BrownStudies » Oddments

Vivian Maier

brownstudy — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 04:00:51 +0000

In 2007, John Maloof ran across a storage locker at a thrift auction house that contained over 100,000 negatives of pictures. The photos spanned the years from the 1950s–1990s and were primarily urban scenes of Chicago and New York.

Maloof began posting the pictures on a blog and dug into the life of the woman who had taken these pictures: Vivian Maier. It took a lot of detective work, but it turned into a labor of love for Maloof, who has parlayed his interest in Maier and her photos into a handsome site, exhibitions, a film, and a book.

I particularly love her urban photos, seemingly taken on the fly, the sort of thing you might see yourself as you briskly walk past a street person or sightseers or a woman talking on a telephone. They’re wonderfully evocative of a different place and time.

Vivian Maier: the nanny with a flair for photography (telegraph.co.uk)
Revealed: Treasure trove of amazing pictures that were kept hidden from the world (dailymail.co.uk)

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A Flapper’s Dictionary

brownstudy — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 13:20:57 +0000

Ran across this delightful post from a used bookseller in Pennsylvania. He acquired the July 1922 edition of Flapper magazine and reproduced an uncredited article that listed phrases and jargon that, while probably quite cheeky at the time, seem quaint and amusing now. It’s fun working out the chain of associations that lead from the slang to the definition.

I wonder really how old the writer of the article was; I smell a fuddy-duddy who wants to appeal to the “with-it” generation. I could imagine a Beatnik or Hippie dictionary article of the same stripe.

Some of my favorites:

Cancelled Stamp—A wallflower.
Embalmer—A bootlegger.
Eye Opener—A marriage.
Father Time—Any man over 30 years of age.
Strike Breaker—A young woman who goes with her friend’s “Steady” while there is a coolness.
Rock of Ages—Any woman over 30 years of age.
Meringue—Personality.
Lallygagger—A young man addicted to attempts at hallway spooning.
Houdini—To be on time for a date.
Smith Brothers—Guys who never cough up.

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Fibonacci sonnets

brownstudy — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:05:28 +0000

I have lately been enjoying a blog by Austin, TX artist/writer Austin Kleon, and have been happily plundering his archives for posts on sketching, storytelling, art, and the like.

I was charmed by this post: Writing The Fibonacci Sonnet. It’s a neat little writing trick that uses the Fibonacci numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8, 13, 21) to create short short stories with sentences that have one word, one word, two words, three words, and so on. Kind of like haiku, except counting the words in the sentences instead of the syllables.

It also reminds me of the poet Jonathan Williams’ dotty “meta-four” poems, where each line only had four words. An example of one of his meta-four poems in this Guardian UK obit. Here’s a meta-four from another appreciation of Williams:

estimated acres of forest

henry david thoreau burned

down in 1844 trying

to cook fish he’d

caught for dinner 300

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Atheists Don’t Have No Songs

brownstudy — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 03:47:14 +0000

A Steve Martin song, performed with the Steep Canyon Rangers

On being a professional

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Be warned

brownstudy — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 19:19:46 +0000

My friend Hill, a denizen of the Humanities PhD wars, vouches for the accuracy of these first two animations. As for the Simpsons clips, well, why not?

Emails as a Game of Life?

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The Suck Fairy

brownstudy — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:35:12 +0000

From Jo Walton at Tor.com comes the idea of The Suck Fairy, that scourge of re-reading that somehow curdles fondly remembered books upon second reading. Working alongside the Suck Fairy are her siblings the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, and the Homophobia Fairy, according to Walton.

One might add the Bad Writing Fairy; sometimes re-reading fondly remembered pulp adventures from my junior high school years (I’m looking at you, Doc Savage) highlights the sheer awfulness of the prose.

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Today in History

brownstudy — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:24:22 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Wikipedia about today. Here’s what the BBC and NY Times have to say. A certain key event from 1961 is missing from all three. (But you could go read some F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories anyway or watch Jim Henson’s early version of the Muppets selling Wilkins Coffee.)

It’s also National! Punctuation! Day!

There are certain character traits of people (including maybe people you might know) who might have been born on the 24th.

Another numerology trick is to add up all the numbers of your birthdate till they reduce to a single number, which expresses your “qualities.” So, say someone was born on this day in 1961 (as a hypothetical example), 9 + 24 + 1961 = 1994. Then add 1+9+9+4=23. Then 2+3=5. This is the Life Path number.

Here’s what another page says about 5s:

You abhor routine and boring work, and you are not very good at staying with everyday tasks that must be finished on time…If you are living on the negative side of the Life Path 5, you are apt to be multitalented, but suffering from some lack of direction, and there is confusion surrounding your ambition. Restless, discontent, and impulsive, you may bounce from one job to the next without accomplishing much at all.

Watch out, 5!

In the Tarot tradition, the Major Arcana card for 5 is The Hierophant, whose keywords are education, belief systems, conforming, and group identification.

This day falls under the sign of Libra.

I wonder what else could be said about this day?

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Old-world skillz

brownstudy — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:50:17 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

I do not know how Michael Leddy finds so many great items for his Orange Crate Art blog. I was struck by his link to this column by The Providence Journal’s Mark Pantinkin on certain specialized life skills we (of a certain generation) accrued growing up that aren’t needed in this day and age. There’s a hint of grumpy old man in his tone, but not too much.

Some of the skills on Pantinkin’s list overlaps with mine: the high-beam toggle on the floor, the rotary dial phone, threading the film in the camera, using coat hangars (and aluminum foil!) to improve TV reception, and dropping the phonograph needle on a turning record.

My own modest list would include:

Black and white darkroom skills, especially threading the film, in the dark, onto wire reels that I then dumped into the fixative. If the film touched itself along that spiral, the outcome was just ugly.
Using a pencil to re-wind slack cassette tape onto its spool.
Affixing labels to 3.5-inch floppy disks.
Creatively naming computer files within the 8.3 scheme.
Using a proportion wheel to size photos for a newspaper page — and keeping your distance from the hot wax machine.
Inking and running my dad’s offset printing presses, and then running the pages through the collator, folding machine, and stapler. I can still hear and feel the loud, mechanical rhythm and sounds of those machines.

But that said, some skills have not passed away from this ever-progressing world:

The Frugal Liz prefers her $20 Whirley-Pop over any microwave popcorn.
I still write letters and cards to my friends, and Simpsons stamps are preferred.
Banjo strings still go on by hand one peg at a time.
A safety pin keeps paired socks together in the wash.
The Sunday funnies, even in their sadly depleted state (the News & Observer only has 4 pages of strips run really small), still make fun birthday gift wrapping in a pinch.
We still have two-stroke lawnmower engines, shoelaces, eyeglass screws, and other physical artifacts of the daily world that will require specialized skills for a while yet.

I would add, though, a few new skills I’ve picked up:

Working with blog software
Using Snopes.com to sniff out urban myths forwarded to me by well-meaning people
Navigating Gmail using the keyboard shortcuts only
Seeing Netflix movies over my wi-fi connection (instant gratification — though I do miss the Mom and Pop video stores)
And, alas, becoming better than I want to be at troubleshooting Windows and Macintosh computers

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Assorted links

brownstudy — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 01:14:40 +0000

“A comparison of the 2008 population — using data from a variety of sources — with the first census in 1881 shows that the number of Cocks has shrunk by 75 per cent…” Read the rest for the context.
How to e-mail a professor. They may not notice, but then again, they do notice.
Saaien Tist on processing research literature, a topic that is becoming of increasing interest to me and that everyone has a different solution for.
Wonderful poem by B.H. Fairchild about “On the Waterfront,” a small-town movie theater, and waiting to come of age.
I’ve always liked Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. (More here, here, and here.) Now someone has created a Twitter feed for them (I think with new or homemade ones added, too): Oblique_Chirps.

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Typology of New Yorker cartoons

brownstudy — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:47:31 +0000

Given the diversity of talents who over the years contributed cartoons to The New Yorker, it may be surprising to learn that everything in our large cartoon bank has, for the sake of easy reference, been reduced to a dozen or so categories…The categories were as follows: arts and galleries; bars and drinking; birds, fish, and animals; businessmen; cars and road signs; cavemen; children, babies, clergymen; cocktail parties; criminals, cops, jails, and judges; doctors and hospitals; heaven, hell, gods, devils, and so forth; olden times (royalty); old people; politicians and generals; musicians; restaurant and food; tourists, vacations; and finally TV and movies. As far as I know, we’ve never had anything in the bank that couldn’t be easily fit into one of those categories. I’m sure the current bank contains a disproportionate number of TV and movie gags. whereas the cocktail party category is rather thinner than it used to be. Desert island and caveman jokes, of course, go on forever.

Lee Lorenz, The Art of The New Yorker 1925-1995, Knopf, 1995

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BrownStudies » Oddments

Vivian Maier

Related articles

A Flapper’s Dictionary

Fibonacci sonnets

Atheists Don’t Have No Songs

Be warned

The Suck Fairy

Today in History

Old-world skillz

Assorted links

Typology of New Yorker cartoons