30 Photos of a Chinese Sex Toy Factory
All that’s left here are the remnants of what was
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the directors of the documentary Jesus Camp, produced a short video at The New York Times about the dismantling of Detroit.
One freezing evening we happened upon the young men in this film, who were illegally dismantling a former Cadillac repair shop. They worked recklessly to tear down the steel beams and copper fasteners. They were in a hurry to make it to the scrap yard before it closed at 10 p.m., sell their spoils and head to the bar.
Surprisingly, these guys, who all lacked high school diplomas, seemed to have a better understanding of their place in the global food chain than many educated American 20-somethings. The young men regularly checked the fluctuating price of metals before they determined their next scrap hunt, and they had a clear view of where these resources were going and why.
from the comments
I know a guy from Ohio who worked as a long-haul trucker for a good while after high school. Then he did other things and we wound up working at a library together and after a time he became a big wheel at the MacArthur Foundation.
He claims to have met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam, and he told me that she stole his drugs, but I know he was just spoofing me.
from the comments
There was a lemon cologne I used when I was a teenage clerk behind the cosmetics counter of a fancy department store. I can’t remember the name. We had dozens of high-end perfume samples available to use. But I spritzed myself with lemon brightness every single time.
I also had a tendency to borrow a sultry red wig from the wig department. But that’s another story.
Daddy’s Plane
My daddy went to work at the aircraft firm of Chance Vought in 1935, I think, when he was nineteen or so. Jobs were hard to come by, but he was smart and mechanically inclined and he had a high school degree.
When the US entered WWII, my daddy was exempted from the draft on account of his working in a ‘critical industry’. Vought’s biggest customer was the US Navy.
After the war, Vought’s military contracts must have dwindled. Or maybe moving operations inland seemed like a good idea. Anyway, the company transferred 1300 key personnel from Connecticut to the right-to-work state of Texas. It was the biggest-ever US corporate move at that time. A Hollywood film inspired by the move even went into pre-production, and Spencer Tracy was said to have been cast. I imagine my mother in a Katharine Hepburn role.
The F4U Corsair (1940-1952) was Vought’s triumph.
The Japanese are said to have called the plane Whistling Death.
from the comments
My Aunt Audrey was a telephone operator in the sticks of Tennessee. We would visit relatives and I would get on the phone to act out, forgetting about Aunt Audrey or just being defiant. Until I heard a distinctive voice that I was sure was her say, “No playing on the telephone, Miss.”
Mr. C. said that even earlier, all calls had to go through the operator. So if you were trying to reach them, the operator might say things like, “You won’t be able to talk to them until Tuesday. They’ve gone to the river to see Nam Becky,” or some such.
I still am convinced telephone operators know everything.
From the Comments
Forgive me for touting my own.
Merry Christmas, er, Happy Holidays, whatever floats the boat.
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
Film.com Reviews
A Roundup of our reviews for the weekend.
I wrote these:
Young Adult
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Other people wrote these:
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
New Year’s Eve
The Sitter
Wreath this year…
I didn’t do a wreath for DIFFA this year. This one, I did at a client’s house this morning.
I hope they like it. The feathery greenery, painted silver, at the bottom the wreath: I couldn’t decide if it looked like hoar-frost or Santa’s beard, but it seemed terribly original.
from the comments
Wait, all this time “Tupac scholar” was a valid career option and nobody told me?
from the comments
I say if you start developing the male pattern baldness you should consider a change of careers.
A Few Remarks
I sat next to him for almost two years. Inches apart, in fact, but there was a wall of sorts between us. Blue tweed-looking stuff stretched over a metal frame and filled with a thin layer of sound deadening material. It was not enough to prevent my hearing his chronic wheezing and throat-clearing.
The first week was not too bad. I was kind enough to welcome him into our little dysfunctional family. Show him how to do things and avoid the obvious rookie mistakes. He was slow to pick up departmental procedures and obstinate about what he thought he knew.
At what point did I stop trying to help him? It was when he took credit for projects that were not his own, compounded by a reluctance to admit he never knew what the fuck he was talking about. He couldn’t support an opinion or back up an assertion based on his own experience–Googling an answer was his method of showing how smart he was.
The Van Dyke Parks Department
Van Dyke Parks’s Arrangements, Volume 1, released this past week, highlights 1960s and 1970s collaborations with Arlo Guthrie, Lowell George, Bonnie Raitt. And: Dean Martin’s son Dino. And: Beau Brummels/Stoneground frontman Sal Valentino. And: other wonders. I love it.
I also love it that in recent years Van Dyle Parks’s collaborators have included Rufus Wainwright, Joanna Newsom, and Skrillex.
“I notice that so many of my peers, aging ingénues, rock stars, are moving along in life into their wrinkles with an adoring audience that’s aging as well, and the plain truth is that I wasn’t condemned by that because I’ve never had to be somebody to do something,” says Parks. “I don’t have a five year-plan. I just hope the phone will ring and it will bring an opportunity to dominate my life.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for hipping me to Michael Slenske’s Interview interview with Parks.)
We Won Backyard Garden of the Year
Kristopher designed this four years ago. Subcontractors did the structures and masonry, we did the garden. This year, the garden grew into the space it was meant to be.
Misery Bear Goes to Work
Thanks, Jenny.
The entire series is pretty great/sad, especially Misery Bear: Dawn of the Ted.
tweet of the day, II
from the comments
I’m not a sweets person either. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Turkey at Thanksgiving. Rolls. That’ll work. The secret with the sledgehammer is to let it do the work for you. You hold yourself still and let the hammer go. You guide it, like what do they say about how to hold a bird? Then, once a crack begins to open up, you guide the chisel to the hairline and open it. It splits as effortlessly as butter. Move to a new location. Repeat.
Van Dyke Parks on the life of the artist
I have had VDP on the brain ever since his new 45s arrived from Bananastan. Little vinyl discs with big ol’ holes in the middle. And sleeve art by Ed Ruscha and Art Spiegelman.
Asked in a recent interview about his roles as composer, performer, instrumentalist, arranger, producer, and lyricist, VDP responded to the question, “What do you think is your greatest strength as an artist?”
. . . the tensile strength and the very definition of an artist is something that I would place at the top of a vertical hierarchy. To be an artist is to suffer and to lead a life without shelter. It takes a great amount of derring-do, self-reinvention, imagination, familial loyalty, sacrifice, economic uncertainty, and the right to be wrong, the right to fail in order to achieve something of noticeable value. So I would say of all those categories the way that I would like to view myself is as an artist. And that is in my mere survival as a musician for these last — just a moment here, let me do the mathematics — 58 years I have supported myself by being a musician.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for the link.)
Tabling and Cutting Broom-Corn
Fig. 3 from Broom-Corn and Brooms. A Treatise on Raising Broom-Corn and Making Brooms, on a Small or Large Scale. Circa 1879.
I expect I will be working on rather a small scale.
headline of the day
Fast-food manager accused of punching mom with service dog
from the comments
The “gentlemen” in the cubicles near me have been talking about how they could beat each other in various sports for the last couple of weeks.
Recently they’ve been talking about running a 40 – throwing around times like 4.8 and 4.6. They’ve decided to have a race next week. One of them has declined because, “do you know how long it takes me to warm up?”
They’re moving to a different part of the building at the end of the day today, so I won’t get the hear about the results of their race.
“It’s all part of life’s rich pageant”
A friend of mine (who eventually became a VP at a Major Philanthropic Foundation) began his (adult) working life as a cross-country trucker. He said that although the so-called “boot-heel” of Missouri scared the bejeesus out of the most seasoned truckers, there was this place where you could go at 7:00 AM and get steak and eggs and bourbon AND watch a live sex show.
Actually, he said, that was also part of the scariness.
He also claimed that he met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam. When pressed, he said, “Well, she said her name was Tanya. And she stole my dope.”
Rememberies of the Star Herald
’76 – ’79-ish.
1) Mrs. Carroll (Editor of the weekly she inherited it from relatives before her, sold it to the the publisher in Corning, a decade before I started working there)l: Rick, you’re fired!
Me: Again! Why this time?
She: You turned the air conditioner thermostat up to 78. (This in the middle of the gas crisis in the late 70′s when we were trying to conserve.) Read more
Thomas J. Wynne advertising his Photographic Studio, Castlebar, County Mayo
Taken circa 1880 and presented by the National Library of Ireland on The Commons.
