Podcast feed

Find my two podcasts here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/thegap

In itunes, next to the File menu, click on Advanced and then Subscribe to Podcast. Copy/paste the above url into the window that pops up. There should be two podcasts/episodes, but when I first linked my itunes, it only downloaded one of them. In order to get the second, it's easiest to do from the list view (change this from the buttons to the right of the "now playing" box) and then you should be able to check off both episodes. Then all you have to do is sync them up to your ipod.

Other mp3 players such as Zune or Zen should have comparable steps. Most interfaces should make it pretty easy to do. Call me if anything is fishy!

To the right, under Cyber Alex, you will also find a link to the blog for my project, In the Gap.

The Follow

On Monday I went following. I had first decided to go to Buccleugh Park to find someone that I could follow around, but since it was chilly and breezy and I went around midday, there weren't many people around and I didn't have the patience to wait. So on my way down Easton, I jumped on my first opportunity when I saw two young Hispanic men turn off Easton Ave and head down Courtland Street. Here is the ensuing adventure...

The Follow: fullscreen interactive


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Also available on the class Neighborhood Narratives blog are the three audio recordings I did during the follow. That link should take you to the specific page with the hipcast recordings (they are at the bottom). The first two were recorded during the follow and the last was recorded while I was walking back to my apartment, though still out of my normal realm of walking, on Hamilton Street.

Below are the notes I took in a small notebook during the follow:

A Separate UniverseCity

Who goes (t)here?

There is a fence

high as a prison wall

though sans barbed wire,

not sans spikes.

Through it,

I see paths,

sidewalks and park spaces,

orange trees and evergreens

with pine cones.

I see the backs of buildings,

air conditioning units

and electrical boxes,

paint-chipped pipes and ducts.

On the city sidewalk

I stand.

Across the street are houses:

some with students,

some with families.

I see empty chairs on porches,

cars and newspapers,

garbage.

You must walk all the way down

to George, and face the traffic's eyes

in order to enter the other

universe-city on the other side

of the fence.

I see gates with enormous

padlocks.

I have never seen them opened...

do they?

Who has the key?

And who goes through them?

Who will never?

And who will never

look through from that other side –

and why?

Who Goes (T)here?

So I went to the street I have been intrigued with for the last two weeks. It came to me as a potential location because of my "experience" of it this past summer, when I would park on Neilson Street and walk up Bishop Street to George Street, where I would head for Voorhees Chapel. The street I was always bothered by was Bishop, because there was no way to get on campus, without walking a few blocks up to George, the main road, and then another half a block until you could finally step foot "into" the campus. The high fence divide perplexes me and I wonder why it is there and what purpose it is supposed to be serving. I went there a few times this week and just walked the length of the street, seeing what I could see, though I didn't know what kind of "something" I wanted to place there.

My main interest stems from the ways in which the fence and the experience of walking down Bishop Street illustrates the constructed boundary between the city of New Brunswick and the "separate Universe-City" of Rutgers.

At one point, my observing poet-mind took over and I scribbled out a poem on the spot, which I then recorded the next time I was there. I've called it: UniverseCity: Who Goes (T)here? I didn't make any attempts really to edit the poem because I wanted it to be kind of impressionistic and as spontaneous as possible. As I was recording it, ironically, one of the gates for cars opened just as I was walking past it, and you can hear the beeping alarm in the background of the recording just about the time I say, "I see gates with enormous padlocks." The timing was a bit disconcerting. It was after doing the recording that I decided I wanted to come back and attach copies of the poem to the fence.

I attached a few handwritten copies of the poem, printed on notebook paper, which I oriented "landscape"/horizontally in order to reflect the vertical lines of fences and to break with the standard way/mode of writing associated with academia. This break/disruption of normalcy and the "rules of the page" were important for me because I want to question the boundaries we practice.

I used poems to fix the poems to the fence/walls with band aids, as a way of designating a kind of injury or wound, or a recognition of such. Krzysztof Wodiczko comments on the bandage as "the oldest and most common reference" or symbol to the kind of design and articulation "of what is most questionable and unacceptable" (Critical Vehicles, 9). He says, "A bandage covers and treats a wound while at the same time exposing its presence. Its presence signifies both the experience of pain and the hope of recovery" (9). As I see it, the fence stands as an eyesore, as well as a symbolic (and also very literal) divider of people, of knowledge, of access. I hoped the band aids would serve as a sign of healing, or desire for healing, as is hopefully begun with the process of questioning and recognition brought up in the poem. The many-tiered division between academia and the neighborhood is very problematic.

Here are the pictures...