The author and her wound

Don’t worry, there wasn’t a zombie invasion on campus last Friday. The Office of Emergency Preparedness conducted a campus-wide exercise called “The Art of Moulage” on the morning of June 24th to determine the readiness of UC Berkeley if there was a massive disaster. Police were at the ready and volunteers staffed triage stations. The scenario? A big earthquake had shaken the campus, causing buildings to fall, labs to malfunction and catch on fire, and general mayhem.

I was one of the victims.

My friend and fellow grad Shanti forwarded the email call for volunteer “victims” to me a couple of weeks ago and I thought, why not? I wasn’t really all that sure what to expect, but they had free breakfast–always a bonus for graduate students. The very nice team of ”simulation technicians” from California State Chico handed out symptom cards and we were instructed how to behave and what symptoms to describe to our would-be rescuers. There were various injuries available, all the way from minor confusion and panic to one guy who had his arm severed, complete with squirting blood! Shanti wanted something gruesome as she was having office hours later in the day, but she ended up with chemical burns in her eyes and lungs. It came out looking a bit like overdone 1980s makeup. I waited for a while to hear all of the injuries available, so by the time I finally picked one, all of the major burns and facial wounds were claimed by other volunteers. I ended up with a card that described “cuts and bruises to the neck and shoulders” and to act “stunned and confused.” I thought I could handle that.

I was warned to wear something that I didn’t mind getting a bit dirty, so the simulation technician applied fake bruising to my face, neck and shoulder, and an open wound made out of plastic. She was finished in about five minutes and me and Shanti went to find some help for our ”injuries.” We had to have a backstory, so I decided that I was at my desk, working on my dissertation when the earthquake hit. Large books fell off the shelves and hit my head, but I got out of the building pretty fast. I was relatively well off, considering there were people with major burns all over their bodies wandering around.

A volunteer gets treated for his wounds

When I got to the triage station I was examined by several volunteers, who took my heart rate and asked me a few questions. I tried to act a bit disoriented without signaling a major brain injury, but after determining that I was pretty much okay (except for the cut, which they bandaged) they made me lay down anyway. So I was laying on a cot next to the Chemistry building under a silver space blanket for about half an hour. There were several “victims” that arrived earlier than I did, and who were much worse off. Still, they were just put under space blankets while we waited for transport to a hospital. It turns out that the other victims had been waiting for up to an hour and a half, and the volunteers who were medically trained frankly told us that they would have been dead. Yikes!

Another young man wandered in, disoriented, burned, and calling for his girlfriend–some of the volunteers were really good actors! When the triage staff tried to help him, he fake vomited all over the unfortunate undergraduate who was in front of him. The simulation technicians had provided some of the volunteers with a horrible smelling bag of parmesan mixed with lemon juice and left to stand for a few days. It was truly horrible stuff. The vomiting volunteer kept trying to leave to find his girlfriend, so the triage staff had quite a hard time trying to keep him calm and stationary enough to examine his wounds.

So as the exercise wound down, the volunteer-victims chatted with each other and evaluated the efficacy of the campus response team. While this wasn’t truly a disaster, the campus had a fairly mixed response to the exercise. I received more than adequate treatment, while the badly burnt victims next to me died from their wounds while waiting for transport to the hospital. Shanti, blinded and coughing from exposure to chemicals, had a difficult time getting the response team clued in to how horrible her injuries were, as there were not many exterior clues. The exercise certainly made me wonder how UC Berkeley would handle a real, full-scale disaster.

If anything, participation in the Art of Moulage made me wonder about my own preparedness in the very real event of a large earthquake. My office is in an earthquake-reinforced building, but I think I’ll move my desk away from the towers of books that surround me.

Still, the group of Uptown businesses that participated in First Friday, the monthly art walk, made it clear that they were remaining open. A smaller-than-usual crowd milled around 23rd street, eating garlic noodles, cupcakes, and homemade sausages from the food carts and buying early gifts for the holidays from the local vendors selling their DIY goods. Plainclothes police officers wading through the crowd seemed tense, then relaxed as the night wound on without any displays of violence. Oakland struggles, but lives on.

It was within this milieu that the Black Diamonds Shining Group show opened at Mama Buzz. Since its opening in 2003, Mama Buzz has become a beloved fixture in a rapidly changing neighborhood, hosting art shows and musical acts, providing a hub for the local art scene. The Black Diamonds Shining show surpasses most offerings there, with a mix of several canvases and multimedia art blending with drawings that cover the walls in true graffiti style. The Black Diamonds Shining is “an Oakland based afro galactic black arts collective” comprised of the artists Ras Terms, Safety First, Deadeyes, Antjuan Jones, AshRose, Brooks Golden and Larry Dobie, many of whom have a decade of experience in the Oakland street art scene, with signature styles that residents of the city quickly come to recognize. Many of the works are executed in tandem, with two or three artists participating to create a single piece. The collective’s art is highly influenced by not only graffiti art, but classical and pop culture references, as well as ancient rock art, which they recognize as part of their tradition.

As a collective, their art is both extremely local and highly political. The collective participates in many “live painting” events, usually hosted at DJ nights at bars like Era or Club Oasis in downtown Oakland but also at rallies and protests. Before their First Friday opening, Safety First and AshRose painted for the Oscar Grant protest in front of the courthouse, producing a work depicting a black mother with the words, “I hope my child gets home safe.” Similar tributes are on the walls at Mama Buzz. Though the canvases will come down and the space will get painted over, the show will be remembered as a bright light in an otherwise dark hour in Oakland.

The Black Diamonds Shining show at Mama Buzz closes on December 2nd.

Photo by Marc Kjerland

Many New Media scholars find it productive to compare technological innovations and their impact on society across time as a way to ground their current research.  In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary traces the modern construction of the observer and visuality to the camera obscura, an early device used for redirecting light to project an image of its surroundings onto a screen or paper. The connection between texting and the telegraph seems more straightforward. After all, I did just sign up for another two years of service from American Telephone & Telegraph.

“Evans: Could you come superintend under my direction important excavation Knossos. Personal not school affair terms four months sixty pounds and all expenses paid to begin at once.

Mackenzie: Agreed coming next boat.”

Telegrams between Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie regarding work at the excavation at Knossos

The 2008 Pew Internet report on Writing, Technology and Teens came amidst concerns over the “death of writing” and the “colour and poetry” of writing being lost. The Pew study also states that students do not consider texting writing, and indeed it appears to be closer to a vernacular form of speech. In their 2005 An SMS History, Taylor and Vincent describe this speech as “new linguistic repertoires that allow for the intimacy afforded in face-to-face encounters to be reproduced between physically remote interlocutors,” in other words, a unique texting argot.

Photo by tarabrown

Alternately, Caroline Habluetzel looks at texting as occupying a unique position between speech and writing, allowing it to “overcome the absence of the receiver and create what in the context of classic letter writing has been called epistolary presence, that is, a sense of presence between the two interlocutors that is more intense than geographical distance would suggest.”

This changing of our sense of place and space through time is something that I’ve always been interested in as an archaeologist. The properties of texting and telegrams are similar enough—limited transmission length, relatively expensive, conveyance of instantaneous information that is expected to be read and acted upon immediately—that it creates an intriguing parallel in history.  Tom Standage calls the telegraph The Victorian Internet in his book with the same title.

It appears that the telegraph has not destroyed writing, nor will texting. If anything, I appreciate the shortness of the telegram agreement quoted above between Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie—how wonderful if more jobs had similar hiring practices!

June 2010. Last night I watched the sun set over four countries. Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are all visible from the beach on the Red Sea south of Aqaba and I had plenty of time to contemplate geopolitical vagaries as I dug my toes into the sand.  A hot wind was blowing in from the Jordanian desert and I watched the various families settle in around me.  The beach is a liminal zone in Muslim countries, where negotiations of culture, politics, and religion come into high relief.

The public beaches at the Red Sea, the Dead Sea, and the Turkish coast of the Mediterranean all have their own particular local mores and acceptable configurations of the highly contested terrain of women’s bodies.  Haram is a very rough equivalent of the word “sinful” in Arabic.  As a Western lady working in the Middle East, I hear it a lot. Pork is haram, chicken is not haram, exposing one’s hands may or may not be haram.  At first I tried fairly hard to figure out how to behave and dress respectfully, but it is contingent on so many factors that it is incredibly difficult–probably impossible since I am foreign anyway. Even my most conservative mosque-going wear was rejected at the Great Mosque in Damascus and I had to put on an Orko-like cloak to enter.  So now I just do what I can in most situations to not draw too much attention to myself, with one notable exception: The Beach. I wear a regular swimsuit and get stared at, but there are usually enough other scantily-clad foreigners to soften the impact. My tattoos also attract attention, perhaps only slightly more than on Western beaches where people pretend not to notice.

Anyway, I will always remember the first time I saw a conservative young couple come to the beach. She was dressed in a full burqa and niqab (face-veil) and he was in short swim trunks.  She sat down under and umbrella and fanned herself as he went splashing off into the sea.  He occasionally came back to check on her, but otherwise she just sat there, sweating in the 50 C heat.

Since then I have seen this same scenario played out several times, with different age-ranges in different states of dress.  I’ve only seen the vaunted burkhini twice, both times on pre-teens who were passing through another liminal state, becoming a sexually mature (and therefore covered) woman.

So it was a familiar scene last night, a woman with her husband and four children, she completely covered and the rest of the family ready for the beach.  She sat in the sand while her husband played with the children and splashed around.  A scholar that was more sympathetic would probably say that she was still the nucleus of the family, that she guarded with the rest of the beach gear, but she seemed very much forgotten in all of the fun.  So, to my surprise, she started playfully throwing rocks at her family and they giggled and dodged the rocks.  This continued until after sunset, when she finally hiked up her burqa and waded into the surf up to her knees.  I looked around and saw that many women were doing this semi-covert dusk activity and that couples were drawing closer together in the dim light of shisha coals.  There’s been daytime swimming as well, women being held tight by their husbands while their burqa swirls around them.  I guess it might not be so different than when I wore a t-shirt to the pool as a self-conscious little kid.

I think I will continue to find beaches in Muslim countries fascinating for both the changing ideas of how women should dress and how foreigners are integrated into the social scene.

You can read more about Colleen’s summer fieldwork and travels here and here.

Photo by Darren Hester

It’s a sad truism that if you are a graduate student, you are probably in debt.  While rumors of Obama forgiving all student loans floated around during his campaign, realistically it was unlikely to happen. Still, it was with eager anticipation that I read all of the news sources I could find about the overhaul of the student lending laws.

The Christian Science Monitor helpfully offered a run-down of key components of the legislation:

* Improved repayment options! New borrowers can cap their repayments at 10%, down from 15%.  Sadly, this is only for new borrowers, so it doesn’t apply to my old debts.

* A streamlined federal loan system! So, all loans now originate from the same source. No real change here.

* Competitive loan servicing! Wait, this means we get better customer service? So they will be nicer to me when they tell me to pay up?

* Support to stay in school and manage debt! $750 million for classes on financial literacy for low-income students. This is probably a good thing, but I’m wondering how much time cash-strapped low-income students will divert from their classwork and jobs to attend supplementary classes.  Will this be mandatory?

* More Pell grant money! Sadly, the amount of money does not match the enormous fee hikes that many colleges are imposing this year.

There is also an additional $4 billion dollars to go to community colleges and historically black institutions. As a former community college attendee, I wholeheartedly support this part of the bill.  I was a transfer student and some of my best students at Berkeley are transfer students; I hope that this money will help our valuable, cash-strapped community colleges.  Still, the financial impact on my student loans–nada.

So, Derek Thompson from The Atlantic is accurate in his assessment of what the student lending law means for borrowing students: not a whole lot.

Photos by Colleen Morgan

It’s late and the bus is still filled to the gills with chattering Berkeley students, fogging up the windows and ignoring the exhortations of the bus driver, “STEP BACK! EVERYONE STEP BACK!” Students are leaving campus after late nights studying and working in labs, some headed to Safeway to stock up on supplies.  The student traffic tapers off south of Alcatraz, with older commuters staying on, heading to downtown Oakland and beyond.  The bus quietly undergoes an almost complete demographic change, one that has not gone unnoticed by the AC Transit authorities.

You may have missed the announcement last month from AC Transit: major changes were coming for some of the local bus lines, the most shocking of which is breaking the 51 in half at the Rockridge BART into 51A and 51B, lines that would service the north and the south segments of the 51′s route.  This would require paying for a transfer for non-UC Students, and for students with a Class Pass (a mandatory charge of $69.50 to your student fees, I hope you make good use of it!) presumably AC Transit would be able to charge UC for two rides instead of one. I also do not particularly look forward to getting off at Rockridge and waiting for another bus, especially late at night after a long day of grading.

It’s not a major disruption and will not change the experience of most students who live inside the Berkeley bubble, yet it seems a bit cynical on the part of AC Transit to break the bus line in half at the Berkeley/Oakland border. Students tend to stay in a tight circle around campus, and while this may benefit their university education, it seems a bit sad to live in the Bay Area for several years without venturing into Oakland and San Francisco.  In this respect, breaking up the 51 is just another division between Berkeley and Oakland, punishing those who would venture outside of the bubble.

Located about 3.5 miles northwest of the Berkeley Campus (take the Buchanan exit off 80 and head west), The Albany Bulb was an active construction landfill until 1987 and is now part of the Eastshore State Park.  It’s not marked on Google Maps, but you’ll recognize it if you follow the coastline up from Gilman until you see, well, a bulb extending into the bay.  Take a nice, meandering walk (or ride) from the parking lot and you’ll be treated to breathtaking views of San Francisco and the bay as well as giant sculptures by local artists and graffiti-covered construction debris.  Head leftish on the path to Mad Mark’s castle, then wander north along the shore to find large murals and amusing uses of the large chunks of concrete scattered throughout the island.  On the north shore you’ll encounter huge sculptures by artists Osha Neumann and Jason De Antonis–I like to get to this part of the bulb by the late afternoon, so I can watch the sunset light up the city and the sculptures.

On any given day you will run into dog walkers, mountain bicyclists, anarchists, graffiti artists, photographers, and people who might rather not be disturbed.  The east side of the bulb is where there are more permanent encampments and the dogs who guard this area are not particularly friendly.  Stick to the well-trod paths and you’ll have a blast.  I bet you didn’t think that the apocalypse could be this fun!

I have to admit that I didn’t feel much of a connection to the Bay Area until relatively recently.  I missed my home, where I was familiar with the local history, geology, and native plants and animals.  Did you know that nearly half of trees species you see around Berkeley and San Francisco are originally from Australia and New Zealand?  I didn’t, until I had a look inside Mike Sullivan’s The Trees of San Francisco, available for check out from the Bioscience and Natural Resources Library.  The blue gum eucalyptus grove, native to Australia, contains the tallest trees on campus, indeed the tallest stand of hardwood trees in North America.

If you don’t have a lot of interest in the not-so-local plants, take a look at Oakland Geology, a blog dedicated to local geology.  Andrew Alden highlights the rocks around town.  According to Alden, “every neighborhood in Oakland with a “mont” in its name has bedrock exposed.”  You’ll know you’ve got it when you can tell the difference between serpentine and blueshist.

An old Sanborn fire insurance map showing the lay of the land along Shattuck Avenue in 1894

Finally, how old is the building you live in?  Was your aging south-side Victorian always chopped up into 12 tiny apartments with hallways for bedrooms?  You can do a little detective work by looking up the old Sanborn fire insurance maps, available digitally through the UC Berkeley library.  It helps to click on the index first to locate the pages containing the street nearest to you.  I found out that my old apartment was built right next to Strawberry Creek before the city moved the stream underground.  Also, most street margins on the major thoroughfares around town have trolley tracks underneath them—the Key Route system served most of the East Bay until it was dismantled as part of the General Motors streetcar conspiracy.  If you happen to live in Oakland, Michael Migurski has done a lot of the heavy cartographic lifting for you at Old Oakland, where you can select and overlay different historical layers.

Welcome to your new home!