places affect me, whether that is in finding the perfect place to study or just the way I feel when traveling abroad. I don’t think I’ll ever go as far as Elizabeth Chamberlain in her quest for ultimate Feng Shui, but I will certainly consider color psychology and space relation once I get my new apartment in the city (perhaps in a week! YIKES).

This class will stay with me forever.

Thank you Steve, and thank you class for all your wonderful insight.

This is my final course at Gallatin, a place that, for over the past couple of months, I have grown to think about often. During these past four years at NYU and in New York, I have visited the same buildings, parks, streets, and shops so often that these places have become the backdrop for my experience at college and significant landmarks in my life. Thinking in the future, I cannot imagine a life where there is no subway or tourists or constant movement, lights and noise. Of course, once I am gone, the city will continue. People will continue to visit and travel to the same streets and cafes that I once frequented. Everyone's experience in New York City is as unique and personal as the sections of the city itself.

There are aspects to the city that make it uniquely its own, aspects that made it a perfect setting to learn about the physical and personal construction of a place. I have learned that love of a place is much like the love of a person. What I may find attractive and appealing in a place may not be everyone's cup of tea but love has always been a very personal experience. Places can affect one's entire being - each of the senses. When I think of New York City, I hear the sounds of a playground with car horns humming in the distance. I smell coffee brewing and sizzling chicken kabobs being prepared by a hard-working street vendor. I taste the vast variety of foods and cultures. I feel the changing seasons, people and time. When I think about my anonymous time spent in the city, I wonder what mark my presence may leave once I am gone. I realize, however, that the mark New York has left on me will be far greater and more permanent in the way that it has profoundly impacted and influenced my life.

TimbuktuIn Yi-Fu Tuan’s ‘Intimate Experiences of Place’ chapter, he explores the notion of skewed reality.

Tuan states that “evaluations and judgments tend to be clichés. The data of the senses are pushed under in favor of what one is taught to see and admire.” In addition, “thinking creates distance” Tuan is thus, pointing out the rarity of having a ‘real’ experience with a place.

Reading this reminded me of Walter Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion. Lippmann provides examples of impediments to the “actual environment”, including our scanty attention levels, the poverty of language, distractions, unconscious constellations of feeling, monotony, and the obscurity and complexity of facts themselves. He also states that “even the eyewitness does not bring back a naïve picture of the scene..” because our senses are arbitrary and visual perceptions are complicated by tricks of memory and imagination.

Although Lippmann is focused on a more general idea of ‘truth’, both he and Tuan successfully note possible obstructions to truth whether that is in reference to a place or situation.

Luckily, Tuan says that we can still have a true experience, “In a new setting ,[where] we are forced to see and think without the whole world of known sights, sounds, and smells.[…]

Good luck!

A Chicago suburb from an airplane window: May 2008Welcome to Gerund Phrases. As expressions of action, these posts demonstrate the varied approaches I follow in characterizing places. One of the defining characteristics of "place," for me, is the evidence of activity. Activity does not necessitate human impact or mobility. An open field - or an abandoned barn - can display just as much of the impact of external forces, such as nature or time, as large-scale urban infrastructure projects or an artist's installation.

The bottom line is: something happened in that space.

For all our in-depth reading on perceptions of space and place, the concept of activity as a fundamental signifier of spaces never made it to the forefront of our discussions. I don't say that as a critique, merely as an observation. Perhaps being located in New York has blinded us to the significance of activity. Or, as a reaction to urban living, we consciously segregate "inactive" spaces from active ones - city vs. country, for instance.

Do these posts illustrate the similarities between supposed "inactive" spaces and visibly bustling spaces? Hardly. Rather, they attempt to summarize, no matter how haphazardly, the ways in which methods of "place-making" and understanding spaces take shape in context, apart from the texts from this course.

Gerund Phrases is an experiment of sorts - of design, of planning, of exploration. It is May 2009 - the course is over, I am graduating - but this experiment is just beginning.

I’m not sure what to post about for this last blog entry, so I guess I’ll just wax nostalgic for a moment (if you don’t mind.)

“A Sense of Place” was my very last Gallatin Interdisciplinary Seminar, and a few short days from now I’ll be graduating. Steve’s comments about not knowing how this class will affect us until years down the line might be true, but I’ve utilized it this semester in several ways already. Most notably, I used two of our text in my collquium. Both Tuan and Kunstler played an integral part in my discussion of how American’s create a sense of place (or rather, how, perhaps, America has no sense of place.) I guess the argument can go either way.

Colloquium aside, I’ve been thinking a lot about that phrase, “sense of place.” In two weeks I’m leaving New York to search for a new place to get a “sense” of. I’m not exactly sure why I’m leaving other than the feeling that I’ve “conquered” New York. Been there, done that, and shamefully bought six T-shirts for $10 on Canal Street. In short, I want a new sense of place.

It’s funny to think about especially at this age. This week was my birthday and in the mail I received cards from Mississippi, Alaska, Washington D.C., New York, and places in between. I find it amusing to think that we, as graduating seniors, are finally at a point where we can go out and create our own sense of place. Those cards were from friends of mine who have moved on to new towns, new jobs, and new lives. This side of five years ago all of my cards would have come, undoubtedly, from Tupelo, MS. (I warned you I would get nostalgic. I feel like I’m writing a graduation speech.) None the less, I’m moving on with that phrase in mind, wherever I may land in the next few months.

Manahatta (with outline of island today)So often collections of New York essays involve some aspect of the relationship between the people and the city, and rightfully so. The urban environment is ripe for study, and the characters that exist in those environments are equally interesting. Ian Frazier’s Gone to New York is no exception, but I wonder if Frazier ever thought about New York before people, or before the building of our urban environment.

But, where it seems other New York essayists have forgotten, someone else remembered. Enter the Manahatta Project. The Manahatta Project is, simply put, an attempt to “rebuild” or “reimagine” what the island of Manhattan looked like prior to colonization. I’ve been semi-following the Manahatta Project since my first semester at NYU watching it grow. (Most recently I saw a big glossy coffee table book at Barnes and Noble called “The Manahatta Project, and I’m assuming it’s from the same folks.)

Unfortunately, despite my continual interest in the project, I’m still not sure what the history or future of it is. When I first heard about it someone told me it was “some guy’s” project. Later, I heard a museum was going to make a scale model of the island of Manahatta (incidentally, the name “Manhattan” comes from a the original name given to the island by Natives, “Manahatta,” which roughly translates to “Many Hills.”) Now, there’s a website where you can take a virtual tour of “Manahatta” created by the Wildlife Conservation Society (click on the image at the top left to go to the website.) Even now I’m not sure who started the project, or where it came from, but I’ve been absolutely fascinated with it.

But all that said, the original island—Manahatta—makes me think of the essays about certain areas of New York that we’ve read. Imagine taking a stroll through Bowling Green when it was still, in fact, Green. Or, what would Ian Frazier write of Canal Street if he were able to walk along the river that was once there? And what if a tourist were to walk to the Empire State Building only to find trees and deer? The transformation is absolutely fascinating to be sure, and it makes me think of New York’s past present and future. (You can glean a sense of how much has changed by the attached picture. The bright green line surrounding Manahatta is actually the outline of today’s Manhattan. THAT much was created by landfill.) Maybe no one cares as much as I do, but if I had my way I’d like to take a walk through Manahatta--just for a day--rather than Manhattan and write essays about it.

A Short Poem…

Sense of Place, oh what a class…
Remember the time we all sat in the grass?

We talked about Whitehead, Jackson, and Tuan
Also, why was the clock on the computer always wrong?

But despite the constant confusion of time
I clearly liked the class enough to rhyme…

More specifically, Frazier was definitely a favorite
Bags in trees, the Holland Tunnel—I enjoyed all his wit

And who can forget the apropos youtube clips
Like Elizabeth Chamberlain and her feng shui tips

But I think we can all safely agree
One of the best parts was the final project about 4-20

So now it’s all over. Could it really be true?
I just hope none of us catch the swine flu.

If I Can Make It Here, I'll Make It Anywhere!: courtesy of Jess Combs

Though I will clearly not fully appreciate the effect this class has had on me for another decade or so, I can, with confidence, say that Sense of Place has been one of the most inspiring and educational experiences I've had at NYU. As someone who knew little about Place Studies save what I had read on this website, the course opened my eyes to countless facets of the discipline, many which I had never considered before. I was able to approach topics such as architecture and urban planning in a critical and analytical way, though I knew very little about either of them. I feel that walking around New York or any other city, I know have another level of awareness that kicks in, thanks to the course.
In fact, the more aware I become of my surroundings in New York, the more I look forward to leaving. I love New York, but we spend day after day saturating this place with memories (especially at our age) and eventually the city needs a break or risk overflowing, swallowing us all. Picking up and leaving a place that has become your home is by no means an easy feat, and I've done it enough times to know that it doesn't ever become easy, but at some point the challenge of creating a new sense of place somewhere began to be exciting in addition to being daunting. And anyone can come back to New York at any time - it's not going anywhere. It's a static place despite the constant construction and destruction and the wave of bright eyed people who arrive every year and the trickle of those who leave. Not many places in the world are as static as New York, in that, the essence of the city doesn't change. It still feels the same, essentially, to my father who lived in New York almost 30 years ago. I wonder if it will feel the same to me if I come back in 30 years and revisit my old haunts? I doubt any of the places I visited in Africa will feel the same in 30 years!
A Sense of Place has encouraged me to leave my comfort zone, physically, educationally, perhaps even emotionally. A sense of place can be created anywhere by anyone (if they try hard enough). And as Sinatra said of New York, "If I can make it here, I'll make it anywhere".
My favorite books were Kunstler and Frazier. Each dealing with very different subject matter, but perhaps a slightly similar tone at times. Kunstler was a great introduction for me to the course and the field and Frazier was a great way to wrap up the semester, allowing me to see the creative outcome of the study of a place.
Though there were other books I enjoyed less, I felt they were necessary to the development of the course and for leading students from Kunstler to Whitehead. There was certainly a sense of progression. The videos we watched in class were a great resource and added to our experience of the books effectively. I particularly enjoyed the documentary dealing with public space (such as plazas in NYC).
I now have a strong base from which to pursue Place Studies and other related disciplines. The class also challenged me to be creative, think critically and participate constructively in class discussions. It was well structured, had a great curriculum and was a lot of fun. I definitely laughed more in A Sense of Place than in any of my other classes this semester, and everyone knows laughing increases your life, so thanks Steve and peers, for adding a few years to my life.