In the City Reactions Blog

Reading the different episodes in this reading – tough-sounding American guys summing up their lives in a few pages or less – I can’t help but wonder how much of this was edited before it got put on paper. They really do all talk like a character in a novel, like that tough guy sitting alone in the bar who’ll tell you all of life’s secrets after two drinks. It’s a lot of fun to read that way, and I think if you put an oral history (especially these particular kinds of oral histories) onto paper you’ve got to make it at least somewhat like this. It’s a lot more gripping and intriguing to have one flowing, charismatic monologues about everything life has taught a guy than to read a transcription of all the questions and pondering that most likely led to them saying the good stuff.

But all that said, this is a collection of very moving oral histories. Each one has its own distinct message which fits in with the whole. You’ll have the ex-cons and the cops both telling their side of the same story – in general, the non-existence of the American Dream – and find out that the different sides aren’t so different after all. And in all of them you’re hearing from the little guy, the guy behind the scenes, the guy who gets stuck with the dirty work. But for the most part they’re not talking about what it’s like to drive a cab or work in a steel mill, but rather the lessons that their various life experiences have taught them.

I think that even though what a lot of the interviewees seem to be saying is that the American Dream has either gone the way of the dinosaurs or else was false from the get-go, I think the overall message of the In the City is that these people ARE the American Dream, or at least were the American Dream at that time. What I mean is that, as is hopefully plainly obvious by now, the “American Dream” that one usually hears of going from dirt to riches, from the ghetto to a palace, is about as “American” as winning the lottery (a one in a million chance, at best). The American Dream that In the City shows is going from nobody to somebody, not the way 50 Cent went from the hood to mainstream record deals, but rather that they have made a full life out of what they started with. Where they were before and where they are now doesn’t matter so much as the things they did and the way they’ve affected other people’s lives and the things they’ve learned about humanity. Things like the ex-con-ex-junkie Robin Hood who spent a fortune’s worth of stolen money on paying for people to ride The Comet at Coney Island, or the photographer who stood up to a hypocritical politicians only to get arrested. Even if what they did only affected people for a few minutes, and even if only their own daughter can still remember them doing it, that’s enough impact. If the majority of the world had the kind of wisdom and experience these people have, it would be a much more pleasant place.

I want to go back to what I was talking about in the first paragraph though, about the way it all reads like each person is a character rather than an actual person. This has convinced me that for an oral history like this, and like we will be doing for our projects, the media has to be some sort of recording, whether video or audio. Text works great for making things clearly understandable and laid out, and is of course easy to edit, but you lose so much of what an oral history is – specifically, the “oral” part. Without hearing the different voices, different accents, different intonations of these people, they all read like they were just different fabricated personalities in a story. And for all I know, that’s what they are. Obviously you can fabricate someone’s personality by piecing together audio or video as well, but the media as a whole are much more immediate and therefore believable.

I feel that for the audience to really get into the person being interviewed and understand the sort of person they are and the actual experiences they’ve had, there needs to be the voice. Some visual would certainly be preferred as well, whether video or just a photo or an artistic interpretation (like that example website we looked at…I forget the guy’s name at the time). There are times when medium specificity is kind of silly, but I think there are definitely certain situations are not fully satisfied with certain media. If you’re interviewing someone for more than just a few sound bytes, it seems like it’s always worth it to present the actual recording and let their character and their message speak for itself (pun intended).