suburbs

Teacher at Point Blank: Confronting Sexuality, Violence, and Secrets in a Suburban School

alicia — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

When Jo Scott-Coe began teaching in the same suburban California high school she’d graduated from four years earlier, she had to overcome her reluctance to call former teachers by their first names. Once that was accomplished, she set out to bring new life to the literature and writing classes she was assigned.

In seventeen essays Scott-Coe lays bare the disappointments and frustrations that marred her eleven years in the classroom. While the book is highly anecdotal—and cannot be read as a general indictment of the educational system--she does hit several general themes, including the way educators—eighty percent of them female—are mistreated by Boards of Education, parents, and students.

To begin, Scott-Coe notes society’s “schizophrenia of reverence and contempt” for teachers. On one hand, she explains, teachers are presumed to be “angels,” long-suffering nurturers and enablers of youth. On the other, they’re treated with contempt, disparaged as overpaid civil servants or lazy paper pushers. The real issues they face—in terms of educational policy, pedagogical proficiency, and their own personal and professional development—never see the light of day in these discussions.

Nowhere is this clearer than in an essay called "Recovering Teacher." In it, Scott-Coe painstakingly chronicles the decline, and then death, of her colleague Neil Webb. A scholar who began his career as a Latin and German instructor, Webb was arbitrarily reassigned to another discipline once the district gutted language programs in the late 1980s. Scott-Coe posits the shift as the administration’s way of emphasizing “the interchangeable nature of subject matter while also disrespecting his primary expertise.” Whatever the bureaucracy’s motivation, the end result was the same: Webb had no choice but to accept the transfer if he wanted to retain his job.

Still, after the shift ,Webb’s peers and students noticed his discernible decline: He lost weight and, always a heavy drinker, began coming to school drunk. When his driver’s license was suspended, they snickered, sidestepping conversations that might have addressed his out-of-control behavior. When he was finally terminated, people breathed a sign of relief, as if his firing was inevitable.

Somewhat later, his home burned down; not long afterwards he was found dead, alone in a seedy motel room. “I still wonder what might have happened if the school staff, as a community, had confronted Webb,” Scott-Coe writes. “We might have seen him as a struggling human being instead of scapegoating him as the problem employee, the exotic and tortured genius who would never fit in, or the pathetic colleague who made us feel less bad about our own problems.“

It’s a painful, if moving account.

Scott-Coe also writes of sexual tension in the classroom, and of the violent undercurrent noted by most of the teachers she worked with. That she and her colleagues had no forum to discuss these issues is absurd. Even more ridiculous, when legitimate questions were aired, administrators served up meaningless platitudes in lieu of practical advice. On top of this, Scott-Coe had to contend with preparing her students for a multitude of constantly-changing standardized tests and had to counsel them—with little-to-no prior training—for personal problems, from eating disorders, to cutting, to domestic abuse.

Small wonder that Teacher at Point Blank is angst-filled. A deeply personal and sad narrative, Scott-Coe lambastes the enormous commitment that is expected of teachers. It then begs the question: How can their stature be elevated while preparing them to cope more effectively with complex classroom and bureaucratic issues?

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, February 17th 2011

Detroit (9/18/2010)

brittany — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Steppenwolf Theater

Chicago, Illinois

Half of the U.S. population lives in suburbs, places where there are no theres there. In the suburb outlying the eponymous city in Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit, all the streets in the Bright Homes subdivision are named after light. If Bill Vaughn’s observation is correct—“Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them”—then this particular development is consistent in its dearth of light, literal and figurative.

The lives that unwind on Sunshine Lane and Feather Boulevard portend the end of pretense and dawn of overwhelming futility, as dreams of ex-urban idylls decay along with the plywood of their construction. Director Austin Pendleton leads the sharp and talented cast—Laurie Metcalf, Kevin Anderson, Kate Arrington and Ian Barford—through a labyrinth of sharp and winding dialogue that leaves its characters stranded.

Ben and Mary are two happy homeowners who graciously welcome their neighbors, Rob and Sharon. Mary’s (Metcalf) twisted energy abounds as she offers the newcomers shelter beneath a vicious umbrella. Wired but not manic, her role is a perfect check to Ben’s persistent affability. He speaks a dialect of bonhomie that Rob (Anderson) will eventually emulate—“Let’s throw these puppies on the grill!”—or perhaps deride. Rob’s girlfriend Sharon establishes the standard of impropriety in the first scene, and in each subsequent scene emotional exposure and physical damage increase as drastically as the characters’ futures plummet.

Kevin Depinet’s set is a monumental replication of two tract home halves, thoughtful and precise: the laid-off bank worker Ben (Barford) builds the website for his nascent financial consulting business on an outdated clunking home pc. The obvious question is never addressed: how do you gain clients as a financial manager when no one has any finances to manage?

The new neighbors, Rob and Sharon (Arrington), have occupations typical of the new economy: warehouse worker and call-center service representative. The individuals, the community, the nation—all are going down in a spiral of low wages and lower expectations. Recovering addicts Rob and Sharon fall off the wagon, at first “just for one day.” In the few days of camaraderie between these old and new suburbanites, the veneer of civilization, is degraded unto destruction, but the viewer is not certain why. Were Ben and Mary primed for annihilation by recent events? Was the community’s stability in comparison to explosive cities always tenuous at best? The two couples sling finely crafted banter culminating in a bacchanal, and then Robert Brueler appears in a final scene in order to provide revelatory details and reminisce about the golden age of Bright Homes, of lights and gardens and children rushing to greet fathers emerging from cars as they returned from work at five o’clock. The closing monologue comes across as a somewhat sentimental ramble at the end of a superbly executed farce.

The play entertains, but audience members might depart with the certainty that the theater was aiming for something more. For some there there.

Photo credit: Michael Brosilow

Detroit runs through November 7.

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, October 2nd 2010

Living on the Edge in Suburbia: From Welfare to Workfare

mandy — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Terese Lawinski

Vanderbilt University Press

Living on the Edge in Suburbia is Terese Lawinski’s comprehensive examination of welfare in the United States using ethnographic research on suburban families in Westchester County, New York. Lawinski leaves no stone in the welfare debate unturned, from the infamous myth of the “Welfare Queen” (introduced to America’s vocabulary by a Reagan campaign speech in 1976) to the fallacy of “illegal immigrants” coming to the U.S. in droves looking for easy money.

With the recession weighing on almost everyone’s mind, Lawinski’s book is timely and relevant. Many suburban Americans like the ones profiled here are losing the economic security they took for granted and are being forced to turn to government programs to get by. But misconceptions about how the system works and who benefits from it (and how much they benefit) shape the general public’s view of welfare as a cushy, well-funded government trust fund for lazy people.

The vitriol aimed at immigrants and people of color is growing as working class and middle class Americans draw an ever deeper line in the sand between “deserving” and “undeserving” aid recipients, as well as “acceptable aid,” like unemployment, versus “unacceptable” programs like Medicaid, TANF, and food stamps. Lawinski addresses this phenomenon adeptly and swiftly.

The word welfare is often associated with so-called urban problems (i.e., people of color, most often women). Instead of yet another examination of the stereotypical recipient of public assistance (young, poor, black, female), which often only serves to further reinforce welfare fallacies, Lawinski focuses on a variety of families, many of whom slipped into the vicious cycle of public assistance after relatively minor circumstances propelled them into major financial crises. Lawinski makes it a point to emphasize the fact that once a family (or individual) is stuck in the system, a myriad of confusing and conflicting rules make it nearly impossible to get back out without an additional support network.

Lawinski does a thorough job of putting the current welfare system in an historical context. She draws connections between society’s disdain for “welfare mothers” and the beginnings of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), part of 1935’s New Deal. At the time, mothers had to show government workers that they "deserved" assistance, which was usually limited to white widows who met “suitable home” requirements. Racist overtones took over the welfare debate when programs were opened to women of color.

Lawinski points out that one of the biggest offenses of President Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is that states began to claim the new law a success based on the number of people collecting benefits rather than the number of people living in poverty. As Lawinski explains, welfare rolls were cut by fifty percent, or even more, due to new regulations, but that didn’t mean people had found gainful employment (or any at all).

Where AFDC had once allowed people to survive (however meagerly), the 1996 welfare reform program, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), left families without even that ability. After AFDC changed to TANF under PRWORA, lifetime limits (five years maximum by federal law, although individual states can further restrict time limits, and many do) meant that recipients were being cut off from public assistance without the means to support themselves. Additionally, TANF work requirements prevent the job training or education opportunities that are necessary for true self-sufficiency, and in a Catch-22, also reduce benefits. For those who can meet work requirements or attend education programs, the next hurdle is inadequate or nonexistent childcare subsidies.

In the epilogue, Lawinski offers solutions and guidelines with the Obama Administration in mind, but in the current political climate, it is doubtful that public aid will get the national attention and restructuring it needs.

Written by: Stephanie Sylverne, September 30th 2010

Ballads of Suburbia

admin — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:03:00 +0000

By Stephanie Kuehnert

MTV Books

It’s strange to find yourself feeling nostalgic about a time that you absolutely hated. I’m obviously not alone when I say that middle and high school weren’t the best times of my life; while I had friends and family that I cared about a lot and vice versa, everything else often seemed like a total mess. Looking back on it with a few years distance, I can say that I blew things out of proportion, overreacted, was irrational in my words and decisions. In short, I was your stereotypical teenage girl.

Stephanie Kuehnert’s second novel, Ballads of Suburbia, brought me right back to those heady, mid-90s days of endless troubles and tears. Kara has left her Illinois home for college in California, and comes back in Christmas 1999, wary about facing her demons, but knowing she has to. We get Kara’s story—one of teenage love, drugs, and intense pain—through flashbacks, as she remembers her past while visiting for the first time. There are some absolutely heartbreaking scenes, as Kara and her friends deal with hard drug use, depressive and suicidal thoughts, and domestic abuse: things we know teenagers deal with, but is rarely written as bluntly as in Kuehnert’s book.

The device that ties the book together is the titular collection of ballads (in the traditional sense, Kara is sure to assert, of a story-song) that Kara and her friends put together to exorcise their demons. Every main character in the novel writes their ballad, the story of something in their lives that made them who they are, for better or for worse, in a notebook. That Kara eventually is able to take the stories and make something wonderful out of them is a testament to the strength of the character, and the redemptive power of writing itself.

Kuehnert’s characters reside in Oak Park, a northern Chicago suburb, and an area that is familiar to Kuehnert, as she lives in a Chicago suburb and received her MFA from Columbia College. The familiarity and seemingly love/hate relationship with the area are obvious in the novel, as the setting is wonderfully described, from the park where Kara and her friends go to smoke and skate, to grungy basement parties, to the unbearable places Kara and her friends call home. The mid-90s setting and allusions to grunge and punk music endeared themselves to me, and produced that intense sense of nostalgia, especially when Kuehnert describes driving around with the music as loud as possible, screaming along to your favorite songs.

Although I never had quite the amount of trouble that Kara and her friends did, there is still a thread that binds us together, and made me appreciate the novel as both a reminder and a cautionary tale. Please note: the novel features somewhat graphic descriptions of drug use and self-mutilation that some might find triggering.

Written by: Dana Reinoos, December 13th 2009

Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence Are Changing America

admin — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 17:32:00 +0000

By Sarah Garland

Nation Books

As sprawl becomes less environmentally acceptable, foreclosures soar, and media trumpet the end of the suburban dream, the suburbs or at least some of them, have emerged as a problem, rather than as a solution. Although the house prices in the true islands of affluence have fallen, crime, drugs, and gangs are emerging in suburban neighborhoods abandoned to working-class and immigrant people. Sarah Garland provides an in-depth analysis of how the Long Island suburb of Hempstead decayed in her book, Gangs in Garden City. She also explores how interconnected the decay of Hempstead and other such communities is to other critical issues such as foreign policy, the war on drugs, immigration, and No Child Left Behind.

However, front and center are the stories of individuals, from gang members to police to educators. We meet Julio, the child soldier of the U.S.-funded Salvadoran army, who braves the perilous border crossing to join his mother in the United States. His attempts to ameliorate the gang problem in Hempstead are rebuffed by authorities and he ends up detained by immigration authorities and eventually agrees to be deported back to El Salvador, where his gang associations still haunt his life. Jessica will especially engage feminist readers. A tough tomboy, who still wants a frilly dress for her fifteenth birthday celebration, she faces fatal retribution when she runs afoul of gang politics.

Garland tracks the gangs of the title from Central America and back, but avoids the facile explanation that views the source of the problem as coming from elsewhere. She traces the ideology of suburbia back to the garden city of the book title, a concept that grew out of the distaste for the slums created by industrialization and urbanization, a flawed ideal of a contained community safe from the outside world. Once a rural village, Hempstead transformed into a suburb in the 1940s and, because of its mix of older single-family housing and apartments, was one of the first suburbs to be racially integrated. She explores the implications of retail flight, a declining tax base, and drug traffic in Hempstead from the point of view of the police chief, the school principal, and county politicians. Add a misguided foreign and immigration policies to this toxic mix, and the result is the sad story of Hempstead. She also explores the uses made of gang activity in stoking the public’s fear of crime for political advantage.

The benefits of meeting the human beings affected by the unfolding sociological disaster are somewhat undercut by the sometimes confused narrative. The intentional intertwining of their stories and the decision to intersperse their stories in necessary exposition about changes in legislation, city planning ideas, and juvenile justice theories make the story difficult to follow at times. Then again, Garland never ignores the complexities attending this issue. For, that she deserves our gratitude.

Written by: Frances Chapman, September 24th 2009

Pygmy

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:07:00 +0000

By Chuck Palahniuk

Doubleday

Chuck Palahniuk has a following online; it’s even called The Cult. The fandom is well deserved. When a book evokes such emotion in the reader that you might just faint from graphic truth (such as in his novel Haunted), you have got to love it! Upon opening his latest novel, Pygmy, I felt as if I were taking a dip into the sexiest sea of twisted delights. I often had to stop reading mid-page to burst into a flurry of laughter brought on by his text. This man makes me feel alive, and I need more! The book left me questioning what is wrong with human nature, and what are we products of, exactly?

The story takes you through the inner tinkering of Pygmy, a pubescent terrorist foreign exchange student implant living in suburban America. The sexual explicitness throughout the story was humorously uncomfortable, yet strangely stimulating. Palahniuk’s satirical prowess is yet again screaming victory in the land of fictitious works.

Pygmy reflects on the various activities of everyday American life as truly absurd actions in a perverse and awkward society. He parades us through big-box stores, the town’s “religion propaganda distribution outlet,” and ponders scholastic shortcomings, all while conniving his way into various illegal actions to work up to his and his fellow terrorists’ “Operation Havoc.”

Cacophonic explosions within Pygmy’s head lead to many devilish deeds. However, a sugary sweet reinvention occurs, suggesting that even programmed human beings can reconfigure themselves. This serves as a surefire reminder that the mind is a powerful weapon that just might also provide peace, possibly. Pygmy often draws on quotes that were drilled into himself and his cohorts from an early age that seem to fuel them in every situation. Most often these quotes were of fascist, communist, and all around extreme iconic thinkers. These shocking tidbits of actual recollections of figureheads past greatly impact the novel’s outcome. Most of the quotes Palahniuk includes are stunning in their impact, and made me want to fight a little, such as Benito Mussolini's assertion that, “War is to man what maternity is to a woman.”

You have to stop and rearrange your thought process every time you pick up the book. This style is a departure from his previous novels—more of a structured, militant mind process of events recounted by the main character. Many times after putting the story down, I would find myself thinking similarly to the character. Each process or action noted, each bizarre human encounter was now a new experience.

My only disappointment with this offering from Palahniuk is that I wasn’t disturbed as greatly as I have been whilst reading some of his other novels. Don’t get me wrong, more than likely I’ll read Pygmy again. It’s a country of it’s own, a ride into a mindset that is foreign and convoluted. Cheers to a man who seems to be unafraid to push his limits in challenging the public and making people think differently after reading. This is entertainment.

Written by: A. Mariel Westermeyer, July 28th 2009

My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

admin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:10:00 +0000

By Joyce Carol Oates

Harper Collins

My Sister, My Love is Joyce Carol Oates’ thirty-fifth novel in forty-five years. Ambitious and sweeping, the nearly 600-page tome explores a plethora of themes: the tabloid press’ obsession with celebrity; marital discord and fidelity; the pressure placed on children by achievement-worshipping parents; forgiving transgressions; the medicalization of normal human development; and the hypocrisy underlying Christian-inspired capitalism, among them.

The story is narrated by Skylar Rampike, a depressed nineteen-year-old whose six-year-old sister, Bliss, was brutally murdered ten years earlier. Bliss, a child-prodigy figure skater, was found in the family’s Fair Lawn, New Jersey home, hanging in the basement boiler room during the Christmas season of 1994. If it sounds familiar, it should. Like a Law and Order episode spun from a lurid news story, My Sister, My Love is a send up of JonBenet Ramsey and her family.

And what a family it is. Betsey is a hover mother of the highest order, hell-bent on making little Bliss a star. It starts serendipitously, when Bliss exhibits an uncanny dexterity that sends her mom into a what-if frenzy. First comes the name change; Bliss’ original name was Edna Louise, after her paternal grandmother, but she was re-christened "Bliss" after Betsey envisioned god instructing her to make the switch. This is followed by hormone injections into Bliss’ child-sized body, regular beauty makeovers to enhance the child’s appearance, and forced practice sessions, even when Bliss is in obvious pain from one or another injury.

While Betsey is over-involved and continually scheming for a place in the spotlight, the family patriarch is the opposite. Named Bix, he is an anti-Semitic womanizer, a politically conservative glad-hander who reveres money and status and is more than happy to keep his family at arm’s length. For his part, Skylar is everything his parents despise, a bookish, non-athletic kid with few friends.

It’s a recipe for trouble and the novel delivers it, in spades. Unfortunately, while there are moments in which the book is affecting, most of the time it falls flat. Among the problems is tone. At times, Skylar is extremely sympathetic—clearly grieving for his sister, tormented by survivor guilt, and filled with fury toward parents who push him out of sight because they are embarrassed by his anti-social mien. At other times, however, the narrator’s snarky voice is distracting. Oates may be trying to replicate the moods of a sullen teen, but like time in the company of a snotty boy-child, one wants to escape him rather than stay in his orbit. What’s more, the many tangents—including hundreds of footnotes meant to elucidate Skylar’s thought processes and intellectual pursuits for the reader—are annoying digressions that make the book longer and more detailed than it needs to be.

Oates is clearly making fun of upper class pretensions and the faux Christian piety and family values endemic to suburban Republicans. It’s a rich playing field, but sadly, My Sister, My Love_ reads like a bloated lecture delivered by a pompous windbag. It’s too bad because real life dramas can be wonderful jumping off points for imagined scenarios. What we get instead is as nauseating as the incessant coverage of celebrity shenanigans we’re continually fed, and we close My Sister, My Love_ feeling no more insight than we had when we picked up the novel for the very first time. It’s a huge disappointment from so gifted a scribe.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, July 26th 2009

Witnessing Suburbia: Conservatives and Christian Youth Culture

admin — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:51:00 +0000

By Eileen Luhr

University of California Press

The short disclaimer is this: I grew up in a family filled with the Holy Spirit. My grandfathers were, respectively, a theology professor and a youth and music minister. One of my uncles, after making his name founding a Phoenix-area megachurch in the '90s, currently works as a professional church-grower, teaching other pastors how to rapidly expand their soon-to-be behemoth congregations of believers. I have attended international youth conventions and camp meetings, and on family vacations, we used to visit landmarks like Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral and the Christian DisneyLand, Knott’s Berry Farm. Now agnostic and estranged from most of my family, I nevertheless find that studying my roots is both personally enlightening and a crucial component of understanding modern cultural warfare in the United States.

In Witnessing Suburbia, Eileen Luhr traces the suburbanization of modern evangelism, exploring how evangelical Christians have become increasingly consumption-oriented and have expertly engaged in a “Christianization” of popular culture. With the 1980's Christian exoduses to the suburbs came a two-part evolution of identity. In addition to staking their exurb areas as heathen-free, family-centric zones, suburban Christians also became focused on the individualization of living space. Believing piety for the larger world must first be learned at home, evangelical Christians became some of the strongest defenders of “homeowner rights.” Many Christians were among the first to adopt doctrines of self-reliance and personal responsibility. Value of the physical home and the values that existed in those homes became inextricably linked.

As many suburban Christians staked their physical territory, large groups of those believers also became engaged in cultural activism to widely promote their home-grown ideals. In order to reclaim public space for sacred values, a number of Christian groups decided to take an anthropological missions-based approach: by investigating and becoming one with secular culture, it would be possible to infiltrate and influence. One aspect of this political campaigning took root in deconstructing rock and heavy metal music. Convinced of music’s duality—weapon of the devil or of Jesus, never neutral—a number of evangelical Christians believed they had found the ultimate battleground on which to wage war for the souls of the unsaved.

The most fascinating part of Luhr’s analysis—which is difficult to quantify, as there are many enthralling subsections within deeply researched chapters of multilayered histories—is the contradiction between how evangelical adults relate to their youthful counterparts. Seen both as needing protection and also as active leaders in religious reformation, an enormous spiritual burden has long been placed on young people. Perhaps this alone explains why religious teens have at times turned to heavy metal, albeit Christian in nature.

Throughout her deconstruction of religious heavy metal, Luhr details many Christian activist mainstream successes of the past three decades, including the rise of Focus on the Family and the anti-porn 7-Eleven boycotts of the mid-1980s. (Ever wonder why you can’t get Hustler at an American 7-Eleven? Thank an evangelical Christian.) Both positioning themselves as cultural saviors and persecuted martyrs, evangelicals were able to balance a number of contradictions in their public campaigns. Anything that served to set them further apart from the mainstream reinforced their outsider status; in reality, major Christian organizations and networks were growing rapidly and gaining immense cultural power. Yet within these larger contexts, alternative Christian culture warriors were also engaged in their own rebranding of their message. You can love Jesus and also love to rock.

From Christian zines of the '80s to the success of metal bands like Stryper, Luhr expertly explores this specific counterculture within the dominant Christian activism of the past twenty-five years. Academic in content and tone, Luhr’s writing is captivating in its intellectual scope and in the ways it ties together complex concepts. Particularly engaging for reformed believers, Witnessing Suburbia is a fascinating and informative page-turner.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, May 6th 2009