Monday, October 25, 2010

TC: Vanitas Goes to the Movies


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Image, Source: digital file from original neg.

Shoveling snow away from the movie entrance, Chilicothe, Ohio: photo by Arthur Rothstein, February 1940

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Entrance to a movie house, Beale Street, Memphis, Tennessee: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, October 1939

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Front of movie theatre, San Antonio, Texas: photo by Russell Lee, March 1939

Image, Source: intermediary roll film

Movie theatre, Saginaw, Michigan: photo by John Vachon, August 1941

Image, Source: intermediary roll film

Children at a movie house on Sunday, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: photo by Jack Delano, January 1941

Image, Source: intermediary roll film

The movie theatre of Escalante, Utah: photo by Dorothea Lange, April 1936

Image, Source: intermediary roll film

Movie theatre, Romney, West Virginia: photo by John Vachon, March 1938

Image, Source: digital file from original neg.

Movie theatre, Moore Haven, Florida: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, January, 1939

Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film

Children and farmers waiting to go into movie on Saturday afternoon, Littleton, New Hampshire: photo by Marion Post Wolcott, March 1939 or March 1940

http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsa/8a25000/8a25600/8a25630v.jpg

Mexican man in front of movie theatre, San Antonio, Texas: photo by Russell Lee, March 1939


Photos from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Monday, October 18, 2010

TC: Double Feature


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Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film




After the moon goes down, the nearness of the night, fair
And dark in its standing against the remaining trees,
Comes off as not an embellishment
But a facsimile. Where have I seen this evening before.
Past is past. It is no longer the small town nineteen forties.
But living in the moment is postponed by
This uncanny sense of repetition.
For example, at the filling station
On the corner outside the theatre,
Beneath violet neon, near green garbage cans
And racks of bright red cans of motor oil, and rows of whitewalls
Stacked for sale, a young man in blue overalls pumps
Gas, over and over, in my mental reproduction of this scene,
Remembered from a foggy night on Pico, Santa Monica,
1951. Sometimes images will never leave your mind.
It's as though you were merely the carrier pigeon
For messages of unknown origin, to be delivered over and over.
As when, after a long day of construction
And assembly, the factory worker and the apprentice escort,
Having put workaday cares aside for a rare night out
At the movies, sitting rapt through the double feature,
Shyly holding hands, turn to one another at last
And sigh, and one whispers to the other,
In a tone of concession gentler than the soft summer night wind,
This is where we came in.



Image, Source: digital file from intermediary roll film




The new movie house in Greensboro, Greene County, Georgia: photos by Jack Delano, June 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Thursday, October 7, 2010

TC: Ray Milland: An Unnoticeable Star


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File:Ray Milland in A Life of Her Own trailer.JPG




Just another pretty face
but behind that blank
and vapid mask
a supercilious nonchalance
with just a faint
undercurrent of malice

A safecracker hiding his
whiskey bottles in the chandelier

Something disturbing
yet horribly true about
his mixture of extreme
irritation and disbelief
with almost gentlemanly disgust

Something about reality
Ray Milland couldn't stand




File:Ray Milland in A Life of Her Own trailer 2.JPG














Ray Milland, from the film A Life of Her Own (1950): screenshots by Thirdship, 2008

Monday, October 4, 2010

TC: Punctum


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File:Leirhnjukur.jpg

































Hot spring, Leirhnjúkur, Iceland
: photo by Andreas Tile, 1996




A point is fixed at the
intersection between the
personal and the rest

of the cosmos, and that
nexus is the source
of the flood of speech

the desperate polyphony
of conflicting meanings
empties continually into,

all signs condensed into
a single line leading
out from this dust mote sized

fraction of the history of
a very tiny star into the
silence everywhere around it




File:Wolf359.jpg

Wolf 359, the orange object just above the center of the image, a red dwarf star located in the constellation Leo 7.8 light years from earth, one of the faintest and lowest-mass stars known, with a photosphere temperature low enough for chemical compounds to form and survive: astrophotograph by Klaus Hohmann, 2006