04 04 10 Update

I've pretty much finished the preparations for Friday's preliminary meeting at Stiffel, including a sheet that each person will take home to hang on the refrigerator to remind them what to bring on April 16.

Since we finally had a decent Monday, the day I keep free to work on Journeys South, I was able to hit the neighborhood and do some videotaping. I want to have a lot of clips I pull from.

I always forget how static cities really are. Apart from cars and humans, not a lot moves. The 7th street area is ever more still. I focused primarily on architecture and spaces doing pans over cornices and house-fronts. I'm always fascinated by remnants and reminders of things that somehow stick around despite progress's best efforts to obliterate them.

The photos are video stills that I extracted.

Stiffel and Community Workshop Outline

03 08 10 Adult Workshop: “Objects of Memory”

Facilitator: RA Friedman

Place: Stiffel Center

Proposed Dates: Friday, March 26 & Friday April 2

^Overview:

^{The objects that we keep or collect often connect us in a very direct way to our family history, where we lived, what we did; how we saw ourselves, and the world. The goal of this workshop is to employ small, easily transportable objects that people may have saved: articles of clothing, a letter, a piece of jewelry, or small tools, as a way of revealing these usually unseen connections and inner visions.}

^{The culminating work for this part of the Journeys South project will be a hand-cranked, mechanical movie kiosk that will be able to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood and also appear at various events. The movie “reel” will be very short, only about two minutes and will be a silent narrative montage made up of workshop footage, images and video captured in the neighborhood, oral history clips, and perhaps historical materials.}

^{The workshop is split into two halves. In the first half (1 hr) I’ll explain what the piece is to be and the ideas behind it. I want to see what peoples’ ideas are and what objects people would like to bring, and to handle any logistical issues. For instance, I may be able to provide certain objects from my own collection or borrow should the need arise. I don’t want people to rehearse, so I’ll probably keep exactly what is to happen in the second workshop, somewhat un-specific.}

^{In the second workshop (2.5 hrs), I will set up a backdrop and lights and center-goers will be videotaped somehow engaged with their object. This could be such things as: putting on a hat, opening and closing a folding camera, making paper cutouts, changing a steel phonograph needle. Ideally, I’ll have a second cameraperson on hand. I want to be sure to capture things like close-ups of hands and facial expressions.}

12 23 09 Update:

I spent yesterday transferring all the interview video onto a mirrored RAID drive. I then need to convert the video again to audio mp3's for Tom Carroll to use, and to DVD format so it can go to the various interviewees and also be easily watched. I'm retaining everything on the one terabyte drive for easy future access. It's over six hours worth and though I didn't watch all of it, I revisited much.

There is more planned for after the New Year, which will round the Stiffel interviews out to eight. Additionally, I hope to interview other people who do not attend Stiffel.

Two things struck me as I watched the videos. The people interviewed rarely talked about objects and their acquisition. Many talked about poverty, but not about things they purchased other than perhaps saving up money for a musical instrument. My point being, as a group, their lives appear to have been very much not oriented around material gain for its own sake.

Also, recollections of how difficult or tough the neighborhood was in terms of street life varied with the women not mentioning it at all and emphasizing the connectedness and harmony in the neighborhood for the most part. The parallel story being that Stiffel has filled the void for many older residents, creating a new sense of community and even connecting people back to neighbors and relatives to which they had lost track.

The men had more "war stories," but then again it varied from recollections of doing a wrestling tackle on a larger opponent (David Welsh) to fending off a group of neighborhood toughs with a burning stick. (Joe Pepper) My only surmise is that like today, one's perception and experience has a lot to do with what circles one runs, personal temperament, and the ability to avoid trouble before it escalates.