Ansel Adams, YouTube: What an amazing artist!
Ansel Adams Reveals His Creative Process in 1958 Documentary
in Art, Film, Photography | February 20th, 2013 2 Comments
Today marks what would be the 111th birthday of Ansel Adams, the American photographer who captured the sublime power of the wilderness, taking iconic images of the American West, most notably in Yosemite Valley. (See photo gallery here.) Original footage documenting the creative life of Ansel Adams is surprisingly hard to come by online. So A/V Geeks and Develop Tube did us all a favor when they revived this 1958 documentary revealing Adams’ technical approach to photography, the cameras and related gear he carried to the field, and his thoughts on the artistic horizons of photography.
Ansel Adams, Photographer (1958) is available at YouTube and Archive.org. It will now appear in the Documentary section of our collection of 500 Free Movies Online.
via Ansel Adams Reveals His Creative Process in 1958 Documentary | Open Culture.
The Fox Theatre Atlanta, Edison Mazda Lamp: Why “Mazda” lamp? “The name Mazda has nothing to do with today’s popular car maker. Instead, it refers to Ahura Mazda. Mazda is an ancient God of an Iranian religion known as Zoroastrianism. His name means “Lord of Light and Wisdom.”
The Fox Theatre Atlanta
June 26
An amazing piece of Thomas Edison history was recently discovered within the walls of the Fox Theatre. This light bulb, or electric lamp as they were once called, is an “Edison Mazda” lamp.
Even though decades have passed since these kinds of bulbs could be purchased, it still looks much like the light bulbs we use today.
In 1909, General Electric began using the trademarked and registered name, Mazda, for its incandescent light bulbs. The name Mazda has nothing to do with today’s popular car maker. Instead, it refers to Ahura Mazda. Mazda is an ancient God of an Iranian religion known as Zoroastrianism. His name means “Lord of Light and Wisdom.”
For more information on historic theatre restoration please visit http://www.foxtheatreinstitute.org/
random:
It just occurred to me that I have clothes hanging in my closet that are “vintage.”
President Obama, housing questions, 1600 Pennsylvania, Zillow roundtable, Yahoo! News: Love this Zillow entry for 1600 Pennsylvania.
President Barack Obama lives in a 16-bedroom, 35-bathroom single-family home that would cost nearly $320 million if it were for sale, according to online home-buying site Zillow.com. (Spoiler: It’s not.)
Still, Zillow’s tens of millions of monthly users will be able to settle in Wednesday for an interview with the president — a virtual roundtable focused on housing policy, part of his drive to retake the initiative on economic issues.
Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff will moderate the event, using questions submitted through a range of social media with the hashtag #AskObamaHousing. Zillow will be looking for especially frequent questions, as well as queries that housing experts think are timely. The White House will not get the questions in advance.
via Obama to take your housing questions in Zillow roundtable – Yahoo! News.
cities , city survival, cities that thrive, Zero Hedge, Detroit: In light of Detroit …
I doubt that anyone in 1968 predicted Detroit would lose most of its industrial base and half its population over the next 40 years (1970 – 2010). Such a forecast was beyond even the most prescient futurist.
Four decades is not that long a time period, and our inability to predict large-scale trends over that time frame reveals intrinsic limitations in forecasting.
Nonetheless, the dramatic decline of Detroit and other industrial cities makes me wonder if there are dynamics that we can identify that could enable us to predict which cities will thrive and which will decay.
Here is my semi-random list of potentially decisive urban dynamics:
1. Since most people live in cities, global trends that appear abstract from 40,000 feet manifest in cities.
2. Single-industry cities are highly vulnerable to disruption if that one industry declines.
3. Cities that are dependent on highly centralized institutions and industries are more vulnerable to disruption that cities with a broad base of smaller, decentralized employers and sectors.
4. Cities that depend on highly centralized employers attract people seeking to become employees; cities that are not dominated by centralized organizations but foster rapidly growing decentralized sectors are more likely to attract entrepreneurial talent and capital.
5. The cities’ primary industries must pull in profits and capital from the nation and world.
6. Highly centralized industries with rigid hierarchies, local political control and vertical supply chains do not foster the same entrepreneurial spirit and ecosystem as decentralized, fragmented industries that are still open financially and politically to competition and cooperation.
7. Rigidly controlled, centralized dominant political and financial organizations cannot foster the complex ecosystem of innovators and risk-takers that generate new wealth.
8. The Ratchet Effect is key: it is easy to expand payrolls, land area, benefits and pensions as the tax base and tax revenues expand; it is essentially politically impossible to shrink payrolls, benefits and pensions as the tax base shrinks and tax revenues decline.
9. Cities with dynamic ecosystems of mobile knowledge workers, innovators, risk-takers and mobile capital will tend to attract these same wealth creators from less dynamic and opportunistic cities and towns, in effect poaching the most potentially productive people and capital from 2nd tier and 3rd tier cities.
Here is a relevant quote from the above article on the poaching of capital and human capital by major cities:
As metropolises such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou become black holes for resources, medium and small-sized cites have encountered difficulties in their development. “The most frustrating part about Tianjin [an industrial city an hour southeast of Beijing] is that we don’t own the resources that commonly exist in first-tier cities – good resources are all taken by Beijing.”
10. Cities that offer cost-effective good governance are attractive to non-elite productive people; cities that skim wealth via corruption and do not provide efficient services offer disincentives to productive people who have a choice of where they live.
11. Wealth is not just the financial wealth of the residents or the tax revenues generated by the tax base. Social and human capital, and the networks that enable flows of information, talent and capital are critical types of capital. We can adapt Bob Dylan’s line here: “Those cities not busy being born are busy dying.”
12. Cities are ultimately constructed not just of infrastructure and political policy but of incentives and disincentives and individuals who respond to those inputs. In this view, the infrastructure of transit, parks, libraries, etc. and non-material policies and cultural-economic zeitgeist create the incentives and disincentives that people respond to.
Cities that offer incentives–most importantly, a healthy ecosystem of like-minded people–to innovators, risk-takers and mobile capital to fund new enterprises will generate a self-reinforcing feedback loop that attracts more productive people and wealth. Those cities that centralize cartels and political elites who naturally suppress competition as a threat to their control are vulnerable to systemic decay as the disincentives to the most productive overwhelm the self-liquidating incentives of rigid, sclerotic, centralized hierarchies.
The one thing we can safely predict is that technological and social innovations will continue to arise and disrupt the Status Quo. If cities are like ecosystems, then we can see that cities that are static monocultures are much more prone to decay and collapse than cities that encourage a complex wealth of competing and cooperating enterprises and networks.
Perhaps these dynamics apply not just to cities but to entire nations.
via Guest Post: Which Cities Will Survive/Thrive? | Zero Hedge.
National Park Visitors, Carry In-Carry Out, WSJ.com:
There are 55 fewer trash cans at one national park in D.C. as park rangers ask visitors to carry out their own garbage. http://on.wsj.com/13Aonau
The idea behind project ‘Carry In-Carry Out’ is to free up the park service’s trash haulers to pursue beautification projects, such as flower planting.
Do you think the park’s priority should be beautification or maintenance? Are you willing to carry out your trash?
…
National Park Service chief groundskeeper Anthony Migliaccio piloted his utility vehicle down the George Washington Memorial Parkway, surveying the good, the bad and the ugly in the government’s new effort to get visitors to do something that doesn’t come naturally: haul away their own garbage.
Along the parkway’s main stem—a lush, tree-lined Virginia roadway that runs from George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate to the forests of Turkey Run Park—there are now 55 fewer garbage cans. In their place are signs informing people that they are now expected to tote away their half-eaten hot dogs, soiled paper plates, crushed soda cans and the like.
With the Iwo Jima statue in the background, a sign at the Marine Corps Memorial explains Trash Free Parks, with complimentary bags.
The idea behind project Carry In-Carry Out, explained Mr. Migliaccio, is to free up the park service’s trash haulers to pursue more noble beautification projects, such as flower planting.
But training the masses to stuff their own refuse back into their cars, purses and strollers is causing something of a stink.
On a recent day, one lonely can in a busy park overflowed with visitors’ refuse. Meanwhile, a nearby dispenser of free plastic trash bags—each printed with a plea for folks to retain their own waste—remained full.
via National-Park Visitors Are Asked to Take Their Trash With Them – WSJ.com.
3-D Printed Version of Yourself, mini me, Wired Design | Wired.com: I’m with you, FB friend … one of me is probably quite sufficient … But still wondering what I would do with a 6″ mini me …
Using the latest in 360-degree scanning and 3-D printing technologies, Twinkind, a new company based in Hamburg, Germany, will turn you, your loved ones, or your pets into a marvelously detailed little statues. It might seem a bit gimmicky if the results weren’t so stunning. The final figurines, which can range in size from roughly 6″ (around $300) to 13″ (around $1,700), are strikingly, maybe even a little unsettlingly realistic, capturing everything from poses and facial expressions down to hair styles and the folds in clothes, all in full, faithful color.
via For $300, You Can Buy a Stunning 3-D Printed Version of Yourself | Wired Design | Wired.com.
Twitter Inc., Weird Twitter, The Daily Dot: weird …
In what you’d have to call a journalistic coup for any news service, The Wall Street Journal has, at long last, gotten Twitter Inc. to comment on the heady subculture known as Weird Twitter.
Weird Twitter, for the uninitiated, refers to a loose confederation of Twitter users who use the social network as a platform for experimental verbiage: satire, poetry, collage, the absurd—all are included. In its push for an eclectic and overdeveloped aestheticism, it resembles a 21st-century branch of Dada.
Simply put, Weird Twitter is pushing the envelope in ways that do not necessarily align with Twitter’s best financial interests. Take the whole sponsored posts angle, for instance: that’s the type of corporate leaching that brings out the quiet anarchist in some people. As the WSJ explains:
Ryan Woodsmall, a 34-year-old information-technology worker in St. Louis., hates promoted tweets. When he notices one from, say, Wal-Mart or Bank of America, in his feed, he will reply to the tweet or retweet it after editing the tweet to insert misspelled words or other flourishes that he hopes will reflect poorly on the brand. He also does this because he hopes it will drive up the cost of advertising for the brand.
“It’s just fractions of pennies and it’s juvenile, but it’s still satisfying,” says Mr. Woodsmall.
That satisfaction may not have much basis in reality, however. According to Twitter spokesman Jim Prosser, the company has an algorithm in place to ensure advertisers never pay for “insincere” engagement—meaning cubicle warriors like Woodsmall would have to get more creative in their disruptions.
That’s not the part that hurts most about Prosser’s comments, however. In the article, he also framed Weird Twitter’s protests, attitude, and policy of self-selection as “the eternal battle people have over hipsterdom.” Ouch. Meanwhile, another employee, John Manoogian III, defended Weird Twitter as “just regular people trying to reclaim the platform with ironic, meta-humor.”
Hard to know which comment Weird Twitter would be more offended by.
via The Daily Dot – Twitter Inc. finally comments on Weird Twitter.
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