“The music never stopped”: naming businesses as a method for remembering the Grateful Dead

ABSTRACT

Memorialization on the cultural landscape is a common method of celebrating the legacy of an event or person significant to the history of geographical location. The Grateful Dead is a band that continues to define the ideals of the late-1960s San Francisco Sound through their music’s creative freedom and inclination toward experimentation. Although the original lineup of the Grateful Dead is no longer intact, the spirit of the music they created and their psychedelic appeal has been preserved on the cultural landscape. Despite differing reasons for naming their business after the band, hundreds of business owners in the United States have collectively preserved the Grateful Dead’s presence on the cultural landscape. In this paper we explore the distribution of businesses in the United States with Grateful Dead-related names, and how the presence of these business names enriches the cultural landscape with the memory of the band’s music as a product of the iconic San Francisco Sound.     

Ghostly Remains and Converging Memories: Yūshūkan and the Australian War Memorial Exhibit the Pacific War

Focusing on the Yūshūkan museum in Tokyo, and the Australian War Memorial Museum in Canberra, this article engages how pain and sacrifice in the Pacific War are represented through the characters of kamikaze and prisoners of war respectively. Despite the inimical historical, political and moral orientations, these institutions’ presentations of memory of war display some interesting overlaps. After establishing that historical, cultural and political contexts are significant in assessing how and why pain and sacrifice in the war are engaged by each institution, I examine the Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney in 1942, which effectively bridges both institutions. By assessing the emotive nature of the exhibitions it becomes apparent that while the framing of this single act of violence is culturally esoteric, themes of bravery, heroism, loyalty and sacrifice cross cultures.     

Reading Habits: Catalina de Erauso and the Subjects of Early Modern Spanish Gender and Sexuality

This article reconsiders the subject of early modern Spanish gender and sexuality studies by analyzing the relación de méritos y servicios presented by the famed ‘Lieutenant Nun’ Catalina de Erauso to the Council of the Indies. Studies have focused on the Vida i sucesos de la Monja Alferez, a biography of disputed authorship, and its transgressive protagonist who hides gender identity and illicit desires from persecuting authorities. In contrast, this article studies the petition to show how Erauso’s identity depends upon bureaucratic forms, their standardized content, and collective authorship. In so doing, it moves from a study of gender transgression to a reading of ‘hábitos’—a term that designates interlocking categories of gender, dress, profession, and social status. By shifting the subject of gender and sexuality studies to this web instantiated by ‘hábitos,’ this article shows how collaborative acts of reading and writing allowed privileged subjects to navigate identity and empire in the seventeenth-century Spanish Atlantic world.     

Designing the 11th-century-AD vessel from Serçe Limanı, Turkey

A previous article investigated the methods used to design the 9th-century vessel from Bozburun, Turkey, and a basic methodology emerged which combined Richard Steffy's emphasis on the comprehensive deconstruction of a hull with the segregation of hull-construction into the phases of conception, design and assembly. This article tests this methodology by applying it to the 11th-century craft from Serçe Limanı, a vessel studied and reconstructed by Steffy. It discusses the resulting design-method, the similarities between this method and that used on the Bozburun vessel, and how we gain insight into changes in the maritime community which built these ships.
© 2010 The Author