Jeremy Beaudry
Projects, Research & Texts

Excerpt from a film not yet made (II)

Posted on August 1st, 2008 in musings and

Remembering Alex

Posted on July 7th, 2008 in musings and

I’ve finally gotten around to starting No One Sleeps in Alexandria by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, a contemporary novel set in WWII-era Alexandria by (obviously) an Egyptian author. Many of my Egyptian friends and acquaintances highly recommended the book for providing a contrasting view of the the city, one to supplement the colonial perspective that I struggled to deal with during my preparation for and time in Alexandria earlier this year. Once again, literature about and memory of place become emeshed as I read Meguid’s book, and I’m roaming the city in memory along with the characters in the book. Alexandria and my friends there are on my mind. Among the scraps of my digital notes, I found a partial list of “Things Observed and Learned” in Alexandria—more memory:

• Things happen in the street.
• I stand out.
• Animals are butchered, goods bought and sold, teas and coffees drunk, sheeshas smoked.
• Movement in the street is choreographed.
• Pedestrians and autos jockey for position and negotiate their respective itineraries.
• There is a unique language communicated through car horns. (Are there other languages / codes / means of communication between pedestrians?)
• There are few maps of Alexandria and they are not reliable because street names and street directions change.
• The streets are scarred and in disrepair.
• Egyptian men walk arm in arm.
• Many women (but not all) wear head scarves (which is a relatively new development); some wear the burqa.
• The shopping mall is the preferred commercial / social space of the affluent classes. This is the street sanitized and branded.
• The downtown has been relocated to a new “downtown” mall (“City Centre”) that is on the outskirts of the city.
• The Faculty of Art (University of Alexandria) is very conservative and infects its students with a reactionary mentality towards art / artist.
• The old Jewish quarter is on a hill. It is very dense and very poor and very easy to get lost in.
• There are hoards of mangy cats in the streets.
• I saw a dead cat curled up between a gutter and a building.
• Fishmongers sell fish on the side of the street.
• Many buildings in Alexandria are crumbling.
• The city is covered in garbage.
• A constant wind blows into the city from off of the Mediterranean.
• Alexandrians are very friendly and eager to say “hello” to me, the American tourist.
• It costs foreigners LE10 to enter the Library.
• I am paying the price of being a tourist.
• There are beautiful scarves woven of fine Egyptian cotton.
• I was offered hash.
• Iran is not an Arab state.
• Foul is a dish of fava beans mixed with various spices and vegetables.
• Aquafina bottled water is suspected to be straight from the tap.
• Don’t forget the baksheesh (tip).
• Two Egyptian beers: Sakara and Stella.
• There are dead cats all over the city.
• In Alex, cars drive like pedestrians walk in Manhattan.
• A row of several dozen men kneeling to pray on astroturf in the street alongside parked cars.
• A man walks through the streets with a push cart and shouts “bikya!” looking to buy unwanted junk.
• Pedestrians walk equally in sidewalks and in streets.
• Before drinking Turkish coffee, one must wait a few minutes after it is poured to allow the grounds to settle.
• Much of Arabic graffiti on the walls are the name of Allah, Islamic sayings, or scriptures.

I see an interesting connection between this ad hoc list and No One Sleeps in Alexandria: amid the narrative of the city and Magd al-Din, a peasant who brings his wife and child to Alexandria after being exiled from his village, Meguid inserts news-clip fragments that offer a kind of survey of contemporaneous local and global events during the period. Magd al-Din often reads aloud from the newspaper to his friend Dimyan, and these passages intimate Magd al-Din’s interest in the news of the world, but also speak to both the interconnectedness and discursiveness of world events as represented in the pages of newspapers:

[...] Hitler himself went to spend Christmas with his troops on the western front. Everyone wished victory for their peoples and their armies. The Finns will still scoring surprising victories. The League of Nations expelled Russia from its membership. Yusuf Wahbi screened his film Street Children in Cairo, where there was an increase in cases of typhoid fever. Many bottle of cognac, champagne, and whisky were sold in Alexandria, where nightclubs stayed open by candlelight to bid farewell to the old year. [...]

These events mingle with the everday narrative of life in the city, as memory binds the collective and individual together to form the texture of consciousness.

Right to the Riverfront, Right to the City

Posted on July 4th, 2008 in activism, collaboration, musings, peripherals and

Last week in Philadelphia, PennPraxis and the newly rebranded Central Delaware Advocacy Group (of which I have been a member for the past 2 years and have written in support before) publicly unveiled a 10 point action plan for implementing the nominally citizen-driven planning vision for the Central Delaware Waterfront. The event included commentary from city planning professionals and bureaucrats that also featured a climactic endorsement from Mayor Nutter, who pledged to begin implementing some early action items within the year. No small victory for many of us was Nutter’s reiteration of the fact that the proposed big-box casinos are antithetical to the kind of waterfront many of us are working to build.

Yet, for all the plan’s championing of public access to the river, bike trails and parks, mix of commercial and residential uses, I felt a certain sinking in my stomach. From my reserved perch in the second row, I turned around to my left and my right to scan the standing-room-only crowd, and I saw energized and enthusiastic citizens, many of whom have devoted hours of time towards crafting the vision for the waterfront. I saw a lot of people who appeared to be like me—white, educated, professional class—and, while my survey was not scientific and while it would be imprudent to place to much emphasis on the demographic of one isolated event like this, the lack of a significant attendance by either people of color or the working class in a city with overwhelming percentages of such folks is alarming when observed through the broader lens of the neoliberal vision of the city. The “rediscovery” and “redevelopment” of Philadelphia as a desirable place to live will tend towards the homogenous; economic, cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity must be actively sought after and guaranteed if such a value is to be sustained and physically manifest in the life and form of the city.

As I listened to rhetoric in the remarks from those speaking at the event—those speaking in some respects for me as a participant in the waterfront planning process but also speaking to me as a citizen and constituent—I was thinking about David Harvey‘s recent lecture on the “right to the city” (see video below), as well as the recently formed coalition of anti-gentrification and anti-displacement groups united under the same name. I’m currently working through Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity which adeptly tracks the political-economic shifts that have occurred between Fordism/Modernism and Late Capitalism/Postmodernism over the last century. Of course, as a trained geographer, Harvey’s particular strength in this research is in how he ties it all back to a discussion of spatial practices and the transformation of the city under these conditions. (I also highly recommend another lecture by Harvey from a couple of years ago entitled “Neoliberalism and the City.”

Harvey’s critique was playing through my mind in the form a series of basic questions about this waterfront plan and the process by which it came to be… For whom are we making this waterfront and this city? Who shows up? Who participates, and why or why not? What, specifically, are we doing to ensure the inclusion of under-served and under-privileged residents? How is the quality of life raised for all Philadelphians? Hidden among the mantras of “civic engagement” and “community participation” are those missing from the program, those I didn’t see at the event last week. We have to work diligently to bring all strata of the city into the planning and making of the next era of Philadelphia. The level and attention to community involvement I have witnessed over the last few years here is admirable and should not be dismissed. However, our under-served communities often remain in the shadows and require much more outreach in order to build understanding, trust, and the kind of relationships that engender empathy and mutual respect across longstanding economic, racial, and cultural barriers.

Excerpt from a film not yet made

Posted on December 5th, 2007 in musings, project news and

What (where) is an unmediated space?

Posted on November 12th, 2007 in musings and

We know this to be the case: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle).

I recently watched The Cruise again, the near perfect showing of a nearly unmediated (yet crafted, I think) experience of New York City as performed by Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Then, I watched it again (twice, for good measure). In one particular scene, Speed embraces — unfolds himself upon — one of the great stone piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, gently patting it, touching his forehead to it, communing with it. (Years ago we talked about licking buildings in architecture school. I think Hillary actually did it.) There’s something about the way he settles into the city, the restless comfort, the awkward sensuality, that confounds a mediated relationship to his world. Watching it now, I feel that that moment must have passed and he can no longer relate to the place in that way.

Aaron (aka Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of ReHumanization) has described his experience as a soldier in the Iraq war as being unmediated — or at least as close to unmediated as he has ever witnessed. It follows, then, that the shock and stress (often diagnosed as PTSD) which soldiers feel upon their return home has everything to do with the transition back into the mediated existence of our “civilization.”

Is mediation a buffer from trauma? Is mediation a barrier to being fully human? I’m curious about the relationship between mediation and dehumanization. Here’s Paulo Freire in the opening chapter of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as a historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.

Mediation implies a distance, the “separation” that Debord finds perfected in modern industrialized societies. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. There must be gradations embedded in this notion of mediation. Can a distinction between mediation (ontological) and media (technological) be discerned? Does the latter necessarily determine the former? Is there any essential difference between a jug and a handheld computer, both technologies of utility which mediate our experience of the world? Gradations and scale (hello McCluhan) present complications…

Is there a post-spectacle society? Within this paradigm, are we unable to imagine something beyond Debord’s critique? And to what degree is Debord’s critique dependent on teleological, historically and technologically determined trajectories of human evolution? Is there a post-mediated existence? (Is there a proto-mediated existence, for that matter?) Not an existence without mediation, but an existence absorbed fully by mediation? Such a prediction feels apocalyptic, dystopian. It suggests a time of post-feeling, post-human, a world populated by cyborgs whose dreams are filled with memories of archived material pulled from the master database of text, images, sounds, and videos that we are now building on the Net.

The image of Speed Levitch persists: he hurriedly crosses a street and enters an urban plaza space. He spins around several times, arms outstretched until dizzy. He lies down on his back, equidistant between the two World Trade Center towers, and carefully extends his right leg up and out, as if maintaining equilbirium between himself and the buildings. “The buildings look like they’re falling down,” he muses. (A few years later, they would say that watching the towers implode and collapse was like watching a movie.) The Cruise reminds me of the angst of mediation, of being less than fully—. Of being behind the lens, behind the glass, separate. It reminds me to go outside and be there.