Tomorrow Museum

Harvard University Press lists their favorite books at the moment published elsewhere.

Here’s a rendering of the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. (via.)

Two guys “went around the country this year removing typographical errors from public signs.” They are now banned from national parks after “vandalizing” a historic marker at the Grand Canyon, part of their year’s probation. (via.) (Previously.)

Lisa Selin Davis has a story in Salon about the couple who lived in the Providence Mall (It was covered extensively on the blogs last year. See Ballardian and the artists’ website here.) The couple Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto crafted a secret apartment inside the massive Rt 95 eyesore. “The mall adventure was to last a week; it went on for four years. If Townsend hadn’t been nabbed by security and charged with criminal trespassing last October, they’d still be camping out there today.” Davis smartly compares their experience to the $1m+ Natick Mall luxury condos just a few miles north in suburban Boston (I’ve been meaning to write a post about the hilarious pseudo-poshness of the “Natick Collection” — its ant farm like freeway chaos and American-travels-the-Continent decor. Eventually.) Of course JG Ballard and Romero allusions can be made, but what I think is interesting is that most science fiction visions of futuristic architecture tend to imagine a massive space — a city or multiple cities — enclosed. (Usually for the purpose of some nuclear disaster or space colony.) Is this a subconscious projection of the shopping mall of the future by the authors? A claustrophobic vision or one of a comforting incubator?

When Humanity Only Survives Within Driving Distance of a Shopping Mall

The city can become an addiction. Live in it too long, and your body will reject the outdoors. Over the weekend, I got up early-ish to catch La Strada at the Brattle (part of the free Elements Of Cinema series.) It seemed like a good Saturday morning thing: get coffee, watch a smart film, maybe browse the dress shops and get coffee again.

But as soon as I opened my eyes, they started to burn. I left the window open that night and the airborne pollens — ragweed or whatever it is that Zyrtec normally takes care of — drifted into my room and into my eyes like evil pixie dust. I shut my window, got dressed, and did what I normally don’t do trying to get to Harvard Square: I drove.

The whole “pahk the cah in hahvahd yahd” thing is a joke not just on the Boston accent. Driving in Harvard Square is kind of like pushing marbles through straws. Saturday morning isn’t much of a problem. Well, any Saturday other than yesterday.

Due to construction, the two and three hour parking spots within eight blocks were unavailable. The open spots were limited to one hour. Hardly enough time to attend a movie and a lecture. No going around it: the meter maids in this city are busybodies. After circling around several times, wishing I were on my bike, I ended up parking much farther than I intended and came smack in contact with exactly what I’d been avoiding all morning: the outside air.

It was a beautiful day. Low 80s, clear skies, perfect for biking, running, reading under a tree, anything outside. But rather than delighting in the weather, I was cursing it. Lightheaded, my eyes feeling like sandpaper lined the rims, sneezing, I was just a mess. I thought wearing glasses would make it better but it was just the opposite: contact lenses shield against these allergens. The sunshine was bouncing off the lenses, only making the situation worse.

This is urban New England, I’m hardly Lawrence of Arabia in a sandstorm, but it bothered me so much, and realizing I was already twenty minutes late, I returned to my car thinking, “how far to the Cambridgeside Galleria?”

I was looking for refuge from the outside world in the form of a shopping mall. My body was rejecting nature in favor of the sanitized, always-68 degrees shopping center down the street. So I watched the sky from the Whole Foods cafe, waiting until I could blink again without discomfort.

Just as domesticated pets can’t make it in the wilderness, city people, according to the “hygiene hypothesis,” live in such clean conditions their immune systems weaken. Preschool peanut bans are so prevalent and contentious, I wouldn’t be surprised if the DEA gets involved eventually.

In addition to increased sensitivity, cities produce more ragweed due to CO2 levels — increasing with climate change. There are additional ripple effects on tree pollen, fungal spores, and other allergens. And warmer climate means the allergy season is much longer than it ever was before.

Years ago, people with severe allergies found relief in the mountains. But “increased human activity such as building and other disturbances of the soil, irrigation, and gardening, have encouraged ragweed to spread to these areas as well.” We’re building our way unhealthy.

Damien Atkins’s play “Lucy” (Kurt Anderson interview here) is about an anthropologist with a 13 year old autistic daughter. She comes to the conclusion her daughter “is perfect. She’s the future,” making a stunning hypothesis that autism is evolution. Mankind is protecting itself from the devastating environmental consequences of modern living. (A little Kumbaya, but quite a lot smarter than whatever M Night Shyamalan was going on.)

Wall-E so radically tackled devolution with the future human race portrayed as gelatinous blobs. More accurately they would have sneezed uncontrollably at contact with the plant.

Todd Haynes’s 1995 film [Safe] was a great comment/parody/prophesy of the modern age fraught with yuppie ailments:

“Safe” has been described as a horror movie of the soul, a description that director Todd Haynes relishes. California housewife Carol White seems to have it all in life: a wealthy husband and a beautiful house. The only thing she lacks is a strong personality: Carol seems timid and empty during all of her interactions with the world around her. At the beginning of the film, one would consider her to be more safe in life than just about anyone. That doesn’t turn out to be the case. Starting with headaches and leading to a grand-mal seizure, Carol becomes more and more sick, claiming that she’s become sensitive to the common toxins in today’s world: exhaust, fumes, aerosol spray, etc. She pulls back from the sexual advances of her husband and spends her nights alone by the TV or wandering around the outside of her well-protected home like an animal in a cage. Her physician examines her and can find nothing wrong. An allergist finds that she has an allergic reaction to milk but explains that there is no treatment for that sort of allergy. She sees a psychiatrist who does nothing but make her nervous. In the hospital, Carol sees an infomercial for Wrenwood, a new-age retreat for those who are “environmentally ill,” and leaves her husband and stepson to try and find salvation at this retreat: headed by a phony, grandstanding, “sensitive” individual named Peter Dunning.

I remember watching it in high school, thinking “just get over it!” Likely someone is thinking the same thing reading my opening paragraph. It’s embarrassing, but I’m not alone:

Ragweed pollen and mold thrive in the opposite conditions. So when it’s dry and windy, you get ragweed; when it’s damp and rainy, you get mold.
Here’s the other cheerful news, you might want to prepare for a worse ragweed season next year. Dr. Mark Dykewicz, chief of the Section of Allergy & Clinical Immunology, at St. Louis University School of Medicine says that next year’s ragweed crop will be from this years rainy, fertile conditions.

In Europe, they are putting up “Wild West ‘wanted’ posters” advocating burning the ragwood (”ambrosia”) plants, which climbing north to Germany, and even Scandinavia.

‘Some gardeners naively think it is an attractive plant and give it water and fertilizer in their front gardens,’ says Susanne Schwarz of Berlin’s Health Department.
‘They should be eradicating this menace instead,’ she adds. ‘Best thing to do is pull it out by the roots and burn it, since the seeds can remain fertile for up to 40 years.’

In case you’re wondering, yeah, I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this week. In the meantime, a friend advised me to take local honey because the pollen in the honey acclimates you to the pollen in the air. Sounds unlikely, but I appreciate the concept as a narrative. Maybe if The Happening hadn’t resigned itself as a joke, Mark Walberg would have hunted the wilderness for an antidote. A lab set up in the fields somewhere. The twist ending M Night Shymalan forgot to write, like a riff on Dorothy’s discovery: the answer is “no further than our own backyard”

Until then, closing my eyes is as heavenly as a dive in a pool full of feathers. And I’m thinking allergies are nature’s way of reminding us to pay attention.

Photography by Julia Fullerton-Batten.

Previously:

Who Needs Sleep?
An Apology for Idlers

Our Past is Haiti’s Present: An Interview with “Secondhand (Pepe)” filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi

Pepe in Haiti. Images used with permission.

In the 1960s, as part of an international aid program, the US started shipping huge loads of secondhand goods to Haiti. Many older Haitians still refer to their secondhand clothes as “wearing kennedy,” a nod to the president at the time. Another word commonly used to describe these goods is “pepe.” Preachers were said to cry Paix! Paix! (”Peace! Peace!”) to calm down the excited crowds awaiting new loads of items to sort through.

Today, anyone in the Miami, NYC, and Boston areas — cities with large Haitian immigrant populations — is likely to run into someone at a flea market or thrift store collecting goods to take home to Port-au-Prince. Secondhand (Pepe) (clip) is a short documentary showing this remarkable trade in goods, as it explains the history of secondhand clothing in our country. Filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell, a Ph.D. in the History of Science at Harvard, and Vanessa Bertozzi, a graduate of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, who now works at Etsy, were curious about the tradition of secondhand clothing. From 2003 - 2007 they visited ragyards in Miami, went through archives in London and Washington DC, and traveled to Haiti to see the pepe markets for themselves.

Shell says Haitians sometimes dress better than Americans because they are used to tailoring their secondhand clothes to fit. While the pepe market makes it difficult for Haitian tailors to sell their own designs or traditional fashions; the cheap cost means, as one woman in the documentary explains, they can “adopt the look that is on television without much effort.” Shell describes the country in an essay in Transition as completely absent of traditional retail, “interiors lie vacant, transformed into makeshift dwellings or pepe depots. Chain stores and standard clothing outlets dot only the poshest streets of Petionville. Whereas McDonalds, Walmart, and American banks have invaded other Caribbean and Latin American countries, Haiti operates at the level of the individual seller and transaction.”

The US has a long complicated history imposing trade embargoes on Haiti, but we never ceased shipping secondhand goods. With the benefit of cheap items, comes the cost of serving as a dumping ground. Shell describes the city of Miragoane, which receives shipments of pepe nearly every day, as “blanketed, literally, by a downy coat of secondhand clothing. It grows out of the ground and into the street, onto every surface, a sartorial network — buildings, barrows, man and machine-made structures, everywhere. Each unsold piece is full of memory and possibility, the ghosts of its previous wearers and the portents of its future ones sharing the same textile skin.”

Secondhand (Pepe) is also a creative film with innovative collage-like usage of archival images and footage. (Shell and Bertozzzi also have Flickr sites with more images.) You can purchase a copy of the documentary on Etsy. Over email I asked the filmmakers about their experience making the documentary.

How did you first find out about the secondhand (”pepe”) clothing market?

We became interested in the stories of secondhand clothing when we were college students together in the late 1990s. We went to thrift stores and began to talk about where the clothes came from – and think about the different stories they would have, depending on who bought them – and where they traveled. In 2002, an article in the New York Times Magazine, discussed the international trade in secondhand clothing and after reading it, we decided to make a film on the subject.

We were living in Boston at the time and started going to secondhand stores where we met many immigrants involved in collecting secondhand clothing for shipment to their home countries. We were particularly struck by the stories of many of the Haitian immigrants we met during our first days of interviewing and shooting, and went to the pier in East Boston where clothes were shipped to Saint Marc. We set out to follow the story of the clothing they purchased – pepe –as it made its way overseas. From there, we got increasingly interested in the history of the secondhand clothing business, and the way it has been shaped by, and shaped, the diasporic experiences of a diversity of immigrant communities in North America.

Who delivers the goods to Haiti? Is it only coming from the US?

There are all sorts of ways and means for pepe to arrive in Haiti. Sometimes individuals in Boston, Miami or New York fill containers, or old cars, with clothes and put them onto boats destined for the port cities of Port-au-Prince, Miragoane or Saint Marc. Other times, people fill up bags with old clothes that they transport on the airplane when they return home to visit friends or families. Small scale pepe business people, might buy a whole bale at a warehouse in Florida and have it shipped over, where it would be received at the port by a business associate. Our sense is that most of it is coming from the United States these days – though some from Canada and France as well.

What does pepe mean?

That’s a good question. The complexity of what pepe means is what motivated us to make the film. It can mean all sorts of things and can at different times have the sense of a noun, a metaphor, an adjective, and an identity. Some of the connotations include: old clothes; free cloth; foreign goods that have already been used.

What sort of things can you get?

Everything.

A woman in the documentary mentioned some Haitians have spiritual apprehension toward wearing someone’s old clothes. Did you meet anyone who felt this way?

Yes we did – old clothes might well carry the spirits of their previous owners and people have many ideas about how to clean, or purify clothes –lemon juice, vinegar, dry cleaning and so on.

Have most Haitians learned to sew or is there a market for tailors?

We saw and spoke with many tailors advertising their services, though perhaps not as many as in years past. The tailors that we spoke with had a difficult time selling their original designs and traditional Haitian clothing. They were working altering pepe.

What other kind of jobs has the secondhand market created?

Sorting, storing, transport, as well as multiple stages of sale, re-sale and re-re-sale. However all this has to be seen in relation to the jobs that have been lost.

Did they really use clothes as currency at one point?

In a sense. . . but we wouldn’t say “as currency” - more like “in the place of currency.” When the paper or coin currency of a nation is unstable and in short supply, it is not uncommon for a good (and often a relatively plentiful good) to take the place of currency - via a kind of generalized barter.

Film screening at Garment District in Cambridge, Ma.

Are there controls in place to keep people from sending over real junk, such as inoperable gadgets or stained items? Do they recycle unwanted things?

As far as we could tell, there was a lot of “junk” being sent over. Even pepe cars marked “no brakes” on their windshields. However, appliances or cars might be used for their parts. Stained clothing might be used as rags or upholstery stuffing. Haitians are very resourceful in ad-hoc engineering and repurposing. That said, we did see an incredible amount of trash and pollution. It was hard to tell whether this was due to the lack of sanitation services or the flood of discarded pepe.

What does the pepe market look like?

First off, we should note that you can find pepe for sale on pretty much any street in Haiti. It seemed as though pepe lined the sidewalks with small-time vendors selling a few things by hanging them up on the walls by the sidewalk. Then we also visited all types of dedicated marketplaces. Some were very concentrated with just clothing, and these were often by the ports, where the clothing would arrive. Sometimes the pepe would be sold within larger markets where you could also find food and other goods. Sometimes the clothing was sorted into different areas or by peddler’s specialty — you would have the used shoe guy over here and the lady that only sold t-shirts over there.

In one of the largest markets in Miragoane, just outside of the gates of the port, in the central town square — you had people opening up boxes and making preliminary sortings. In the Saline marketplace in Port-au-Prince, there was an incredible expanse of peddler/tailors set up with sewing machines, sitting among mounds of clothing, under tents sewn together from fabric scraps and old blankets. It gave us a very visceral sense of the flow of goods and the ways in which they were being altered.

Posted by Joanne on May 13, 2008 | Link

Building the Body Better: John Hockenberry and Hugh Herr at the MIT Museum

“How do we marry technology to humanity?” asked John Hockenberry, journalist, Distinguished Fellow at MIT Media Lab, and now morning show host at WNYC. Last week, he gave a talk at the MIT Museum with Hugh Herr, director of Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group.

Hockenberry began by explaining the shifting attitudes toward medical technology since the 1976 car accident that left him in a wheelchair:

At that time, being a parapalygic was an extraodinarily fringe activity in mainstream America and was percieved to be at first something that was horrific, secondly something staggeringly poigniant around the 1980s, and as we got toward the end of the 90s, it became something, perhaps not mainstream, but at least suggesting that what i had been doing in this wheelchair for previous thirty years was not… just worthy of memoirs and stories of overcoming obstacles. It was in fact central to the issue: how do we marry technology to humanity in a way that is organic to the body, appropriate to the spirit, and sustainable to the community?

It became clear that few insitutitions or people had spent any time thinking about this at all and it was also clear … that people with disabilities had spent all their lives thinking prescicely about how to make pieces of technology — often pieces of junk that had been handed to them by doctors — into something that could be used on a sustainable human scale that would be useful to them and allow them to participate in the community

Herr raised the point that what at first seemed to be an extraordinary disadvantage, actually provided opportunities he never otherwise would conceive of, “I could be as tall as I like, not just 5′10… and, gee, I could put materials here with density less than the human body.” He could even work on his leg to improve his rock-climbing skills.

Runners with prosthetic blade “cheetah legs” are known for their high speeds, an advantage of more than 30 percent. South Africa’s Oscar Pistorius is even ineligible to compete in the Beijing Olympics. (Update 4/18/08: Please read the comments to see an explanation why this “advantage” is negligible. Here is a good case for why he should be allowed to run.) Will we need an Extra-Special Olympics for those among us with super-human skills? Because of the Iraq war, there are a lot more people now qualified for such an event. It’s even a status symbol among patients at Walter Reed.

There’s a spike in biomechatronics innovation and funding after every war. DARPA and the Department of Veterans Affairs are behind most current projects. Now, no one wants a Sleeper Cylon leg — but that’s why open source design labs like FabLab are also important to the design process.

People already see artificial limbs as upgrades. So why not have a third arm? I have heard that DARPA research has a cap on biomedical devices that go beyond human ability. In the meantime, a major rule of design is forget those beige attempts at realistic “flesh.” As Herr explained, “Mannequins –creepy. Robots –cool.”

You can watch the lecture on the website (although, it seems to be down at the moment. For now, here is a video of a forum with Hockenberry, Herr and Segway’s Dean Kamen. You can also watch Hockenberry’s 2005 appearance on the Daily Show.) And if you are anywhere near Cambridge on April 29, you don’t want to miss the next Soap box event featuring Sherry Turkle, author of the The Second Self, one of the first and most influential books on the user’s experience in the digital world, and Cynthia Breazeal, MIT’s leading researcher in humanoid robotics. These “salon-style” conversations with scientists are participatory and fun. After the lecture, the audience separates into small groups and brainstorms question on tablet pcs.

When Humanity Only Survives Within Driving Distance of a Shopping Mall

Our Past is Haiti’s Present: An Interview with “Secondhand (Pepe)” filmmakers Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi

Building the Body Better: John Hockenberry and Hugh Herr at the MIT Museum

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