Archive for the ‘Popular Culture’ Category
A collection [On National Geographic love, and deciding what to keep]
Since I began subscribing to National Geographic in 2004, as a sophomore in high school, I have only paid for the issues that I get via my membership to the Society. But I acquired an enormous collection, every additional one having been gifted to me. That meant that a good friend would find a singular [...]
May 8th, 2012TV Show: on urban white girls in 2012
Lena Dunham is third from the left. Last night I finally began watching a show I’d been reading about, and to be quite honest, sounded just like something made for me, whose characters I might love. Girls, on HBO, which premiered in April. I love the characters. They are confused, they have both aim and [...]
May 7th, 2012Expectant parents, back away from the baby-name books
Snippet of my name collection I collect names. I love spotting a new one (my job working in naturalization records, etc. at the national archives means I get many opportunities to collect and find new muses), saying it, relishing the syllables and imaging what type of person is a Josefina or a Beryl or Basilia [...]
May 1st, 2012Touching the Quilt, learning its stories
I happened upon a display of a small segment of the AIDS Quilt on campus at GSU last night. It is here for three days, to promote health and awareness of HIV/AIDS, sponsored by the GSU campus health and auxiliary services. I have seen small bits of it, but they were specific panels I had asked them [...]
March 27th, 2012A movie about culture, to influence our culture today
How appropriate. The 1982 film Diner was groundbreaking in that its characters spent a lot of time talking in a diner, and talking about popular culture. And it turns out that until the 1980s, filmmakers were generally wary of including popular culture references in their films. Immediately what comes to mind is Quentin Tarantino, and the films [...]
March 9th, 2012On marriage, gender, income, babies, single ladies
In her recent book, comedian and writer Mindy Kaling makes a comment about those articles that come out every year or so that declare the end of marriage and convention, and cause the women reading them to vow to buck the conventional marriage set-up, and seek moving instead into one of those single convents, to perhaps [...]
March 2nd, 20121988: “History will record…”
An incredibly powerful photo from Cleve Jones’s book. He says: "Here I am with the friends of Zoel St. Sauver at his panel, 1988. For many of us, AIDS was our World War II, our Vietnam. This photograph reminds me of the classic memorial to Iwo Jima. All of us in the picture were HIV [...]
February 12th, 2012My Pop Art Series
This is part of the Living Atlanta street art series that was done by local artists in 2011, but I have only recently discovered this piece, very close to my office at 34 Peachtree Street. I absolutely love it. So I played with it in Lightroom to my heart’s content, and this is the result. I can’t [...]
January 30th, 2012“With the digital age come new conceptions of authorship.”
I have waxed poetic about my love for Twitter before. Its way of lessening the distance between artists, authors, and other people we admire is my absolute favorite reason for the micro-blogging social network. (A close second place is how it has changed the way I think in my own head. In pithy little statements [...]
January 16th, 2012On Christmas and material memory
1950s holiday cheer, and kitsch old & new 1954 sampling of Christmas decorations, which were one way that people made use of electricity in the Tennessee Valley, and the reason someone was paid by the TVA to document and photograph these things. One day last week, I spent the morning compiling and digitizing documents to [...]
December 11th, 2011