Rhapsody in Blue

Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place and Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation: that is all that I will say about the books. However, what I will say is sometimes in the books.

I always liked nostalgia. It is a double-edged sentiment that shapes the memory and link the people to the past but at the same time recreate the past with colors tinted by sour or sweet feelings. Nostalgia pushes perhaps the first steps of every historian and crooks their neck on the back, influencing once and for all their going. Nevertheless, nostalgia is not owned by historians, it infects every human being, and, by my experience, even cats, if I think on how my black furry companion was searching around the house for his old places when we moved here in Philly.

Peoples, communities and neighborhood share with a common memory also a common nostalgia, often mixed with pride or mystification of the reality of the past, but together these people are also the matter that constitutes the past, or at least of its remains.

Museums and galleries, even if beautiful, require a certain detach, sort of an intellectual journey that filters the community out and leaves the visitor alone with his mind in front of the little altars of knowledges  and their descriptions on the walls.

Not all the art rests enclosed in the walls though. Interaction in the street creates interesting connections between memory, place and community that can build or characterize the common memory and “remind” the past to the present.

I read the books, they made me think and then I remembered. I was not in the U.S. for most of my life and the sidewalk monuments of this new world were not part of my experience; I had my load of Garibaldi’s statues and marble signs reminding to me the events that signed the lives of my city’s people, but nothing of America’s past life. Or perhaps it is not true.

Radio days, the intro of Manhattan with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Once upon a time in America; the list could continue long with the scenes full of color, sentiment and even a sort of smell. For the still images Hopper and his urban humanity or Will Eisner of Dropsie Avenue or A contract with God with his characters that show with their own point of view the general personality of the city or of the neighborhood.

Personal point of view, this is the core: memories, experiences and emotions, in a single word the life of the people that built the place and that gave it the tactile and concrete presence in our life today.

I wonder if the memory frozen in the movie, the painting or the comic book is a lesser memory than a monument on the street or on the wall of a temporary art exhibit. Moreover, are all these part of history or are part of memory?

Will Eisner, Dropsie Avenue: The neighborhood.