Sunday, August 25, 2013

victory belles

So.  Returning from SAA in New Orleans with a head full of fog (literally, some kind of swamp-virus humidity/excessive air-conditioning thing, AND figuratively, so overstimulated and jumbled with ideas)... the most clear detail I can recall is this strange scene from the "all-attendee reception" on the last night.

The event was held in the National WWII Museum, which is, for some reason, in New Orleans.  Before heading down to the conference, I had been interested in visiting the museum, because who doesn't love WWII?  It's obviously the BEST WAR ever.  Anyway, there wasn't really enough time, and after I had seen all the billboards advertising the museum around town I felt a little turned off by the super-hetero-masculine yay-big-machines-and-weapons vibe.  What the hell is a 4-D movie anyway?  (That's rhetorical; I don't actually want to know.)  And when did Tom Hanks become America's official WWII ambassador?  (No offense intended to Mr. Hanks.)  But then it turned out all the archivists would get to play in the museum at night, so great, I would get to see it after all. 

And... the part of the museum we were in for the reception was basically an airplane hangar full of tanks and torpedoes (I think it's called "the Freedom Pavilion"?), but okay, we were a very large group of increasingly drunk weirdos so it might have been the only space that could hold us all.  I eventually noticed a lot of hot pin-up girls emblazoned around, in their iconic 40s hair-styles, and realized that a number of these were posters for, quote, "The National WWII Museum’s charming vocal trio, the Victory Belles," who will take you on a "nostalgic journey" down "memory lane" with "spirited performances" of "timeless" musical classics, blarf blarrrf blarghhhff.

Now I know I started the week with a feminist archivist symposium, but I'm pretty sure this would have set off my alarms anyway.  You know what IS a timeless classic?  Tone-deaf misogynistic tokenism!  You can purchase their music and other souvenirs here, but my favorite pick is the Precious Moments Dolls.  Just like in real life, you can choose "Blonde, Brunette, Redhead, or collect all three!"


And seriously, don't even get me started on WWII Monopoly.  My co-workers and I converged on this item in a corner of the hangar that was set up as a makeshift gift shop.  Probably Jewish-history archivists who spend a lot of time with Holocaust-era documents are NOT Hasbro's intended audience for this game, but we can't be the only people confused by the idea that the goal is to build "camps" instead of hotels...?

Back to the Belles.  This is the part that kills me.  I'm chatting with the bartender at one of the tables serving drinks.  She's about my age; maybe a little younger, but not by a lot.  I notice she's got a really great nail-art manicure, with stencils of stripes and anchors and stars.  Oh, it's patriotic, I think.
     "Did you get them done like that for this job?" I ask.  "So cute."
     "Thanks," she says.  "No.  Well, I usually work in the restaurant here, so I guess so.  They go with the dresses."
     "What dresses?" I ask, because she is wearing the basic-black outfit of all catered events.
     "They have us wear the dresses from the shop, like the vintage style ones."
     "REALLY?"  My mouth is actually hanging open slack-jawed.  Where am I and how did I get here?  "You have to wear a fancy dress to serve food at a restaurant?  That seems like a terrible idea!" I laugh.  (It is probably a good thing that I laugh at myself a lot when I talk because otherwise people would realize what a total jerk I am.) 
     "Well, I'm the hostess," she says.  "But I love them!  It's like totally my fashion era.  Sometimes I think I should have been around back then."
     I don't even think before I open my mouth and say, "You know it was a really horrible time to be alive, right?"
     She laughs and says, "Yeah, I guess so!"
     Oh, we laugh and laugh and everyone lives happily ever after.

Really.  I just don't.  I can't.  It's not this girl.  I like a bunch of stuff about 1940's fashion, too.  It's just the whole scene.  The whole point of what we're doing.  Why are we preserving history anyway, if it's not to learn anything from it?  This is the NATIONAL WORLD WAR TWO museum.  Presumably, in some part, funded by the government, and run by educated people who've at least taken high-school level history courses and have access to our country's collective knowledge bank of archives and artifacts and documentary evidence and really?  REALLY?  The best we can do is package it up with some 4-D "dazzling special effects," some platitudes about "freedom" and "glory," and wrap it all in a red-white-and-blue polyester dress made in China? 

Well, America, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. 


 

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

cities and the dead


St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, New Orleans.  Established August 14, 1789; exactly 224 years ago.

Sometimes, actually a lot of times, it is hard for me to explain my job to people.  What it is to do the things that I do every day that add up to being "an archivist" versus what it means, why it matters, to be an archivist.  So, like I do, I try to find metaphors.

Then, is this not an archive?


In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old post cards that show it as it used to be:  the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory.  If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the post card city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits:  admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old post cards ...

... whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one's eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves.  At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.  It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Cities & Memory 5)