via Mashable, via Retronaut.
Jan. 28, 1949. A worker trims the eyelashes on a pair of doll’s eyes.
Dec. 15, 1951. Freshly cast doll legs dry at a factory in England.
c. 1950
1947. Freshly cast doll heads wait to dry.
Tag: history
the kinds of things I now refuse to keep
I took apart a small cardboard box covered in shiny blue foil today. I made it out of scraps when I was a teenager, glued the dark foil onto the cardboard with navy nail polish, used a broken earring I found in a burned out house as a clasp. It went with the waterproof dead-drop that I put in the messy rose bush outside my bedroom window, my pre-internet solution for letters or presents to or from the people connected to my house.
The dead drop worked. Well, sort of worked. The blue box filled, but mostly with terrible things. So today I decided that it is time to let it go. I am finally loved enough to read through them and empty enough to throw them away. These bad memories are a country that I am going to burn down. By which I mean recycle.
Going through them, I discovered the letters inside the blue box are long folded and strange to read. Some of them have probably only been read once, while some are so creased and worn their paper feels like fabric. Either way, none of them are recognizable. Who were these people? My life! Such a terrible place. The majority seem from 1999, the year of the dead drop, but they range from ’95 to ’01. Most of the names are completely unfamiliar.
The first letter I read was a warning from someone I went to high-school with, “I saw your bruises. I’m worried. p.s. Don’t show him this letter.” Bruises? Him? I have no idea. Maybe it refers to the unstable teenager who sent me the barely legible poem I found next, “A thousand pardons / Won’t forgive / What I put you through / But do not worry / This shadows time has come / The crack of dawn / Unerring call / Alight upon my soul.” Yay. How tremendous. Discard pile.
“Spiritual doors just keep opening. After being locked into a three dimensional material world for so long, knowing there is more, occasionally expressing more… I felt a timelessness of spirit, I felt the point all souls meet when you spoke to me today, where a ray of light becomes part of the light itself..”. Signed, “the busker who saw you through the window”. Metaphor? Probably not. It’s the sort of thing that would happen when I had a dead-drop, so it fits the history, but I have no idea who it’s from.
The next I pulled was six pages long, describing some sort of unspecified accident that ended someone’s martial arts career. It’s signed with a scribble I cannot understand, but seems to begin with a D. Going further into the box, it turns out that this is where this task gets dark.
Whoever “D” was, they were prolific. They wrote profoundly dull letters and insisted on referring to me by pet names that border on insulting – Angelface, Sweet Stuff, Honeybear, Doll, Bombshell. (Almost all of them are written on stationary branded with the name of a collections agency. Maybe where “D” worked?) They read like an imaginary film noir relationship where I star front and center. “I apologize for getting up in that guy’s face last night, I just don’t like people who threaten my happiness, and you and I are so happy together. It was so good to kiss you after I bashed that guy’s face.” Given the content, I suspect that they wrote me without my knowledge, the letters like a journal, then delivered them in a anonymous batch. I remember we shut the mail-drop down because someone was exceptionally creepy. I can’t remember specifics, but I’m guessing “D” was the reason.
No wonder I hate this place. Special mentions to the note threatening to skin my cat, the note that accuses me of being involved in an acquaintance’s murder, the come-back-to-me letters signed in blood from the aforementioned teenager who used to leave vials of blood in my house, and the note that reads only, “I don’t care what the teacher made me say – I’m not sorry I set you on fire.”
the anatomy of the box under my bed
Still Life at Dusk
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
It happens surprisingly fast,
the way your shadow leaves you.
All day you’ve been linked by
the light, but now that darkness
gathers the world in a great black tide,
your shadow leaves you to join
the sea of all other shadows.
If you stand here long enough,
you, too, will forget your lines
and merge with the tall grass and
old trees, with the crows and the
flooding river—all these pieces
of the world that daylight has broken
into objects of singular loneliness.
It happens surprisingly fast, the loss
of your shadow, and standing
in the field, you become the field,
and standing in the night, you
are gathered by night. Invisible
birds sing to the memory of light
but then even those separate songs fade
into the one big silence that always
seems to be waiting.
Once upon a time, before the invention of touch but long after writing, there was a voice on the wind that spoke to a boy and the voice sounded like the petals of a rose unfolding. “I offer you a wish”, said the voice. “What is the price?” asked the boy. The voice came closer, with a rustle like red feathers. “You must remember that I am real, even when it will make you unhappy.” The boy stood and thought, his face as serious as his face could be, then said, “That is a fair price. I will accept your wish.” And then there was a flash and he flew away.
I have now filled an entire recycling bin with discarded photographs. Close to an entire ten year history, destined for shredding. I have been scanning them, envelope by envelope, and throwing out the negatives, taking an entire day to do it, digitizing my past in the name of a better future. (Lung visited yesterday, looked through some of them, said, “Fuck, you need better memories.”) It is interesting how it still feels a tiny bit taboo, even as I find myself enjoying the act of throwing them away. Two piles: one for recycling, the other to be burned.
Meanwhile, I wonder if I should be better documenting this apartment, this nest that David and I have built together. Taking pictures of what we’ve done with the walls, how we’ve arranged our furniture, decorated the windowsills with plants. The place is changing, the illusion of permanence dissolving as my things leave, either given away or sold. I wonder how I will look back on this apartment, at our time together. Will I miss it? Or do I feel it’s more a duty to take note of my existence, archive it, surroundings included?
Going through old photos has only reinforced the notion, as I’ve been discovering that I don’t have any photographs of the many, many places I’ve lived, like my teenage bedroom, wallpapered in art posters and poetry, or the room I painted over by Victoria Drive to look like a sunset, stars made from pie tins thumb-tacked to the ceiling, with the tree in the corner that I hauled in from a wind storm and hollowed and carved into a shelf. Rare, even, to find pictures set in my old places, like the one of a friend who happened to be sitting on the couch in the converted storage unit I lived in with my first love in Toronto. Not that it shows nothing of any relevance, only a guy playing video games, homeless as his own apartment was being sprayed for roaches. You can’t see the absurd scope of the place, the huge roll-up door that sounded like thunder anytime anyone went in or out, or the hobbit-sized floor above, accessible only by a rough wooden ladder, which was our “room”, our bed under green hand-prints which probably only now exist as echoes in my mind. The list goes on – the cavernous ex-bank with the working vault that Grady found in the downtown east side, the terrible basement on the north shore with the deviant landlord, the house on 53rd with the gold and black velvet wall where that old guy tried to kidnap me – all of them worthy of being preserved, if only so I remember that once upon a time I lived there. It’s like I abandoned my history, as if because my life wasn’t happy, none of it was worth keeping. It seems negligent, as if I should have been preserving these places as I went, offering evidence that we existed there, that our lives once gave these buildings meaning.
artpost: something I could never do
E-mail submissions to: dearphotograph@gmail.com
Dear Photograph, Thank you for everything we had. @jonathanstampf
Dear Photograph, Dad never took a picture of me, ever. Then I noticed his reflection in the glass. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. Anonymous.
showing the rest of the projecter art-nerds how elegantly it can be done
The 600 Years from the macula on Vimeo.
the newest Secret Knots wants to know what to do
Walkthrough.
It is not even a question anymore that given the opportunity I would go back in time to lay out a new life for my past self, sit myself down and explain where not to be, who to see, what, instead, I should be finding. Tony and I were discussing this recently, that we would change our history without any hesitation, in particular, the year we were almost neighbors, both wrapped in misery, walking the same streets at night, locked out of the house by abusive relationships, (it’s very likely we brushed against each other as strangers, sat in the same places, rode the same bus, inches away yet years apart from saying hello). How incredible it would be to explain to our past selves, Do not continue with this. Instead, find this other person, tell them I sent you, tell them you’ll care.
so fascinating I’m forgetting to sleep
I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the disease. From that point on, we were told, the Royal Navy had required a daily dose of lime juice to be mixed in with sailors’ grog, and scurvy ceased to be a problem on long ocean voyages.
But here was a Royal Navy surgeon in 1911 apparently ignorant of what caused the disease, or how to cure it. Somehow a highly-trained group of scientists at the start of the 20th century knew less about scurvy than the average sea captain in Napoleonic times. Scott left a base abundantly stocked with fresh meat, fruits, apples, and lime juice, and headed out on the ice for five months with no protection against scurvy, all the while confident he was not at risk. What happened? […]
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.
An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.
Also: Vitamin D crucial to activating immune defenses. Copenhagen scientists have proven that without sufficient intake of the vitamin, the killer cells of the immune system – T cells – will not be able to react to and fight off serious infections in the body.
Today’s something wonderful
via Karen:
The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization.
Leningrad Siege: Now and Then (history like ghosts)
via EnglishRussia:
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“The Siege of Leningrad, also known as The Leningrad Blockade was an unsuccessful military operation by the Axis (Nazi) powers to capture Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) during World War II. The siege lasted from September 9, 1941, to January 27, 1944, when a narrow land corridor to the city was established by the Soviets. The total lifting of the siege occurred on January 27, 1944. The Siege of Leningrad was one of the longest and most destructive sieges of major cities in modern history and it was the second most costly.” – from Wikipedia.
Photos by Sergei Larenkov. More here.
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meme: 2008 in LiveJournal, the first sentence of the first post of each month for the entire year.
January – Seattle was the escape I needed. Not only does it have a refreshing amount of honest-to-mercy architectural and social diversity, it seems everyone I know there is brilliant, fun, and good-looking.*
February – He’s young in that way that teenage girls find attractive, fizzing with ginger enthusiasm, wiry, laughing, his arms beaten with a couple of tattoos.
March – Ray and I are going sailing on a Viking War-ship tomorrow! Anyone want to come?
April – Once upon a time when time was shivering apart and memories seemed more real than reality, the girl who fell from the sky and the west coast hacker king came to an agreement.
May – A clean uniform of friendship, tattered in places, worn in the elbows and the shoulders, but strong all the same. I think of stone, how it erodes too slow to see, though it shapes itself to the wind almost perfectly.
June – Walking across the street in the rain, there’s someone in front of me with a spiderman brand popsicle, the blue eyes two wan gum-balls that look like they were manufactured years before I was born.
July – I’ve been mistaken for a porn star.
August – Something’s wrong with my internet at home. It’s corpse blood sluggish, and flickering faster than an animated disco.
September – The weekend was spent moving David from his cave apartment of the mysterious smells to a pleasantly crooked #9932CC-darkorchid room in an old heritage style house on Arbutus street, right across the street from the Ridge Theater.
October – Something I can’t seem to get over is how much mind-bogglingly delicious food there is in Montreal, for incredibly cheap.
November – We’ve decided to paint the guest room library the colours of a Hypselodoris nudibranch bullock, but darker and a bit richer, leaving us with aubergine, pumpkin, sunflower mustard, and crimson red.
December – Today we’re hitting up, (or on, your pick), Lou O’Bedlam, Frederick’s of Hollywood, Kevin again, (who will hopefully have recovered from his sudden death-flu), and somewhere delicious to eat, hopefully in Venice, with dear Crunchy of Mutaytor if we can line up with her lunchbreak.