Pine Door 1770

Door
1770-1800
Pine, painted decoration, iron
Made in Pennsylvania
Titus C. Creesy Collection
1953-125-18
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Summer is here, tenure has been granted, I rush to finish a sleuth of over-due articles, while also getting ready for another season of The Deserted Greek Village Project. After a hiatus, I feel compelled to return to blogging.

I have been thinking a lot about vernacular culture across Pennsylvania and Greece. This year has been the year of Pennsylvania fraktur with three exhibitions, Drawn with the Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, A Colorful Folk at Winterthur, and Framing Fraktur at the Philadelphia Free Library.

What has also become clear to me is that Franklin and Marshall College had been a pioneer in the study of Pennsylvania fork arts, a specialty that we have mostly left to the wayside. Before moving on to the University of Pennsylvania and establishing the discipline of Folklore and Folklife, Yoder was teaching at FandM. Generally speaking, the study of American folk arts seems to have become co-opted by heritage. Pennsylvania German art has been co-opted by the heritage industry most aggressively. Walking through the fraktur exhibition, it becomes clear an elderly white Christian group is the target audience. In engaging younger contemporary artists, the Free Library has tried to break that mold. In similar ways, Greek folk arts have lost the critical edge that they had in the 1960s.

The most important story to be (re)told about the arts of the Pennsylvania Germans is that it's radically different from the art of the English Protestants. What the Germans brought to Pennsylvania is the rich visual culture of the Baroque. Their Quaker hosts (William Penn, etc.) had a fundamental mistrust of art and architecture. Even if some of the German groups were radically anti-art, a great majority of them brought continental visual traditions to the U.S. German Baroque is absolutely wild and has nothing to do with the reserved nature of its British equivalent.

I strongly recommend Don Yoder's 2001 “The European Background of Pennsylvania’s Fraktur Art,” and “The Fraktur Texts and Pennsylvania-German Spirituality,” in Bucks County Fraktur (Pennsylvania German Society 23) [I can send you PDFs]

The door above is in the permanent collection of the PMA. I sketched it because I wanted to figure out the parts and sequence of its construction. Note that the two vertical boards are primary with the three horizontal boards as secondary and the painted panels are tertiary. The panels are painted and decorated by curved shaped that stand out in such a way as to negate the architectonic logic of the door. The painted panels, in other words, float into space. They are served by the door as frames. Within each panel, we have the figure of the heart. Iconographic scholars have beaten the symbolism of the hear to death, as a reference to Christianity. What I see instead, is a smart game of transformations. What might look like a heart at the first upper panels is flipped in the second upper panel to create a dual composition. The heart stops being a "heart" and it becomes a formal game that can lead to imaginative connotations. The upside-down heart, for instance, begins to look like a fruit. It touches its parent shape at the tip adding a sense of visual tension and fragility. At the lower panel, the shapes melt into a third shape. I don't know about you, but to me the final derivations is suggestive of the human body. I see a torso and a posterior with the breast or shoulder shapes above. Anatomically suggestive of the human body, I interpret this as a sexual transformation.

The architectural challenge of any door is to counteract the weight of its material, greater at the bottom than the top. The two iron hinges act quite differently, the top hinge is in tension, the bottom hinge is in compression.  The shapes at the lowest panel, it seems to me, hint on the horizontal striation of any door. The concave and convex shapes address gravity towards the earth and the aspiration of ascent above.

One group of people that loved Pennsylvania folk arts were the Modernists. The 1770 door makes it clear why someone like Charles Sheeler used Ephrata Cloisters as a source of inspiration in the 1930s. Looking at folk art with fresh eyes, even through the spectacles of modernist formalism, makes them provocative once again.

Lancaster Station Christmas

As Lancaster's train station decks itself out for Christmas with a large tree, balls and even a little radio that blares holiday music, a set of 12 panels have been hung on the walls. They tell the good old Night Before Christmas story. Like many things in Lancaster, they have a timeless eerie quality that Ben Leech used to record in Old Weird Lancaster. If I knew more about the history of popular prints, this might not be such a mystery, but I'm intrigued by the inability to fix the panels to any art-historical meaning. They have a vernacular feeling to them. They most likely date to the 1970s (or is it the 1930s?) but act out a primitive style appropriate to the 1822 setting. Lancaster Station is terribly unkempt with threatening water damage and deterioration. The panels testify to the building's instability. They, too, are stained and distorted.

I wish I knew more about the particulars of this ephemeral collection of material culture. They represent the activities of the local community to particularize the building and resist the neglect of its owner: Amtrak. Other installations throughout the station testify to this local care (the photographic history of the station, installed by the local historical society, for instance). Whatever their ultimate origin, habit and meaning might be, I felt compelled to document the whole series and through them celebrate the weirdness that is Christmas in America. The panels are presented clockwise, starting from the NE. Six of them hang on the E wall and six hand on the W wall. I transcribe the text below each panel.

T'was the night before Christmas and all through the house, Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds. While visions of sugarplums danced in their heads.

And Mamma in her kerchief and I in my cap. Had just settled down for a long winter's nap.

More rapid than eagles his courses they came. And he whistled and shouted, and called them by name: "Now Dasher! Now Dancer! Now Prancer! Now Vixen! On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen! To the top of the porch, to the top of the wall. Now, dash away, dash away, dash away all!

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, gave a luster of midday to objects below, when, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a miniature sleigh and a tiny reindeer; with a little old driver, so lively and quick I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky, So up to the house-top the courses they flew With a sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too.

He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf. And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself. A wink of his eye, and a twist of his head, soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread.

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work. And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk
And laying his finger aside of his nose. And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose.

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, and away they all flew like the down of a thistle. But I heard him exclaim 'ere he drove out of sight,

"Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!"

A Visit from Saint Nicholas, by Clement Clark Moore (1823)

Time Definite Services

I was riding behind this truck on the Schuylkill Expressway and I was really overtaken by the graphics of this company from Illinois, Time Definite Services, Inc. The logo shows an analog clock with its circumference growing in thickness. The hands end with an airplane and a truck. I especially liked the truck pictogram for its clarity, and its economical perspective. I admit that part of this sketch was done while driving.

J. C. Leyendecker

The New Britain Museum of American Art displays a drawing of a male fashion model by illustrator J. C. Leyendecker for Kuppenheimer's Men's Clothing Co., intended possibly for Country Gentleman Magazine, ca. 1920. The drawing illustrates the mastery of Leyendecker's craftsmanship, his regulating lines (hinted in the geometry of the socks), the care of the folded hands, the dreamy tilt of the head, the contrasting aquatic background, etc. Unlike other illustrators (like Norman Rockwell), Leyendecker has received little scholarly attention with only one book published since his death, Michael Schau, J. C. Leyendecker (New York, 1974). A new study by Laurence and Judy Cutler seeks to rectify this neglect, J. C. Leyendecker: American Imagist (New York, 2009), reviewed in Steven Heller, "Signs and Portents," New York Times Book Review (April 5, 2009), pp. 12-13.

The German-born Joseph Christian Leyendecer (1874-1951) produced hundreds of illustrations appearing continuously from the 1900s to the 1940s in The Saturday Evening Post, The Century, McClure's, Vanity Fair and other popular magazines. One of my favorite series is New Year Babies running on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post between 1908 and 1943. Leyendecker is also best known for his Arrow shirt ads and the beautiful Ivy League athletes embraced by gay visual history. The Atwater Kent Museum in Philadelphia, the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, and the National Museum of American Illustration in Newport (founded by the authors) have made important contributions in ushering low-brow graphic works into the canon of American art. For example, see my earlier posting, Norman Rockwell and Conn College and Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus. The medium's popularity in the American public is best seen at antique stores or even at the listings of eBay, where original magazines are highly desirable and inexpensive. I have begun a small collection of Collier's and Saturday Evening Post's from the 1930s. Seeing the illustrations next to contemporary prose, fiction, ads and related graphics is my favorite way of understanding the genre and the decade. The prose--of mostly forgotten writers--matches the visual language; the rhetorical and interdisciplinary coherence is great. After a bit of research, it also becomes evident that artists of some repute contributed images, this being the subject of Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators, 1850-1950 at the New Britain Museum of American Art. As was the intention in the original publications, I appreciate possessing the art intended for my class, poor man's masterpieces.

Unlike Rockwell, who in 2001 was ushered into the halls of high art (by a Guggenheim exhibition), Leyendecker has not received his due acclaim. Part of the problem is Leyendecker's homosexuality. As Cutler & Cutler point out, Leyendecker stayed away from the public eye to protect his homosexual private life at a time when it would have caused him professional and social persecution. He also purged any reference to homosexuality from his archive, making it doubly difficult for the historian to reconstruct the artist's intentions. In the 1980s, the homoerotic subtext in his work was recognized by gay subculture and he was immediately embraced as an artistic forefather. However, the homosexual branding has kept Leyendecker in a private drawer as a transitional but not conclusive figure in gay America's coming of age.

Regardless of sexual orientation, Leyendecker is profusely erotic. According to the new study, he painted in a dark room illuminated by a single candle to capture a transgressive erotic quality. His visual language, more than any of his contemporaries, encapsulates the sexual tensions of the 1920s, flapper liberties tamed by censorship. Sometimes, I feel that Leyendecker is forgotten because he was so successful in his primary objective, "creating images easily reproduced, immediately recognized and broadly distributed for audiences by the millions to appreciate." We have internalized Leyendecker's Jazz Age to such a degree, that we claim it as our own. This familiarity has thrown the true author into obscurity. The same can be said about our internalized vision of homey America in the work of Rockwell. But we have scratched deeper under the Rockwell surface because we know it won't be sexually uncomfortable. A broader study of Leyendecker would trace the trickling down effect of Leyendecker's qualities in all aspects of visual culture. Even in archaeology, my expertise, I see traces of Leyendecker in the handling of scaled figures (typically placed in elevation drawings).

I write my ponderings on American culture, homosexuality and aesthetics, while learning of the death of Eve Sedgwick, the literary historian who helped create the discipline of queer studies, see Claire Potter, "All About Eve," Tenured Radical and New York Times obituary. I can't say that I have been influenced by Sedgwick's research directly, but in the hope of refining my critical vocabulary, I hasten to her classic Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1990).

Church Logos

Back in December, I began a blog theme called Airport Chapels. Since then, I've been trying to visit as many of them as my journeys have made possible. The Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) is a place I used to know very well from a commuter marriage from Clemson. But only during a recent connecting flight did I note the airport's multiple chapels . In addition to a permanent room and an ephemeral Sunday space, I found the first graphic sign for chapel. The icon depicts an abstract figure in a kneeling pose. I took a picture of the illuminated airport directory (above), but you can also see it on the official airport website. Charlotte's airport chapel is located just outside the terminal. At the risk of missing my connecting flight, I exited the terminal and visited the sacred space.

The chapel door bears a circular stained glass window depicting an appropriately jet-setting icon, the globe (left). Longitudes and latitudes divide the earth into green, blue, yellow and clear zones, while the logo kneels opaquely in front, genuflecting on Antarctica with its head rising from the equator. The image is too rich for words, crossing multiple planes of signification, from the Platonic immateriality of logos and the visual immateriality of glass to the capitalist abstraction of the logo and its legalistic immediacy. Was this logo copyright-ed?

Chapel logos are not limited to the heterotopia (Foucault) of airports . My good friend Kat (aka Little Ethiopia[n]) is all about church shops and church logos, and I thank her for introducing me to the genre. Kat's and the Esquire's infinite hospitality in Los Angeles included driving me to all the architectural monuments my heart desired.

At the top of my list was Rafael Moneo's celebrated Catholic Cathedral (of our Lady of the Angels) completed in 2002. We marveled at the structure's monumental ingenuity, the historical materiality unique to Moneo, the new Catholic art, the speaker funnels, the tapestry, Moses the Ethiopian (of course), and then we visited the church shop. We swung open a glass door (left) with the shop's hours and an iconic distillation of the building, literally mirroring the solid volumes across the open space.

Another Los Angeles church with its own shop and logo is the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Saint Sophia completed in 1952. I've been studying this building in its own right as a pious donation of Charles and Spyros Skouras, the founders of Fox Studios in Hollywood. Spyros Skouras, moreover, was a trustee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the producer of a 1947 documentary for the School. In the collection of essays I have just edited, The Archaeology of Xenitia, Natalia Vogeikoff-Brogan has written on the relationship between the Greek-American community (the omogeneia) and the School. The 1947 documentary, Triumph over Time, that Vogeikoff-Brogan discovered has been remastered as a DVD and published along with Vogeikoff-Brogan's insightful commentary.

My own contribution to The Archaeology of Xenitia was an essay on the Orthodox Cathedral of Philadelphia (a church without a logo). The research on Saint George has morphed into another project, a survey of Greek-American architecture, a collaboration with Vasilis Marinis at Queens College. LA's Saint Sophia is a hybrid of Hispanic and Orthodox motifs, appropriate for its locale. The commemorated craftsmen for the building seem to have been Latin American, but according to oral history, they were all brought from Greece. But that could be the subject of another posting altogether.

Documenting chapel logos throughout the U.S. illustrates a well-studied phenomenon, the intrusion of corporate culture into religious space. Most research, however, has focused on the phenomena of televangelism and megachurches. The more modest evidence from Charlotte's chapel, from the Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels and from Saint Sophia point attention to different processes of image-making and meaning.

House Stories: I Love Lucy

House Stories is a collection of personal narratives, a teaching experiment in History of Domestic Architecture (Wesleyan ARTS 637). See Introduction, and Table of Contents.

I LOVE LUCY
by Christina Chamberlain

As we drove down the street, I could not stop smiling. It was Memorial Day Weekend, my sophomore year of high school. While most of my friends were at the beach, I had spent eight hours in a car with my mother, journeying from central Connecticut to the far western corner of New York State. The weekend ahead would be filled with celebratory activities, but for now, this was all that mattered; I had been waiting for this for five years. I tried to notice every small business, to engrain every house in my memory, to take in every tree on this serene road in the tiny working-class village of Celeron. With its modest and well-worn homes, rusted cars, and unfashionable stores, the area seemed to lag behind my hometown in the Farmington Valley by several decades. It seemed appropriate, though. This place should be frozen in time, I thought. It contained a piece of history. That was why I had made the pilgrimage.

The tall green street sign we had been searching for finally appeared when we rolled to a quiet intersection. Lucy Lane, it indicated, was to the left. My mother nudged the steering wheel and navigated our family Jeep down the tree-lined road. I held my breath as our car rambled the rutted gray pavement. This was it. Five years of waiting and wishing were coming down to this very moment. I flicked my camera on. “What’s the house number, again?” my mother inquired. I gave no answer. I had never been down this road, nor anywhere in this state west of New York City, but I did not need a house number to know where we were going. I was positive I would know the house when I saw it. I knew it already.

For five years, I had read accounts of activities that took place in the humble 1890 residence, some by its former occupants, others by authors who had never visited. I had stared endlessly at photos of the house, taken from various angles, by various photographers, at various times over the past century. I cringed every time at its sea green aluminum siding, always wondering when it was added—certainly, it could not be original—and why a dignified colonial blue or even deeper green could not have been selected for the façade. I tried to imagine playing dolls on the covered front porch, which spanned the first story. I dreamt of inventing games in the ample backyard or playing hopscotch on the narrow front sidewalk. I envisioned what it would be like to perform in amateur shows in a makeshift theater, with draperies doubling as stage curtains, in the living room. I wondered what impact these spaces could have on who a person became later in life.

Over these years, I had also tried to picture what the inside of the house looked like. What color were the walls? Were the original hardwood floors still there? Was the original woodwork painted? Did the stairs creek? Was the bathroom tiled? Were the table and chairs in the kitchen, or a separate dining room? Whose bedrooms were behind the two side dormers, which flanked the second story like wings, but were hidden from sight when the house was observed straight on? What was the view from the tiny window that was centered just below the front gable? Might there be a scrap of eighty-year old wallpaper buried beneath the more recent layers? Could there be a tiny, cryptic carving in a door, or initials scrolled on a floorboard? Maybe a long-forgotten trinket or memento hidden in the corner of the attic? What treasures from the past did the house have to offer?

I looked out the passenger’s side window, then slowly turned my neck to the left. There, I saw it. The unmistakable green siding made my stomach cinch tight. The white porch, with its narrow columns and slatted rails, looked just like I knew it would. “Oh my God, there’s the house, that’s it, STOP!” I shrieked. My mother pulled over on the side of the street, opposite the house. I stared at it. The tiny window just below the front gable, the double window in the middle of the second story, the front door below and the single window to the left of it, the white porch: it was all there, exactly as I had seen in the photographs, and exactly as I had hoped to see one day for myself. This was it. I was here: fifty-nine Lucy Lane, Celeron, New York. This was the childhood home of Lucille Ball.

The comedienne had been my idol since I was twelve. I did not just watch her television shows and movies, I studied her—her performances, her personality, her personal history. To visit the home where she lived as a child, the site of her earliest experiences and memories, the place she described in so many interviews and autobiographical writings later in life, had long been a dream of mine. While our Jeep idled along the edge of Lucy Lane, I sat in it, not knowing what to do next. “Do you want to take some pictures?” my mom suggested, pointing to the camera in my lap. I hesitated. “Do you want me to take some pictures?” she asked. I handed her the camera and she leaned out the open window.

After taking a few frames, she turned to me. “Go stand in front so I can get you with the house,” she encouraged. As I zipped up my fleece, climbed out of the car, and ambled to the front sidewalk running parallel to the house, I noticed a gray-haired woman sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. Had she been there the entire time? I was unsure. Would she mind if I took a photo, as long as I stayed this respectful distance away from the house itself? I was too afraid to ask. She probably had fans coming by all the time. I positioned myself on the edge of the front lawn. “Hurry up,” I mouthed to my mom.

Standing awkwardly while the homeowner watched silently behind me, I waited for the camera to flash twice. After the second flash, I was knew I had to return to the car. The elderly woman was making me nervous. But, I was convinced that I needed something else first. I had come all this way, to Lucy’s hometown, for the annual Lucy-Desi Days, but I was not ready to go back to the neighboring city of Jamestown, where the weekend’s activities were centered. I knew I would never get inside the house. That was a dream that would never come true, I was certain. I would probably never know what it looked like, what it felt like to be in there. I would probably never really understand how this house had shaped Lucille Ball, the same way my childhood home shaped me.

Still, I could not leave just yet. I needed some thing to commemorate my experience, beyond a photograph and a memory. Spontaneously, I crafted a plan. Facing the street, my heart pounding in cadence with my racing thoughts, I knelt down as if to adjust my left sandal. In one quick and smooth motion, I furtively slid my hand to the right of my sandal. Because I had my back to the house, my body hid this move from the homeowner. I quickly opened and shut my hand, then rose to my feet, bringing a fistful of grass from the lawn with me. Holding my unique if unethical souvenir in front of me, I sprinted back to the car, where I shoved the grass in empty film canisters for safekeeping until going home. “Go, go, go, before she realizes,” I urged my mother.

To this day, a photo of 59 Lucy Lane and my “Lucy Grass” are in a framed display in my study.

Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus

Norman Rockwell's "Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus" (left) appeared in Country Gentleman on February 9, 1918. Founded in 1831, Country Gentleman was the oldest agricultural magazine in the U.S. In 1911, it was bought by the Curtis Publishing Company that also published the Saturday Evening Post. The print shows a Harry-Potteresque child outshining his cousins in a spelling bee. I have used this image for its humor when I tell people that my scholarly specialty is actually the Peloponnesus. And how do you spell that? Only cousin Reginald knows. It is interesting that the obscure peninsula of Greece was featured, even indirectly, in the pages of an American agricultural journal at this very moment. We must remember that Greece entered World War I only the summer before this issue of Country Gentleman and three years after the War began. The details of Greece's joining the Allies on June 1917 are interesting. The country was torn between allegiances to the Central Powers by the German-friendly monarch and allegiances to the Entente by the French-friendly Parliament. The French and British navy blockaded the Peloponnesus to support the government of Venizelos and ultimately tip the favor towards the Allies. Rockwell's image remains funny. Why would anyone but a bookish child know how to spell Peloponnesus? After years of working on the Peloponnese, I occasionally have to check myself. Does Peloponnesus have a double "p" or a double "n"? Beyond the humor, however, Rockwell's illustration attests to an event of geopolitical anxiety even to the reader of rural America.

I feel compelled to bring up cousin Reginald because of some welcome comments I received on my Norman Rockwell and Conn College (Feb. 8, 2009). A typo on the original posting (1967 instead of 1977) made the director of the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts ten years older. You can imagine my embarassment when Laurie Norton Moffatt herself caught my mispelling. At that moment, I wished I was more like cousin Reginald. But the saving grace of my typo is that it initiated a conversation that would have not happened if blogging did not connect even so hastily.

I want to post a follow up in the form of a question. What place does an archaeologist of the Mediterranean have in a dialogue with Norman Rockwell? My answer is simple. Beyond the timely reference to Greece in Rockwell's 1918 illustration, I find some deeper affinities between the visual cultures of modern Greece and modern America. Modernism in the United States was an idiosyncratic phenomenon, resisted by the general public. In one of my favorite books about the 1930s, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century (1996), Michael Denning observes that the tensions between figurative and abstract art developed into a "grotesque" American expression. The United States was frought with a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, it was the most modern country in the world (and celebrated as such by the European intelligentsia) but, on the other hand, it lacked institutions that respected the role of the intellectual, the bohemian and the avant-garde. In other words American combined ultra-modernity with anti-intellectualism. The realism of Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton offered proud resistance to European abstraction (Cubism, etc.). Artists like George Tooker (student of Reginald Marsh) took this resistance into the 1950s. I mention Tooker because he was the recent subject of a retrospective at the National Academy Museum in Manhattan and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The work of Norman Rockwell should not be dismissed as merely commercial illustration. Rather it should figure centrally in the debates over American modernism.

Interestingly enough, modernism in Greece also hang dearly on figurative representation. During the last couple of years, I have been studying the visual documents through which archaeologists communicated their ideas in 1930s Greece. I've been focusing on the work of George V. Peschke, a true trans-national case study. He was born in Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, moved to Greece to practice his fine art, married a Greek, and made his living as an architect and illustrator for American archaeologists. In 1934, he was chief architect at the excavations in Corinth. Peschke was also a member in a Greek artistic association that resisted total abstraction, retaining the recognizability of human form. Although better integrated with French and German artistic traditions, Greeks were also confronted with the very modern media (advertising, posters, magzines) that divided American artistic production into commercial and fine art. Greece's problem in the 1930s was similar to America's tensions but in reverse. Although not the most modern of countries it contained a surplus of intellectuals.

There are many reasons to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum. One of them is to contemplate Cousin Reginald, the sudden relevance of the Peloponnesos in world wars, and similarities between American modernity and other modernities. Another reason is to contemplate the relationship between Norman Rockwell and the classical tradition. No better image addresses this issue than Rockwell's own Saturday Evening Post cover from April 18, 1931.


I look forward to my next visit to Stockbridge and take advantage of the amazing new research possibilities it offers. Almost exactly nine years after my first visit, I have accumulated a whole new set of questions for the artist.

I should also mention that a few months ago, I was at the Atwater Kent Museum in Philadelphia, where my good friends James Ker and Jo Park held their wedding party. Seeing a whole display of Rockwell covers was part of the party's treat. If I am not mistaken, there was once a Rockwell Museum in Philadelphia and its collection was acquired by the Atwater Kent. I must confess that seeing the original magazines on display was such a delightful experience that I developed a bad eBay habit; I have begun collecting old issues of Collier's and the Post. The covers, combined with the articles, stories, and advertisements, make an incredible collective artifact of modern America.

Teaching Thursday: Norman Rockwell and Conn College

On February 23, 2000, a couple of Greek architectural history grad students specializing in Byzantium took a weekend road-trip up to New England to visit Mass MoCA (which had just opened in New Adams) and the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge. The prime mover of the trip was Nikolas Bakirtzis who wanted to make a pilgrimage to Norman Rockwell's house. The other traveler (which was I) had grown up in the U.S. and was more derisive of the saccharine Americana projected in Rockwell's utopia. I was much more interested in the high art world, I wanted to see an abandoned mill now housing New York's largest minimalist works (Mass MoCA). Nikolas had grown up in Greece but had spent one year in Urbana-Champaign, while his parents had an academic fellowship at the University of Illinois. At the age of 15, Nikolas fell in love with the America he met, and Norman Rockwell encapsulated for him that experience. I was a little younger when I first met America, but I came to stay; my family had immigrated for good to Columbia, S.C. So, my American experience fermented through puberty and exploded in typical rebellion (e.g. punk rock). As I think through the Punk Archaeology project now (see earlier postings), I realize that punk was just another phase in romanticizing America and deeply rooted in the traditions it subverted. In my most recent definition, punk begins in 1935, but there will be more about that later. As we commemorate Lux Interior, lead singer of the Cramps who died last week, we are reminded that 30s swing and 50s rockabilly gave punk its basic language. See obituary, Ben Sisario," Lux Interior, 62, Singer in the Punk-Rock Era is Dead," New York Times (Feb. 5, 2008), p. A18, and Bill Caraher's posting on Punk Archaeology blog.

I have reason to think about Norman Rockwell almost a decade after my pilgrimage to Stockridge from a new perspective, that of a teacher. The interview of a Connecticut College alumna in, "The Rise of the House of Rockwell," New York Times (by Carol Kino, Feb. 8, 2009, p. AR26), forces me to ask a basic pedagogical question. What kind of enduring influence can an art history professor have? As a visiting lecturer at Connecticut College, the question is even more specifically localized. Art history's primary goal is to teach young students about the highest forms of art and culture. Vernacular expressions typically fall on the wayside. Even after postmodernism's erosion of the high-low divide, the art history curriculum remains entrenched in the classics. If anything, Connecticut College is exceptional these days because it has managed to incorporate what other programs might consider lesser. Unusual for most departments, for example, is Connecticut College's architectural historian Abigail van Slyck, a renown authority on American vernacular architecture (houses, summer camps, libraries, etc.) She does not supplement some Alberti, Palladio, Ruskin or Le Corbusier specialist, but stands on her own. And the ancient/medieval historian, Joseph Alchermes, studies spolia, decrepit houses in Greece, and other such degradations of the canon. The modernist, Barbara Zabel, studies the machine and assemblages, and the Renaissance specialist, Robert Baldwin, thinks of money, race, gender and music more than connoisseurship. Connecticut College's Art History Department may have not been so inclusive 30 years ago.

Laurie Norton Moffatt, director of the Rockwell Museum, studied art history at Connecticut College but her experience only negatively encouraged her future career. In the 1970s, art historians had great derision for popular arts and that very scorn galvanized Ms. Moffatt:

"Ms. Moffatt began working there [Rockwell Museum] as a part-time guide in the summer of 1977, between her junior and senior years at Connecticut College, where she was studying art history and Asian studies. From the start she was struck by 'the incredible connection that our visitors had with the paintings,' she said. 'People would be moved to tears. People would be moved to laughter. People would be lined up around the building, waiting an hour to get in.' Yet in her college classes, she said, Rockwell received short shrift. 'If he was even put up on a slide at all, it was with great derision and scorn. It was very galvanizing for me.'"

Moffatt's Connecticut College experience begs the question. What may we be deriding in our curriculum in 2009 that will undercut some future cultural sensitivity? The case with Rockwell has changed dramatically. The turning point happened the year after my friend and I visited Stockbridge. In 2001, Rockwell entered the bastions of high art when the Guggenheim Museum hosted its first Rockwell exhibition, "Pictures for the American People," co-organized by the High Museum in Atlanta. Yet the question of inclusion has not quite been settled, as it became obvious a few weeks ago with the death of Andrew Wyeth (Jan. 16, 2009). Considered by many to be a populist, Wyeth's figurative style captured the general public but left the art world in ambivalence. The media stunt of the Helga drawings in 1986 and Wyeth's Republican politics did not help his reputation among art circles. Wyeth's death has sparked again the debate between purists and populists (where Norman Rockwell is always implicated). Robert Storr (dean of Yale School of Art) seemed to be pitched against Kathleen Foster (Curator of American Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art) on the airwaves and press.

The high-low art divide was intelligently thematized in a fantastic exhibit at my newest favorite local institution, the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA). Its Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection prominently displays Norman Rockwell, Stevan Dohanos, J.C. Leyendecker and other illustrators as central to the American canon. In the current exhibition "Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators 1850-1950," illustrates this very American juxtaposition of high and low art especially by artists who worked on both sides of commerce. Many American painters worked as illustrators in magazines and newspapers. N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth's own father, is an important figure in this conflict, best known for his illustrations of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Treasure Island (1911). My personal favorites from the exhibition are a drawing by Maxfield Parrish for Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), Lyonel Feininger's Kin-der-Kinds cartoon for the Chicago Sunday Tribune (1906) and works by the Philadelphian "Eight," John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and William Glackens (who, I learned from the show, went to my high school). I am thrilled that on March 6, the NBMAA will open a new exhibit, The Eight and American Modernisms, co-organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and featuring 70 paintings. If you remember from earlier postings, my interest on The Eight began with George Bellows, whose biography was written by Byzantine archaeologist Charles Morgan. I am intrigued that the NBMAA exhibition title has "modernisms" in the plural. My personal discovery of The Eight is also conditioned by the art-historical curriculum. As a student, even in the 1980s, we learned all about European avant-gardes and nothing about American figurative painters.

Perhaps, it is "modernisms" in the plural that today's art history professor can aspire to. Hopefully, our teaching at Connecticut College will positively influence the future curators of American art. Although, I suppose, negative influence goes a long way, as well.

One of the most interesting endeavors spearheaded by Ms. Moffatt at the Rockwell Museum is ProjectNorman, an internet database that will go live in November. In addition to massive digitization, ProjectNorman has sought to identify all the people that served as Rockwell's live models. For the 1958 illustration, "The Runaway" (shown above), Clarence Barrett and Eddie Locke have been identified as the sitters. Ms. Moffatt hopes to use Flickr to identify more individuals. Many of the models were from Stockbridge, where Rockwell lived from 1953 until his death in 1978. Rockwell typically took photographs of people and based his paintings on these photos. The paintings then became illustrations. Identifying the live models places attention on the fascinating and convoluted sixpartite chain of media transmission: 1) the all-American individual poses in front of Rockwell's camera, 2) a photograph of that pose is printed, 3) a painting is executed based strictly on the photograph, 4) the painting is photographed into an illustration, 5) the illustration is printed in Saturday Evening Post, McCalls and other magazines, 6) the magazines are shipped by mail to millions of all-American readers back to the reality of Main Street. Speaking as an archaeologist, the materiality of this transmission, tracing it back to the original daily life elevates the illustrative process of American life to the highest chambers of art and theory.

Roland Barthes or Walter Benjamin could really have a field day with ProjectNorman. In contrast, they might have less to say about some contemporary high art. For instance, the most recent exhibition that I saw in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Marlede Dumas' retrospective Measuring Your Own Grave left me disapointed. See Peter Schjeldahl, "Unpretty Pictures: A Marlene Dumas Retrospective," New Yorker (Dec. 22, 2008). Dumas has been discussed in relation to figurative artists like Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud; I was interested to see the intersections between the figurative and the abstract. But ultimately, I prefered to see the Francis Bacons downstairs.

A nice treat at the MoMA, however, was a small show on the Esquire covers by my favorite Greek American George Lois. The exhibit focused closely on the steps of manipulation. As in the case of Rockwell, there is a clear sequence of photographing a model and basing an illustration on the photograph. Some of Lois' famous covers include Andy Warhol swimming in a soup can (Esquire, May 1969), or a composite face of Bod Dylan, Fidel Castro, Malcom X, and John F. Kennedy (left, Esquire, Sept. 1965). To read more about the show, see Charles McGrath, "Cover Story: The King of Visceral Design," New York Times (April 27, 2008). Lois, famously created the "I Want My MTV" ad campaign. For further reading, see Lois' book Iconic America (2007), co-authored with Tommy Hilfinger, and Kurt Andersen's interview on Studio 360, "Rosenquist, Still Lifes, Jingles" (Apr. 28, 2008).

Herbert Spencer and the ASCSA

Coinciding with Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, three new books have been published on the scientist's intellectual environment, and reviewed by Christopher Benfey, "Charles Darwin Abolitionist" (p. 11) and Debby Applegate, "Intellectual Selection" (p. 10), NYT Book Review (Feb. 1, 2009),

1) Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views of Human Evolution
2) Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
3) Barry Werth, Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.

The upsurge of Darwinian scholarship has also brought attention to an almost forgotten theorist, Herbert Spencer (above), whose influence outstripped Darwin's in late-19th-c America. Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest," shared Darwin's principles of competition and adaptation but extended their applicability onto politics. Spencer argued that people developed into characters with inherent social worth; the best emerged at the top and the worst sunk to the bottom. This deterministic model accepted social stratification as natural, matching the competitive notions of capitalism and its lack of compassion for the losers. Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie were devout followers of Spencer and deployed him against organized labor and social reform. As Debby Applegate observes in her review, Spencerism shares some similarities to contemporary notions, "as Americans are reassessing their belief that social progress will grow naturally out of unfettered free-market competition." Interestingly enough, fundamentalist Americans that reject Darwin's evolution today (for Creative Design) have implicitly accepted Spencer's social evolution. In 1882, crowds squeezed into Delmonico's Restaurant in New York to celebrate Spencer as the greatest thinker of the 19th c. The match between the British theorist and his capitalist followers created a capitalist sociology with a long afterlife.

Spencer's incredible popularity in the U.S. makes me think of the mindset that American archaeologists brought to their fieldwork in Greece. Reading through the writing of members of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, for example, has given me hints of Spencerism. In the 1920s, Americans were intellectual lightweights compared to the Europeans. But they did have Spencer. To apply Orientalist critiques on these Americans is, of course, very instructive, but I suspect that we must look also consider the stratigraphy of an evolutionary class. Capitalist Americans did not bring an imperialist sense of superiority (it's too early for that), but an evolutionary superiority applicable to fellow, but poorer, Americans. Modern Greeks like poor Americans had essential character flaws that kept them from progressing. J. Lawrence Angel's essay, "Skeletal Material from Attica," Hesperia 14 (1941), pp. 279-363, suggests an evolutionary perspective, for sure.

In order to make a compelling cultural history of the American School, however, we must do more documentary research. What were the archaeologists reading? How entrenched was Spencerism in the popular notions of the American monied elites? On July 8, 1929, archaeologist Alison Frantz wrote to her mother, "I might stay in Phaleron which is on the sea and only about two miles from Athens. I could play golf and swim in the mornings and read the Decline of the West or go up to Athens and work in the Library, or amble around the Acropolis in the afternoon." (Box 8, Folder 1, Alison Frantz Papers, Princeton University Library). Insignificant as this piece of correspondance may seem, it reveals that Frantz was reading Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. The rare clue of extra-curricular philosophical readings might illuminate Frantz's own theory of history. Spengler provided a gloomy, pessimistic view of western culture, a critique of money and democracy. Spengler grows out of German idealistic tradition that would have been quite foreign to an American reader. Assuming that Frantz came to Greece with an American Spencerian anthropology, the reading of Spengler would have encouraged its dismantling.

The Inauguration

I have been glued on the TV all day watching the inauguration of Barak Obama. Tomorrow, I start my history of architecture class at Connecticut and I am simply overwhelmed with the richness of America's architectural tradition unfolding in front of the television. From Saint John's Episcopal Church (Benjamin Latrobe, 1815), and the Capitol Building (William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch, William Strickland, 1791-1863), its Statuary Hall and its featured painting View of the Yosemite Valley by Thomas Hill (on loan from the New York Historical Society), to the Beaux Arts buildings on Pennsylvania Avenue swarming with people, The Old Post Office Pavilion (Willoughby Edbrook, 1880), the National Gallery East Building (I.M. Pei, 1968), the Canadian Embassy (Arthur Erickson, 1989), the White House (Benjamin Latrobe, 1801), its Miesian viewing stand, the Washington Monument (Robert Mills, 1848) and, of course, the Lincoln Memorial (Henry Bacon, 1922), the most central building in Barack Obama's architectural iconography, see Democratic Classicism post.

Emotionally overwhelmed by the momentous event, I turn now inward and confront my own civic responsibilities. How can I contribute to the Change heralded by Obama's presidency? Re-reading Howard Zinn, People's History of the United States: 1492-Present, was the first thing that came to mind for guidance. But ultimately, I feel my commitment is to teach through architectural history. I set my first goal as follows. To give my students the necessary vocabulary so that they could truly understand how radically different the White House is from the Lincoln Memorial, even though superficially they seem similarly traditional. I am afraid that the nuances of Washington's architecture was lost to most viewers because it has been generically labeled "all American." Perhaps here I can make a modest contribution. Two weekends ago, I gave a walking tour "Archaeology into Architecture" for the Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in Philadelphia. The attendants were all non-specialists. For 2 1/2 hours we traveled across American history, from the colonial Independence Hall to the modern PFSF Building, showing the consecutive but radically different archaeological inspirations for each of the various American styles. We also visited the 2003 excavations of the slave quarters behind the President's House, published in Rebecca Yamin's Digging in the City of Brotherly Love: Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology (2008). Perhaps change can come through architectural knowledge and archaeological discipline.

My favorite images from the Inauguration festivities came from two days ago, with Bruce Springsteen performing "We Are One" at the Lincoln Memorial, flanked by its Doric colonnade and a red gospel choir. The image (above) was published in the New York Times (January 19, 2009, p. C1). I have some hope in these white columns, at least in as much as they can be understood. Let's look beyond the iconic and understand the substance.

Domestic Archaeology: House of the Rising Sun

The House of the Rising Sun is one of the best known rock songs, a landmark across many genres: American blues and folk, the British Invasion, garage rock and even punk. Its origins are complicated and contested; people still argue whether it was Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, or The Animals who ushered the song into the popular mainstream. It probably dates to 18th-century American folk tradition but entered ethnographic fact on September 15, 1937, when folklorist Alan Lomax taped a 16-year-old miner's daughter, Georgia Turner, performing the song in Middlesborough, Kentucky. Since then, many have rendered their own versions, from Roy Acuff (1937), Woody Guthrie (1941), Lead Belly (1948), Glenn Yarbrough (1957), to Bob Dylan (1961). The song, however, did not become a classic until 1964, when the The Animals from Newcastle, Britain made it into a number one hit.

The song refers to a New Orleans house of prostitution with a contested archaeological history. Some claim that 826-830 Louis Street is the original location of the house, originating from the name Marianne LeSoliel Levant, the brothel's Madam from 1862 to 1874. There is no proof of this lineage. An 1838 newspaper mentions a Rising Sun coffee house on Decatur Street, and a Rising Sun hotel stood on Conti Street before it burned down in 1822. The latter site was the subject of a 2004 excavation by Shannon Lee Dawdy, now assistant professor of archaeology at the University of Chicago. Dawdy could not conclusively prove whether this was the famous House of the Rising Sun. For Dawdy's fascinating work after Katrina, see John Schwarts, "Shannon Lee Dawdy: Archaeologist in New Orleans Finds a Way to Help the Living," New York Times (Jan. 3, 2006).

More interesting than the song's real archaeology is its idealized archaeological projection. The Animals performed their number one hit in the 1965 music film Pop Gear, surrounded by a fantasized archaeological cage, stripped down in groovy mid-modern minimalism. The clip (seen here) is absolutely stunning. The artistic level of its production is so superior that it makes one wonder what happened to the integration between popular music and the visual arts.

The set design is based on an Ionic colonnade built by purely white thin boards through which The Animals circumnavigate. A yellow wall (matching the band's shirts, beneath their 4-button suits) forms the background and receives both the white thin columns and their intense gray shadows. I've tried to capture the dynamism of this imagined House of the Rising Sun in a sketch at the beginning, but much of the energy of the video comes from the movement of the mobile musicians (Burdon, Valentine, Chandler) around the stationary musicians (Gallagher, Steel), the close ups on Burdon, and the movement of the camera behind the colonnade providing a peculiar (both thin and thick) sense of depth. The set reconfigures the porch of southern domestic architecture, its classical vocabulary, as well as its papery thinness. The composition, however, is entirely modernist with Cubist composition, Constructivist combinations and an Expressionist sense of light.

The L-shaped elements may also remind us of the hang-man games we played as children and, thus, suggest connotations of lynching. Without a doubt, The Animals were aware of Billy Holiday's Strange Fruit. A fascinating song in its own right, Strange Fruit was written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher from the Bronx. Meeropol cited Lawrence Beitler's graphic 1933 photograph (click here) as inspiration for the lyrics, which he published in a school-teacher union magazine in 1936. Holiday performed the song at the first integrated night club in Greenwich Village in 1939. But this is only a slight, if not sublimated reading.

Overall, The Animals' House of the Rising Sun is pure form. Like the British Invasion in general, the clean-cut gentlemen from Newcastle distilled the southern blues, and repackaged them with a sleek force that could bring down the walls. Cleaned up, the House of the Rising Sun stops being an item of ethnographic "authenticity" and becomes pure libidinal force. Much more than the legendary Beatles, Eric Burdon and The Animals offer the building blocks of a raw subversiveness that leads straight to The Clash. One can clearly see that the architectural style of Deconstructivism begins in 1965. Zaha Hadid, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Liebeskind and other paper-thin superstars suddenly seem derivative. Are The Animals so important? I hope to study more Pop Gear clips and see how other peer groups contributed to punk archaeology. This includes performances by Herman's Hermits, The Four Pennies, Matt Monroe, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and other slightly forgotten pioneers of what we now group under the category of garage rock.

I must thank my 10-year-old nephew Sean Gray for introducing me to Pop Gear inadvertently. Grandparents Terry and Brenda Gray got Sean a guitar for his birthday in July. During the last few months, Sean has become a studious guitar player, giving his first public recital in Albuquerque, of the House of the Rising Sun. He emailed The Animals video to his uncle and aunt, in case they had never heard of the song before. Since I also got a guitar last Christmas (thanks to Terry and Brenda), I have taken up the challenge of the Rising Sun. Sean is much better than me, but Popi is enjoying the finger picking across the classic Am, C, D, F and E7th chords.

Airport Chapels: Detroit

Almost exactly a year ago, Bill Caraher wrote some Travel Notes from a 30-hour-long international odyssey spent on airports. The posting explored the notion of Third Space, Edward Soja's powerful paradigm for analyzing the postmodern condition. Bill took notes for those 30 hours in a special notebook. I was reminded of this notebook recently, when Bill blogged once again in transit, this time from the Grand Forks International Airport on his way to Montreal.

As the Holiday Season approaches, we migh spend many hours in the heterotopia of airports (see Foucault, 1967). Recently, I've been intrigued by the sacrality of airport heterotopias, and here I'm not speaking metaphorically, but I'm referring to a recent architectural type, the non-denominational Airport Chapel. I had no idea that such a thing ever existed until the Eleutherios Venizelos airport opened in Athens. Flying out of Greece in 2003, my dear Aunt Popi came along to bid me farewell. Aunt Popi had immigrated to the United States in 1953, and she has a deep psychological connection with leaving home; she loves taking people to or picking people up from airports, having herself dramatized so many highlights of her life in those spaces. Popi goes beyond the airport. Whenever she spots a plane flying up in the sky, she blesses it with the sign of the cross (a very subtle and fleeting sign, considering the minuscule size of a plane seen from the ground). I think my grandmother started doing this when Popi took her first flight to the United States; the idea is that every plane in the sky must have some person leaving his/her mother, getting uprooted, and in need of blessings. Some readers will find it interesting that Orthodox forms of devotion have adjusted to modern technologies. After all, didn't a sign of the cross appear in the skies during Emperor Constantine's victory revelation at the Milvian Bridge? Aviation and devotion have a long history. From my aunt's point of view, airports are spaces of life-altering events, uprootings and returns, not spaces for casual business commuting. A room dedicated to divine concerns is the most logical thing in airports for Popi.

I must confess, I know very little about the history of airport chapels ( starting with Our Lady of the Airways, Boston Logan Airport, 1951). Nevertheless, I feel compelled to document them. They are fascinating spaces. Today, I'm giving a final exam in my History of Art class, where I'm asking the students to define the minimum requirements for a religious space (church, synagogue, mosque). We must write the history of airport chapels because here we'll find the minimum requirements for religious devotion. What are those elements that transform a generic room into a chapel? Most airport chapels seem to recycle generic notions of Christian decoration, making slight quotations to a rich history of churches. The very stuff we, art historians, teach our students with slides and digital images gets recycled as popular imagery within the interior of non-confrontational, non-denominational chapels. There is often low lighting, some back-lit stained glass windows, mosaics, a pseudo-altar or pulpit, etc. From a Protestant point of view, there are no liturgical requirements, but the visual references are always there.

During the Holidays, as people pass through airports, waiting for long connections, I encourage them to seek the chapel and report back. Let's collect some evidence and then make some observations. During my last airport visit, I did exactly that in Detroit's airport, which has a "Religious Reflection Room." It's not easy to find. After following signs, riding up an elevator, and walking through some corridors, one finds a marked room (see sign at beginning). Once you open the door, you enter a drab space that looks like this:

Surrounded by seats along four walls, marked in the cardinal directions, lies a bizarre religious space caught in the weirdness of postmodernity. A compass on the carpet situates you globally, an important detail if you need to face towards Mecca. The lack of Christian iconography suggests that a Moslem audience was considered for this space. There are some Bibles lying on a chair, but also some prayer mats and Korans lying in the corner.

The Islamic overtones raise all kinds of interesting questions. A Muslim does not need a "religious reflection place" to pray, but can pray anywhere. Is this an attempt to segregate Muslims away from an assumed Christian airport? South East Michigan has one of the highest concentrations of Arab Americans, ca. 150,000 people, see "Hockey and Hijab," Economist (December 6th, 2008) p. 79. Dearborn is the home of ACCESS (the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services) and an Islamic Center bigger than any nearby church. The Arab American National Museum also just openned. Can you imagine McDonalds selling halal McNuggets? There are two in Dearborn. So perhaps, the Detroit airport chapel is a statement of Arab American pride. Demographically, one may wonder whether the audience might be not travelers but the airport's Arab Americans working force.

Then there is this bizarre sign next to the door of the Reflection Room, which complicates matters. It says, "This is a Religious Reflections [not Reflection] Room NOT A BREAK ROOM. Employees using this facility as a break room are subject to CONFISCATION OF BADGE," signed personally by Lester W. Robinson, the the CEO of the Airport Authority. It must be one of the most dense social artifacts of the entire airport, loaded with assumed meanings, assumptions, directives, prohibitions, control, policing, discipline and punishment.

Personally, this very sign makes it impossible for me to feel reflective, other than in some Marxist sense of critical thinking. Authority, ownership, labor and leisure get all twisted up. How does a private company intersect with the public sphere? the sacred and the profane figure into the equation.

17N: Ann Arbor, Michigan

November 17 is the infamous day of the Athens Polytechnic student uprising in 1973, which triggered the end of the CIA-sponsored junta in Greece (1969-1974). Every year, protest marches at the Polytechnic commemorate the student resistance, the Greek Left and anti-Americanism. The Anarchists typically engage the police and destroy property. This year, I will be spending November 17 at the University of Michigan, where I've been invited to give a lecture, “Radical Byzantium: American Archaeology in Greece between the Wars." I have never visited Ann Arbor and I am very excited for my trip; it's the academic highlight of my semester. Once I took a highway exit and got gas at Ann Arbor, sadly on the way back from Angela Volan's funeral at Merrillville, Indiana. Michigan holds an almost mythical spot in my mind, so I will list all the reasons why I'm excited for this first visit.

1) First, I'm deeply honored to have been invited by Artemis Leontis and Vassilis Lambropoulos, a couple whom I know only by their scholarly reputation and their spectacular contribution to one of the best Modern Greek Studies Program in the United States. I still remember Fall Break 2004, when I first read Leontis' Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland (Ithaca, 1995), still one of my top-three favorite books on the Modern Greek predicament. Leontis' book helped align my thinking into the direction that conlcuded with the paper I'll be presenting. One of the pleasures of academia is meeting people you have admired on print.

2) Michigan had been one of the fountains of medieval archaeology, initially under the leadership of George H. Forsyth, Jr. Interestingly enough, my paper deals with Forsyth's contributions to archaeology in the 1930s and last year, I was the Forsyth annual speaker of the Archaeological Institute of America. Michigan also pioneered the discipline of Islamic archaeology in the U.S. Michigan's excavations of Qasr Al-Hayr East is where my mentor Renata Holod received her archaeological training.

3) During my graduate-school years at Penn (late 90s, early 00s), Michigan was a powerhouse of Mediterranean archaeology. My own graduate program, Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, saw Michigan as a direct rival for prestige and graduate students. During this golden period, Michigan trained some of the best archaeologists in the field. Bryan Burns, Robert Caldwell, Jeremy Hartnett,Veronica Kalas, Camilla MacKay, Amy Papalexandrou, Adam Rabinowitz, Jane Rempel, Ann Marie Yasin are some of my good friends, scholars of Michigan's making. With so many alum friends, I look forward to visit the mothership.

4) Last but not least, I'm psyched to visit Ann Arbor as a punk rock pilgrimage to the city of Iggy Pop and the Stooges. James Newell Osterberg (Iggy Pop) was born at the town of Ypsilanti in 1947. He grew up at the Coachville trailer park on Carpenter Road ( 42°14'20.06"N, 83°40'40.17"W). Believe it or not, Ypsilanti was named after Demetrios Ypsilantis, the brother of the more famous Alexandros Ypsilantis, both heroes of the Greek War of Independence. I find it most fitting to celebrate November 17 in a town named Ypsilanti and pay tribute to the godfather of punk in front of Demetrios Ypsilantis' statue at the city's water tower building, between a Greek and an American flag. Iggy Pop attended Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor (42°15'46.37"N, 83°45'14.30"W) where he met Ron Asheton, Scott Asheton and Dave Alexander, who formed the Stooges in 1967.

On my commute to Connecticut College this week, I happened to play an odd sequence of CDs, Marika Ninou and Vasilis Tsitsanis rembetika (1966) and the Stooges' first album (1969). Paradoxically they seemed to belong together, part of a similar universe. And then, I reviewed some of my notes on Iggy Pop's performance style (see left), including live footage from the documentary Punk Attitude (2005). While preparing my Michigan lecture, I also got a chance to review some paintings by Greek modernists (Photis Kontoglou 1930 painting on the right) and Byzantine artifacts (12th-c sgraffito plate excavated in Corinth, see top). I was struck by some subtle aesthetic similarities. Is Iggy Pop a kind of Byzantine ascetic? a naked bedecked Cynocephalus ("I Want to Be Your Dog")? a rock mosaic in drag? I leave you with this to think about. Juxtapose glam rock with the mosaic of Justinian and Theodora at San Vitale in Ravenna and you're there. To fully appreciate Iggy's ascetic stage performance, we should also consider Bob Dylan's masquerades, and Jim Morrison's antics.

A lucky friend of mine saw Iggy Pop perform at the open theater at Lycabettos in Athens more than a decade ago. He reported all kinds of rowdy fan behavior, throwing refrigerators from the stands, stage-diving, etc. From Ypsilanti Michigan to Athens is a long journey. Seeing Iggy Pop glowing under the Greek moon might have revealed some of his Byzantine undercurrents. I'm thrilled that my introduction to Ann Arbor will happen through the thematic cross-road between Byzantium and bohemia. Michigan's generous invitation will also allow me to experience the specific postindustrial landscape that rooted punk in midwestern soil (enough about New York and London). Unfortunately, there won't be enough time to also visit Detroit and explore another its rich punk poetics from MC5 to the White Stripes, not to mention the literary avant-garde of Jeffrey Eugenides.