punkarch

Paul Graves Brown and John Schofield are doing interesting work on the archaeology of punk, via an apartment used by the Sex Pistols.

I wonder if anyone archived anything from New York's CGBGs before it went the way of most popular culture.... A quick google search throws up a few things

Sounding Off: the symbolic values of speaking and listening in the city

I usually hear New York before I see it. On the plane coming into the city, coming up the steps from the subway, and particularly emerging from Columbia’s immediate area and crossing into the surrounding city, I often find myself suddenly aware of one, a few, many, a waterfall of New York sounds and voices that signal to me things about where I am before I make a visual distinction of place. Which is why I found the following video entertaining and thought-provoking (if the video embed doesn't work, click here):

This video is an elaborate impression of the signs people send about themselves and their places through their voices. It demonstrates the several levels of linguistic analysis that are involved in instantly interpreting different accents in New York City, supposedly as a "native" New Yorker would hear them. There are phonological differences, in terms of the pronunciation of unique sounds within words, such as the “masticated vowels” in the Brooklyn accent, and in terms of the placement of stress on specific parts of the word, as in the punctuated first consonants heard in the Bronx accent. There is also the speed of speech, particularly evident in the Manhattan “fast-talker”, and cadence, as in the Brooklyn “sing-song” and the drawn-out, “nasally” Queens speaker. However, for each of the cases, the most significant point is that lifestyles, borough-specific cultural traits, and social attitudes are depicted as the causative factors behind different speaking styles. Although clearly intended to play lightly on classic borough stereotypes, a quick glance through the comments shows how strongly and widely these indices resonate, positively and negatively, with viewers.

Language, speech, and its associated forms and manners have long been a recognized site for signaling all kinds of anterior social information. To put a theoretical context to this, I turn to the rather well-known thoughts on language, symbolism and power of Bourdieu, for whom every act of speaking is also an act of positioning oneself, consciously or subconsciously within one’s social field (which in fact dictates the way in which you can carry out that act of positioning). How one speaks, as much as what one says, is an act of identity assertion, a process of articulating belonging or difference, and simultaneously claiming the authority to do so. He writes:

“Thus we know that properties such as voice setting (nasal, pharyngeal) and pronunciation (“accent”) offer better indices than syntax for identifying a speaker’s social class: we learn that the efficacy of a discourse, its power to convince, depends on the authority of the person who utters it, or, what amounts to the same thing, on his “accent” functioning as an index of authority. Thus the whole social structure is present in the interaction (and therefore the discourse): the material conditions of existence determine discourse through the linguistic production relations which they make possible and which they structure” (Bourdieu 1977: 653).

Accents (sounds, styles, forms, mannerisms of speech) are instantly meaningful to us because we recognize them by degrees of difference and sameness to not only our own accents, but to those of others operating across our social field(s). As such, they are symbolic of broader generalizations that we make about relative positions in those fields. Without delving further into the implications of his structural determinism here, I instead pose the issue of power and class relationships embedded in our interpretations of accents.

Bourdieu would see the stereotypes offered in explanation of the different borough accents as a reflection of the power struggles going on between social classes, and I do not dispute that the associations we make with the accents in the video reflect power dynamics past and present, but I think that this video also describes a site for positive identity claims. Through tongue-in-cheek stereotyping, the narrator bonds New Yorkers together through their idiosyncrasies of language; a local inverse of the perhaps now-clichéd observation by George Bernard Shaw that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”

This discussion is of course easy to elaborate out of New York City itself and consider in the context of broader regional or interregional accent relationships. I find it particularly interesting, as a Midwesterner, that the Midwestern accent is often described as the lack of an accent, as I have always considered (as implied above) that accents within a shared language are all relative to each other and any prescribed norm is an illusion created by a dominant group and, these days, enforced by the power of the media. However, speech behavior and attitude towards accent is different; I find that I subconsciously assert my “accent,” such that it is, and other distinctive speech patterns, far more strongly when I find myself outside of the Midwest, and even more so when outside the country, in a place where my accent or language is not the dominant social norm. This behavior in its various forms as conscious and subconscious, individual and group, and within and between languages, has been well-noted by linguistic anthropologists, who see it as a reaction to the fear of one’s identity disappearing into homogeneity or conformity. For many indigenous groups throughout the world, for instance, it has become a form of activism against a history of oppression and exclusion that progressively eroded their languages; for this purpose, the Endangered Languages Alliance exists in New York City: http://endangeredlanguagealliance.org/main. To bring this back to the case of city accents, a quick Google search for “New York City accent” will bring up pages of articles whose headlines proclaim concern for the demise of the “traditional” or “working-class” accent of New York City in an era of globalized language and media, changing city demographics, and increasing gentrification. These urgently-worded concerns, as well as long debates about their relevance and accuracy according to individual experience of accents, have been going on for years: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/is-the-new-york-accent-disappearing/ for instance, and http://gothamist.com/2008/02/25/new_york_city_a_1.php). In these instances, accent and language have become potent symbols of identity and resistance that are continuously reconstituted in their daily use, and in the processes of re-learning, recording, teaching, and even in some cases, rejecting them.

Although it is somewhat beyond the scope of this contribution to consider fully here, I would also like to include a link to this 2006 article, presents changing city accents in a particular group defined by class, gender, and age (middle and upper middle-class, female, young) with a series of meditations on causes and meanings of this change. I offer one excerpt: “Mr. Vaux, who conducted a survey of American dialects while teaching at Harvard, said that while the voice heard increasingly in New York was distinctive, it was not particular to the region. Trying to pinpoint what made it unique, Mr. Vaux crossed off nasality, which he says is what humans always mistakenly identify as different in foreign speech. He overlooked “like,” for which he said the speakers of Sanskrit also had a penchant” (http://www.observer.com/2006/03/city-girl-squawk-its-like-so-bad-it-really-sucks/). Dell Hymes, in his work on ethnographies of speaking, also looks to antiquity when describing the method of assigning social and cultural characteristics to particular speech patterns. He cites Plato’s description of Athenians, Spartans, and Cretan speech patterns: “The Athenian citizen is reputed among all the Hellenes to be a great talker, whereas Sparta is renowned for brevity, and the Cretans have more wit than words” (Plato Laws Book I, Preamble: 28; cited also in Hymes 1974: 35).

Clearly, speech patterns have a long history of carrying all kinds of symbolic baggage around with them, and our interpretation of this baggage may tell us more about where we identify ourselves relative to the speaker than about the speaker themself. In either case, the processes of change played out in the sounds of speaking continue to fascinate and compel us to interpret and evaluate them.

Works Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1977. “The economics of linguistic exchanges.” Social Science Information 16: 645-668.
Hymes, Dell, 1974. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Plato, “Laws” in The Dialogues of Plato. B. Jowett (Transl.). Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1873.

Communicating via Roly Poly: The Remote Possibility of Touch

MoMA's latest offering, "Talk to Me", explores the recent movements in the design of human interaction with man-made objects. In recent years, design disciplines have taken a new angle on the old themes of form, function, and meaning. Recently there has been a movement to integrate these with even more intimate and ambitious forms of communication including ideas of dialogue, connection, and even emotion. One object on display at the MoMA exhibit that struck me as particularly evocative was the Roly Poly, from the Design Incubation Center in Singapore.

From the Design Incubation Center website:

Roly Poly is designed to enable two individuals to “sense” the presence of each other even though they may be physically apart. The mirrored movements in a pair of Roly Polys is such that a soft tap to rock one will simultaneously rock its partner to the same degree, creating a corresponding reaction in the other instantly. While the Internet provides a vast array of text messaging and video calling interaction options, Roly Poly offers a unique, spontaneous and subtle mode of instant communication, exclusive between two individuals.

There is no doubt that the explosion of Internet and wireless technologies has enabled the emergence of a variety of new forms of interpersonal communication. Like so many new technologies, what has once been considered a novelty is now an essential utility, like water or electricity. Today, texting, facebook, email, and photosharing are deeply integrated in our lives. Each new medium is accompanied by its own unique logic of expression. And yet, the expressive power of these media is in some ways constrained, and in other ways enabled by the affordances of each particular system. The entire ecosystem of Twitter, for example, is defined in 140 character snippets. Such a microform, we have found, far from being a painful restriction, has facilitated vast networks of communication. 

However, these forms of communication just mentioned are based on 19th and 20th century metaphors of communication: the typewriter, the cable telegram, the photograph. These paradigms of communication are ones that we are extremely comfortable with, and function well in our lives. But the potential to access other, less traditional, forms of personal interconnection through digital technology has hardly been explored. The Roly Poly represents just such a shift away from traditional forms of symbolic communication towards haptic forms of expression. There is something beautifully intuitive, nuanced and yet simple and ambiguous about the Roly Poly. Like the Ouija board used in seances to communicate with the dead, the Roly Poly allows for the externalization of one of the most neglected of human senses: the proprioceptive sense, that is, the sense of orientation, of movement. 

This proprioceptive sense, perhaps more than any other, has proven the least abstractable. This at least in part accounts for its neglect by contemporary communications technology. It is also perhaps the most intimate, the most context specific, and yet, paradoxically the most universal. The message of touch is a challenge to define abstractly, but is easily recognized. The possibilities for communication touched upon by the Roly Poly opens up a world of questions about the future of human communication as well. As our daily personal experiences become increasingly subsumed by the remoteness of digital communications, how will we adapt the basic human wiring for haptic communication (that is, for touch) to an inherently sterile and abstracted medium? Is such a simple gesture easily interpreted between people? between cultures? And how does the distance that separates us when we use the Internet to communicate affect the shared knowledge of meaning on which such an intimate medium as touch relies?

Crosstown Traffic meets The Land of Confusion - The Colour-Coding of the New York Subway System

Ever missed a date in Constantinople, because she was waiting in Istanbul? Yeah, me neither. But I’ve been living in New New Amsterdam for just a couple of months and I already had a misunderstanding due to failed reading of the Subway system nomenclature. Some friends of mine were visiting the city and wanted to see the university campus. I gave them proper directions from the place they were staying in Flushing to Columbia with the subway with only one transfer at Times Square. The plan was foolproof as the 116-Columbia station has only one exit and I was waiting just outside of it. It was easy, it was perfect. And then I got the call from 116^th and Lenox Ave…where the 2-train stops, some seven avenues away. Everybody who has used the New York Subway at least a few times by now knows that they got confused by the colour-coding and took the other Red line, which does not go to Columbia. You have no idea how many times I said “the 1-train” in my directions and how many times I refused to answer the question “so which colour is that?”…

The obvious reason for the confusion is that the couple that visited me was from Chicago where the ‘L’ only has colour-coding as opposed to the NYC Subway which has a triple coding system of colour, line and service. While colour is obvious, the other two terms might be confusing even to locals. “Service” refers to the letter or number, which is the most commonly used every day name for a train and then “line” refers to the physical tracks that the trains run on, which both have historic background. Up to 1940 there were three companies (two private and one municipal) that operated the Subway – Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (BMT), Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) and Independent City-Owned Subway System (IND). They are all now parts of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), but they are still recognized by its structure. The IRT alone constitutes the MTA’s A-Division and its services are assigned numbers. The B-Division consists of the former BMT and IND and its services are assigned letters. So any given train receives a three-fold code, for example the one that goes to Columbia University would be IRT Broadway-7^th Ave Line Tomato Red 1-train.

Here are some examples of remnants of the three former companies :

BMT Subway

IND Subway 14th St

IRT 191st St

CTA 'L' Map

The history of the subway system in New York as well as its structure made it all so complicated. To use the Chicago example, every line has its own tracks and theonly stations with multiple lines are in the down town area around the Loop, where all lines stop. However, the history of the rapid transit system in Chicago is not much different with the major change coming in 1940 as well. So why can Chicago switch to simple colour-coding and New York cannot? Another question spring out of that, though – how simple would such a system really be in NYC? One could argue that such a system is already in place since people most readily recognise the colour-coding. Currently, though colour is assigned in correspondence to the line the service runs on in Midtown Manhattan. For one, this shows zonal rankings within the city with Midtown apparently being the most important one. Another possible meaning that could be derived is that Midtown is supposed to be the main tourist centre as local would most probably know the system better and would not simply rely on colour-coding. I bet Battery Park City, SoHo and the Financial District would have something to say about such distribution of tourists…

MTA Subway Map

Many interesting inference could be made about the meaning behind the choice of colour-coding, but it is not only culturally and socially, but also practically problematic. What would happen to tourists who decide to wander outside of the realm of Midtown? What people who live in the city but are new to the area? For example, I know people wondering why the E-service is coded Vivid Blue and paired with A and C-services. It only shares eight stations with the C and five with the express A. On the other hand the E-service shares six stations with the Bright Orange M-service. Orange colour seems even more appropriate when considering that the E-service runs together with the F-service from Jamaica to Long Island City and they share five stations when running express during the day and thirteen stations when running local at night. So how confusing could it be for someone from Chicago or Washington, DC or Prague, for example, where only colour-coding is applied, to recognise the A and E-services as the same line? How confusing is that for someone who lives in Jackson Heights and to whom the F and E-services are virtually the same, but are different in colour?

Future 2nd Ave Line

So it is confusing, but so what? Maybe it is more important for the city to preserve its historic association with the BMT, IRT, and IND, whose ownership of the Midtown tracks before 1940 determines the colour-coding of the whole transit system in four of the five boroughs. Maybe the MTA does not believe that colour is all that important and that letters and numbers are more appropriate labels. Maybe the colours are just an extra that the MTA throws out of generosity. Buy one get two free kind of situation. Maybe the diversity of New York is once again represented in the subway nomenclature as it uses this three-fold designation system. Well, maybe. But what about the planned 2^nd Ave line? It will not run on any of the three historic companies lines in Midtown so how can it be assigned a colour? Or a number or letter for that matter? The 2^nd Ave line is tentatively dubbed T in teal and is supposed to open in 2016. It would run from Hanover St along 2^nd Ave up to 116^th St and would then end at 125^th and Lexington Ave where transfer would be available to the 4-5-6 IRT Lexington Ave Apple Green lines. A redirection of the BMT Broadway Sunflower Yellow Q-service from 59^th St to 63^rd St and then onto 2^nd Ave would provide a double service on the new line. I guess the BMT connection with the Q-service is where the T-service gets its letter association. But where does the colour come from? Is it a combination of the 4-5-6 apple green and the Q sunflower yellow or is it just completely random? I assume everyone is free to making his own reading of it.

What the MTA Subway system shows is how colour-coding could be read in a variety of ways. The reading presented here is perhaps the one that the MTA was looking for, but there are so many others. The 1-2-3 and 4-5-6services run almost parallel in Manhattan on the two opposite sides of Central Park and are assigned the two opposite colours of a traffic light – red and green. However, the 2 and 5-service run along the same tracks for a substantial length in the Bronx and in Brooklyn, too, which makes the opposing lines reading obsolete. The L-service could be read as tied to the Shuttle services.I have heard tourists regularly referring to the “S-train”, which a local would probably never say. The MTA makes the distinction between Light Slate Grey L-service and Dark Slate Grey Shuttles, but I am sure many people think they somehow need to be connected due to the proximity of their colours. Yet the L-service does not share a single station with any of the Shuttles. Colour is also recognized differently by different people so some might view the Lime Green G to be closely connected to the Apple Green 4-5-6, while other would-think they are just as different as any other two line and colours. Some would see the M-service (newly Bright Orange) running along with its former colour-mates Terra Cotta Brown J and Z-services for some six stations as logical because of the proximity of the colours, while other might think otherwise. I am not even going to dare discussing colour-blindness and how it could affect reading the subway nomenclature. At any rate, the subway system isquite a fascinating case of how colour-coding could be read in a variety of ways producing both justification for the MTA arrangement and confusion and drawing on history, visual perception, track length, number of stations shared and many other categories.

The Fashion of Color on Fifth Avenue

It’s a rare day when I trek over to the East Side to see my friend at NYU Uptown. I always glance at the Empire State Building during the long trudge from the 6 Station to her 1^st Avenue apartment. Last week the group of us that had gathered at her place debated the significance of the evening’s lighting colors. Red, yellow and black signaled the start of Oktoberfest to some and nothing to others, but a quick Google search confirmed that we were all wrong. The lights commemorated the 54^th annual Steuben Day Parade which, while perhaps related to Oktoberfest, was still lost on us when we interpreted the color scheme from a mere glimpse.

The Empire State Building, as its website claims, is one of the most seen buildings in the world. To become a “lighting partner”—or, to have the ability to choose a night’s lighting color scheme—demands a detailed application and an approval from the private group that owns the building. Charitable and nonprofit groups are most often accepted. (Famously the Empire State Building displays red and green lights for Christmas and blue and white for Hanukkah, but religious requests are unilaterally denied.) Even the competition as to whose technology has the privilege to light the building is fierce.

Mark Kingwell, author of Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams, described the Empire State Building as “the distinctive image of mythic New York,” an image that is “totally irresistible.” (Although it’s a bit old, this commemorative section in the New York Times elaborates on the Empire State Building’s inner workings, its social meaning and its importance to New York’s skyline.) It is difficult to resist the urge to advertise one’s cause on the top of a billboard that reaches millions of people nightly. While these lights are surely seen, the transmission of their intended message is often ambiguous, sometimes obtuse and even incomprehensible.

Some of the lighting arrangements are universally identifiable: red, white and blue for Independence Day, green for St. Patrick’s, orange and black for Halloween. Yet, often divergences from the classic white (which itself signals a lack of a lighting partner for the day) are more obscure and therefore puzzling. Could you guess what this lighting scheme represented?

It’s Hanukkah and Christmas put together, on December 24, 2008. What about this one?

This was in honor of the various countries competing in the 2006 Olympics, where each side represented a different nation. In celebration of a particular school’s commencement every year, we get this:

While Columbia students easily recognize this sign, the typical city resident may have no idea what it indicates. Luckily for the stumped and irked, the Empire State Building publishes the lighting schedule and its significance online. You can even create your own color combination with a unique meaning and send it to a friend using the e-card maker.

Colors serve as indicators for many unspoken concepts in New York City. The colors of the subway lines signify which express and local lines travel on the same paths, or even the character of the station (the powder blue tiles at 116^th Street come to mind). Colored traffic lights direct trains, vehicles and pedestrians (although they are not strictly obeyed). Wear red at a New York Yankees game and prepare to face ridicule, even if you do not intend to associate with the Red Sox. The coppery green patina of the Statue of Liberty not only secures its status as another recognizable symbol of the New York skyline but also its old age.

The Empire State Building and its lights are paradoxical: they are ubiquitous and recognizable, yet their nightly color-coded message can be confusing and even unintelligible. One person may see one meaning while others see another. Unlike the letters of language or the colors of a traffic light, there is no predetermined paradigm for what the Empire State Building’s color arrangement represents. Whether or not we understand its significance is independent of our identification of the colors in and of themselves. The sign may be visible to all, but the code is not always easy to crack.