Tom Carson has a piece at Vox about Rockwell becoming politicized in the 1960s, something I didn’t know about.
The first painting Rockwell did for Look magazine, after moving over from Saturday Evening Post, was a vivid statement about race in those tumultuous times. Alas, all the well-meaning actions at the time stalled and ended up meaning more as a symbolic nod than any radical change.
We’re still waiting for that.
So much of how we (and everyone else) turns out is due to happenstance. This story explains how working for equal opportunity makes merit meaningful. Good stuff.
Read it at Vox here.
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay
A fascinating explanation of how modern elections turn not on swing voters choosing candidates, but the base voting against the other guys.
Which is why voters who dislike Trump have to remember to vote for the Democratic candidate, no matter who that is, in November. The Republicans, the Russians, the White Supremacists will try to get Dems and Independents to stay home, or vote for a third party candidate.
Don’t get fooled again!
“Only 53 percent of Sanders voters say they will certainly support whomever is the Democratic nominee. This is no idle threat. In 2016, in Pennsylvania, 117,000 Sanders primary voters went for Trump in the general, and Trump won the state by 44,292 ballots. In Michigan, 48,000 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 10,704. In Wisconsin, 51,300 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 22,748. In short, Sanders voters helped elect Trump.”
So, who among Democrats siphons votes away from Trump? Bernie seems to be the answer. Brooks says.
You can read his column, which makes a different and not really defensible point, here.
I think the better message is that most people don’t like Trump. Most people are opposed. No matter who the Democratic nominee is, and we may or may not like her or him, we all have to vote for the nominee. That’s the job. None are as bad as the choice of not voting, which is equal to a vote for Trump.
That’s what we all have to remember, even as Republican and Russian and White Supremacist operators pound us with divisive information. There’s better, there’s best, there’s not quite as good. All fine, especially if the alternative is Trump.
Washington Post has a group of designers analyze the Best Picture candidates’ posters. You won’t agree with them, they don’t agree with each other, but what they discuss helps me see a little bit better. Click here for the story.
Stories about creativity are often tedious. Not uninteresting, at least not always, but often worthless.
So, it’s pleasing to find an old memory turned blog post about a painting that is charming and funny and meaningful. If you think so.
It’s about this piece.
A lunch counter, actually. It’s called Saartje, named after the given name of a South African woman who became better known as the Hottentot Venus, and it serves Nigerian fare, dishes like Woloff rice and fried plantains. But the chef, Tunde Wey, has bigger things in mind than just food.
The linked story, in the Washington Post, explains why Wey charges people of color $12 for lunch (and they can choose to take a percentage of the stand’s profits when the project is over, or not), and gives white people the option of paying $12 or $30, the larger figure representing the local income disparity between the races.
Wey is taking no profits from the stand, and has a Tulane student conducting post-lunch interviews, collecting data about why diners chose the option they did. He’s a cook, but this is also a sociological experiment.
Putting a face on the ways racial inequality persists seems pretty important, especially in a way that touches people emotionally. The story does a good job of amplifying those feelings, and where they come from.
I went back to see this show at Bard’s Hessel Center for a second time today. I rushed through the first time, and didn’t quite get all the amazing connections going on here.
This is a show about photographs that digs deep into their documentary value. The first and last images in the loop of an exhibit space are workers entering and leaving their factories.
In between, there is a fantastic survey of photographic imagery working on social issues. Walker Evans and Lewis Hines are here, in the context of their documentary work, and some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s sex pictures are here, too. Plus one of the flowers, because it exists.
Not everything clicks, but everything does get at this idea that pictures and ideas and politics and social understanding, at least, go together.
There is an amazing video, built around Kanye’s Ultralight Beam, that weaves a history of black culture in image and sound that challenges and undermines the very notion of integration. In the way that I Am Not Your Negro does, disdaining the very notion of accommodation.
Martha Rosler’s detournment of women’s roles in American advertising struck me, maybe because this is what I grew up with, and how I learned to distrust the media.
Here’s one of those not in the show. Go if you can.
A movie on Netflix you probably haven’t heard of.
I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore is a pretty terrific piece of work.
If you want comps, Blood Simple and Blue Ruin come to mind, but this movie is sweeter than those. And no less hard.
It stars Melanie Lynskey, who is terrific. This is star making.
Directed by Macon Blair, his first film.
I could describe it, I guess, but really what you need to know is this movie is really well made. It combines genre stereotypes with stereotype breaking tropes. There is violence and very little dialogue, but it is more thoughtful than action-y.
It’s not perfect. Some of the characters are too broad. Some of the scenes don’t score perfectly.
But partly because of Melanie Lynskey and partly because of the craft of the production, it is highly recommended.
