first efforts

5 things to love about Evanston

For roughly ten years I spent lots of time in Evanston. On the occasion of my return for a few days, I ask, what's not to love?

1. The lakefront. 'Nuf said.

2. The New Deal era post office on the corner of Oak and Davis and its sexy social realist art. How can you not love a gold 7-ft. tall mailman?

3. The Lucky Platter for breakfast.

4. The lakefront. Oh, wait, I already said that.  Lulu's!

5. The Unicorn Cafe. I wrote most of my dissertation there. Longhand, people!

Wordling my book

Taking a cue from metaspencer and others on the value of tag clouds to help you "see" what your work is about, I ran the final five pages of my book introduction through Wordle and here's what emerged:

This is a pretty fair representation of the book's focus. The image also tells me that the things I think matter most about the project (such as recognition and viewership) are coming across in my writing, at least via repetition. That's good to know.

Tweet!

A few weeks ago I blogged about our new neighbors on the back porch; here's the result of all their labor. Cute in a hideous, prehistoric way, no?

Political documentary

Though my beloved knows just about everything you can know about the Kennedys (both J- and R -FK), he had never seen Robert Drew's pioneering 1960 documentary, Primary, nor its 1963 Drew Associates' cousin, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment. This must be remedied! Visual politics girl to the rescue! We watched the former this past week and our new DVD of the latter arrived today, just in time for Memorial Day weekend viewing.

I first saw both films as an undergraduate in Robert Thurber's "Documentary Tradition" course at the University of St. Thomas. In that context, our focus was on the films' pioneering cinema verite style, which eschewed conventional photography and the standard "voice of god" narrator in favor of a candid camera approach and natural sound. The result was an unguarded, and seemingly "real," film. But of course that's the genius and the paradox of documentary, what documentary pioneer John Grierson famously called "the creative treatment of actuality." We're used to such approaches today, but at the time they were positively revolutionary.

Primary follows 1960 candidates Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy as they campaigned across Wisconsin. From the opening frames Drew sets up the key juxtapositions. Kennedy is the urban, ethnic, Catholic candidate, while Humphrey is (often quite eloquently) "for the farmers."  Kennedy is surrounded by professional advisors who crunch the numbers and work the system, while Humphrey strategizes largely alone. And the one with deep resonance coming off of the election of 2008: Kennedy is a celebrity with a beautiful wife surrounded by throngs of adoring crowds (lots and lots of young women), Humphrey is a regular guy walking the streets of small towns (Tomah!), all shoeleather and handshakes and retail politics. The shots following Kennedy into claustrophobically crowded public events, or shooting him from behind in handshake/autograph receiving lines, are especially pointed: he nearly glows with enigmatic celebrity and people stumble all over themselves in his presence. In the film's parlance, he really was better looking and more fabulous than you and me and everybody else. Humphrey, bless his Minnesota heart, was not. Kinda makes you feel for Hillary all over again.

All is not lost for our beloved HHH, though. Not to be missed are an impassioned, populist plea to an audience of local farmers and a scene in which he shows his sharp, calculating side as he strategizes how to handle the questions in a televised call-in show.

We'll be watching Crisis next, a film that follows Attorney General Robert Kennedy's attempts to negotiate the integration of the University of Alabama in June 1963.

Lens: A new NYT photography blog

When C. emailed me about Lens, the new photography blog at the New York Times, I worried that in all the end-of-the-semester hubub I was woefully out of the blogospheric loop. How had I missed this? Then I realized it's brand-new. So, thanks to C. of course, I'm not actually out of the loop after all. Phew! It is so hard to keep up.

I encourage you to check it out. Unlike most blogs, it's actually designed to emphasize the visual, with features like full-screen available on each post. Today's post gives additional background on what Barbie Zelizer would call an "about-to-die" photograph of Pfc. Richard Dewater in Afghanistan. Dewater was photographed by NYT photographer Tyler Hicks just moments before he was killed by a bomb blast. The heartbreaking photo was published last month as part of an outstanding series on Afghanistan; it (and other Hicks photographs from that day) are featured in this slideshow.

From what I can tell so far, the posts combine "picture of the day" features with more substantive behind-the-scenes pieces like the Hicks photos. Happily, it looks like they'll also be digging into the archives, judging from this post on how Iowans dealt with foreclosures in 1933.

Finally, this one-minute video from a White House pool photographer is perhaps the clearest definition of a "photo op" you can get. I'll be showing this to students in my visual politics class next fall.

(A link to Lens is now to your right, along with a hodgepodge of other things I'm lookin' at).

First harvest!

It's been 6 weeks since we planted the garden and here's the first teeny crop of greens, harvested this morning. This makes me ridiculously happy, and probably disproportionately so. Lots of people garden, of course, so it's no big deal. Except that this is OUR first crop of greens grown from OUR very own seeds in OUR very own dirt in OUR very own new vegetable garden, so I am very, very excited.

If you've seen my visual chronicle on Facebook this is probably old news, but we're using the Square Foot Gardening system (book here and cheesy YouTube videos here) and so far It. Is. Awesome.

 

You build boxes that are 4 by 4 feet square, hence 16 square feet total for each box. Then you divide each box into separate one square foot sections, and plant the appropriate number of plants/seeds in each. There are several advantages to this system. Because you are building a raised bed you can control the soil you use and the mix they recommend using has great drainage (nice given how rainy this spring has been). In addition, you can grow a lot in a very small space. We have devoted one box to herbs, and in the other two we were able to cram 4 kinds of greens, radishes, peppers, broccoli, cucumbers, strawberries, carrots, green beans, snap peas, and 2 kinds of onions. And get this: there's virtually no weeding. Everything is grown so intensively that whatever weeds pop up are tiny and swiftly yanked. Finally, you can rotate easily; when something's done, you can just start over in the square and plant something else. I'm looking forward to playing with multiple plantings and, later in the summer, planting cold-weather crops for fall and early winter.

But first: salad!

Cat sleeps on dog bed? Now I've seen everything...

Picturing policy

Could there be anything more boring than pictures of people in meetings? The White House doesn't seem to think so. The White House Photostream at Flickr is filled with photographs like this one: people sitting around a table, or in a circle of chairs in the Oval Office, talking, gesturing, taking notes, listening.

Take this photograph, for example, made this past Monday by White House photographer Pete Souza. According to its caption, this is a photograph of President Obama "meeting with heathcare reform stakeholders in the Roosevelt Room." 21 people (mostly white men) are gathered around a conference table. The "stakeholders" are mostly silent, while the President does the talking and gesturing. He's on the far right of the image, but everyone (including FDR) is looking at him, so that's where we look too. Apart from noticing (yet again) the visual symbolism of FDR (you want him on that wall! you need him on that wall!), this photograph is pretty uninspired.

Judging from the photo alone, the meeting above certainly does not look like the adjectives used this week to describe it: "significant," "a watershed event" and "remarkable." Indeed, most news reports suggest that folks around the table had probably agreed to particular concessions before they ever got to the Roosevelt Room. Yet in only two days it has already circulated as the visual marker of an important moment in the history of health care reform. Whatever happens from here - whether this image is later seen to mark the beginning of real reform or, as one story put it, it turns out to have been just another "photo-op"- it does have an important rhetorical function. Souza's photo (and the many others like it) serves as a visual record of the first rule of deliberation: getting everyone to sit down at the same table. And you can be sure that Obama wants us to know that's more than some past presidents have been able to do.

Nesting

Somehow we missed this construction project going on right outside our back door. A few weeks ago I started finding little organic stringy pieces on the back steps, then looked up and realized we're in trouble. There's definitely an egg (or more?) in there, because every time we open the back door and go out onto the porch the mom (or dad?) bird flaps away to distract us from the nest.

Last summer a bird nested in one of our hanging pots on the porch, and we had the same situation. We didn't think much of it - we figured we could all coexist happily. Except that after the babies were born, the mother didn't fly away when we came onto the porch. She dive-bombed our heads instead.

A picture worth 328,835 words, er, dollars

This is the result of the Air Force One flyover flap. What do you think? Was it worth the $328,835 of taxpayer money, one job, and deep anxiety among millions of New Yorkers it took to make it?