This month in Brooklyn/Monroe/Kansas City/Philadelphia

Happy holidays! I am thrilled to be sitting in a rental apartment in Brooklyn on Smith Street, a delightfully familiar view out of my kitchen window and dear friends close at hand.

You'll find us here this week, making the rounds, celebrating the births, engagements, projects, and other life-changers that have happened since we've been gone. Next week we head to Monroe for Jessie's family Christmas celebrations, and then after lunch on Christmas day, we'll fly to Kansas City for Owens Christmas dinner, a Santa double header thanks to a year of bumped flights and a growing stash of frequent flyer miles.

Then, Jessie heads to Philly, where she will be delivering a paper on the influence of the photographic on Hawthorne's creative nonfiction -- 1:30 on Tuesday Dec 29th at the MLA. Stop by if you're a member.

She'll meet James back in Brooklyn on Dec 30th, where we'll be dancing and relaxing for the rest of 2009. Katie D has graciously made up her spare room and plans to have a little party. I look forward to hearing the steam pipes at Pratt again this/next year.

We go back to Singapore on January 5th, in time to welcome our second guests, Kristine Z and baby Esme and usher in the new semester.

So, if I don't get to say so in person on this whirlwind loved ones tour, I hope you and yours have a happy holiday season and a fruitful, prosperous, and magical 2010.

James's birthday

"Do I look older?"

Last Wednesday, we took the day off to celebrate James's birthday. We began the day in the neighborhood at the Tiong Bahru market. I had convinced the plant vendor to bring in a Calamansi lime tree for him, which James had made VERY clear was his heart's desire.



(This bowl of limes was destined to become key lime pie)

After the tree was safely planted in our al fresco bathroom, we went out for porridge at Ah Chiang's, a neighborhood institution, and James's favorite breakfast since introduced to the goodness of pork porridge in Laos.

The shredded ginger and chillies make all the difference.

After breakfast and a nap we headed back to East Coast Park, the site of our Monsoon Halloween to try our luck with the weather. Almost as soon as we sat down with a coconut (to drink from with a straw), it began to rain again. We ran for cover in the same spot, but this was no 2-hour deluge. We had just about made it through the satay and popia rolls when it stopped. We took a beer down to the water's edge and watched antsy high school kids in teams and uniforms build sand castles. Windsurfers went out to the container ships and back again. No paddling through the inside!

It was my intention to get on the water or on a bike, but the sailboat rentals were for certified sailors only, so biking it was. We rode along the beach to a trail which turns north, running alongside Changi airport. It was gorgeous and wild, with the occasional plane watching -- this airport has one of every kind come in like clockwork all afternoon long. We'd ride a while, then watch planes land, then ride a while longer.



After we returned the bikes to the rental stand -- late -- we took quick showers at the changing stand, then drip dried while watching the sunset.



Once we were presentable, we made our way to the "Seafood Centre": the five top rated seafood restaurants in Singapore, all "co-located" by the Housing Development Board into one seafront extravaganza of capitalism and chilli crab. Jumbo, Red House, Fisherman's Village, Long Beach, No Signboard -- all of them set up to seat a thousand diners, all clamoring for our business. The only chilli crab we hadn't tried was the name that suited the day best: Long Beach. All day we'd been pretending that we were in California!



We got "Set A" which came with bamboo clams, rice with tiny, crispy silverfish, spinach and garlic, fried buns, chilli crab, and pumpkin ice cream, served over a jar of smoking dry ice. We ate everything but what got left behind on the table cloth!

Mamiya

While we were photographing Mt Phousi, a group of French tourists decided that James and his camera are part of the attractions of Luang Prabang! Hear the temple drums in the background?

Monsoon Season

And it's rained every day since! Just like home!

Jessie's first publication, available Feb 16, 2010

In March 2007, I went to the UK (sponsored by the University of Southampton, where Quinn is now!) to deliver a paper on photography and abolition at a conference held in honor of the 200th anniversary of the end of slavery in the British Empire. Cora Kaplan and John Oldfield took interest in my work and invited me to submit a chapter for this volume. Scholarly publishing takes time, but Palgrave Macmillan now lists our book for next spring, and this week it appeared on Amazon.com

From the editors' description :

A collection of new essays, Imagining Transatlantic Slavery offers the latest research and thinking on current debates about the representation - past and present - of transatlantic slavery. Building on the interest generated by the bicentenary in 2007-8 of the end of British and American involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, our volume is interdisciplinary, drawing on history, literature and museum and heritage studies. Its focus is on the transatlantic nature of slavery and abolition, and the essays range from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Its distinguished contributors offer a critical view of the histories leading up to the defining decisions of 1807-08 and its complex legacies over the last two centuries. Essays on notable figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Hannah More, Benjamin Flower, and William and Ellen Craft are juxtaposed with those on early Quaker writing and the use of photography in abolitionist discourse. The last part of the book on 'Remembering and Forgetting' addresses debates surrounding the representation of slavery in drama, visual culture, museums and galleries, and appraises the importance of recent research to public understanding of slavery today.

Contributors: Brycchan Carey, Vincent Carretta, Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Eileen Razzari Elrod, Catherine Hall, Douglas Hamilton, Cora Kaplan, HollyGale Millette, John Oldfield, Jessie Morgan-Owens, Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace and Marcus Wood

Maybe you want a taste? Here's the first paragraph from my chapter, "'Another Ida May': Photography and the American Abolition Campaign":

Photography’s potential as a persuasive visual adjunct to reform campaigns was recognised from the inception of the medium in 1839, even if before the half-tone process revolutionised printing in 1880 images had to be distributed hand-to-hand. The majority of photographs made in antebellum America were daguerreian portraits: a unique image typically the size of your palm, imprinted on a reflective mirror, encased in brocade and brass. Daguerreotypes circulated without captions; therefore, authors who utilised these early photographs to depict abolitionist ideology found a malleable and suggestive representative space. Their evidentiary power in political debate relied upon writing to instruct audiences how to ‘read’ these images. In this essay I will discuss images of two little girls, both in appearance white, one fictional and the other daguerreotyped, one free and the other a slave, that nevertheless illustrated the same potent message of late abolitionist rhetoric: that however impugned by the public’s anxieties surrounding miscegenation, the invisibility of racial markers demonstrated a moral obstacle to defining slavery along racial lines.

Pre-order your copy now! Or, since it's listed at $74.95, ask your library to order one for you.

Making groceries

James and I went to Carrefour today to pick up some groceries, and ended up seeing Julie and Julia instead, which cast life in Singapore into sharp perspective.

The biggest supermarket in our area is a French-owned conglomerate, which means that we can pick up "Western" items like cheese, sausages, unscented eco-friendly detergents, cous cous, charcoal briquets, and El Paso brand tortillas (oh how far the mighty have fallen!). I heard Carrefour pronounced Ka-fou by a cosmopolitan local friend last night, but we still call it "Care-a-4." Stupide americaines...

The aisles are wide and well lit. Today, touts with bullhorns announced one-hour specials on Korean grapes, bone-density screenings, and ready-made Swiss rostis. Durian gets an entire section apart from the regular produce. The first basement offers the sorts of items one might find in Target (but mysteriously, whatever we are shopping for-- lamps, gardening tools--is never there).

In short, making groceries here in no way resembles a trip The Met on Henry Street, followed by a visit to Scottos or Smith and Vine, followed by Fish Tales, followed by Mazzolas, followed by the green market on Carroll Street, and the many other stops on our peripatetic daily shopping trips in Brooklyn and Union Square. That said, the reason we live in this neighborhood is the extensive wet-market a few blocks away, which we visit with the same frequency we did our marketing at home. So it's all good.

But some things necessitate a visit to Carrefour, which is located on the ground floor and 1st basement of a 9 story shopping mall called Plaza Singapura (which we pronounce with a Spanish accent for no reason whatsoever). This mall is but one of many malls on Orchard Road, an avenue which features 10 blocks of 9+ story malls facing one another, many of which also have grocery stores on their bottom floors and cineplexes on their top ones.

Each floor of Plaza Singapura has a theme: for example, go to floor 5 for hobbies and crafts, floor 6 for music and instruments stores, and a floor each for books, young fashion, imported fashion, home improvement, etc. There are four food courts, each catering to a different taste: mall restaurants, local hawker style food, fast food chains, and the desserts/snacks chains.

Today, I was feeling a little post-shoot malaise. Anyone feels low when a week-long trip is followed by a long work week of catchup, though in my case, this feeling is compounded by nostalgia for the those 7 days of joy, fulfillment, and energy that accompany successful creative output. Add in meeting beautiful new people and trying new cuisines while staying in five star accommodations and you'll understand the catch in my stride. So I planned to enjoy a book of poems written by my landlord at the Starbucks, and then join James in a bit of grocery shopping.

(Caveat: Before you indulge my feeling sorry for my slump today, I should admit that I had a great week at the university and then I spent Saturday: at a poetry reading from 1-2:30, then a dessert date at 3:00 with my female colleagues, then we met friends at Siloso beach at sunset, then J and I watched part of a movie on our couch, then we met up with friends for falafel and foul on Arab street, had a nightcap at a jazz club, and still managed to catch a full night's sleep. So don't let me whine.)

Instead, we wandered up to level four to look for a lamp for my office, stopped by the faucet store to a price a hot water heater for the kitchen sink, and did a quick pass though the sale at the fabric store on level five. Since we were all the way upstairs, we decided to visit the cineplex on level 7 to see what was on. There was The September Issue, but frankly, Gourmet's closing this past week has me just too aggravated at 4 Times Square to enjoy a movie about the work (and waste) of putting together a magazine. But Julie and Julia was in sneak previews today...in 5 minutes! so we bought tickets and went in.

I got a little teary in those first few minutes because I simultaneously missed our life in New York, Paris, my mother (Meryl reminds us of her), and Julia Child, who I just love, even though I haven't successfully made a single one of her recipes. I remembered how we used to shop for groceries in Brooklyn, how our apartment (much less than 900 sqft!) also looked crammed with worn but comfortable things, how I also got pearls on my 30th, and oh, all that beautiful fall produce I'm missing! I remembered the first time I read the Julie/Julia blog and marveled at the tenacity of her idea. I remembered the first time I went to Dean and Deluca, and the rooftop parties--it was at my first roof party that I met my dear Parisian friends, who would in time, teach me about markets and picnics and productivity.

The movie is slow in parts, too long by a quarter hour, and delightfully sappy as all get out, but my thanks and my two thumbs up for capturing that moment. (But did we really dress like that in 2002? for goodness sakes!)

After the movie we sat at an outdoor table at Toast Box for butter and jam/butter and ham sandwiches and pretended we were on the continent. Then we did our shopping at Carrefour and tried to enjoy the irony. At the checkout line I bought the last copy of the last issue of Gourmet. Then James made beet salad for dinner, followed by my zucchini bread and some brie.

Bon appetit!

call me

I hate to use this space for product placement but I want everyone to know that you can call us on our 718 number, and vice versa. There's been a some confusion when we call and our 718 number comes up on your caller id, seeing as how we sure don't live in Brooklyn anymore! We subscribe to a service called Vonage that magically transferred our old home line into a little black and orange box, that when hooked up to a DSL line anywhere on the planet, thinks it's still in Brooklyn. So our phone rings here in Singapore, though for all intents and purposes, your phone company thinks you're calling Brooklyn. It works the same for us, too, when we call you. Our bill looks the same as if we were calling you from Brooklyn. Except Vonage throws in 60 other countries for free, including Singapore and her neighbors, Germany, UK, Mexico, France, and 50 other places we haven't had a reason to call yet. For this service we pay a flat rate of about $30, which we call the Momma Bill, since my mom and I love to talk to each other on the phone. Worth every penny!

The downside: having a 718 number that rings in Singapore also means that dinner time sales calls ring here at 6am. And sometimes even well-intentioned callers get the time zones upside down. Thankfully, the service comes with voicemail, so we'll call you back when we wake up and turn the ringer back on.

Hanoi airport

We are waiting out a long layover at the Hanoi Airport on our way to a shoot in Laos. James is trying to condense our scouting/shooting in Singapore last week into 200 words for the magazine, while I read the International Herald Tribune and try not to use up all my kleenex (I'm kicking a cold, so we decided not to take a cab into town exploring). James reports that the Banh Mi at the Bamboo cafe in the airport is not as good as at Hanco on Bergen Street.

Every other time I've heard Vietnamese spoken all around me was in the movies. What a trip! We can't help but be dorks about it. I know we're supposed to seem like jaded jetsetters, weary world-travelers but OMG We're in HANOI! What would our 19 year old selves think of us if they saw us now?

The Kodak people interviewed us back in the Spring, over the phone, while we sat at the big table in our apartment in Brooklyn.We rattled off stories about ourselves and what we did to get here. They've just published an article about us in their ProPass magazine. See "Partners in Life, Partners in Business" online at their website along with a slide show some of the photos we have taken with Kodak film these last 9 years. They seem to think that if our 20-something year old selves could see us now "after 9 short years" (really? didn't seem short to me!), they'd think we were living a "fairy tale." There's an editorial in the IHT called "The Referendum" today which posits that since we shouldn't look back (see: Lot's Wife) we look sideways, and evaluate our lives to the paths taken by our dear friends and neighbors. There's a winning view of James from where I'm sitting (at the airport in Hanoi OMG!!!!).

In the article I say that I learn a lot from talking to photographers, but omits the names of to those photographers with whom we've shared long standing conversations and poker games. I'd like to ameliorate that with a big shout out to Cedric Angeles, David Nicolas, Frédéric Lagrange, Zubin Shroff, Buff Strickland, Ball & Albanese, and Joshua Paul. There's a legion of other photographers we know, and some who feel like familiars. My thanks to them as well, but that's a list for another post, compiled from someplace with airconditioning.

Tanjong Beach--our new harborside spot (part 2)

Tanjong Beach--our new harborside spot (part 1)

WEBSITE!

A new look for the new digs! Check it out at www.morganowens.com!



We have long found the quote on the first page inspirational. It's from the hilarious first chapter of Moby Dick, "Loomings." These days it seems an apt slogan for our new lives on the equator, though we've edited out the part about lungs and ragged purses.

And introducing two new features: a Print SALE, found on the About Us page. This month we are offering Dr. Tibor Beske's favorite, and generally beloved image from Rovinj in Croatia. (FYI: The existing print sale is closed.)

And an image library will be up and running by the end of the year for all you photo-editors and researchers.

Enjoy!

Mythologies, or One Month in Singapore

Before we readied ourselves to move here, “Singapore” was not a proper noun I often said or often heard. In the months prior to the Big Move, dozens of friends passed along contacts and recommendations for our new lives here. I found it startling to uncover unknown connections to what was at that time a faraway, unknowable place.

This blank spot in my imagination’s map effects my daily life in a way I did not expect. I wander around this city without a representational map, without layers of history and mythologies to guide me. When we drop into a new neighborhood bar, we don't know how long it’s been there, what the neighborhood is called, what they serve, what language the locals speak, what religion they celebrate. It’s not at all like the West Village, where I can point out where the Velvet Underground or Bob Dylan first played, the temperature of the local contemporary scene and the highlights of scenes past, which restaurants are new and which are treasured, what ethnicity predominates now, and who was there before they moved in.

I’m no longer a tour guide. Now I guess I’m a resident tourist. It’s a feeling strange to me. Is this what acculturation feels like? Am I getting my first real taste of what it feels like to be a minority? Am I making the first steps towards assimilation or towards global citizenship, or even *gasp* expatriation?

In the month since we arrived on July 21st, we’ve figured out the bus system, comparison shopped our local markets, run errands all over central, northern, and western Singapore. We hit the ground running like we're on a shoot, enthusiastically applying every ounce of that talent for producing that James and I share. We’ve reveled in the details of new-homemaking. (And let's be honest: we were already fluent in "mall" and "ikea.") We have just begun to make friends and have even marked a few special spots we can’t wait to show the people we miss.

(We had very little to go on. I can recall four details about a-priori, pre-arrival Singapore. I’m embarrassed to include them here, but it seems somehow useful, to record my blindness before my eyes adjust and I can see what’s plain in front of me:
1) In the 90s, the story of the diplomat’s kid who was caned for vandalism dominated the Singapore myth.
2) Don’t chew gum.
3) According to Anthony Bourdain, the food is inventive, spicy, and cheap.
4) “We sail tonight for Singapore…we’re all as mad as hatters here…”
My dad, who was in Indonesia at the time, has told me another side, so that item of news seems tinged by the retelling. Still, I do miss admiring graffiti. I watched the No Reservations episode on Singapore twice before coming. So far, #3 strikes true. Tom Waits is probably not the best conduit of cultural knowledge of this sort, but the song sticks with you. None of these three wise men are Singaporean. )

I am delinating the counters of a blindspot, recognizing unknown islands of history, of cultural legacy, of ideology that mean so much to me and my work. Without storytelling, this place seems more foreign, even if the day-to-day-life, for better or worse, feels much the same.

We’re just catching up on what signifies what. I’ve never lived, or for that matter, been a tourist someplace I knew nothing about before. I'm a know-it-all with a penchant for living in places seeped in stories that fascinate me. I’ve learned, then taught, propagated, and enacted "Brooklynite" or "New Orleanian" as a resident actor and artist.

Maybe that’s why we travel? To walk through closed down markets of Paris at night, shining in the rain, to drive a convertible right up to the club door in Los Angeles, to shine a light into the cave of the Cyclops, and survive to tell the tales, and to have these tales become part of us.

I believe, following Roland Barthes, that the culture encoded in images and speech communicate great volumes of meaning, which are enormously powerful in practice. They influence communication between cultures. We're in the business of communication between cultures. When we shoot, we riff on this script of prior representations. So what myths will we learn, point out, and propagate here?

Earlier this week the locals started burning tissue paper luxuries – bundles of fake money, paper houses, paper shirts – in high piles in the park in front of our house. Altars covered in food and incense turned up all over. I knew from a walking tour of NYC Chinatown that these paper luxuries honored the dead. I’ve since discovered that this is Hungry Ghost month, when the boundary between the Other Place and ours blurs. There are new orange cakes at the market I had to ask about: they’re bland to living humans, to be bought for the ghosts. One of my students came up to me after class the other day to explain that I was not to walk through the piles of ash, or angry spirits might follow me home. How treacherous ignorance can be!

My starry-eyed honeymoon with Singapore has begun. These last few days James or I has turned to the other and said: "I really like it here" and "This is all turning out much better than we could have hoped." We’re hitting the culture scene hard to make up for lost time: talks, museum visits, art galleries, film festivals, activist happenings. I try to order something new each day: today's delights were Kickapoo Joy Juice and Prawn Mee (translation: Mountain Dew, but greener, and shrimp spaghetti, but yummier). I’ve signed up for an afternoon lecture on working with the different cultures that make up our new society. I ordered documentaries on Hungry Ghost and on Singapore history from the local Netflix. James has shared a you-tube video of the Prime Minister talking about cultural and religious tolerance. I expect we'll turn out to be a quick study in “Asia 101,” as we're putting all our energies into finding the groove of our new home.

But I’d like to acknowledge, one month in, what a humbling and intellectually invigorating road lies before us.

My commute, a slide show

In honor of the first week of school: my commute.




The tune is "Early Morning Blues" by Archibald. (Thanks Brent for the track, and yes, I know the title of the song is misleading, but for some of us arriving at work by 10:30 means early. Somehow I managed to lose my wallet later that afternoon--it just disappeared!--so that day was a good day to play the blues.)

Total eclipsed time in real life: 45 minutes. Oh, and the campus is now thronged with students. I won't see all those empty seats in the canteen and on the bus until December. But the train is always that empty both ways due to the "reverse" commute out of town.

My first class meeting isn't until Friday morning, 9:30am. "Nineteenth Century American Literature and Culture." I am looking forward to kicking off the new job and meeting the students.

We're all moved in -- our stuff arrived on Saturday, and we've been spending the three day weekend (Happy 44th National Day!) unpacking and rearranging and shopping. When the shipment first arrived, and our things started appearing out of boxes, I admit a few teary moments. I guess this really means 545 is no more! for real! but our things do look beautiful in here. The track lighting and 18% gray walls are very flattering. We chose well, and brought only the very best stuff, and it all made it here in good shape.

After 6 weeks of living out suitcases it sure feels good to put them away -- full of winter clothes for our December visit!

A bit more from the neighborhood

Here's a few more walks through the neighborhood. Sorry for the camera shake!

Two shakes and off to Tiong Bahru

We headed to our new digs today in Tiong Bahru. Check out some of the fun bits and a tour of the place!



I hope to post a tour of the neighborhood soon.