main street, usa

Our gratitude once again to Nag on the Lake for acquainting us with the enigmatic and extensive catalogue of historic, nostalgic photography of Barry L Gfeller.
A seemingly solitary person who lived and died in his childhood home was surprisingly well-travelled and his survivors were shocked to find among his legacy over fifty thousand snap-shots documenting over two decades of road-trips across the United States and Canada, fossilising impressions of Main Streets that in many cases no longer exist. Caretakers are actively searching out a permanent home that could host all the pictures and make them available to the public and to researchers. The current host website is pretty sophisticated, nonetheless, and features interactive maps where one can trace Gfeller’s travels and perhaps find a vintage scene of one’s own town. Be sure to visit the links above to learn more.

purse-spective or beyond the valley of secret treasures

Via the splendiferous Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links (a quite nice tradition) we encounter street artist Thrashbird who has turned an abandoned cement factory on the Oregon-Idaho border—all the limestone has been quarried away and now with the bust following the boom, the place is a veritable ghost town—into a giant and expressive canvas to make a statement on exploitation and industrial decay. Huge concrete blocks—perhaps test or sample structures worked up for potential clients—were strewn along the former factory grounds and Thrashbird envisioned them transfixed as monumental handbags—the luxury sort that attracts counterfeits.  Visit the links above to learn more.

it happens again and again, like the sunrise

A series of entries from marginal illustrations of a 1922 collection of southwestern Native American folktales prompted us to dig a bit deeper to discover an interesting anthology of Pueblo parables and myths gathered for a young girl with an insatiable appetite for a good story, sort of a Scheherazade character.  
Taytay’s Tales (being the grandfather who most often is the one to impart this oral tradition down to the next generation) feature dozens of Hopi and Pueblo stories retold with analysis by ethnographer Elizabeth Willis De Huff (in a fairly enlightened way for the time) and illustrated with the help of two young Hopi natives, Fred Kabotie (whose Indian name is the title) and Otis Polelonema. All the stories and pictures are available to peruse at the link above.

thrones and dominions or patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel

Though thwarted by the rise of fascism and its spectacular failure in Europe with the film being kept out of circulation for seventy years along with other laudable efforts of the Warner Brothers studio to make sure that the politics of totalitarianism weren’t glorified in North America as well (more here), the 1933 pre-Code Hollywood (the era before the Hays’ rules on self-censorship that curtailed what had previously been rather frank depictions of profanity, violence, illicit drug-use and promiscuity as well as rhetorically dangerous and subversive points of view, unchecked) production of Gabriel over the White House, starring Walter Huston, father of director John Huston. With the financial backing and creative input of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, the bizarre political fantasy, wish-fulfilment piece, named for the archangel, depicts a typically partisan United States president transfigured after a near-death encounter (resulting from a automobile accident) by divine intervention.
Congress makes good on their commitment to impeach the president (please visit this link if the video does not display), who responds by first nationising the production and sale of alcohol—the country’s ill-fated experiment with Prohibition (previously) having just concluded—then dissolving the legislative and judicial branches and declaring himself dictator (presumably in the imperial Roman sense, or perhaps not) and seizing absolute power. In order to speed the US recovery from the Great Depression in the interbellum period, the president directs the creation of a corps of construction workers to be employed improving national infrastructure and creates a federal police force of ‘stormtroopers’ to enforce martial law. Threatening to destroy the world with America’s new secret weapon, the president successfully lobbies global powers for a lasting peace and having accomplished his divinely-appointed mission, the president is quietly assumed into the bosom of heaven.

6x6

epa epa eeeeepaaaaaahhhhhh: Scott Pruitt falls on his sword finally but the US Environmental Protection Agency Chief in-waiting is an even bigger corporate shill

there are nicer ways to do it but the nice always fail: the power of protest music

a broken chain lies at her feet as she walks forward: Therese Patricia Okoumou scales the Statue of Liberty in the name of her fellow immigrants

angry baby: London’s mayor approves the display of a blimp over the Houses of Parliament during Trump’s visit to the capital

phantom islands: an atlas of maritime artefacts, via Things Magazine

mud larking: a massive curation of seven hundred thousand articles recovered from a single canal in Amsterdam, via Waxy