Dust on the Bookshelf

Defecting to Wordpress

Goodbye Typepad.
Hellooo wordpress!

Dear Readers,

From now on please find my blog, Dust on the Bookshelf, at the following address: http://sarahjessicajohnson.com/

I have officially switched over to Wordpress because I wanted more flexibility and creative control over my blog. I also now I have my own website. All my old posts and your comments have been moved over. So please add this site to your favorites and RSS feeds. Here's a snapshot/link below. I hope you enjoy the new look and set-up and keep reading!

All my love,

Sarah

http://sarahjessicajohnson.com/

Paragon Carousel

83 years, $2.25 a ride, and old-time music available only in Hull, Mass. There's something eerily pleasant about carousels. The lights, nausea and crying children are somehow irresistible to me. I can't help paying up every time I'm in Hull. Now their ride fares go towards preservation and restoration. 

photos by me

Meet the Friends of the Paragon Carousel

Street Etiquette

 

via streetetiquette.com

Street Etiquette is one of the most beautiful blogs I have seen this year. It combines excellent photography with an important mission: providing young black american men (and everyone else) with alternative styles to consider, with an emphasis on individuality, and the important history behind these looks.
You must check this out and the recent nytimes piece on the the blog.

http://streetetiquette.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/18/fashion/pushing-the-boundaries-of-black-style.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210

One Nation, Under Coins

busy day.

Tim Polenta, I mean Pawlenty, wants to be Vice President

Some of you may remember my earlier discussion comparing Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty with Polenta...

            And yet I can't stop thinking about Tim Pawlenty. This man:

            

            He seems nice enough from this picture. And I figured as the former governor of Minnesota he's probably smart enough too. Until I saw the video in which he thought Bill O'Reilly's calling him "vanilla" (re: plain) meant that O'Reilly was playing the race card. Or the video of the Republican presidential debate, after his "ObamneyCare" comment was brought up, in which he back-stepped and sucked-up so hard to Mitt Romney I thought he was just going to abandon his podium to go door-to-door for the former governor of Massachusetts.

            Geez, this guy seems lame, and confusingly so. Maybe comparing him with the food that always brings him to mind will stir some clarity into this melting pot.

            -Polenta -vs- Pawlenty
            -Bland unless well-seasoned -vs- Bland and politically unseasoned
            -congeals over hot fire -vs- breaks down under fire
            -sticks to your ribs -vs- sticks it to Mitt
            -can be molded into a loaf -vs- easily molded and aloof
            -vs- "vanilla"

I refresh your memory today to make a bold claim about the man. Tim Pawlenty wants to be Vice President. He always has. As mentioned above, TP was early afraid to stand up to Mitt Romney and refused to confront him in person. In this past week's Republican Presidential debate, TP was given the opportunity to actually confront Romney on his state health care plan and defend his creation of the term "Obamneycare."
   
In that clip TP is evasive as ever and while he does stand behind his creation of the term, he mostly focuses on how he better contrasts with President Obama than Mr. Romney.

But it gets better. After the moderator asks many of the candidates about certain absent figures (Rick Perry and Sarah Palin), TP takes the opportunity on an unrelated question to name drop and highlight a time he got to hang out with Rick Perry. Watch the clip for yourself, but all I heard him say was "pick me rick! pick me!"
  

Sunday Pawlenty officially dropped out of the race for Republican Presidential nominee. He came in third in the Iowa straw poll. A day earlier, Rick Perry announced that he would run for president (here we go again, texas). Seems that TP probably ticked Mitt Romeny off one too many times, but lucky for Tim, he has not yet gotten on Rick's bad-side. He practically gave him a shout out and a thumbs up at this weekend's debate. 

As I said before, like polenta, Pawlenty can be easily molded into any desired shape. So I would not be surprised if we soon saw him take the form of a Mockingbird, Texas' state bird, and perch himself on the roof of Rick Perry's camp, mimicking any cry that political campaign makes. 

You've Got Mail

I wasn't kidding about my affinity for post cards and thought I'd share my latest aquisition with my dear readers. 

Good friend Mateo Corby has moved to São Paulo after graduation. He's always been a traveling man, and while he's signed up for a yeas in Brazil, he won't have to stay completely put. So far his work with education has taken him all around the country to other cities including Paraty, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia.
Mateo is ever the lover of trivia, especially that which is geographical in nature. So he shares with you and me a few fun facts about São Paulo. Enjoy.

1 The third largest city in the world, and largest in the Americas, Sao Paulo has about 18 million people.
2 There are over 30 parks and 15 million square meters of green space in the SP.
3 The largest Japanese community outside of Japan can be found here.

Them! a cold war film.

I began this blog by writing about worms, but today I switch to a more terrifying insect, the ant! or a film about them at least. 

Them! is the 1954 classic black and white horror film about ginormous mutated ants who begin killing people in the New Mexico desert. 
I describe and recommend it today  as a cold war film- a movie to be enjoyed and understood in the long complex context of the 20th century global battle for nuclear supremacy and control.

I knew that I would like this movie when Dr. Harold Medford (played by Edmund Gwenn aka the santa claus in the original Miracle on 34th Street) upon finding the giant colony with his daughter-scientist Pat and local police, looked off-camera into the distant desert range and said, "We may be witnesses to a Biblical prophecy come true- 'And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation and the beast shall reign over the earth'"
Writing out this quote eliminates some of the abiguity that it creates in the film. Does the doctor refer to the beast, the one and only devil/antichrist/etc or the beasts- the animals that already roam this planet? When certain species grow giant after exposure to man-made nuclear chemicals and radiation, our self-drawn conclusion of humans as the dominant most developed species is called into question. 

This movie is truly scary! Dr. Medford's presentation on the nature of ants-- they are war-like, super strong, industrious, organized killers-- is taken in with the understanding that these characteristics apply ten-fold to the twenty foot monsters burrowing underneath American soil. If you were scared watching The Hills Have Eyes, consider viewing this throw-back film where special effects are not the driving force of fear. These ant puppets hearken back to the (definitely frightening) robot puppets on stage at Chuck E. Cheese, but it is the movie's set up, concept and the implied consequences of an army of giant vicious mutant ants that left me holding my breath, squirming in my seat, praying for the safety of the city of Los Angeles.

The discomforting last lines of the film are as follows:
Robert Graham: Pat, if these monsters got started as a result of the first atomic bomb in 1945, what about all the others that have been exploded since then? 
Dr. Pat Medford: I don't know. 
Dr. Harold Medford: Nobody knows, Robert. When Man entered the atomic age, he opened a door into a new world. What will he eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict. 

Even with American victory at the end of the movie, the message of the piece is shaming, ominous and clear: humans, with their nuclear weapons, are messing with the natural order of life and death, disturbing so greatly the world's ecosystem that all sort of choas is probable. By creating a means for global destruction, humans are setting themselves up for a destruction of the status quo- their sense of power and control based off of a constructed world order.

My message is see the film, see Them! This little girl did:

 

 

The Lost Art of Postcard Writing by Charles Simic | The New York Review of Books

From NYRblog, "The Lost Art of Postcard Writing"

Here it is already August and I have received only one postcard this summer. It was sent to me by a European friend who was traveling in Mongolia (as far as I could deduce from the postage stamp) and who simply sent me his greetings and signed his name. The picture in color on the other side was of a desert broken up by some parched hills without any hint of vegetation or sign of life, the name of the place in characters I could not read. Even receiving such an enigmatic card pleased me immensely. This piece of snail mail, I thought, left at the reception desk of a hotel, dropped in a mailbox, or taken to the local post office, made its unknown and most likely arduous journey by truck, train, camel, donkey—or whatever it was— and finally by plane to where I live.

via www.nybooks.com

Some of you dear readers may be aware of my extensive postcard collection (hundreds). it began when I was in middle school and grows every few weeks. As a result, i am enthusiastic to share this blog post from the New York Book Review (thanks esther!) concerning the motivations and tribulations of postcard writers. The author posits a dichotomy of post-card sender types: those who pick the iconic image from their visit and send sentimental notes about traveling, and those who find the funky if not absurd image and write a quirky, ideally humorous, note to the intended recipient.

I was struck by one interesting historical observation made by the author. He questions the existence of a "post-card literature" (very hist and lit of him) and refers to the very brief pointed messages that accompanied post-cards in the early 20th century. I have picked up a couple of vintage cards over the years and indeed they often contain the most serious of news. Marriages, deaths, funerals, and births were all announced by carte-postale. And I wonder, was it the relative cheapness or telegram-like aspect of post-cards that caused people to trust them (no envelope to speak of) with their most intimate and private of messages?

I occasionally grapple with the lack of anonymity of the post-card. Any one at the post office can read my note! Of course, I always realize that no one at the post office cares what I wrote. Furthermore, with the impending slashing of USPS jobs fewer actual people will be reading them.
We should all send a few more of these colorful personal notes, it might seriously boost the Post's numbers while helping to perpetuate a dying print "literature."

 one of my more recent aquisitions. Text on back: "Hi Sarah! Greetings from hot-hot-hot (literally Phnom Penh." author will remain anonymous...

The DAP - On the Scene/ Interviews

The DAP - On the Scene/ Interviews

I will now be contributing to a awesome new blog called the Diverse Arts Project! Please check it out. There are some really great cultural observers and flaneurs on this site. You've now got two to follow, dear readers.

does Frank Norris speak of cities?

I am giddy to begin a new book today. It was referenced in my class on the American Gilded Age (1870-1900) and nestled in the used book basement of the Harvard Book Store for a whopping $2.50.

The Octopus by Frank Norris, (full title: The Epic of Wheat: The Octopus, a Story of California) was published in 1901 as part of an intended three part series about wheat. Norris sadly died after completing the second volume. But Norris, who the inside cover of this book describes as "strikingly handsome" wrote about more than just wheat. He wanted to capture, in style of the newly popular european realists, the destructive push and pull between wheat farmers and railroad monopolies in the West. He essayed to show how these big businesses, a popular depiction of them at this time was in the form of an octopus, hurt American families and small businesses while poisoning the whole industry with their black gold ink. Unclear if Norris will at any point talk about "big government" but I look forward to the likely parallels in his contemporary nostalgia for a wild, more independent if not personal, America and some opinions expressed today at a changing american market and economy.

For now a passage, in which I feel Norris may not only be talking about sheep. His dreary account of this pack resonates with some the turn-of-the-century fears of big American cities becoming urban wastelands of lost anonymous souls. 

The sheep were spread out roughly in the shape of a figure eight, two larger herds connected by a smaller, and were headed to the southward, moving slowly, grazing on the wheat stubble as they proceeded. But the number seemed incalculable. Hundreds upon hundreds of gray, rounded backs, all exactly alike, huddled, close-packed, alive, hid the earth from sight. It was no longer an aggregate of individuals. It was a mass-- a compact, solid, slowly moving mass, huge, without form, like a tick pressed growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth. From it there arose a vague murmur, confused, inarticulate, like the sound of very distant surf, while all the air in the vicinity was heavy with the warm, ammoniacal odor of the thousands of crowding bodies (28).

Standard Oil as the Octopus

 
"The curse of California" Railroad monopoly as the octopus