Kowloon Walled City was a lawless, densely-packed phenomenon

Usually depicted in sci-fi novels and movies after the collapse of government and anarchic revolution, rambling cities overrun with lawless activity and shady characters are usually the products of fiction.  Not so in the Kowloon settlement near Hong Kong, China.  This nearly unrestricted place, called the Kowloon Walled City and nicknamed the “City of Darkness,” was host to prostitution, gambling, drug use and other unregulated activity from after World War II until its “citizens” were evicted in 1992. 

In 1899, the British took control of the Kowloon Peninsula from China for the next 99 years, except for a magistrate’s fort that they temporarily let China keep.  The Chinese left the fort, so when the British attacked it, they found it empty. From then on, the British did little but leave the small strip of land in limbo between the two governments.  After Japan surrendered following World War II, China vowed to reclaim rights to the Walled City and by 1947, 2,000 squatters occupied the city to escape Chinese law. The British tried to drive these squatters out, but after failing to do so, by 1948, decided to leave the Walled City-dwellers to fend for themselves.

Because of both Chinese and British governments leaving it alone, the Walled City became crime-ridden in the next decade.  Housing opium dens, brothels and gambling houses, as well as unlicensed doctors and dentists, the city became ruled by an organized crime group called the Triads. The crime in the Walled City ran so rampant that in the 1970’s Hong Police had no choice but to crack down on it.  In 1973-74, Hong Kong police depleted the Triads’ power by holding more than 3,500 police raids, making over 2,500 arrests and seizing 4,000 pounds of drugs. By 1983, the police commander of the Kowloon City District said that the crime in the Walled City was under control.

This is saying nothing about the quality of the life in the city. One such reason for the poor quality of life in the area was all ofthe unregulated building that took place within the small city.  In the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the Walled City consisted of almost 350 buildings with 10+ stories, although they could not exceed 14 stories because of the proximity to the airport. Most buildings had no utilities and crumbling foundations.  Apartments were generally 250 square feet in size, with haphazard rooftop patios and caged balconies. Roofs were where families spent most of their leise and were full of TV antennaes, clotheslines and garbage. Surrounding the city were alleys that were only about 3.3-6.6 feet wide that were poorly lit and poorly drained.  Hastily designed passages linked the upper levels.

In addition, during this period, the Walled City was  the densest place on earth.  33,000 people inhabited the city and by 1987, 3,249,000 people lived within every single square mile.  For comparison, Kowloon's neighbor, Hong Kong, had 17,000 people per square mile in 2009. 
 

In 1987, the Chinese and British governments banded together to tear down the city because the sanitation condition was much lower than Hong Kong’s and was beginning to pose a danger to the city. Walled City dwellers were paid a total of $350 million dollars to vacate the city.  Some citizens were not satisfied and had to be evicted in 1991 and 1992.  The city was demolished by 1993 and a park now sits on its former site.

“Dixie” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic": Civil War song poems in the American repertoire

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During the Civil War, both north and south used the song-poem to advance a nostalgia for their regions in order to create a willingness to fight.  As evidenced by “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the true specificities and historical contexts rarely mattered, but instead interacted in a conversation with feelings about older tunes to advance new views on abolitionism. The poets or those who “claimed” these two song-poems created often false contexts for the song-poems in order to advance their causes.

Messages and tunes mattered more than specificity of language in 19thcentury song-poems. The individuality of the poem, specifically its unique language and the identity of the poet, mattered less than the message the poem tried to convey. Song-poems often used the language of other genres—blackface “dialect”, declamatory language, Romantic images—to convey a message, rather than to innovate.

Often sung in large groups, song-poems focused on collective experience, nostalgia, and familiarity with tunes and words in order to create an “us” vs. “them” atmosphere to engage sympathies to enact change. 

Dan Emmett, a northern blackface performer, used blackface dialect for his performance of “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land,” but this true historical context was subverted by both the north and south to promote regional nationalism. Emmett’s language mimicked the dialect of blackface minstrelsy, much of it for comic effect. A white man in the north playing the part of a black slave who missed his southern slave home—“I wish I was in de land ob cotton,” probably picking the cotton himself—surely would have been met with laughter from the audience.

In fact, much of the nostalgia for Dixie land both in Emmett’s performance and the later repetitions seems to rely repeat of the refrain—“Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.” In this way, the specificity of the poem seems to matter very little in contrast with the ease in singing the refrain and the catchiness of the song-poem. In other words, ease in performing a song-poem to foster a group unity was more important than the song-poem itself. Or, in the case of “Dixie,” catchiness was more important than the original intention for the song-poem. Instead, “Dixie” was used to foster a regional nationalism in both the north and south, and, the tune and the words of the refrain mattered more than the song-poem’s original purpose in using it as a nostalgic battle cry.

In “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Julia Ward Howe uses Romantic imagery to speak about the war, but also uses “John Brown’s Body,” a song full of call-to-action implications, and her own mythologized account of how the poem came to her to suffuse this call-to-arms poem with layers of meaning. Romantic images of the land in particular, like “[God] is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,” as well as lines about God being around on the North’s side—“I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps” give the poem a feeling of poems of the past, a nostalgia for the pre-war north, and a reassurance that God has blessed the northern land.

Howe builds on this idea of God being on the side of the North by mythologizing—purposefully or not—the way that the poem came to her like a dream in the night. This idea of waking with the stanzas already in place implies that God planted the stanzas in Howe’s head, adding to the idea that God was on the side of the North. Also, Howe’s use of “John Brown’s Body” added another motivating impulse for those who listened to the song—John Brown was a man of action, so the listeners could take action as well. This meaning, coupled with the double implication of God on the North’s side, made this a very effective call-to-action song-poem.   

Buy Aunt Jemima brand and let a mammy make you breakfast!

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In 1889, Chris Rutt, a newspaper man, along with his business partner Charles Underwood, was attempting to sell the new innovation of self-rising pancake flour. Rutt happened into a blackface minstrel house in St. Joseph, Missouri and saw Billy Kersand’s perform as “Aunt Jemima” in a bandanna and apron. The idea for his invention's mascot was born--she would be a mammy.

The mammy character began cropping up in the mid-19th century, becoming well-known in popular culture by 1850. Mammies, generally matronly, dark-skinned and large, were domestic superheroes: they could take care of the house, the children, and the cooking. Mammies’ happiness in performing slave labor was used for a larger purpose. Pre-emancipation, mammy characters were used in literature and other arts to illustrate the kinder side of slavery—mammies were content in their roles as slaves, and had no wish to leave their white families. After emancipation, the mammy figure entered popular culture as a nostalgic symbol of these loving race relations in the Old South.

Aunt Jemima became a fairly popular character by 1890, but she rocketed to national renown, however, only after Rutt and Underwood sold the trademark and image to R.J. Davis, a seasoned grocery producer from Missouri. One of Davis’ best marketing ploys was his hiring of a real-life Aunt Jemima, whom he found in the Chicago-based housekeeper, Nancy Green, to dress in mammy gear and travel to fairs, make up stories about Aunt Jemima’s life in the pre-emancipated South, and cook pancakes for her adoring crowds.

Davis also created an illustrated pamphlet called The Life of Aunt Jemima, the Most Famous Colored Woman in the World, which included a story written by Purd Wright that merged Nancy Green’s stories with aspects of other mammy stories to create Aunt Jemima’s life story. Aunt Jemima is the loyal slave to Confederate Colonel Higbee in Louisiana, and makes better pancakes than any of the white women in the area. During the Civil War, Union soldiers come to Higbee’s plantation and threaten to rip his moustache off of his face, so Aunt Jemima cooks them pancakes to stop them. The soldiers beg Jemima for her recipe, but she refuses to give it to them. Eventually, they succeed in persuading Aunt Jemima to come up river to the north and give them her pancake recipe. The soldiers pay her handsomely, but in gold and not currency.

Inauthentic slave representations like Aunt Jemima helped create a yearning in both the South and the North for the leisure of the plantation south. Nostalgic ideas like these were only exacerbated post-emancipation, in the South in particular, where food preparation traditions for white women and black cooks were quickly shifting. Both urban and rural Southern women post-emancipation changed the way they provided food for their families. Rural women spent most of their days cooking, often having to buy large portions of their food on credit in hopes that their next harvest would bring in enough money to pay off their debts, while urban women began working in larger numbers in textile factories. This type of national nostalgia for black mammies made Aunt Jemima particularly appealing; even though she was only a face on a pancake bag and box, Aunt Jemima capitalized on a complex, but loving nostalgia for mammy characters, and let white Northern and Southern women buy a mammy and cook her pancakes up for breakfast.

Nancy Green, the real-life Aunt Jemima, is a different case, however, in that both her cooking skills and her ability to transform herself into a mammy were what allowed her to move outside of the traditional domestic spheres for black women. Green’s willingness to be Aunt Jemima--not only act as Aunt Jemima--her storytelling skills, and her cooking were what caused the Davis Milling Company to choose her as their Jemima, as well as what made her so popular with white audiences. At fairs, Green’s food presentation display was housed in a large flour barrel, and her space was made to look like a kitchen. This literal move of the kitchen and the black cook outside of the home illustrates a willingness on the part of white audiences to accept a mammy in an Old Southern kitchen in their public spheres, even if she was truly a black woman from Chicago in a stylized reproduction of a southern kitchen.

Aunt Jemima brand pancake mix and syrup still features a smiling mammy, drawn with pearls and sans bandanna, on its logo, and the familiar red box is sold in supermarkets today.

 

Google Street View Problems

Google has a fleet of vehicles with external cameras on swivel mounts which are driving around in cities and towns all over the world. Google provides a site where anyone can experience the street level view of the scanned cities and towns. This can be useful for tourists, travelers, researchers and fun for casual Internet browsing. Unfortunately, sometimes the cameras captures things that people would rather keep private such as embarrassing things glimpsed through curtains and cars parked where they should not be. There have been law suits to have some scenes removed from the Google site.

Governments have become involved in disputes with Google Street View over privacy issues. In 2010 Google announced that it might cancel Google Street View in the European Union because the European Union has made unmanageable demands. Austria and the Czech Republic has banned Google from taking pictures. In May 2010 Germany threatened legal action when it was revealed that Google vehicles has also been capturing information from unencrypted wi-fi connections. In October 2010, Google Street View had to stop operating in Australia after investigation by Australian authorities.

As with all technology, depending on how it is used, it can help and/or hurt people.

 

American suburbs are white, happy places

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            Suburbia in America is a relatively new invention. Before the 1920’s, most city dwellers lived within the city limits, most often in an apartment within their ethnic communities. The most affluent people, usually from well established immigrated families, lived in houses within the city. The newer immigrants lived in apartments near other members of their ethnicity in order to enjoy the benefits of ethnic grocers, ethnic charitable organizations, religious organizations, and the like.

            By the end of the 20’s and throughout the 1930’s, a move towards heterogeneous white mass culture and the want to own one’s own home increased the popularity of suburbs. Throughout the 20’s, big stations began controlling radio, national distribution houses began distributing movies to identical movie houses, and chain stores began beating out mom and pop places for business with their cheap prices. The Great Depression solidified the idea of white American, and nullified specific white distinctions like Italian, Polish, German, etc… This homogeneity of skin color and ideology increased the want for a place for white people to exist together and apart from the ills of the city. Still, during the 1930’s, building was very slow and very expensive.

            In the 1950’s, William Levitt and his assembly-line houses and the G.I. Bill for soldiers returning from WWII revolutionized the housing market and created the modern American suburb. Levitt standardized home building. By making 27 steps to building a home and hiring contractors, Levitt built 10,600 homes on a potato patch in Long Island in three years. Coincidentally, ensuring that Levitt’s homes would have families to buy them, the G.I. Bill following WWII gave returning servicemen the funds to buy a home in a suburb, seeing as there was a housing shortage in cities and no room for expansion within the cities.

            Hand in hand with the popularity of suburbs came the idea of isolation from the problems of the city. Before the late 40’s, most Americans didn’t have cars. In the late 40’s to early 50’s, the move to suburbs caused a huge want/need for automobiles, and the number of Americans who owned cars during these years increased 133%. This, coupled with the Highway Act of 1956, which allowed for the construction of highways so that planes could land on them in war time, ensured not only that suburbanites would be living away from the problems of the city, but also that they wouldn’t be commuting with “the problems” either.

           The popularity of the automobile and the isolation that highways ensured created the mindset that suburbanites needed their own isolated places to shop, as well. When designing suburbs, planners thought that suburbanites would commute into cities for all of their shopping needs. Instead, as planners of the first shopping mall in Paramus, New Jersey-- only seven miles from Manhattan--learned, suburbanites would shop wherever was most convenient.  Paramus’ mall created the model for the modern shopping mall, with its anchor stores and smaller stores, but with many other amenities, such as a hardware store and grocery store, as well. Despite its resemblance to a city shopping district, however, malls were private property and security could keep anyone unwanted person out. City bus lines generally didn’t run to suburban malls.

            One of the “problems” that suburbanites wanted to be isolated from, of course, was African Americans. During the 1960’s, white homeowners were nervous about the property values of their homes decreasing when black families would move to their blocks. Many families looked to suburbs like Levittown, where blacks weren’t allowed to buy houses until the late 1960’s, as options to create their isolated white utopias.

            By the 1980’s, as political allegiances began to shift, huge numbers of white people would leave the city. In Atlanta, a city with only a black minority in the 50’s and 60’s, shifted to being 2/3 black by 1980, with most white residents living in suburbs, and with only 7,000 white students in a public school system of 110,000 by 1985. Detroit is a similar model to Atlanta and illustrates the consequences of urban white flight—the inner city is predominantly black and poor, with a ring of Eastern and Southern European or “new” immigrants around it, followed by an outer suburb of older white immigrants. The white move to outer suburbs perpetuated a cycle a poverty that didn’t allow for urban renewal in many of the predominantly black inner cities.

Connecticut Answered the "Lexington Alarm"

"The shot heard 'round the world" spurred immediate local response.

For American history buffs, living in New England is simply amazing.  While in a nearby town last week, I saw a plaque naming the first contributors to the American Revolution from the (later named) town of Meriden, CT. 

The "Lexington Alarm" was Massachusetts' call for aid from other colonies following the battles of Lexington & Concord, April 19, 1775.  This was the famous "shot heard 'round the world." 

The prior night had included Paul Revere's ride and two lanterns in the Old North Church.  When the alarm document reached Meriden, a group of men organized into a militia and headed to Boston to aid in the defense of the Patriots.  This was the case in dozens of towns and villages throughout CT.  These men eventually fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

 

The text of the Lexington Alarm, that spurred these men to action, is as follows:

"Wednesday morning near 10 of the clock - Watertown
To all the friends of American liberty be it known that this morning before break of day, a brigade, consisting of about 1,000 to 1,200 men landed at Phip's Farm at Cambridge and marched to Lexington, where they found a company of our colony militia in arms, upon whom they fired without any provocation and killed six men and wounded four others. By an express from Boston, we find another brigade are now upon their march from Boston supposed to be about1,000. The Bearer, Israel Bissell, is charged to alarm the country quite to Connecticut and all persons are desired to furnish him with fresh horses as they may be needed. I have spoken with several persons who have seen the dead and wounded. Pray let the delegates from this colony to Connecticut see this. 

J. Palmer, one of the Committee of Safety.

They know Col. Foster of Brookfield one of the Delegate"

 

The plaque reads: “Lexington Alarm *Captain John Couch, responding to hostilities with British at Lexington, left this area April 23, 1775, commanding the Meriden militia: John Allen   Christopher Atwater   Moses Baldwin   *Divan Berry   Samuel Briggs   John Butler   Samuel Collins   Asael Deming   Israel Hall, Jr.   Joel Hall   *Moses Hall   Rufus Hall   Samuel Hall   *Benjamin Hart   *Insign Hough   John Hough   Phineas Hough   Aaron Hull   David Ives   Elnathan Ives Enos Ives   Samuel Johnson   Epaphras Knott   Isaac Livingston   *Phineas Lyman   Daniel McMullen   *Ephraim Merriam   John Merriam   John Pearce   *Benjamin Rice   *Ezekiel Rice   Gideon Rice   Samuel Rice   Joseph Shaylor   Seth Smith   Bela Warner   *Jonathan Yale   *Nathaniel Yale
*Buried in Broad Street Cemetery

 These plaques appear in towns throughout Connecticut.

 

 

Vaudeville and the Orpheum circuit

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          From the late 1800’s to the mid 1920’s, vaudeville and the Orpheum circuit were early examples of entertainment for all of America wherever they were—from Portland, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts. Featuring all types of act from contortionists to musicians, celebrities to balancing acts, vaudeville was the best and worst of American theatrics and was a homogenizing force that brought upper and lower classes together like never before.

            Unlike its performing arts relative burlesque, where women wore sequins and feathers and often little else, vaudeville could be any kind of act, as long as it was family friendly. Surprisingly popular acts included acrobats, ice skaters and regurgitators. Regurgitators, including the most famous of them all, Hadji Ali, would swallow enough liquid to spew kerosene onto open flames and then enough water to put out the fire he had swelled.

            Other surprising people who made vaudeville appearances included Helen Keller, Babe Ruth and Will Rogers, who performed rope tricks onstage. In addition, as is to be expected, vaudeville made way for its offspring, the musical, by giving room to singers and dancers on every vaudeville bill.

            Besides being entertainment for all types of people, vaudeville performers could come from all races, religions and ethnicities.  There were Jewish vaudeville acts and black performers, comedians who had been window washers in another life and recent immigrants.

            At the height of its popularity in the early 1900’s through the 1920’s and because of its widespread appeal, it’s no surprise that vaudeville, its performers and the owners of its performance spaces were raking in the dough. Variety magazine reported that vaudeville was earning over $30 million dollars a year.

By 1919, even small-time performers who performed on the vaudeville circuit forty-two weeks out of the year were making $75 a week, or $3,150. Compare that to the average factory worker who made less than $1,300 and it’s no wonder that every Tom, Dick and Harry with a little talent tried to make it to the big time.

            Major chains of vaudeville circuit theaters were built by Sullivan and Consodine, Alexander Pantages and Marcus Loew, but the largest chain by far was handled the hardened businessmen Benjamin Keith and Edward Albee. The businessmen incorporated and managed the Orpheum circuit, an 1880’s-constucted chain of theaters, which stretched form the east to the west coast. Modeled after opera houses in Europe, the opulent houses featured gold leaf paneling, high ceilings and interesting moldings. At their completion, the Orpheum circuit had 45 houses in 36 cities throughout the country.
            Keith & Albee had a virtual monopoly over vaudeville houses by 1907. They crushed a performers’ union called The White Rats by creating their own fake union, the National Vaudeville Artists and refused to book anyone who didn’t join their union. They became radically puritanical about the cleanliness of the acts in their show, as well, and verbally and sometimes physically threatened any small-time performers who didn’t comply with their rules.

            Deadened by the Great Depression and the invention of the talking motion picture, vaudeville lost much of its audience and appeal in the 1930’s. However, the legacy of the Orpheum theater remains. Many of these opulent theaters are still in cities across the country, including Vancouver B.C., Omaha, NE, Madison, WI and Minneapolis—and have been refurbished and protected for years of viewers of whatever type of live entertainment comes next.

 

Sources and further reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheum_Circuit_Inc.

http://www.musicals101.com/vaude2.htm

Shadows of Obsession


Shadows of Obsession, An erotic novel that cautions us that sometimes one touch, one taste of undulated ecstasy, or one chance encounter, is all it takes to become the object of someone's affection, or the desire to become someone's obsessional affliction

  An erotic psychological thriller that sets the heart racing, and the pulse pounding

  An intimate romance that indulges your wildest and illicit fantasies

  

First Gay Caveman Discovered?

When I first read this headline, I got pretty excited; I love it when we have new historical finds, particularly those that prove that people (and animals) have been gay since forever and it’s perfectly natural so STFU, Uncle Gary. But when I read the basis of the study it gave me pause.

The remains of this potentially gay caveman are thought to be so because he was buried without tools or weapons but instead with household jugs. That’s it; there was no sign of him, say, buried with his mate, but he was pointing eastward, which was traditionally a placement for female skeletons.

Okay, so wouldn’t it be more logical to suggest that this might have been the first transsexual caveman instead? There really isn’t evidence that this skeleton’s bearer was gay or not, but there is evidence of both female roles and burial rites—which were taken pretty seriously, as scientists say.

The article actually ends with the statement that a female cave person had been found before buried like a man. So, in actuality, if they are making this the case for the “first homosexual caveman,” it sort of fails on all fronts, doesn’t it?

If it is an indication of homosexuality or transexuality (as is actually postulated at the end of the article), however, it would be a pretty cool discovery, perhaps serving as further proof that our “liberal media” and whatever else is blamed for “causing” people to be gay isn’t reality, but that nature itself, in fact, is what causes people to love who they love.

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