Boxes, Sperry and maduro, converted to cameras in twenty minutes; darkroom paper negatives shopped/inverted: the entire spectrum of the history of photography.
Special Legends Edition Chicago
Two years ago, Sonny Rollins played to an SRO audience to open the Chicago Jazz Festival. Last year Roy “Snap Crackle” Haynes delivered an equally phenomenal performance. This Thursday evening, August 29 at the Pritzker Pavillion, drummer Jack DeJohnette leads an all-star quintet featuring bassist Larry Gray, saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. Be there or be square, folks. Prep your ears for thirty-some minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-xRldjmfwg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPYwp8rdUAg
A Garage Sale for the Ages
Below are portions of the e-mail transmitted last week by the fine emporium Dusty Groove America. I removed the pricing information because this not paid advertising, but trust me, the sale prices are fantastic.
FYI: Last year the store acquired 20,000 LPs, 40,000 45s and several thousand CDs from WGN, who figured they no longer needed them.
“Hey there! Sorry to bother you out of the blue, but we’ve got some special news we wanted to share with you — a huge sale at the Dusty Groove store in Chicago!
We’ll be running this sale for one day only at our store at 1120 N Ashland Ave in Chicago — from 10am to 5pm on Saturday, August 24 (with Sunday, August 25 as a rain date). If you’ve ever been to one of our garage sales, you know what to expect — amazing bargains at rock-bottom prices designed to move a lot of music in a short amount of time. And for the first time ever, we’ll also be auctioning off whatever’s left at 5pm to the highest bidder — so bring a truck if you’d like to walk away with an entire collection’s-worth of music!
There’s no way we can share all the details of the music with you in advance — but we’ve already spent weeks putting together this special selection, and we’ve got a lot more work ahead of us in the weeks to come. We really hope you can make it — and we can promise plenty of goodness if you make the trip!
The whole thing happens on Saturday, August 24 (rain date Sunday, August 25)– starting at 10am in Chicago. See you there!”
http://www.dustygroove.com/visitus.htm
Sun-Times Dumbs Down; Trib Rats On Sun-Times
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/breaking/chi-chicago-sun-times-photo-20130530,0,4361142.story
…including: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._White_(photojournalist)
Yikes. We concurred this afternoon, in the Heart Office at the Huge School, that we automatically recoil from news video.
But wait: is this coincidence, or is it a case of waiting for a shoe to drop? The mind boggles. (I feel like I got the scoop.)
Get Ready, Boys and Girls: It’s Almost Showtime
Here is the trailer for “Finding Vivian Maier:” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o2nBhQ67Zc&feature=youtu.be
UPDATE: Ach, Ayun Halliday beat me to it. Maier and Darger, Darger and Maier: http://www.openculture.com/2013/02/finding_vivian_maier.html
Mural Art In Public Schools
Myron Nutting was commissioned in June 1934 to design and paint the Wauwatosa High School murals in the school’s art-deco style front lobby. 
Anyone who stood by the railing at the well between classes will remember the three-story high mural “Spirit of Education,” the WPA mural, in the main entrance hallway of Lincoln High School in the Cleveland Municipal School District. The mural is now a cultural and historical memorial which was painted specifically for the school in 1939 by artist, William Krusoe.
The large mural on the east wall of Dubuque’s Senior High School was painted by Cyrus Ferring in his spare time, the necessary expense borne by the student fund, and is a gift from Mr. Ferring to the school. It was hung in its present location in the summer of 1935.
This appeared, unannounced, over winter break in January 2013, filling some available space above the already-busy entry wall of Barrington Huge School. Rotating displays concerning student activities (occasionally giving way to student art), sit next to a patriotic collage hung over the shoulders of the reception desk attendant.
Rather than taking the allegorical approach used by many artists commissioned in times of financial uncertainty, the new piece consists of politically-correct buzzwords partially obscured by reproductions of yearbook-style photographs, each representing a decade of this particular school’s history; current logotypes used on district and school stationery; and the district’s “motto,” written in the style of other nearby districts. The application of spot color in the monochromatic reproductions, popular in 1980s television commercials and used sparingly (once) in a 186-minute Stephen Spielberg film twenty years ago, is employed no fewer than five times, apparently in an effort to unify the images. The designer is anonymous (design may have been by committee).
Time and Pictorialism
How are photographs supposed to look? Where might photojournalism fall on the spectrum between comfort and engagement?
http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/13072.aspx
http://maristredfoxesprssa.blogspot.com/
What would George Santayana have to say about all this?
Or this: http://lightbox.time.com/2012/10/25/a-vibrant-past-colorizing-the-archives-of-history/#1
Sheesh.
“Meaning is mushy. Meaning falls apart.”
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1040&fulltext=1&media=
Excuse me: digital humanities? Somehow not unrelated: as Howard Hampton put it in, mid-paragraph (and the Times placed it, at the top of the column), this Sentence Of The Week: “The random gush of information and observation starts to coalesce into patterns; the leapfrogging backward and forward in time is gradually shaped into history, or at least becomes dried handprints in the warped concrete of memory.”
Creative Camerawork 