Hi, everybody, sorry I’m late. As usual, the Tohu Bohu book club is meeting to talk about Better Together. In there is the Introduction, in there is Valley Interfaith, the chapter on Branch Libraries is in there, and this room is for the Shipyard Project.
My first comment is simply very cool. And I say that as a fellow who has little use for modern dance. I would very likely have skipped most of the performances, and if I went I would have complained a lot. Still, this is a very cool project, and it’s very cool that it happened.
On the other hand, the chapter does feed in to my main complaint about the book so far, which is that the authors don’t talk about costs. In particular, of course, there’s the money: how much did they have to raise to do this thing? Did the Wallace money cover it, or was there a lot of money raised to add to it? How much did the city spend on shutting the bridge down, and what other things were competing for that money? There are lots of good ideas in the world, and I am happy to believe that this one deserves its share of the money, but somebody made that decision—lots of people did, and I’m curious about why. In addition to the money, though, there are other costs. In this case the obvious one is the inconvenience of having the bridge shut down for a day, but did the Shipyard lose something by participating? Did it lose a sense of mission, a sense of identity separate from the town? Again, I am sure the Shipyard and the town gained much more than they lost, but that’s different from saying they didn’t lose anything (or just ignoring the losses). That’s just a complaint about the way they chose to write the book.
One of the big issues the Project brings up, to me, is this idea of bridging capital, and of making social networks intersect. I found the idea of the later project called Neighborhoods particularly interesting in that regard. The thing is that most of us know only the people we know, and if you aren’t expanding your social networks, you can pretty much assume that anyone you don’t know, you are very unlikely to get to know. My guess is that Navy families knew Navy families, and many people didn’t know any Navy families at all. When the Navy family social network met the arts social network, not only did the society produce a new network, among other things, but there was (it seems) a fundamental shift in perception. I’m curious about that shift.
Let’s say I were a member of, say, four different social networks—parents of kids at my Perfect Non-Reader’s school, volunteers at the library, my Best Reader’s colleagues, and my synagogue—and those networks shifted somewhat, with people joining and leaving, staying at the margins, moving into the center, taking different roles, all the way these things work. I will frequently be meeting strangers, in circumstances where I can expect that we will have quite a few interactions with them. Not every day, but more than once a month. Isn’t my attitude to strangers generally going to be very different? On the other hand, I may be able to classify strangers into possible insiders and possible outsiders: in the fifties (before the disjoining trends), a white woman could be in the PTA, the altar guild, her local political club, the community center craft classes, and a bridge club, hold Tupperware parties and go dancing every week, and still if she met a black woman she could safely assume that she would never come across her again in any of those settings. At some point, that changed. I suspect that Town/Gown splits and the Town/Military Base splits are kind of like that now, although without the obvious physical marker. Anyway, more questions:
- There’s a theater in the shipyard? That is off-limits to civilians?? What’s up with that? What is it used for? How could that be changed?
- Does dance really do a good job of storytelling? Does the dance/audio mix work? I’ve never gone to anything like this that worked for me at all, but then that may just be me.
- Was the plan always to take 2� years to create the events? How did they sell that? I think it’s great, of course, but I’d love to have heard from somebody at the Wallace fund.
As always, feel free to ignore my questions and start me on something else; I’m not even a moderator, here, I’m just the host.
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-Vardibidian.