Last week, mailboxes in Bostonist’s Somerville neighborhood started to get copies of a one-page letter, announcing the existence of one "Daily Museum of Amazement." “Hi,” the letter began. “My name is Raj, and I live on Newton Street. I’ve started a collaborative museum that centers around this neighborhood, and I’d like to invite you to contribute to it.” The letter went on to invite neighborhood residents to call a number and leave messages describing “things that excite you or capture your imagination in small ways” each day. Each evening from 8:00 to midnight, we could call the same number and listen to the day’s messages, or go to the museum’s website and hear them as an mp3 stream.
The museum quickly became the talk of the neighborhood, or at least of the neighbors on Bostonist’s corner. We listened one evening and heard one woman with back problems describe the harrowing ordeal of finding a replacement massage therapist on short notice when her regular person couldn’t be there: After much calling around and an uncertain trip to a place in Watertown where she’d never been, the replacement massage was every bit as good as the regular, the therapist using all the techniques she preferred. She concluded, naturally, by saying that it was amazing. Then another woman talked about the guy at South Station who announces what tracks trains are on, and says the track number as though it were the most exciting thing in the world. This too was happily described as amazing. And then Raj came on, sounding awfully earnest, urging people to keep calling.
Charmed by this odd project (and by the neat signs Raj has put up around the neighborhood to publicize it - see photos), Bostonist decided to find out more. Luckily for us, Raj, whose last name is Kottamasu, responded to our e-mail right away and was happy to do an interview. Originally from Michigan, Raj is a grad student in urban planning at MIT. He went to Harvard for undergrad and has worked in Dover teaching filmmaking and animation to kids. He met us at a local coffee shop to chat about the Museum of Daily Amazement. The interview is after the jump.
Bostonist: What motivated this project?
Raj Kottamasu: Well, I really like experiencing these these types of moments of amazement during my day. You know, small things that you can learn about you, or sort of appreciate the kernel of meaning in, are really great, because sometimes it’s a while between big things that you can appreciate, so they sort of help me, through my day, to feel validated. And I like hearing those things from other people, because they’re really human, and human-scaled.
I’m also taking a class - and this is where I get uneasy in talking about it - I’m taking this class, this seminar in public art, where everybody is working on a public art project and this is the one that I’ve developed, but I don’t want people to perceive this as some sort of class project or an experiment, because I really do have an interest in making connections with people who live around and with me. Since I worked in an arts background before I was doing this urban planning stuff, and I still not really sure exactly what I’m doing with that education, I’m just trying to take on some projects that give me some clues for where I’m going with this.
Aside from the fact that we’re all presumably checking the website and listening to the calls, is there an element that emphasizes the neighborhood aspect of this project?
Yeah. They’re really mundane things that people talk about, and that’s great because I really appreciate that people can talk about these mundane things and find them special. They are really small-scale and also they’re local, a lot of the time. And the people who are best able to appreciate that, I think, are the people who are in your mundane, everyday scale place, where you’re not on the lookout for big things to happen, because you’re just coming home. Also, people can appreciate, when someone says, “I was walking down Washington Street and saw this tree,” it’s not just that I know where Washington Street is and can picture it in my mind, but I can go there and see the same thing, or I can go there and have a different experience. There are traces of people that you could actually know, people you could have seen, or who you might see, and you might know them.
Do you know a lot of your neighbors?
I don’t know that many of my neighbors. I’ve only lived in this neighborhood since September, and school is really busy, so when I come home, I would really like for it to be a great community experience, but I haven’t really had that opportunity before this. And this is really doing it for me. I get really excited to come home and put together the program for the night.
How has the response been so far?
Pretty good. I think the first three days - maybe sometimes I left a message that day too, so let’s not count that - there was only one message every one of those nights, and then there were two the fourth night, and then there were seven the fifth night, and then there were five last night, and so far there are five or six today.
I’ve gotten a lot of really positive e-mails, but I’ve also gotten - I think the first day that I dropped letter in people’s mailboxes, I did get one angry call from a man who said that it was illegal to put advertisements in the mailbox and I could get fined for that. And then, somebody else called - a couple of days ago, I put up some new posters - I put up a bunch of them. I tried to be discreet about it so that they didn’t overwhelm anybody when they were looking at them, so they only would see one at a time. I did get a call from somebody who - it was a really angry call, there was a lot of cursing in it and he said that - he called me lots of names, but he also told me that he’d torn down as many signs as he’d seen, and told me to get a new hobby.
Have you done anything like this before, that involves the same sort of reaching out to strangers as what you’re doing now?
Nope. All my art projects in the past have been things that I have worked on on my own, just me, and they’ve been films, mostly, so - take animation, in particular, where you can work on a film in your room for ten months, and then you shoot it and you show it to some friends. And when I teach with kids, those are all opt-in things - kids want to do that stuff, and when they show it it’s all to their friends and their families - never to people who are unaware that they’re going to, you know, digest something.
Bostonist likes taking pictures, but we’re personally a little wary of photographing people we don’t know - it feels a little weird. Going into this, were you worried you would get a ton of negative feedback, or that it wouldn’t catch on at all?
I didn’t think about it at all. When you talk about taking pictures - I don’t take pictures for that reason; I think I’ve taken six pictures in the last three years. I am really uncomfortable with that kind of voyeurism as well, and the way that it distances me from people. But in this case, I guess I didn’t conceive of it as an intrusion on anybody’s public space for me to put up posters.
Not just that, but you’re trying to create something that will only exist if people partcipate - you’re in the position of having put up a lot of posters and having staked a lot of energy and a fair bit of planning on it, and maybe it will fall through. It seems like it’s not falling through, but were you worried about that?
Yeah, I was worried.
Not least of all, Bostonist presumes, because this is the only thing you have as the project for your class.
Oh, I don’t care about that so much, especially for that class. It’s not like a grade rests on the completion of anything. It’s just a talking class. But I think I was worried because I put in a lot of investment, not just in time and money, but also in - you know - getting excited about the project enough to put in that time and money and going through that, there’s an investment of my mental resources. I want to succeed in the things I undertake. That’s why I went out the second time and put up more posters.
Photo: Raj Kottamasu
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