Posts Tagged ‘Salvation Army’
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”*…
Readers will know that (R)D delights in the works of Banksy. So it will come as no surprise that your correspondent has a warm spot in his heart for Jeff Friesen. An award-winning photographer, Friesen is also a dedicated dad who makes LEGO dioramas with his daughter June. Their latest project: a series of meticulously-constructed homages to the great street artists himself… a series that Friesen and June call “Bricksy.”
See them all at “Bricksy: LEGO Banksy.”
[TotH to My Modern Met]
* Banksy
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As we resolve, with Banksy, to “speak softly, but carry a big can of paint,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1892 that Australia’s first real film production house, The Limelight Department, was set up by the Salvation Army in Melbourne. In its 19 years of operation, the Limelight Department produced both evangelistic material (from the simplest lantern slides to Christian epics of redemption) and secular documentaries commissioned by private and government contract. In all, the operation created about 300 films of various lengths (making it one of largest film producers of its time) until it was summarily closed by a new Commander, a puritanical Scot who “protected” Salvationists from films for many decades. Sadly, the Limelight films were destroyed in the 1950s.
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.
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