librarypunk - 005 - career>path ft. Luisa Díez

Episode Date: March 7, 2021

CONTENT WARNING: We discuss stories of people involved in 9/11 and its aftermath.   We’re joined by anthropologist Luisa Díez to talk about labor in museums and libraries, navigating college, winding career paths, and specifically the 9/11 museum where Luisa worked for six years. Luisa and Carrie also get into what makes a good museum experience.    Follow Luisa at @luisadieznuts on Twitter and her podcast Why You Mad.  Warm up article: https://themarkup.org/news/2021/03/02/major-universities-are-using-race-as-a-high-impact-predictor-of-student-success

Welcome to Library of Punk, the webinar, you're too much of a coward to do. Okay, my name is Justin. I'm a scholar at communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I'm an IT administrator at a public library. My pronouns are she, her, and they, them. I am Jay. I'm of the metadata and discovery strategy librarian at an academic library, and my pronouns are he or they. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian, and my pronouns are she, her. And we have a guest. Oh, do I introduce myself? Would you like to introduce yourself?

Hi, I'm Louisa. Currently, I actually am a director of digital content strategy for Viacom. So I do what I had done in the public, I'm sorry, in the public sector for the private sector now. So I'm a different kind of librarian, I guess. And my pronouns are she. I got there. Nice. Now, I wanted to do a proper intro because last week we just went rogue, which it meant the episode started with about 10 minutes of movie chat and then just chaos ensued. So for our warm up, I wanted to do this kind of a follow up on what we talked about with Dorothea, which is about academic analytics.

So there's a story that came out that looked at some of the universities that are using these academic analytics. academic advising metrics. I can't remember what the name of the company is. It was an acronym. It was EAB or something. Yeah, EAB. And so what they did is they have included, so what these things do is they take a whole bunch of data on you and they try to assess a risk factor. And part of your risk factor is based on the major you choose as well. And because they, in most of the schools that were surveyed for the story, they try to control for race. or not, didn't try to control. They just threw it in as a variable and didn't do any controlling, which was the problem.

And so it was constantly funneling students out of majors where they were typically underrepresented into other majors that was also built into, you know, anything that can be sort of gate-kept. So they already have an issue. They're trying to make sure that students are going through persistence and going through retention and graduating on time. and they've just kind of made an entirely new problem for themselves. Are you going to force me to say something weird about my workplace because one of the schools profiled is actually where I work.

I can cut it out. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for putting me in an awkward spot here because I work at an urban research one institution that is part of this study. And one of the things that they indicated here is that 31% of black students disproportionately to 13% of white students at the institution where I work were labeled high risk, which is the highest discrepancy in the schools that they looked at. And interestingly enough, my institution is looking very seriously at what they are calling the, I can't remember what they're calling it. but looking at like these like achievement gaps, I guess.

And I'm curious if this is part of it. Well, I guess I should have framed this before we jumped into the warmup. But so I wanted to talk about, yeah, no problem, dad. I wanted to frame this discussion as sort of like library careers because we've all had kind of weird careers in terms of going through university. Tell me about it. in terms of going through university and then like making your way into librarianship. And so there's a lot of weird things I want to talk about, especially with Louisa, about like being working class and trying to navigate academia.

And so now you have all these advisors who are being told with very complex math. You can't see the math, of course, but very complex math telling you that you're a high risk in your field. And therefore you need to swap careers as soon as possible. so that way our retention looks better. Learning analytics, am I right? Right. It's what happens when you turn an indicator into a metric is you start gaming the metric,

which is a problem I encounter a lot in my job. So a lot of things that were supposed to be indicators of quality and scholarly publishing are now gameable metrics. And so now everyone just games those. They don't actually measure anything anymore. There have been whole math papers written about how the impact factor doesn't even measure anything, except I guess money and prestige, which it seems like that's what this company is doing.

So I wanted to like steam through this and not spend like an hour on it because we definitely could. But what we talked about with Dorothea was that this had to do with Georgia State being the one that all of these universities are sold on, that Georgia State was this great success story. and that's the one school that's not using race as a factor and therefore not feeding that data into the algorithm that's then seeming to flag students of color disproportionately in the major explorer part of this. Well, I don't even know that it's like specifically students of color. It's specifically black students. Like, according to this article, like it's not even putting that blanket people of color language over it. It's saying black people. I think. there's, you know, maybe no reason to kind of sugarcoat it like that. No. No, it definitely is, I mean, that's when you're talking about something explicitly racialized. You're always usually talking about something explicitly anti-black as well, which, you know, is an academia for you. And one thing I put in the notes, and I think this is sort of relevant to discussions in like the, because as well as like a traditional path towards librarianship, there's a lot of,

a discussion about particularly black women leaving librarianship lately. Yeah. The pipeline. Right. The pipeline. And one thing I put in the notes was that, like, this is taking an actual real sociological problem of retention and graduation for black students and students of color and working class students.

And like, this is an actual problem. But it's just like, let's throw data at it and it turns race into what the problem is and not the culture and the context and like all of the things that they're doing that makes that like an actual problem. They're just like, oh, well, obviously these, you know, it just simplifies it too much. And just like, like you said, Justin, before we started recording it creates a new problem entirely. And I'm just like wondering within the field, when are we going to start? because there's all these, you know, surveys and statistics about retention in librarianship.

And I'm wondering when that's going to start to get like this kind of treatment or something. I don't know. Oh, God. That would suck so bad. That would be fucking the worst. Because all right now is just like, let's just do programs and diversity residencies, which, you know, I wrote the book for and I kind of feel bad about. But, you know, instead of...

We don't make mistakes when we're emerging librarian award. Did you get an emerging leader, yeah. Yeah, that's in 2018. I was in the same group as Netanel, Guinea, and so that was really fun. I really like how in here, and by like, I mean, absolutely... Oh, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just going to say, you all four went to school for a librarian. Is that correct?

Yeah? No. I do. We have one no. Yeah, I'm the kind of outlier here where I work in a public library and I am not a librarian. By degree, I've just worked in libraries for quite a few years now. Gotcha. Yeah, okay.

I did not train to be in museums or libraries. And I know we don't want to get to that, but I didn't read the article. So I am surmising from the notes now and your comments. It's okay. I didn't either. Yeah, sorry. I just skim over it while we're talking. I'm like, I'll be honest and tell you if I completely screw this up,

it's because I did not read the article. But it is striking to me because I went into academia without much knowledge of how academia worked. I got into like insurmountable amounts of debt. I have a lot of degrees, but like they're all in entirely, you know, people would call them useless things that do not result in, quote, real jobs. and for me I've never thought of it in this way of like what

I thought about it in the anthropological sense of the systems that, you know, keep people from having access to education all these kinds of things but not like I don't have inside knowledge of the actual institutional function because I didn't really ever work for academic like I think I would say

I identify as an anthropologist and I realize at some point that that identification didn't go so far as wanting to make it my job, either in the sense of performing actual anthropology, which is pretty toxic and bad in a lot of ways, or much less in the way of teaching other, like, rich, especially white kids about anthropology. Like, I felt very much like I am not going to go be the Latin ex-professor of anthropology to just teach white rich kids about how to go write books about brown people. know what I mean. So I very much just made my decisions by feeling and by the things that I wanted

to do, not like math or tests that I took. Did any of you ever have to take the ASVAB, I think is what it was called? Do you remember that? Or is that a Florida only thing? Maybe. They offered that frequently at my high school. That was like a, that was like a weekly announcement. Like, hey, don't forget to sign it for the ASVAB. That was like a very frequently. in Florida. Advertising at my high school. It was a mandatory test that you had to take. So it was a...

Yeah. It was like kind of all but in Missouri. Yeah. And so it was, you know, like a thing where it's like a vocational test, basically. And they come back to you with like, this is the job that you should do. And, you know, obviously they do like use that test to target poor communities who are looking for options for how to get their education. so they like get them in high school they took you know so I had to go in the military yeah exactly exactly

because it's a military created test exactly and your information from that test goes to the military right and they heavily targeted well I grew up an area that was yeah yeah I would get phone calls my mom would give phone calls where they specifically wanted me to go work for like particular programs developed for particular programs of the Navy because of what my skills test showed or whatever you know what I mean and I was just like No. I even had my mom, you know, being like, I'm 17 and my mom was like, this sounds like a great plan. And I was like, what? Absolutely not. So I've never just, I didn't go for the test. You know what I mean? I went for the feeling. And the feeling was like I just didn't want to be in academia. But like what skills do I have that I could use? So then I use those skills to work in museums, basically. And I think they're bad. So I wonder if maybe. Maybe I'm going to bring a very, like, very pessimistic point of view to this show. Oh, hell yeah.

No one has librarianship and museums and stuff more than the people in those fields. Because we're like, oh, we get such a terrible heritage. Yeah. I've done, like, all of the above, too. So, you know, we can go there. Wait, you've done what? It's breaking up a little bit, so I didn't hear you. Oh, I said I've done all of the above.

of like I've done kind of all kinds of cultural heritage work and library work. I have a really weird career trajectory. Interesting. Yeah. So that was my comment as far as like how interesting it is to think about like, I guess I never really feel like I was inside of academia to have this like point of view of particular institutions and how they're using their tools. And like it's even been forever since I've had a real conversation with somebody about. real like admission rates and things like that. I'm more having conversations with people about whether or not we should be going to college

at all, you know? And those are great questions. Those are great conversations to have too because I like to I love to ask those kinds of questions too because I would love to live in a world where people didn't feel like they had to go to college just to make a living wage and get health insurance, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's like my sort of ideal is that like it's not that I think college.

is bad. It's more like the fact that it went from let's like learn things and like learn things about the world and different ways of thinking. It went to you you do this in order to get a job. Like it turned into like part of the workforce instead of a more intellectual pursuit. I'm like, no, just like let us be snooty and go to university for free and just like study Plato or something and not have that required for jobs. I don't even think it's that though. I don't even think it's that though. I think it's this, yeah. The snootiness kind of, that idea of it bugs me a little bit because I think this idea that like we've trained people to think that like a college degree is what warrants your

ability to create value for society is problematic. It's totally. In itself. Yeah. The only reason I'm really like pro college still is that I think everyone should have access to it to go study like the dumbest most useless thing they want to just because they want to and it should be available. Oh, fuck yeah.

Yeah. That's the only reason I did. I completely agree on that point too. Yeah. Yeah. And I was going to say earlier that in Germany, actually, they, instead of making them do that tests, y'all were talking about, this is sort of built into the education system in Germany.

Like you do tests and like based on your grades and stuff, they sort of funnel you into you go to college, you do a trade and you sort of don't get to deviate from that path and that's chosen for you in high school or something like that. It's kind of, you know, scary. Yeah. I grew up in a really Navy area. Like seriously, I think like 40 to 50% of the, of like that county works for the Navy in some way. It's got like a couple of major bases at it. And yeah, the ASVAB was such a thing when I was in high school. I didn't take it, but the fact that I didn't was really weird. So, yeah, it's straight up just a funnel straight into the military. And yeah, I didn't go to, back to college. I didn't even go to college until I was, oh God, how old was I? In my mid-20s is when

I went back to a community college, got my IT degree, and they're still really pushing like computer security jobs. And the number one pushing point is that is. there's going to be a shortage, so think about how much money you can make. Like nothing about, like, you know, the difference you can make or why it's interesting or anything like that. Yeah, or if you'll even enjoy it, it's, there's going to be a shortage and you can make bank doing it. So how about, and like how about you do it? And this was a school that did a lot of trades too. They trained to put people at the Navy bases to work.

So, yeah, it's kind of dire out there. Well, this also connects a little bit, I think, to like, if we want to connect it back to the initial article we pull up, since my workplace is mentioned, a large portion of our student base is returning students, like, that are non-traditionally aged. Like, our average freshman is actually around 28 because of its location and some other factors. So, like, being an institute that's like being a university. that's situated the way we are with the kind of, you know, location that we are, because we're an urban research, you know, larger institution, we're able to help being public as well, we're able to serve those kinds of students in, or we're, that's part of our demographic, essentially, is that we serve, you know, kind of that more kind of, I guess, community oriented kind of program. And as someone

who works with, I guess, like, I guess you would call them more professional programs. I kind of take umbrage with the idea that like college is just for like intellectual like dumbass pursuits even though like that's what I did in college was like I love to fuck around um but like as someone who like works with people who are like actively trying to make the world a better place like with health sciences like there's a place for that too within the university as well and I think that there's room for that in the discussion now if you want to shit on business majors I'm here for that all day. But, like, I think there has to be room for some more subtlety in the discussion. Something we can all agree on. Yeah. Yeah. Um, because like, yes, I agree with fucking wrong.

But yes, I also agree that there's room for some of those, like, you know, you want people to have educations for vocational needs too. Like, um, I think that's another point. I don't understand why, um, like, uh, trade schools aren't like more, I guess, well, I know why they're not. I, I know why they're not. as sort of advertised to high school. They're very well funded. Actually, they're very well funded in Wisconsin. Librarians at the technical colleges actually make more than librarians at most of the four-year schools do. But it can also be privatized and extremely predatory. So like, yeah, ours are all very like publicly, like we have a very large system of two-year publicly invested trade school.

And they're kind of designed as like trade and like public trade technical schools. And they're designed around kind of a more vocational model than a community college model. But there's still like a lot of community college kind of ethos around it. But that's one thing that Wisconsin is particularly strong. And that's where a lot of the higher education money has shifted to because they actually have their own taxation districts. So I wanted to ask Louisa about your, I saw the Poddam America stream. I saw you talking about the new school a lot. Oh, yeah.

You know, speaking of, you know, fucking around in college. You know, like you said, you were not sure how to navigate academia, which, you know, most of this internal stuff is just what I've learned from working in academia. Like, no one explained any of this shit to me. Right. So I guess during FIU, when did you decide to, like, go to grad school and take up the new school? Oh, it was a combination of things. And one of them, I'm going to be really honest with you, is the fact that if you, and I'm sure you are all aware of this, if you enroll in another degree, then you don't have to pay your previous student loans. Right? Everybody knows that. So I kept just getting more loans and more, you know, other degrees and going to another school so that that way I could keep deferring my original loans. So then I considered, okay, well, got to go back to school.

So what should I do? And I very much just was like, okay, one of my degrees was fine art. I was a sculptor. And I had to do this final project. It literally is just about this final project that was so bad. You guys, I was not a good artist. And it was about symbols, basically. Let's just keep it at that.

And in doing my research about like the history of these particular symbols that I chose to put in my artwork, I became honestly just more enthralled with the narrative and like the idea of who framed this narrative this way and why and more like the knowledge production behind the knowledge that I was like collecting. You know what I mean? And it became more interesting to me to pursue those kinds of thoughts than to express myself artistically. You know what I mean? And I had this realization that it wasn't. really an artist and express yourself person. I was a researcher and a collector of information and an organizer of data, you know.

And I... Oh, you had a librarian moment. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, I consider you all of my brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings. Absolutely. We are Kenfolk because, like, yeah, I also have had a moment like that while I was working on seminar papers in my undergrad because it was just like, I don't want to write this thing.

I just want to collect the information. Yeah, and I'm good at it. And I felt like I cared about context and I care about like making information accessible to others and to more people than ever and all of that kind of stuff. And anthropology just called to me just because I was specifically interested in the knowledge production by humanity, right? and even more specifically than that through art, because that's where I came from.

So I decided to just go to school for cultural anthropology. So I started looking at master's degree programs. And I very literally was just like, where would I live in the United States? I'm not going to, that's part of the reason that academia was also not for me. I was not going to chase jobs to like middle America. I'm so sorry. I do not want to live in Wisconsin. So I, and for a lot of reasons, you know what I'm not being elitist.

absolutely. It's absolutely not. I lived in rural Iowa and it's way worse. Yeah. After you've lived in rural Iowa, Wisconsin's like a fucking dream. So, um, yeah. Sorry, I picked that name out of thin air, maybe because you did say it before, but Iowa is not good either. I don't want any of that. And, you know, I'll back you up on Iowa. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's like, it is very cultural. I'm an immigrant. I'm a first generation American. I didn't feel really

like I belonged at any of the schools that I went to. FIU was kind of a place that I did belong at because everybody was like me. They were all commuter students who had jobs, who were there on scholarships, who were pursuing some kind of more vocational-leaning

kind of pursuit because we're also, you know, all immigrants and our parents tell us to get real jobs. You know what I mean? and I realized like I just I could not live in a place that doesn't have other immigrants and the food that immigrants have and the life, you know. So it was very clear to me early on. Yeah, that I cannot chase that lifestyle. You know what I mean?

Like it's like admitting you're not an athlete and you're never going to go to the Olympics. That was me admitting I could not be a professor, you know. So I looked at just schools in New York City. and I looked into what kind of institutions they were and when I learned about the new school and I had heard other artists and like poets and speakers and stuff mentioned their dealings with this new school

whether they went there or taught there or things that interested me. I think Hannah Arendt might have been the first person that I remember the connection and I applied and I got in and I was just like, okay, cool, I'm moving to New York. That's what I'm doing. I'm going to go be an anthropologist.

And it was very weird because I went from a commuter school to like a rich people school with like a lot of international students who are also very rich is the thing that people don't really ever point out. It's not like, you know, because they like to be like, it's such a diverse school. They have the biggest like international population of the East Coast or something like that. It's all little princes. Exactly. I'm like, it's like super rich people that you're just like, you have. It's a diversity of wealthy people.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But with that said, I feel like I learned the most that I ever learned. I had like the most access to information framed in a way that I found extremely useful and that I felt like I could apply to a lot of things in my life. And then it came time to like decide whether you to finish the PhD. And I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. We can, I don't want to be a professor.

what could I do? So I went to NYU after that. After finishing my master's in cultural anthropology, I went to NYU for a postgraduate certificate in museum anthropology. So that's when, as I was finishing that program, which was basically just like, okay, you're an anthropologist, learn some librarian stuff, you know? And so it was pretty useful.

It was like vocational school, honestly, kind of. and because you learn putting on exhibitions and cataloging and all of that kind of stuff. And then while I was at NYU finishing that program, I was recruited by the 9-11 Museum. And I began my career there with museums. And was that, so were you still at the new school when like the, was it the UN or the military was trying to recruit anthropologists at the time? Were you still at the new school while that was going on? I was recruited by the UN, but I did it.

know that that had a connection through the to the school because says so I worked full time so I also wasn't very involved in any of the schools that I went to you know I didn't have time to hang out at the quad and talk with people like I had to work so I didn't realize that like a lot of the things that we talked on that stream I'm like oh shit I was there when that happened I just like walk through there with my blinders on because I'm going to be late to class like there's there's a protest going on oh shit um so But yeah, I was actually offered a job for the UN doing exhibitions in embassies around the world. But that's one of those where you're like, oh, red flag, I'm not doing that.

I'm like, no, thanks. I will wait for the next job offer. But surprisingly enough, the 9-11 museum is also extremely toxic and complicated and not a good workplace nor an ethical project. I am shocked. One could say. Flabrous gas. Yeah. Flabbergasted.

But I did make a monument. Wait. America exceptionalism? Yeah, exactly. That was actually a question that I was curious about with like, because I feel like a lot of times and like you would think it wouldn't be this way, but I feel like a lot of the times within the glam sphere that like, you know, we, it's not that we don't focus on the materials or even what they're about, but it's like we, there is sort of this detachment of like it's

the physical object or just like the object, but we don't really. ever deal with what's inside it necessarily, like, at least from a metadata perspective, I have to, like, look up what something is. But I, and I can't remember who it is. I think, I know she's on Twitter, but I'm not sure which of my friend she is because I have a terrible memory. But she works with, like, Holocaust and, like, Jewish materials. Christy, yes. And she talks all the time, like, I see her posts on Facebook sometimes about how emotionally taxing that can be to work with that sort of archival material. It's like how she like can't watch Schindler's List or like certain movies anymore because it's so much like she works with those materials now.

And is she at Yale? Is that where she is? I think. Yeah. It's the Fortune Off archive. Yes. And so it's like and I feel like I never see other people in our sort of line of work talking about how working with the materials like affects them emotionally and in their life. So I was like, God, what it must be like to work at the.

the 9-11 museum if you would like I was just so curious about that if you wouldn't mind mentioning that. Yeah, I mean, uh, dating me during those years like, man, I had some of the worst first dates ever because like, oh, but that was fun. It was just, you know, like imagine you're just like, oh, so hi, how are you? Let's get to know each other. Oh, so what do you do? I work in a museum.

Which museum? Oh, we can talk about it later. So tell me about yourself, you know? And then it's like, no, but really, I love museums. Tell me which museum. The 9-11 museum. And obviously, you know, I live in New York City. And it was literally nine out of ten times.

Yes. The person then immediately launched into their 9-11 story, which very often was that they were here, that they lost a person, that, you know, just like horror. So then that was our first. It was freaking terrible. So, you know, it's interesting because I guess like I never thought of like, I'm thinking of like Stephanie, one of my catalogers. I'm like, I guess it must have been very hard also for Stephanie. she had to handle like pretty horrible stuff, you know? But my issue was like I was the anthropologist, not the collections manager, right?

So it's funny because in museum school, I never forgot it. They taught us once that, like a cool professor, taught us that in working in museums, we would eventually encounter the conflict that always exists there, which is between object people and people people, right? And so, you know, this professor explained, like, every museum, and I would say this part extends to glam with, you know, probably a few tweaks, has people who believe to their core that their job is the object, right? That it's about treating it and cataloging it and showing it and making it available

and making sure it exists forever, et cetera, whatever your mission might be at your institution. And there's the people people who think that their mission, their job is to use these objects in order to serve people. So the museum exists to serve the people, not to protect and serve objects, right? So I have kind of like a contentious relationship with the object people, which I think a lot of you might be, right? and the reason is... I'm actually not. No? That's great.

Awesome. Great. I met those people in grad school and I actually have a... They're terrible, right? Yeah, I'm a health sciences librarian. And I actually have a specialization in rare book and manuscript studies. And the object people were the worst people in the class. And like, you could see the professors get annoyed with the object people in the class

who were like trying to touch all the materials. And they would just be like, why do you have to touch everything? It's always the rare book people. See, I get told all the time that I wasted on tech services. I remember the, I remember one of my, I remember my, one of my rare, like he used to be the former head of rare, the rare books library at University of Illinois, Alvin Bragman. We, like, he taught my intro to rare books and he was the illuminated manuscripts guy. And so like he pulled out a book one day and it was like woven on a jacard loom and it was like, you know, oh, these were made on punch cards. and there was like three people in my class

who would just like sprint to every item he would pull out and there'd be like can we touch it and he just goes why do you got to touch everything and like I would just like we just like exchange this glance in that moment that was just like this private joke between the two of us and it was just like yeah I see you and it was like this kind of magic moment of like

yes we are both mutually annoyed by everyone else in this class right now. And that's how I knew, I guess, I could never. The fetishists. Yeah. The object fetishists. Yeah. I just can't.

I can't handle it. Yeah. Like, yeah, I will fucking throw books away. I'll put them right in the trash. I don't fucking care. How dare you be a library in a same? Doesn't Scott make like a sticker that's like I throw away books as part of my job or something? Shit, bitch.

I'll put them in the recycling, okay? Yeah, no, totally. Exactly. cranking about that. But to answer your original question, right, about the living with what taking care of these, for me, stories, right? Because I didn't feel like my job was the objects. And so I was specifically hired to, they called it round out the collection because when I was

hired, it was basically going to be a shrine to just rich white people and like hero figures is what I call them. and that was because, you know, they had obviously already reached out to, like, traditional museum-type audiences, meaning rich people who understand the role of a museum and are used to giving money to one and donating objects to one and such. And the heroes, the staff, the initial staff, went out and reached out to, like, the fire captains that died, their families, that kind of stuff. So then they realized that actually quite a large chunk of the people were immigrants, were people who didn't speak, speak English or, you know, English was like their second or third language.

Because they were hourly workers and things like that, they moved a lot. So if you're trying to collect information about them or objects about them 10 years later, they're not living in the same address that you're looking at, you know, from 10 years ago. And so they reached out to me specifically to do the outreach to families of the security guards, the waiters at the restaurant upstairs, the delivery people, you know, all the people that were just not already part of their initial scope of who should be represented and who are not going to naturally go to this institution

and be like, hey, let me knock on your door, you need to tell my story and collect objects, right? So I did it, you know, because it did seem like, wow, these people shouldn't be left out, right? And so I did it, but then what was really hard about it is that once I started, I felt extremely responsible for not leaving anyone out. And so then I was stuck in this traumatic job where I could not leave until the museum was open. And I had spoken to every single family member. And I think I had, what was the number?

I think I, when I first started, we were missing images of 988 people, I believe. And when I left, we were missing nine. So I tracked down people like in other countries, you know, and I was the point of... Damn. Yeah, and so I was the point of contact with the original holder of the objects and the stories. And it was my job to collect the context that I then passed on to the collections team and to the curators, right? And the collections team catalogs it and puts it away. And then the curators use that information that I collected and that the catalogers input and, you know, organize to make their narrative.

at this museum. And it was very stressful to watch. You know, I do think the collections team was on my side, but the curatorial team were these object people, to be honest with you. They were people who held these objects reverently, but didn't dean to speak to the people directly that came to their offices to tell their stories and give their objects. And they were people who, you know, I would rather just email me and say, hey, we got to do a news conference. Can you send us 10 stories about 10 victims that we could just bring up, make sure that it's diverse and that there are some gays and some blacks in there? Okay.

You know, that's my job to be the point of collecting all of this for you. And so I had no reverence for the actual objects. I felt like the reverence was for this point of contact where people who often had never even stepped in a museum before in their life. came into these cold offices near the site where their father or grandmother or whoever died for the first time, often in 10 years, you know, that they hadn't been to Lower Manhattan because they were, like, traumatized and whatnot. And it very often felt like they unloaded their trauma in a way by telling their story for the first time. Look, I can't even, like,

talk about it without getting very emotional because it was something where I felt like the thing that they donated or that they gave up was this feeling that they unloaded on me. Like I had like an old fire captain who like straight up had not talked about 9-11 in 11 years to anyone. Just straight start crying in my office. And I just have to comfort this man for like two hours. You know, while he tells me about all the boys that he lost. You know, and he's like, I was like 29, you know, or like 30. And so it was something that they did not. prepares for while acting like these objects were like the most important thing and spending like millions of dollars on like media pieces and display cases and um temperature controls and all these things

but i had to fight them to translate materials into other languages i had to um we created a phone bank you know because we collected oral histories as well right uh not just like you tell me your story but you also could record it. And clips from family members talking were incorporated into both the collection, obviously, and the exhibition. And I had to argue with these people that, like, if you actually want people's stories, why wouldn't you make it easy for them to do it from their home, for them to tell it in their language?

Like, you can't expect people to just do it your way and understand your way of grieving or your way of collecting stories, you know? do you know what they made us do they gave us like a crap budget and I had to go around the office finding all the people that spoke different languages and I had to get a friend to come in to do the creole prompts you know because they just wouldn't pay for that but they paid for like such expense like it's such an expensive project you know for media pieces there were like fancy propaganda pieces basically and so to me I can't help but like be very hateful sometimes when I go to museums and like places that have these things and like shrines and glass yeah places with lots of funding to put on a show but not to put it in context yeah and i didn't expect to cry but this is i hadn't talked about the nine 11 museum in a while um and it is okay we all dramatic yeah but what i was yeah um most of the time most regular people they walk by an object even if it's in a beautiful case, even if it has a label, you know, A, they don't fucking read the label, to be honest with you,

but B, all that you're seeing is an object. And you're not actually seeing the story of what it meant to the person who made it or the person who collected it even or the person who cataloged it. It just becomes a thing. And I don't think that that's ultimately our job. You know what I mean? I agree. Yeah. So this is the kind of trauma that you live with when handling these objects and stories. Well, yeah, because it's like at one, you like you have people telling you these stories and then your your workplace itself is like propaganda machine. Yeah. Totally against that. So yeah. When you, when your workplace as culture is like communicating the story of American exceptionalism, but your job is to try to, I guess, communicate something that is, I don't know even how to put this like, but like

something that's, I guess, a narrative that it doesn't fit their preconceivable. notions of that. I think maybe that's where that conflict exists. I think you've hit the second part of your librarian feeling bingo, which is you described vocational awe, which is a concept. We use a lot in terms of like the emotional overinvestment that being the people-centered people is very common in libraries. I think a lot of people are going to resonate with that, especially when you're talking about like oral histories. Yeah. They're done so badly. At so many places, I work with oral histories a lot.

And, you know, people don't think about could this oral history get someone deported because they're talking about something illegal that happened or everyone wants to do oral histories with undocumented immigrants. It's like ICE listens to these. They do at universities. They will go to these collections and listen to them. Yeah. And, yeah, it's. I would tell you, I tried to mitigate what I was doing.

doing, right? Because, man, so you know also like Bloomberg was on the board, it was like, it was bad. And that surprises me none. None, right? Yeah, but it was like he was involved. And we had to get approvals from him on like the way things were phrased and things like that. It was really bad. But, uh, wait, what was they telling you? I was going to tell you something. Oh, is how I mitigated. No, yeah, no, how I mitigated this because, you know, I, I obviously had many points where I wanted to leave. But then I felt like nobody would reach out to these people. And maybe that's good because then they wouldn't have been included in this thing. Like, I don't know. I guess I still wrestle with that one. But what I told family members. That's also what toxic

workplaces do to you. It's like, that's what a toxic workplace does. It makes you think like, like, if I don't do this, then who will? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what an abusive toxic workplace will do do to you. I know. I know. But I guess I really do mean it in the sense of like, There were no people of color on that staff. There was no, like I said, no concern for telling stories that are not going to come with a donation check. And it felt like it had an expiration date. You know, we were opening a new museum. I just had to do the job of contacting every family member and just asking them the question, making it their choice, right?

Do you want to include your family member in this memorial effort? and I would frame it as it's their choice. I would have like open conversations with people, you know, like saying like, you know, not talking down to them, explaining like what it would look like, what it would do, what kind of things we collect, giving examples of the other materials I had collected from other people before, that kind of thing. And in a lot of cases, it was like people that thought about it, went away, came back with a lot of stuff. and other people that came back and went like, I just want the picture for the wall and I don't want to tell you anything. I had one family member that literally we were missing nine pictures, but really we're missing 10 on the wall.

But it's because one, the next of kin doesn't even want her father's picture on the wall. And she didn't want even his real birthday. So it just says his year because she was worried about identity theft and things like that. So like I, everything that was within my control to make it how the family members, wanted it, we did that. I did that, you know. But the thing is the museum was like divided into two exhibitions, the historical exhibition and the memorial exhibition. And I was the manager of the memorial exhibition, which was about the people who died. And the historical exhibition is literally starts, you know, at 8.46 in the morning and goes through the entire recovery effort through

May. And it is a kind of hellish joyride that like historical exhibition, you know, they'd like purposely hung things higher so that you would have this experience of looking up at the towers as the witnesses that they had to until their necks hurt. It has horrific, horrific video, horrific things on the wall that you're just like, in the exhibition there's panic exits is what they called them at first, I believe, so that if you felt like you couldn't handle the exhibition at that point,

you could exit instead of having to walk backwards through, 9-11 again basically it was horrifying and so I had family members who would just like be like oh so the museum open should I go and I would like absolutely not you should not go and so they were

obviously not designed for them yeah exactly can I just say that's not trauma informed yeah it's extremely extremely bad and tasteless and I know that it's it was completely made in this way of like how it will be seen in a hundred years not how it's

seen by the people who live this now. And it sucked. And, you know, there was a lot of people who were happy with the memorial exhibition, but then the way that their people, their family stories get used in these other propaganda efforts outside the museum even by politicians and doing, like, dropping names that were victims and things like that. They got that information from us. You know, they like email the museum to ask us about like pictures of Victor, you know, all of that. So I did, I just felt like I couldn't leave until I offered the choice two years. each person, right, to each family as to whether or not they wanted to be a part of this and give them power over the degree to which they were involved. And I feel good about the fact

that I made that a choice for everyone. But ultimately, the thing that I made is bad. I'm like, oh, don't go there. It's very, very bad. What you said about, you know, it's meant to be viewed as a historical record as someone who's both trained in history. So I did my master's in history. and a research project I'm working on now is undocumented oral history protocols. So what data do you destroy? Because you can't just say we're going to embargo it because there's no legal protections for archives. So if they get a subpoena, they can get in. So what are you going to destroy permanently?

And then what does that mean for the historical record? A lot of people think that our first priority is somehow to people who don't exist yet. Whereas I think as an ethical human being, my main primary. priority is the people who exist now, not hypothetical people. So I can't do like something that's a potential harm. Because like in 100 years, 200 years, that's their job to figure out what history was. That's not my job entirely to make sure that it's like laid out for them. Like it's going to be hard because a lot of stuff doesn't get saved. So yeah, I think this this will resonate with a lot of people who do similar kind of work. And it's how long were you at the 9-11 museum, by the way?

A little over six years. I was there only one year after opening. So I made it through the one year anniversary and then I resigned the next week because yeah, that was like pretty much as far as I could go. I was just like I'm absolutely done. We opened it. I feel like, you know, everybody who wanted to be a part of this has the ability to be a part of it. But those, to be honest with you, it's funny that you bring that up because deciding who gets to speak let's say on behalf of a victim or what story doesn't get included. These were probably the hardest things that I had to go through working there. You know, there were, you know, like really, really messed up things.

Like, you know, it went somewhat good, I guess, as far as destroying things, like where family members regretted an oral history. I deleted it if they asked me to. I took care of it. I made sure the documentation would disappear. Like, I took care of it. We're not even going to revisit this. with anybody else, not with curators, we got it.

And I mean, I'm comfortable, you know, saying that publicly. And but then from to the bad end of like, you know, to avoid the having to be the arbiter as much as possible as to like who gets to speak for someone, the museum had a policy that the next of kin was the ultimate determinant of how somebody was represented, right? But it wasn't always the next of kin who I got in contact with. obviously I would try to reach the next of kin first, but in many cases either you couldn't or they didn't have any interest in talking to you. You know, like, as you can imagine, you're like calling 9-11 widows.

And as soon as you're like, hi, I'm calling for the 9-11 museum, click. I don't, it's Tuesday and it's 11. And I did not want to talk about my dead husband. Who the fuck are you? You know, it was not a great job. And sometimes you would end up with people who voluntarily came and it would be like a cousin of somebody, you know what I mean, or a brother or a mother. So it's not the next of kin necessarily, but a family member who wanted to donate a story

or an object, a photograph. And because it's the only thing we have, we would put it into the exhibition. And so then the first probably like six months that the museum was open, my entire team, our job, like the memorial exhibition team, was we basically were running a phone bank where people would show up to the museum and then get furious about what was on the wall for their person, right? And what was in the digital displays and all of that. It ranged from just like, I hate this picture of him. Where did you get it? Why did you put it there? To my kids didn't know that he had a child with another woman and you put that on a public thing. And now I have to have this

car, you know, like things like that. There was a firefighter who had two wives, basically. And it turns out that the FDNY thought that one wife was the legal wife, but the legal wife was the actual next of kin who didn't live with him. So she got to determine his story and how it got told. And she cut out the woman who had lived with him for the past 12 years.

Okay? Oh my God. Yeah. No. No. Do you have those phone logs? Yeah. No. It's shit. It's pretty crazy. And it's like,

it brought a lot of conflict into my heart and my head as to like, people should determine how they're represented, but then who gets to tell stories about whom and who gets to be the arbiter. And, you know, man, I could tell you many. Like that, it was like... With queer couples, I can only imagine. Oh, my God.

Because also remember our marriage was illegal. So we had more than one situation where the next of kin was the mother because they weren't married to their partner. And the mother chose, like, not to include the gay wedding and not to include the partner. and like barely a mention, you know? George Bush's America. Yeah, it was really bad, you know. And then there were other things where it was like...

Doma Act. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it's interesting because it's a lot, like the mentality of everyone in our job is like preserving information. But then if we have to think about the people that are affected by this information and how it's collected and how it's used.

And some of my biggest fights with curators and with heads of collection was, no, I know that you think this is a great story, but this can't be shown. We had also, the worst thing was a note from the 86th floor. There was a group of people who died in a conference room together. They were trapped. And they left a note that they tried to pass through a floor below that said, you know, there's this many people trapped on the 86th floor. And when the towers collapsed, a lot of paper debris landed on, like, people all the way in

Brooklyn and in Jersey on their balconies and stuff. And so a lot of my job also was people that just random people that didn't know anybody sending me things and calling me and being like, I found this picture of a kindergartner, you know, like it landed on my window that day. And somebody returned the 86th, the note from the 86th floor. And they're like, we think that this is from the World Trade Center. Sure enough, we do the research, we find out who were the people. Because we had, if you go to the museum, there's like a horrible freaking chart where you

could actually like pinpoint what floor each person died on and everything. It's terrible. And the curators, you know, obviously wanted to use this artifact, right? And it was only because of the memorial exhibition that there was the insistence of like, you need to first show this to his wife before you put it anywhere, before you catalog it, before you take a picture of it, before you put it anywhere. And the, we had, I called her, we had the wife come in. Imagine. Just like imagine me like, hi, we found this. And so it turns out that it was written in her husband's, like we had a couple of people related to the, because

there was multiple people in the conference room. So we had a couple of people come in. And then eventually we found the wife of the person who recognized the handwriting, right? And she agreed that the note could be displayed, I believe it's still on display in the museum, but that she had to first show it to her teenage daughters and make sure that they were okay with this and that they knew about it. So then we had to have a second meeting where they came in to look at it and just like crying our office basically for six hours while they like learn another piece of how their father died. And it was. It was strange because there was a case in which this family chose to say, yeah, let's put this part of the story in there, you know.

Yeah, but that seems like the museum, did the museum prompt them for that, though? Like, yeah, of course. Yeah. The curator. Yeah. That's, yeah, that's a curatorial decision that is pretty tasteless. Not just that, but it's also something where, um, I think that most people who, who are of a typical museum audience, right? So let's say upper class white people generally. Maybe they have a relationship with these institutions of like, I can get my way. You know, I can come in and donate money, get the name change, do some, you know, I don't know, be a member, these kinds of things.

But I think the vast majority of working class and like, you know, firefighters, wives and that kind of thing, they did not, you know, they're coming to the World Trade Center to be like overlooking this pit. that used to be the building where their husband died. And they have this fancy lady sitting here telling them like, we found this, we're going to use this. Is that okay with you? I don't think that that's a situation where the power balance leans towards somebody feeling like they can say, I don't want you to use this.

Because what recourse do they have to say, don't do it if this curator says we're going to do it. Like rip it out of her hand? You know, what are you going to do? So I think, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that ultimately, like, the power structure of, or like, what it represents, what these institutions represent by the basis of, like, getting to display these things has a power over people that I don't think was acknowledged sufficiently in a lot of these interactions. I don't even think that's taught a lot of the times. No, I had a completely useless library administration course I had to take where I just learned how to be talked down to by a library administration.

who talked the class. So we're at an hour and you've already given us so much. I just want to do this last question we usually ask, which is like a hypothetical. So like in fully automated luxury gay space capital capitalism, communism. Yeah, like, wait, what? What podcast? I'm like, I was, I was listening to the podcast about all the people who made the capitalist commune and that's stuck in my head today. I'll send the two guys later. But like, so, so after the revolution, when we value labor and well-being above all else, like what, if anything, is the role of the museum?

Or, I mean, that also extends to libraries, but I think we'll have to do a whole separate episode on that. But, like, if a museum is, like, inherently sort of nationalist, imperialist, reifies an imagined past in some ways, is there a human-centered version where, like, the curation is important, the people as people can be in charge? Yeah, no, I think my answer applies to both museums and libraries

and I think it is what a lot of the good public usually libraries and good public usually museums are doing these days, which is definitely not enough, but they're leaning there is programs, right? Actually investing in programs

that teach in the community things, that provide access to their content or their objects or whatever it may be that include disabled people in different ways to interact with the content and the knowledge that they have there, not just in the first basic way that you think of, but also to just like have, continue the stories. You know what I mean? The opening access to making something like a multi-narrative institution where the story is not told from an authoritative point of view where the curation is about curating access, not content, and therefore is as much leaning towards getting as many stories from as many point of views

as possible, and then providing access to those to as many people as possible, including people who will never visit your four walls and that kind of thing, right? I did hear amongst communist circles, I'm sure you guys would probably discuss this then, but like how nice idea. about libraries being like more of places that also have like usable objects that people can rent out and bring back and share. So like big kitchen tools, you know, like big, I don't know, wheat grinders. Cake, cake, paint library. Yeah. Yeah, libraries. Yeah, exactly. Fishing. Pohl libraries. Yes. Which I do think. We check out telescopes. Yeah, exactly. So I do, I do personally, actually envision a possibility of a museum library hybrid that because you guys also know that zoos

are also part of us right because they have a living collection and bought i actually worked at a zoo for two summers in college i know that aquariums aquariums yeah exactly they're all part of our world too they're cataloging living collections um wineries yeah but so if you can imagine like a hybrid library museum where we do both things where we collect information and make it accessible, both in like a written, recorded digital, all these forms, but also objects, right, which is what museums have a strength in. And, you know, if we're like a museum that collects cake pans, right, we can have cake pans that are antique that are displayed because they're beautiful.

And then also all these cake pans that are available for the community to use that we teach you had to use that we provide workshops to learn a new thing all this kind of stuff are to build community among seniors all different things where our objects are actually serving our people I love a fucking historic house tour where they have cake pans and shit like that out

I would love like and so like one of actually there's there's a thing that happened in a library system that I used to work for where they built a branch library around a historic home and I would just be like I always think of cake pans when I'm in a historic house because I once toured

one historic I'm a big Frank Lloyd Wright fan I go on Franklin Wright themed vacations whatever I worked at the Bougainheim also oh yeah yeah that's a fun place that's a fun building to be in I don't know about the work environment but the

building itself is fun I know it has lots of problems because Franklin Lloyd Wright is notoriously bad about building proper foundations for his buildings. Yeah, so that's why actually for the Guggenheim, it operates out of five different buildings. So the collection is housed off site because there's nowhere to put the collection. Yeah, the top. That's how you got to design a museum, right? Yeah, the top floor of the Guggenheim was originally not supposed to be collection display space. It was originally supposed to be administrative offices. Yeah. So now it has only like in the top ring these little

dumb offices that are horrible. They're like little cocoons. It's horrifying. So most of us, most of the staffs actually worked in another building in downtown. So it was actually, yeah, it was pretty nice. You didn't have to go uptown and deal with that. But because I did the website redesign, so that was a weird job switch. I left the 9-11 museum to oversee the redesign of the website for the Guggenheim for the

first time in like 12 years or something. But it was because they were making a new digital collection, yeah, a new online collection. And I had to do like all that about me research about the institution and like publication history and exhibition history and all the buildings that they existed. So I know all this stuff about Frank Lloyd Wright just because of that. So I could have a Frank Lloyd Wright conversation with you. Wisconsin. Speaking of like art museums to sort of speak to your like, you know,

fully automated luxury space gay communism idea of like the combined museum library. It reminded me of, so last year, the last sort of actual thing I did before the world ended was I went to a conference of Pittsburgh and I went to the Warhol Museum there. I don't know if any of y'all have ever been to the Warhol Museum, but on each floor. No, but I used to be obsessed with Warhol. It's great. They have like things you can touch of like the different periods of his works to sort of like feel what screen printing is. It's sort of, there's no color or anything on it, but it's just like the tactile. They have a room you can go in and watch all his videos.

Like you can watch, what is it, the blowjob one? Like you can just watch that in there. Yes. It's called blow job. Yeah, yeah. I was like, it's called blow or what? No, it's called blow job. And then like in the power, blow job, all the tops, all the hits.

Cocaine Cowboy. Oh, hell, yeah. I know the film. Have you ever seen the documentary, though, about the Warhol Museum in Czechoslovakia? Because it's about how they won't let the local Roma population. go and visit the museum and it has a leaky ceiling and all these other problems. That's terrible.

Yeah. It's called great. But yeah, it's really fascinating about like the dynamic between the local Czech population or the local Roma population where they build this Czech war hall museum in the middle of Czechoslovakia. Or yeah, it's Czechoslovakia at the time when they make the documentary. Yeah. I can't remember what it's called.

but because I watched it like a million years ago and I have a terrible memory. Yeah. I'll put it on the list. But I think about it a lot about like, you know, when you talk about the audience from a museum and like who's around. And I mean like the Roma keep trying to visit the museum too. That's the that's like the other part of the documentary too. Is it like they're like, no, we want to visit the museum.

We want to see the work. They're like, yeah, we don't let you in here. Like it's this whole dynamic that goes on throughout the, throughout the, throughout the documentary. Yeah. And then in the like basement of it, you can actually do screen printing and like take home your screen print and everything.

So they can go through the Warhol Museum and then like go home. Like I still have mine that I made. They have like actual artists down there who help you. I know also a lot of art museums actually do the more like they will give you stuff where you can actually do art while you're in the museum or something. And I find that. They do that for children all the time. Yeah.

When your child, Jay. Yeah. Well, yeah. whatever. But then I was, the other thing is that like with the people focus, but like in a good way, I've noticed that the people,

the sort of, because I focus on this sort of thing a lot, but with like object description, like metadata in general, to sort of mitigate that power imbalance. You can never get rid of it. But, and I've noticed that like all of the like breaking research and actual people doing this are indigenous communities,

especially in New Zealand and Canada. Yeah. who are like doing exactly what you're talking about. Like I've heard, I haven't been there, but the museum of the American Indian in D.C. Apparently has like a space where you can even do like, like, like ritual and like, you know, stuff in there.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's a few trying. I mean, there are some museums that are very, very bad, honestly, like very, very bad. The British Museum is very, very bad. But it's like one end of the scale. Yeah. And then, I mean, it's amazing.

I imagine just from the pictures, I'm like, oh, I would love to be there. But it's bad. Don't go. I mean, let's not kid ourselves. We'd all like to go there. I know. But we would also like complete. Can't imagine the smell.

Oh, my God. I like the Victorian Albert better. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I'd fucking love this, but a bunch of fucking feelers. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think, you know, for the most part, our museums are the worst.

They are extremely objects centered and they are about the value. of the objects within their walls. And they do these like things about like, oh, free act, free hours and whatever. Very like, if we have to, you know, with this kind of attitude. So the art museums, the art museums where I grew up were entirely free. But they were full of so much stolen shit. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

The Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri talking about you. So they were established in the 1920s, which was a period of. of very rich development for stolen shit. Yeah. And so, like, a lot of it is, are these, they built a lot of their collections around these, like, you know, international pieces that they sold largely from India, China, Africa, and. That's the case of almost all of them.

And so, like, they have entire, yeah. Oh, exactly. But, like, yeah, you walk in there, like, oh, like, look at our mud painting that we have stuck to the wall. Oops, we stole it. Yeah, exactly. Donated by a white guy. But it's like, okay, where do you get that?

Yeah. So that's why I don't think that museums are good in general, right? Because the majority are doing what you're saying. And they do like a small little thing here and there to try to make it okay. You know, like the Brooklyn Museum is pretty good and does a lot of great things. One of which is that it does let or I guess see the fact that I use the word let is what's bad here. But they provide a space where native peoples can come and visit and touch their objects. that had the ritual values, yeah,

and they can do their rituals that there are rituals or just visits or prayers, whatever. I don't know how often they get taken up on this. I don't know. But obviously, you still have this thing that doesn't belong to you in this building, right? But on the other side is,

you know, probably my favorite museum is the Museum of Chinese in America. Although, I mean, the Brooklyn Museum is probably the best art museum, I would say, in the world in terms of presenting art in a fair way that is accessible and encourages equality in how it presents art and beauty and American history and all this stuff, which I can tell you about in a sec. But the Museum of Chinese in America, I guess, speaks to more of this library museum mix thing.

Unfortunately, they're like really great at what they do, but unfortunately very underfunded. So it's a small museum that has, you know, like some of their exhibits look old the last time I went to see, you know, broken things here and there. I'm like, oh, no, they need money. But they're amazing because they actually were started by two graduate students who lived in Chinatown in the 70s, I want to say. And they were historians. And they set about doing a project to tell the history of New York's Chinatown, right? And they ended up creating an archives house, basically, that they opened to the public, that collected materials that told the story of, York's Chinatown, but in this way where it didn't limit it to Chinese American history.

So it mapped and collected the stories of like the Latino neighborhoods that lived in and around Chinatown, of the Jewish and Italian people that lived in and around Chinatown, including their festivals and their art. And so they had exhibitions that were about graffiti in the Lower East side. And it was like in sections by culture. So they showed like the Chinese. type of graffiti and then Latino type of graffiti and black, you know, like Brooklyn type of graffiti. And so they tried to tell these stories. They were about like the overlapping identities and histories. They had an ongoing program where they would collect photographs and then they would post them publicly around Chinatown asking for help for identifying the people in the picture.

And they would just get these like old ladies who would be like, I went to PS86, which is like on the corner of canal and whatever. And that is my teacher from blah, blah, blah. And they would like tell the stories and identify the people. And they have this whole story. So far it's all just archives, right? And they're doing all these community programs to connect this information. And then they opened the museum part of it to use the archives that they had.

But they did just so much to, they did, they had this like interactive map where people could come in and tell their story. or no, sorry, identify every, like, the businesses that they remember from growing up in the area. So then anytime you clicked on a year, you would see an approximation of what all the businesses were in that. So then like a 90-year-old lady could come in and be like, oh, my God, I remember this candy store. And then like a 17-year-old will be like, that's crazy. That's where my favorite boutique is. You know, like just have these amazing conversations. They had an exhibition that was about cooking, right?

and actually specifically about Chinese food, but then they featured 30 chefs, and within the chefs, they were like Michelin Star chefs of Chinese background or Chinese descent or any of that. Moms and grandmothers that are immigrated from China and cooks in Chinese restaurants who make Chinese like regularly.

And it just told these stories and featured photographs of all the differences in the food and told the stories of where the recipe came from and the different regions that these types of Chinese food were linked to, really connecting this story like across class and across, like, so many things. You know, it's an amazing institution

where they worked really hard always to present this story from multiple points of view to make up what this community was. Or, like, they did exhibitions then that were about things that linked China towns across America, so to, like, show the different, things that were actually common to Chinatown in San Francisco versus Chinatown in New York. Really amazing, just amazing stuff, you know, amazing work. But precisely because it seems like it's something that's insular and monocultural,

I think people don't seek out that kind of experience and they often miss the fact that this tiny museum is role modeling what an institution of its community should do. You know what they did actually? what's the violinist's name? I forgot her name Chinese. Oh, whatever. They, so they opened their archives in Chinatown, right? And then they opened their first museum upstairs from the archives in Chinatown.

And then when they were able to raise enough money to get a beautiful new building, the expectation was that they were going to move up to Museum Mile, right? Up in upper Manhattan by the Met and all the fancy museums. It's basically the step that a community or monocultural institution would take to aggrandize itself, right? And it's what the Museum of Barrio did, which is a Latin history museum here that started in Harlem. And then when they got big and they got a big building, they moved to Museum Mile and they sold out, right? The Museum of Chinese in America chose to build their fancy small new building on Canal Street in Chinatown, They felt that it was their job to serve their community within their community,

not to go represent them for outsiders somewhere else, right? And I just think it's like a great model in every way, except that it's running out of money constantly. So it doesn't work in capitalism, but it might work in communism. We'll see what we can do with our podcast followers to get money to this great museum. Now I have a good reason to go to New York to go see. to go see some perfect me i actually really appreciate that i've never been to new york so no i have see i'm a class trader and i will like drive five hours to go watch an opera bat day's like next time i'm

down there like just getting too much money to go to the bat i'll be like oh yeah the only reason i went to museums growing up is because they were free so um yeah no that's not the case anymore um but if you do um if you do ever make the trip out go to the brooklyn museum it's um a better of I guess the typical museum that we're thinking of because it's an encyclopedic museum, meaning that it's supposedly trying to cover all of human history or whatever, which is where they get into trouble, right? I hate museums like that, actually, because I find them so overwhelming. Yeah, exactly.

I love a focused museum, actually, and I used to work in a small focused museum. Yeah. That was like my job was to give tours and I made people pay for tours. It was like my job was like, no, you can't roam freely in here. I'm going to give you context for what you're going to see because it was such a small space.

But so I respect the hustle of the small museum because I want to learn and I'm like going to pay that extra for the tour or two or two if they have them. Like I'm much more appreciative of like something of what like the Museum of Chinese in America would do then like a bigger museum It's pretty small

It won't take you too long It's everything is touchable You know Everything I love that shit Yeah Yeah everything is Like experiential You know they have a whole section

Because they also had an Exhibition that was about Laundry work Because laundry work Yeah Laundry work was We did a whole episode On my podcast

Yeah about laundry work But it was essentially a space where Latino and Chinese communities in Manhattan blended and their foods and their language blended and they had these like common lives as workers. And so they did this exhibition about laundry work and they still have a part of the exhibit where it's like they tell you the story of what the laundress work was like. And then they invite you to pick up one of these old iron freaking irons and it's so heavy and you're just like oh god. Yeah. You're so heavy. Yeah, exactly. So it's very fun.

Yeah. Yeah, the museum I worked in was a garment district museum. Cool. And so it was also interactive, but it was largely, so it was like, the factories were Jewish-owned largely, but the workforce was Czech and Italian. And so it was a Czech and Italian. And then, like, also incorporating race into it was, like, black men specifically worked as pressers. And so that was, like, part of the story, too, was that, like, they were involved in every single step of the garment because every time a steam needed to be. made, it had to be pressed, but it was also one of the hardest jobs. So they were always

right along the windows. And like, so talking about how, but they were often not union jobs either because the unions were segregated in ladies garment production. So that was like part of the tour that I would give, which was like, you're going to pay for the tour because I'm going to give you the overview of like what went into making one of these garments because it's different than it used to be because like there's a one inch seam allowance to give you room to work with it versus modern manufacturing doesn't give you that kind of seam allowance and things like that and there's like a very particular style that like went into where the garments were produced because it was like a very regionally specific type type of style and things like that so I mean you I can't believe

you haven't come to New York honestly yeah I can't believe you haven't come to New York yeah I'm you are a museum nerd okay you are a museum nerd just accept it and come here because it's There's great museums. I would recommend for you actually. They really are, yeah. The tenement museum. The tenement museum is a tenement house in the Lower East Side. I've heard about that.

Completely. They just like recreated it. It's three different floors. And it's, they're rebuilt to be three different periods of immigration waves in the first hundred years of New York or first 200 years of New York. So it has like a room about Irish immigrants and a room about Chinese. immigrants in a room about Italian immigrants. They do switch the stories around and you go and you pick one of the tours and they walk you through the house and tell you about the people who lived in that

actual house. Yeah, it's very cool. I'm a very judgmental tour guide. Oh, no. Yeah, I'm judge them. I gave tour guides at the zoo and then I gave tour guides at that museum. So like I'm a very judgmental tour guide. I can tell you the worst and best tours I've ever been on. Like I'm very particular. The worst tour I've ever been on was I act this is the worst vacation decision I've ever made was I went to the Andrew Jackson home the hermitage don't go there it's the worst place on earth um my tour guide looked like Mitch McConnell yeah it fucking sucks and my tour guide looked like Mitch McConnell about a fountain pin there they kept talking about the they kept talking about the history in the present tense which was really unsettling that's annoying especially like when you're talking

about slaves and you're trying to make it sound like they treated their slaves nicely and treated their adoptive adopted native child positively. Yeah, a lot of whitewashing. Yeah, I'm not a big fan. I actually gave it like a half star.

Yeah, I gave it a half star Google review. You know, I don't do that a lot, but I did that for the hamertage. Yeah. And it's one of those presidential sites that's actually owned and operated by a private company rather than the National Park Service. I think a lot of the older ones still can be. Yes.

I think like the Adams is in Jefferson. So I grew up in Independence, Missouri, which is the home of Harry Truman. And all the Truman sites are National Park Service. Who is, you know, they're all white men, so they're all problematic. But in like the Lincoln stuff is all National Park Service too. because I lived in Illinois and did all the Lincoln stuff. And my brother does all that stuff for fun because he's entered more than I am. And he's like telling, he knows which ones are National Park Service and which ones aren't.

Anyway, not that that makes any difference, but it makes a little bit of one difference. No, but I understand the tour hating thing as an insider. I literally go to museums to hate. Like I go to like pick apart how they hung things, what their label style is, how much context they do or do not provide. I want to know like the rates. I want to know how, you know, when's the free night? I ask them about their programs. I'm like, do the security guards know anything?

Like, I want, I like, I'm extremely annoying in a museum. Do you go with like a spreadsheet that you score them? I don't, but I do like leave my friends behind, you know, like they'll still be looking at and I'm like, I'm moving back at this room. I'm done. Next one. Let's go. And then I like end up walking the whole.

thing and coming back and finding them and being like, I got to show you something I hate. And then I bring them over. I also, at least in New York City, because I went to school for this, I know the history of almost every museum in New York, which many of them have very fucked up stories. So I invite people and I'm like, let me tell you about this horrible place. And so like the Museum of Natural History, you know, is a big one here. The people, when they visit New York, they want to come here. it's a bad museum, right?

Not only is it quite literally kind of like the birthplace of American anthropology, meaning that it set off this whole colonial outburst of anthropologists, leaving the East Coast to go collect information about the natives in the west of the country and steal their artifacts and all this stuff

to bring it back here and make this museum, right? But it began as this like working institution ran by anthropologists who were out there stealing stuff so that they could bring it back under the guise of academic pursuit and collecting and preserving and all of that. And eventually, now that it is sold over 100 years old, it became a protected New York City landmark. Okay. So what happens when a building is made in New York City landmark is that you are not allowed to change it.

Like now your job is to preserve it the way it was at the time that it achieved landmark status. So they are literally not allowed to change the exhibition halls in the original halls of the museum. So they have old-timey interior. Interior, yes. So they have bad science on the wall. They have like racist murals on the wall that they like move things to like block them. So I'm like, hey, come here. Look at this.

It's amazing. I freaking love it because it's a terrible place. But it's amazing. And so it has like these. play Where's Waldo with the racist shit? Yes, exactly. With like, let's go look at the Neanderthals and talk about how they're brown for some reason, even though they're in Europe.

Let's go. You know, like, it's really amazing. And then there's like, all the animals. Yeah, they were found in Italy. Yeah. Okay. And so it's just very funny because it's like, people think it's like a scientific institution that is funded publicly to provide knowledge creation for the public.

But it's literally not doing that. It had to open new halls to have like, yeah, exactly. It has an, what do you call it where you go look at the stars and stuff? I forget. Oh, yeah. The observ. A planetarium. A planetarium.

Thank you. There we go. Thank you. That's sexy word. Thank you. Yeah. That's, I think, they're big moneymaker and just the fact that it's a landmark. People see it in movies.

And yeah. And they're just like, this is awesome. And they have like fundraising events there. Oh, yeah. People love giving money to dumb shit like that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it just doesn't serve the public in any way, but everybody's like, I love it.

I went through as a kid. Before Gawker folded, I think Hamilton Nolan had like a piece that was like, don't give your money to museums. Like, don't give your money to opera. Like, don't do that. Like, they don't need it. Yeah. Yeah. Like with the Met, like they like.

they like fired all their, laid off all their musicians. And then the opera met, not the movie at that. Even though like their board has like a bazillion dollars. Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of opera houses are signing support for the musicians, those.

Yeah. Oh, that's good. They also almost all the museums take support from the Sackler family also. They have like Sackler wings and Sackler programs and Sackler theaters. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All over the place. their money everywhere yeah yeah um yeah they're terrible both in philadelphia both in philadelphia and in

Milwaukee there have been uh efforts to unionize museum workers um there's been a big push uh to you like i know philadelphia has been a big one and that's why milwaukee push their art um art museum the art music the workers of the art museum pushed to unionize and uh it's been an uphill battle for sure I know that the majority of people turned in cards, but whether or not the administration accepted their demands or not, I know that they're pushing to open soon, which is another matter. But I had a friend who was one of the employees who was pushing union efforts. So shout out to my buddy Warren.

Yeah, that's really cool. Shout out to Warren, who I don't know, but awesome. Warren's ran out of the house. Yeah, because I, you know, I would say despite having bad experiences, in museums, the bad experiences were based on class, to be honest with you, is the fact that I was very often the only one who was not a rich person working there. And it didn't even feel like I had people around me that would even know could you unionize with. You know what I mean? Like even like for example, at the Guggenheim, the staff, the office staff is like all in this

other building. I didn't even get to see security guards and docents and like the people who would probably be my people, right? Oh, I know. Yeah. You know, so it just, I am, I am kind of sad that I basically walked away from museums about a year ago, actually. Maybe thank God, I guess. I mean, I don't believe in God, but you know what I mean, colloquial. Hail state. Yeah. I, like in November, right before COVID, I changed jobs. I was at the Museum of the Moving Image before this. And I just, got to this point where I was very frustrated with the environment at museums. I was getting paid very badly, very, very badly. And you have to be able to afford to work in these fields sometimes. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And not to mention to be able to do all these internships and all these

things, it was very hard to get these jobs. Especially in New York. Yeah. Yeah. So to be honest with you, I felt like I busted my ass to do, to get this job and to get into this field. And then I did 10 years in it and I burned out. And I just felt like there was no future and that there was no improvement on the pay or the situation. And I started looking for a job in the for-profit sector, right? And right before COVID, I hit on a job with Viacom, where I am right now. And I bring it up only because maybe you all will think it's, It's like a hopeful sign for us types because I work this very weird satellite job for Viacom, where I am not part of their regular content production for like TV and apps and websites.

I am working on a project to advise them on like how to catalog their content basically, right? So they obviously do have CMSes in these kinds of things, but realize this, right? These people in media are today people. They live in a world, sorry, of like deadlines where this has to go up today. So it doesn't matter what I have to enter in this field. I don't care if this video will be playable in two weeks. I don't care about the future of this content in any way other than it has to go up tonight at 8 p.m. to 8.30. And so then they realize every time they have to go to a new platform, every time they go to a new CMS, every time something like flash disappears or like whatever, they're having problem with accessing their own content.

Right. And they hired me and they're like, we don't know what the problem is. And I'm like, well, the problem is that none of you have this like mentality towards your content as like your job is to maintain it in its most whole form with all of its information and all of its format. and all of its duplicates and make it accessible and make it, you know, like, they don't have this librarian and archivist and museum person mentality. And I feel like now they're going to keep me forever because they're just like, wow, we never thought, you know, like now after a year or so of being there, I feel like at the beginning, they thought I was annoying, like the day-to-day producers

that I had to work with because I'm the one going back and being like, you didn't tag this and you didn't put this here and you used the wrong format of this video and this is wrong. Sorry, you have to do it again. And so it was just like another thing in their day that was annoying. And now a year later, their day to day is easier because they don't have to deal with the problems that they were dealing with before. They can access everything. And they're learning this mentality of like the responsibility of being the caretaker of information and content and like passing it on correctly. And it's really nice. I feel like I'm teaching them librarian and archivist mentality.

You know what I mean? I enjoyed my job very much. It's weird. So if you can't unionize, try to see how you can serve the for-profit sector. My supervisor, my library director at my first post-grad school job used to be a corporate librarian for the newsrooms, I think, in New York. And she was saying how they all went away kind of after the rise of the World Wide Web. And so I think it's not surprising that eventually they've had to kind of rediscover corporate librarianship and be like, oh, right, we need someone to run like a digital asset management system. Yeah.

I have a friend who left digital archiving and now works exclusively with DAMS and just asset tagging. Like I applied for a job one time with like Blizzard because they just needed someone to tag all their assets. Yeah. Because they have so much intellectual property that they can't get the artists to like check the rest. references because none of it was tagged. I mean, that's also why the CIA is constantly trying to recruit librarians is because they don't know how to tag their data either. Yeah.

And so that they are always losing information. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I feel like, wait, I forgot what I was going to say. Sorry, I got distracted. Never mind. Was it Maude? Did Mod just? Surprise Arthur hasn't come to say hello.

I know. I also have a black kitty. And he likes to sit right here. I also have a black kitty. Her name is Lucy, like a loose cigarette. Lucy. Yeah. She's from Brooklyn.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I have a porn store kitty. She's always, like, knows when shit's about to go down. Yeah. You know, the, I remember what I was going to say, which is that the important thing,

It's funny. It's a new school thing, which is that I always say, like, New School taught me about how to think, not what to think. And I think this is what I'm saying about librarians and, like, archivist and us, this kind of people is the ability to understand information and how to organize it and how to make it useful and how to make it serve you and your purpose as opposed to, like, being boxed into, well, this is how it's always been. in that kind of idea. It's something that I think doesn't really exist outside of people who already have that mentality. You know, for the 9-11 Museum, actually, one of the things that I did was I worked with helping them develop a custom collections database because what we did there was, you know, we talked about collecting objects, but in reality, we collected entities and stories, right? So we had to make this Custom Collections Database that allowed us to make entity records that were about a person, right? So it would be like your name, your biography, as though you were an object. And we cataloged

you entirely as a person. And then any object that was related to you also was related to this record. Any oral history that was about you was related as about. If it was a speaker, you were related as a speaker. So we had a specific database built entirely just for the purpose of mapping all of the people impacted by 9-11, like family, survivors, all of that. And then in relation to them, objects and stories and audio and video, right? And now I come to this, like, giant media conglomerate. And it's just like a giant team. They get paid so much money. And they're just like, well, I'm like, why did you do this? Like, why did you do this to this record? You know, and they'll just be like, well, I couldn't get it to work. And it just seemed like if I just saved,

it's fine. And whatever. That's how. it's always been done. And I'm like, you know you can make them, make you a thing that does the thing you want them, you want it to do without you breaking the record or losing information or putting in false data or, you know, like any of this stuff. So I think it goes a long way to think of like if we use our skills outside of our job, we tend to also be people who think about how the world can be reorganized and how it doesn't have to be in the order that it currently is, you know, trying to teach that to these for-profit people. We'll see.

I think it's a pretty optimistic ending. I don't want to keep you too long. But yeah, that's that is kind of like an upbeat in terms of, yeah, I mean, you are taught to see the world in a different way and taught to, you know, yeah, people do tend to be like, I serve the process, not the other way around. And so, I mean, librarians fall into this too. but instead of saying like no i could just reorganize this in a way that works for me i think that's pretty useful so uh luisa did you want to plug all of the fun stuff where people can

find you and why they should be listening to why you mad because they should and i've been sending your episodes to the group chat all week oh nice thank you um the art modalities one was fun oh thank you that was me high as hell being like here's something i've been thinking about that was great i totally enjoyed it i love james joy so i was like well, fuck yeah. Great. Thank you. Yeah.

You had us both fully on board with James Joyce being nasty. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's basically that's what the show is. I would plug, why you mad? It's a podcast that I do with a comedian named Jake Flores. And it's, you know, it's a fun pairing because he's a comic. And I'm an anthropologist who worked in producing live comedy.

So we have these two angles of the comedy world. And we're both leftist and we're both leftist. and we're both Latinos and we both like talking about philosophy and art history and history in general. Jake has that other podcast called Poddam America, which is, I'll also plug it. It's more political and they get even more academic, I think, sometimes than YMAD. Why You Mad? It's a little more fun and gossipy and stuff like that. But it has been my joy to do this podcast. So if you're a nerd who might be into this kind of stuff, listen to that.

And you can follow me on Twitter at Luis deez nuts. That's it. I also always love a good D's nuts joke. So good. I was like, that's a hell of good. It's an excellent handle. You really got me right in the heartballs with that. Thank you so much.

I try to, you know, be equally serious and full of stupid dick jokes as well. And my name was taken, so I had no choice. I have to say, I love the YUMAD opening. It makes me cackle every time. We had, that was made by a listener who just made like a mashup and sent it to us to be music. And then we paid him because we believe in paying labor. So, yeah. But it's purely a labor of love.

We'll see. We've missed this week's episode. But oh well. We'll do another next week. There's plenty of people can catch up on. Yeah. They can catch up on D's. No.

Good night. everybody. Good night. Thanks for being on. Thanks, Louisa. I really thank so much for sharing with us this week. Yeah, please tag me when you share it in all of that stuff so I can share with everyone. Nice to meet everybody.

Where are the sound drops? I am about to do one. So, Louisa, hang on one second after I stopped the recording. So serious, we couldn't goof off. So we can make sure we get you recording. I've got it. I've got it. Hang on.

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