What Was On (1957) – 48 Photos of women on TV taken late at night by a lonely photographer in 1957. Encrusted with 50 year old dust and emulsion the photos of women from melodramas and late-night talk shows are not only a record of one person’s peculiar obsession but also a virtual catalog of the kind of roles women played in the popular entertainment of the era.

From Square America, a gallery of vintage snapshots and vernacular photography.

“Mulling it over, I couldn’t articulate it fully but definitely, I knew I had become lazy, really lazy. A spectacular sloth by the standards of shooting film. Film is hard. Film is a stone cold unforgiving killing bastard. Film is once in a lifetime, no excuses. F8 and really, really be there: ready, steady, in focus, correct exposure, and pressing the shutter in synch with life.”

This is serious.  Digital cameras have annihilated my instincts (I’ve grown to resent digital photography, my meal ticket).  Doug has taken all the discomfort in me and put it into words.  Read the whole post.  These bits strike my chords:  

Film is hard. Film is a stone cold unforgiving killing bastard. Film is once in a lifetime, no excuses. F8 and really, really be there: ready, steady, in focus, correct exposure, and pressing the shutter in synch with life …

… But while you have your head down checking the LCD guess what? You just missed your pulitzer. That LCD is crack. You just can’t get enough. We all want instant gratification and here you have it. Bliss. Yet the act of constantly checking the back of the camera is taking your head out of the game. You gain a useful bit of knowledge but at what cost? I know it also can save time we used to spend covering our asses with brackets and snip tests and whatnot but if it’s moments in time you are after, I now believe it’s the disciplined Zen mindset you need.

  From Doug Menuez 2.0: Go Fast, Don’t Crash

On the Set makes dioramas. Brady Bunch | Mike and Carol’s bedroom

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son, commits suicide.

I have your Baby Brownie Special, the Bakelite one.  It’s not in very good shape, I bought it on eBay from a woman who felt it necessary to misrepresent its condition it in a highly inflated grandiose fashion.  Pants. On. Fire.  But that’s another matter.  When I finally got it open I found it has your name inside, exactly “Arthur Kimmel, Oxford NJ”.  Treasure!  Arthur Kimmel, who are you and what pictures did you make with this camera?

Ok.  Bye for now.

Love,

Lili

All I know about “My Winnipeg” is that I love this still madly and it makes me want to see the movie, which is #3 in Time Magazine’s top 10 movies of 2008.

In 1942 the city of Winnipeg held an “If Day,” dressing its burghers up as Nazis to show the locals some of the terrors of life under the Third Reich. For Canadian deranged-genius filmmaker Guy Maddin, every day is an If Day: his movies transform his hometown reality into comedy-dramas of sibling rivalry and family life that would give Freud the creeps. So Maddin is not the most reliable reporter. In spite or because of that, My Winnipeg is a trip: a “docufantasia” that mixes the city’s history with Maddin family values. He moves back into the home where he grew up, hiring actors to play his relatives — including Ann Savage, the notorious harridan of the 1945 cheapo-noir classic Detour, as his mom. Filming in black-and-white, streaking the frame, explaining the action with silent-movie intertitles, Maddin must want us to understand that, in movies, nothing is real, and everything is true. Oh, and My Winnipeg: it’s weird-hilarious.