viz. - memorials

Keeping It Weird: Leslie as Austin’s Icon

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:12:33 +0000

Austin’s Thirteenth Annual East Pet Parade, held just last Saturday, not only celebrated “family, friends, and of course our furry friends,” but also Austin resident Leslie Cochran, who passed away a month before. The organizers encouraged owners to dress their dogs in drag in Cochran’s honor, so Chris Perez dressed her dog Leslie in traditional Leslie garb: a pink bra and a feather boa.

(NSFW after the jump.)

While dogs in drag make an interesting sight, the parade memorialized Leslie not only for his unique fashion but also his status as one of Austin’s most famous residents. The impact of his recent illness and subsequent death stretched from gossip blogs to The New York Times, from Twitter feeds and Facebook posts to City Hall, where Austin’s Mayor Lee Leffingwell declared March 8, the day of his passing, Leslie Cochran Day. When Mayor Leffingwell recognized Leslie in his proclamation as “an icon in the Keep Austin Weird scene for many years,” he indirectly acknowledged that Leslie was an Austin icon because Austin, like Leslie, has been known for being “weird.” Yet his passing seemed to put this into question, as The Huffington Post asked, “Can Austin Stay Weird?” I’d like to take the opportunity here to think through not only Leslie’s status as an Austin icon, but also how Austin’s “weirdness” is put under continual contention.

Image Credit: Austin-American Statesman

One other reason that Leffingwell’s proclamation gives for naming March 8 Leslie Cochran Day is that “many Austin visitors and tourists over the years have an indelible image in their minds of Leslie as a reminder of their trip to our fair city.” Leslie represented Austin in part through his own enacted visibility. His outfits, which often involved high heels, hose, tiaras, and thongs, made him notorious in the South Congress neighborhood and through downtown Austin. This image translated into refrigerator magnet sets in which you could dress Leslie in various costumes, including naughty and nice Santa suits. If Leslie represented Austin, the Austin he displayed was aggressively non-normative. While Leslie himself was friendly, his self-chosen homelessness and clothing directly opposed him to traditional suburban ideas of normal.

Image Credit: Austin-American Statesman

Leslie, though, was not just a fashion plate. While his three mayoral campaigns certainly protested against politics as usual like Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Leslie also demonstrated an Austinite political activism. The video for his 2000 mayoral campaign shows a man interested in smart growth, transportation, and environmental conservation. However, Leslie also advocated for Austin’s homeless population and, later, police accountability:

One noticeable point that his supporters make is that “Leslie is here for everybody … he’s for the people. He’s here for the homeless.” The video’s evidence for this claim is the images of Leslie holding the baby at Barton Springs, walking around and talking to people outside Waterloo Records, near the Starbucks on Sixth and Congress, people jogging on the Town Lake Trail. As Leslie says, the problem with government is that we’ve got “a whole lot of politicians and very few statesmen.” Leslie never became a member of the state, but his state became tied to Austin’s status as a “weird” city.

Image Credit: Austin-American Statesman

What, however, makes Austin “weird”? While its weirdness has been tied up in things like Eeyore’s Birthday and Hippie Hollow, the slogan’s origins were in supporting local businesses. It was, in Red Wassenich’s words, “a small attempt to counter Austin's descent into rampant commercialism and over-development.” However, Austin’s weirdness has been continually challenged over the last few years. Landmarks like the Cathedral of Junk, Emo’s, and SXSW have disappeared or been corporatized. The city’s east side has undergone significant gentrification. “Keep Austin Weird” was trademarked not by the slogan’s originator, but by a group who uses it to market coffee mugs and bumper stickers. Before his death, Leslie was planning to move from Austin back to Colorado. Austinist even declared that NPR was "so over Austin". In short, when the Dallas Observer can write articles about Austin’s lost cool, you know the city’s cred is in trouble.

Image Credit: Keep Austin Weird

However, what might make Austin Austin is not just its lack of rain or the prevalence of breakfast tacos, but Austinites’ disdain for a changing Austin. In other words, South By is always already uncool, because it always was better before—just like South Congress, the music scene, and everything else. As Austin Culture Map recommends:

“To all the listmakers and smart people calling Austin the greatest, smartest, funnest, most awesomest place ever laid on the earth by God: STOP. Those of us who saw the light emanating from Austin and walked toward it back in the 70s and 80s would like to put up the gates and love our city to death before we lose yet another awesome Austin-tatious cool place like Liberty Lunch or the Armadillo.”

In short, Austin has always been a site for cultural contention between those who treasure Austin as it is and outsiders who want to take part in Austin's unique culture. While Leslie’s death may have motivated much hand-wringing over whether or not Austin is, can be, or still is weird, I’d like to think Austin’s weirdness can never die as long as those here adopt it. In other words: if Austin is going to the dogs, as long as they're wearing pink boas, I think Austin’s weirdness (and Leslie’s) will live on in our hearts.

#IWillAlwaysLoveYou: Whitney Houston and Rhetorics of Tribute

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:51:43 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

By this point most people—at least the ones reading blogs or The New York Times—have heard about Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday. As it so happened, Houston passed away the night before the Grammys, turning that celebration into a kairoitic moment of mourning. Singer LL Cool J opened the Grammys with a prayer for Whitney and Jennifer Hudson performed her most famous hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Since then, LeAnn Rimes and the television show Glee have offered performances of this song in tribute to Whitney. Likewise, her family is allowing her funeral to be streamed on the Internet. I’d like here to consider further the function of these institutionalized tributes. How can (or should) we remember the dead?

The Jennifer Hudson performance occurred after the Grammys showed video of Houston singing her hit “Saving All My Love For You” at the 1986 Grammys. Hudson sang part of the song while placed under images of the vibrant young Houston in red.

The performance’s visual rhetoric of mourning is clear: the blue light behind her encodes the seriousness of the moment; her black dress makes visual the grief she expresses through the song. The styled hairdo might almost be an allusion to Houston’s hair in the video. Hudson’s voice has some of the same gospel sound that Houston was herself trained in, but her register and tone are lower and deeper than Houston’s, both turning what in Houston’s performance was a divaesque number into something sadder. She ends her performance not in a repetition, “Darling, I will always / I will always / I will always / Love you,” but in “I will always / Love you / Whitney, we love / we love you.” The choice to sing “I Will Always Love You” is a natural one, not only because it’s Whitney Houston’s greatest hit, but also because the song is about saying goodbye to a loved one.

Originally written by Dolly Parton about her split from a partner, Houston’s performance of “I Will Always Love You” for the movie The Bodyguard changed in into a parting from the man who saved her life (as played by Kevin Costner). The music video made for the song, which featured scenes from the movie, showed a lone Houston in an empty theater, singing as she recollected her experiences with Costner. It is thus not just a song of parting in her voice, but one of departure.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Her performance of the song, described by Joe Levy, is “monumental, undeniable and, as many of her recordings were, a triumph of vocal ability that presents itself as human indomitability.” In fact, memorializing her through reference to her most famous and popular performance is to remember Whitney at her best.

Image Credit: The Mirror

However, Whitney Houston, like the deceased singer Michael Jackson, lived a life of controversy. As her personal struggles with drugs overtook her musical career, she took part in the reality show Being Bobby Brown. Certain phrases she said on the show—like “hell to the no,” “kiss my ass!,” and the infamous “crack is whack” from a Diane Sawyer 2002 interview—gave her a secondary notoriety. She became the subject of humor for comics, with Maya Rudolph doing imitations of her on Saturday Night Live. However, what Whitney can be remembered at this time? As Rudolph is preparing to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, a number of websites are speculating whether she’ll attempt to do her impersonation again. Many suggest it’s “too soon” to remember her such—but who has the right to memorialize her? Her family and friends, like Rev. Marvin Winans, are “seriously grieving” and “want to do this with dignity.” The Whitney they remember is as much a young girl as a famous singer. Her fans and the music world at large pay tribute to her vocal gifts. Others might treasure her almost-campy afterlife on Bravo and The Soup. Decorum suggests that the dignified or proper thing is to preserve her in an orderly—and ordered—fashion. Yet fans on Twitter connect to her death through hashtags varying from #iwillalwaysloveyou to #crackiswhack as they attempt to come to terms with her death. In such case, the public’s memory and public memorializing practices can’t be disciplined, though hopefully all such actions are done out of fondness and love.

Experiencing a Long-Lost Town

Megan Eatman — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:34:24 +0000

Front page of Welcome to Pine Point, by the Goggles

Welcome to Pine Point is an interactive experience that documents a mining town that, rather than declining slowly or attempting a resurrection, erased itself, leaving behind only empty land and a website entitled "Pine Point Revisited." Mike Simons and collaborator Paul Shoebridge built Welcome to Pine Point to document and reflect on the experience of discovering that a place Mike remembered from his childhood was not simply empty or decayed; it was actually gone.

The project is constructed as sort of an enhanced scrapbook. The artists combine grainy video, including shots from a memorial video that was offered to residents before the town was destroyed, and old and new photos of Pine Point and its residents with text that reflects on the experience of rediscovering the town. The fragmentary nature of the documents and the scrapbook feel give the project a certain intimacy, as if the reader/viewer/user is discovering these traces of Pine Point herself. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the project draws on the nostalgia most of us feel for places we experienced as children. For viewers who remember the eighties, the poor video and photo quality (as well as the wardrobe choices the images document) will likely draw on that nostalgia as well.

The collection of different media into a digital format raises questions about how we remember, and the project at times seems to invoke these questions. The initial load screen features an illustration of a VHS tape rewinding, thereby replicating a regressive process that most of us haven't seen in a while and thereby drawing attention to how technology affects the process of remembering. A later load screen, which features the word "Town" and a progress bar, draws attention to Pine Point's fully digital existence. Wiped off the map, it exists primarily in its memorial website and in this project. While the disappearing town is by no means a new phenomenon, the project does raise questions about what will become of towns that are currently in decline and how they might best be remembered.

The thing with feathers

ebfrye — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 05:10:36 +0000

Image Credit : Timothy Schubert

As Cate’s post from last week illustrates, while we continue to be affected by the events of 9/11, we’re also faced with the task of interpreting an expansive and wide-reaching 9/11 memorial culture.

In a recent NYT Op/Ed, when remembering the attacks, Charles M. Blow wrote, “I saw images of small figures that looked liked birds outside the towers. Only they weren’t birds, they were people, forced out by the flames, forced to make an impossible choice under impossible circumstances.” What’s odd is that Blow’s statement came before the memorial events of this year, when two beams of light were blasted into the night sky. The gesture, which oddly recalled the “bat signal,” attracted 10,000 migrating birds, which were subsequently driven into a frenzy and thrown off course.

Having first learned of the incident via a story on NPR’s All Things Considered, my interpretive cues were aural ones. Hearing the recorded flapping of thousands of wings left me only to imagine the scene until I saw the pictures and video posted on gizmodo.

Image Credit: Robert Berjarano

Video Credit: Robert Berjarano

Curiously, the blogger describes the incident and its accompanying images as “spooky.” Indeed, that a stream of “terrorized” birds overtook the celebration is remarkable, especially given Blow’s comments about the way in which those fleeing the towers those years ago took on an avian appearance.

But I’ll go a step further and ask whether such "spookiness" provides an occasion for us to reconsider whether blasting two streams of light can really be the most appropriate form of memorial given such (unintended) consequences and our growing energy concerns.

To illustrate my point, I shift to the work of National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson who documents light pollution and its effects. The image below shows a group of local school children hovering over a display of Toronto's light pollution “victims."

Image Credit: Jim Richardson

Although the image depicts an educational occasion, it also portrays, quite obviously, such a morbid one. Furthermore, I can’t help but think that the shape of the sheet as well as the arrangement of the dead birds visually recalls the appearance of an American flag.

In these cases, to revise Emily Dickinson, hope is not necessarily the thing with feathers.