Editor's Note, 3/28/2013

A few New Yorker’s ago, I read a piece by Joseph Mitchell—a contributor to the magazine for over 50 years—entitled “Street Life,” a mesmerizing, lyrical account of both New York’s well-trodden neighborhoods and its forgotten crevices. “What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city,” he writes. “I like to walk the streets by day and by night.” As much as I admire Mitchell’s impulse to breathe the city in at all hours of the night, content to be an active observer while the city pulses around him, my first thought wasn’t, “I want to do that.” My first thought was, “I can’t do that.” Psychogeography—the act of wandering through an environment and tapping into that carefree yet thoughtful aimlessness—will never be a luxury I can have. At least at night.

Looking like you have nowhere to be on an unfamiliar street in an urban space when it’s dark out is exactly what I’ve been taught not to do, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, especially any woman. All this said, I’m moving to New York after I graduate (God willing). For me, the city is the cultural and artistic heart of the world, and I want to be a part of what makes it beat so loudly. But unlike Mitchell, I will never get pleasure from floating through the Bronx at 2 a.m., even if there’s the potential to discover a new haunt or meet Don DeLillo or whatever. On the surface, concerns of personal safety may not seem like they have much to do with art, but that’s only if you don’t see artistic space as existing in a reality that can be ugly, unfair and dangerous.

Art is nevertheless born out of this reality, and it’s this reality that bookends our artistic experiences, however brief or extensive they might be. Separating the two is difficult for me. Thinking about seeing a concert (in New York, in Atlanta, in Durham) will immediately be followed by thoughts of whether I can find someone to go with me and how I’m getting home. If I don’t know these two things, then unfortunately I won’t be going out that night. No, these are not fun thoughts. In fact, they almost always weigh down plans of going to see a movie, a performance or an exhibit opening. But I would never leave it up to chance just because I don’t want to deal with logistics or practicalities, which, depending on how you define art, can seem antithetical to immersive artistic experiences.

But I don’t have to go to New York to be bogged down with these concerns. They’re right here at Duke as well. I can feel uneasy in any environment that doesn’t adequately provide the infrastructure to ensure my safety. I was a deejay at WXDU for a minute and a half my sophomore year. The deejay booth is tucked away in the Bivins Building on the periphery of East Campus; it’s an unassuming building, but so was the house in Amityville Horror, am I right? Unless you invite someone to sit in on your shift with you, you’re likely to be the only one in the building, a thought that can amplify every creak and make rustling leaves sound like hushed whispers coming from outside. Walks home at 2 a.m. after a graveyard shift are not a walk at all, but rather a walk-jog hybrid that I know is too familiar for too many people reading this. It’s at least several minutes before you reach the East Campus main quad. Maybe I gave into my anxieties too quickly, maybe I could have ridden them out, but I decided to quit deejaying that semester.

What was hardest for me about the whole experience is that I knew exactly what deejaying in a comfortable community space could be. The whole reason I applied to WXDU is because, before I transferred to Duke as a sophomore, I was a deejay at the University of Georgia. By contrast, their station was housed in UGA’s equivalent of the Bryan Center, a busy, centralized area where deejays would spend as much time inside the booth as they would on the station’s sofas outside of it. I felt more at ease, better able to enjoy my time taking requests, digging through an overwhelming library of CDs and records and in general doing my job as a Purveyor of the Arts.

The WXDU station is only a part of Duke’s disturbing campus planning trend to push several artistic spaces to the outskirts of campus. The Arts Annex has quickly become an important campus resource—if you know where to look for it. There is no campus bus that goes directly to the Center for Documentary Studies or the Hull Avenue dance studio, and the Duke Coffeehouse is a stone’s throw away from the invisible line that demarcates Duke from Durham. And as for Durham, unless you have a car or money for a taxi, The Pinhook, The Carolina Theatre and the Durham Performing Arts Center are that much more out of reach if you don’t feel comfortable walking there. God forbid your show goes past midnight, because then you can’t catch the Bull City Connector.

If you think I’m overreacting or overly paranoid about my safety, I’m going to say it’s probably because you have the luxury of never having to feel this way, for whatever reason that might be. I don’t speak for all women, but I am speaking about a shared experience that many of us have every day. I know some men feel similarly and may not be as vocal about it. But reading Joseph Mitchell’s article only reminded me of how my access to the arts is limited by the reality that surrounds us, the reality that is funneled through statistics and brought to light through awareness campaigns. Feeling like I can’t enjoy and devote myself to the arts—both personally and professionally—as fully as I want and plan to only makes me more frustrated that I’m living under different constraints than my male counterparts. I’ve never been a fan of trying to separate the two to begin with, because my belief, one that I’ve held in my capacity as Arts Editor of Recess, is that the arts don’t exist on a higher plane than the one we live in. Every story I’ve pitched for Recess has been an attempt to bring performances, exhibits and plays into our lives in the only way I know how—through everyday decisions about what we want to experience, how we want to go about it and convincing our friends to tag along because we don’t want to go alone.