Category: America

finding vivian maier, and making money from her work

VivianMaier-05

When I first heard about Vivian Maier I was super excited. She’s a woman who photographed obsessively all of her adult life, without any recognition, and without ever developing most of her film. After her death her considerable talent was discovered. Her work is amazing in many different ways. It’s documentary, striking, and produced by a very particular mind. Here is a New York Times story and slide show to give you an idea if you haven’t seen her work before.

There are (at least) two movies about Vivian Maier’s life. One was produced by John Maloof, the man who owns the bulk of her negatives. John Maloof has worked hard at promoting Vivian Maier and her work, and he was behind the news stories that surfaced about three years ago. John Maloof’s movie is in theaters right now, and as excited as I’ve been about it, I’ve decided not to see it. It feels like a commercial venture, and it strikes me as odd that a woman who protected her privacy all of her life, shall be making money for someone else. This Boston Globe review of the film is generally positive, but interesting.

The second movie, The Vivian Maier Mystery (available on Amazon and Google Play, and also, at least for the time being, here) was produced by BCC Scotland. This film tells a slightly different story. It puts John Maloof and his actions into perspective, and it asks interesting questions about ownership, fame, and money.

(The image above comes from a story in The New Yorker.)

never ever read the comments if you want to keep your lunch

I read this story about the aftermath to the hate crime last fall at San Jose State University, and I think how hard can it be to get it right at a campus that is predominantly non-white, in a city, and a county, and a state, that is predominantly non-white. But then I read the comments, and I realize exactly why. Grown-ups are racist, and why would college age kids be any different?

not about don draper

So, the current season of Mad Men, season 7, takes place in 1969. When a character in the second episode turns out to be racist, people (present day viewers, I mean) are surprised, plastering exclamation points all over twitter. Really? I wonder if today’s smartypants have forgotten that racism may include actual face-to-face discrimination in the workplace. I also wonder if they think the Civil Rights Movement was some abstract thing, that naturally just made sense to everybody. Of course it didn’t. Both Dr. King and Robert Kennedy were shot in 1968, just a year before the events of season 7.

an extended family

My friend Steve is making a movie with his wife, and their family. That may sound mundane enough, but whole point of the movie is to question and expand the concept of family: The project An Extended Family connects families who used the same Northern California sperm bank, and the same sperm donor, some 15 years ago. Right now they’re in the middle of raising funds through Kickstarter, and the link for their page is here. Watch the video. It’s wild.

at middleton

At Middleton is a bad movie, and one I would never have watched hadn’t it been for a scathing write-up in The Atlantic. The title of the piece, by Noah Berlatsky, is College Is Not A Playground.

The movie tells the story of two parents who show up for a campus tour, with their respective kids, at a small, pretty, liberal arts college. The parents let themselves be separated from the tour, get to know each other, and spend the afternoon together. They run in sprinklers, smoke pot, steal bikes, and generally “let loose”. Their behavior is contrasted to that of their kids: The young woman (the daughter of the female parent) is high strung and focused on being a linguistics major. She meets her linguistics idol and is disappointed. The young man, the son of the male parent, didn’t want to come and doesn’t want to be there, but meets the aging campus DJ, and gets to pick and announce a song. He loves the experience, and, it follows, the college. One tiny detail from the visual story telling: In the process of the afternoon both father and son untie their bow-tie and tie. (“Letting loose.” Get it?)

In his piece Berlatsky calls out the parents for irresponsibility towards their kids, and the movie for being classist. (The mom avoids her daughters calls, and lies to her all afternoon. The cost of “Middleton”, and many liberal arts colleges, runs in the tens of thousands of dollars per academic year.) Berlatsky ends his take on the film’s message with this sentence: “The college experience is not in books, or lectures. Instead, it is a dream of freedom and possibility, for some.”

The question is what you are supposed to gain in college. A broad, general, education, skills for a profession, or something more diffuse; life skills and “experience.”

At the private college where I teach we aim for the first. A broad education that will prepare students for both life and a professional life. When talking with students it sometimes seems to me that what they want is the second, and the third: A set of specific skills to prepare them for a well defined profession, and a “college experience” of travel, trips, clubs, and parties.

I think travel, trips, clubs, and parties are great. Everyone should have them. But universities don’t need to be responsible for offering them. Just because they’re part of life, or part of being in your twenties, your college shouldn’t be required to set up the sprinklers you want to run through. To portray college as a main sprinkler (if you have patience with that analogy) provider is doing everyone a disservice. It’s making higher education look frivolous, and it’s making those who go there look stupid.

crazytown, amazon

Amazon has patented something they call “anticipatory package shipping“. This is a method that aims to predict consumer interest, and ship products to home addresses, or to “fulfillment centers” near customers, even before the products have been ordered. The idea sounds crazy, and futuristic. Just as we’ll be thinking, in the near future, that a new book sounds like something for us, there will be a knock on the door. The book is already being delivered, because Amazon predicted our interest.

But, when you think of it, doesn’t it sound like Amazon is reinventing that old idea of stores and warehouses? Of course it would be easier for me if the books I want were held in a building just up my street, and I could go there and, crazy thought, buy them when I wanted them. Delivery times would be cut super short, around ten minutes. Like when there was a Borders bookstore just up my street. But Borders went out of business, because, wait, what was it again? Oh, Amazon put them out of business. That’s what happened.