um, aristocrats... again.

In Tim Evans' Folk Art class Christie Burns reviewed a book called Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives by Margaret Morton and Diana Balmori, —A great book about the assemblages of homeless people in lower Manhattan, written by a photographer (Morton) and an architect (Balmori). "The Aristocrats" is a film by Penn Gillette and Paul Provensa, who are, respectively, a magician and a stand-up comedian. True, only a comedian (or a magician who works on the fringes of professional stand-up) would be inside enough to elicit and reveal an emic viewpoint, and we have certainly often looked outside of our discipline for scholarship (usually in anthropology). But what bothers me is this: Having spent a month in Indiana officially searching for folklore using the wrong definition, it's terribly troubling to see something this well done by "untrained outsiders"*. Vulgar as it is, it is a 90 examination of a classic folk tradition. Because of its obscenity, "The Aristocrats" has remained a form of oral transmission. It has remained outside of the homogenizing deluge of television, nearly free of it.

Dundes says** "everyone is folk" and that "folklore is everywhere", but many of those things today exist well outside mainstream America. Today finding folklore may mean getting outside of wide bright beam of televised culture, scouring the dark places in our cities, our towns and ourselves to find the gritty places where folklore lives. This is where we find the things that reveal the larger truths about our culture and our society.

Besides, do we really need another book about chairs?****

*Untrained in the stoic ways of modern ethnography, they're still wicked smart.
**Dundes said a lot of things.
***David Whisnant's "All that is native and fine", read the part about Morris Dancing (in chapter 3). Yeah, we really suck sometimes.
****Actually, MoJo's book is a really good example of what I'm talking about.