Posts Tagged ‘Disneyland’
“Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities”*…
Readers will remember Lori Nix and her glorious photo collection”Unnatural History.” As it happens, Ms. Nix has been working for even longer on another series, one that centers on intricate dioramas that she constructs and shoots in her Brooklyn apartment.
From the description of the book that captures the work:
Over the past eight years, Lori Nix (born 1969) has created meticulously detailed model environments and then photographed them–locations within a fictional city that celebrate modern culture, knowledge and innovation. But her monuments of civilization are abandoned, in a state of ruin where nature has begun to repopulate the spaces. “I am fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with the idea of the apocalypse. In addition to my childhood experiences growing up with natural disasters in Kansas, I also watched disaster flicks in the 1970s. Each of these experiences has greatly influenced my photographic work.” Nix considers herself a “faux landscape photographer” and spends months building the complex spaces before photographing them. As critic Sidney Lawrence wrote in Art in America: “Oddly endearing, terrifying and often electrifyingly plausible, [Nix’s tableaux] prod us to ponder the fact that, like it or not, our fate is uncertain”
Explore more of Nix’s post-apocalyptic metropolis (and find links to her other work) here.
* Marcus Terentius Varro
###
As we don’t even try to keep ’em down on the farm, we might recall that it was on this date in 1861 that Anaheim, California got it first post office and its inaugural Postmaster, John Fischer. Four years earlier, a group of German immigrants, disillusioned with their lot as prospectors in Northern California, moved south to grow grapes; a group of 50 of them settled in what is now Anaheim and founded the town.
Within a few decades the grapes were long gone. Anaheim developed first into an industrial center, producing electronics, aircraft parts and canned fruit, then into a travel destination: it is, of course, the site of the Disneyland Resort, the collection of theme parks and hotels that opened in 1955, Angel Stadium, Honda Center, and the Anaheim Convention Center, the largest convention center on the West Coast.
Then
What goes around…
George Packer described in the New York Times what happens to the clothes that one drops with charity…
If you’ve ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive, chances are that you’ve dressed an African. All over Africa, people are wearing what Americans once wore and no longer want. Visit the continent and you’ll find faded remnants of secondhand clothing in the strangest of places. The ”Let’s Help Make Philadelphia the Fashion Capital of the World” T-shirt on a Malawian laborer. The white bathrobe on a Liberian rebel boy with his wig and automatic rifle. And the muddy orange sweatshirt on the skeleton of a small child, lying on its side in a Rwandan classroom that has become a genocide memorial. A long chain of charity and commerce binds the world’s richest and poorest people in accidental intimacy. It’s a curious feature of the global age that hardly anyone on either end knows it.
Mother Jones and the International Reporting Project collected a stunning gallery that helps those on this end of the chain better appreciate the other.
The circumstantially-ironic commentary of the photos is just a bonus…
"Iowa: Nothing to do since 1772" shirt worn by University of Liberia student
More wonderful pix– all shot in November, 2010 in Liberia, West Africa, “where former warlords tend rice paddies and American t-shirts are sold in heaps under the hot African sun”– at Mother Jones‘ “Where Do Goodwill Clothes Go?”
As we appreciate the long reach of the global market, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that Walt Disney announced plans for Disneyland in Anaheim, California. Construction was begun on July 21st of that year, and the park opened a year-and-a-day later.
Tres exclusif…
I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member…
– Groucho Marx
From DreyX, “Ten Places You Can’t Go“… for example:
Since 1967, Disney’s Exclusive Club 33: Walt Disney felt that he needed a special private place where he could entertain sponsors and other guests. After he had died Disney Land decided to make Club 33 open only to special members and their guests. Located at at the heart of New Orleans Square at Disney Land, it gives the members and their guests exclusive access to the club’s restaurant, and the premises which are not open to the public at large. After Disney’s death Club 33 had opened itself with special limited memberships to the public. As of June 2007, the membership waiting list was 14 years, and membership interest list was closed to new inquiries as of April/May 2007.
Or
Metro-2 in Moscow: Russia has a secret underground metro system which parallels the public Moscow Metro. The length of Metro-2 is rumored to exceed even that of the “civil” (i.e. public) Metro. (It is said to have 4 lines and lie 50 to 200 m deep. It is said to connect the Kremlin with the FSB headquarters, the government airport at Vnukovo-2, and an underground town at Ramenki, in addition to other locations of national importance. In the late 1940s Stalin had created the tunnels in the event of a nuclear war. In 1994, a group of urban diggers had stumbled on to the underground system. Though not much more information is known known to the public about this.
See the other eight– from the Vatican’s Archive to Area 51– here.
As we manage our aspirations, we might frame a close-up of D.W. Griffith, a father of cinema, who arrived in Los Angeles on this date in 1910 in search of a sunny climate and a range of scenery. With a stock company that he brought with him (including such future luminaries as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish), Griffith began producing one- and two-reelers for Biograph. After shooting over 450 shorts for Biograph, Griffith struck out on his own to make his powerfully-influential– but equally-powerfully controversial– Birth of a Nation (1915). On the heels of the criticism (and in some quarters, riots) that greeted this history of the Civil War and the Ku Klux Klan, Griffith made Intolerance (1916), meant to prove his opposition to racism; at $2.5 million, it was by far the most expensive film ever made– and ruined Griffith financially. But he rebounded, and in 1919 co-founded United Artists with Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. To this day, the highest honor bestowed by the Directors’ Guild of America is “The D.W. Griffith Award.”
The romance of retail…
But then, Zippy can console himself that, as recent honoree H.L. Mencken observed, “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
As we revisit our plans to open that book store, we might recall that this is the anniversary of the premiere (in 1954) of Walt Disney’s first prime-time television program (Disneyland, on ABC; later re-titled The Wonderful World of Disney), the second longest running television franchise in the country (as measured in seasons aired), and arguably the nation’s first major full-length infomercial (…though Bonomo, The Magic Clown, which ran on NBC from 1949 to 1954– and which was essentially an advertisement for Bonomo Turkish Taffy– has a defensible rival claim to that honor).
Your correspondent is headed for points antipodal, where, as it happens, the drains do not spiral in a different direction, but where connectivity promises to be uncertain… consequently, for the next week or so, these missives are likely to be more roughly than daily.
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Is it real or is it…?
source: Life
On a continuing theme of (Roughly) Daily (c.f., e.g., here and here): the “grand old man” of pictorial journalism, Life, offers a series of arresting photos and asks “Real or Fake?”
As we squint, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that master of illusion, Walt Disney, previewed Disneyland to the press in anticipation of opening it to the public the following day.
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