Journal articles on the topic 'South High School (Springfield, OH)'

Classical scholars have begun to delineate the dynamic pattern of black classicism. This new subfield of the classical tradition involves the analysis of the creative response to classical antiquity by artists as well as the history of the professional training in classics of scholars, teachers and students in high schools, colleges and universities. To the first group belongs Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880-1969). Born in Fayetteville, NC, Chesnutt was the second daughter of acclaimed African American novelist, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). She earned her B.A. from Smith College in 1902 and her M.A. in Latin from Columbia University in 1925. She was a member of the American Philological Association and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Her life was spent teaching Latin at Central High School in Cleveland, OH. This is the first full scale account of her career.

AbstractIn late 1998 the International Gemini Project Office identified a need for a low cost, near-infrared spectrograph to be commissioned on the Gemini South telescope on the shortest possible timescale. In response, the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics of the Australian National University proposed to design, construct, and commission a near-infrared, integral-field spectrograph on Gemini. The science drivers and novel design of the Near-infrared Integral-Field Spectrograph (NIFS) are described in this paper. NIFS will achieve significant economies in cost and schedule in several ways:• By addressing targeted science with high efficiency. NIFS will primarily target velocity measurements in galaxies to study the demographics of black holes in galactic nuclei and the evolution of structural properties in high redshift galaxies. However, NIFS will also be applied to a wide range of general astronomical topics, but these will not dictate the instrument design.• By adopting a largely fixed-format design. A 3·2″ × 3·2″ ‘stair-case’ integral field unit (IFU) will feed a near-infrared spectrograph with four fixed-angle gratings mounted on a single grating wheel. A single, fixed-format camera will form the spectral image on a 2048 × 2048 Rockwell HgCdTe HAWAII-2 array. Two-pixel spectral resolving powers of ∼5400 will be achieved with complete wavelength coverage in each of the J, H, and K photometric bands through 32 optimally sampled 0·1″ wide slitlets. The velocity resolution of ∼55 km s−1 will be sufficient to achieve the targeted science objectives, and will allow software rejection of OH airglow lines.• By packaging the NIFS instrument within a duplicate of the Near-Infrared Imager (NIRI) cryostat. The NIRI cryostat, On-Instrument Wavefront Sensor (OIWFS), detector focusing mechanism, control system, and EPICS software will all be duplicated with only minimal change. Construction of the duplicate NIRI cryostat, OIWFS, and control system will be done by the University of Hawaii.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Vitamin D deficiency is common in adults and has been associated with diabetes or insulin resistance. However the association between vitamin D and insulin resistance has not been fully studied. Thus we investigated the association between serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D level (serum 25(OH)D) and fasting glucose, fasting insulin and insulin resistance in healthy Korean adolescents. METHODS: Study participants included 258 (134 males and 124 females) in the first grade students (mean age, 15.5 years) at a rural high school in South Korea. Insulin resistance was calculated using homeostasis model assessment (HOMA-IR). Both categorical (Sex-specific quartiles groups) and continuous measure of serum 25(OH)D were assessed in association with fasting glucose, fasting insulin and HOMA-IR. RESULTS: Lower serum 25(OH)D level was significantly associated with fasting glucose, fasting insulin, HOMA-IR after adjustment for age and body mass index in males. But the associations were not significant in females (table). CONCLUSIONS: This study suggests that serum 25(OH)D level may be inversely associated with insulin resistance in healthy male adolescents. Table. Association between serum vitamin D and glucose metabolism. Variable Quartile of serum 25(OH)D Continuous measure of serum 25(OH)D Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 P for trend β * P-value * Males N 33 34 33 34 Serum 25-OH-D (ng/mL, median(min, max)) 9.7 ( 5.4, 12.2 ) 14.2 (12.3, 15.8) 17.9 (15.9, 19.3) 24.8 (19.6, 40.9) Fasting glucose (mg/dL) 87.7 ± 5.4 85.7 ± 6.4 86.2 ± 6.7 85.0 ± 6.2 0.125 −0.138 0.004 Fasting insulin ( μ IU/ml) 9.9 ± 3.5 8.4 ± 3.3 8.8 ± 3.9 7.7 ± 2.8 0.022 −0.570 0.005 HOMA-IR 2.1 ± 0.8 1.8 ± 0.7 1.9 ± 0.9 1.6 ± 0.6 0.018 −2.518 0.004 Females N 31 31 31 31 Serum 25-OH-D (ng/mL, median(min, max)) 7.1(4.5, 8.3) 10.7(8.4, 12.8) 15.5(12.9, 18.5) 23.7(18.9, 36.1) Fasting glucose (mg/dL) 83.0 ± 5.1 83.0 ± 5.8 81.6 ± 5.9 84.0 ± 6.4 0.726 0.103 0.364 Fasting insulin ( μ IU/ml) 8.5 ± 2.6 9.0 ± 2.9 7.8 ± 2.6 8.6 ± 2.9 0.698 −0.009 0.970 HOMA-IR 1.7 ± 0.6 1.9 ± 0.6 1.6 ± 0.6 1.8 ± 0.7 0.831 0.316 0.781 * Adjusted for (sex), age, body mass index

Problem 1 was submitted by Dene Lawson, 26221 South Nottingham Drive, Sun Lakes, AZ 85248-0928. Problems 2–5 were prepared by Harry Simon, 701 Viola Street, Eunice, LA 70535-4339. Problems 6–13 and 23–27 were contributed by Boyd Henry, 600 South 18th Avenue, Caldwell, ID 83605. Problems 14–16 were provided by Enrico Uva, Outreach Schools, 1741 de Biencowt, Montreal, PQ H4E 1T4. Problems 17 and 22 were submitted by Bob Kinner, Hamilton High School, 1165 Eaton Avenue, Hamilton, OH 45013. Problems 18 and 20 and 28–30 were contributed by the falll994 Honors Problem Solving Class of Clarion University of Pennsylvania: Lyru1 Anderson, Tonnie R. Anderson, Nicole Bell, Lori Bessetti, Dipendra N. Bhattacharya, Kimberly Casper, Christopher Collins, Amanda Glaz, Kelly Gould, Julie Grove, Jessica Hackett, Scott Hunsberger, Rebecca Kelley, Melissa Klinginsmith, Bryan Lohr, Bobbie Manross, Jennifer Nicholes, Jeremy Peffer, Rosalyn Rapsinski, Marion Russell, Shane Sanders, Natalie Skalsky, Rebecca Smith, Samuel Thoma, Billie Jo Wells, and Stephen Westover. Problem 19 was contributed by Gene Zirkel, Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY 11530. Problem 21 was submitted by William D. Jamski, Indiana University Southeast, 4201 Grant Line Road, New Albany, IN 47150-6405.

Introduction This paper offers a survey of familiar popular music performers and songwriters who reference coffee in their work. It examines three areas of discourse: the psychoactive effects of caffeine, coffee and courtship rituals, and the politics of coffee consumption. I claim that coffee carries a cultural and musicological significance comparable to that of the chemical stimulants and consumer goods more readily associated with popular music. Songs about coffee may not be as potent as those featuring drugs and alcohol (Primack; Schapiro), or as common as those referencing commodities like clothes and cars (Englis; McCracken), but they do feature across a wide range of genres, some of which enjoy archetypal associations with this beverage. m.o.m.m.y. Needs c.o.f.f.e.e.: The Psychoactive Effect of Coffee The act of performing and listening to popular music involves psychological elements comparable to the overwhelming sensory experience of drug taking: altered perceptions, repetitive grooves, improvisation, self-expression, and psychological empathy—such as that between musician and audience (Curry). Most popular music genres are, as a result, culturally and sociologically identified with the consumption of at least one mind-altering substance (Lyttle; Primack; Schapiro). While the analysis of lyrics referring to this theme has hitherto focused on illegal drugs and alcoholic beverages (Cooper), coffee and its psychoactive ingredient caffeine have been almost entirely overlooked (Summer). The most recent study of drugs in popular music, for example, defined substance use as “tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and other stimulants, heroin and other opiates, hallucinogens, inhalants, prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and nonspecific substances” (Primack 172), thereby ignoring a chemical stimulant consumed by 90 per cent of adult Americans every day (Lovett). The wide availability of coffee and the comparatively mild effect of caffeine means that its consumption rarely causes harm. One researcher has described it as a ubiquitous and unobtrusive “generalised public activity […] ‘invisible’ to analysts seeking distinctive social events” (Cooper 92). Coffee may provide only a relatively mild “buzz”—but it is now accepted that caffeine is an addictive substance (Juliano) and, due to its universal legality, coffee is also the world’s most extensively traded and enthusiastically consumed psychoactive consumer product (Juliano 1). The musical genre of jazz has a longstanding relationship with marijuana and narcotics (Curry; Singer; Tolson; Winick). Unsurprisingly, given its Round Midnight connotations, jazz standards also celebrate the restorative impact of coffee. Exemplary compositions include Burke/Webster’s insomniac torch song Black Coffee, which provided hits for Sarah Vaughan (1949), Ella Fitzgerald (1953), and Peggy Lee (1960); and Frank Sinatra’s recordings of Hilliard/Dick’s The Coffee Song (1946, 1960), which satirised the coffee surplus in Brazil at a time when this nation enjoyed a near monopoly on production. Sinatra joked that this ubiquitous drink was that country’s only means of liquid refreshment, in a refrain that has since become a headline writer’s phrasal template: “There’s an Awful Lot of Coffee in Vietnam,” “An Awful Lot of Coffee in the Bin,” and “There’s an Awful Lot of Taxes in Brazil.” Ethnographer Aaron Fox has shown how country music gives expression to the lived social experience of blue-collar and agrarian workers (Real 29). Coffee’s role in energising working class America (Cooper) is featured in such recordings as Dolly Parton’s Nine To Five (1980), which describes her morning routine using a memorable “kitchen/cup of ambition” rhyme, and Don't Forget the Coffee Billy Joe (1973) by Tom T. Hall which laments the hardship of unemployment, hunger, cold, and lack of healthcare. Country music’s “tired truck driver” is the most enduring blue-collar trope celebrating coffee’s analeptic powers. Versions include Truck Drivin' Man by Buck Owens (1964), host of the country TV show Hee Haw and pioneer of the Bakersfield sound, and Driving My Life Away from pop-country crossover star Eddie Rabbitt (1980). Both feature characteristically gendered stereotypes of male truck drivers pushing on through the night with the help of a truck stop waitress who has fuelled them with caffeine. Johnny Cash’s A Cup of Coffee (1966), recorded at the nadir of his addiction to pills and alcohol, has an incoherent improvised lyric on this subject; while Jerry Reed even prescribed amphetamines to keep drivers awake in Caffein [sic], Nicotine, Benzedrine (And Wish Me Luck) (1980). Doye O’Dell’s Diesel Smoke, Dangerous Curves (1952) is the archetypal “truck drivin’ country” song and the most exciting track of its type. It subsequently became a hit for the doyen of the subgenre, Red Simpson (1966). An exhausted driver, having spent the night with a woman whose name he cannot now recall, is fighting fatigue and wrestling his hot-rod low-loader around hairpin mountain curves in an attempt to rendezvous with a pretty truck stop waitress. The song’s palpable energy comes from its frenetic guitar picking and the danger implicit in trailing a heavy load downhill while falling asleep at the wheel. Tommy Faile’s Phantom 309, a hit for Red Sovine (1967) that was later covered by Tom Waits (Big Joe and the Phantom 309, 1975), elevates the “tired truck driver” narrative to gothic literary form. Reflecting country music’s moral code of citizenship and its culture of performative storytelling (Fox, Real 23), it tells of a drenched and exhausted young hitchhiker picked up by Big Joe—the driver of a handsome eighteen-wheeler. On arriving at a truck stop, Joe drops the traveller off, giving him money for a restorative coffee. The diner falls silent as the hitchhiker orders up his “cup of mud”. Big Joe, it transpires, is a phantom trucker. After running off the road to avoid a school bus, his distinctive ghost rig now only reappears to rescue stranded travellers. Punk rock, a genre closely associated with recreational amphetamines (McNeil 76, 87), also features a number of caffeine-as-stimulant songs. Californian punk band, Descendents, identified caffeine as their drug of choice in two 1996 releases, Coffee Mug and Kids on Coffee. These songs describe chugging the drink with much the same relish and energy that others might pull at the neck of a beer bottle, and vividly compare the effects of the drug to the intense rush of speed. The host of “New Music News” (a segment of MTV’s 120 Minutes) references this correlation in 1986 while introducing the band’s video—in which they literally bounce off the walls: “You know, while everybody is cracking down on crack, what about that most respectable of toxic substances or stimulants, the good old cup of coffee? That is the preferred high, actually, of California’s own Descendents—it is also the subject of their brand new video” (“New Music News”). Descendents’s Sessions EP (1997) featured an overflowing cup of coffee on the sleeve, while punk’s caffeine-as-amphetamine trope is also promulgated by Hellbender (Caffeinated 1996), Lagwagon (Mr. Coffee 1997), and Regatta 69 (Addicted to Coffee 2005). Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night: Coffee and Courtship Coffee as romantic metaphor in song corroborates the findings of early researchers who examined courtship rituals in popular music. Donald Horton’s 1957 study found that hit songs codified the socially constructed self-image and limited life expectations of young people during the 1950s by depicting conservative, idealised, and traditional relationship scenarios. He summarised these as initial courtship, honeymoon period, uncertainty, and parting (570-4). Eleven years after this landmark analysis, James Carey replicated Horton’s method. His results revealed that pop lyrics had become more realistic and less bound by convention during the 1960s. They incorporated a wider variety of discourse including the temporariness of romantic commitment, the importance of individual autonomy in relationships, more liberal attitudes, and increasingly unconventional courtship behaviours (725). Socially conservative coffee songs include Coffee in the Morning and Kisses in the Night by The Boswell Sisters (1933) in which the protagonist swears fidelity to her partner on condition that this desire is expressed strictly in the appropriate social context of marriage. It encapsulates the restrictions Horton identified on courtship discourse in popular song prior to the arrival of rock and roll. The Henderson/DeSylva/Brown composition You're the Cream in My Coffee, recorded by Annette Hanshaw (1928) and by Nat King Cole (1946), also celebrates the social ideal of monogamous devotion. The persistence of such idealised traditional themes continued into the 1960s. American pop singer Don Cherry had a hit with Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (1962) that used coffee as a metaphor for undying and everlasting love. Otis Redding’s version of Butler/Thomas/Walker’s Cigarettes and Coffee (1966)—arguably soul music’s exemplary romantic coffee song—carries a similar message as a couple proclaim their devotion in a late night conversation over coffee. Like much of the Stax catalogue, Cigarettes and Coffee, has a distinctly “down home” feel and timbre. The lovers are simply content with each other; they don’t need “cream” or “sugar.” Horton found 1950s blues and R&B lyrics much more sexually explicit than pop songs (567). Dawson (1994) subsequently characterised black popular music as a distinct public sphere, and Squires (2002) argued that it displayed elements of what she defined as “enclave” and “counterpublic” traits. Lawson (2010) has argued that marginalised and/or subversive blues artists offered a form of countercultural resistance against prevailing social norms. Indeed, several blues and R&B coffee songs disregard established courtship ideals and associate the product with non-normative and even transgressive relationship circumstances—including infidelity, divorce, and domestic violence. Lightnin’ Hopkins’s Coffee Blues (1950) references child neglect and spousal abuse, while the narrative of Muddy Waters’s scorching Iodine in my Coffee (1952) tells of an attempted poisoning by his Waters’s partner. In 40 Cups of Coffee (1953) Ella Mae Morse is waiting for her husband to return home, fuelling her anger and anxiety with caffeine. This song does eventually comply with traditional courtship ideals: when her lover eventually returns home at five in the morning, he is greeted with a relieved kiss. In Keep That Coffee Hot (1955), Scatman Crothers supplies a counterpoint to Morse’s late-night-abandonment narrative, asking his partner to keep his favourite drink warm during his adulterous absence. Brook Benton’s Another Cup of Coffee (1964) expresses acute feelings of regret and loneliness after a failed relationship. More obliquely, in Coffee Blues (1966) Mississippi John Hurt sings affectionately about his favourite brand, a “lovin’ spoonful” of Maxwell House. In this, he bequeathed the moniker of folk-rock band The Lovin’ Spoonful, whose hits included Do You Believe in Magic (1965) and Summer in the City (1966). However, an alternative reading of Hurt’s lyric suggests that this particular phrase is a metaphorical device proclaiming the author’s sexual potency. Hurt’s “lovin’ spoonful” may actually be a portion of his seminal emission. In the 1950s, Horton identified country as particularly “doleful” (570), and coffee provides a common metaphor for failed romance in a genre dominated by “metanarratives of loss and desire” (Fox, Jukebox 54). Claude Gray’s I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee (Then I’ll Go) (1961) tells of a protagonist delivering child support payments according to his divorce lawyer’s instructions. The couple share late night coffee as their children sleep through the conversation. This song was subsequently recorded by seventeen-year-old Bob Marley (One Cup of Coffee, 1962) under the pseudonym Bobby Martell, a decade prior to his breakthrough as an international reggae star. Marley’s youngest son Damian has also performed the track while, interestingly in the context of this discussion, his older sibling Rohan co-founded Marley Coffee, an organic farm in the Jamaican Blue Mountains. Following Carey’s demonstration of mainstream pop’s increasingly realistic depiction of courtship behaviours during the 1960s, songwriters continued to draw on coffee as a metaphor for failed romance. In Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain (1972), she dreams of clouds in her coffee while contemplating an ostentatious ex-lover. Squeeze’s Black Coffee In Bed (1982) uses a coffee stain metaphor to describe the end of what appears to be yet another dead-end relationship for the protagonist. Sarah Harmer’s Coffee Stain (1998) expands on this device by reworking the familiar “lipstick on your collar” trope, while Sexsmith & Kerr’s duet Raindrops in my Coffee (2005) superimposes teardrops in coffee and raindrops on the pavement with compelling effect. Kate Bush’s Coffee Homeground (1978) provides the most extreme narrative of relationship breakdown: the true story of Cora Henrietta Crippin’s poisoning. Researchers who replicated Horton’s and Carey’s methodology in the late 1970s (Bridges; Denisoff) were surprised to find their results dominated by traditional courtship ideals. The new liberal values unearthed by Carey in the late 1960s simply failed to materialise in subsequent decades. In this context, it is interesting to observe how romantic coffee songs in contemporary soul and jazz continue to disavow the post-1960s trend towards realistic social narratives, adopting instead a conspicuously consumerist outlook accompanied by smooth musical timbres. This phenomenon possibly betrays the influence of contemporary coffee advertising. From the 1980s, television commercials have sought to establish coffee as a desirable high end product, enjoyed by bohemian lovers in a conspicuously up-market environment (Werder). All Saints’s Black Coffee (2000) and Lebrado’s Coffee (2006) identify strongly with the culture industry’s image of coffee as a luxurious beverage whose consumption signifies prominent social status. All Saints’s promotional video is set in a opulent location (although its visuals emphasise the lyric’s romantic disharmony), while Natalie Cole’s Coffee Time (2008) might have been itself written as a commercial. Busting Up a Starbucks: The Politics of Coffee Politics and coffee meet most palpably at the coffee shop. This conjunction has a well-documented history beginning with the establishment of coffee houses in Europe and the birth of the public sphere (Habermas; Love; Pincus). The first popular songs to reference coffee shops include Jaybird Coleman’s Coffee Grinder Blues (1930), which boasts of skills that precede the contemporary notion of a barista by four decades; and Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee (1932) from Irving Berlin’s depression-era musical Face The Music, where the protagonists decide to stay in a restaurant drinking coffee and eating pie until the economy improves. Coffee in a Cardboard Cup (1971) from the Broadway musical 70 Girls 70 is an unambiguous condemnation of consumerism, however, it was written, recorded and produced a generation before Starbucks’ aggressive expansion and rapid dominance of the coffee house market during the 1990s. The growth of this company caused significant criticism and protest against what seemed to be a ruthless homogenising force that sought to overwhelm local competition (Holt; Thomson). In response, Starbucks has sought to be defined as a more responsive and interactive brand that encourages “glocalisation” (de Larios; Thompson). Koller, however, has characterised glocalisation as the manipulative fabrication of an “imagined community”—whose heterogeneity is in fact maintained by the aesthetics and purchasing choices of consumers who make distinctive and conscious anti-brand statements (114). Neat Capitalism is a more useful concept here, one that intercedes between corporate ideology and postmodern cultural logic, where such notions as community relations and customer satisfaction are deliberately and perhaps somewhat cynically conflated with the goal of profit maximisation (Rojek). As the world’s largest chain of coffee houses with over 19,400 stores in March 2012 (Loxcel), Starbucks is an exemplar of this phenomenon. Their apparent commitment to environmental stewardship, community relations, and ethical sourcing is outlined in the company’s annual “Global Responsibility Report” (Vimac). It is also demonstrated in their engagement with charitable and environmental non-governmental organisations such as Fairtrade and Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). By emphasising this, Starbucks are able to interpellate (that is, “call forth”, “summon”, or “hail” in Althusserian terms) those consumers who value environmental protection, social justice and ethical business practices (Rojek 117). Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow provide interesting case studies of the persuasive cultural influence evoked by Neat Capitalism. Dylan’s 1962 song Talkin’ New York satirised his formative experiences as an impoverished performer in Greenwich Village’s coffee houses. In 1995, however, his decision to distribute the Bob Dylan: Live At The Gaslight 1962 CD exclusively via Starbucks generated significant media controversy. Prominent commentators expressed their disapproval (Wilson Harris) and HMV Canada withdrew Dylan’s product from their shelves (Lynskey). Despite this, the success of this and other projects resulted in the launch of Starbucks’s in-house record company, Hear Music, which released entirely new recordings from major artists such as Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Elvis Costello—although the company has recently announced a restructuring of their involvement in this venture (O’Neil). Sheryl Crow disparaged her former life as a waitress in Coffee Shop (1995), a song recorded for her second album. “Yes, I was a waitress. I was a waitress not so long ago; then I won a Grammy” she affirmed in a YouTube clip of a live performance from the same year. More recently, however, Crow has become an avowed self-proclaimed “Starbucks groupie” (Tickle), releasing an Artist’s Choice (2003) compilation album exclusively via Hear Music and performing at the company’s 2010 Annual Shareholders’s Meeting. Songs voicing more unequivocal dissatisfaction with Starbucks’s particular variant of Neat Capitalism include Busting Up a Starbucks (Mike Doughty, 2005), and Starbucks Takes All My Money (KJ-52, 2008). The most successful of these is undoubtedly Ron Sexsmith’s Jazz at the Bookstore (2006). Sexsmith bemoans the irony of intense original blues artists such as Leadbelly being drowned out by the cacophony of coffee grinding machines while customers queue up to purchase expensive coffees whose names they can’t pronounce. In this, he juxtaposes the progressive patina of corporate culture against the circumstances of African-American labour conditions in the deep South, the shocking incongruity of which eventually cause the old bluesman to turn in his grave. Fredric Jameson may have good reason to lament the depthless a-historical pastiche of postmodern popular culture, but this is no “nostalgia film”: Sexsmith articulates an artfully framed set of subtle, sensitive, and carefully contextualised observations. Songs about coffee also intersect with politics via lyrics that play on the mid-brown colour of the beverage, by employing it as a metaphor for the sociological meta-narratives of acculturation and assimilation. First popularised in Israel Zangwill’s 1905 stage play, The Melting Pot, this term is more commonly associated with Americanisation rather than miscegenation in the United States—a nuanced distinction that British band Blue Mink failed to grasp with their memorable invocation of “coffee-coloured people” in Melting Pot (1969). Re-titled in the US as People Are Together (Mickey Murray, 1970) the song was considered too extreme for mainstream radio airplay (Thompson). Ike and Tina Turner’s Black Coffee (1972) provided a more accomplished articulation of coffee as a signifier of racial identity; first by associating it with the history of slavery and the post-Civil Rights discourse of African-American autonomy, then by celebrating its role as an energising force for African-American workers seeking economic self-determination. Anyone familiar with the re-casting of black popular music in an industry dominated by Caucasian interests and aesthetics (Cashmore; Garofalo) will be unsurprised to find British super-group Humble Pie’s (1973) version of this song more recognisable. Conclusion Coffee-flavoured popular songs celebrate the stimulant effects of caffeine, provide metaphors for courtship rituals, and offer critiques of Neat Capitalism. Harold Love and Guthrie Ramsey have each argued (from different perspectives) that the cultural micro-narratives of small social groups allow us to identify important “ethnographic truths” (Ramsey 22). Aesthetically satisfying and intellectually stimulating coffee songs are found where these micro-narratives intersect with the ethnographic truths of coffee culture. Examples include the unconventional courtship narratives of blues singers Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt, the ritualised storytelling tradition of country performers Doye O’Dell and Tommy Faile, and historicised accounts of the Civil Rights struggle provided by Ron Sexsmith and Tina Turner. References Argenti, Paul. “Collaborating With Activists: How Starbucks Works With NGOs.” California Management Review 47.1 (2004): 91–116. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Bridges, John, and R. Serge Denisoff. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song: Horton and Carey revisited.” Popular Music and Society 10.3 (1986): 29–45. Carey, James. “Changing Courtship Patterns in the Popular Song.” The American Journal of Sociology 74.6 (1969): 720–31. Cashmere, Ellis. The Black Culture Industry. London: Routledge, 1997. “Coffee.” Theme Time Radio Hour hosted by Bob Dylan, XM Satellite Radio. 31 May 2006. Cooper, B. Lee, and William L. Schurk. “You’re the Cream in My Coffee: A Discography of Java Jive.” Popular Music and Society 23.2 (1999): 91–100. Crow, Sheryl. “Coffee Shop.” Beacon Theatre, New York City. 17 Mar. 1995. YouTube 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_-bDAjASQI ›. Curry, Andrew. “Drugs in Jazz and Rock Music.” Clinical Toxicology 1.2 (1968): 235–44. Dawson, Michael C. “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s) and Black Politics.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 195–223. de Larios, Margaret. “Alone, Together: The Social Culture of Music and the Coffee Shop.” URC Student Scholarship Paper 604 (2011). 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://scholar.oxy.edu/urc_student/604›. Englis, Basil, Michael Solomon and Anna Olofsson. “Consumption Imagery in Music Television: A Bi-Cultural Perspective.” Journal of Advertising 22.4 (1993): 21–33. Fox, Aaron. Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Fox, Aaron. “The Jukebox of History: Narratives of Loss and Desire in the Discourse of Country Music.” Popular Music 11.1 (1992): 53–72. Garofalo, Reebee. “Culture Versus Commerce: The Marketing of Black Popular Music.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 275–87. Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. Hamilton, Andy. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum, 2007. Harris, Craig. “Starbucks Opens Hear Music Shop in Bellevue.” Seattle Post Intelligencer 23 Nov. 2006. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Starbucks-opens-Hear-Music-shop-in-Bellevue-1220637.php›. Harris, John. “Lay Latte Lay.” The Guardian 1 Jul. 2005. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/jul/01/2?INTCMP=SRCH›. Holt, Douglas. “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (2002): 70–90. Horton, Donald. “The Dialogue of Courtship in Popular Songs.” American Journal of Sociology 62.6 (1957): 569–78. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Juliano, Laura, and Roland Griffiths. “A Critical Review of Caffeine Withdrawal: Empirical Validation of Symptoms and Signs, Incidence, Severity, and Associated Features.” Psychopharmacology 176 (2004): 1–29. Koller, Veronika. “‘The World’s Local Bank’: Glocalisation as a Strategy in Corporate Branding Discourse.” Social Semiotics 17.1 (2007): 111–31. Lawson, Rob A. Jim Crow’s Counterculture: The Blues and Black Southerners, 1890-1945 (Making the Modern South). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2010. Love, Harold. “How Music Created A Public.” Criticism 46.2 (2004): 257–72. “Loxcel Starbucks Map”. Loxcel.com 1 Mar. 2012 ‹loxcel.com/sbux-faq.hmtl›. Lovett, Richard. “Coffee: The Demon Drink?” New Scientist 2518. 24 Sep. 2005. 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725181.700›. Lynskey, Dorian. “Stir It Up: Starbucks Has Changed the Music Industry with its Deals with Dylan and Alanis. What’s Next?”. The Guardian 6 Oct. 2005: 18. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2005/oct/06/popandrock.marketingandpr›. Lyttle, Thomas, and Michael Montagne. “Drugs, Music, and Ideology: A Social Pharmacological Interpretation of the Acid House Movement.” The International Journal of the Addictions 27.10 (1992): 1159–77. McCracken, Grant. “Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods.” Journal of Consumer Research 13.1 (1986): 71–84. McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. London: Abacus, 1997. “New Music News” 120 Minutes MTV 28 Sep. 1986. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnqjqXztc0o›. O’Neil, Valerie. “Starbucks Refines its Entertainment Strategy.” Starbucks Newsroom 24 Apr. 2008. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://news.starbucks.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=48›. Pincus, Steve. “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture.” The Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 807–34. Primack, Brian, Madeline Dalton, Mary Carroll, Aaron Agarwal, and Michael Fine. “Content Analysis of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Other Drugs in Popular Music.” Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine 162.2 (2008): 169–75. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004676/›. Ramsey, Guthrie P. Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Rojek, Chris. Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Polity P, 2007. Rosenbaum, Jill, and Lorraine Prinsky. “Sex, Violence and Rock ‘N’ Roll: Youths’ Perceptions of Popular Music.” Popular Music and Society 11.2 (1987): 79–89. Shapiro, Harry. Waiting for the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music. London: Quartet Books, 1988. Singer, Merrill, and Greg Mirhej. “High Notes: The Role of Drugs in the Making of Jazz.” Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse 5.4 (2006):1–38. Squires, Catherine R. “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres.” Communication Theory 12.4 (2002): 446–68. Thompson, Craig J., and Zeynep Arsel. “The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004.): 631–42. Thompson, Erik. “Secret Stash Records Releases Forgotten Music in Stylish Packages: Meet Founders Cory Wong and Eric Foss.” CityPages 18 Jan. 2012. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.citypages.com/2012-01-18/music/secret-stash-records-releases-forgotten-music-in-stylish-packages/›.Tickle, Cindy. “Sheryl Crow Performs at Starbucks Annual Shareholders Meeting.” Examiner.com24 Mar. 2010. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.examiner.com/starbucks-in-national/sheryl-crow-performs-at-starbucks-annual-shareholders-meeting-photos›.Tolson, Gerald H., and Michael J. Cuyjet. “Jazz and Substance Abuse: Road to Creative Genius or Pathway to Premature Death?”. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 30 (2007): 530–38. Varma, Vivek, and Ben Packard. “Starbucks Global Responsibility Report Goals and Progress 2011”. Starbucks Corporation 1 Apr. 2012 ‹http://assets.starbucks.com/assets/goals-progress-report-2011.pdf›. Werder, Olaf. “Brewing Romance The Romantic Fantasy Theme of the Taster’s Choice ‘Couple’ Advertising Campaign.” Critical Thinking About Sex, Love, And Romance In The Mass Media: Media Literacy Applications. Eds. Mary-Lou Galician and Debra L. Merskin. New Jersey: Taylor & Francis, 2009. 35–48. Wilson, Jeremy “Desolation Row: Dylan Signs With Starbucks.” The Guardian 29 Jun. 2005. 1 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jun/29/bobdylan.digitalmedia?INTCMP=SRCH›. Winick, Charles. “The Use of Drugs by Jazz Musicians.” Social Problems 7.3 (1959): 240–53.

The Florida I grew up with - Marineland, Coral Castle, Weeki Wachee, mom-and-pop motels - is fast disappearing, replaced with more and more theme parks and big box chain hotels. Before the interstates laced across the state, US1 was the main access to Florida and many of these older attractions (or what remains of them) lie along this highway. The Land of Sunshine is my photographic series that sets out to document these disappearing monuments before all trace of them is gone. So much of living in a place designed for the sole purpose of selling itself to visitors is the sacrifice of nostalgia. These cute mom-and-pops motels and the boardwalk, which hold fond memories for many in the region, just look run down and “old” to the tourists. For this reason, little stays the way it is; there is constant remodeling, a never-ending expansion, and a steady development. This happens to the point that much of Florida’s history is lost, forgotten, and covered up by the sky-rise, beach-view condos that seem to multiply daily. Florida’s commodity is itself. It’s an image. It’s a reflection of both careful branding as well as exterior expectations. This process creates a special sort of irony. In an area where tourism is a major part of the economy, this region chooses to let itself be shaped so that visitors will be pleased. A business could only succeed based on the public opinions of places such as Peoria, IL or Toledo, OH. Now the region mourns the loss of landmarks built primarily for others. Starting at the Florida-Georgia border, I have been traveling along US1 documenting the remnants of attractions, motels, roadside stands, “tourist traps” and whatever else I find along the highway. There is a reoccurring theme along this highway and throughout Florida (and probably much of America right now) - property. Past commercial successes no longer possible and unbridled ambition have motivated small groups to purchase, parcel and zone all possible land. The result is an area razed by “outsiders” in the name of progress. To those in the region, the word “developer” has become something most foul. They are seen as destroyers of mass pleasure for the sake of private profit. They are seen as vampires. In my series I photographed an empty lot that once was the Daytona Bowl. My memories of the Daytona Bowl include skipping class one afternoon to go there with a friend in high school. I had never been bowling before and although it seemed like an odd way to spend a skip day (usually young people enjoy more “dangerous” or exciting activities) but there, with the unemployed and the retired, I bowled for the first time and found out I was fairly decent at the sport. The Daytona Bowl lot was purchased in 2004 and torn down in preparation for a condominium that was never built. Now the empty lot is up for sale. There are a lot of things in Daytona that were torn down in the real estate boom that were never replaced. I can’t help but think as I drive by them that if only they hadn’t been torn down in the first place we could still be bowling or playing skee ball at the boardwalk. How long can we as a society continue to expand? Is new always better? Is old always bad? Perhaps this region should be allowed to embrace what the tourists have abandoned. Liz Murphy Thomas is an artist, photographer and educator. She holds a BFA in Creative Photography from the University of Florida and an MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Ms. Thomas’ work investigates issues of identity, memory and the associations we give to our possessions. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Alexey Borisovich Shipunov Alexey Shipunov was an outstanding person in many ways. An accomplished botanist, he was also a programmer and a teacher. One of his many impressive features was his universality. Indeed, he was interested in a vast range of things, and his professional scope accordingly tended to be universal: for example, as a taxonomist, he studied a few groups of plants, but, unlike almost any taxonomist today (and like Linnaeus), he was keenly interested in the global system of life, and had his own opinion about how it should look like. Alexey was born and grew up in Moscow. He graduated from the Department of Higher Plants, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, in 1990. In 1998, he defended his candidate of sciences (PhD) thesis on taxonomy of the genera Plantago L. and Psyllium Mill. (Plantaginaceae) in European Russia and adjacent areas. Alexey’s thesis was supervised by Professor Vadim Nikolayevich Tikhomirov, who at that time was the head of the Department of Higher Plants. Having spent some years after his PhD in Moscow with no success in getting a research or teaching position at the University, in 2002–2003, he moved for a year to Kew Gardens, United Kingdom, then briefly returned to his hometown, and finally emigrated to the United States in 2006. He worked first at the university of another, much smaller, Moscow (Idaho), then in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and then in Minot, North Dakota, where he got his tenure. However, restless as he was, in 2019, Alexey left the USA for a temporary position at Kyoto University, Japan. Kyoto was his last place of residence. During his last few years, he travelled all around Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa, but mainly lived in the Old Capital. Alexey dedicated much of his time to education. He was a long-time member of the organising committee of the most informal of Russian biology contests for school students, the School Biology Olympics at Moscow State University. He taught at Moscow South-West High School No. 1543 (1992 – 2006), where he established a system of scientific projects for children of the specialised biology class; both the class and the system survived to this day. Alexey also taught in each of the several universities where he worked. Additionally, he recorded a lot of short educational videos for YouTube, and even during the last evening of his life he was preparing for an online lecture for students of Moscow University. Alexey was also into programming and considerably helped to develop and popularise the R software environment, which is widely used among researchers worldwide. Alexey published a series of manuals on employment of this programming language in biological studies. Alexey travelled across the world to study the flora of all its regions. One of his most impressive accomplishments was the re-discovery (together with his daughter, Ekaterina) of the poorly known plant Haptanthus Goldberg & C. Nelson in Honduras described as recently as in 1989. The plant was known from a few poorly preserved herbarium specimens, and its phylogenetic position and floral morphology remained unclear. Alexey’s re-discovery was instrumental in establishing the actual phylogenetic and structural relationships of this enigmatic and highly endangered monospecific genus. A video of his seminar talk on Haptanthus is available (see https://msu-botany.ru/ seminar-biology-2020/). The list of publications by Alexey provided here (Electronic appendix) and mainly compiled by himself demonstrates the enormous diversity of his scientific interests. He was always interested in any new techniques and ideas and, most importantly, had a unique and extremely broad knowledge of literature and scientific problems. Apart from his books, papers and other traditional publications, Alexey left some web resources, including two highly important and widely used ones: his Manual for the Plants of the World (http://herba.msu.ru/shipunov/school/f/index.htm) and the Flora and Fauna fundamental electronic library (http:// herba.msu.ru/shipunov/school/sch-ru.htm). Alexey Shipunov's materials (http://herba.msu.ru/ shipunov/index-en.htm) include diverse information that will be of continuous use for many teachers and researchers in biology. In particular, they comprise a series of versions of Alexey’s classification of flowering plants. This classification continuously was in the focus of Alexey’s interest. It provides an example of his ability to go against the mainstream. While nearly all the current classifications are illustrated or can be illustrated by cladograms, he continued the tradition of presenting a diagram of taxonomic relationships in the form of a two-dimensional map. This tradition was introduced in the 18th century by Paul Dietrich Giseke (inspired by Carl Linnaeus) and developed in the 20th century by Rolf Dahlgren. Alexey’s choice is related to the fact that, in the time of almost universal dominance of the cladistic concept of monophyly, he continued accepting paraphyletic taxa. In doing this, he followed the views of several major taxonomists of the 20th century, such as Armen Takhtajan, Arthur Cronquist, Rolf Dahlgren, and Robert Thorne. At the same time, he was using, as much as possible, any new pieces of phylogenetic evidence, including, of course, the molecular ones. As a result, Alexey’s system provides a unique opportunity to observe the pure impact of molecular data on angiosperm taxonomy because the classification of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group incorporated changes made according to the new molecular evidence as well as the cladistic interpretation of the idea of monophyly. Alexey’s diagram of classification (Fig. 2) can be used as a modern analogue of the famous Dahlgrenograms. The Flora and Fauna fundamental electronic library is one of the parts of Alexey’s heritage that will save the memory about him for a long time. In this project, which was upheld without any funding but with the enthusiastic help of numerous colleagues from various cities and countries, Alexey managed to compile an outstanding collection of literature on the biodiversity (and related topics) of the countries of the former Soviet Union. It is difficult to imagine any formally organised programme that has achieved a comparable enormous outcome. Apart from the pure scientific value, this library, and entire life of Alexey, served to save the remains of the Soviet scientific community and to maintain scientific links between experts in natural history from different countries. We will remember Alexey as a lively, bright, and kind person. For example, we will remember his self-ironic story about how he came to the Botanical Congress in Melbourne and rented a car. “I’m driving out of the airport and I see something is wrong; everyone is driving towards me. Oh… In Australia, you drive on the left side of the road.” Alexey died last year: he drowned while swimming in the Pacific Ocean near the coast of the Miyazaki Prefecture, Kyushu Island, Japan. We, his colleagues, lost in him a dear friend and a priceless source of knowledge. We will miss him, and will try to do our best to preserve his heritage.

“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them [...] life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” (Garcia Marquez 165) Introduction The refugee experience is, at heart, one of rebirth. Just as becoming a new, distinctive being—biological birth—necessarily involves the physical separation of mother and infant, so becoming a refugee entails separation from a "mother country." This mother country may or may not be a recognised nation state; the point is that the refugee transitions from physical connectedness to separation, from insider to outsider, from endemic to alien. Like babies, refugees may have little control over the timing and conditions of their expulsion. Successful resettlement requires not one rebirth but multiple rebirths—resettlement is a lifelong process (Layton)—which in turn require hope, imagination, and energy. In rebirthing themselves over and over again, people who have fled or been forced from their homelands become both mother and child. They do not go through this rebirthing alone. A range of agencies and individuals may be there to assist, including immigration officials, settlement services, schools and teachers, employment agencies and employers, English as a Second Language (ESL) resources and instructors, health-care providers, counsellors, diasporic networks, neighbours, church groups, and other community organisations. The nature, intensity, and duration of these “midwives’” interventions—and when they occur and in what combinations—vary hugely from place to place and from person to person, but there is clear evidence that post-migration experiences have a significant impact on settlement outcomes (Fozdar and Hartley). This paper draws on qualitative research I did in 2012 in a regional town in New South Wales to illuminate some of the ways in which settlement aides ease, or impede, refugees’ rebirth as fully recognised and participating Australians. I begin by considering what it means to be resilient before tracing some of the dimensions of the resettlement process. In doing so, I draw on data from interviews and focus groups with former refugees, service providers, and other residents of the town I shall call Easthaven. First, though, a word about Easthaven. As is the case in many rural and regional parts of Australia, Easthaven’s population is strongly dominated by Anglo Celtic and Saxon ancestries: 2011 Census data show that more than 80 per cent of residents were born in Australia (compared with a national figure of 69.8 per cent) and about 90 per cent speak only English at home (76.8 per cent). Almost twice as many people identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander as the national figure of 2.5 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics). For several years Easthaven has been an official “Refugee Welcome Zone”, welcoming hundreds of refugees from diverse countries in Africa and the Middle East as well as from Myanmar. This reflects the Department of Immigration and Citizenship’s drive to settle a fifth of Australia’s 13,750 humanitarian entrants a year directly in regional areas. In Easthaven’s schools—which is where I focused my research—almost all of the ESL students are from refugee backgrounds. Defining Resilience Much of the research on human resilience is grounded in psychology, with a capacity to “bounce back” from adverse experiences cited in many definitions of resilience (e.g. American Psychological Association). Bouncing back implies a relatively quick process, and a return to a state or form similar to that which existed before the encounter with adversity. Yet resilience often requires sustained effort and significant changes in identity. As Jerome Rugaruza, a former UNHCR refugee, says of his journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Australia: All the steps begin in the burning village: you run with nothing to eat, no clothes. You just go. Then you get to the refugee camp […] You have a little bread and you thank god you are safe. Then after a few years in the camp, you think about a future for your children. You arrive in Australia and then you learn a new language, you learn to drive. There are so many steps and not everyone can do it. (Milsom) Not everyone can do it, but a large majority do. Research by Graeme Hugo, for example, shows that although humanitarian settlers in Australia face substantial barriers to employment and initially have much higher unemployment rates than other immigrants, for most nationality groups this difference has disappeared by the second generation: “This is consistent with the sacrifice (or investment) of the first generation and the efforts extended to attain higher levels of education and English proficiency, thereby reducing the barriers over time.” (Hugo 35). Ingrid Poulson writes that “resilience is not just about bouncing. Bouncing […] is only a reaction. Resilience is about rising—you rise above it, you rise to the occasion, you rise to the challenge. Rising is an active choice” (47; my emphasis) I see resilience as involving mental and physical grit, coupled with creativity, aspiration and, crucially, agency. Dimensions of Resettlement To return to the story of 41-year-old Jerome Rugaruza, as related in a recent newspaper article: He [Mr Rugaruza] describes the experience of being a newly arrived refugee as being like that of a newborn baby. “You need special care; you have to learn to speak [English], eat the different food, create relationships, connections”. (Milsom) This is a key dimension of resettlement: the adult becomes like an infant again, shifting from someone who knows how things work and how to get by to someone who is likely to be, for a while, dependent on others for even the most basic things—communication, food, shelter, clothing, and social contact. The “special care” that most refugee arrivals need initially (and sometimes for a long time) often results in their being seen as deficient—in knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capacities as well as material goods (Keddie; Uptin, Wright and Harwood). As Fozdar and Hartley note: “The tendency to use a deficit model in refugee resettlement devalues people and reinforces the view of the mainstream population that refugees are a liability” (27). Yet unlike newborns, humanitarian settlers come to their new countries with rich social networks and extensive histories of experience and learning—resources that are in fact vital to their rebirth. Sisay (all names are pseudonyms), a year 11 student of Ethiopian heritage who was born in Kenya, told me with feeling: I had a life back in Africa [her emphasis]. It was good. Well, I would go back there if there’s no problems, which—is a fact. And I came here for a better life—yeah, I have a better life, there’s good health care, free school, and good environment and all that. But what’s that without friends? A fellow student, Celine, who came to Australia five years ago from Burundi via Uganda, told me in a focus group: Some teachers are really good but I think some other teachers could be a little bit more encouraging and understanding of what we’ve gone through, because [they] just look at you like “You’re year 11 now, you should know this” […] It’s really discouraging when [the teachers say] in front of the class, “Oh, you shouldn’t do this subject because you haven’t done this this this this” […] It’s like they’re on purpose to tell you “you don’t have what it takes; just give up and do something else.” As Uptin, Wright and Harwood note, “schools not only have the power to position who is included in schooling (in culture and pedagogy) but also have the power to determine whether there is room and appreciation for diversity” (126). Both Sisay and Celine were disheartened by the fact they felt some of their teachers, and many of their peers, had little interest in or understanding of their lives before they came to Australia. The teachers’ low expectations of refugee-background students (Keddie, Uptin, Wright and Harwood) contrasted with the students’ and their families’ high expectations of themselves (Brown, Miller and Mitchell; Harris and Marlowe). When I asked Sisay about her post-school ambitions, she said: “I have a good idea of my future […] write a documentary. And I’m working on it.” Celine’s response was: “I know I’m gonna do medicine, be a doctor.” A third girl, Lily, who came to Australia from Myanmar three years ago, told me she wanted to be an accountant and had studied accounting at the local TAFE last year. Joseph, a father of three who resettled from South Sudan seven years ago, stressed how important getting a job was to successful settlement: [But] you have to get a certificate first to get a job. Even the job of cleaning—when I came here I was told that somebody has to go to have training in cleaning, to use the different chemicals to clean the ground and all that. But that is just sweeping and cleaning with water—you don’t need the [higher-level] skills. Simple jobs like this, we are not able to get them. In regional Australia, employment opportunities tend to be limited (Fozdar and Hartley); the unemployment rate in Easthaven is twice the national average. Opportunities to study are also more limited than in urban centres, and would-be students are not always eligible for financial assistance to gain or upgrade qualifications. Even when people do have appropriate qualifications, work experience, and language proficiency, the colour of their skin may still mean they miss out on a job. Tilbury and Colic-Peisker have documented the various ways in which employers deflect responsibility for racial discrimination, including the “common” strategy (658) of arguing that while the employer or organisation is not prejudiced, they have to discriminate because of their clients’ needs or expectations. I heard this strategy deployed in an interview with a local businesswoman, Catriona: We were advertising for a new technician. And one of the African refugees came to us and he’d had a lot of IT experience. And this is awful, but we felt we couldn't give him the job, because we send our technicians into people's houses, and we knew that if a black African guy rocked up at someone’s house to try and fix their computer, they would not always be welcomed in all—look, it would not be something that [Easthaven] was ready for yet. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (Refugees and Employment) note that while Australia has strict anti-discrimination legislation, this legislation may be of little use to the people who, because of the way they look and sound (skin colour, dress, accent), are most likely to face prejudice and discrimination. The researchers found that perceived discrimination in the labour market affected humanitarian settlers’ sense of satisfaction with their new lives far more than, for example, racist remarks, which were generally shrugged off; the students I interviewed spoke of racism as “expected,” but “quite rare.” Most of the people Colic-Peisker and Tilbury surveyed reported finding Australians “friendly and accepting” (33). Even if there is no active discrimination on the basis of skin colour in employment, education, or housing, or overt racism in social situations, visible difference can still affect a person’s sense of belonging, as Joseph recounts: I think of myself as Australian, but my colour doesn’t [laughs] […] Unfortunately many, many Australians are expecting that Australia is a country of Europeans … There is no need for somebody to ask “Where do you come from?” and “Do you find Australia here safe?” and “Do you enjoy it?” Those kind of questions doesn’t encourage that we are together. This highlights another dimension of resettlement: the journey from feeling “at home” to feeling “foreign” to, eventually, feeling at home again in the host country (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, Refugees and Employment). In the case of visibly different settlers, however, this last stage may never be completed. Whether the questions asked of Joseph are well intentioned or not, their effect may be the same: they position him as a “forever foreigner” (Park). A further dimension of resettlement—one already touched on—is the degree to which humanitarian settlers actively manage their “rebirth,” and are allowed and encouraged to do so. A key factor will be their mastery of English, and Easthaven’s ESL teachers are thus pivotal in the resettlement process. There is little doubt that many of these teachers have gone to great lengths to help this cohort of students, not only in terms of language acquisition but also social inclusion. However, in some cases what is initially supportive can, with time, begin to undermine refugees’ maturity into independent citizens. Sharon, an ESL teacher at one of the schools, told me how she and her colleagues would give their refugee-background students lifts to social events: But then maybe three years down the track they have a car and their dad can drive, but they still won’t take them […] We arrive to pick them up and they’re not ready, or there’s five fantastic cars in the driveway, and you pick up the student and they say “My dad’s car’s much bigger and better than yours” [laughs]. So there’s an expectation that we’ll do stuff for them, but we’ve created that [my emphasis]. Other support services may have more complex interests in keeping refugee settlers dependent. The more clients an agency has, the more services it provides, and the longer clients stay on its books, the more lucrative the contract for the agency. Thus financial and employment imperatives promote competition rather than collaboration between service providers (Fozdar and Hartley; Sidhu and Taylor) and may encourage assumptions about what sorts of services different individuals and groups want and need. Colic-Peisker and Tilbury (“‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”) have developed a typology of resettlement styles—“achievers,” “consumers,” “endurers,” and “victims”—but stress that a person’s style, while influenced by personality and pre-migration factors, is also shaped by the institutions and individuals they come into contact with: “The structure of settlement and welfare services may produce a victim mentality, leaving members of refugee communities inert and unable to see themselves as agents of change” (76). The prevailing narrative of “the traumatised refugee” is a key aspect of this dynamic (Colic-Peisker and Tilbury, “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement”; Fozdar and Hartley; Keddie). Service providers may make assumptions about what humanitarian settlers have gone through before arriving in Australia, how they have been affected by their experiences, and what must be done to “fix” them. Norah, a long-time caseworker, told me: I think you get some [providers] who go, “How could you have gone through something like that and not suffered? There must be—you must have to talk about this stuff” […] Where some [refugees] just come with the [attitude] “We’re all born into a situation; that was my situation, but I’m here now and now my focus is this.” She cited failure to consider cultural sensitivities around mental illness and to recognise that stress and anxiety during early resettlement are normal (Tilbury) as other problems in the sector: [Newly arrived refugees] go through the “happy to be here” [phase] and now “hang on, I’ve thumped to the bottom and I’m missing my own foods and smells and cultures and experiences”. I think sometimes we’re just too quick to try and slot people into a box. One factor that appears to be vital in fostering and sustaining resilience is social connection. Norah said her clients were “very good on the mobile phone” and had links “everywhere,” including to family and friends in their countries of birth, transition countries, and other parts of Australia. A 2011 report for DIAC, Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals, found that humanitarian entrants to Australia were significantly more likely to be members of cultural and/or religious groups than other categories of immigrants (Australian Survey Research). I found many examples of efforts to build both bonding and bridging capital (Putnam) in Easthaven, and I offer two examples below. Several people told me about a dinner-dance that had been held a few weeks before one of my visits. The event was organised by an African women’s group, which had been formed—with funding assistance—several years before. The dinner-dance was advertised in the local newspaper and attracted strong interest from a broad cross-section of Easthaveners. To Debbie, a counsellor, the response signified a “real turnaround” in community relations and was a big boon to the women’s sense of belonging. Erica, a teacher, told me about a cultural exchange day she had organised between her bush school—where almost all of the children are Anglo Australian—and ESL students from one of the town schools: At the start of the day, my kids were looking at [the refugee-background students] and they were scared, they were saying to me, "I feel scared." And we shoved them all into this tiny little room […] and they had no choice but to sit practically on top of each other. And by the end of the day, they were hugging each other and braiding their hair and jumping and playing together. Like Uptin, Wright and Harwood, I found that the refugee-background students placed great importance on the social aspects of school. Sisay, the girl I introduced earlier in this paper, said: “It’s just all about friendship and someone to be there for you […] We try to be friends with them [the non-refugee students] sometimes but sometimes it just seems they don’t want it.” Conclusion A 2012 report on refugee settlement services in NSW concludes that the state “is not meeting its responsibility to humanitarian entrants as well as it could” (Audit Office of New South Wales 2); moreover, humanitarian settlers in NSW are doing less well on indicators such as housing and health than humanitarian settlers in other states (3). Evaluating the effectiveness of formal refugee-centred programs was not part of my research and is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I have sought to reveal some of the ways in which the attitudes, assumptions, and everyday practices of service providers and members of the broader community impact on refugees' settlement experience. What I heard repeatedly in the interviews I conducted was that it was emotional and practical support (Matthews; Tilbury), and being asked as well as told (about their hopes, needs, desires), that helped Easthaven’s refugee settlers bear themselves into fulfilling new lives. References Audit Office of New South Wales. Settling Humanitarian Entrants in New South Wales—Executive Summary. May 2012. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.audit.nsw.gov.au/ArticleDocuments/245/02_Humanitarian_Entrants_2012_Executive_Summary.pdf.aspx?Embed=Y>. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2011 Census QuickStats. Mar. 2013. 11 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/census_services/getproduct/census/2011/quickstat/0>. Australian Survey Research. Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals—Report of Findings. Apr. 2011. 15 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/research/_pdf/settlement-outcomes-new-arrivals.pdf>. Brown, Jill, Jenny Miller, and Jane Mitchell. “Interrupted Schooling and the Acquisition of Literacy: Experiences of Sudanese Refugees in Victorian Secondary Schools.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 29.2 (2006): 150-62. Colic-Peisker, Val, and Farida Tilbury. “‘Active’ and ‘Passive’ Resettlement: The Influence of Supporting Services and Refugees’ Own Resources on Resettlement Style.” International Migration 41.5 (2004): 61-91. ———. Refugees and Employment: The Effect of Visible Difference on Discrimination—Final Report. Perth: Centre for Social and Community Research, Murdoch University, 2007. Fozdar, Farida, and Lisa Hartley. “Refugee Resettlement in Australia: What We Know and Need To Know.” Refugee Survey Quarterly 4 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/search?fulltext=fozdar&submit=yes&x=0&y=0>. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Love in the Time of Cholera. London: Penguin Books, 1989. Harris, Vandra, and Jay Marlowe. “Hard Yards and High Hopes: The Educational Challenges of African Refugee University Students in Australia.” International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23.2 (2011): 186-96. Hugo, Graeme. A Significant Contribution: The Economic, Social and Civic Contributions of First and Second Generation Humanitarian Entrants—Summary of Findings. Canberra: Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2011. Keddie, Amanda. “Pursuing Justice for Refugee Students: Addressing Issues of Cultural (Mis)recognition.” International Journal of Inclusive Education 16.12 (2012): 1295-1310. Layton, Robyn. "Building Capacity to Ensure the Inclusion of Vulnerable Groups." Creating Our Future conference, Adelaide, 28 Jul. 2012. Milsom, Rosemarie. “From Hard Luck Life to the Lucky Country.” Sydney Morning Herald 20 Jun. 2013. 12 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/national/from-hard-luck-life-to-the-lucky-country-20130619-2oixl.html>. Park, Gilbert C. “’Are We Real Americans?’: Cultural Production of Forever Foreigners at a Diversity Event.” Education and Urban Society 43.4 (2011): 451-67. Poulson, Ingrid. Rise. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2008. Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Sidhu, Ravinder K., and Sandra Taylor. “The Trials and Tribulations of Partnerships in Refugee Settlement Services in Australia.” Journal of Education Policy 24.6 (2009): 655-72. Tilbury, Farida. “‘I Feel I Am a Bird without Wings’: Discourses of Sadness and Loss among East Africans in Western Australia.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 14.4 (2007): 433-58. ———, and Val Colic-Peisker. “Deflecting Responsibility in Employer Talk about Race Discrimination.” Discourse & Society 17.5 (2006): 651-76. Uptin, Jonnell, Jan Wright, and Valerie Harwood. “It Felt Like I Was a Black Dot on White Paper: Examining Young Former Refugees’ Experience of Entering Australian High Schools.” The Australian Educational Researcher 40.1 (2013): 125-37.

Why do politicians wear what they wear? Social conventions and parliamentary rules largely shape how politicians dress. Clothing is about power, especially if we think about clothing as uniforms. Uniforms of judges and police are easily recognised as symbols of power. Similarly, the business suit of a politician is recognised as a form of authority. But what if you are a female politician: what do you wear to work or in public? Why do we expect politicians to wear suits and ties? While we do expect a certain level of behaviour of our political leaders, why does the professionalised suit and tie signal this? And what happens if a politician challenges this convention? Female politicians, and largely any women in a position of power in the public sphere, are judged when they don’t conform to the social conventions of appropriate dress. Arguably, male politicians are largely not examined for their suit preferences (unless you are Paul Keating wearing Zenga suits or Anthony Albanese during an election make-over), so why are female politicians’ clothes so scrutinised and framed as reflective of their abilities or character? This article interrogates the political uniform and its gendered contestations. It does so via the ways female politicians are challenging gender norms and power relations in how they dress in public, political, and parliamentary contexts. It considers how rules and conventions around political clothing are political in themselves, through a discussion on how female politicians and political figures choose to adhere to or break these rules. Rules about what dress is worn by parliamentarians are often archaic, often drawn from rules set by parliaments largely made up of men. But even with more women sitting in parliaments, dress rules still reflect a very masculine idea of what is appropriate. Dress standards in the Australian federal parliament are described as a “matter for individual judgement”, however the Speaker of the House of Representatives can make rulings on members’ attire. In 1983, the Speaker ruled dress was to be neat, clean, and decent. In 1999, the Speaker considered dress to be “formal” and “similar to that generally accepted in business and professional circles”. This was articulated by the Speaker to be “good trousers, a jacket, collar and tie for men and a similar standard of formality for women”. In 2005, the Speaker reinforced this ruling that dress should be “formal” in keeping with business and professional standards, adding there was no “dignity of the House for Members to arrive in casual or sportswear” (“Dress”). Clothes with “printed slogans” are not considered acceptable and result in a warning from the Speaker for Australian MPs to “dress more appropriately”. Previous dress rulings also include that members should not remove their jackets in parliament, “tailored safari suits without a tie were acceptable, members could wear hats in parliament but had to remove them while entering or leaving the chamber and while speaking”. The safari suit rule likely refers to the former Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans’s wearing of the garment during the 1980s and 1990s. The Speaker can also rule on what a member of the federal parliament can’t do. While in parliament, members can’t smoke, can’t read a newspaper, can’t distribute apples, may not climb over seats, and can’t hit or kick their desks. Members of parliament can however use their mobile phones for text messaging, and laptops can be used for emails (“Dress”). These examples suggest an almost old-fashioned type of school rules juxtaposed with modern sensibilities, positing the ad-hoc nature of parliamentary rules, with dress rules further evidence of this. While a business suit is considered the orthodoxy of the political uniform for male politicians, this largely governs rules about what female politicians wear. The business suit, the quasi-political uniform for male MPs, is implicit and has social consensus. The suit, which covers the body, is comprised of trousers to the ankle, well cut in muted colours of blue, grey, brown, and black, with contrasting shirts, often white or light colours, ties that may have a splash of colour, often demonstrating allegiances or political persuasions, mostly red or blue, as in the case of Labor and Liberal or Republicans and Democrats. The conventions of the suit are largely proscribed onto women, who wear a female version of the male suit, with some leeway in colour and pattern. Dress for female MPs should be modest, as with the suit, covering much of the body, and especially have a modest neckline and be at least knee length. In the American Congress, the dress code requires “men to wear suit jackets and ties ... and women are not supposed to wear sleeveless tops or dresses without a sweater or jacket” (Zengerle). In 2017, this prompted US Congresswomen to wear sleeveless dresses as a “right to bare arms” (Deutch and Karl). In these two Australian and American examples of a masculine parliamentary wear it is reasonable to suppose a seeming universality about politicians’ dress codes. But who decides what is the correct mode of political uniform? Sartorial rules about what are acceptable clothing choices are usually made by the dominant group, and this is the case when it comes to what politicians wear. Some rules about what is worn in parliament are archaic to our minds today, such as the British parliament law from 1313 which outlaws the wearing of armour and weaponry inside the chamber. More modern rulings from the UK include the banning of hats in the House of Commons (although not the Lords), and women being permitted handbags, but not men (Simm). This last rule reveals how clothing and its performance is gendered, as does the Australian parliament rule that a “Member may keep his hands in his pockets while speaking” (“Dress”), which assumes the speaker is likely a man wearing trousers. Political Dress as Uniform While political dress may be considered as a dress ‘code’ it can also be understood as a uniform because the dress reflects their job as public, political representatives. When dress code is considered as a uniform, homogenisation of dress occurs. Uniformity, somewhat ironically, can emphasise transgressions, as Jennifer Craik explains: “cultural transgression is a means of simultaneously undermining and reinforcing rules of uniforms since an effective transgressive performance relies on shared understandings of normative meanings, designated codes of conduct and connotations” (Craik 210). Codified work wear usually comes under the umbrella of uniforms. Official uniforms are the most obvious type of uniforms, clearly denoting the organisation of the wearer. Military, police, nurses, firefighters, and post-office workers often have recognisable uniforms. These uniforms are often accompanied by a set of rules that govern the “proper” wearing of these items. Uniforms rules do not just govern how the clothing is worn, they also govern the conduct of the person wearing the uniform. For example, a police officer in uniform, whether or not on duty, is expected to maintain certain codes of behaviour as well as dress standards. Yet dress, as Craik notes, can also be transgressive, allowing the wearer to challenge the underpinning conventions of the dress codes. Both Australian Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to name just two, leveraged social understandings of uniforms when they used their clothing to communicate political messages. Fashion as political communication or as ‘fashion politics’ is not a new phenomenon (Oh 374). Jennifer Craik argues that there are two other types of uniform; the unofficial and the quasi-uniform (17). Unofficial uniforms are generally adopted in lieu of official uniforms. They generally arise organically from group members and function in similar ways to official uniforms, and they tend to be identical in appearance, even if hierarchical. Examples of these include the yellow hi-vis jackets worn by the French Gilets Jaunes during the 2018 protests against rising costs of living and economic injustice (Coghlan). Quasi-uniforms work slightly differently. They exist where official and unofficial rules govern the wearing of clothes that are beyond the normal social rules of clothing. For example, the business suit is generally considered appropriate attire for those working in a conservative corporate environment: some workplaces restrict skirt, trouser, and jacket colours to navy, grey, or black, accompanied by a white shirt or blouse. In this way we can consider parliamentary dress to be a form of “quasi-uniform”, governed by both official and unofficial workplaces rules, but discretionary as to what the person chooses to wear in order to abide by these rules, which as described above are policed by the parliamentary Speaker. In the Australian House of Representatives, official rules are laid down in the policy “Dress and Conduct in the Chamber” which allows that “the standard of dress in the Chamber is a matter for the individual judgement of each Member, [but] the ultimate discretion rests with the Speaker” (“Dress”). Clothing rules within parliamentary chambers may establish order but also may seem counter-intuitive to the notions of democracy and free speech. However, when they are subverted, these rules can make clothing statements seem even more stark. Jennifer Craik argues that “wearing a uniform properly ... is more important that the items of clothing and decoration themselves” (4) and it is this very notion that makes transgressive use of the uniform so powerful. As noted by Coghlan, what we wear is a powerful tool of political struggle. French revolutionaries rejected the quasi-uniforms of the French nobility and their “gold-braided coat, white silk stockings, lace stock, plumed hat and sword” (Fairchilds 423), and replaced it with the wearing of the tricolour cockade, a badge of red, blue, and white ribbons which signalled wearers as revolutionaries. Uniforms in this sense can be understood to reinforce social hierarchies and demonstrate forms of power and control. Coghlan also reminds us that the quasi-uniform of women’s bloomers in the 1850s, often referred to as “reform dress”, challenged gender norms and demonstrated women’s agency. The wearing of pants by women came to “symbolize the movement for women’s rights” (Ladd Nelson 24). The wearing of quasi-political uniforms by those seeking social change has a long history, from the historical examples already noted to the Khadi Movement led by Gandhi’s “own sartorial choices of transformation from that of an Englishman to that of one representing India” (Jain), to the wearing of sharecropper overalls by African American civil rights activists to Washington to hear Martin Luther King in 1963, to the Aboriginal Long March to Freedom in 1988, the Tibetan Freedom Movement in 2008, and the 2017 Washington Pink Pussy Hat March, just to name a few (Coghlan). Here shared dress uniforms signal political allegiance, operating not that differently from the shared meanings of the old-school tie or tie in the colour of political membership. Political Fashion Clothing has been used by queens, female diplomats, and first ladies as signs of power. For members of early royal households, “rank, wealth, magnificence, and personal virtue was embodied in dress, and, as such, dress was inherently political, richly materialising the qualities associated with the wearer” (Griffey 15). Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), in order to subvert views that she was unfit to rule because of her sex, presented herself as a virgin to prove she was “morally worthy of holding the traditionally masculine office of monarch” (Howey 2009). To do this she dressed in ways projecting her virtue, meaning her thousands of gowns not only asserted her wealth, they asserted her power as each gown featured images and symbols visually reinforcing her standing as the Virgin Queen (Otnes and Maclaren 40). Not just images and symbols, but colour is an important part of political uniforms. Just as Queen Elizabeth I’s choice of white was an important communication tool to claim her right to rule, Queen Victoria used colour to indicate status and emotion, exclusively wearing black mourning clothes for the 41 years of her widowhood and thus “creating a solemn and pious image of the Queen” (Agnew). Dress as a sign of wealth is one aspect of these sartorial choices, the other is dress as a sign of power. Today, argues Mansel, royal dress is as much political as it is performative, embedded with a “transforming power” (Mansel xiiv). With the “right dress”, be it court dress, national dress, military or civil uniform, royals can encourage loyalty, satisfy vanity, impress the outside world, and help local industries (Mansel xiv). For Queen Elizabeth II, her uniform rendered her visible as The Queen; a brand rather than the person. Her clothes were not just “style choices”; they were “steeped with meaning and influence” that denoted her role as ambassador and figurehead (Atkinson). Her wardrobe of public uniforms was her “communication”, saying she was “prepared, reliable and traditional” (Atkinson). Queen Elizabeth’s other public uniform was that of the “tweed-skirted persona whose image served as cultural shorthand for conservative and correct manner and mode” (Otnes and Maclaren 19). For her royal tours, the foreign dress of Queen Elizabeth was carefully planned with a key “understanding of the political semantics of fashion … with garments and accessories … pay[ing] homage to the key symbols of the host countries” (Otnes and Maclaren 49). Madeline Albright, former US Secretary of State, engaged in sartorial diplomacy not with fashion but with jewellery, specifically pins (Albright). She is quoted as saying on good days, when I wanted to project prosperity and happiness, I'd put on suns, ladybugs, flowers, and hot-air balloons that signified high hopes. On bad days, I'd reach for spiders and carnivorous animals. If the progress was slower than I liked during a meeting in the Middle East, I'd wear a snail pin. And when I was dealing with crabby people, I put on a crab. Other ambassadors started to notice, and whenever they asked me what I was up to on any given day, I would tell them, “Read my pins”. (Burack) Two American first ladies, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michelle Obama, demonstrate how their fashion acted as a political uniform to challenge the ideal notions of American womanhood that for generations were embedded in the first lady (Rall et al.). While modern first ladies are now more political in their championing of causes and play an important role in presidential election, there are lingering expectations that the first lady be the mother of the nation (Caroli). First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s eclectic style challenged the more conservative tone set by prior Republican first ladies, notably Barbara Bush. Rodham Clinton is a feminist and lawyer more interested in policy that the domesticity of White House functions and décor. Her fashion reflects her “independence, individuality and agency”, providing a powerful message to American women (Rall et al. 274). This was not that much of a shift from her appearance as the wife of a Southern Governor who wouldn’t wear makeup and kept her maiden name (Anderson and Sheeler 26). More recently, as Democratic Presidential nominee, Rodham Clinton again used fashion to tell voters that a woman could wear a suit and become president. Rodham Clinton’s political fashion acted to contest the gender stereotypes about who could sit in the White House (Oh 374). Again, the pantsuit was not new for Rodham Clinton; “when I ran for Senate in 2000 and President in 2008, I basically had a uniform: a simple pantsuit, often black” (Mejia). Rodham Clinton says the “benefit to having a uniform is finding an easy way to fit in … to do what male politicians do and wear more or less the same thing every day”. As a woman running for president in 2016, the pantsuit acted as a “visual cue” that she was “different from the men but also familiar” (Mejia). Similarly, First Lady Michelle Obama adopted a political uniform to situate her role in American society. Gender but also race and class played a role in shaping her performance (Guerrero). As the first black First Lady, in the context of post-9/11 America which pushed a “Buy American” retail campaign, and perhaps in response to the novelty of a black First Lady, Obama expressed her political fashion by returning the First Lady narrative back to the confines of family and domesticity (Dillaway and Paré). To do this, she “presented a middle-class casualness by wearing mass retail items from popular chain stores and the use of emerging American designers for her formal political appearances” (Rall et al. 274). Although the number of women elected into politics has been increasing, gender stereotypes remain, and female representation in politics still remains low in most countries (Oh 376). Hyland argues that female politicians are subject to more intense scrutiny over their appearance … they are held to higher standards for their professional dress and expected to embody a number of paradoxes — powerful yet demure, covered-up but not too prim. They’re also expected to keep up with trends in a way that their male counterparts are not. Sexism can too easily encroach upon critiques of what they wear. How female politicians dress is often more reported than their political or parliamentary contributions. This was the case for Australia’s first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Jansens’s 2019 research well demonstrates the media preoccupation with political women’s fashion in a number of ways, be it the colours they choose to wear, how their clothing reveals their bodies, and judgements about the professionalism of their sartorial choices and the number of times certain items of clothing are worn. Jansens provides a number of informative examples noting the media’s obsession with Gillard’s choices of jackets that were re-worn and tops that showed her cleavage. One Australian Financial Review columnist reported, I don’t think it’s appropriate for a Prime Minister to be showing her cleavage in Parliament. It’s not something I want to see. It is inappropriate to be in Parliament, it is disrespectful to yourself and to the Australian community and to the parliament to present yourself in a manner that is unprofessional. (Jansens) The media preoccupation with female politicians’ clothing is noted elsewhere. In the 2012 Korean presidential election, Geun-hye Park became the first female president of Korea, yet media reports focussed largely on Park’s fashion: a 2013 newspaper published a four-page analysis titled “Park Geun-hye Fashion Project”. Another media outlet published a review of the 409 formal function outfits worn by Park (Oh 378). The larger focus, however, remains on Park’s choice to wear a suit, referred to as her “combat uniform” (Cho), for her daily parliamentary and political duties. This led Oh to argue that Korean female politicians, including Park, wear a “male suit as a means for benefit and survival”; however, with such media scrutiny “female politicians are left under constant surveillance” (382). As Jansens argues, clothing can act as a “communicative barrier between the body and society”, and a narrative that focusses on how clothes fit and look “illustrates women’s bodies as exceptional to the uniform of the political sphere, which is a masculine aesthetic” (212). Drawing on Entwistle, Jansens maintains that the the uniform “serves the purpose in policing the boundaries of sexual difference”, with “uniforms of gender, such as the suit, enabl[ing] the repetitious production of gender”. In this context, female politicians are in a double bind. Gillard, for example, in changing her aesthetic illustrates the “false dichotomy, or the ‘double bind’ of women’s competency and femininity that women can be presented with regarding their agency to conform, or their agency to deviate from the masculine aesthetic norm” (Jansens 212). This was likely also the experience of Jeannette Rankin, with media reports focusing on Rankin’s “looks and “personal habits,” and headlines such “Congresswoman Rankin Real Girl; Likes Nice Gowns and Tidy Hair” (“Masquerading”). In this article, however, the focus is not on the media preoccupation with female politicians’ political fashion; rather, it is on how female politicians, rather than conforming to masculine aesthetic norms of wearing suit-like attire, are increasingly contesting the political uniform and in doing so are challenging social and political boundaries As Yangzom puts it, how the “embodiment of dress itself alters political space and civic discourse is imperative to understanding how resistance is performed in creating social change” (623). This is a necessary socio-political activity because the “way the media talks about women affects the way women are perceived in society. If women’s appearances are consistently highlighted in the media, inequality of opportunity will follow from this inequality of treatment” (Jansens 215). Contesting the Political Uniform Breaking fashion norms, or as Entwistle argues, “bodies which flout the conventions of their culture and go without the appropriate clothes are subversive of the most basic social codes and risk exclusion, scorn and ridicule” (7), hence the price may be high to pay for a public figure. American Vice-President Kamala Harris’s penchant for comfy sneakers earned her the nickname “the Converse candidate”. Her choice to wear sneakers rather than a more conventional low-heel shoe didn’t necessarily bring about a backlash; rather, it framed her youthful image (possibly to contrast against Trump and Biden) and posited a “hit the ground running” approach (Hyland). Or, as Devaney puts it, “laced up and ready to win … [Harris] knew her classic American trainers signalled a can-do attitude and a sense of purpose”. Increasingly, political women, rather than being the subject of social judgments about their clothing, are actively using their dressed bodies to challenge and contest a range of political discourses. What a woman wears is a “language through which she can send any number of pointed messages” (Weiss). In 2021, US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wore a ‘Tax the rich’ dress to the Met Gala. The dress was designed by social activist designers Brother Vellies and loaned to Ocasio-Cortez to attend the $30,000 ticket event. For Ocasio-Cortez, who has an Instagram following of more than eight million people, the dress is “about having a real conversation about fairness and equity in our system, and I think this conversation is particularly relevant as we debate the budget” (“Alexandria”). For Badham, “in the blood-spattered garments of fighting class war” the “backlash to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s … dress was instant and glorious”. At the same event, Congresswomen Carolyn Maloney wore an ‘Equal Rights for Women’ suffragette-themed floor length dress in the suffragette colours of purple, white, and gold. Maloney posted that she has “long used fashion as a force 4 change” (Chamlee). US Senator Kyrsten Sinema is known for her “eccentric hipster” look when sitting in the chamber, complete with “colourful wigs, funky glasses, gold knee-high boots, and a ring that reads ‘Fuck off”’ (Hyland). Simena has been called a “Prada Socialist” and a “fashion revolutionary” (Cauterucci). Similarly, UK politician Harriet Harmen received backlash for wearing a t-shirt which read “This is what a feminist looks like” when meeting PM David Cameron (Pilote and Montreuil). While these may be exceptions rather than the rule, the agency demonstrated by these politicians speaks to the patriarchal nature of masculine political environments and the conventions and rules that maintain gendered institutions, such as parliaments. When US Vice-President Kamala Harris was sworn in, she was “not only … the first woman, Black woman, and South Asian-American woman elected to the position, but also … the first to take the oath of office wearing something other than a suit and tie”, instead wearing a feminised suit consisting of a purple dress and coat designed by African-American designer Christopher John Rogers (Naer). Harris is often photographed wearing Converse sneakers, as already noted, and Timberland work boots, which for Naer is “quietly rebellious” because with them “Harris subverts expectations that women in politics should appear in certain clothing (sleek heels, for instance) in order to compete with men — who are, most often, in flats”. For Elan, the Vice-President’s sneakers may be a “small sartorial detail, but it is linked to the larger cultural moment in which we live. Sneakers are a form of footwear finding their way into many women’s closets as part of a larger challenge to outmoded concepts of femininity” as well as a nod to her multiracial heritage where the “progenitors of sneaker culture were predominantly kids of colour”. Her dress style can act to disrupt more than just gender meanings; it can be extended to examine class and race. In 2022, referencing the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 2021 Met dress, Claudia Perkins, the wife of Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt, wore a “white, full-length dress covered in red and black text” that read “coal kills” and “gas kills”, with slick, long black gloves. Bandt wore a “simple tux with a matching pocket square of the same statement fabric” to the federal parliament Midwinter Ball. Joining Perkins was Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, wearing an “hourglass white dress with a statement on the back in black letters” that read: “end gas and coal”. The trim on the bottom was also covered in the same text. Hanson-Young posted on social media that the “dress is made from a 50-year-old damask table cloth, and the lettering is made from a fast fashion handbag that had fallen apart” (Bliszczyk). Federal MP Nicolle Flint posted a video on Twitter asking a political commentator what a woman in politics should wear. One commentator had taken aim at Flint’s sartorial choices which he described “pearl earrings and a pearly smile” and a “vast wardrobe of blazers, coats and tight, black, ankle-freezing trousers and stiletto heels”. Ending the video, Flint removes her black coat to reveal a “grey bin bag cinched with a black belt” (Norman). In 2018, Québec politician Catherine Dorian was criticised for wearing casual clothes, including Dr Marten boots, in parliament, and again in 2019 when Dorian wore an orange hoodie in the parliamentary chamber. The claim was that Dorian “did not respect decorum” (Pilote and Montreuil). Dorian’s response was “it’s supposed to be the people’s house, so why can’t we look like normal people” (Parrillo). Yet the Québec parliament only has dress rules for men — jacket, shirt and ties — and has no specifics for female attire, meaning a female politician can wear Dr Martens or a hoodie, or meaning that the orthodoxy is that only men will sit in the chamber. The issue of the hoodie, somewhat like Kamala Harris’s wearing of sneakers, is also a class and age issue. For Jo Turney, the hoodie is a “symbol of social disobedience” (23). The garment is mass-produced, ordinary, and democratic, as it can be worn by anyone. It is also a sign of “criminality, anti-social behaviour and out of control youth”. If the media are going to focus on what female politicians are wearing rather than their political actions, it is unsurprising some will use that platform to make social and political comments on issues relating to gender, but also to age, class, and policies. While this may maintain a focus on their sartorial choices, it does remind us of the double bind female politicians are in. With parliamentary rules and social conventions enamoured with the idea of a ‘suit and tie’ being the appropriate uniform for political figures, instances when this ‘rule’ is transgressed will risk public ridicule and social backlash. However, in instances were political women have chosen to wear garments that are not the conventional political uniform of the suit and tie, i.e. a dress or t-shirt with a political slogan, or a hoodie or sneakers reflecting youth, class, or race, they are challenging the customs of what a politician should look like. Politicians today are both men and women, different ages, abilities, sexualities, ethnicities, religions, and demographics. To narrowly suppose what a politician is by what they wear narrows public thinking about a person’s contribution or potential contribution to public life. While patriarchal social conventions and parliamentary rules stay in place, the political sphere is weaker for it. References Agnew, Molly. “Victorian Mourning Dress.” Eternal Goddess 27 Nov. 2020. 12 Dec. 2022 <https://www.eternalgoddess.co.uk/posts/esbvxua79pcgcwyjp6iczrdfgw4vm5>. Albright, Madeleine. Read My Pins: Stories from a Diplomat’s Jewel Box. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2010. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wears Dress with ‘Tax the Rich' Written on It to Met Gala.” NBC 13 Sep. 2021. <https://www.nbcnewyork.com/entertainment/the-scene/met-gala/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-wears-dress-with-tax-the-rich-written-on-it-to-met-gala/3270019/>. Anderson, Karrin, and Kristine Sheeler. Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor and Political Identity. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005. Atkinson, Emma. “Power Dressing: The Queen’s Unique Style.” BBC News 1 Jun. 2022. <https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61593081>. Badham, Van. “AOC’s Guide to Getting Noticed at Parties: Drape Yourself in the GGarments of Class War.” The Guardian 15 Sep. 2021. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/15/aocs-guide-to-getting-noticed-at-parties-drape-yourself-in-the-garments-of-class-war>. Bliszczyk, Aleksandra. “Adam Bandt’s Wife and Sarah Hanson-Young Slayed Last Nights Midwinter Ball w/ Anti-Coal Dresses.” Pedestrian TV 8 Sep. 2022. <https://www.pedestrian.tv/style/adam-bandt-wife-anti-coal-statement-midwinter-ball/>. Burack, Emily. “An Ode to Madeleine Albright's Best Brooches.” Town and Country 24 Mar. 2022. <https://www.townandcountrymag.com/style/jewelry-and-watches/g39526103/madeleine-albright-brooch-tribute/>. Caroli, Betty. First Ladies: The Ever-Changing Role, from Martha Washington to Melania Trump. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2019. Cauterucci, Christina. “Kyrsten Sinema Is Not Just a Funky Dresser. She’s a Fashion Revolutionary.” Slate 31 Jan. 2019. <https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/01/kyrsten-sinema-fashion-boots.html>. Chamlee, Virginia. “The New York Democrat Also Wore a Bag Emblazoned with ‘ERA YES’, an Endorsement of the Proposed Equal Rights Amendment.” People 14 Sep. 2021. https://people.com/style/congresswoman-carolyn-maloney-wears-suffragette-themed-met-gala-dress. Cho, Jae-eun. “During Election Season, Clothes Make the Politicians.” Korea JoongAng Daily 4 Sep. 2012. <https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2012/09/04/features/During-election-season-clothes-make-the-politician/2958902.html>. Coghlan, Jo. “Dissent Dressing: The Colour and Fabric of Political Rage.” M/C Journal 22.1 (2019). <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1497>. Craik, Jennifer. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression. Oxford: Berg, 2005. Deutch, Gabby, and Emily Karl. “Congresswomen Protest the ‘Right to Bare Arms’.” CNN 14 Jul. 2017. <https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/14/politics/capitol-dress-code-protest/index.html>. Devaney, Susan. “How Kamala and Her Converse Rewrote the Rule Book on Political Style.” British Vogue 13 Nov. 2020. <https://www.vogue.co.uk/news/article/kamala-harris-sneakers-fashion>. Dillaway, Heather, and Elizabeth Paré. “Locating Mothers: How Cultural Debates about Stay-at-Home versus Working Mothers Define Women and Home.” Journal of Family Issues 29.4 (2008): 437–64. “Dress and Conduct in the Chamber”. Parliament of Australia, 11 Nov. 2022. <https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/ Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Dress_and_conduct_in_the_Chamber>. Elan, Priya. “Kamala Harris: What Her Sneakers Mean”. The Guardian 4 Sep. 2020. <https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/sep/03/kamala-harris-what-her-sneakers-mean>. Entwistle, Joanne. The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Fairchilds, Cissie. “Fashion and Freedom in the French Revolution.” Continuity and Change 15.3 (2000): 419-33. Griffey, Erin. Introduction. Sartorial Politics in Early Modern Europe: Fashioning Women. Ed. Erin Griffey. Amsterdam UP, 2019: 15-32. Guerrero, Lisa. “(M)other-in-Chief: Michelle Obama and the Ideal of Republican womanhood.” New Femininities. Eds. Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: 68–82. Howey, Catherine. “Dressing a Virgin Queen: Court Women, Dress, and Fashioning the Image of England’s Queen Elizabeth I.” Early Modern Women 4 (2009): 201-208. Hyland, Veronique. “Women in US Politics Have Learnt to Stop Worrying and Embrace Fashion.” Financial Times 17 Mar. 2022. <https://www.ft.com/stream/c5436241-52d7-4e6d-973e-2bcacc8866ae>. Jain, E. “Khadi: A Cloth and Beyond.” Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal & Gandhi Research Foundation, 2018. <https://www.mkgandhi.org/articles/khadi-a-cloth-and-beyond.html> Jansens, Freya. “Suit of Power: Fashion, Politics, and Hegemonic Masculinity in Australia.” Australian Journal of Political Science 52.2 (2019): 202-218. <https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2019.1567677>. Ladd Nelson, Jennifer. “Dress Reform and the Bloomer.” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.1 (2002): 21-25. Mansel, Philip. Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II. New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. “Masquerading as Miss Rankin.” US House of Representatives: History, Arts and Archives. 22 Mar. 2017. <https://history.house.gov/Blog/2017/March/3-27-Masquerading-Rankin/>. Mejia, Zameena. “4 Powerful Reasons Hillary Clinton Always Wears Her Famous Pantsuits.” CNBC 14 Sep. 2017. <https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/14/hillary-clinton-discusses-why-she-wears-pantsuits-in-what-happened.html>. Naer, Danielle. “The 2 Shoe Styles That Kamala Harris Wears on Repeat Might Surprise You.” The Zoe Report 8 Oct. 2020. <https://www.thezoereport.com/p/kamala-harris-shoe-choices-keep-going-viral-heres-why-37827474>. Norman, Jane. “Liberal MP Nicolle Flint Wears a Bin Bag to Call Out 'Sexist Rubbish' after Column Describes Her Clothing Choices.” ABC News 27 July 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-27/liberal-nicolle-flint-wears-garbage-bag-to-protest-sexism/12497238>. Oh, Youri. “Fashion in Politics: What Makes Korean Female Politicians Wear ‘the Suit’ NNot ‘a Dress’?” International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education 12:3 (2019): 374-384. Otnes, Celi, and Pauline Maclaren. Royal Fever: The British Monarch in Consumer Culture. Oakland: U of California P, 2015. Parrillo, Felicia. “What Not to Wear: Quebec National Assembly to Review Dress Code.” Global News 5 Dec. 2018. <https://globalnews.ca/news/4732876/what-not-to-wear-quebec-national-assembly-review-dress-code/>. Pilote, Anne-Marie, and Arnaud Montreuil. “It’s 2019: What’s the Proper Way for Politicians to Dress?” The Conversation 15 Nov. 2019. <https://theconversation.com/its-2019-whats-the-proper-way-for-politicians-to-dress-126968>. Rall, Denise, Jo Coghlan, Lisa Hackett, and Annita Boyd. “‘Dressing Up’: Two Democratic First Ladies: Fashion as Political Performance in America.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 7.2 (2018): 273–287. Simm, Pippa. “What Not to Wear in Parliament.” BBC News 23 Dec. 2015. <https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-33700928>. Turney, Joanne. Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance. Bloomsbury, 2019. <https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/fashion-crimes-dressing-for-deviance/>. Weiss, Joanna. “Pearls and Chucks: How Kamala Harris Is Changing Fashion in Politics.” WBUR 20 Jan. 2021. <https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2021/01/20/vice-president-harris-style-vogue-inauguration-joanna-weiss>. Yangzom, Dicky. “Clothing and Social Movements: Tibet and the Politics of Dress.” Social Movement Studies 15.6 (2016): 622-33. Zengerle, Patricia. “For Women at the U.S. Congress: The Right to Bare Arms?” Reuters 14 Jul. 2017. <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-dresscode-idUSKBN19Y2BV>.

Introduction: Brutal?The word “brutal” has associations with cruelty, inhumanity, and aggression. Within the field of architecture, however, the term “Brutalism” refers to a post-World War II Modernist style, deriving from the French phrase betón brut, which means raw concrete (Clement 18). Core traits of Brutalism include functionalist design, daring geometry, overbearing scale, and the blatant exposure of structural materials, chiefly concrete and steel (Meades 1).The emergence of Brutalism coincided with chronic housing shortages in European countries ravaged by World War II (Power 5) and government-sponsored slum clearance in the UK (Power 190; Baker). Brutalism’s promise to accommodate an astonishing number of civilians within a minimal area through high-rise configurations and elevated walkways was alluring to architects and city planners (High Rise Dreams). Concrete was the material of choice due to its affordability, durability, and versatility; it also allowed buildings to be erected quickly (Allen and Iano 622).The Brutalist style was used for cultural centres, such as the Perth Concert Hall in Western Australia, educational institutions such as the Yale School of Architecture, and government buildings such as the Secretariat Building in Chandigarh, India. However, as pioneering Brutalist architect Alison Smithson explained, the style achieved full expression by “thinking on a much bigger scale somehow than if you only got [sic] one house to do” (Smithson and Smithson, Conversation 40). Brutalism, therefore, lent itself to the design of large residential complexes. It was consequently used worldwide for public housing developments, that is, residences built by a government authority with the aim of providing affordable housing. Notable examples include the Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia, and Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada.Brutalist architecture polarised opinion and continues to do so to this day. On the one hand, protected cultural heritage status has been awarded to some Brutalist buildings (Carter; Glancey) and the style remains extremely influential, for example in the recent award-winning work of architect Zaha Hadid (Niesewand). On the other hand, the public housing projects associated with Brutalism are widely perceived as failures (The Great British Housing Disaster). Many Brutalist objects currently at risk of demolition are social housing estates, such as the Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens in London, UK. Whether the blame for the demise of such housing developments lies with architects, inhabitants, or local government has been widely debated. In the UK and USA, local authorities had relocated families of predominantly lower socio-economic status into the newly completed developments, but were unable or unwilling to finance subsequent maintenance and security costs (Hanley 115; R. Carroll; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth). Consequently, the residents became fearful of criminal activity in staircases and corridors that lacked “defensible space” (Newman 9), which undermined a vision of “streets in the sky” (Moran 615).In spite of its later problems, Brutalism’s architects had intended to develop a style that expressed 1950s contemporary living in an authentic manner. To them, this meant exposing building materials in their “raw” state and creating an aesthetic for an age of science, machine mass production, and consumerism (Stadler 264; 267; Smithson and Smithson, But Today 44). Corporeal sensations did not feature in this “machine” aesthetic (Dalrymple). Exceptionally, acclaimed Brutalist architect Ernö Goldfinger discussed how “visual sensation,” “sound and touch with smell,” and “the physical touch of the walls of a narrow passage” contributed to “sensations of space” within architecture (Goldfinger 48). However, the effects of residing within Brutalist objects may not have quite conformed to predictions, since Goldfinger moved out of his Brutalist construction, Balfron Tower, after two months, to live in a terraced house (Hanley 112).An abstract perspective that favours theorisation over subjective experiences characterises discourse on Brutalist social housing developments to this day (Singh). There are limited data on the everyday lived experience of residents of Brutalist social housing estates, both then and now (for exceptions, see Hanley; The Pruitt-Igoe Myth; Cooper et al.).Yet, our bodily interaction with the objects around us shapes our lived experience. On a broader physical scale, this includes the structures within which we live and work. The importance of the interaction between architecture and embodied being is increasingly recognised. Today, architecture is described in corporeal terms—for example, as a “skin” that surrounds and protects its human inhabitants (Manan and Smith 37; Armstrong 77). Biological processes are also inspiring new architectural approaches, such as synthetic building materials with life-like biochemical properties (Armstrong 79), and structures that exhibit emergent behaviour in response to human presence, like a living system (Biloria 76).In this article, we employ an autoethnographic perspective to explore the corporeal effects of Brutalist buildings, thereby revealing a new dimension to the anthropological significance of these controversial structures. We trace how they shape the physicality of the bodies interacting within them. Our approach is one step towards considering the historically under-appreciated subjective, corporeal experience elicited in interaction with Brutalist objects.Method: An Autoethnographic ApproachAutoethnography is a form of self-narrative research that connects the researcher’s personal experience to wider cultural understandings (Ellis 31; Johnson). It can be analytical (Anderson 374) or emotionally evocative (Denzin 426).We investigated two Brutalist residential estates in London, UK:(i) The Barbican Estate: This was devised to redevelop London’s severely bombed post-WWII Cripplegate area, combining private residences for middle class professionals with an assortment of amenities including a concert hall, library, conservatory, and school. It was designed by architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon. Opened in 1982, the Estate polarised opinion on its aesthetic qualities but has enjoyed success with residents and visitors. The development now comprises extremely expensive housing (Brophy). It was Grade II-listed in 2001 (Glancey), indicating a status of architectural preservation that restricts alterations to significant buildings.(ii) Trellick Tower: This was built to replace dilapidated 19th-century housing in the North Kensington area. It was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ernő Goldfinger to be a social housing development and was completed in 1972. During the 1980s and 1990s, it became known as the “Tower of Terror” due to its high level of crime (Hanley 113). Nevertheless, Trellick Tower was granted Grade II listed status in 1998 (Carter), and subsequent improvements have increased its desirability as a residence (R. Carroll).We explored the grounds, communal spaces, and one dwelling within each structure, independently recording our corporeal impressions and sensations in detailed notes, which formed the basis of longhand journals written afterwards. Our analysis was developed through co-constructed autoethnographic reflection (emerald and Carpenter 748).For reasons of space, one full journal entry is presented for each Brutalist structure, with an excerpt from each remaining journal presented in the subsequent analysis. To identify quotations from our journals, we use the codes R- and N- to refer to RB’s and NC’s journals, respectively; we use -B and -T to refer to the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower, respectively.The Barbican Estate: Autoethnographic JournalAn intricate concrete world emerges almost without warning from the throng of glass office blocks and commercial buildings that make up the City of London's Square Mile. The Barbican Estate comprises a multitude of low-rise buildings, a glass conservatory, and three enormous high-rise towers. Each modular building component is finished in the same coarse concrete with burnished brick underfoot, whilst the entire structure is elevated above ground level by enormous concrete stilts. Plants hang from residential balconies over glimmering pools in a manner evocative of concrete Hanging Gardens of Babylon.Figure 1. Barbican Estate Figure 2. Cromwell Tower from below, Barbican Estate. Figure 3: The stairwell, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate. Figure 4. Lift button pods, Cromwell Tower, Barbican Estate.R’s journalMy first footsteps upon the Barbican Estate are elevated two storeys above the street below, and already an eerie calm settles on me. The noise of traffic and the bustle of pedestrians have seemingly been left far behind, and a path of polished brown brick has replaced the paving slabs of the city's pavement. I am made more aware of the sound of my shoes upon the ground as I take each step through the serenity.Running my hands along the walkway's concrete sides as we proceed further into the estate I feel its coarseness, and look up to imagine the same sensation touching the uppermost balcony of the towers. As we travel, the cold nature and relentless employ of concrete takes over and quickly becomes the norm.Our route takes us through the Barbican's central Arts building and into the Conservatory, a space full of plant-life and water features. The noise of rushing water comes as a shock, and I'm reminded just how hauntingly peaceful the atmosphere of the outside estate has been. As we leave the conservatory, the hush returns and we follow another walkway, this time allowing a balcony-like view over the edge of the estate. I'm quickly absorbed by a sensation I can liken only to peering down at the ground from a concrete cloud as we observe the pedestrians and traffic below.Turning back, we follow the walkways and begin our approach to Cromwell Tower, a jagged structure scraping the sky ahead of us and growing menacingly larger with every step. The estate has up till now seemed devoid of wind, but even so a cold begins to prickle my neck and I increase my speed toward the door.A high-ceilinged foyer greets us as we enter and continue to the lifts. As we push the button and wait, I am suddenly aware that carpet has replaced bricks beneath my feet. A homely sensation spreads, my breathing slows, and for a brief moment I begin to relax.We travel at heart-racing speed upwards to the 32nd floor to observe the view from the Tower's fire escape stairwell. A brief glance over the stair's railing as we enter reveals over 30 storeys of stair casing in a hard-edged, triangular configuration. My mind reels, I take a second glance and fail once again to achieve focus on the speck of ground at the bottom far below. After appreciating the eastward view from the adjacent window that encompasses almost the entirety of Central London, we make our way to a 23rd floor apartment.Entering the dwelling, we explore from room to room before reaching the balcony of the apartment's main living space. Looking sheepishly from the ledge, nothing short of a genuine concrete fortress stretches out beneath us in all directions. The spirit and commotion of London as I know it seems yet more distant as we gaze at the now miniaturized buildings. An impression of self-satisfied confidence dawns on me. The fortress where we stand offers security, elevation, sanctuary and I'm furnished with the power to view London's chaos at such a distance that it's almost silent.As we leave the apartment, I am shadowed by the same inherent air of tranquillity, pressing yet another futuristic lift access button, plummeting silently back towards the ground, and padding across the foyer's soft carpet to pursue our exit route through the estate's sky-suspended walkways, back to the bustle of regular London civilization.Trellick Tower: Autoethnographic JournalThe concrete majesty of Trellick Tower is visible from Westbourne Park, the nearest Tube station. The Tower dominates the skyline, soaring above its neighbouring estate, cafes, and shops. As one nears the Tower, the south face becomes visible, revealing the suspended corridors that join the service tower to the main body of flats. Light of all shades and colours pours from its tightly stacked dwellings, which stretch up into the sky. Figure 5. Trellick Tower, South face. Figure 6. Balcony in a 27th-floor flat, Trellick Tower.N’s journalOutside the tower, I sense danger and experience a heightened sense of awareness. A thorny frame of metal poles holds up the tower’s facade, each pole poised as if to slip down and impale me as I enter the building.At first, the tower is too big for comprehension; the scale is unnatural, gigantic. I feel small and quite squashable in comparison. Swathes of unmarked concrete surround the tower, walls that are just too high to see over. Who or what are they hiding? I feel uncertain about what is around me.It takes some time to reach the 27th floor, even though the lift only stops on every 3rd floor. I feel the forces of acceleration exert their pressure on me as we rise. The lift is very quiet.Looking through the windows on the 27th-floor walkway that connects the lift tower to the main building, I realise how high up I am. I can see fog. The city moves and modulates beneath me. It is so far away, and I can’t reach it. I’m suspended, isolated, cut off in the air, as if floating in space.The buildings underneath appear tiny in comparison to me, but I know I’m tiny compared to this building. It’s a dichotomy, an internal tension, and feels quite unreal.The sound of the wind in the corridors is a constant whine.In the flat, the large kitchen window above the sink opens directly onto the narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, on the other side of which, through a second window, I again see London far beneath. People pass by here to reach their front doors, moving so close to the kitchen window that you could touch them while you’re washing up, if it weren’t for the glass. Eye contact is possible with a neighbour, or a stranger. I am close to that which I’m normally separated from, but at the same time I’m far from what I could normally access.On the balcony, I have a strong sensation of vertigo. We are so high up that we cannot be seen by the city and we cannot see others. I feel physically cut off from the world and realise that I’m dependent on the lift or endlessly spiralling stairs to reach it again.Materials: sharp edges, rough concrete, is abrasive to my skin, not warm or welcoming. Sharp little stones are embedded in some places. I mind not to brush close against them.Behind the tower is a mysterious dark maze of sharp turns that I can’t see around, and dark, narrow walkways that confine me to straight movements on sloping ramps.“Relentless Employ of Concrete:” Body versus Stone and HeightThe “relentless employ of concrete” (R-B) in the Barbican Estate and Trellick Tower determined our physical interactions with these Brutalist objects. Our attention was first directed towards texture: rough, abrasive, sharp, frictive. Raw concrete’s potential to damage skin, should one fall or brush too hard against it, made our bodies vulnerable. Simultaneously, the ubiquitous grey colour and the constant cold anaesthetised our senses.As we continued to explore, the constant presence of concrete, metal gratings, wire, and reinforced glass affected our real and imagined corporeal potentialities. Bodies are powerless against these materials, such that, in these buildings, you can only go where you are allowed to go by design, and there are no other options.Conversely, the strength of concrete also has a corporeal manifestation through a sense of increased physical security. To R, standing within the “concrete fortress” of the Barbican Estate, the object offered “security, elevation, sanctuary,” and even “power” (R-B).The heights of the Barbican’s towers (123 metres) and Trellick Tower (93 metres) were physically overwhelming when first encountered. We both felt that these menacing, jagged towers dominated our bodies.Excerpt from R’s journal (Trellick Tower)Gaining access to the apartment, we begin to explore from room to room. As we proceed through to the main living area we spot the balcony and I am suddenly aware that, in a short space of time, I had abandoned the knowledge that some 26 floors lay below me. My balance is again shaken and I dig my heels into the laminate flooring, as if to achieve some imaginary extra purchase.What are the consequences of extreme height on the body? Certainly, there is the possibility of a lethal fall and those with vertigo or who fear heights would feel uncomfortable. We discovered that height also affects physical instantiation in many other ways, both empowering and destabilising.Distance from ground-level bustle contributed to a profound silence and sense of calm. Areas of intermediate height, such as elevated communal walkways, enhanced our sensory abilities by granting the advantage of observation from above.Extreme heights, however, limited our ability to sense the outside world, placing objects beyond our range of visual focus, and setting up a “bizarre segregation” (R-T) between our physical presence and that of the rest of the world. Height also limited potentialities of movement: no longer self-sufficient, we depended on a working lift to regain access to the ground and the rest of the city. In the lift itself, our bodies passively endured a cycle of opposing forces as we plummeted up or down numerous storeys in mere seconds.At both locations, N noticed how extreme height altered her relative body size: for example, “London looks really small. I have become huge compared to the tiny city” (N-B). As such, the building’s lift could be likened to a cake or potion from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. This illustrates how the heuristics that we use to discern visual perspective and object size, which are determined by the environment in which we live (Segall et al.), can be undermined by the unusual scales and distances found in Brutalist structures.Excerpt from N’s journal (Barbican Estate)Warning: These buildings give you AFTER-EFFECTS. On the way home, the size of other buildings seems tiny, perspectives feel strange; all the scales seem to have been re-scaled. I had to become re-used to the sensation of travelling on public trains, after travelling in the tower lifts.We both experienced perceptual after-effects from the disproportional perspectives of Brutalist spaces. Brutalist structures thus have the power to affect physical sensations even when the body is no longer in direct interaction with them!“Challenge to Privacy:” Intersubjective Ideals in Brutalist DesignAs embodied beings, our corporeal manifestations are the primary transducers of our interactions with other people, who in turn contribute to our own body schema construction (Joas). Architects of Brutalist habitats aimed to create residential utopias, but we found that the impact of their designs on intersubjective corporeality were often incoherent and contradictory. Brutalist structures positioned us at two extremes in relation to the bodies of others, forcing either an uncomfortable intersection of personal space or, conversely, excessive separation.The confined spaces of the lifts, and ubiquitous narrow, low-ceilinged corridors produced uncomfortable overlaps in the personal space of the individuals present. We were fascinated by the design of the flat in Trellick Tower, where the large kitchen window opened out directly onto the narrow 27th-floor corridor, as described in N’s journal. This enforced a physical “challenge to privacy” (R-T), although the original aim may have been to promote a sense of community in the “streets in the sky” (Moran 615). The inter-slotting of hundreds of flats in Trellick Tower led to “a multitude of different cooking aromas from neighbouring flats” (R-T) and hence a direct sensing of the closeness of other people’s corporeal activities, such as eating.By contrast, enormous heights and scales constantly placed other people out of sight, out of hearing, and out of reach. Sharp-angled walkways and blind alleys rendered other bodies invisible even when they were near. In the Barbican Estate, huge concrete columns, behind which one could hide, instilled a sense of unease.We also considered the intersubjective interaction between the Brutalist architect-designer and the inhabitant. The elements of futuristic design—such as the “spaceship”-like pods for lift buttons in Cromwell Tower (N-B)—reconstruct the inhabitant’s physicality as alien relative to the Brutalist building, and by extension, to the city that commissioned it.ReflectionsThe strength of the autoethnographic approach is also its limitation (Chang 54); it is an individual’s subjective perspective, and as such we cannot experience or represent the full range of corporeal effects of Brutalist designs. Corporeal experience is informed by myriad factors, including age, body size, and ability or disability. Since we only visited these structures, rather than lived in them, we could have experienced heightened sensations that would become normalised through familiarity over time. Class dynamics, including previous residences and, importantly, the amount of choice that one has over where one lives, would also affect this experience. For a full perspective, further data on the everyday lived experiences of residents from a range of different backgrounds are necessary.R’s reflectionDespite researching Brutalist architecture for years, I was unprepared for the true corporeal experience of exploring these buildings. Reading back through my journals, I'm struck by an evident conflict between stylistic admiration and physical uneasiness. I feel I have gained a sympathetic perspective on the notion of residing in the structures day-to-day.Nevertheless, analysing Brutalist objects through a corporeal perspective helped to further our understanding of the experience of living within them in a way that abstract thought could never have done. Our reflections also emphasise the tension between the physical and the psychological, whereby corporeal struggle intertwines with an abstract, aesthetic admiration of the Brutalist objects.N’s reflectionIt was a wonderful experience to explore these extraordinary buildings with an inward focus on my own physical sensations and an outward focus on my body’s interaction with others. On re-reading my journals, I was surprised by the negativity that pervaded my descriptions. How does physical discomfort and alienation translate into cognitive pleasure, or delight?ConclusionBrutalist objects shape corporeality in fundamental and sometimes contradictory ways. The range of visual and somatosensory experiences is narrowed by the ubiquitous use of raw concrete and metal. Materials that damage skin combine with lethal heights to emphasise corporeal vulnerability. The body’s movements and sensations of the external world are alternately limited or extended by extreme heights and scales, which also dominate the human frame and undermine normal heuristics of perception. Simultaneously, the structures endow a sense of physical stability, security, and even power. By positioning multiple corporealities in extremes of overlap or segregation, Brutalist objects constitute a unique challenge to both physical privacy and intersubjective potentiality.Recognising these effects on embodied being enhances our current understanding of the impact of Brutalist residences on corporeal sensation. This can inform the future design of residential estates. Our autoethnographic findings are also in line with the suggestion that Brutalist structures can be “appreciated as challenging, enlivening environments” exactly because they demand “physical and perceptual exertion” (Sroat). Instead of being demolished, Brutalist objects that are no longer considered appropriate as residences could be repurposed for creative, cultural, or academic use, where their challenging corporeal effects could contribute to a stimulating or even thrilling environment.ReferencesAllen, Edward, and Joseph Iano. Fundamentals of Building Construction: Materials and Methods. 6th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2013.Anderson, Leon. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.4 (2006): 373-95.Armstrong, Rachel. “Biological Architecture.” Forward, The Architecture and Design Journal of the National Associates Committee: Architecture and the Body Spring (2010): 77-79.Baker, Shirley. “The Streets Belong to Us: Shirley Baker’s 1960s Manchester in Pictures.” The Guardian, 22 Jul. 2015. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/jul/22/shirley-baker-1960s-manchester-in-pictures>.Biloria, Nimish. “Inter-Active Bodies.” Forward, The Architecture and Design Journal of the National Associates Committee: Architecture and the Body Spring (2010): 77-79.Brophy, Gwenda. “Fortress Barbican.” The Telegraph, 15 Mar. 2007. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/3357100/Fortress-Barbican.html>.Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1865.Carroll, Rory. “How Did This Become the Height of Fashion?” The Guardian, 11 Mar. 1999. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/mar/11/features11.g28>.Carter, Claire. “London Tower Blocks Given Listed Building Status.”Daily Telegraph, 10 Jul. 2013. 16 Feb. 2016<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/10170663/London-tower-blocks-given-listed-building-status.html>.Chang, Heewon. Autoethnography as Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 2008.Clement, Alexander. Brutalism: Post-War British Architecture. Marlborough: Crowood Press, 2012.Cooper, Niall, Joe Fleming, Peter Marcus, Elsie Michie, Craig Russell, and Brigitte Soltau. “Lessons from Hulme.” Reports, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 1 Sep. 1994. 16 Feb. 2016 <https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/lessons-hulme>.Dalrymple, Theodore. “The Architect as Totalitarian: Le Corbusier’s Baleful Influence.” Oh to Be in England. The City Journal, Autumn 2009. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_otbie-le-corbusier.html>.Denzin, Norman K. “Analytic Autoethnography, or Déjà Vu All Over Again.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35.4 (2006): 419-28.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004.emerald, elke, and Lorelei Carpenter. “Vulnerability and Emotions in Research: Risks, Dilemmas, and Doubts.” Qualitative Inquiry 21.8 (2015): 741-50.Glancey, Jonathan. “A Great Place To Live.” The Guardian, 7 Sep. 2001. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/sep/07/arts.highereducation>.Goldfinger, Ernö. “The Sensation of Space,” reprinted in Dunnet, James and Gavin Stamp, Ernö Goldfinger. London: Architectural Association Press, 1983.Hanley, Lynsey. Estates: An Intimate History. London: Granta, 2012.“High Rise Dreams.” Time Shift. BB4, Bristol. 19 Jun. 2003.Joas, Hans. “The Intersubjective Constitution of the Body-Image.” Human Studies 6.1 (1983): 197-204.Johnson, Sophia A. “‘Getting Personal’: Contemplating Changes in Intersubjectivity, Methodology and Ethnography.” M/C Journal 18.5 (2015).Manan, Mohd. S.A., and Chris L. Smith. “Beyond Building: Architecture through the Human Body.” Alam Cipta: International Journal on Sustainable Tropical Design Research and Practice 5.1 (2012): 35-42.Meades, Jonathan. “The Incredible Hulks: Jonathan Meades’ A-Z of Brutalism.” The Guardian, 13 Feb. 2014. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/feb/13/jonathan-meades-brutalism-a-z>.Moran, Joe. “Housing, Memory and Everyday Life in Contemporary Britain.” Cultural Studies 18.4 (2004): 607-27.Newman, Oscar. Creating Defensible Space. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 1996.Niesewand, Nonie. “Architecture: What Zaha Hadid Next.” The Independent, 1 Oct. 1998. 16Feb. 2016 <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture-what-zaha-hadid-next-1175631.html>.Power, Anne. Hovels to Highrise: State Housing in Europe Since 1850. Taylor & Francis, 2005.Segall, Marshall H., Donald T. Campbell, and Melville J. Herskovits. “Cultural Differences in the Perception of Geometric Illusions.” Science 139.3556 (1963): 769-71.Singh, Anita. “Lord Rogers Would Live on This Estate? Let Him Be Our Guest.” The Telegraph, 20 Jun. 2015. 16 Feb. 2016 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/11687078/Lord-Rogers-would-live-on-this-estate-Let-him-be-our-guest.html>.Smithson, Alison, and Peter Smithson. “But Today We Collect Ads.” Reprinted in L’Architecture Aujourd’hui Jan./Feb (2003): 44.Smithson, Alison, and Peter Smithson. “Conversation with Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry.” Zodiac 4 (1959): 73-81.Sroat, Helen. “Brutalism: An Architecture of Exhilaration.” Presentation at the Paul Rudolph Symposium. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, MA, 13 Apr. 2005. Stadler, Laurent. “‘New Brutalism’, ‘Topology’ and ‘Image:’ Some Remarks on the Architectural Debates in England around 1950.” The Journal of Architecture 13.3 (2008): 263-81.The Great British Housing Disaster. Dir. Adam Curtis. BBC Documentaries. BBC, London. 4 Sep. 1984.The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Dir. Chad Friedrichs. First Run Features, 2012.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

We take as our subject what many would deem a waste of good celluloid: the degraded cultural form of the stoner film. Stoner films plot the experiences of the wasted (those intoxicated on marijuana) as they exhibit wastefulness—excessiveness, improvidence, decay—on a number of fronts. Stoners waste time in constantly hunting for pot and in failing to pursue more productive activity whilst wasted. Stoners waste their minds, both literally, if we believe contested studies that indicate marijuana smoking kills brains cells, and figuratively, in rendering themselves cognitively impaired. Stoners waste their bodies through the dangerous practice of smoking and through the tendency toward physical inertia. Stoners waste money on marijuana firstly, but also on such sophomoric accoutrements as the stoner film itself. Stoners lay waste to convention in excessively seeking pleasure and in dressing and acting outrageously. And stoners, if the scatological humour of so many stoner films is any index, are preoccupied with bodily waste. Stoners, we argue here, waste whiteness as well. As the likes of Jesse and Chester (Dude, Where’s My Car?), Wayne and Garth (Wayne’s World), Bill and Ted (Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) and Jay and Silent Bob (Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) make clear, whiteness looms large in stoner films. Yet the genre, we argue, disavows its own whiteness, in favour of a post-white hybridity that lavishly squanders white privilege. For all its focus on whiteness, filmic wastedness has always been an ethnically diverse and ambiguous category. The genre’s origins in the work of Cheech Marin, a Chicano, and Tommy Chong, a Chinese-European Canadian, have been buttressed in this regard by many African American contributions to the stoner oeuvre, including How High, Half Baked and Friday, as well as by Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and its Korean-American and Indian-American protagonists. Cheech and Chong initiated the genre with the release of Up in Smoke in 1978. A host of films have followed featuring protagonists who spend much of their time smoking and seeking marijuana (or—in the case of stoner films such as Dude, Where’s My Car? released during the height of the War on Drugs—acting stoned without ever being seen to get stoned). Inspired in part by the 1938 anti-marijuana film Reefer Madness, and the unintended humour such propaganda films begat amongst marijuana smokers, stoner films are comedies that satirise both marijuana culture and its prohibition. Self-consciously slapstick, the stoner genre excludes more serious films about drugs, from Easy Rider to Shaft, as well as films such as The Wizard of Oz, Yellow Submarine, the Muppet movies, and others popular amongst marijuana smokers because of surreal content. Likewise, a host of films that include secondary stoner characters, such as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Wooderson in Dazed and Confused, are commonly excluded from the genre on the grounds that the stoner film, first and foremost, celebrates stonerism, that is “serious commitment to smoking and acquiring marijuana as a lifestyle choice.” (Meltzer). Often taking the form of the “buddy film,” stoner flicks generally feature male leads and frequently exhibit a decidedly masculinist orientation, with women, for the most part reduced to little more than the object of the white male gaze.The plot, such as it is, of the typical stoner film concerns the search for marijuana (or an accessory, such as junk food) and the improbable misadventures that ensue. While frequently represented as resourceful and energetic in their quest for marijuana, filmic stoners otherwise exhibit ambivalent attitudes toward enterprise that involves significant effort. Typically represented as happy and peaceable, filmic stoners rarely engage in conflict beyond regular clashes with authority figures determined to enforce anti-drug laws, and other measures that stoners take to be infringements upon happiness. While Hollywood’s stoners thus share a sense of entitlement to pleasure, they do not otherwise exhibit a coherent ideological orthodoxy beyond a certain libertarian and relativistic open-mindedness. More likely to take inspiration from comic book heroes than Aldous Huxley or Timothy Leary, stoners are most often portrayed as ‘dazed and confused,’ and could be said to waste the intellectual tradition of mind expansion that Leary represents. That stoner films are, at times, misunderstood to be quintessentially white is hardly suprising. As a social construct that creates, maintains and legitimates white domination, whiteness manifests, as one of its most defining features, an ability to swallow up difference and to insist upon, at critical junctures, a universal subjectivity that disallows for difference (hooks 167). Such universalising not only sanctions co-optation of ethnic cultural expression, it also functions to mask whiteness’s existence, thus reinforcing its very power. Whiteness, as Richard Dyer argues, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It obfuscates itself and its relationship to the particular traits it is said to embody—disinterest, prudence, temperance, rationality, bodily restraint, industriousness (3). Whiteness is thus constructed as neither an ethnic nor racial particularity, but rather the transcendence of such positionality (Wiegman 139). While non-whites are raced, to be white is to be “just human” and thus to possess the power to “claim to speak for the commonality of humanity” whilst denying the accrual of any particular racial privilege (Dyer 2). In refuting its own advantages—which are so wide ranging (from preferential treatment in housing loans, to the freedom to fail without fear of reflecting badly on other whites) that they are, like whiteness itself, both assumed and unproblematic—whiteness instantiates individualism, allowing whites to believe that their successes are in no way the outcome of systematic racial advantage, but rather the product of individual toil (McIntosh; Lipsitz). An examination of the 1978 stoner film Up in Smoke suggests that whatever the ethnic ambiguity of the figure of the stoner, the genre of the stoner film is all about the wasting of whiteness. Up in Smoke opens with two alternating domestic scenes. We first encounter Pedro De Pacas (Cheech Marin) in a cluttered and shadowy room as his siblings romp affectionately upon his back, waking him from his slumber on the couch. Pedro rises, stepping into a bowl of cereal on the floor. He stumbles to the bathroom, where, sleepy and disoriented, he urinates into the laundry hamper. The chaos of Pedro’s disrupted sleep is followed in the film by a more metaphoric awakening as Anthony Stoner (Tommy Chong) determines to leave home. The scene takes place in a far more orderly, light and lavish room. The space’s overpowering whiteness is breached only by the figure of Anthony and his unruly black hair, bushy black beard, and loud Hawaiian shirt, which vibrates with colour against the white walls, white furnishings and white curtains. We watch as Anthony, behind an elaborate bar, prepares a banana protein shake, impassively ignoring his parents, both clothed in all-white, as they clutch martini glasses and berate their son for his lack of ambition. Arnold Stoner [father]: Son, your mother and me would like for you to cozy up to the Finkelstein boy. He's a bright kid, and, uh... he's going to military school, and remember, he was an Eagle Scout. Tempest Stoner [mother]: Arnold…Arnold Stoner: [shouts over/to his wife] Will you shut up? We’re not going to have a family brawl!Tempest Stoner: [continues talking as her husband shouts]…. Retard.Arnold Stoner: [to Anthony] We've put up with a hell of a lot.[Anthony starts blender] Can this wait? ... Build your goddamn muscles, huh? You know, you could build your muscles picking strawberries.You know, bend and scoop... like the Mexicans. Shit, maybe I could get you a job with United Fruit. I got a buddy with United Fruit. ... Get you started. Start with strawberries, you might work your way up to these goddamn bananas! When, boy? When...are you going to get your act together?Anthony: [Burps]Tempest Stoner: Gross.Arnold Stoner: Oh, good God Almighty me. I think he's the Antichrist. Anthony, I want to talk to you. [Anthony gathers his smoothie supplements and begins to walk out of the room.] Now, listen! Don't walk away from me when I'm talking to you! You get a goddamn job before sundown, or we're shipping you off to military school with that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid! Son of a bitch!The whiteness of Anthony’s parents is signified so pervasively and so strikingly in this scene—in their improbable white outfits and in the room’s insufferably white décor—that we come to understand it as causative. The rage and racism of Mr. Stoner’s tirade, the scene suggests, is a product of whiteness itself. Given that whiteness achieves and maintains its domination via both ubiquity and invisibility, what Up in Smoke accomplishes in this scene is notable. Arnold Stoner’s tortured syntax (“that goddamn Finkelstein shit kid”) works to “mak[e] whiteness strange” (Dyer 4), while the scene’s exaggerated staging delineates whiteness as “a particular – even peculiar – identity, rather than a presumed norm” (Roediger, Colored White 21). The belligerence of the senior Stoners toward not only their son and each other, but the world at large, in turn, functions to render whiteness intrinsically ruthless and destructive. Anthony’s parents, in all their whiteness, enact David Roediger’s assertion that “it is not merely that ‘Whiteness’s is oppressive and false; it is that ‘Whiteness’s is nothing but oppressive and false” (Toward the Abolition 13).Anthony speaks not a word during the scene. He communicates only by belching and giving his parents the finger as he leaves the room and the home. This departure is significant in that it marks the moment when Anthony, hereafter known only as “Man,” flees the world of whiteness. He winds up taking refuge in the multi-hued world of stonerism, as embodied in the scene that follows, which features Pedro emerging from his home to interact with his Chicano neighbours and to lovingly inspect his car. As a lowrider, a customised vehicle that “begin[s] with the abandoned materials of one tradition (that of mainstream America), … [and is] … then transformed and recycled . . . into new and fresh objects of art which are distinctly Chicano,” Pedro’s car serves as a symbol of the cultural hybridisation that Man is about to undergo (quoted in Ondine 141).As Man’s muteness in the presence of his parents suggests, his racial status seems tentative from the start. Within the world of whiteness, Man is the subaltern, silenced and denigrated, finding voice only after he befriends Pedro. Even as the film identifies Man as white through his parental lineage, it renders indeterminate its own assertion, destabilising any such fixed or naturalised schema of identity. When Man is first introduced to Pedro’s band as their newest member, James, the band’s African American bass player, looks at Man, dressed in the uniform of the band, and asks: “Hey Pedro, where’s the white dude you said was playing the drums?” Clearly, from James’s point of view, the room contains no white dudes, just stoners. Man’s presumed whiteness becomes one of the film’s countless gags, the provocative ambiguity of the casting of a Chinese-European to play a white part underscored in the film by the equally implausible matter of age. Man, according to the film’s narrative, is a high school student; Chong was forty when the film was released. Like his age, Man’s whiteness is never a good fit. That Man ultimately winds up sleeping on the very couch upon which we first encounter Pedro suggests how radical and final the break with his dubious white past is. The “Mexicans” whom his father would mock as fit only for abject labour are amongst those whom Man comes to consider his closest companions. In departing his parents’ white world, and embracing Pedro’s dilapidated, barrio-based world of wastedness, Man traces the geographies narrated by George Lipsitz in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. Historically, Lipsitz argues, the development of affluent white space (the suburbs) was made possible by the disintegration of African American, Chicano and other minority neighbourhoods disadvantaged by federal, state, and corporate housing, employment, health care, urban renewal, and education policies that favoured whites over non-whites. In this sense, Man’s flight from his parents’ home is a retreat from whiteness itself, and from the advantages that whiteness conveys. In choosing the ramshackle, non-white world of stonerism, Man performs an act of racial treachery. Whiteness, Lipsitz contends, has “cash value,” and “is invested in, like property, but it is also a means of accumulating property and keeping it from others,” which allows for “intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations” (vii-viii). Man’s disavowal of the privileges of whiteness is a reckless refusal to accept this racial birthright. Whiteness is thus wasted upon Man because Man wastes his whiteness. Given the centrality of prudence and restraint to hegemonic constructions of whiteness, Man’s willingness to squander the “valuable asset” that is his white inheritance is especially treasonous (Harris 1713). Man is the prodigal son of whiteness, a profligate who pours down the drain “the wages of whiteness” that his forbearers have spent generations accruing and protecting (Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness). His waste not only offends the core values which whiteness is said to comprise, it also denigrates whiteness itself by illuminating the excess of white privilege, as well as the unarticulated excess of meanings that hover around whiteness to create the illusion of transcendence and infinite variety. Man’s performance, like all bad performances of whiteness, “disrupt[s] implicit understandings of what it means to be white” (Hartigan 46). The spectre of seeing white domination go ‘up in smoke’—via wasting, as opposed to hoarding, white privilege—amounts to racial treason, and helps not only to explicate why whites in the film find stonerism so menacing, but also to explain the paradox of “pot [making] the people who don’t smoke it even more paranoid than the people who do” (Patterson). While Tommy Chong’s droll assertion that "what makes us so dangerous is that we're harmless" ridicules such paranoia, it ultimately fails to account for the politics of subversive squandering of white privilege that characterise the stoner film (“Biographies”). Stoners in Up in Smoke, as in most other stoner films, are marked as non-white, through association with ethnic Others, through their rejection of mainstream ideas about work and achievement, and/or through their lack of bodily restraint in relentlessly seeking pleasure, in dressing outrageously, and in refusing to abide conventional grooming habits. Significantly, the non-white status of the stoner is both voluntary and deliberate. While stonerism embraces its own non-whiteness, its Otherness is not signified, primarily, through racial cross-dressing of the sort Eric Lott detects in Elvis, but rather through race-mixing. Stoner collectivity practices an inclusivity that defies America’s historic practice of racial and ethnic segregation (Lott 248). Stonerism further reveals its unwillingness to abide constrictive American whiteness in a scene in which Pedro and Man, both US-born Americans, are deported. The pair are rounded up along with Pedro’s extended family in a raid initiated when Pedro’s cousin “narcs” on himself to la migra (the Immigration and Naturalization Service) in order to get free transport for his extended family to his wedding in Tijuana. Pedro and Man return to the US as unwitting tricksters, bringing back to the US more marijuana than has ever crossed the Mexican-US border at one time, fusing the relationship between transnationalism and wastedness. The disrespect that stoners exhibit for pregnable US borders contests presumed Chicano powerlessness in the face of white force and further affronts whiteness, which historically has mobilised itself most virulently at the threat of alien incursion. Transgression here is wilful and playful; stoners intend to offend normative values and taste through their actions, their dress, and non-white associations as part of the project of forging a new hybridised, transnational subjectivity that threatens to lay waste to whiteness’s purity and privilege. Stoners invite the scrutiny of white authority with their outrageous attire and ethnically diverse composition, turning the “inevitability of surveillance” (Borrie 87) into an opportunity to enact their own wastedness—their wasted privilege, their wasted youth, their wasted potential—before a gaze that is ultimately confounded and threatened by the chaotic hybridity with which it is faced (Hebdige 26). By perpetually displaying his/her wasted Otherness, the stoner makes of him/herself a “freak,” a label cops use derisively throughout Up in Smoke to denote the wasted without realising that stoners define themselves in precisely such terms, and, by doing so, obstruct whiteness’s assertion of universal subjectivity. Pedro’s cousin Strawberry (Tom Skerritt), a pot dealer, enacts freakishness by exhibiting a large facial birthmark and by suffering from Vietnam-induced Post Traumatic Stress disorder. A freak in every sense of the word, Strawberry is denied white status by virtue of physical and mental defect. But Strawberry, as a stoner, ultimately wants whiteness even less than it wants him. The defects that deny him membership in the exclusive “club” that is whiteness prove less significant than the choice he makes to defect from the ranks of whiteness and join with Man in the decision to waste his whiteness wantonly (“Editorial”). Stoner masculinity is represented as similarly freakish and defective. While white authority forcefully frustrates the attempts of Pedro and Man to “score” marijuana, the duo’s efforts to “score” sexually are thwarted by their own in/action. More often than not, wastedness produces impotence in Up in Smoke, either literally or figuratively, wherein the confusion and misadventures that attend pot-smoking interrupt foreplay. The film’s only ostensible sex scene is unconsummated, a wasted opportunity for whiteness to reproduce itself when Man sleeps through his girlfriend’s frenzied discussion of sex. During the course of Up in Smoke, Man dresses as a woman while hitchhiking, Pedro mistakes Man for a woman, Man sits on Pedro’s lap when they scramble to change seats whilst being pulled over by the police, Man suggests that Pedro has a “small dick,” Pedro reports liking “manly breasts,” and Pedro—unable to urinate in the presence of Sgt. Stedenko—tells his penis that if it does not perform, he will “put [it] back in the closet.” Such attenuations of the lead characters’ masculinity climax in the penultimate scene, in which Pedro, backed by his band, performs “Earache My Eye,” a song he has just composed backstage, whilst adorned in pink tutu, garter belt, tassle pasties, sequined opera mask and Mickey Mouse ears: My momma talkin’ to me tryin’ to tell me how to liveBut I don't listen to her cause my head is like a sieveMy daddy he disowned me cause I wear my sister's clothesHe caught me in the bathroom with a pair of pantyhoseMy basketball coach he done kicked me off the teamFor wearing high heeled sneakers and acting like a queen“Earache My Eye” corroborates the Othered natured of stonerism by marking stoners, already designated as non-white, as non-straight. In a classic iteration of a bad gender performance, the scene rejects both whiteness and its hegemonic partners-in-crime, heterosexuality and normative masculinity (Butler 26). Here stoners waste not only their whiteness, but also their white masculinity. Whiteness, and its dependence upon “intersection … [with] interlocking axes [of power such as] gender … [and] sexuality,” is “outed” in this scene (Shome 368). So, too, is it enfeebled. In rendering masculinity freakish and defective, the film threatens whiteness at its core. For if whiteness can not depend upon normative masculinity for its reproduction, then, like Man’s racial birthright, it is wasted. The stoner’s embodiment of freakishness further works to emphasise wasted whiteness by exposing just how hysterical whiteness’s defense of its own normativity can be. Up in Smoke frequently inflates not only the effects of marijuana, but also the eccentricities of those who smoke it, a strategy which means that much of the film’s humour turns on satirising hegemonic stereotypes of marijuana smokers. Equally, Cheech Marin’s exaggerated “slapstick, one-dimensional [portrayal] of [a] Chicano character” works to render ridiculous the very stereotypes his character incarnates (List 183). While the film deconstructs processes of social construction, it also makes extensive use of counter-stereotyping in its depictions of characters marked as white. The result is that whiteness’s “illusion of [its] own infinite variety” is contested and the lie of whiteness as non-raced is exposed, helping to explain the stoner’s decision to waste his/her whiteness (Dyer 12; 2). In Up in Smoke whiteness is the colour of straightness. Straights, who are willing neither to smoke pot nor to tolerate the smoking of pot by others/Others, are so comprehensively marked as white in the film that whiteness and straightness become isomorphic. As a result, the same stereotypes are mobilised in representing whiteness and straightness: incompetence, belligerence, hypocrisy, meanspiritedness, and paranoia, qualities that are all the more oppressive because virtually all whites/straights in the film occupy positions of authority. Anthony’s spectacularly white parents, as we have seen, are bigoted and dominating. Their whiteness is further impugned by alcohol, which fuels Mr. Stoner’s fury and Mrs. Stoner’s unintelligibility. That the senior Stoners are drunk before noon works, of course, to expose the hypocrisy of those who would indict marijuana use while ignoring the social damage alcohol can produce. Their inebriation (revealed as chronic in the DVD’s outtake scenes) takes on further significance when it is configured as a decidedly white attribute. Throughout the film, only characters marked as white consume alcohol—most notably, the judge who is discovered to be drinking vodka whist adjudicating drug charges against Pedro and Man—therefore dislodging whiteness’s self-construction as temperate, and suggesting just how wasted whiteness is. While stonerism is represented as pacific, drunkenness is of a piece with white/straight bellicosity. In Up in Smoke, whites/straights crave confrontation and discord, especially the angry, uptight, and vainglorious narcotics cop Sgt. Stedenko (Stacey Keech) who inhabits so many of the film’s counter-stereotypes. While a trio of white cops roughly apprehend and search a carload of innocent nuns in a manner that Man describes as “cold blooded,” Stedenko, unawares in the foreground, gives an interview about his plans for what he hopes will be the biggest border drug bust in US history: “[Reporter:] Do you expect to see any violence here today? [Sgt. Stedenko:] I certainly hope so.” Stedenko’s desire to act violently against stoners echoes mythologies of white regeneration in the Old West, wherein whiteness refurbished itself through violent attacks on Native Americans, whose wasteful cultures failed to make “civilised” use of western lands (Slotkin 565).White aggression is relentlessly depicted in the film, with one important exception: the instance of the stoned straight. Perhaps no other trope is as defining of the genre, as is the scene wherein a straight person accidentally becomes stoned. Up in Smoke offers several examples, most notably the scene in which a motorcycle cop pulls over Pedro and Man as they drive a van belonging to Pedro’s Uncle Chuey. In a plot twist requiring a degree of willing suspension of disbelief that even wasted audiences might find a stretch, the exterior shell of the van, unbeknownst to Pedro and Man, is made entirely of marijuana which has started to smoulder around the exhaust pipe. The cop, who becomes intoxicated whilst walking through the fumes, does not hassle Pedro and Man, as expected, but instead asks for a bite of their hot dog and then departs happily, instructing the duo to “have a nice day.” In declining, or perhaps simply forgetting, to exercise his authority, the cop demonstrates the regenerative potential not of violent whiteness but rather of hybrid wastedness. Marijuana here is transformative, morphing straight consciousness into stoner consciousness and, in the process, discharging all the uptight, mean-spirited, unnecessary, and hence wasteful baggage of whiteness along the way. While such a utopian potential for pot is both upheld and satirised in the film, the scene amounts to far more than an inconsequential generic gag, in that it argues for the disavowal of whiteness via the assumption of the voluntary Otherness that is stonerism. Whiteness, the scene suggests, can be cast off, discarded, wasted and thus surmounted. Whites, for want of a better phrase, simply need to ‘just say no’ to whiteness in order to excrete the brutality that is its necessary affliction and inevitable result. While Up in Smoke laudably offers a powerful refusal to horde the assets of whiteness, the film fails to acknowledge that ‘just saying no’ is, indeed, one of whiteness’s exclusive privileges, since whites and only whites possess the liberty to refuse the advantages whiteness bestows. Non-whites possess no analogical ability to jettison the social constructions to which they are subjected, to refuse the power of dominant classes to define their subjectivity. Neither does the film confront the fact that Man nor any other of Up in Smoke’s white freaks are disallowed from re-embracing their whiteness, and its attendant value, at any time. However inchoate the film’s challenge to racial privilege, Up in Smoke’s celebration of the subversive pleasures of wasting whiteness offers a tentative, if bleary, first step toward ‘the abolition of whiteness.’ Its utopian vision of a post-white hybridised subjectivity, however dazed and confused, is worthy of far more serious contemplation than the film, taken at face value, might seem to suggest. Perhaps Up in Smoke is a stoner film that should also be viewed while sober. ReferencesBill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Dir. Stephen Herek. Orion Pictures Corporation, 1989.“Biographies”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.cheechandchongfans.com/biography.html›. Borrie, Lee. "Wild Ones: Containment Culture and 1950s Youth Rebellion”. Diss. University of Canterbury, 2007.Butler, Judith. "Critically Queer”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1.1 (1993): 17-32.Chavoya, C. Ondine. “Customized Hybrids: The Art of Ruben Ortiz Torres and Lowriding in Southern California”. CR: The New Centennial Review 4.2 (2004): 141-84.Clerks. Dir. Kevin Smith. Miramax Films, 1994. Dazed and Confused. Dir. Richard Linklater. Cineplex Odeon Films, 1993. Dude, Where’s My Car? Dir. Danny Leiner. Twentieth Century Fox, 2000.Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. London: Routledge, 1997.“Editorial: Abolish the White Race—By Any Means Necessary”. Race Traitor 1 (1993). 9 June 2010 ‹http://racetraitor.org/abolish.html›.Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Dir. Amy Heckerling. Universal Pictures, 1982.Friday. Dir. F. Gary Gray. New Line Cinema, 1995.Half Baked. Dir. Tamra Davis. Universal Pictures, 1998.Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Dir. Danny Leiner. New Line Cinema, 2004.Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property”. Harvard Law Review 106 (1993): 1707-1791. Hartigan, John Jr. “Objectifying ‘Poor Whites and ‘White Trash’ in Detroit”. White Trash: Race and Class in America. Eds. Matt Wray, and Annalee Newitz. NY: Routledge, 1997. 41-56.Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.How High. Dir. Jesse Dylan. Universal Pictures, 2001.Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit fromIdentity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006. List, Christine. "Self-Directed Stereotyping in the Films of Cheech Marin”. Chicanos and Film: Representation and Resistance. Ed. Chon A. Noriega. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 183-94.Lott, Eric. “Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness”. The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1999. 241-55.McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.case.edu/president/aaction/UnpackingTheKnapsack.pdf›.Meltzer, Marisa. “Leisure and Innocence: The Eternal Appeal of the Stoner Movie”. Slate 26 June 2007. 10 Aug. 2010 ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2168931›.Toni Morrison. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.Patterson, John. “High and Mighty”. The Guardian 7 June 2008. 10 June 2010 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/jun/07/2›.Roediger, David. Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Rev. ed. London: Verso Books, 1999.———. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Class and Politics. London: Verso Books, 1994.Shome, Raka. “Outing Whiteness”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 17.3 (2000): 366-71.Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1973.Up in Smoke. Dir. Lou Adler. Paramount Pictures, 1978.Wayne’s World. Dir. Penelope Spheeris. Paramount Pictures, 1992.Wiegman, Robyn. “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity”. boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 115-50.

If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/thoerin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.

Saturday, 24 July 1971, Tower Mill Hotel The man jiggles the brick, gauges its weight. His stout hand, a flash of his watch dial, the sleeve rolled back, muscles on the upper arm bundled tight. His face half-erased by the dark. There’s something going on beneath the surface that Murray can’t grasp. He thinks of the three witches in Polanski’s Macbeth, huddled together on the beach, digging a circle in the sand with bare hands, unwrapping their filthy bundle. A ritual. The brick’s in the air and it’s funny but Murray expected it to spin but it doesn’t, it holds its position, arcs forward, as though someone’s taken the sky and pulled it sideways to give the impression of movement, like those chase scenes in the Punch and Judy shows you don’t see anymore. The brick hits the cement and fractures. Red dust on cops’ shined shoes. Murray feels the same sense of shock he’d felt, sitting in the sagging canvas seat at one of his film nights, recognising the witches’ bundle, a severed human arm, hacked off just before the elbow; both times looking so intently, he had no distance or defence when the realisation came. ‘What is it?’ says Lan. Murray points to the man who threw the brick but she is looking the other way, at a cop in a white riot helmet, head like a globe, swollen up as though bitten. Lan stands on Murray’s feet to see. The pig yells through a megaphone: ‘You’re occupying too much of the road. It’s illegal. Step back. Step back.’ Lan’s back is pressed against Murray’s stomach; her bum fits snugly to his groin. He resists the urge to plant his cold hands on her warm stomach, to watch her squirm. She turns her head so her mouth is next to his ear, says, ‘Don’t move.’ She sounds winded, her voice without force. He’s pinned to the ground by her feet. Again, ‘Step back. Step back.’ Next to him, Roger begins a chant. ‘Springboks,’ he yells, the rest of the crowd picking up the chant, ‘out now!’ ‘Springboks!’ ‘Out now!’ Murray looks up, sees a hand pressed against the glass in one of the hotel’s windows, quickly withdrawn. The hand belongs to a white man, for sure. It must be one of the footballers, although the gesture is out of keeping with his image of them. Too timid. He feels tired all of a sudden. But Jacobus Johannes Fouché’s voice is in his head, these men—the Springboks—represent the South African way of life, and the thought of the bastard Bjelke inviting them here. He, Roger and Lan were there the day before when the footballers pulled up outside the Tower Mill Hotel in a black and white bus. ‘Can you believe the cheek of those bastards?’ said Roger when they saw them bounding off the bus, legs the span of Murray’s two hands. A group of five Nazis had been lined up in front of the glass doors reflecting the city, all in uniform: five sets of white shirts and thin black ties, five sets of khaki pants and storm-trooper boots, each with a red sash printed with a black and white swastika tied around their left arms, just above the elbow. The Springboks strode inside, ignoring the Nazi’s salute. The protestors were shouting. An apple splattered wetly on the sidewalk. Friday, 7 April 1972, St Lucia Lan left in broad daylight. Murray didn’t know why this upset him, except that he had a vague sense that she should’ve gone in the night time, under the cover of dark. The guilty should sneak away, with bowed heads and faces averted, not boldly, as though going for an afternoon walk. Lan had pulled down half his jumpers getting the suitcase from the top of the cupboard. She left his clothes scattered across the bedroom, victims of an explosion, an excess of emotion. In the two days after Lan left, Murray scours the house looking for some clue to where she was, maybe a note to him, blown off the table in the wind, or put down and forgotten in the rush. Perhaps there was a letter from her parents, bankrupt, demanding she return to Vietnam. Or a relative had died. A cousin in the Viet Cong napalmed. He finds a packet of her tampons in the bathroom cupboard, tries to flush them down the toilet, but they keep floating back up. They bloat; the knotted strings make them look like some strange water-dwelling creature, paddling in the bowl. He pees in the shower for a while, but in the end he scoops the tampons back out again with the holder for the toilet brush. The house doesn’t yield anything, so he takes to the garden, circles the place, investigates its underbelly. The previous tenant had laid squares of green carpet underneath, off-cuts that met in jagged lines, patches of dirt visible. Murray had set up two sofas, mouldy with age, on the carpeted part, would invite his friends to sit with him there, booze, discuss the state of the world and the problem with America. Roger rings in the afternoon, says, ‘What gives? We were supposed to have lunch.’ Murray says, ‘Lan’s left me.’ He knows he will cry soon. ‘Oh Christ. I’m so sorry,’ says Roger. Murray inhales, snuffs up snot. Roger coughs into the receiver. ‘It was just out of the blue,’ says Murray. ‘Where’s she gone?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘She didn’t say anything?’ ‘No,’ says Murray. ‘She could be anywhere. Maybe you should call the police, put in a missing report,’ says Roger. ‘I’m not too friendly with the cops,’ says Murray, and coughs. ‘You sound a bit crook. I’ll come over,’ says Roger. ‘That’d be good,’ says Murray. Roger turns up at the house an hour later, wearing wide pants and a tight collared shirt with thick white and red stripes. He’s growing a moustache, only cuts his hair when he visits his parents. Murray says, ‘I’ll make us a cuppa.’ Roger nods, sits down at the vinyl table with his hands resting on his knees. He says, ‘Are you coming to 291 on Sunday?’ 291 St Paul’s Terrace is the Brisbane Communist Party’s headquarters. Murray says, ‘What’s on?’ ‘Billy needs someone to look after the bookshop.’ Murray gives Roger a mug of tea, sits down with his own mug between his elbows, and cradles his head in his hands so his hair falls over his wrists. After a minute, Roger says, ‘Does her family know?’ Murray makes a strange noise through his hands. ‘I don’t even know how to contact them,’ he says. ‘She wrote them letters—couldn’t afford to phone—but she’s taken everything with her. The address book. Everything.’ Murray knows nothing of the specifics of Lan’s life before she met him. She was the first Asian he’d ever spoken to. She wore wrap-around skirts that changed colour in the sun; grew her hair below the waist; sat in the front row in class and never spoke. He liked the shape of her calf as it emerged from her skirt. He saw her on the great lawn filming her reflection in a window with a Sony Portapak and knew that he wanted her more than anything. Murray seduced her by saying almost nothing and touching her as often as he could. He was worried about offending her. What reading he had done made him aware of his own ignorance, and his friend in Psych told him that when you touch a girl enough — especially around the aureole — a hormone is released that bonds them to you, makes them sad when you leave them or they leave you. In conversation, Murray would put his hand on Lan’s elbow, once on the top of her head. Lan was ready to be seduced. Murray invited her to a winter party in his backyard. They kissed next to the fire and he didn’t notice until the next morning that the rubber on the bottom of his shoe melted in the flames. She moved into his house quickly, her clothes bundled in three plastic bags. He wanted her to stay in bed with him all day, imagined he was John Lennon and she Yoko Ono. Their mattress became a soup of discarded clothes, bread crumbs, wine stains, come stains, ash and flakes of pot. He resented her when she told him that she was bored, and left him, sheets pulled aside to reveal his erection, to go to class. Lan tutored high-schoolers for a while, but they complained to their mothers that they couldn’t understand her accent. She told him her parents wanted her to come home. The next night he tidied the house, and cooked her dinner. Over the green peas and potato—Lan grated ginger over hers, mixed it with chili and soy sauce, which she travelled all the way to Chinatown on a bus to buy—Murray proposed. They were married in the botanic gardens, surrounded by Murray’s friends. The night before his father called him up and said, ‘It’s not too late to get out of it. You won’t be betraying the cause.’ Murray said, ‘You have no idea what this means to me,’ and hung up on him. Sunday, 9 April 1972, 291 St Paul’s Terrace Murray perches on the backless stool behind the counter in The People’s Bookshop. He has the sense he is on the brink of something. His body is ready for movement. When a man walks into the shop, Murray panics because Billy hadn’t shown him how to use the cash register. He says, ‘Can I help?’ anyway. ‘No,’ says the man. The man walks the length of the shelves too fast to read the titles. He stops at a display of Australiana on a tiered shelf, slides his hand down the covers on display. He pauses at Crocodile Hunt. The cover shows a drawing of a bulky crocodile, scaled body bent in an S, its jaws under the man’s thumb. He picks it up, examines it. Murray thinks it odd that he doesn’t flip it over to read the blurb. He walks around the whole room once, scanning the shelves, reaches Murray at the counter and puts the book down between them. Murray picks it up, turns it over, looking for a price. It’s stuck on the back in faded ink. He opens his mouth to tell the man how much, and finds him staring intently at the ceiling. Murray looks up too. A hairline crack runs along the surface and there are bulges in the plaster where the wooden framework’s swollen. It’s lower than Murray remembers. He thinks that if he stood on his toes he could reach it with the tips of his fingers. Murray looks down again to find the man staring at him. Caught out, Murray mutters the price, says, ‘You don’t have it in exact change, do you?’ The man nods, fumbles around in his pocket for a bit and brings out a note, which he lays at an angle along the bench top. He counts the coins in the palm of his hand. He makes a fist around the coins, brings his hand over the note and lets go. The coins fall, clinking, over the bench. One spins wildly, rolls past Murray’s arm and across the bench. Murray lets it fall. He recognises the man now; it is the act of release that triggers the memory, the fingers spread wide, the wrist bent, the black watch band. This is the man who threw the brick in the Springbok protest. Dead set. He looks up again, expecting to see the same sense of recognition in the man, but he is walking out of the shop. Murray follows him outside, leaving the door open and the money still on the counter. The man is walking right along St Paul’s Terrace. He tucks the book under his arm to cross Barry Parade, as though he might need both hands free to wave off the oncoming traffic. Murray stands on the other side of the road, unsure of what to do. When Murray came outside, he’d planned to hail the man, tell him he recognised him from the strike and was a fellow comrade. They give discounts to Communist Party members. Outside the shop, it strikes him that perhaps the man is not one of them at all. Just because he was at the march doesn’t make him a communist. Despite the unpopularity of the cause —‘It’s just fucking football,’ one of Murray’s friends had said. ‘What’s it got to do with anything?’— there had been many types there, a mixture of labour party members; unionists; people in the Radical Club and the Eureka Youth League; those not particularly attached to anyone. He remembers again the brick shattered on the ground. It hadn’t hit anyone, but was an incitement to violence. This man is dangerous. Murray is filled again with nervous energy, which leaves him both dull-witted and super-charged, as though he is a wind-up toy twisted tight and then released, unable to do anything but move in the direction he’s facing. He crosses the road about five metres behind the man, sticks to the outer edge of the pavement, head down. If he moves his eyes upwards, while still keeping his neck lowered, he can see the shoes of the man, his white socks flashing with each step. The man turns the corner into Brunswick Street. He stops at a car parked in front of the old Masonic Temple. Murray walks past fast, unsure of what to do next. The Temple’s entry is set back in the building, four steps leading up to a red door. Murray ducks inside the alcove, looks up to see the man sitting in the driver’s seat pulling out the pages of Crocodile Hunt and feeding them through the half wound-down window where they land, fanned out, on the road. When he’s finished dismembering the book, the man spreads the page-less cover across the back of the car. The crocodile, snout on the side, one eye turned outwards, stares out into the street. The man flicks the ignition and drives, the pages flying out and onto the road in his wake. Murray sits down on the steps of the guild and smokes. He isn’t exactly sure what just happened. The man must have bought the book just because he liked the picture on the front of the cover. But it’s odd though that he had bothered to spend so much just for one picture. Murray remembers how he had paced the shop and studiously examined the ceiling. He’d given the impression of someone picking out furniture for the room, working out the dimensions so some chair or table would fit. A cough. Murray looks up. The man’s standing above him, his forearm resting on the wall, elbow bent. His other arm hangs at his side, hand bunched up around a bundle of keys. ‘I wouldn’t of bothered following me, if I was you,’ the man says. ‘The police are on my side. Special branch are on my side.’ He pushes himself off the wall, stands up straight, and says, ‘Heil Hitler.’ Tuesday April 19, 1972, 291 St Paul’s Terrace Murray brings his curled fist down on the door. It opens with the force of his knock and he feels like an idiot for even bothering. The hallway’s dark. Murray runs into a filing cabinet, swears, and stands in the centre of the corridor, with his hand still on the cabinet, calling, ‘Roger! Roger!’ Murray told Roger he’d come here when he called him. Murray was walking back from uni, and on the other side of the road to his house, ready to cross, he saw there was someone standing underneath the house, looking out into the street. Murray didn’t stop. He didn’t need to. He knew it was the man from the bookshop, the Nazi. Murray kept walking until he reached the end of the street, turned the corner and then ran. Back on campus, he shut himself in a phone box and dialed Roger’s number. ‘I can’t get to my house,’ Murray said when Roger picked up. ‘Lock yourself out, did you?’ said Roger. ‘You know that Nazi? He’s back again.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ said Roger. ‘It doesn’t matter. I need to stay with you,’ said Murray. ‘You can’t. I’m going to a party meeting.’ ‘I’ll meet you there.’ ‘Ok. If you want.’ Roger hung up. Now, Roger stands framed in the doorway of the meeting room. ‘Hey Murray, shut up. I can hear you. Get in here.’ Roger switches on the hallway light and Murray walks into the meeting room. There are about seven people, sitting on hard metal chairs around a long table. Murray sits next to Roger, nods to Patsy, who has nice breasts but is married. Vince says, ‘Hi, Murray, we’re talking about the moratorium on Friday.’ ‘You should bring your pretty little Vietnamese girl,’ says Billy. ‘She’s not around anymore,’ says Roger. ‘That’s a shame,’ says Patsy. ‘Yeah,’ says Murray. ‘Helen Dashwood told me her school has banned them from wearing moratorium badges,’ says Billy. ‘Far out,’ says Patsy. ‘We should get her to speak at the rally,’ says Stella, taking notes, and then, looking up, says, ‘Can anyone smell burning?’ Murray sniffs, says ‘I’ll go look.’ They all follow him down the hall. Patsy says, behind him, ‘Is it coming from the kitchen?’ Roger says, ‘No,’ and then the windows around them shatter. Next to Murray, a filing cabinet buckles and twists like wet cardboard in the rain. A door is blown off its hinges. Murray feels a moment of great confusion, a sense that things are sliding away from him spectacularly. He’s felt this once before. He wanted Lan to sit down with him, but she said she didn’t want to be touched. He’d pulled her to him, playfully, a joke, but he was too hard and she went limp in his hands. Like she’d been expecting it. Her head hit the table in front of him with a sharp, quick crack. He didn’t understand what happened; he had never experienced violence this close. He imagined her brain as a line drawing with the different sections coloured in, like his Psych friend had once showed him, except squashed in at the bottom. She had recovered, of course, opened her eyes a second later to him gasping. He remembered saying, ‘I just want to hold you. Why do you always do this to me?’ and even to him it hadn’t made sense because he was the one doing it to her. Afterwards, Murray had felt hungry, but couldn’t think of anything that he’d wanted to eat. He sliced an apple in half, traced the star of seeds with his finger, then decided he didn’t want it. He left it, already turning brown, on the kitchen bench. Author’s Note No one was killed in the April 19 explosion, nor did the roof fall in. The bookstore, kitchen and press on the first floor of 291 took the force of the blast (Evans and Ferrier). The same night, a man called The Courier Mail (1) saying he was a member of a right wing group and had just bombed the Brisbane Communist Party Headquarters. He threatened to bomb more on Friday if members attended the anti-Vietnam war moratorium that day. He ended his conversation with ‘Heil Hitler.’ Gary Mangan, a known Nazi party member, later confessed to the bombing. He was taken to court, but the Judge ruled that the body of evidence was inadmissible, citing a legal technicality. Mangan was not charged.Ian Curr, in his article, Radical Books in Brisbane, publishes an image of the Communist party quarters in Brisbane. The image, entitled ‘After the Bomb, April 19 1972,’ shows detectives interviewing those who were in the building at the time. One man, with his back to the camera, is unidentified. I imagined this unknown man, in thongs with the long hair, to be Murray. It is in these gaps in historical knowledge that the writer of fiction is free to imagine. References “Bomb in the Valley, Then City Shots.” The Courier Mail 20 Apr. 1972: 1. Curr, Ian. Radical Books in Brisbane. 2008. 24 Jun. 2011 < http://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2008/07/18/radical-books-in-brisbane/ >. Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier. Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History. Brisbane: Vulgar Press, 2004.