Dum…da da dum.…da da dum…

On Senator Clinton's website you can find the poll that allows you, the voter, to select the Senator's campaign song. I voted for The Tempations' "Get Ready" because not only is it a classic, but it is also the only song on the list I can stand the thought of hearing repeatedly for the next year+.

This brings me to a question a friend asked me the other day: "Does your dissertation have a theme song?" After pausing to consider the possibility of opening my defense with a song, I told him that there are three songs that run repeatedly through my head as I research. Occassionally, I also hum/sing them quietly, much to the annoyance of others in various reading rooms. So, here they are in no particular order:

• "I Happen to Like New York": In my head, I always hear the Bobby Short version of this Cole Porter song. Woody Allen used it in the opening sequences of Manhattan Murder Mystery as the camera lovingly pans New York from above. The line that gets me: "I like the sight and the sound and even the stink of it." I never fail to hear that and think, "It's true! It's true! I do!"

• "Summer in the City": This choice may be the result of waiting to do all of my research in the summer or it may be the fact that I am stuck in the decade of long hot summers, in which the least of anyone's worries was the actual temperature. And, since the Lovin Spoonful version dates from 1966, it is completely of the period. I find the hopeful chorus pretty reassuring: "Despite the heat it'll be alright..."

• The Barney Miller Opening Music: Really, this doesn't need any explanation, does it? The bass line! The cast (Fish, Chano, Wojciehowicz/Wojo, Yemana and his coffee, Dietrich, etc.)! The 12th Precinct! The squad room! The finest of New York's finest! The show even looks like I imagine my topic looks, if that makes any sense, and just hearing the opening theme brings that all to life for me.

Alas, there is no poll to pick my dissertation theme, but I'll seriously think about bringing a bass to my defense.

[Update: The official theme song of the Clinton campaign has been chosen: Celine Dion's "You and I." No comment.]

"Silence was never written down"...

...goes the old Italian proverb. Playing back my interviews, I realize that there are a lot of spots without any sound. Could it be that my recorder was periodically failing? Nope. The silence indicates things that were said with hand gestures, rather than words.

To illustrate my point, here's a random sample from the middle of one interview:

Me: So was he upset?
Interviewee: [Frowns and makes the cosi cosi gesture then shrugs]
Me: [Makes the capisco gesture] Would he have been happier if you had completely assimilated? Became a medigan?
Interviewee: [Laughs as we both "fare la corna" to ward off the malocchio] No, I don't think so.

The dilemna is trying to capture the "true" meaning of this exchange. Putting it all into words, the tone is a little different:

Me: So was he upset?
Interviewee: [Sure, he was a little upset sometimes; other times it didn't bother him. But what could I do about it? You know how it is, how they can be...]
Me: [ You so don't have to tell me!] Would he have been happier if you had completely assimilated? Became a medigan?
Interviewee: [O god forbid! How could you even say that?! What a terrible thing that would have been!] No, I don't think so.

I think I have hit upon the major difficulty that Italian Americans may encounter when simply making an audio recording of their interviews with other Italian Americans. Unless I switch to video, I guess I'm going to lose about half of all of my interviews. [Eh. What are going to do?]

As American as...

Spent the weekend prepping for my first set of "oral history" interviews, which I will conduct based out of a snazzy New Haven hotel room. For me, this means agonizing over how I am going to sound on tape. This seems petty, I know; I should be worrying about what questions I am going to ask, how to draw information out of people or making sure I have my facts straight. Bah! That's kids' stuff compared to having to sit through the sound of yourself while transcribing.

Seeking inspiration, I turned to Terry Gross and Fresh Air. She doesn't seem to have a problem with her voice hitting millions five days a week. Nor does she have any problem getting information from people. Anyway, while searching the archives, I came across a 2000 interview with David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos.

In this interview, Gross asked Chase about his response to Italian-American organizations that have protested against the show's perpetuation of the depiction of Italian Americans as Mafiosi. Chase responded (after describing his inability to disassociate the idea of Italian anti-defamation from Joe Colombo):

But I don't know what is with these people why they never stop and say to themselves, just possibly let this thought into your head: What am I missing here? What is it that so many of my fellow Americans see here? And see in a very deep, seemingly profound and endless way. Is it possible that I am overlooking something that a lot of even my fellow Italian Americans like? And for whatever reason, and I don't understand this, the Italian-American gangster story has become a national myth. And why people persist in these kind of parochial concerns in the face of that, I sometimes want to ask them, 'Are you an Italian American or are you an American?' Because this is an American story.

So, is Chase right? Is the Mafia image American or Italian? Every Italian American "defending" their neighborhood, from Chicago's Little Hell in the 1940s to Bensonhurst in 1989, has claimed something along the lines, "We're just doing what all Americans do." Yet, the press has depicted them, not as average Americans, but as Italians acting in the image of the Mafia. If Chase is right, maybe both are correct: For Italian Americans, acting in the Mafia image is simply acting American.

In this light, Al "Kid Blast" Gallo's defense of "we only done what any red-blooded American boys would do" sounds a bit more credible.

A thought on writing: Fridays with Joe

"We'd like to know how close you've got your ear to the ground. There's a gang of bunks in town. They're working hard," says Jack Webb, with the famous staccato Joe Friday delivery.

Nobody tells it like Jack. If Joe Friday talked any other way, the lines would lose their camp credibility. Striking the right tone when writing is so important. I want my topics to sound as fun as I think they are, but I worry that my tone is too flippant.

The less "serious" a topic is, the more "serious" the writing style should be? Or is that how those horridly pretentious bits of cultural history are created? I think so. The best way to admit that you realize the potential criticisms of the validity of your topic is to address it tongue planted firmly in cheek. The more serious you sound about things like tomato sauce ads or The Wizard of Oz as lesbian fantasy, the less credible or believable you are. If you write as if there is an inside joke between you and your reader, there will be an inside joke and a connection with that reader.

Now, if only there were such a thing as "just the facts", we'd be all set.

“Here the skeptic finds chaos and the believer further evidence that the hand that made us is divine.” --Robert Moses

For some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to start the day with a long walk. And, even though the train to Penn was running two hours (two hours!) late, I chose my route carefully, wanting to swing by ABC Home, Madison Square Park, Washington Square, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building, and so forth and so on, wending my way ultimately to the Surrogate Court building where my papers were waiting.

I will not wax sentimental about the beautiful coffee mug I have from ABC Home, nor will I remark upon the soothing nature of the parks. Instead, I'll borrow from Rebecca Read Shanor theme [The City That Never Was] and take this opportunity to mention what isn't there-- for example, the Lower Manhattan Expressway or Lomex, the six-lane elevated highway that Robert Moses proposed run the length of Canal Street to connect the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges.

Noooo, that wouldn't have changed the Village and SoHo too, too much. As Jane Jacobs' wrote, expressways like this "eviscerate" cities: "This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities." Luckily, Rocky put the final kibosh on the plan in 1971.

One of the streets that would have fallen victim to Moses' expressway is Mercer Street, one of my favorites. It is quiet and cobbled, and always feels as empty as a Sunday morning. Many of the buildings are former small factories with beautiful cast iron fronts. Walking along there is very soothing and sorta time-warpy; yet, it is difficult to picture it either as a street of working factories or in the Fun City years, crowded with trash, etc. Therefore, I am not sure exactly to where or when one is warped back to, but there is a definitely a sense of removal from both the present and the "true" past.

This feeling is intensified as you look down Mercer towards Canal. Looking up, you should see the Twin Towers and, again, you are hit with the feeling that time, to borrow from Shakespeare, is out of joint. Yet, if Moses had had his way, it is the street that would be missing. Maybe that is why things are not where they belong on Mercer Street and, right down to the buildings' facades, they are not what they seem. Perhaps this isn't really New York after all.

Grab your kroj and let's go

My mom, a proud Czech-American, clipped this article for me from today's American Profiles magazine (an insert in the local Sunday paper). What, you may well ask, does a kolache festival in Nebraska have to do with Italian Americans in Fun City? Well, not much really, except that it illustrates the resurgence of celebrations of ethnicity prior to the late 1960s:

The town’s Czech Federation began the celebration honoring Czech food and community spirit in 1939. It was held intermittently until the 1950s, when it became an annual event hosted by the Verdigre Improvement Club with the help of local organizations, youth groups and churches.

Seems pretty odd that a bunch of Americans in the middle of America would wake up one morning in the decade of super-Americanness and just say, "Hey, we need to remind people we're Czech and celebrate our desserts!" I'm guessing that their motivation was part economic and part cultural, which begs the question why? What is the bigger meaning of this not-so-much-isolated-as-ignored-1950s phenomenon of ethnic return?

It is also interesting that this particular festival was originally run by an ethnic fraternal organization; yet, its post-war sponsor is the very generic, very typical 1950s community group. Did ethnicity become synonymous with community identity?

Sigh. I'll stop. If I continue in this vein, I'll be right back to my criticism of Elaine Tyler May, who, judging by Homeward Bound, never ate anything more ethnic than Wonder Bread.