twee pregnancies and postindustrializing racializations of space

As with most things, I'm about five months late with this, but I finally saw Juno tonight. My reactions follow, though it's narcissistic of me to assume that anyone would care at this point.

My parents loved the movie, my great aunt thought it was anti-abortion (but never saw it), and my own reaction falls in with the ambivalent chorus that my own age cohort seems to have with the movie. I do think it's a bit anti-abortion, moreso even than Knocked Up and the whole "shmushmortion" claptrap that actually merited column space in,like, the New York Times and The Nation. But then I've never actually been in an abortion clinic, so maybe barely post-pubescent goths do regale patients with tales of their boyfriend's grape penis and anti-abortion protesters engage potential aborters in well meaning conversations about fingernails rather than shouting threats and physically accosting them, cause, you know, that sort of thing only happens in movies. Like Dogma. Or not.

The twee-ness of the dialogue, and really therefore the uber-reliance on commodity fetishism (The Stooges, Sonic Youth, Orange tic tacs, blue slurpees, Kimya Dawson) in lieu of meaningful character development is either a really profound comment on postmodern aporia or just really lazy, probably both. And it's weird to see a song I got over quickly when i first heard it like six years ago treated as if it were the most profound piece of music in a film since John Cusack's boom-box discovered "Within Your Reach," which was the real star of Say Anything, not that Peter Gabriel song. I've always felt, since i first saw them at one of the Sideway anti-folk nights (I'd gone to see Sam play) that the moldy peaches were good, but not great, fun but hardly world altering, and this seems to be the kind of intervention the film wants to make too, just in a much more pretentious, Wes Andersonny kind of way.

Let me also add, on a totally unrelated note, that while I have not yet read, but look forward to reading Mandi Isaacs Jackson's new book about New Haven in the 1960s and 70s, Model City Blues, I have read an earlier essay Jackson (who i've known for about six years) wrote on the subject and I've done a good amount of research on the period (for my senior essay, which looked at the years between 1968 and 1971) and Paul Bass's review in New Haven Independent, which posits Bass collaborator Doug Rae as paragon of multivocality and textual democracy, is a bit problematic. Some of Bass's criticisms may be justified - I haven't read the book yet, but what I have read and my own knowledge of New Haven history leads me to be skeptical of some of the more pointed allegations Bass makes of Jackson's alleged historiographical failures, which would be strengthened if Bass were willing to discuss the actual text beyond offering a scarequote here or there. Though we need to be skeptical of the idea that people are organically speaking for themselves when interviewed by an academic or journalist - speech is always mediated - Bass might be right that there may be value in talking to more people than he accuses Jackson of doing. Again i don't yet know enough to form an opinion. But that doesn't, i think, invalidate the way Jackson reads the archive that she works with, the way she finds traces of a very real subaltern resistance (Hill Parents Association, anyone?) to the New Haven planner state in file photos and newspaper articles, for instance. Bass's claim that the fact that Jackson only interviews seven people means that her massive archival work is somehow flawed is thus specious. This is not an adequate lens by which to evaluate Jackson's project and/or its viability.

Bass's takedown really seems to unravel, though around his offering up of Rae as paragon of scholarly virtue - Rae whose investment in the actions of planners (ordinary people appear anecdotally and occupy a decidedly subaltern position in Rae's text, which tows orthodox lines on all matters of New Haven political history - Lee flawed, Panthers bad, John Daniels happy ending, Levin era implicit new epoch in Yale's investment in city though analysis of university's role largely absent from book despite G. William Domhoff's urges to the contrary) erases much if not all of the history Jackson treats on, almost completely ignores any popular involvement in the conversation around the city's future in favor of the narrative of heroically flawed planners. Rae's book - and i will admit it's been a few years since i read it, seemed to me far more invested in taking arrogant potshots at the left than in adequately answering the questions Jackson's work does deal with - the untold stories of urban redesign, the fraught and contested histories of racialized urban space, and the ways in which such spaces are shaped and reshaped not only by the Doug Raes of the world, but also the movements that Rae largely dismisses, ignores, or pathologizes in his own text. (Rae's hostility towards, for instance, the FHUE that Bass namedrops and that Jackson has been involved with for nearly a decade, is well known.) There's far more value in such a project than what Bass, despite his pointed references here to FHUE's complex tactical frames, seems, of late, willing to admit.

I feel a little weird posting this having not yet read Jackson's book (i just ordered a copy this morning,) so I'll stop there and maybe I'll post more later after I've finished reading it. But let me end with a question: does the fact that, say, Vinnie Sirabella was a backer/booster of Richard Lee's renewal programs really invalidate what i am sure is a very smart account of movements against said transformations or for a different kind of city if the author of such a history is a product of a political legacy which unites that opposition with the unions Sirabella helmed? That is what I take to be Bass's overriding argument, and it's unsatisfying.