Billy Mays + Sky Saxon
Who knew that the purchase of our first house would be made memorable by such an endless stream of death?
June 29, 2009 10:22 AM | Comments (0)
Toledo
June 8, 2009 5:42 PM | Comments (0)
Syracuse
June 7, 2009 4:50 PM | Comments (0)
Shoppingtown Mall
June 6, 2009 8:44 PM | Comments (0)
Carousel Center
To induce a people, hitherto scattered, uncivilized and therefore prone to fight, to grow pleasurably inured to peace and ease, Agricola gave private encouragement-and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and private mansions. He praised the keen and scolded the slack, and competition to gain honour from him was as effective as compulsion. Furthermore, he trained the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts and expressed a preference for British natural ability over the trained skill of the Gauls. The result was that in place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable-arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when really they were only a feature of enslavement.
Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola
June 6, 2009 6:49 AM | Comments (2)
RV/MH Hall of Fame and Museum
June 3, 2009 8:00 PM | Comments (1)
What I Can Show and Tell
I’ll begin with what I take to be a remarkable understatement. David Gerald Orr concludes his essay “The Icon in the Time Tunnel” (a discussion of secular and vernacular icons) with this remark:Who is making an effort to logically and consistently archive vernacular icons? Ironically, many icons of our own existence are ephemeral by nature and should be recorded. The alternative is a great cultural loss to generations of future historians and “iconographers.”I call this an understatement because the loss Orr speaks of is not just a loss to future historians and iconographers, but to all of us. The ephemeral he speaks of, objects of our ordinary experience, are evidences of ourselves. From generation to generation they disappear. At any given moment they are mostly gone, for no one has saved them. With them are gone evidences of ourselves. The past is lopped off behind us. We try to remember, always absent complete archival storage. If there were complete storage of the artifacts of our lives, we’d not be able to use it, for it would overwhelm us. We have to select if we are to see, think, act, or talk. We will select, whether or not we intend to do so.
. . .
Whether knowingly or not, we’ll select what we show and tell, what we have decided through continuing rhetorical transactions is real and can be shown or told. We live in and are continuing contests, some gentle and mild, some fierce and desperate, some entirely eternal, self against self, some external, self against the other, contests in which we select what can be shown or told. Identity is a continuing rhetorical transaction as we negotiate our itineraries through the revealing through finally irrecoverable archives and through structural and stylistic maneuvers by which we select what can be shown and told.
Jim Corder on living and dying in West Texas: A postmodern scrapbook 2008
June 3, 2009 5:25 AM | Comments (0)
Stephen Shore on the road
June 2, 2009 10:34 PM | Comments (0)
Huge
on the road in Wisconsin
June 2, 2009 10:22 PM | Comments (0)
Making and Doing
Michael Almereyda: The reality is dreamlike and the photography is real.
William Eggleston: You know what? That doesn’t mean a thing to me.
I am really happy that Snag Films has placed some good documentaries online (for the US and Canada only, I’m afraid), including William Eggleston in the Real World. I do hope that it is the future of documentary distribution, as is claimed in the Fortune article [via]. It’s a coincidence really, because I just finished quoting/clipping some bits to discuss here. They have also released Black White and Grey, which gave me material for consideration a few weeks ago.
Eggleston’s evasions, typical in most interviews, are particularly poignant in Almereyda’s film. You get the feeling that he just might have something to say if someone asked the correct question. Otherwise, what remains except to say “no” or “I don’t think so”? The commentary he offers outside Almereyda’s insistence that emotion must play some role in what he’s doing is excitingly analogous to Aristotle’s discussion of techné and praxis in the Nicomachean Ethics.
