11. Frazier

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.

Ode to a Bra Tree: There are links to opinions at the bottom of the blogWhile reading Frazier’s essay, “Bags in Tress”, I wanted to give him my full attention. I, too, get annoyed with trash in trees. It makes me feel the filth of the city even more readily. As if seeing filled trash bags all over the street weren’t enough. I wanted to read and commiserate. Finally someone raised the issue.
But instead of simply jumping onboard I got distracted. I kept thinking about bra trees. What is a bra tree, you ask? I’ve never heard of a tree that bears supportive lingerie fruit!
Well, to allay your concerns, it doesn’t actually grow brassieres. It’s an entirely normal tree, but with special human enhancement. On most ski mountains there is at least one tree, the bra tree, which becomes the focal point of an annual ritual. Every year people throw their bras and other undergarments onto it. These ornaments come to litter nearly every branch by the end of the winter. The tree transforms into a cotton and timber reminder that no matter how prissy the resort, there are people there that still want to have a good time.
It was easy to tell the difference between the two in the beginning. Bra trees are enjoyable because they give energy and become a funny emblem, while bags in trees are only a reminder of bad littering habits. But when I learned that there is actually a faction of people that enjoy this sight, that just relish in the rough glittering of shopping bag strips, I wasn’t so sure of where to draw the line anymore.
I assume that there are also people that get offended by the bra trees. Some older people probably think it’s a sign of cultural decay, or just don’t want their grandchildren to witness the horrors of lace. As well, others may see it as an intrusion on the beauty of the pristine mountain. So there are contending points of view around this type of tree embellishment. It became confusing.
I started thinking about how, since there were clearly polarized views regarding both, I could formulate an educated opinion about why I like one and not the other. Why did I think the bra tree was fun and festive, while the bag tree was disgusting? It seemed that the way I perceived these defined places came down to a question of ratios. This is relevant because bags litter trees everywhere. I hardly think that people would get upset enough to make a totally new invention, the bag snatcher, if there weren’t many trees like it. The bra tree, conversely, stands alone in a natural setting: a single reminder of human presence. In the former case, it seems that man is ruining nature while in the latter, man is only making a small mark on nature. giving himself a place of reference.
It seems interesting in terms of place making because it speaks to the uniqueness of a place and what people value in it. When a place, no matter good or bad is unique it will be much more valuable and noticed, while once it becomes ubiquitous it loses its value and people may come to dislike it.
In my research I came across a few links that discuss the bra trees and their origins/
Here’s a link to a discussion Group about bra trees, most of the bloggers are older women: http://www.theskidiva.com/forums/showthread.php?t=749
This one has more about the history of them:
http://skiinghistory.org/forums/showthread.php?t=183&highlight=tradition

only living boyS in NY

According to the cover of Gone to New York: Adventures in the City, someone at the Los Angeles Times described Ian Frazier as “America’s greatest essayist.” I may not be much of a venerable critic, but I would not spend too much time arguing with this bold statement. He is at least ONE of the great American essayists. I actually vaguely remember reading his On the Rez in high school…I digress…

What makes Frazier’s collection of essays, written between 1975 and 2005, so powerful, is his fearless approach to exploring his surroundings. He draws you instantly into his little New York world (and beyond), weaving it together with the little New York worlds of those around him. That’s more or less what we are as New Yorkers, small entities of memory, culture, history, intellect, emotion, occasionally intersecting with others, physically or within thought, to create a diverse urban community. As individuals in our day-to-day endeavors, we may be more or less insignificant, go essentially unnoticed. But we prove (do we have anything to prove? Need to prove anything? Probably. At least in theory…) our worth, our value when we collide with other human entities of equal or similarly sized auras. Validation? Recognition.  How many people have felt like “The Only Living Boy in New York?” (<== click for video)

Frazier shares a great deal of typical daily occurrences, like going for a walk through boroughs, as well as quite bizarre or unusual events, such as his walk down Route 3 from New Jersey to New York. What I find most moving about the collected essays as a whole, is not how personal (and personally revealing) his writing feels, although that is certainly a fabulous quality in an essayist, but more the way in which we are suddenly privy to the stories of so many people who have touched Frazier’s life in some way—not to mention the way a humanized New York City has deeply effected him. We not only learn of tender moments between Frazier and Brooklyn neighbors and passersby, but gain the background stories of so many who have moved him to write candidly about this amazing city – from his Israeli landlord on Canal Street to the tragic urban hero Clifford Holland.

The French verb essayer means “to try,” and Frazier succeeds. His topics do not always lend themselves to particularly moving material, although some certainly do, but he has done his homework and seems to give credit where it is due. Ugh, more clichés—forgive me. He seems to get lost in those who have moved him, either face to face, or from a story he is just passing along to anyone to will listen.

Frazier made me wish I knew more about my “friends” at Murray’s Bagels – they are always happy to see me (I’m not the kind of person who assumes such things, but in the chaos that is this popular haven, their faces certainly light up when they ask how I am), know my orders, know I value my sleep (“You’re early today!”), and notice when I have been trying to cut down on carbs (“We’re you out of town?”). They even gave me free Matzah during Passover (“A side of cream cheese and… are you selling…” “No but is that what you want?”) But if they know my name, it’s from looking at my credit card. I see them more than I see some of my closest friends, and I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced.

"We Don't Toast"

Baudrillard, America.In his collection of essays, Frazier has crossed the works of Baudrillard with Kerouac, making AMERICA as personal as ON THE ROAD. I was struck early on with the phrase ‘authentic American’, something both Baudrillard and Kerouac strove to pin down. Similarly, Frazier tries to pin down the authenticity of the city with tales of apartments, districts, floating bags, the skyline, etc.

The passage that struck me the most was Out of Ohio (of course). Frazier reflects up on his childhood in Hudson, Ohio from his matured perspective in New York. He discusses the details of the town, he finds him self caught up in the clichés of the ‘nostalgic mid-America’ (186). And because there is a sense of ‘corniness’ in his tone when he discusses home with New Yorkers, it puts them off.

            Sometimes it is important in life not to think of everything as a conspiracy to make your life difficult and boring; but to take every random experience and see the deeper meanings and ironies hidden beneath the surface. In Ian Frazier’s “Gone To New York” the author accomplishes the masterful feat of turning everyday meaningless experiences into important anecdotes about the meaning of life in New York City from the 1970’s to the present day. Whether discussing the nature of the shape of the island of Brooklyn or talking about devices that grab plastic bags out of tress, Frazier takes a humoristic yet passionate approach to explaining life in the big city. His essays talk about the important shit, and I purposefully use the word shit, that no other author that I have read has chose to attack as important topics. He puts into words the daily parapraxes that New Yorkers experience and does so in a way that is both passionate and absolutely hilarious.

            Being a New Yorker from the beginning, as I was born here, I have toiled in the unbearably hot summer day, I have heard about the disgust of the gowanus canal, I have taken a bus to Jersery and witness the glory and pride that America has manufactured in our never ending goal to “advance”. I see Frazier as a man who was just bored and feeling funny one day, and decided to write about the ridiculously ridiculous unheard of experiences that one encounters in a day simply walking the streets of Manhattan. One sees more and experiences more in New York than any other major city in the US and maybe even the world. Nothing happens in other places in the United States, but in New York there is an infinite amount of absurdity occurring just outside ones doorstep and beckoning them to come outside and just live. Frazier has inspired me to write down just a few of these incredible images and experiences that have happened to me in the few years I haved lived in this wonderfully disgusting city.

1. The always present stain of puke on St. Marks Place as I walk to class or just about anywhere.

2. Bums passed out with their pants down who sometimes like to sleep in the vestibule of my apartment

 3. The disgusting people who walk into head shops to get tattoos of nautical stars and other stupid bullshit that they don’t realize will be on the body for the rest of their life

4. birdshit all over the place

5. trash everywhere; sometimes good trash that ends up becoming your furniture

6. people bumming cigarettes left and right---not saying I’m not guilty of this

7. the snake man in Washington square park

8. public displays of affection that sometimes evolve into full blown sex acts in parks-specifically Tompkins square---might have been guilty of this as well

9. sex on rooftops

10. sex

11. people staring at you in your apartment----just after you stared at them

12. feeling uncomfortable on the subway, not because of it being crowded, but because you’re a white jew with a fro

13. urinating in public---getting a ticket for public urination

14. smoking weed and doing just about anything else that involves narcotics in Washington square during the summer—no comment

15. lastly walking into a freaking corner story buying a pack of cigarettes, a roll of toilet paper and a vitamin water---and walking out unable to pay your rent

            Sometimes it is important in life not to think of everything as a conspiracy to make your life difficult and boring; but to take every random experience and see the deeper meanings and ironies hidden beneath the surface. In Ian Frazier’s “Gone To New York” the author accomplishes the masterful feat of turning everyday meaningless experiences into important anecdotes about the meaning of life in New York City from the 1970’s to the present day. Whether discussing the nature of the shape of the island of Brooklyn or talking about devices that grab plastic bags out of tress, Frazier takes a humoristic yet passionate approach to explaining life in the big city. His essays talk about the important shit, and I purposefully use the word shit, that no other author that I have read has chose to attack as important topics. He puts into words the daily parapraxes that New Yorkers experience and does so in a way that is both passionate and absolutely hilarious.

            Being a New Yorker from the beginning, as I was born here, I have toiled in the unbearably hot summer day, I have heard about the disgust of the gowanus canal, I have taken a bus to Jersery and witness the glory and pride that America has manufactured in our never ending goal to “advance”. I see Frazier as a man who was just bored and feeling funny one day, and decided to write about the ridiculously ridiculous unheard of experiences that one encounters in a day simply walking the streets of Manhattan. One sees more and experiences more in New York than any other major city in the US and maybe even the world. Nothing happens in other places in the United States, but in New York there is an infinite amount of absurdity occurring just outside ones doorstep and beckoning them to come outside and just live. Frazier has inspired me to write down just a few of these incredible images and experiences that have happened to me in the few years I haved lived in this wonderfully disgusting city.

1. The always present stain of puke on St. Marks Place as I walk to class or just about anywhere.

2. Bums passed out with their pants down who sometimes like to sleep in the vestibule of my apartment

 3. The disgusting people who walk into head shops to get tattoos of nautical stars and other stupid bullshit that they don’t realize will be on the body for the rest of their life

4. birdshit all over the place

5. trash everywhere; sometimes good trash that ends up becoming your furniture

6. people bumming cigarettes left and right---not saying I’m not guilty of this

7. the snake man in Washington square park

8. public displays of affection that sometimes evolve into full blown sex acts in parks-specifically Tompkins square---might have been guilty of this as well

9. sex on rooftops

10. sex

11. people staring at you in your apartment----just after you stared at them

12. feeling uncomfortable on the subway, not because of it being crowded, but because you’re a white jew with a fro

13. urinating in public---getting a ticket for public urination

14. smoking weed and doing just about anything else that involves narcotics in Washington square during the summer—no comment

15. lastly walking into a freaking corner story buying a pack of cigarettes, a roll of toilet paper and a vitamin water---and walking out unable to pay your rent

Bathroom Graffiti: From the Bathroom Graffiti Project

Lawrence Lessig has famously written about free speech and its barriers, legal and otherwise. Free speech is circumscribed in many extralegal ways, some social and some architectural. The social limitations are inevitably tied to onymity, which in many social and political situations is strongly encouraged: it is socially unacceptable in most places to explicitly hide ones identity, and covering one's face with a mask is assumed to be a means of avoiding legal repercussions for illegal and possibly dangerous acts. We become nervous around those who hide their identities: imagine a person with a figure-obscuring large puffy coat, thick pants, gloves and a face mask sitting across from you on the subway, under an "IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING" MTA/NYPD poster. This is a person you probably want to get as far away from as possible; this is not a person you are prepared to have a casual conversation with, or someone you want to hear a political speech from. You can't tell their sex, their race, any distinguishing characteristics; and so, you imagine, they could get away with a lot: they are not constrained by the possibility of tarnishing their identity like you are. They know what you look like and you know nothing about them, and so they seem to have power over you. It is for this reason that they are not credible: you will not want to listen to them except out of fear, and you will only humor them with nods and smiles as if they were an agressive homeless person asking you for change, even if they mean well.

We are not prepared to listen to those who have this kind of power over us: we want to talk to people like ourselves, people who we can see and judge and with whom we can associate words with a face, to love or to hate. And so the constraints on socializing in a regular, day-to-day environment come strongly into play, including where, when, with whom, how and about what we can talk—in the US, if the where and when and with whom are "the office" and "lunch" and "co-workers", for example, the how and about what are often not "boistrously" and "politics". In many suburbs across the US, citizens have no particular local civic center, no nexus of public activity where the people of the town regularly mingle and interact except that of privately-owned commercial centers. The mall is a place where masses of people gather but architecture and management work together to encourage some actions and prohibit others—respectively, shopping and assembly are among the most obvious.

Ian Frazier's writing—curated lists might be a better term—on the mostly anonymous visitors' comments at the Brooklyn Museum ("Bumpin'n") and graffiti in the reading areas of Butler Library ("In The Stacks") are accounts of places that more or less level the playing field in terms of anonymity recall for me a phenomenon that would only really come into its own as a broad societal trend years after these peices were written: "anonymity" on the Internet. BBSes, then Usenet, then chat rooms, forums and so on give us more-or-less equal opportunities for a more-or-less anonymity and pseudonymity that we never had before. Anyone can be anyone else on the Internet, it's been said: when we're all wearing facemasks and puffy jackets, we are on equal ground, one not mediated by normal social conventions but instead tied to what we choose to present about ourselves, a real (virtual) marketplace of ideas. Kind of. Law enforcement and privacy advocates alike will be quick to tell you that you are not as anonymous as it may at first appear. The multitudes of servers that you access keep detailed logs of your every action, and the huge corporate ISPs track every router that you move data through, to say nothing of intelligence agencies. Highly publicized pedophilia cases have led to the Internet axiom that an underage girl in a chatroom is most likely a federal agent. In short, you can always be found out.

The ease of traceability has certainly not deterred everyone, and many workarounds and tools like TOR and WikiLeaks have been made available. These are neither perfect nor very broadly used, and the USA PATRIOT Act and similar have especially eroded what degree of privacy and anonymity can be expected of the Internet. In the physical world, the rapid rise in surveillance equipment documenting nearly every accessable space, the proliferation of portable recording devices, especially on cell phones, and the ease of uploading to social-networking sites results in what futurist Jamais Cascio calls a "participatory panopticon", or a combination of top-down "Big Brother" surveillance and grassroots "Little Brother" surveillance.

It has often occurred to me, half-seriously, that bathroom stalls may be the last bastion of truly free speech. Still, as evidenced by the actual writing on bathroom walls, these hidden places of temporary anonymity, last bastions that they may be, may be largely irrelevant to meaningful discourse. True anonymity may yield true freedom of speech, but as Frazier points out, much of this speech, untethered by social pressures, just ends up being about longing, (literal, in this case) toilet humor, and out-of-context statements with little or no standard for logic or evidence, much like YouTube comments. It becomes apparent that it is not just the statement itself but also the context and standards to which the statement adheres that enable meaning to emerge. The bathroom stall, for all its advantages, is not and has never been enough: it is one end of a scale of free speech, utterly unfettered and mostly irrelevant. Still, it is a part of our culture, and a rare place where a pen can run wild.

America's Foundation: click to enlarge

In Ian Frazier first essay from Gone To New York titled "Antipodes", he discusses what exists below the Earth's surface beneath New York and other part of the world. He describes the vast oceans that cover the majority of the planet and the infinitely deep trenches that we have barely been able to explore. It is an intriguing and overwhelming question to ponder what lies below our feet. A recent article from New Scientist describes what is probably the most ambitious seismological project ever conducted. Its called USArray. Its goal is to essentially conduct an ultrasound scan across North America. If it succeed it will generate an unprecedented 3D picture of what lies beneath the continent.

The New Scientist article describes the project: "It is a mammoth undertaking, during which USArray's scanner - a set of 400 transportable seismometers - will sweep all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Having started off in California in 2004, it is now just east of the Rockies covering a north-south swathe stretching from Montana's border with Canada down past El Paso on the Texas-Mexico border. By 2013, it should have reached the north-east coast, and its mission end."

For such a fundamental idea as what lies beneath our feet, our general understanding is extremely limited. The current theory of plate tectonics was only developed in the 1960s. This theory supposes that the Earth's crust, or lithosphere, is divided into a number of crustal plates resembling jigsaw puzzle pieces, each of which moves on the plastic asthenosphere (the region below the lithosphere) more or less independently to collide with, slide under, or move past adjacent plates. These enormous plates carry entire continents and chunks of ocean and are constantly moving. When two plates collide one often dives beneath the other. That process, known as subduction, can create forces strong enough to build up spectacular mountain ranges such as the still-growing Andes in South America or the Rocky mountains of the western US and Canada.

But there is still much that we don't about during these slow transitions beneath the Earth surface that have been occurring for millions of years. How exactly does the path deep underground relate to features we can see on the surface?

Le Corbusier once remarked that New York's skyscrapers are too small. Most New Yorker's thought this meant that they weren't tall enough, that they needed to be built higher. He was referring to the ground plan being too small, however. Manhattan is a dense compacted city. For many decades it has been the biggest, the tallest, and the best. But New York is no longer able to compete in terms of size with future cities such as Shanghai for example.

In 1999 Abitare magazine published a special issue devoted to New York City, where they asked several architects to make some sort of comment about New York. Lebbeus Woods made a drawing of Manhattan with both the East River and the Hudson drained. He wanted to suggest "that maybe lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet. So, in the drawing, you see that the East River and the Hudson are both dammed. They’re purposefully drained, as it were. The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region."

Lower Manhattan: by Lebbeus Woods, Abitare Magazine 1999

I have always been struck by this image and consider it a profound notion. Seeing the depth and scale of the planet that we walk on, even in a conceptual drawing is overwhelming. Similar to the impact of witnessing the spectacular depth of the Grand Canyon, we are forced to confront our own scale and relationship to the Earth. Recent natural disasters have reminded us that nature is still a force to be reckoned with. Man is only part of much larger systems, and the part can never control the whole. If we want to continue our civilizations existence on this planet we are going to have to rethink and reconsider our relationship to the natural environment. Perhaps understanding the composition of the planet will open up a new realm for exploration and future inhabitation.

Any physical location has stories to tell.

Every place consists not only of its immediate physical characteristics, but also, in a sense, of the events that have helped mold it. No matter where we go, something has already happened there, someone has been there before, someone has experienced something there before. These events make a place what it is before we get there, and our actions in that place shape it for its next set of visitors. Our bodies and brains, only capable of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching, and moving through space, fail to capture the depth of information embedded in our surroundings.

How can we begin to unveil the rich layers of history, events, and experiences that we are blind to, but exist everywhere we go?

Ian Frazier's essay Bumpin'n shows how a device as simple as a guest book can begin to capture the layer of human experience embedded in a place. While the guest book does not represent the entirety of events and ideas that belong to a place, it begins to show us how rich this type of information can get.

Geo-tagging is a technology that, much like a guest book, helps capture content that is associated with a physical place. By adding geographic information like latitude and longitude to a photograph or blog post, electronic content be tied to a dot on the map instead of just floating in cyber-space.

While geo-tagging may be gaining popularity thanks in part to the growing amount of consumer electronics devices with built in global positioning chips, it has not always been the status-quo. An older method of leaving an electronic trail in a physical location that I am quite fond of is called the Yellow Arrow system.
Yellow Arrow: Location: 44th Street @ 7th Avenue, Manhattan, NY (US) TXT: Stand facing this arrow and you'll hear the best urban symphony of your life.
YellowArrow.net reads: "Yellow Arrow is a global public art project of local experiences. Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow transforms the urban landscape into a 'deep map' that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces." Let's say you want to leave a comment in a specific place for the other people who come to that place to see. All you need is a Yellow Arrow sticker and a mobile phone. You stick the Arrow on what you want to comment on, and then you write your comment in a text massage on your phone, and send it to the Yellow Arrow number. The Yellow Arrow sticker has a unique ID number and a phone number that passers-by can send a text message to when they want to read that Arrow's content. Your content is then text messaged to whoever passes your sticker and wants to know what you wrote.

As a cross between a guest book and a geo-tag, the Yellow Arrow system is useful, fun, and implements technology in an interesting way that makes us consider the layers and layers of personal experience that exist in a place before we get there.

Unofficial Princess Di Memorial

In Ian Frazier's collection of essays, Gone To New York, he includes a piece about the shooting of a drama teacher in Prospect Park and how the place where the man was shot becomes a memorial for him. When people die tragically, say, in an accident or at the hand of another, the place in which the die or another place connected to them is often turned into a memorial space, either officially or unofficially. In Frazier's essay "To Mr. Winslow", the memorial is an unofficial one and grows slowly and then, as the memory of the murder fades, it disappears. As a child driving along long empty roads in New Zealand on the way to my grandmother's, we often passed white crosses at the side of the road, some greying and battered by rain and time, others freshly painted and surrounded by flowers and candles. Yet if a man were to have a heart attack and die on the sidewalk, it is unlikely a memorial would be created in that place. Memorials mark places where someone has been killed, either by another or by misfortune, but always the person has been "killed", they have not simply "died". In a situation like this, the victims are often taken unexpectedly from friends, families and communities, therefore creating a void in the lives of those who have been left behind. Memorials - wreaths, candles, inscriptions, crosses; these are all ways in which the grief-stricken may try to not only ease their pain, but fill a void. Also, someone who has died tragically and unexpectedly, is often deemed to be more worth remembering and commemorating (by a community) than an 60 year old man who dies of liver disease or an 80 year old woman who dies in her sleep. These deaths are also cause for much grief among family and friends, but they are explainable, inevitable. In Paris, a statue of a torch, officially a copy of the torch of the statue of liberty and a sign of French-American friendship sits over a tunnel along the quais near the Place d'Alma. Unofficially the torch has been turned into a memorial for Princess Diana, who died in the tunnel underneath. Though flowers and mementos placed at the flame for Diana are periodically removed, it seems that there is always some wreath or single bloom or damp ribbon clinging to the statue. This is an example of a memorial that continues to exist in people's minds and memories and continues to be visited by those who loved the Princess. When I moved to Paris as a child, my parents pointed out the 13th pillar in the tunnel that the car has collided with and the flame, surrounded by tourists. I always knew that the flame was built long before Diana's death, but until I did some research for this blog post I had no idea what it was for. Many people are still under the misapprehension that the flame was built and placed as a memorial for Princess Di. Now I know, though I will always think of that statue as Diana's memorial. Places can be comforting to people in the absence of a lost one, a place in which they can be formally remembered and a in which we sometimes believe their spirit resides. Many people will talk to dead loved ones only when they visit the grave, and we feel that a person's memory can be maintained and revived by placing flowers or notes in a place. Public memorials and cemeteries are a manifestation of society's continued need to honor the dead in public and have a place in which the deceased shall always reside and where those who grieve can establish a connection with the deceased. And when a memorial disappears? Does this mean some sort of closure has been attained? Or have we just forgotten?