I'm continuing my exploration of video as a medium of escape for my Nova Scotia Faces collections, this time with a short narrative linking together photos from a photo album rescued from a junk store in the 1970s. I'm not completely satisfied with this presentation, but it's useful to try out different approaches. I don't know what I think until I see what I say...
via The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, and you oughta go there to hear Louis's variations on the theme.
via Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond, this gem of urban wit:
panoptICONS Utrecht 2010 from Helden on Vimeo.
It's getting on for 40 years since I first started working on Nova Scotia, and I've finally found a productive outlet for the thousands of photographs I collected in junk stores, mostly in the 1970s before others saw the possibilities in vernacular photography. Here are two videos, produced in the last couple of days:
I suppose there are millions in this genre, but this is the only one I'm in:
This picture has been on my mind for years, and it recently resurfaced with its metadata intact (names written on the back). What, I wonder, happened in the lives of those people I more-or-less knew pretty well at the time? How could the tales be collected? I left Andover MA myself about a year later, after 7th grade, and most of what I remember so vividly about the Shawsheen district of Andover has been effaced by decades of progress: the American Woolen Company mill (closed in the early 1950s) became a Raytheon factory and then transmuted into condos, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart school also condofied, and I doubt that commuter trains stop at Shawsheen.
Doc Searls, bless him, does a considerable service in his recent post after seeing The Social Network, suggesting to me that I ignore the phenomenon (of Facebook, and its broader significance) at my peril. Putting aside for a moment my squirmier feelings about Facebook itself, I focus on his comments on business, and specifically on a sentence he quotes from James Surowiecki's New Yorker piece ("The Business-Movie Business"):
The film represents a rare attempt to take business seriously, and to interrogate the blend of insight, ruthlessness, creativity, and hubris required to start a successful company.Yup, right there on a silken pillow is all my discomfort with 'business': ruthlessness and hubris I deplore, insight and creativity I applaud. Perhaps this is my problem... Anyway, thanks to Doc's take, I'm much more likely to see the Facebook movie, to try to think more creatively about the Facebook phenomenon, and maybe even to think more insightfully about my long-term bugaboo take on 'business'.