chapter outline

This paper addresses a number of newspaper stories, identified by topic, as simulacra behaving much like regional or group-specific variations on a traditional folktale.¹ As my material, I take not hot-button controversial issues, but stories which feel mundane and incontestable alongside Somali pirates and healthcare reform. This bares my object, a public funeral eulogy, as one of several expressive culture (folk) forms employed to report the effects of localized conflicts as part of a natural order. I examine newspaper stories topical to the closure of public recreation centers in American cities and towns. My analysis will present clues with which to load ostensibly unbiased, objective, and meaningless newspaper stories with bias, objectives, and meaning.

We regret to inform you...

As the story goes, an immovable budget crisis racks the metropolis. City services are cut across the board. Officials do everything they can, but some recreation centers, like some employees of other city services, won't pull through. The department is suffering from underemployment and lack of funds. Loved ones and mourners share their loss. City officials regret to inform us. Visitors will be redirected to the closest other center, but it will be too far to walk for seniors and children. Local nonprofits and faith-based organizations might absorb some of the runoff, but their capacity and selection of programs cannot match the center's. Everyone is sorry for the kids, and scared of what they will do out in the open, at-risk and unsupervised.

It is not difficult to see the funeral eulogy skeleton, especially glancing back and forth among variations of the article. Most variation is built into the skeleton: the date, city, names (of the center and the speakers), the center's activities, age, the size of the city deficit and amount of money to be saved by closing the center(s). All of this works like Mad-Libs² or Clue:³ filling in the blank and answering the who, what, when,where, why, and how - not to solve a crime, but for the purpose of indexing an event.

The center is remembered fondly; sometimes upcoming plans for the center are reminiscent of a funeral eulogist's mention of the deceased's unfinished business. Occasionally reporters appear to have spent a fair amount of time talking to center employees as well as visitors young and old. Just like a person who has passed away, a center is a multiplicity that will never be replaced. A funeral eulogy reports not on an active killer or conflict, but for the passive deceased. Likewise, these stories report in memoriam on the passive buildings closing; budget cuts are analogous to natural causes.

At first blush, it appears that meaning has been stripped from center closings reports - an invested reader asks who to blame, where the money has gone, which city projects made the cut, and so on⁴ - and the stripped event is appended to any number of grand narratives.⁵ So much, however, is at stake in defining opposing sides and competing interests in urban and local politics that, to be categorized as objective, newspapers tell tales of conflict as if they were events epiphenomenal to or divorced from local power struggles.

Events are instead incorporated by readers into popularized struggles, often rounded up to become homogenized with national or international issues,⁶ not withstanding varying popular conceptions of globalization. City operators have skirted a great deal of criticism thanks to stylized accounts of "what's going on" that produce a contextual lack for local events - an evental meaninglessness which can cast struggle and conflict as the steady, plodding advance of real events and statistics.⁷

Casting this conflict as event steadies our typically gun-shy, business-first local powers against organized confrontation and boat-rocking. The report of a heartfelt apology from a mayor under pressure probably does as much for their popularity as a plan to keep centers open. It definitely doesn't hurt their popularity as much as if s\he were to favor the centers' funding over that of other civil services like fire and police. As well it does not call publicly-funded development projects, let alone the dogma of development, into question.⁸ I believe the contrary, that by displacing the folk form of a eulogy onto the dissolution of what remains of American welfare⁹ projects, subjects more or less actively build fluency in Neoliberal discourses of society, welfare and development.¹⁰

In Society Must Be Defended Michele Foucault shows how state management of the life and death of its subjects correlates with the transition from a system of sovereign power to one of power over life. The change in the relationship between state and subject can be partly characterized as the change from a state which lets its subjects live or makes them die (this is the sovereign right), to one which makes its subjects live or lets them die.¹¹ With respect to recreation centers, media outlets eulogize their closure, more combative sources criticise or blame public officials; none, however, are capable of identifying the closure of a center as an effect of an economic discourse which claims the status of science. The city is relinquished of the responsibility to make neighborhoods live, and global economic failures preclude any sustained accusation of budgetary malfeasance.

Centers once imagined to be solutions to social ailments are perceived as state-sponsored philanthropic organizations. While cities rush to pull plugs on municipally-owned services and properties in favor of investing in non-profits and CDCs,¹² the very effects of Neoliberal development as a scientific discourse are styled as natural responses to economic conditions. That is, centers are closing and changing, in part, to fall in with a Neoliberal conception of the subject as entrepreneur, in whom the city invests for maximum return.¹³ The Department of Parks and Recreation in Columbus, at least, advertises itself and its centers as a services, not investments.

In the city of Columbus, the 2008/9 tale included a unique variation, that the centers to be closed would continue to be maintained. This meant, in practice, that the lawns would be mowed, the utilities left on, and the security cameras recording. Alien to a funeral eulogy, the second life of empty centers stands out of the frame. The appointment of non-profit organizations into leadership positions at select centers contests the form of funeral eulogy. This raises the question: If the centers themselves are not dying, what is?

Centers are opening nationwide, ostensibly more often than they are closing. Reports hail their arrival enthusiastically - most articles are likely solicited by the organizations opening the centers and shopped to local papers. There are several key differences in operating procedures reported on, as well there are a number of utterances which I feel are key to understanding what is passing on in the funeral eulogy, what is being replaced, and what kinds of discursive shifts are making these changes possible. Newspaper articles reporting the tale as a funeral eulogy fashion the effects of conflicts into natural events; they are brought to bear when set next to the seeming proliferation of recreation facilities. More centers means that the funeral eulogies in the news are not of a natural order.

Most centers (re)opening appear to be sponsored by private non-profit entities, faith-based groups and occasionally businesses with a stake in the community. One center opening in Memphis, TN is being sponsored by the director of a private prison company. Most of the others target children, the disabled, or the elderly - their target is most often a demographic, not a neighborhood. Town-gown partnerships are common as well.

Centers opening are billed as assets to the neighborhood - investments in the area's future. Neoliberal economic discourse makes possible neighborhood assets and investments where it undermines public services. Although their closure occasionally provokes touching eulogies or righteous outcries, no newsworthy responses has been able to identify the closures as effects of a conflict.

The centers, themselves, have little to do with this process. Centers in Columbus are supposed to reopen, after the city effectively bullied its constituencies into voting for a tax hike, but under qualitatively different conditions. For example, comprehensive pricing schemes are being designed to minimize losses, refashioning ostensibly free spaces as pay-to-play environments. Some new and forthcoming centers shamelessly advertise their space for rent to business functions and private parties, calling to mind a sweaty convention center.

Nonprofits are being asked to continue supervising select centers. Some nonprofits no doubt operate centers more effectively and passionately than city employees did, but charities' mission statements and priorities most often are not coterminous with the biopolitical mission to serve communities.

As unbiased, objective harbingers of the real into everyday homes and laptops, modern media utters the facts we see, and with which we disbelieve our own landscapes and affectual responses to everyday intensities. I have rewritten the closure and (re)opening of recreation centers as effects of an economic science - part of an effort to imagine that process as an effect of a conflict. I have suggested a measure of objectivity as a power-laden and productive category - a style which evacuates effects of conflict as meaningless events more or less salient to society recited.¹⁴ Furthermore, by studying the uniformity of far-flung statements, I have rewritten it working toward the rule that underpins a series of displaced utterances. Loading a tale with meaning is not a ploy to garner sympathy, it is akin to an attack on the discourse that makes the closure possible.¹⁵

1The simple skeleton fleshed out differently depending on contexts of time and place as in tale-type and motif indexes.

2'Mad-Libs' is a party game in which the parts of speech are used to choose words which will occupy key places in a story. The audience chooses words before hearing the story, then the story is told with those chosen words incorporated into predetermined spots.

3A whodunnit party game in which players must uncover the who, what, and how of a murder.

4Some papers, especially alternative newspapers like The Other Paper more thoroughly investigate the cause of death than mainstream news outlets. Perhaps this is the folk form of a police report.

5Read the comments section of any internet newspaper story for widely varying recitations of societal narratives.

6See web-based reader feedback on newspaper websites, for example.

7 As de Certeau put it: "Once constituted in secret, the real now jabbers away....Never...have the gods' ministers made them speak so continuously, in such detail and so injunctively as the producers of revelations and rules do today in the name of topicality. Our orthodoxy is made up of narrations of 'what's going on'. Statistical debates are our theological wars. The combatants no longer bear ideas as offensive or defensive arms. They move forward camouflaged as facts , data and events." (de Certeau in Ward 124)

8A notable exception is Columbus' The Other Paper's article challenging the city budget on the whole as unfair and hypocritical. (Teter, Lyndsey. Rich Man, Poor Man. 19 December 2008).

9This is a problematic term. I expect a more extended look into the first crystallizations of recreation centers will point to centers' use as welfare, a form of economic control, with a population as its primary target. Many American community centers, however, were focused first on individuals' political capacities - characteristic of disciplinary society. (Foucualt...why can't u remember which book is which...)

10 The Neoliberal bent most clearly the forfeiture of any mind for the public good in post-Keynsian economic theories,

most notably those originating from Friedman and the notorious Chicago School of Economics . As noted by folklorist

Kelly Feltault, Neoliberal economics employ a "discourse that conflates economic growth with human security

"

(Feltault 95)

11Foucault, M. 2003. Society must be defended: lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, transl. D. Macey, pp. 239-263. New York: Picador (chapt. 11, pp. 239-263)

12Community Development Corporations, like Campus Partners in the campus area or Community Properties of Ohio in the Short North and Weinland Park, make use of the city's allocation of federal funds to, in effect, homogenize and gentrify neighborhoods by buying project-based housing from the city (with people living in it) and designing place-making schemes including gateways and cohesive street planning.

13For example, the Columbus cut funding to Davis Discovery Center (like a rec center downtown for the arts) shortly after city council voted to declare the city "Independent Art Capitol of the World." A flock of new investments into private arts-based nonprofits, however, are still flowing.

14"Quotation...is the ultimate weapon for making one believe. Because it plays upon what the other is assumed to believe, it is the means by which 'reality' is instituted. To quote the other on one's own behalf is thus to make believable the simulacra produced in a particular place. Opinion 'polls' have become the most elementary and the most passive procedure for doing this." (de Certeau in Ward 127

15I'm working toward an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" that I hope will be "capable of opposition and of struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific discourse." In a word: genealogy (Foucault 1980d. p 83)

abstract

Outline of a Practice of Theory: Everyday Land, Labor and
(Social)Capital in a Public Recreation Center

Public recreation centers are boring to look at, smelly to be in,  overdetermined, puritanical, masculinist and expensive to maintain.
What's more, most programs cost money, which leaves us wondering
exactly what makes them public to begin with. Many centers are also
immensely popular places for young people and young adults to
socialize after school and on Saturday afternoons, often a rec center
is an everyday stop for young people on their ways home from school.
In early 2009, 11 public recreation centers in Columbus, Ohio closed for "lack of funds." This project has been under way for as long, not only to find

ways of advocating for public space, but also to investigate what
everyday lives are produced in a recreation center. My operating

assumptions are that we're missing effective modes of introducing the
value of these facilities into political machines, and that that has
more to do with the shift from Reformist to Neo-Liberal
styles of urban governmentality than it has to do with any budget
crisis.
My work is presented as a critical introduction to a series of
original short stories and interviews inspired by extensive fieldwork,

organizing efforts, conversations with public officials and many hours spent in select centers.  The inversion of Bourdieu's title speaks more to my impatience with disciplinary canon than it does to my gown's theoretical underpinnings. I draw more inspiration from Donna Haraway and Kathleen Stewart, both of whom embrace storytelling in their critical theoretical work to produce a "contact zone for analysis" (Stewart, 2008).

football practice

On the first day of football practice Coach Davis introduces the kids to Mr. Alex. Most of them just want to be in the basketball clinic that Coach Kibbe is running but Kibbe and Davis say that no one can be in the basketball clinic if they're not playing flag football too. Davis says the kids won't do anything but play basketball if someone doesn't push them to do it. It's about not being one-dimensional. He'll teach them golf and badminton, too.
He lectures them all about sportsmanship and preparation and not calling each other weak. The teams are going to be balanced so no one wins all the time.
The field is huge and sits a good 5 feet above the streets on either side. Mr. Davis and Mr. Alex keep telling the kids, anywhere from 7-11 years old, to stay behind the line until it's time to run the drill. They listen, most of the time, but lines like these lines in the grass must not have the same significance for kids as they do for adults.
Maybe that's what they're learning - or not - moreso than passing or catching. Everyone is watching or ignoring whoever's running next. No one's paying attention to the teenager smoking a Newport and watching practice, or to the kids hanging out on the jungle gym they've well grown out of. Every time the whistle blows the lines still creep forward a step or two.

big papa puff

It probably looked big before they built the mammoth middle school next door, especially with the soviet-styled solid brick facade, windows on the second floor that still don't open, metal doors with little squares of plexi to look through.
I hoist my bike up the stairs to the entrance and pull the door open. There are only two people inside, and they're both inside a booth: 4ft of painted concrete topped by thick glass to the ceiling. There's a little sliding rectangle of space that I have to lean down to talk to the man in the chair inside. Folks must've been shorter in the 50s.
"Hi, can you tell me what kinds of programs you're offering here?"
The man reads them off for me, most of them, because I didn't ask for anything specific, but he doesn't mention the sewing circles or cooking classes, just the sports. We're almost yelling even though we're only a few feet apart. The other guy disappeared into the back somewhere. I get this talk when I walk into a place unannounced and undetermined. Do I have kids? Do I live around here? What am I looking for?

The conversation picks up when I mention that I'm a researcher with the university. I tell him I'm doing my work about rec centers in Columbus and he starts describing his work, giving contacts and telling me about the neighborhood. His name is Mr. Davis, and the disappeared man is Thomas.

We chat through that rectangle for half an hour before he stands up and comes out of the glass office. He's 6 foot 7 and some kids call him dad. The only thing that got him up was the opportunity to retrieve a collection of thank you cards that young kids had made for him over the years. He held up a poster board with cards stuck to it, pointing to them, reading them out loud, smiling the whole time.
We must've talked for over two hours, me saying almost nothing. Sometimes it felt like he was making a case for the place. I'm used to that like I'm used to the disaffected concentration when I ask a rec employee what goes on in their center. I'm used to being seen as a journalist initially.
He says he wants kids to not be "one-dimensional," teach the value of preparation, keep them out of trouble, learn to cooperate, learn to get on with each other. It's not about competition and it's not about the money.  He told me how one of the kids he used to work with is a state employee in some pretty high up spot, and how this guy thanked Mr. Davis by name in his acceptance speech, cuz he "couldn't have done it" without him.
He also told me about how a reporter and a city official came through when they were deciding which centers were closing last winter. To prove his value to the kids he took the two into the gym packed with kids playing.
"Hold up, y'all" he bellowed.
Then he sang "Say my name say my name," just like the Destiny's Child song.
All the kids yelled back, in harmony: "Big Papa Puff!"

a weighted reeling present

"This book tries to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us. My effort here is not to finally 'know' them--to collect them into a good enough story of what's going on--but to fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form....In this book I am trying to create a contact zone for analysis."

Those sentences center the introduction of Kathleen Stewart's Ordinary Affects. (2007) Ostensibly a cryptic bundle of strangely engaging short stories, OA tells us about TVs, shopping malls, trips to 7-11, quiet drunks and the plastic talking owl that appeared at a Laurie Anderson concert.

I won't try to tell what it's about, much less what it means, even if I think I know. I will say that I am interested in storytelling as a genre, and I'm interested in learning about storytelling by telling stories. I'll also tell you that Stewart's stories are to be read in concert with several rock star theorists including Lauren Berlant, D&G, Raymond Williams, Roland Barthes, and Nigel Thrift.

There we have two reasons for me to read this book. The third is its preoccupation with the Ordinary, which I feel free to lump loosely with the Everyday, which happens all the time. Soon I'll have to make explicit the points of contact between Everyday Life and the object of my research (my field), or admit that I'm only called to study EL because I find the object of my research to be hopelessly boring, banal, and devoid of scholarly sex appeal.

ladies, you know

 Kory:  hi are you there?

 me:  sorta

what's up?

 Kory:  just saying hi

i haven't talked to you in a while

 me: it's a bummer, really

that we don't talk so much

 Kory:  i know

for me too

how are you?

 me:  are you ok?

>_>

i'm good

Kory:  i'm ok. very very sleepy right now.

 me:  ya me three

Kory:  homework?

 me:  ya

i'm taking a class where everyone reads each others' papers

 Kory:  oof

 me:  and provides comments and suggestions

I haven't presented yet

 Kory:  that's worse then just the teacher reading it, for sure

 me:  I can't decide if I'm gonna backtrack or present something new

 Kory:  i mean, not worse just you need to put more effort

 me:  sure

and be more clear

cuz there's no guarantee that the folks in the class have any idea what I'm talking about

 Kory:  i got an a on my last paper and i was worried about it

 me:  that's mo[s]tly why I'm thinking about writing a new one

just for class

Kory:  what are you talking about? in your paper

me:  what are you writing papers about?

gosh

we're on the level

 Kory:  ladies, you know

 me:  right

I'm writing about dudes, mostly

 Kory:  i figured! i'm writing papers about chicana feminists right now.

 me:  oh neat

 Kory:  and their art

xicana, really

 me:  I'm writing about rec centers

 Kory:  i knew it!

 me:  and reformist --> neoliberalist urban spaces

[...]

tricking out the everyday

I used to come home from high school to find mom sitting downstairs reading a paper or novel, paying bills, always something. I'd walk in and first thing she'd say "hey hey!" or "hi, little mister" like she'd been waiting for me.

Suddenly weary of it all, I'd drop my bag to go forage in the kitchen.

She says: "Well?"
I say: "Well, what?"
Smiling now: "Tell me everything."

I sigh, peer into the fridge, remember that I want a glass of water, try to remember what I did today, hope she'll give up asking.

Then she starts leading me. "First I..." she croons, never backing down, killing me with kindness. She is diligent in her commitment to stay involved in my everyday life. Young adults whose parents participate actively in their teenage years are over twice as likely to graduate from a post-secondary institution. Asking the same question every afternoon makes it clear that she cares not only about which hoops I jumped through at school, but about me, about my success, my happiness. Asking the same way every time suggests she's been taking cues from a guide to parenting teenagers. My most intimate and sustained introduction to the human sciences.

"First I...got on the bus." I answer, painstakingly, and rehash every dumb detail that comes to mind. I gloss over classes that I skip, I grope for answers when she produces interest in what I haven't learned today.

One day, probably while I was evading what I hadn't learned in geometry class, I chose to skip the usual "realistic" assortment of responses. Instead of "learning congruent right triangles," I was chasing a tornado and joyriding in a school bus. It was unexpected, too fast to catch, a gift from who-knows-where, a weird quantum conflation of daily antagonisms, love, and excitement that taught me to lie with my mouth wide-open. And to this day she loves it.

She giggles and scrunches up her face to keep from spitting out her drink. She knows I'm full of it, but plays along, asking where the tornado was, pushing on little details in the narrative to see where they'll go. She tilts her head back and shuts her eyes to laugh when she's taken by surprise and, if I tell the story right, she always has a little bit of wet Kohl or mascara to wipe like sleep seeds out of her eyes.

I think this is one place where I learned to play like I do. After so many years my coming-home exercise had become so tedious for me; it produced daily a plodding, steady anger, the kind that makes me so mad that I want to lie down. It got to where, some days, I felt great until I stepped through my front door, at which point I'd remember that, in hindsight, I'd had a terrible day. I'd realize that I'd had the most boring, ill-lived, unproductive day in the history of angsty-bored teenagers. I could be instantly crabby, spiteful and mean, and not for low-blood sugar, lack of nicotine, deep-seated mean spiritedness or even "stress."

They're not really lies; a lie is a tied end. The good bits of my day - the fluent bits - weave in and out of make-believe, in and out of time. Outlandish stories are ways to articulate the eloquences of my everyday life to mom, as well as tools for learning from her and sharing with her, frames for articulating the swiftly shifting ground beneath my puppy-dog feet to the barrage of emergent objects finding my purview.

That's reason enough to play this way. I think we have lots more ways of getting on with each other than we acknowledge, and it's always fun to make mom laugh.