[On March 6th, 1836
the Alamo, a San Antonio fort and part of the newly independent Texan
Republic, fell to Mexican forces. That battle became a rallying cry for the
remainder of the war between Texas and Mexico, and so this week I’ll AmericanStudy
a handful of the ways the Alamo
has been remembered. Leading up to a special weekend post on Tejano culture
and legacies!]
On a couple
takeaways from a very strange 21st century story.
I’ve long waited
for an opportunity to blog about Phil Collins, and finally with this series the
chance has presented itself. Actually, that’s a bald-faced lie, and backwards
to boot—I had never given Phil Collins the slightest bit of blog-thought (although
“Land of Confusion”
might be worth a post down the road, now that I’m doing such thinking) until my
colleague
and friend Irene Martyniuk sent me this late June 2014 BBC
story about Collins donating his ginormous collection of memorabilia
related to the
1836 Battle of the Alamo to a San Antonio museum. I initially wrote about Collins’s
collection as part of a weeklong
series on collectors, but couldn’t resist the chance to share the story,
and the contexts it helps us think about, one more time.
For one thing,
note Collins’—or at least the story’s—conflation of cultural and historical
versions of the battle. Collins says that he has “had a love affair with this
place [the Alamo] since I was about five years old,” the age when he saw “the
1950s TV series Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier”
(King was a 1955 live-action film edited
together from episodes of the
TV show, but I think we can allow a 5 year-old some latitude in memory).
It’s probably likely that most of us are first drawn to history through
cultural rather than historical texts, but there’s still some significant
slippage in Collins’ statement—neither the TV show nor the film, nor for
example the John Wayne
film of five years later, would have connected Collins to “this place”
itself, but rather, as my week’s series has highlighted again and again, to
versions of it just as constructed as the one he gradually assembled in his
Swiss basement. And certainly none of those versions were likely to have
included the
Mexican histories and stories that comprised a significant part of the
battle as well and that I discussed in Tuesday’s post.
For another
thing, and one relevant to many different aspects of American memory and
history, there’s the distinction but also the overlap between private and
public collecting. The two would seem quite different, both in purpose (Collins
assembled his collection to make himself happy, while a museum does so to share
its artifacts with and inform the public) and relatedly in audience (Collins’
collection was limited to whomever he invited to his Swiss basement, while a
museum’s is ideally open to whoever can travel to, afford, and otherwise access
it). But on the other hand, most every prominent American collection came into
existence because of the efforts, the choices, and even the personal interests
and quirks of individuals, and I think it’s fair to say that there are few if
any museums about which we couldn’t say the same. Phil Collins doesn’t seem to
be in the same discussion as Isabella
Stewart Gardner or George
Catlin (P.T.
Barnum, maybe—I kid, Phil fans, I kid!), but maybe a century from now we’ll
see his donation and collection in the same light.
Last Alamo
memory tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
No comments:
Post a Comment