Earphones and Bedlamites

Crashed yellow ear phones, parking lot, passenger side of absent car, Liberty and Water. Hart Crane. 40°03'06.43"N, 76°18'47.79"W

Coming of Age

Objects of childhood that I picked up in the landscaping of Lancaster train station. The dinosaur was found near the base of a tree, while the pacifier was close to the pavement. Both are plastic in bright colors. These objects pay homage to Ben Leech's poetic archaeology in "Subterranean Recovery Crew," Old Weird Lancaster (Nov. 17, 2009), particularly figs. 3 and 9.

40°03'15.14"N, 76°18'28.92"W (left); 40°03'14.16"N, 76°18'29.60"W (right)

Behind the Buttons

It's kind of crazy, how many discarded cell phones I find on my walk to work. I had blogged about the triptych at Lancaster station. Just a few yards to the west, I found yet another phone carcass the next day. Interestingly enough, it's the same brand and model. Differences in the IMEI and S/N numbers suggest a slightly variation in vintage or production. Otherwise the electronic board was identical with the previous find. This carcass is missing its keyboard. So what you see in my sketch is the metallic shapes that receive the pressure every time the user dialed a numbers or letter. Like the preponderance of Newport cigarette boxes, the discarded cell phones invite some archaeological questions. Is it common to jettison a cell phone? Surely some consumers recycle their phones, but what happens to the vast majority that don't? Is there any significance in the brand pattern or the value of the phone (dumb or smart)? Are these Samsung models particularly cheap and more likely to break? Is there something temporary, or sinister about these tossed phones, perhaps used in activities that necessitated instant disposal? For more Lancaster phone carcasses see here and here.


Lancaster Object 012
Location: 40° 03'12.83"N, 76°18'34.08"W
McGovern Ave., Lancaster
Date: February 22, 2012

Cell Phone in Three Parts

Only a few months after its completion, the landscaping of Lancaster's train station is beginning to accumulate the shreds of material occupation. This afternoon, I picked up three broken parts of what was once a single cell phone, scattered over the course of about 5 feet. Almost exactly two years ago, I had picked up two fragments of a phone not far from here, see Pink Cell phone (Lancaster Object 001-002). What is it about the proximity of a train station that provokes cell phone disposal? Below, I started wandering through the interior landscape of the broken cell phone. I was particularly amused by the fourth line of the upper right text, "For more information call 1-888-987-4357." And for greater resolution click images below.Lancaster Object 009, 010, 011
Location: 40° 03'14.49"N, 76°18'29.84"W
Water Street, nr. King Street
Date: February 20, 2012

Wonderful World of Novelties

Around 11 Water Street, just North of King Street, you'll find a decommissioned truck from Rebman's, a shop of gifts and novelties. Rebman's was founded in 1954 and was a fixture in Lancaster's history as the place where everyone bought candy, costumes and games. The store closed in 2004. Chancing upon this late-20th-century graphic is what makes Lancaster a magical place. If you look at Google Earth's street image of Water & King Streets, you'll see the truck parked here (perhaps permanently). This truck, has thus become embedded in the city's virtual presence.

Location: 40° 02'16.23"N, 76°18'30.59"W
Water Street, nr. King Street
Date: February 15, 2012

Nuts and Bolts (Lancaster Object 007)

SPS 10, found in Lancaster parking lot @ 40°03'7.39"N, 76°18'42.72"W
SF07 Penn USA, found in Philadelphia street @ 39°57'11.07"N, 75°11'41.65"W

Beige Eye Glass Sleeve (Lancaster Object 006)

Found near Pennsylvania Station

Purple Toy Car (Lancaster Object 005)

Walking a few blocks south of the Pennsylvania RR station, along Queen Street, the residential quarters of Lancaster slowly emerge: small houses, mixed populations, children. It is here that I picked up the fragment of a plastic purple toy car. Thematically, the find links up with the automobile preoccupations of Lancaster Objects 001-004. It once belonged to a child that probably attended Ross Elementary School a block away. Matchbox cars, as I remember them from my childhood, were solid and metallic. They asserted the material power of the industrial world and brainwashed the collective potential of boys to love the speed and beauty of the machine. The purple toy car here is made out of cheap plastic. It bears an iconic but no material connection to the heroic psyche of the car. Real cars zoom up Queen Street and cut through the old fabric. Only a block away, we have an automotive landscape with strip malls, 45 mph multi-lane roads, and dealerships. Ross Elementary School is a beautiful Beaux Arts building embodying human scale. Many of its students walk to school but many are driven. Geographically, their childhood is caught between the urban core (further South) and the highway speed (further North) that lubricates the suburban economy. This object makes that conflict a little more sensible.

Lancaster Object 004
Purple Toy Car
Location: 40° 3'4.59"N, 76°18'29.09"W
Date: April 20, 2010

Red Car Light (Lancaster Object 004)

Since 1929, the entry way into Lancaster was the new train station, which moved a mile north on Queen Street from the 1860s station. A couple of routes (222 and 72) come from the North to either end of the station and link up in the most anti-urban solution. The pedestrian arriving to the city by train must fight the cars if she wants to walk into town. The automobile's priority at this knot is most evident by the dealerships that surround it. The pedestrian commuter has no option but to walk through the sale parking lots that abut the multi-lane traffic roads without a sidewalk. It is in this traffic knot, that I picked up this fragment.

Fallen off from a zooming vehicle, this must be a special light. Its conical shape takes us back 50 years in car design, unsuccessfully recycled in models like the PT Cruiser. I had it sitting on my office desk when my student, Paul picked it up with curiosity and confidence. We agreed that it could not belong to any car designed in the last 20 years. It is not blobby enough. Its geometrical autonomy removes it from any car. What is it then? Maybe part of a trailer? An emergency light? It's a cab light.

Paul belongs to the future of Franklin & Marshall, a new demographic of immigrants that don't come from privilege (I thank my colleague Dean Hammer for this idea). Unlike the great majority of other F&M students, Paul has done manual labor. He was worked on cars and could comprehend better than anyone else what Le Corbusier meant by comparing the 1907 Humbert with the Temples at Paestum and the 1921 Delage Grand Sport with the Parthenon at Athens, see Towards a New Architecture (Paris, 1923), pp. 180-181.

Although designed for blinking and great visibility, the red car light becomes a thought piece. Multiple modes of movement from foot, to train, to automobile come to bear. They do not directly enter the classroom but we don't enter the classroom without them. The electrical portal for the light, below, reads "Quick Eye, Falconer, NY." I thank my die-hard archaeology friend (see comment below) for taking the research a step further. What I have collected is a cab marker light, a light accessory that people fix on their pickup trucks to ornament/highlight the cab (see example here).

Lancaster Object 004
Red car light
Location: 40° 3'13.50"N, 76°18'33.47"W
Date: April 15, 2010

Minnesota Diva (Lancaster Object 003)

Who is the Minnesota Diva? Lancaster Object 003 is a pink tag separated from its artifact. I picked it up on my commute from Pennsylvania Station to my office, The plastic pink pseudo-leather is stitched around cardboard and is capped by a plastic tag painted metallic. The tag shows a crown and the words MINNESOTA in capital letters and Diva in Art Deco script. Surprisingly enough, Lancaster Objects 001 was also pink. Our sample so far is small and statistical meaningless but, you must admit, there is something weird going on with pink desiderata. Some might argue that I have picked up proof of the pink dictatorship that we are all living through.

When I picked up Minnesota Diva, I thought, "piece OK. Surely I'll be able to find the missing accessory once attached to the label. I have in my hands the diagnostic fragment, the label." But it wasn't as easy as that. The first Google hit for Minnesota Diva is an HIV/AIDS charity organization (make sure to watch the video). The next Google hit is a blog, Thoughts from a Diva, "Random images and thoughts from a misplaced Minnesota Diva trying to survive in Wisconsin." The rest of the hits are equally helpless, ranging from actual divas like the Minnesota-born soprano Audrey Stottler to nail salons in Lake City, MN.
No doubt, the lost tag once belonged to a Minnesota diva now attending Franklin & Marshall College. We'll never know unless that Minnesota diva Googles herself and finds this posting, in which case I HOPE SHE LEAVES A COMMENT.

Unlike the previous Lancaster Objects found on a busy road (in fact ran over by a car), this object was collected from the sidewalk around a college dormitory. Walking through the same site again this morning, I saw a diligent employ sweeping up the sidewalk. Unlike the previous sites, this one is kept clean. In other words, the tag could not have been lying dormant for more than 24 hours, otherwise it would have been swept up. The tag clearly belonged to a Franklin & Marshall student living in the adjacent dormitory, College Row. I must have picked it up minutes or just hours after its dislocation.

Lancaster Object 003
"Minnesota Diva" accessory tag (4.0 x 4.5 x 0.5 cm)
Location: 40° 2'57.46"N, 76°18'59.03"W
Date: April 13, 2010

Pink Cell Phone (Lancaster Object 001-002)

We find objects and objects find us. These two modes reflect epistemologies situated in two polar extremes, archaeology (we find objects) and poetry (objects find us). On my daily walk between Lancaster's Pennsylvania Station and my office at Franklin & Marshall, I cross a few topographies usually with headphones wrapped around my ears, catching up on my weekly podcasts (This American Life, Studio 360, Radio 3 Arts and Ideas, A History of the World in 100 Objects, the Moth, New Yorker Fiction, In Our Times with Melvin Bragg). My gaze occasionally descends and I intake information from the ground and all its surfaces. I cannot keep the surface surveyor's thoughts out of the commute. Yesterday, on my first day after a conference steeped into the dialectics of archaeology, a poetic object was offered to me by the street, the fragment of a smashed up cell phone. I bent over and picked it up. The object was wet from a mixture of black dirt and the rain. I held it cautiously with two fingers trying to keep my hand clean. About 80 yards later, I found

Publish Post

another fragment of the same object. Having chosen to pick the first fragment, this second piece seemed fated, a congratulatory gift. And I cannot fail to recognize that the pick-up act was totally therapeutic, dissolving all the academic anxiety that the conference had raised. Michael Shanks has engaged Julia Kristeva into the conversation. Postprocessualism lets me embrace the archaeological Abject, and I don't care anymore that my reading list is not shared by everyone (see Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium).

Even the most unsentimental pedestrian could not have resisted bending down to pick up this ordinary eloquent object. The physical debris turns poetic and we pay attention. We find it difficult to resist 1) feeling sorry for the owner of the phone that might have lost it, 2) reconstructing the process of loss (did it slip out a pocket, or was it violently thrown from a window?), 3) imagining the feminine modes marketed in magenta, 4) marvel at the circuitry, 5) feel the violence of physical scrapes against the pristine electronics, 6) ponder on the objects maker somewhere in China, etc. etc. I picked up the object and henceforth began a new series of posts called Objects of Lancaster. The series relates to my earlier thoughts on the train commute (that precedes the walk), see "Trainscape: Philadelphia-Lancaster" (March 5).

I took the fragments to my office, washed off the dirt, dried up the clean water with napkins, and let the object air-dry on an orange chair, where students sit during office hours. Today, I scanned the dry fragments on the Art & Art History Department's scanner with a manila envelope as background. I did not include a scale figure fearing that it would add an unnecessary aura of science and factuality. The image below shows the "front" of Object 001 (right) and Object 002 (left), and then the "back" of both objects. If I had more time, I would love to take the objects to the next level, the analytical drawing, inspired by Ben Leech's "Subterranean Recovery Crew" shown in Old Weird Lancaster.

I don't have very much to say about this discarded cell phone, so I'll let it be but simply provide some basic documentation and the context. Below, I clip a Google Earth image (taken from the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. The two pins illustrate the find spots. The building in the upper right is Lancaster's Pennsylvania Station (with adjacent tracks, driveway, parking) and the apsed building on the lower left is a car dealership (with adjacent lot).

Lancaster Object 001
Magenta cell phone, fragment of mouthpiece (5.4 x 5.7 cm)
Location: 40° 3'13.36"N, 76°18'31.21"W

Lancaster Object 002
Cell phone fragment with number keypad (7.4 x 5.2 cm)
Location: 40° 3'12.89"N, 76°18'34.22"W
Date: April 12, 2010

The cell phone fragment led me to believe that I should easily be able to identify the vintage of the original product. Actually, it is not that easy to get information about older cell phones; the web is saturated by new models. Frankly, I wasn't very successful in fine-tuning my search. My gut feeling is that the fragments belong to a Motorola RAZR type of phone, but not the most recent model (shown left). Something about the width, also directs me to Motorola.

As you can see in the scanned images, a few codes survive in the interior part of the phone. Barcodes and numbers identify the inner parts. Unfortunately, I have no idea what all these numbers mean. But here they are:

G0RV2935ZP csf 058 B06
SJUG2150CB 0101 Made in China

V3 (G8/9/18/19) S/W: 08.BD.D3R
SKU: 64634 SEO: LO68527
FCC ID: IHDT56EU2 IC: 1090-EU1
MSN: E23MHD2WLZ M04-4411G21
IMEI: 3515300104889566