Historic Tale Construction Kit Recreated
A recreation in HTML and JavaScript of Historic Tale Construction Kit, a now-defunct Flash application.
There’s a description of the original (ein Authoring Tool basierend auf dem Teppich von Bayeux); it’s auf Deutsch.
Fat Man’s Misery
“I’d like a Fat Man’s Misery, easy on the mayo, and a glass of buttermilk. The little lady here will have the Ruins of Karnak and a cup of Postum.”
From the menu of the Mammoth Cave Hotel. (NYPL Restaurant Menu Collection.)
tweet of the day
Just imagining all the creepy shit being stored in old Pringles cans right now.
— Ted Travelstead (@trumpetcake) January 10, 2012
Chicago Screenshots
Chicago Screenshots is a (slowly growing) collection of Chicago-centric movie and television stills, presented as architectural and urban landscape photography.
Funk songs from Vietnam GIs
If you didn’t get a Christmas present from me, it’s because I’m waiting till the New Year to buy you East of Underground: Hell Below. (Thanks to Valerie for the tip.)
In 1971 the US was pulling troops out of Vietnam, and its bases in Germany were full of draftees at a loose end. “You were painting shovels, picking up cigarette butts – it was a lot of busy-work,” remembers former serviceman Lewis Hitt. “There was a longing by everyone, especially the draftees, to get home and go back to what you were doing before.”
This was the crucible in which were formed scores of raucous funk bands made up of servicemen, four of which have just been compiled by Now-Again Records. Adoring crowd noise was crudely dubbed on top of their records, which were then distributed in recruitment centres. These bands were used by the army to present service as varied, even hip. But the songs they cover – the bitter, suspicious likes of Backstabbers and Smiling Faces Sometimes – undermine any potential propagandising.
The Struggle for the Occupy Wall Street Archives
I thought at first that this long article by Michelle Dean might strike most of y’all as Too Much Archives, which is to say too much shop talk and too narrow in its focus. More than you really want to read about the issues archivists face.
Then again, maybe not. Maybe this will draw you in.
Read more
Phonograms
Patrick Feaster studies the culture of early phonography (the recording and reproduction of sound) and blogs at Phonozoic, where I’ve been hanging out for the past hour or so. At the 2011 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Feaster shared “Phonogram Images on Paper: 1250-1950.” You can listen to his presentation and download slides here. Just scroll down a little ways and you’ll find the links.
(via Excavated Shellac)
Cherchez La Femme — Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band [circa 1976]
on the “Tony Orlando & Dawn” show.
DISCLAIMER:
The intent of this post is anthropological and not to make profit. It is strictly to share with fans and the periodic visitors to this planet from other galaxies a part of the musical history of the aforementioned musical group.
Also:
During these times all the TV shows wanted us to mime the entire performance which we were reluctant to do. A compromise was reached with the shows we finally performed on.
Clark
That is all.
Back to back on Twitter
So to speak.
Join the LA&M Women’s Leather History Project and Alex Warner on the road at Beyond Vanilla in Dallas TX. (From the Leather Archives and Museum.)
Do I know anyone who works with leather, in a book binding way? Here’s the info. (From clusterfriend Pete Ashton.)
I am a woman of many and varied interests.
On the redemption of physical reality
“This is, of course, what (film theorist) Siegfried Kracauer meant when he spoke of the ‘redemption of physical reality.’ It’s also at the heart of Werner Herzog’s new documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), in which he attempts to retrieve the ‘now’ of prehistoric cave painters flickering into life – the analogy often used to explain the psychological power of film.”
In the same way that cutting ourselves off from any older aspect of our culture diminishes us by dimming our awareness of who we were and how that made us who we are, there is something lost when we turn away from the gray ones.
It’s quite a long piece, but it is worth reading. Bill Mesce’s The “Gray Ones” Fade To Black, brought to attention by Ebert.
The idea is to be able to collect one copy of every book ever published.
Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.
“There is always going to be a role for books,” said Kahle as he perched on the edge of a shipping container. Each container can hold about 40,000 volumes, the size of a branch library. “We want to see books live forever.”
So far, he’s collected about 500,000 of what Google estimates are 130 million books worldwide.
A Talk with Blaine Dunlap
In March [Unfair Park] screened one of the greatest films made in or about Dallas, director Blaine Dunlap’s 1973 Sometimes I Run, about Stanley Maupin, who worked for the city’s Public Works Department flushing downtown’s streets in the wee small hours of the morning. Some Friends of Unfair Park said they’d seen it before, in high school long ago or in a sociology class at SMU. For most, though, the blue-tinted black-and-white short was brand new, a riveting revelation — 21 minutes’ worth of downbeat cinéma vérité, Pennebaker rolling with the Public Works Department as his leading man played country Kerouac.
And a couple of weeks ago, Unfair Park’s Robert Wilonsky published this feature on my dear long-time friend Blaine: Sometimes I Direct: A Talk With Blaine Dunlap, Who Once Captured Dallas Better Than Anyone.
Interview with an Ubu
The mainstream art world knows nothing of Ubu. Why would they be interested? Ubu is intended for people who don’t have access to the centres of urban culture and all the riches they offer. We often receive emails from people living in rural, isolated or suburban areas whose only line to the outside world is a web connection. For them, Ubu is an open-source museum and offers a full education on a type of culture that is unavailable, say, in their local mall or library. The museum world, although claiming to be interested in education, only serves those who can afford to come to them, a privileged class. Ubu is free and embracing of everyone, regardless of their geographic location or income.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Gas Station
The town of Cloquet, Minnesota plays host to the world’s only Frank Lloyd Wright gas station.
In the early 1930s, Wright began developing concepts for Broadacre City, a city spread out to the point where it would be ‘everywhere and nowhere,’ kind of like what we would eventually call ‘suburbia.’ The design for the Lindholm gas station came directly from this conceptual project, and it was built in 1956. The station remains open and fully operational today, and it’s currently getting restored to its original condition.
Click through for a link to a video of some of the station’s details.
(via @coudal)
START TODAY
MAKE NO DELAY
TRUTH will out!
This is Mr Curtis’s shop window in Barrack Street, Waterford, dressed for a competition. (Circa: 1930.)
Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.
Thomas J. Wynne advertising his Photographic Studio, Castlebar, County Mayo
Taken circa 1880 and presented by the National Library of Ireland on The Commons.
Dateline Paris
I was on temporary assignment, holding a postcard or photo of a belly dancer. Which seemed appropriate for the time and the place, somehow.
Journalists start out wanting to save the world and after a while get jaded. You write and write and write. You’re accused of having a secret agenda when really you don’t. Then, in the middle of the night you examine your motives for one that maybe you’ve hidden from yourself. At least having accusers is better than people who don’t read you at all.
Everyone is tired. Stressed. People with strong opinions aren’t likely to change them after a certain point. Back then, lots of folks would get their notions from television and it is hard to explain a complicated issue in a sound bite. Now, I’ll sometimes hear people citing as fact opinion pieces or blogs or the things coming out of talking head yelling matches. And it has gotten completely confusing, I admit.
I talk about the difference between fact and opinion. I say it is difficult to isolate a fact, but I’ve been told that statement makes no sense. Let’s see, try to isolate an actual fact from opinion or something made up or slanted or spun. How’s that.
And on and on and on it goes.
1. Make List; 2. Do Stuff
This is a flaming brilliant concept for an exhibition. (It’s based on a recently published book.) At the Morgan Library & Museum through October 2, 2011. Drawn from the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
The more you study the Morgan exhibition, the more you realize that lists are everywhere, and that list making is an essential human activity — a way not just of keeping track but also of imposing order on what would otherwise be chaos. Your address book, a restaurant menu, the instructions on the MetroCard machine, prescription-drug ads spelling out possible side effects: they’re all lists. So are those annoying thoughts at the back of your head reminding you that you have books overdue at the library and still haven’t sent a thank-you note to Aunt Gert. Artists are no different, no less preoccupied with keeping track, though most of them have better handwriting than the rest of us, and their lists tend to be a little neater.
Dear India
Will you tell us where you got your name? Was someone in love with the impish India in “Delta Wedding” maybe? Or something more obvious. You can tell me to mind my own business.
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
Bill Morrison: “The Miners’ Hymns” trailer
The juxtaposition wherein kids and dogs race up a slag heap in one decade, then race down in another. My god.
Bill Morrison: “The Miners’ Hymns” began as a commission from Forma, the producer of the film. Because of my past work creating films from archival footage edited to music (e.g., “Decasia”), I was approached by David Metcalfe to develop a film with Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson about coal mining in the Northeast of England. What followed was a year of research about the subject, the region, its history. We visited regional film archives and spoke with union organizers. We shot a few of the former mine sites from the air. Drawing on the tradition of colliery brass bands, Jóhann composed a score for brass instruments with pipe organ. The project premiered as a live performance at the Durham Cathedral in July 2010. In September 2010 the soundtrack was recorded in the same cathedral, and we re-edited the film to match the recording. We mastered the finished film with 5.1 audio in January 2011. The finished film will have its world premiere screening at Tribeca April 22. The soundtrack will be released on CD by FatCat Records on May 23. And the BFI will release the DVD on June 20, 2011.
Everything Tracy Jordan Said Season 5
Oh no! I missed it. Do it again:
Episode 3
-That’s Tracy Jordan spelled backwards.
-Don’t worry about it, Jacky D, I’m on it. Call Griz. I need someone around me who’s not just a yes man.
-So, what do we want to see on TV? I personally love cop shows. I can’t wait for Law and Order to start back up.
-Why? It was a tent pole. A tent pole!
-I’d like to see that incorporated in to your re-write. OK, meeting over.
-The only thing that worked in the read through was the dog.
-Good, and there’s a lot of buzz. Can you hear it, too? Or is my tinnitus acting up. Hey, that food is for DotCom Productions only. TGS’s food is backstage.
-Yo, Jacky D. I had dinner with Don Imus last night. He told the following joke…
-And thank you, Representative. What you’re doing is very important. I can assure you that NBC is committed to making diversity, a priority. Then just walk away, and don’t try to kiss her, Tracy. And don’t say that last part.
-I’ll kill you, white devil.
-I’m cutting that fat cracker’s head off.
-Yes! Great fix, Griz.
National Jukebox
The National Jukebox debuts, featuring more than 10,000 78rpm disc sides issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1900 and 1925.
What’s on the menu?
From project staff at the NYPL:
With approximately 40,000 menus dating from the 1840s to the present, The New York Public Library’s restaurant menu collection is one of the largest in the world, used by historians, chefs, novelists and everyday food enthusiasts. Trouble is, the menus are very difficult to search for the greatest treasures they contain: specific information about dishes, prices, the organization of meals, and all the stories these things tell us about the history of food and culture.
To solve this, we’re working to improve the collection by transcribing the menus, dish by dish. Doing this will allow us to dramatically expand the ways in which the collection can be researched and accessed, opening the door to new kinds of discoveries. We’ve built a simple tool that makes the transcribing pretty easy to do, but it’s a big job, so we need your help.
