USA in the 1950s

A soupçon of synchronicity was experienced at the weekend. On Saturday I was led, via a link at naked capitalism, to some photographs:
20+ Rarely Seen Photos Of America In The 1950’s Show How Different Life Was Before

Monika Brazaitytė wrote:

"The 1950’s are often viewed as a golden era in U.S. history, a time of happiness and prosperity, despite the threat of nuclear annihilation, racial segregation and the looming Cold War.

While most photos from the time are in black and white, color photography was still a relative novelty at the time and the film was quite expensive for regular people, the photos below are in glorious color. This means that they are more relatable, and makes the period feel closer to us than ever.

Many of the photos were collected by Denis Fraevich, a New Yorker of Russian descent who loves to bring the era back to life. “The pictures were found at auctions, flea markets and yards, digitized and posted on the Internet,” he told Bored Panda........"

An interesting collection of photos!

Later the same day we decided to rent a handful of DVDs for weekend viewing. One of my choices, watched the same evening, was picked purely due to director and cast members: Suburbicon. The movie, directed by George Clooney, was originally a Coen Brothers vehicle from the 1980s, but was shelved until Clooney came along, re-wrote parts of it and took over direction. Matt Damon and Julianne Moore have starring roles. How bad could this be?

It was, in fact, pretty bad! Synchronicity? Well the story is set in much the same era as depicted by those photographs I'd looked at just hours before. In fact it was almost as though some of those photographs were coming to life before my eyes.

Suburbicon is a mess of a movie, although it did hold our interest. The storyline didn't go where we initially thought it was going, there were continual deviations along with a fumbled attempt to weave two separate themes together.

The ultimate message, for viewers who managed to stay with the film to the end, was that back in the 1950s, racial hatred in the USA was so intense that it could blind the seriously prejudiced to such an extent that pure evil, going on right under their noses, was able to pass, almost without notice.

After watching Suburbicon, those photographs mentioned at the top of the post didn't seem at all "Golden Age-ish". The 1950s, in the USA anyway, had distinctly creepy underpinnings!

GUEST POST ~ by "Anyjazz" on Music Monday

What follows comes from a post written by my husband on his blog "Thinks Happen" in 2008. I stumbled across it in searching for something else and decided the post ought not to be wasting away, hidden in the depths of defunct blogdom. In its original setting the piece can be accessed via the link at the foot of this post.

NEVER THROW AWAY A PICTURE. WE ARE ALL WE HAVE.


The camera tried hard to get a shot for me but the lighting and the inept operator gave only a marginal result. The shutter was open too long and Alison Young moved.

That’s okay. The memory of listening to her play live comes back just as well with this shot as with any other. As my wife and others will attest, when I hear a really talented musician or a really wonderful performance, I tend to weep. Yes, I know.

As I sat in the dark at an after-hours jam session during an Ottawa Jazz Festival, I was often a bit misty eyed. Talented musicians, relaxed before a small audience, played as they felt, often only for their own appreciation. Good stuff.

One such night, a young fellow played an alto sax solo backed with rhythm and piano. His technique was good, polished; his chorus was fresh and welcome. Then as he finished, he unhooked the alto from its neck strap and handed it to a red-haired girl standing just out of the spotlight. After a couple hearty solo piano choruses, 19 year old Alison Young stepped into the light and began to play that same alto sax. And tears came instantly to my eyes. Yes, I was impressed.

It was the same saxophone but nothing else was the same. Her tone and range set her apart. Her attack and enthusiasm made it fascinating. Most of all, her inventiveness kept the listener sitting up straight. I’ll never forget it. When she finished we all realized we had been holding our collective audience breath.

Every moment of our lives has that possibility to connect with someone. Each moment has that ability to be an important moment in someone’s life.

Perhaps as a race we are losing that capability to empathize with our fellow humans. We have become protectorates, isolationists in our own being. We fear or loath connection so much that we avoid sharing any of ourselves. We only perceive the surface of others, not the warmth within.

A child knows how. A child has the ability to freely observe moments from everything, collecting, mimicking and blending. But just like the fairy tales and goblins, this talent fades away as adulthood comes jack booting down the life path.

We can rail on about conservation and brotherly love. We can preach about faith and hope and charity. We can be reliable or lie and make work or leisure for ourselves. We can vote and debate and scoff and complain.

But in the final analysis: we are all we have.


http://jabberclarks.blogspot.com/2008/02/alison-young-and-moment.html

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. Carl Jung

A few of husband's quirky photos from our trip last week:

 My caption:  Cleanest dirty shirt time!

Toilet? Sorry!  There were lots of sad animal pelts in this corner, and nowhere to barf!

 Mantoys?

 Mantoys II

 Husband's caption: "If you look a little bit closer, it's easy to trace
Oh, the tracks of my tears stairs."

My caption was:  
"Once upon a time
The world was sweeter than we knew
Everything was ours  stairs
How happy we were then
But somehow once upon a time
Never comes again."

My caption:  Ascendancy of The Greens

Friday, Saturday & Sundry "Grub"

I've heard that people on Facebook like to photograph their food using smartphone/cellphone. I recall that my husband, occasionally, has taken pics of food he's preparing or has prepared, or something interesting set before us in a restaurant, if his camera happened to be handy at the time. I trawled through as many of his Flickr pages as I could before going cross-eyed and came up with these. Clicking on the pics should take you to the pages of their origin.




In preparation



In waiting




Ravioli Anyjazz



Squash Anyjazz (a dish, not a command!)




In the supermarket



Hearty



Snacky



Fancy (in a restaurant in Austin, Texas - I think).





Experimenting with warm Greek-ish salad.



Colourful and healthy in a small cafe in Norman, Oklahoma.



'Murican favourite: peanut butter and jelly on toast.




Back in the UK, 2003/4 during a break from shopping in Debenham's department store snack bar.


The two following come from an era pre-Twilight - I know nothing!

THERE WILL NOW BE AN

.........Learning Curve on the Ecliptic will be on hold for a while, but...
I'll be back.

Our Cousins Around the Globe

This Photographer Is Making It His Mission To Document Faces Around The World -
“Our diversity is not a reason to hate each other. Quite the opposite, we must admire and respect it.”

Superb facial portraits of some of our many cousins - do scroll all the way down!

"When words become unclear...."

Getting away from both politics and astrology for a moment - some beautiful photographs of gardens and other scenic delights:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35476291

Some of those splendid gardens reminded me of visits Anyjazz and I took to some "stately homes" and gardens close to where I lived in England. Most of the photographs we took have become buried under mounds of later photos and linger in digital dark dungeons. I found these strays among my own files, they were taken in parts of the gardens of a splendid old stately home, must've been in the spring of 2004. A chess board had been added to the lovely gardens for additional amusement; and a maze. Clicking on the photographs might produce clearer versions.

QUOTE: “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” ~ Ansel Adams

SAFEKEEPING

The first part of this post is in the nature of a Guest Post by my husband, aka "anyjazz", after which I've added a few lines myself.

By "anyjazz"
Prompted by the post:
The Good and Not So Old Days,
from Thursday, May 28, 2015 -

At the risk of sounding like a rabid conspiracy theorist, here are some thoughts on the digital era.

Unless one of our current minimum-wage PhDs invents a completely tamper-proof, loss proof digital system, humanity is doomed to lose a substantial segment of subtleties in its history. The big facts will remain in memory but the detail found in photographic documentation will be gone. Forever.

A few years ago my daughter boasted videos and photographs of a great grandson’s beginnings. She documented his first steps, words and other childhood events. All on her phone. The data could not be transferred to anything, another phone, a computer, a “cloud” or a disk. The history is lost.

How do we examine some history of say, the 1920’s? We read about it and look at the plethora of pictures and cinema from that era, printed and reprinted in books. We can look at that old, black-page photograph album from the closet shelf that great grandma put together with US in mind! That decade was nearly a hundred years ago. What will be left of the current era a hundred years from now?

Will there be “clouds” of photographs and text available conveniently for perusal and education? Or are we doomed to become more and more uninformed about the reality we live in?

Twilight is right. One big bang and it’s all gone. Or perhaps “not available” to an inquiring mind. History might be reduced to oral stories from memory, passed down in limited quantities to new memories; New memories that do not have the depth and color of their predecessors, nor their passion.

What was the government’s big problem with the Vietnam disaster? It was on television, step by step, mistake by mistake. People saw it. People didn’t want any more of it. The lucrative war machine ground to a halt for a while. That’s not going to happen again. No more satellite transmissions of digital television from on the scene.

If George Orwell had known of this digital development, he would have said “Aha! See! I told you so.” Keep the public uninformed of current events. Keep historical events dim so that they can be re-written at any time. You can’t say things are better or worse today than they were yesterday, because you don’t accurately remember yesterday. The corporate governments won’t want you making those comparisons anyway.

And after all, deleting data files is much safer and tidier than burning books.

Even without dire calamity removing the internet from our lives, there are still problems associated with our digital way of life. An interesting article explains:

Google boss warns of 'forgotten century' with email and photos at risk...Digital material including key historical documents could be lost forever because programs to view them will become defunct, says Vint Cerf.

Snip:

The warning highlights an irony at the heart of modern technology, where music, photos, letters and other documents are digitised in the hope of ensuring their long-term survival. But while researchers are making progress in storing digital files for centuries, the programs and hardware needed to make sense of the files are continually falling out of use.

“We are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,” Cerf told the Guardian. “If there are photos you really care about, print them out.”

It's good to have precious photographs and documents available in both paper and digital form - "proper" photos and papers can be lost for ever too - as I know very well due to having lost all of my own to fire in 1996. Fortunately my mother's collection provided some replacements, but the majority remain lost forever.

 At Shutterfly

One method of saving photographs the "paper-way", while still taking advantage of our digital world, is to make up a "photo book" with the help of one of the several companies offering this service: Walgreens, Shutterfly etc. Here's a comparison and review of the ten currently offering this service. We haven't yet used this service, but intend to do so.

Seeing signs......

When we're out and about and see signs, husband can never resist snapping them. Here are a few examples, signs of life as she is lived in "flyover" America. Captions are mine. Clicking on an image will take you to its original location on husband's Flickr pages ~~~





"gods' "....which ones are involved in this I wonder? Mars, Jupiter, Apollo?





Hmmm...erm...(never mind)






We're like...spontaneous ya know, unpremeditated - or maybe meditating.






I do not want to wonder if there is a connection!






Just...LOL!






"No worries"? I'd be very worried indeed having a massage in that place, on my back or on my front!






Do we have to tick a box as we enter the store then, to indicate our preference, should it come to that? (Hope they're getting me on my best side.)





(We're mere reflections of ourselves in this one).
As husband (anyjazz) responded to one of his commenters, "..if no one tells you to get stuffed, you're not trying hard enough."


PS...Next post will be on Monday. It's our wedding anniversary (11th) today, 30 April so, weather permitting, we'll be slipping into north Texas for a couple of days in celebration, and for a change of scene.

Monday's "Misty Watercolor Memories"

Bypassing dismal national and international news, and searching for something on a disc of stuff recorded in the UK from my first home computer, I found, among many photographs, a few of my garden there. I'd forgotten how much I used to enjoy fiddling around in the garden - I hesitate to call what I did real gardening, because it wasn't. I'd go to the market on the bus, haul back as many plants as I could carry, put 'em in, feed them with anything that took my fancy - one year it was a bag of dried elephant poop (!), water them with rainwater collected in water butts behind the shed, and watch them grow. Sometimes I'd grow from seeds too. Flowers and shrubs, always - not vegetables; also I avoided the bother of having lawn or grass plots, anywhere in the garden, or in the small square area at the front of the house - gravel was my friend. I had inherited a good base for my pleasures, with what was already mature in the long, narrow back garden; all I did was add to it, re-arrange, re-new, revitalise.

Those photographs, and a song from Ms Streisand to match:

Memories, light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolor memories...

If memory serves me well, I took most of these, but husband definitely took the one of the bee on the Rhododendron with his powerful camera, and maybe the bud immediately before it.

Click on the images for larger versions of the photographs.