Philadelphia

We got to Philadelphia on Sunday night, leaving the splendor of New York City, (or "THE city" as the call it in New York) behind us. New York was fun. We stayed with our friend Katie, who lives in Brooklyn. We did things like go to Coney Island and Central Park and stuff ourselves with delicious food. There was no screening in New York, although we had intended to do something at Bluestockings, it just didn't work out.

On Sunday night we were supposed to have been doing a screening at the A-Space but then realized that it probably wasn't going to happen considering that Courtney hadn't gotten a response on email from the person setting it up in months (and also we weren't on their calendar on their website ). So we went to my friend Davin's apartment and walked downtown to go to Kingdom of Vegetarians, a famous vegan mockmeat Chinese restaurant. We stuffed ourselves and then walked back to her apartment.

The next day Monday, May 1, was our screening at Temple University. I had been pretty excited about doing something here because the person setting it up was this guy Juris who I contacted on the Space and Place listserv that I'm on. I had asked him a while ago if he thought that he might be able to set something up or knew of a student group that might be interested in sponsoring us. He suggested the Graduate Association of Visual Anthropologists. This was the first time on the entire trip that the people sponsoring us were officially associated with anthropology at all. The response from the people who came was definitely different in a noticable way. It was actually nice to get questions about ethnography and the way that we conducted our "fieldwork" and questions about how we incorporated theory into our documentary.

It was also nice because we got to meet this woman Courtney, a grad student in the visual anthropology department who helped do a lot of the work to help bring us to campus. She showed us around the media lab and showed us her short film that she did while in Tokyo that kind of juxtaposes the craziness of modern everyday life in Tokyo with the traditional art of caligraphy.

The discussion after the screening actually went better than I think it has in a while. People just seemed genuinly interested in our project and they had things to say, opinions to contribute, etc.

It was also nice because we got to see James from the Wooden Shoe, who we interviewed for the movie. He came to the screening and invited us to go get a beer with him afterward. It was nice to talk to him and hear about how the Wooden Shoe has changed over the course of two years and how his thoughts on the project have changed. Hopefully today we'll get a chance to stop by the wooden shoe and take a look at it for ourselves to see how it has changed.