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…
Monthly Archives: October 2010
links for 2010-10-31
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from NYRB, and truly excellent coverage of material I consider essential
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inspired wordplay
Now THAT’s Entertainment
via The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, and you oughta go there to hear Louis’s variations on the theme.
Don’t miss this one
via Bruce Sterling’s Beyond the Beyond, this gem of urban wit:
panoptICONS Utrecht 2010 from Helden on Vimeo.
Videos from Nova Scotia Faces
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:
links for 2010-10-29
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from Language Log, some terms that OUGHT to have wider currency (I mean… if Schadenfreude, why not mamihlapinatapei?)
Sixth Grade Class Photo
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.
links for 2010-10-23
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Bryan gives us something to chew upon, watch for, and wonder at
links for 2010-10-22
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One despairs: "…They both feel cut out, distrust their leaders, want things to change, and don’t want anything to change. Above all they want to speak, and what comes to their lips is drawn straight from the national Id. Don’t tread on me! and On va gagner! turn out to mean exactly the same thing: we will be heard. Whether they have anything to say is another matter." (by Mark Lilla, at New York Review of Books Blog)
links for 2010-10-15
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"…will make a greater number and variety of useful resources, both published and unpublished, available for the field of folklore studies and the communities with which folklore scholars partner…" from American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries