Reading the introduction to Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind brought up from the deep recesses of my memory two recollections – one of an Act Up action I encountered as an eighth grader, and another of reading the work of Paul Monette as a high school senior in a creative writing class. Accompanying these memories, in the light of Schulman’s work, were questions about my own coming of age as a gay man and as a musician. Specifically I wonder why I never continued to explore the stories of the queer generation before me, given how fascinated I was with Monette’s work and a few close friendships with men that age. I also wonder why I gentrified my own work as a songwriter and pianist when I was in my twenties.
A goal of mine for our two weeks in New York is to explore the process of pod-casting. In the podcast linked to below I briefly share my two stories and try to get the audio-generating machinery in motion.
See you all tomorrow!
badkins2012
benjaminscammon
devinzuber
Frances
goofymystic
Rev. Daniel Borysewicz
Meredith
meredithmassar
nielsteunis
oaksidea
Sandra V.Sanders-West
Timothy Gregoire-Pierson
Sarah
willbdtanner
Cultural Memory in Urban Space 
Yeah! great post, Ben, thanks so much for putting on the podcasts. I am at SFO, en-route to you all — I look forward to listening to this in the plane (assuming the promised wifi works,we shall see). Re-reading Schulman’s work, thinking on your observations here, reminds me how central “gentrification” as a concept is for our conversations and site-visits the first week. I’ll put it up under “Keywords.” We never really talked too much about it during our in-class sessions, but it strikes me that gentrification so often correlates into a willed kind of forgetting — be it the silencing of other voices and alternative histories in particular city streets (the lower east side in Schulman’s work), or willed-silencing in ourselves. And silence, forgetting, raises much we have addressed in Cole’s novel and elsewhere…
Hi back to you Ben! Good recording. Am in my Landmark room recovering from a three plane trip from Honolulu which began yesterday at 2pm. I think cultural forgetting also depends on whether the history is based on an oral tradition and whether that orality survives (e.g. death of peoples/story-bearers/chanters by natural causes or genocide or the Plague). Thanks for a thoughtful post. See you for dinner. I’m hungry already!