This was sent out from CeMoRe in Lancaster. I've had a look at their
website, and it seems to be to do with urban and social policy rather
than bikes or ethnography, but may be of interest to somebody here.
Paul
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FW: [Comurb_r21] RE: Bike Ethnography: A Manifesto
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 09:23:19 +0100
From: Drinkall, Pennie <[log in to unmask]>
To: CeMoRe explosion list <[log in to unmask]>, CeMoRe Lancaster
<[log in to unmask]>
De: [log in to unmask] em nome de Terry Nichols Clark
Enviada: qua 30/05/2007 4:01
Para: [log in to unmask]
Assunto: [Comurb_r21] RE: Bike Ethnography: A Manifesto
The bike is a great tool for exploring neighborhoods. Joined with
theories, and ideally discussion with fellow cyclists who observe the
same scenes, biking can spark continuous discussion and confrontation
with various data bits.
I have been biking around urban neighborhoods for decades. This started
with a few students from classes and grew, so I now do an annual bike
tour with students and two other faculty: John Boyer an
urban/intellectual historian, and Hank Webber, the UofC's VP for public
affairs, who deals daily with city hall, civic groups, etc. We stop
every 10 minutes or so and all three of us lead a discussion with
students on sites and interpretations, from Operation PUSH (Jesse
Jackson's national headquarters) to the Douglas Tomb (he debated
Lincoln) and the Daily Defender (the beacon for Southern Migration) and
more. I call the tour the Iconography of Black Power.
Then in the midst our LA vs. Chicago vs. NYC schools of urban theory,
the bicycle seemed an ideal way to capture some differences. So I biked
several times around LA this winter (2006-07) along with some local
experts, complemented by various seminars and interviews.
Lots more is available in PowerPoint and text of two books for anyone
interested, but here are some snippets for flavor.
Transforming Glamour into Gold: Cultural Magic in LA From Regression
Coefficients and Bike Ethnography
(excerpts only)
Prefatory Shots: A Seville Toreador walking proudly away from the
throbbing bull, Michal Jordan leaping to a successful basket, a small
turnout of voters in an LA Neighborhood Council election, Mayor Mockus
of Bogota and his bride riding elephants in their wedding ceremony,
LA citizens are unhappy. National and state-wide citizen surveys show LA
citizens to be more unhappy, more alienated, more isolated, less
involved with their neighbors, and more distrustful of people in general
and political leaders in particular than are citizens in most of the US.
What to do? The answers turn on the definition of the problem. I seek
to broaden current discussions of Neighborhood Councils, but join with
those specific concerns.
Many see low voter turnout as the problem. This fits into a conceptual
framework from New England and Northern California. But I suggest that
this framework fits less well in Southern California, esp. the City of
Angels.
A first question: How to interpret the results labeled with city names
in our PowerPoint of regressions for USC / UCLA? Namely, that glamour,
sometimes combined with charisma and self expression, is more powerful
in LA in its association with growth in total number of jobs from 1998
to 2001 (and even the number of Environmental Assns) in a zip code than
esp. Chicago. NY has less glamour but is sometimes high on charisma, in
means and some coefficients. How might glamour relate to art and arts
jobs, which we find predict general job growth and environmental
activism in our Power Point show?
The key results about LA are in the Power Point, including an overview
of our methods. More details are in draft papers we can send to
interested persons, on the 15 scene dimensions, sources and coding of
thousands of items for each US zip code combining citizen survey data
with local organizations and population measures. See www.faui.org for
general background, esp. the book, The City as an Entertainment Machine
(Elsevier 2004), chs. 2 and 3, chapters of which can be downloaded free
from the website.
It would be great to add some ethnographic or more systematic cultural
evidence, that probes values and meaning further than our counts of jobs
and enterprises. To try to replicate, deepen, clarify and complement
what we have. Maybe look for a few comparable entities that have
cultural content: speeches at a Sierra Club in LA, NY, Chicago,
elsewhere. Are movie starts more often invited to Sierra Club fund
raisers in LA? (While sober Birkenstock-shod folks attend in Marin or
Napa County or Portland, OR or Bennington, VT?) Mayors speeches? But
they vary hugely and we need something like a content analysis to get a
broader range; done in one MA by Deidre for aesthetics in speeches by
Daley II, but hard work. More below. These comments are more a
theoretical wandering to guide toward later propositions that might in
turn be tested with more specific evidence.
Candidate: the Mormon Church on Santa Monica Blvd in Beverly Hills, at
night, with a massive tower and bronze figure at the top of a hill maybe
100 feet high and 600 feet back from the street, the tower is atop a
large white building, brightly illuminated, from Hollywood thru Beverly
Hills to the sunning and surfing at Santa Monica Beach and Pier. (I
biked all this by day and partly by night.) The bike/walking path runs
down the beach front for the entire length of the city, from
Malibu/Pepperdine to Long Beach. The scene is analogous to the Chicago
lakefront, but more dramatic with the pounding surf and sand, and more
close commercial cafes / residential small white beach houses / or
massive marinas from Venice to Marina Del Mar? to Manhattan Beach.
Biking back north, I tried to go thru low income Hispanic, Asian, and
Black neighborhoods, up to Koreatown and Hollywood. Poorer neighborhoods
are further east. But two main points: every house and street I biked by
had a style and if not elegance or at least cleanliness and freshly
painted attractiveness. Second, outside many, many homes in the poorest
areas were Mercedes and BMWs that were clean and shiny, freshly waxed
and polished. The CAR that James Dean drove to his death, and James Q.
Wilson raced as a teenager, is several notches higher than their
analogues in Chicago. (Although in Chicago in poor black neighborhoods,
shiny cars are still more common than in Upper middle income white
neighborhoods, with the Southern glamour the presumed causal link.) How
much do the credit card companies collect in higher interest payments,
or defaults on consumption. Do we have any data by city? Or subgroups
within cities?
On to theory.
How about 1. individualism, combined with 2. southern migration,
carrying the links back to 3. the aristocratic European court (even
inside the cowboy?s pack or Oakies' car, albeit not stressed by
Steinbeck).
This is heightened in LA by the film industry and the hopefuls it
attracts. They try to act glamorously and theatrically to get hired for
any lower-level job that might lead into a film career. I heard dozens
of varying examples of this story from Jack Katz (who has been doing
ethnographies of Hollywood for 10 years and lives in Hollywood) as we
biked around. He talked for 3-4 hours (and has stuff on websites, etc.)
Some areas of Hollywood have 30% of the residents below the poverty
line! Lots of poor immigrants, many from Mexico and Caribbean, and Asia,
earlier elsewhere. Many trying to break into something associated with
film. Or computer design or still further. Rooming houses where 6
bedrooms share 2 bathrooms, are being converted from smaller houses
illegally right now by Orthodox Jews, Armenians, Koreans with occasional
protests from neighbors who try to get the LA city govt to stop the
expansion (doubling of house sizes by adding rooms illegally), etc. Thus
an attractive, glamorous young lady fails to get a film job, so she
starts a chauffeur service and hires others like herself to drive stars
around with hopes to break into film via contacts made that way. The
chance contact that was leveraged was repeated by Jack K as if this were
Dublin and the Irish ethic. But this is closer to the Southern small
town with its particularism; is it greater than in Portland OR or say
Microsoft hires? By extension, this proximity to Hollywood logically
should glamorize myriad occupations and activities that would be more
mundane elsewhere. An analogous process works elsewhere: documented in
Rich Lloyd's Neo Bohemia on the artists' neighborhood of Wicker Park in
Chicago: many waitresses/bartenders are wannabe artists and actors.
Lloyd has interviews with the managers who report that they explicitly
hire such folks as they work for less and do a better job, dress better,
and 'act' while serving. Their style is critical in defining the
restaurant's image. Are there LA examples documented in any research?
One test of the broader values / migration interpretation that is
independent of the film industry to ask how much one can find similar
style among surfers, mountain bikers, waitresses, sun bathers, swim
accessories salesmen, drug procurers, sun cream appliers, nail
polishers, guitar strummers, Ipod toters, swish basketball shoe
sporters, and their ilk -- to update Marx's 18th Brumaire list--all over
S California, Arizona, and nearby in the same migration stream, even
independent of the film industry. ASU and USC are the two citadels of
glamour that I would hear cited when I taught at UCLA, where students
did not think of themselves as so glamorous. Despite the UCLA Sunset
Canyon Olympic pool, where I trained for triathlons, and revisited last
week.
The house is the quintessential Southern / aristocratic / gentry symbol
of status (Gone With the Wind, Faulkner). Yes Veblen should work here,
but this is more than Veblen or Bourdieu or DiMaggio if people
internalize the values and do it because they feel it is good and right,
even for themselves without an audience.
How about joining this with Hispanic immigration and more? Deep changes
are underway in Spain, Mexico and other Latin contexts as the very
concept of macho is being debated, redefined, and carefully researched,
even while simultaneously Americans and Brits are adding concepts like
'metro sexual' to their repertoire.
The S. European version blends elements of glamour and honor: the
toreador is the dominant consumption item in Seville today. Think of the
LA basketball field, of Michael Jordan in his Nike Shoes which gang
members in LA and Chicago and NY can wear in watered-down consumerism,
yet still linked with the honor of confronting the Man, and jumping
higher. Don?t dis me. Think of Football, where the USC students mobilize
behind Tommy Trojan as the Rally speaker warms the crowd, claming we
will trounce Berkeley as Berkeley students are protesting politics and
studying, while we are out there supporting our team.
Such honor and glamour conflicts with the Civil society incarnated in
Northern Californian good government and the Neighborhood Councils that
achieve a voting turnout in LA of about 1-2%. Some Councils were elected
by about 20 voters. Why? In part because of the cultural disjuncture
between the N and S Cal themes which continue those from earlier
(Baldassare 2000).
Miami is a specter of clientelism and 'Latin corruption' that haunts LA
observers, and drives some to Montana. The LA Times features gangs on
the front page and reports that five times as many Hispanics attacked
blacks as vice versa in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood, etc. (March 4,
2007).
This ethnic drama is featured by the popular media: Tu Ciudad Los
Angeles, Angeleno, and Los Angeles magazines. Example: Laurie Pike
writing on 'Social Distortion' in Los Angeles (March 2007), pp. 98ff,
esp. p. 104 explores two Blue Books that feature old LA families. Jews
on the West side, film stars, and Hispanics have traditionally been
separate. This split especially between the Chandler family/LA
Times/downtown versus the film industry/West Side Jewish leadership is
stressed by Michael Davis in City of Quartz and Raphael Sonenshein, but
such ethnic specifics seem almost politically incorrect in much writing
by others, including both those concerned with good government and the
Neighborhood Councils as well as more economic interpretations that
stress global capitalism, gated communities, and geographic/suburban
fragmentation (Michael Dear, even Allen Scott). LA's anti-immigrant
tradition, especially virulent in the early twentieth century, is
stressed by Philip Ethington. Dowell Myers's Boomers and Immigrants
focuses on the economic assimilation and success of most immigrants to
LA, not their cultural distinctiveness.
More available in two draft books and powerpoints for anyone interested.
Terry Nichols Clark
University of Chicago
1126 E.59 St., #322
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
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On the FAUI Project: www.faui.org
--
Dr Paul Rosen
Stockholm Environment Institute
University of York
Heslington
York YO10 5DD
Tel. 01904 – 434577
Mobile: 07968 707738
Email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.sei.se
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