The Americans

The Americans, by Robert Frank

Robert Frank’s masterpiece, The Americans, was first published fifty years ago in the US. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is observing the anniversary with an exhibition of all the images from the book, plus other photos, contact sheets and a short film by Frank.

The Americans contains 83 photographs made on road trips across the country.

Looking at America, Frank took in things others had seen but failed to note. Some were banal: jukeboxes, the ubiquity of flags, the many manifestations of automotive culture. Other elements – vaguer, abstract, even sinister – were anything but banal: a sense of isolation, the place of African-Americans in US society, a tension between openness and confinement. The latter is evident in everything from the sweep of a Southwestern landscape to the flickering image on a TV screen.

It’s a beautiful book, and many of its themes will still resonate with viewers 50 years later. The exhibit will be up at the Met through January third. I’ll be making a trip to NYC at the beginning of the year and I’m looking forward to seeing them all in person.

11.30.2009Tagged with:    

5 Star Wars Status Updates

What if Facebook had existed a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away? Here are some status updates from classic Star Wars characters.

11.28.2009Tagged with:    

Califone: All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

I’m really enjoying the new Califone record, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers. I’ve been a fan for a long time, and it’s great to see them putting together quality releases again and again.

I loved this bit from the Pitchfork review:

“Giving Away the Bride” is one of the most radical deconstructions of normal rock production in the band’s catalog, eschewing even their normal roughly recorded acoustic guitars for a spaced-out beat and a monster of a distorted electronic bass figure, over which Rutili floats dreamily, intoning like a blues singer from the 1930s who got lost and tripped into the 21st century. The otherworldliness is so well-developed that it’s genuinely startling when the piano drops almost four minutes in or the live drums take up the rhythm a minute after that. If the band had hits, this would be among the greatest.

As Harry at Owl and Bear notes, no Califone release has received a score below 8 at Pitchfork. That has to be some kind of record.

11.28.2009Tagged with:    

Intimate Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered

Twelve Nights in Hollywood is a new box set of Ella Fitzgerald performing over a twelve day period in a small jazz club in Los Angeles. Remarkably, none of the tracks have been released before, despite a scarcity of live recordings in small venues, and despite the quality of the performances.

Gary Giddins, the veteran critic and author of “Jazz,” agrees. “This ranks on the top shelf of her live recordings,” he said. “It’s about as good as it gets.”

Why these tapes stayed locked in the vault for nearly half a century — and what it took to set them free — is a tale of a producer’s neglect, a jazz sleuth’s obsession and a string of happy coincidences.

11.28.2009Tagged with:    

The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Writer

McSweeney’s is running a column, credited to Lynsey G., that details her involvement as a writer in the smut industry.

From the introduction:

In many ways I believe that stance to be a fair one, and I stand by my decision to support women’s choices. But the longer I keep my tenuous toehold in the jizz rag biz, the more the realities of the porn industry stare me in the face, and it’s not just the faces covered in jizz that bother me. There are a lot of really upsetting things going on both inside and outside the studio, both on the industry and consumer sides, which are disturbing and decidedly unfriendly to women. The language used to describe them in industry terminology and in social contexts, the attitudes about their worth as human beings, the aesthetics with which they are presented to the world, and the acts they perform raise a lot of questions. I mean, what’s with the fake boobs and nails and eyelashes and tans and hair? Why the no-body-hair rule? And who came up with the idea that ejaculate is the new trend in facial moisturizers? On that note, where is the line between pleasure and degradation drawn, and by whom? Why have the past few years seen such an abrupt switch from full-length feature films to half-hour-long frenzies of manic semen spewing?

11.27.2009Tagged with:    

Empty LA

Photographer Matt Logue spent 4 years making beautiful photos of an uninhabited Los Angeles.

Empty LA from Matt Logue

His book can be purchased here.

11.25.2009Tagged with:    

Lincoln’s Letter to Young George Patten

In 1861, less than a month before the start of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln took a moment to write a letter confirming that he had indeed met a young George Patten the year before in Springfield, Illinois. George’s classmates hadn’t believed his story about meeting the President of the United States and had mocked him, prompting his teacher to write to the White House to settle the matter.

Lincoln’s reply reads: “Whom it may concern, I did see and talk with master George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. Respectfully, A Lincoln”

Abraham Lincoln's Letter to George Patten, confirming their meeting

The letter was sold to a private collector for $60,000.

11.25.2009Tagged with:    

Have a Cigarette with The Flintstones

The first two seasons of The Flinstones were co-sponsored by Winston cigarettes, as the series was originally intended for adults. Witness Fred and Barney enjoying a smoke while the womenfolk work about the yard.

11.24.2009Tagged with:    

Scroll Clock

Working clock with numbers made from scroll bars, built using MooTools.

11.23.2009Tagged with:    

Going West

Beautiful animated film from the NZ Book Council to promote reading and the love of books.

(via boing boing)

11.23.2009Tagged with:    

Playing Second Fiddle to OS X and Windows

John Gruber speculates that neither Chrome OS nor Litl has any interest in being your primary operating system.

The idea that they’re designed to serve as secondary computers is a big part of the opportunity I see for new Web-focused OSes. I think that’s one of the implicit factors that define what people call “netbooks”. How many people use one of those as their one and only computer?

If you start with the assumption that a computer will be a secondary machine — something purchased because it’s cheaper, smaller, and lighter — you can make all sorts of different assumptions about what it needs to be capable of.

11.23.2009Tagged with:    

New David Sedaris Audiobook on Vinyl

The new David Sedaris audiobook, a collection of the author reading his essays on stage, will be released on vinyl – an old-fashioned record album, complete with old-fashioned album artwork.

Albums are enjoying something of a renaissance, posting $57 million in sales in 2008, more than double the previous year and the best for the format since 1990, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The format is so rare for audiobooks, however, that the Audiobook Publishers Association has never even tracked its sales.

But Maja Thomas, senior vice president for digital and audio publishing at the Hachette Book Group, said she was drawn to the idea precisely because it was quirky. Mr. Sedaris’s “audience is very attuned to irony and is going to find this funny,” Ms. Thomas said.

The album version will only contain 2 of the 5 essays that will be on the CD, but a code will be provided with the album to download the entire thing.

11.23.2009Tagged with:    

Mmmvelopes

Mmmvelopes are bacon flavored envelopes.

(via coudal)

11.20.2009Tagged with:    

Jeanne-Claude, Collaborator With Christo, Dies at 74

“We want to create works of art of joy and beauty, which we will build because we believe it will be beautiful,” Jeanne-Claude said in a 2002 interview. “The only way to see it is to build it. Like every artist, every true artist, we create them for us.”

RIP.

11.20.2009Tagged with:    

Slaughterhouse Five

The excellent Letters of Note has a scan and transcript of the letter Kurt Vonnegut sent home in May 1945 to inform his family of his capture, imprisonment and survival of the firebombing of Dresden. As a prisoner of war during the bombing, he was held in an underground slaughterhouse known as Slaughterhouse Five, which would save his life and lend its name to his famous 1969 anti-war novel.

From the transcript:

It was our misfortune to have sadistic and fanatical guards. We were refused medical attention and clothing: We were given long hours at extremely hard labor. Our food ration was two-hundred-and-fifty grams of black bread and one pint of unseasoned potato soup each day. After desperately trying to improve our situation for two months and having been met with bland smiles I told the guards just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came. They beat me up a little. I was fired as group leader. Beatings were very small time: — one boy starved to death and the S3 Troops shot two for stealing food.

On about February 14th the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. their combined labors killed 250,000 people in twenty-four hours and destroyed all of Dresden — possibly the world’s most beautiful city. But not me.

After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children, old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.

Letter home from Kurt Vonnegut, 1945

(via 3 quarks daily)

11.20.2009Tagged with:    

Cormac McCarthy – Hollywood’s Favorite Cowboy

There’s a really good interview with Cormac McCarthy in the Wall Street Journal. The movie version of his novel The Road will be released on November 25.

People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore and people need to get used to that. If you think you’re going to write something like “The Brothers Karamazov” or “Moby-Dick,” go ahead. Nobody will read it. I don’t care how good it is, or how smart the readers are. Their intentions, their brains are different.

(via df)

11.18.2009Tagged with:    

Concept Art Offers Peek at Tim Burton’s Twisted Genius

The Museum of Modern Art in New York will have a retrospective of Tim Burton’s sketches and paintings beginning November 22.

This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton’s career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects.

MOMA’s site has a fun promo spot:

See also: Wired.com has a gallery of images from the companion book.

(via 3 quarks daily)

11.18.2009Tagged with:    

The History of the Internet in a Nutshell

Brief overview of how the internet came to be, covering major milestones and the folks who were responsible.

There were 6 comments posted before Al Gore was brought up.

(via coudal)

11.17.2009Tagged with:    

12 Sexist Vintage Ads

Delmonte Ketchup - You mean a woman can open it?

Sexist ads from a bygone era in advertising.

(via kottke)

11.17.2009Tagged with:    

Famous Authors Narrate the Funny Pages

From McSweeney’s, Virginia Woolf does Cathy:

A rain fell over the city, streaking the office window. Cathy looked up from the computer screen with its instructions on how to knit a brown sock. “My God, to be a stereotypical woman makes me feel as though I have no nose!”

Love the Hemingway, too. And the Faulkner. And… well, they’re all pretty good.

11.17.2009Tagged with:    
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