Atlanta's Doll's Head hiking trail and West Texas star parties
Things I Saw This Week — Friday, May 16
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Art
The May 15th edition of the New York Times features Memphis in two different art-related stories, and in both, photography on the page plays a major role in the storytelling. (Both links below are gift links, i.e., free to read.)
The second story is about efforts to preserve 75,000 historical photos that a Black photography company (the Hooks Brothers) took. The efforts are led by C. Rose Smith, a Black Memphis photographer and curator, and will lead to exhibitions at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the National Civil Rights Museum.
Photography is an art, but I often think of its use as an archival medium, and what it says about what we value based on what we choose to photograph and put on display.
In a similar spirit, here’s a recent photo I took of pioneering Memphis hip-hop artist Tommy Wright III at Shangri-La Records in Memphis.
Astronomy
Meet Judy Meyer, who convenes star parties in Fort Davis, Texas.
More than twenty years ago, Judy Meyer moved to West Texas from Idaho after her husband got a job working on the telescopes at McDonald Observatory, the University of Texas facility in the Davis Mountains. Meyer, who has degrees in chemistry and math, spent two years making sandwiches in the observatory’s cafe before a position came open on the program staff.
Cities
A roundup of city-related news of note:
Atlanta
“The creepy beauty of Atlanta's strange Doll's Head hiking trail”
Chicago
“‘Pure chaos’: Why most Chicagoans used to move at the same time on Moving Day”
“Arts Nonprofit Brings Former Austin Bank Building Back To Life”
“Eve L. Ewing And Friends Unite To Buy South Side Cafe Build Coffee”
Lagos
“This Artist-Run Archive Preserves Endangered Photographic Negatives in a Celebration of Lagos”
San Francisco
Education
NPR reports on an increase in community colleges offering bachelor's degrees in the U.S.
“What's been blocking many of these students from four-year degrees, Ponce said, "is the sheer distance. There's not a public university option within an hour or more away. And affordability and transportation barriers are huge issues."
…
"What I think is misunderstood is that, in general, these are not like the baccalaureates that conventional four-year institutions offer," said Davis Jenkins, a senior research scholar at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
Bachelor's degrees at community colleges, said Jenkins, "meet an economic need for bachelor's degree graduates that isn't being met by other institutions."
That includes helping rural workers move up in their jobs without leaving home.
Food
Here’s what happens at a tuna cutting.
.Around the U.S., many restaurants are offering alternative versions of tiramisu.
Everything served at Paul Chuanchaisit’s Los Angeles supper club DAG has some sort of Thai influence, he explains. With tiramisu having been a favorite dish from his childhood, Chuanchaisit wanted to play with the dessert for DAG, which has offered dishes like panang curry pappardelle. Fittingly, Chuanchaisit’s tiramisu features pandan, coconut, and matcha.
The swap seemed natural enough. “In Western cuisine, they usually use vanilla, and in Asian cuisine, we use pandan,” Chuanchaisit says. “Italian people use coffee.” But to him, that can easily be swapped for another drink; he’s also been working on tiramisu using hojicha, the roasted green tea. Tiramisu is “like a vessel, where you can add your own flair to it,” he says.
Literature
Bling was about hip-hop. It had a pretty straightforward, rags-to-riches plot mixed with the beats of A Star Is Born, following the rise of hip-hop princess Mimi, her Svengali label head/lover Lamont, and the various industry players surrounding them. Its characters weren’t particularly noble like Alice Walker’s, but they also were not grotesque. The people in Bling liked money, knew how to dress and observed as much as they were observers. The book had a sense of humor and a point of view about Black life that was not merely how we had suffered. I got a copy of Bling from the library and read it in three days, then read it again, and again, and again.
The plot was engrossing and fast-paced, but the book’s power lay in Kennedy’s extraordinary observational skills. She catalogued everything of the early 2000s hip-hop scene–the fashion, the clubs, the slang, and most tellingly, the way power and sex moved through that world.
Since I’ve read Bling, I have never forgotten it. Apparently, I am not alone. Bling may no longer be in print but hard copies go for as much as $1000 online. And most troubling is what has happened to the legacy of the author herself. Currently, we live in a time that has mythologized turn of the millennium hip-hop and R&B, constantly looking back in a series of nostalgia trips, while also understanding the era through the lens of post #MeToo sexual politics of assault and coercion in the entertainment industry.