first efforts

Pesto!

Spent much of my Saturday afternoon making pesto with basil from our garden. The purple might not look as spectacular as the green, but it promises to be just as tasty. And it sports the secret (well, not so secret now) ingredient of lemon rind to give it a little extra kick. A couple of these jars will go to friends as hostess gifts for various Labor Day weekend gatherings, and we'll happily eat up the rest ourselves. In addition, there's an ice cube tray full of both the purple and the green in the freezer, for when the garden is just a vague summery memory.

Alaska? Meet viral visual stereotyping.

This image is already floating around the blogosphere, fast becoming the representative image of the thriving metropolis over which Sarah Palin presided as mayor: Wasilla, Alaska. Judging from what I could dredge up on Google Image, it looks, topographically speaking, like a lovely place: mountains, lakes, trees, and water. But - fair or not - it is the awesomely named Mug-Shot Saloon and the rowdy, one-horse-town, nowheresville image it conjures that is likely to leave the most lasting impression.

DNC postscripts

The convention is over, but you can still check out the BAGnewsNotes archive of visual coverage and analysis. Michael Shaw and Alan Chin made an amazing team, and Chin's photographs are compelling, as always. Especially worthwhile is the Bill Clinton slideshow. It's only five images, but those five images say a heck of a lot about the man.

Staying up late (okay, late for me) and living with a live-blogger are exhausting. Especially when you have to get up at 6 to meet your running buddies the next morning. Tired of TV, last night I proposed a media blackout for a few days, as a way to decompress. But the horrified, "what about the Cubs?" look I got suggested that I was the only one interested in such decompression.

Now that McCain's picked a hockey mom instead of a hockey player, I suppose we'll have to turn our attention to the RNC next week. We'll be watching, and oa will likely do some live-blogging, though not as much as this past week. (I've been promised). I'll especially be on the lookout for how St. Small fares in the national spotlight. And how many times network reporters announce they are in "Minneapolis" instead of St. Paul. God, I hate that.

August 28, 1963

 

 

Photo credits: Library of Congress; National Archives

Traveling pantsuits

I suppose this photo in today's NYT* could be interpreted as yet another example of the MSM's sexism: Hillary gives the greatest speech of her career and you focus on her pantsuit choices? But I choose to read this image in a different way. First, note that it's men - large, manly men, in fact - who are testing out the various pantsuits against the blue backdrop where HRC will be speaking. It's not HRC or Chelsea out there fussing over her attire, it's the people who work for her. Because she's got more important things to think about. Second, it reveals the pragmatism of women professionals everywhere: if it fits and it's comfortable, then buy one in every color. As a professional woman who just bought identical skirts in brown and black, I identify. Finally, HRC herself embraces the dilemmas of women candidates, as her joke about the "sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits" last night suggested. For me, what the photo does more than anything else is remind us of the constructedness of the spectacle. Does anybody really think these folks just wander out to the mic and do their oratorical thing?

I would like to see a little more coverage of the Obama Blue ties on the men, though. It really is the male uniform of choice for this convention.

*The image does not appear in online NYT, as far as I could tell. I scanned this from p. A15 of the hard copy. Photo credit: Mark Wilson, Getty Images.

Bio diversity

I have a zero-time appointment in Art History. A few days ago I was asked to send them a short bio for their graduate student handbook. The copy they sent me to revise essentially reproduced my Department of Communication bio:

rhetorical criticism, rhetorical theory, photography, visual rhetoric, U.S. rhetorical history, U.S. women's rhetorical history, publics theory

The art history grad students here know me as the person who studies photography and asks odd questions about audience during colloquia. All that rhetoric stuff isn't very useful to them. So I revised my bio to this:

history of U.S. visual culture (esp. late 19th and early 20th centuries); photography; communication history; rhetoric; media and politics; relationships between visual culture and print culture

Still true to what I do and who I am, but a slightly different version of me.

This week in photography

Still recovering from a densely packed week, but never too tired to bring you a smattering of photography news that you can use...

It was inevitable that Sports Illustrated would give Michael Phelps the Mark Spitz treatment. Thank god porn star mustaches are no longer in fashion.

Several folks have asked me what I thought of this week's PBS program, "Documenting the Face of America," on the FSA project. It was only an hour long, so there's only so much you can do. I thought it did a good job of focusing on the project as a whole rather than the "great art" of individual photographers. I liked that it used the marvelous textual archives in addition to the visual one. And it snagged some good interviews, both the scholar/experts (F. Jack Hurley, Sally Stein, Beverly Brannon of the Library of Congress) and folks who were there (including the great "get" of Gordon Parks before he passed away). There were a few factual errors and they didn't give enough attention to the work of Russell Lee, who made a huge percentage of the photographs in the file. But these are small things; I'm going to use it in my visual politics class next spring in a short unit on the FSA. 

Looking for ongoing, insightful, critical coverage of the visual spectacle that is the Democratic National Convention? BAGnewsNotes has it all this coming week, including extended team coverage from some people The BAG calls "visual academics" - hey, wait, that's me!

Discombobulation

Our household is heavy into pre-semester stuff this week. While my oratorical half is busy getting oriented and being received (two orientations and three receptions this week alone), I'm busy orienting and receiving. So we're both more than a little discombobulated. Monday morning was the first time in a long time that I've had to pull myself together to be somewhere on campus in a 9-5 kind of way. And to top it off, I had to do it looking more or less like a real, professional professorchick: big-girl clothes, makeup, blow-dried hair. Yikes! As I scrambled around doing these and other things, I realized suddenly that I don't know how to do this here. Because of our move to the new house, I don't yet have a rote, automatic, bodily script for how to Do the Things You Have to Do to Get Out of the House in the Morning. I realized a new house and a new living situation means we have to re-write that script, too. And just when I was confidently telling people, "Yes, we're all settled in..."

If there were a Feline Olympics

We have watched a lot of the Olympics this past week, so my beloved and I think we know what it takes to be a champion. Here are five sports in which Cecil could win a gold medal:

1. Tail-Twitching

2. Window-Sitting (see photographic evidence; withering glance=extra style points)

3. Airing Grievances

4. Sharing Thoughts and Feelings

5. The Feline Heptathalon, also known as Getting In The Way:

Butting In At The Breakfast Table; Sitting On Your Newspaper; Being Underfoot While You Walk Down a Flight of Stairs; Noodging Your Laptop; Being a Better Door Than a Window; Sleeping On Your Hair; and Sitting On Papers You Need To Grade.

As far as human Olympians go, we have great news: Matt and the U.S. Rowing Men's Eight got a bronze!

Solo

I hit the Mahomet trail this morning for a five-mile solo outing and it kicked my butt. Sad to say, this pretty tame trail was the toughest run I've done (length+terrain) in a long time. In the month or so since solving that pesky shoe issue, I've done most of my solo runs using an 8 minute run/2 minute walk strategy, and that's worked pretty well to get me past that weird injury hump - so well that sometimes I forget it's time to take my walk break. I can't say that happened this morning, though. The run felt good but hard, especially because the walk breaks didn't coincide with any of the hills. 

But the temps were cool, the humidity low, and the prairie was bursting with yellow and purple flowers and butterflies. Being by myself gave me the chance to enjoy that, and also to plan my fall semester. Not my teaching or research, but my running. Here's The Plan: if I run at Mahomet on lots of Sunday mornings this fall, maybe even adding a bit of mileage, then by the time November rolls around I should be ready to join the TuffGirls on their Saturday morning 8 mile Parking Garage Runs (yes, it's exactly what it sounds like it is). And if I can spend a good chunk of winter Saturdays doing that, then I'll be ready to ramp up for whatever next spring has in store.

That's The Plan, anyway.