guerrilla curatorship

lookmom:

Where the Urban Dream Life Is Going Cheap

i am not moving to buffalo

no way no how

This is interesting for me, both as a perpetrator of that “couldn’t cut it” attitude toward suburban flight (which is admittedly less hardcore over here on the left coast but nonetheless, a snobbery that exists alive and well in San Francisco too) and someone who has gazed longingly at upstate New York with drooly bohemian antiquarian eyes. Such a stock of historic buildings! Such vacancy rates! So undervalued! It’s not the personal space I crave but the smorgasbord of antique elements. Still, the likelihood of actual relocation is - how you say? - non. Le sigh.

Also, I am totally crushed out on lookmom.

mollylambert:

benhasten:

“According to her studio, Theda Bara was born around 1892, in the shadow of the Pyramids, the daughter of an Italian artist and a French actress. Film history books state that Bara was actually born in 1890, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Yet this also turns out to be a myth: a little research reveals that Theodosia Goodman was really born in Avondale (a wealthy, largely Jewish, suburb of Cincinnati) on July 29, 1885.”

I don’t have any context for reblogging this it’s just the kind of shit I love.

emptyage:

Gold Medalist Shawn Johnson’s peace earrings are, I think, a sure sign of the
changing times. There would have been all kinds of noise about this in
2004.

I really want to believe this is a sign of significance, of advancement, of sea-change. I do. Because despite the fact that my inner child looks mostly like a walk-of-shaming, gravelly-voiced drunken Jezebel blogger, there is a part of her that still looks all sweet and wholesome like this little Iowan smiley midget here. (Seriously though, how can you not be in love with Shawn Johnson? She is A-motherfucking-DORABLE and she’s teeny tiny and like, the best gymnast in the world and even though everyone is trying to make her say mean things about the Chinese gymnasts she will NOT because she is from the Midwest which I imagine to be the land of eternal niceties and raising people right and euchre and ANYWAY, I hope that even if American forgets about her entirely in three weeks (Shannon Miller anyone!??) and she realizes she has accomplished more at sixteen than anyone else she’ll ever meet and nobody will ever be really relatable to that, that she still finds something to do with her life that’s more fulfilling and awesome than coaching gymnastics. Which I’m sure is fun, but I mean like, I hope she goes to college and discovers lesbianism and/or the joys of the nonprofit sector. I don’t really want her to be a lesbian, that was just for example’s sake. She’s clearly hella straight. It would be fun if she did College Playboy though.)

Anyway, the point of this reblog was that I hope that her peace earrings and her peace sign flashes really indicate some kind of sea-change on the part of the American public; that it’s a signal that even in the Breadbasket and the Bible Belt the “regular” people are sick enough of the hypocrisy of conservatism, the abuses of justice, et. al, that they’re tolerating this overt televised statement-making. But I dunno. I guess I’m not convinced it’s that frought with meaning. I mean, remember when “hippie culture” came back in 1994 in the form of peace signs all over those horrendous ill-fitting “baby tees”? I don’t think that many kids were really contemplating the legacy of the struggle of counterculture or anything. I mean, sure there were the girls in ripped jeans smoking pot and writing in their journals incessantly who professed to be anti-establishment, but most teenagers who were at the mawl buying those earrings at Claire’s (sorry Shawn, maybe yours are real silver or something) were just buying cheap trendy crap. The peace sign just carried a kind of superficial, anachronistic, cutesy appeal. Like, “I’m too young to be washed out and scarred for life by the consequences of hard drug use and group sex, so I represent the innocent new face of peace and love, man!” Maybe I’m overanalyzing this and maybe because I’ve lived in the Haight Ashbury most of my adult life I have a knee-jerk “you don’t know what you’re talking about” reaction to anyone attempting to fly the hippie flag, but I’m inclined to see this whole peace sign thing as superficial. Or if a statement, a partly unwitting one.

More than just cheesy hotel art (because everything with me has to be imbued with some kind of pseudo-significance!), this is a repro of some 1936 propaganda of the vintage wherein California land speculators were nurturing an image of California as a fair-weathered Shangri-La of open space, cheap land, health and wealth. And knowing what I do of California in its adolescence (armchair historian that I am), I’m sure it was a lovely, pastoral place full of promise. And, you know, rampant white supremacy, overspeculation and oppression of the underclass. Just like anywhere else I guess.

But anyway, what’s interesting to me is the legacy of this boosterism. It promoted a culture of personal space, ubiquitous single-family detached homeownership, and sun worship that seems to persist in various forms even today. I guess it’s why I’ve always regarded California as eh, just a’ight. None of those things are particularly well-suited to my personality (I consider myself a San Franciscan first, Californian only secondarily and peripherally) and I never really identified with why anyone would want to leave the dense, Industrial Revolution-era East for somewhere without a proper train system, but people certainly seem to. My mother, some of my best friends, probably half the people I know are all transplants arriving here on some kind of fresh-foods/knowledge economy/mild weather pilgrimage. It’s not that the appeal is lost on me, but more interesting that such pilgrimages west are still happening, a century or so after they were first popularized.