The Afterlife of Dead Objects

A really fascinating interview with filmmaker Laura Poitras who was asked by Edward Snowden to help with the NSA revelations because of her extraordinary work about civil liberties and the changed world after 2001. She was a chef (!) and a student of Ernie Gehr before studying film at the New School. The NYT has a feature about her (at last) today and there have also been excellent features on Salon.

Drive-in movie theaters are less places than practices, which is one of the reasons that these images make them hard to see.  I tried taking photos of the drive-in at Wellfllet a couple of years ago and it was ludicrous: what do you photograph? the screen? the marquee? the cars at the entrance waiting to pull inside?  there's no image of a drive-in theatre except in our heads and it's so much about the interactions there that it becomes corporeal as well as nostalgic. I don't even want to start on what I remember *doing* in movie theaters when I didn't watch the films whose titles I have no recollection of. Though I did see, with my parents, when I was supposed to be asleep in the back seat, some amazing films (Goldfinger at age 8 comes particularly to mind: scared the bejesus out of me). Does anybody remember what they saw at drive-ins once they were old enough to be driving in without mom and dad?

BBC Radio 3 broadcast Sunday 26 May includes Dr. Jann Matlock of the Autopsies Group talking to Sarah Dunant about syphilis in nineteenth-century Paris.

This is an amazing project in terms of making available a wealth of local history. Particularly interesting is the blog post on Otto Dreschmeyer (1965-68) documenting Coney island. But the entire site is worth exploring.  Above is the Loeser Department store in 1941.This is such a great model for reconstructing the historical and visual past of a place and its citizens!

The Salon article is good on what it meant to read the IHT before the internet changed the availability of news from home.  But it's wrong about one thing: you can have an international newspaper that evokes its New York origins. Before it was called the IHT, the paper was the New York Herald, European Edition (for a long and successful run about which I wrote in this volume, review here: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Marie-Eve+Therenty+et+Alain+Vaillant,+dir.%3A+Presse,+nations+et...-a0296951893 ;). I'm sad to see the IHT go but it's been gone for a while already. And the way it participated in our lives abroad changed irrevocably with the internet that brought news from home in a myriad of ways, not least through live tv footage and news clips from the major networks. But like Andrew Leonard in Salon, I remember gulping down every word of the IHT as part of the expatriate day abroad. It wasn't about having access to home, truth be told, it was about making sense of what communities I belonged to--one of which was an American in Paris or Berlin or Frankfurt or Rome or, later, London--which somehow seemed to require making sense of being anywhere but there. The IHT was always about being in between, always ailleurs. Maybe now that it's to be called the International New York Times, the paper will own again the strange transnationalism of its origins? (though I doubt it will ever again offer the thrill of its Paris in-between-ness in quite the same way as A Bout de Souffle's Patricia advertised it when she walked down the Champs in that tight t-shirt calling out "International Herald Tribune"...)

This article ends with the story of someone confronting John E. Karlin as "the most hated man in America." It's hard to imagine today that there was so much tied up emotionally in the telephone exchanges that framed U.S. and UK phone numbers through the 1960s. Butterfield 8 with Elizabeth Taylor like Northside 777 named films through the phone exchanges. I learned only in looking up the former that Klondike, the exchange one often heard used in tv shows, was entirely fictional. So, of course, was LOnesome 7-7203, the exchange imagined in Hawkshaw Hawkins' tearjerking ballad of 1963, released just before the death of the artist in the plane crash that also killed Patsy Cline. The stakes for changing the exchanges over to exclusively numbers were, as the obituary of Karlin explains, having enough phone numbers to go around. But people had a harder time remembering the longer (at first 5-digit, then 7-digit, today 10-digit) numbers. For many people, the identification with a word, as is suggested by the woman's anger at Karlin, was not as random as the names originally seemed. We may be nostalgic about the old rotary dial phones, but one thing giving up the letters meant was no more party lines where anyone in the neighborhood could listen in at any time.... RIP John E. Karlin.

Dr. Jann Matlock participates in this radio program with novelist Sarah Dunant about the history of sexually transmitted diseases. Historian Kevin Sienna is great at the end about what we've learned from the tragic mishandling of STDs in previous centuries.

Link for the Radio program (click the button on the left of the image)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01slkwz

Thanks to producer Paul Frankl and Sarah Dunant for their great work!

Jordan Baseman's "Deadness" exhibition including his own photographs and film as well as other related photos collected, will open this weekend at Matt's Gallery (to 21 July 2013). Embalming and photography are the center. More on the gallery page.

The description of Alice Kober's archive boxes is extraordinary. She scrapped up every piece of cardboard in sight for her 180,000 index cards, using greeting cards and church circulars to inscribe the characters she attempted to understand. "her tens of thousands of homemade index cards, fitted neatly into 'file boxes' made from empty cigarette cartons." And then, despite her decade of meticulous work, the British male narrative of triumph over Linear B left her behind. Hooray for the New York Times obituary writer Margalit Fox who, by her own description,  "rescues souls," for rescuing this remarkable one.

For more on women in archaeology and classics see this site at Brown: http://www.brown.edu/Research/Breaking_Ground/results.php?d=1&first=Alice&last=Kober

The New York Times sings the praises of archivists and even offers a neat little film about their NY collections and work. The NY Public Library for the Performing Arts woman has some wild objects on her hands.... I like the fact that the digital presence of these objects means that lots more people are writing letters to the archivists who used to have no one but specialists to talk to. Having the public know more about what is in these collections means, too, that the public will understand why it's so important to fund archives. Love the Archivists Round Table idea too....

The story of how this piano was found made me giggle: its young benefactor was looking for vinyl records and came upon this amazing piano in St Louis, Missouri. Of course, in 1971, vinyl records were the only kind out there, so the future ballet dancer must have been looking for music from another era than that of the Stones and Led Zeppelin. But the article tells nothing of his taste in music, just that he paid up his $700 and hauled this piano home to his mom's house. Now the piano is moving to Langston Hughes Place in Harlem where its rococo Victorian style will surely fit right in. It would be great if newspapers let you see as well as hear their subjects. Makes a great pitch for collecting vinyl records, doesn't it?

Food columnist Mark Bittman imagines the old Fulton Fish Market revitalized amidst hearings that would turn "what amounts to a failed mall with a museum into what its developers (the Howard Hughes Corporation . . . ) hope will be a successful mall with a museum. The adjacent public space in the area is the former fish market (pictured above in its current state, abandoned in 2005). Bittman gives information about a petition to the Mayor and city council sponsored by Save our Seaport that seeks to (in MB's words, "recognize the value of a rebuilt and permanent indoor market."  The model for this project is London's Borough market, a covered farmers' market on a site that has had markets since the 11th century but was distinguished by being purchased by residents of the area to keep its market alive after Parliament closed it down in 1755: http://www.boroughmarket.org.uk/the-history-of-borough-market

The home page (with petition links) of the New Amsterdam Market project is here:

http://www.newamsterdammarket.org/

This is an extraordinary article about the "backlash against the creative class" which, it argues, "is part of a larger revolt against experts and expertise." Scott Timberg, LA arts reporter, and author of TheMisreadCity.com analyzes the profound hostility against the so-called "cultural elite." "We produce and export creativity around the world," he argues, and asks "So why aren't we [or at least the mainstream media?} lamenting the plight of its practitioners." The financial crisis has hit people particularly hard in creative industries just as it has created enormous problems for those who supplement their incomes through university/college/school teaching.