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March 7, 2001, 4:49 p.m. || take lots of notes

-- Tomorrow morning I leave for Meridians and other storms on a jet plane, where postmodern pirate Lauren is also presenting, "scrutinizing safe spaces." Boston zinegals Wendy and Yumi will crash our hotel rooms like maurauders, stealing our plastic-wrapped plastic cups and mini-bars of Dove soap. Cornell graduate student and Epicenter cohort Rachel is hijacking a ride with a preacher man to join the looting and pillaging, punk rock expatriate queer grrrl style.

-- Rachel is however jealous of Mark, who gets to see Pinhead Gunpowder this Thursday. (Everybody scream now.)

-- I have to buy winter gear to prepare for the storm. I intend to wear the same pair of black jeans every day I don't have a presentation and knit myself a scarf on the long plane ride.

--  In the Punk Planet following the issue in which I wrote a column about Without Sanctuary, Joe Lockard writes a review of the monograph, saying, "The book's graphic and unutterable images move a soul to both despair and wonderment at human monstrosity. It is pornography in a true and most evil sense, yet the despicable images are the purest education against racism."

Wow, do I need to say this again? Here's the summary: 1) "A soul" is an abstract identification that blurs the differential social locations of potential viewers, and their relationship to the photographs. 2) "Human monstrosity" is similarly abstract, and does not speak to the historical and ideological specificity of lynching as racial terror. 3) "The purest education against racism" assumes two things. First, that simply viewing images of atrocities will necessarily inspire compassion or empathy. Not at all -- images of violence are often produced by perpetrators to document the act, inspire patriotic feelings (in the "right" population) or fear (in the "wrong" one). They also become aestheticized in Woody Allen films or punk rock record covers. Second, that racism is simply a matter of physical violence. It's not. I mean really.  

March 5, 2001, 5:03 p.m. || the return of teen angst

Of course the week that I have the Meridians conference to go to, I develop a zit. 

March 3, 2001, 1:24 p.m. || black velour & black photographs

listening: Huggy Bear, Taking the Rough with the Smooch CD, Blatz/Filth Shit Split CD

I think my new favorite piece of clothing is the black velour hooded sweatshirt I bought on sale at Urban Outfitters. It makes me feel like an Elvis painting, without the Elvis, Rocky without the grunt or the gloves. The white piping is the added plus, the sly wink that says, "Hey, isn't this a kick? It's velour! Originally priced at sixty, bought for five! When is Three's Company on?" 

I've otherwise become disinterested and my closet is a mess. The vintage dresses I used to wear hang neglected and the vinyl pants and PVC tucked into drawer. These require too much commitment and offer little comfort, and when was the last time I went out dancing anyway? Graduate school is an exercise in butching it up, a test of survival or endurance, fists balled, nights spent hovering over reams of paper crafting arguments in capable prose.

In the closet corner there is a "sell and/or donate" pile that grows and shrinks according to my mood. A white sleeveless top because I never wear white; a "#13" baseball jersey I bought in Williamsburg; a dull black shirt I wore while working at a bookstore in Manhattan; the leather boots that once screamed "nineteenth-century street urchin;" a '50s ladies green jacket shaped for a woman with a bosom. The red leather skirt I bought for three dollars at the St. Vincent de Paul's down the street migrates constantly, restless. I removed the forest green Ralph Lauren sweater Mark's stepmother gave me for Christmas, two years ago, because it's warm, if bourgeois. I wear it and pretend I am in Aspen, cozying up to a warm fireplace in a pre-fab and tastefully accessorized log cabin.

It takes too much effort in the morning to coordinate so I wear black. Even then I have trouble -- do I go with the black boots, black cuffed jeans or the blue Adidas and black pants? Fat red studded belt or skinny black studded belt? Already this qualifies as too many choices. At least my socks are all black and worn, nothing to decide there. Dette confides, "I've worn the same thing for days. My students never can tell."

Ponytail or pigtails, loose bun or let loose, instead I cut it all off. I wanted Edward Furlong in Terminator 2 but the skeptical Asian hairdresser gave me cheap Claire Danes in The Mod Squad. Close enough, all it takes is some pomade and I can signal a) Japanese anime character b) dirty punk rocker c) lazy graduate student.

==

The Village Voice lists Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America as the best photography book of 2000. Below the headline "PICTURE PERFECT" is a chained and hanging black man, dead. Vince Aletti writes, "Without Sanctuary [is] a collection of American lynching photographs that is at once more beautiful than it has any right to be and more appalling than you could ever imagine. These are brutally matter-of-fact documents --shameless, even celebratory evidence of our casual inhumanity-- but their publication isn't just important, it's necessary."

Beautiful? Necessary?

In the liberal documentary impulse (never mind for now that these photographs were taken for commercial purposes by lynching participants, they are reproduced for the edification of a presumably liberal audience), oppression is invariably equated with natural disaster -- causality is vague and blame is not assigned, unless it is attributed to an amorphous "human nature" or in this case "our casual inhumanity." The (images of the) bodies are not perceived as fundamental to the social system that not only tolerated them, but encouraged them -- these atrocities were bred as a systematic (and symbolic) program of terror and genocide. These acts of violence are constituitive of white supremacy in the American South -- but so are the images. These photographs do not simply refer to an empirical body, an event or object, they are themselves a social relation in which you/I are/am implicated as viewers. We are differentially constituted in relation to the object, depending.

It bears noting that the phrase "more appalling than you could ever imagine" assumes a viewer who is privileged, a "you" who is not a target, a "you" who may (wrongly) assume this doesn't happen here anymore. Arguments for reform need not even be advanced, as polite and domesticated as reform is, because these photographs are read as evidence of the past, and not images with the power to create bodily subjects in the present.

==

John Burke in response to this:

"Something else occurs to me. After the bombing near Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, The Times quoted Pentagon officials as saying that Iraq claimed there had been civilians wounded but the US 'had no evidence' of this.

"Living with (or being) a lawyer can be interesting. A lot of lay people are vague on this point, but what people say is evidence. It may be deemed false, or true, or a combination, but it's just as much (or as little) evidence as fingerprints or tire marks... or pictures. The Iraqi 'claim' that civilians were hurt by the bombs is evidence. What's more, it's uncontradicted evidence--the Pentagon didn't produce somebody who said 'I was there and no one got hurt,' or someone to testify that the Iraqi 'claim' was made by a notoriously untruthful person. (Though of course from the Pentagon viewpoint all Iraqis are by definition untruthful.)

"So to what extent does the attention to photos--lynching, napalm, death camps--bespeak an implicit distrust of the testimony of those to whom these things happened? I was raped, my brother was lynched, my mother was burned, my child was killed: why aren't these declarations enough evidence, why must it be reinforced with the visual image of suffering?"