Posts Tagged ‘Polaroid’
“I get slightly obsessive about working in archives because you don’t know what you’re going to find. In fact, you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.”*…
An update on that remarkable treasure, The Internet Archive…
Within the walls of a beautiful former church in San Francisco’s Richmond district [the facade of which is pictured above], racks of computer servers hum and blink with activity. They contain the internet. Well, a very large amount of it.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit, has been collecting web pages since 1996 for its famed and beloved Wayback Machine. In 1997, the collection amounted to 2 terabytes of data. Colossal back then, you could fit it on a $50 thumb drive now.
Today, the archive’s founder Brewster Kahle tells me, the project is on the brink of surpassing 100 petabytes – approximately 50,000 times larger than in 1997. It contains more than 700bn web pages.
The work isn’t getting any easier. Websites today are highly dynamic, changing with every refresh. Walled gardens like Facebook are a source of great frustration to Kahle, who worries that much of the political activity that has taken place on the platform could be lost to history if not properly captured. In the name of privacy and security, Facebook (and others) make scraping difficult. News organisations’ paywalls (such as the FT’s) are also “problematic”, Kahle says. News archiving used to be taken extremely seriously, but changes in ownership or even just a site redesign can mean disappearing content. The technology journalist Kara Swisher recently lamented that some of her early work at The Wall Street Journal has “gone poof”, after the paper declined to sell the material to her several years ago…
A quarter of a century after it began collecting web pages, the Internet Archive is adapting to new challenges: “The ever-expanding job of preserving the internet’s backpages” (gift article) from @DaveLeeFT in the @FinancialTimes.
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As we celebrate collection, we might recall that it was on this date in 2001 that the Polaroid Corporation– best known for its instant film and cameras– filed for bankruptcy. Its employment had peaked in 1978 at 21,000; it revenues, in 1991 at $3 Billion.
“The older I get the more things I gotta leave behind, that’s life.”*…
It’s that time of year…
Worried about your carefully chosen holiday presents languishing on a container ship somewhere? We invite you to consider these select Supply Chain–resistant items, up for bid from the world of Sylvester Stallone!
The exclusive auction event presenting the extraordinary collection of the international superstar and the Golden Globe Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated actor, screenwriter, fitness icon, author, artist and director’s most cherished treasures from his singular life and career, [is] taking place on Sunday, December 5th at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills and live online at juliensauctions.com.
Give a piece of Rocky (or Rambo or Cobra or…): “Slice Through the Clutter of the Holiday Giving Season With a Little Something From the Personal Collection of Sylvester Stallone,” from @JOEMACLEOD666, @tomscocca, and the good folks at @Read_Indignity. Do browse: lots of knives…
* Sylvester Stallone, Rocky Balboa
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As we stock up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948 that Edwin Land’s Polaroid Land Camera Model 95– the first “instant” camera, producing finished prints in about a minute– went on sale for the first time. It was priced at a then-lofty $95 (to wit, the model number).
Polaroid originally manufactured sixty units of the camera. Fifty-seven were offered at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store for the Christmas holiday. Polaroid’s marketing department reckoned that the camera and film would remain in stock long enough to manufacture a second run based on customer demand. In the event, all fifty-seven cameras and all of the film were sold on the first day. Over 1.5 million units were sold over the next few years, before the company introduced new models.
“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself”*…
Andy Warhol enjoyed dressing for parties in drag, sometimes in dresses of his own design. He admired “the boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls,” so in 1981 he and a photographic assistant, Christopher Makos, agreed to collaborate on a session portraying Warhol in drag. In many ways, they modeled the series on Man Ray’s 1920s work with the French artist Marcel Duchamp, in which the two artists created a female alter ego name Rrose Sélavy for Duchamp.
Warhol and Makos made a number of pictures, both black-and-white prints and color Polaroids, of their first attempt. For the second round of pictures, they hired a theater makeup person. This stage professional better understood the challenge of transforming a man’s face into that of a woman. After the makeup, Warhol tried on curled, straight, long, short, dark, and blonde wigs…
More on Warhols collection of polaroid self-portraits– and more selections from it– at “Oh, You Pretty Thing! Polaroid Portraits of Andy Warhol in Drag.”
* Andy Warhol
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As we add “Jean Genie” to our playlists, we might note the irony that today is the birthday of both Soren Kierkegaard (1813), the Danish philosopher who was a fierce critic of Hegelianism, and of Karl Marx (1818), the Prussian philosopher (and “father of Communism”), who was one of Hegel’s strongest– and most concretely active– supporters. Thesis… anithesis…
Kierkegaard and Marx
Short– very short– stories…
Lou Beach is renown as an illustrator…
“Brand City,” Time
… and as a designer of album covers…
Blink 182, MCA
… but not so well-know as a writer. At least, not yet.
Beach has just finished a collection of stories that he calls 420 Characters, explaining in his preface:
The stories you are about to encounter were written as “status updates” on a large social networking site. These updates are limited to 420 characters, which include letters, spaces, and punctuation. They provided a daily exercise in fiction writing for the author, who hopes you enjoy them and return to read more. They will be regularly updated.
For example:
‘Whatcha wanna go on a game show for?’ She was disinclined to answer, thought it obvious, but said: ‘To win money and prizes and shit.’ She ran a wet finger around the rim of her glass, couldn’t make it sing. He continued ironing the napkins. ‘You gonna wear a costume?’ She turned slowly, found his eyes hovering in the iron’s steam, stared until he looked away. ‘I do not intend to make a fool of myself.’
The book is due out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on December 6, but readers can find it online here. More of Beach’s artwork is on display on his site, from which the examples above were selected.
As we distill, distill, distill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1948 that Edwin Land’s Polaroid Land Camera Model 95– the first “instant” camera, producing finished prints in about a minute– went on sale for the first time. It was priced at a then-lofty $95 (to wit, the model number).
Polaroid originally manufactured sixty units of the camera. Fifty-seven were offered at Boston’s Jordan Marsh department store for the Christmas holiday. Polaroid’s marketing department reckoned that the camera and film would remain in stock long enough to manufacture a second run based on customer demand. In the event, all fifty-seven cameras and all of the film were sold on the first day. Over 1.5 million units were sold over the next few years, before the company introduced new models.
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