The Boston.com Big Picture blog has a subset of the photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. Remarkable.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html

Funny how a familiar technology in an unusual context can produce such an odd impression.

It’s a very strange and rather hard to explain feeling that comes from breaking the unconscious linking, born of experience, of “past” to “black and white”. My first unconsidered impression on seeing these photos, this color out of context, is that the photographs are … somehow staged, which is absurd, of course. Then the consideration begins….

Since I was a kid, I’ve often wondered what exactly “real life” looked like in 1942 for example when my dad came to the US for the first time (and took photos that I’ve seen), or in the 1910s (from which I’ve seen photos of my grandparents). What did people in the late 1800s experience when they walked around. Or for that matter, in the year 200?

I can tell myself that, yes, what everyone saw and experienced was just like what I see now but with the different trappings of time and location. Reality is reality, always has been, and it’s all in color. No different from now in any great way. But even after that intentional, intellectual exercise, there remains the sense that it must have been different; after all, it existed in black and white, didn’t it? People back then mush have experienced some kind of fog or fuzziness between themselves and their world, since that is what I see now of that time….

These photos here shoot those impressions all to hell and so I’m left with some sort of cognitive dissonance, a difficulty in accepting that the past I’ve always thought existed as different is actually similar to my present. I haven’t quite yet accepted that, but I’m beginning to see the people in these photographs as people I share a reality with.

I travel to Buenos Aires just about every year to visit family and to take in one of the more interesting cities in the world. I try to go in February and March to escape the bleak Michigan winter and store up some BTUs in the dead of a Buenos Aires summer.

I usually like to take 3 weeks vacation to make it worth the long trip. This year, my supervisor at JSTOR was kind enough to offer a hybrid approach. Since there was definitely some pressure to get some projects done, I would be here longer, just under 5 weeks, but would telecommute for part of the time. I’m doing my best to make it work, and it seems to be working.

I brought my wireless hub with me to hook up to the apartment’s cable modem. I get on the work VPN and, other than the occasional slowness when hitting some resources, I might as well be in the office. Social interaction? Email, wikis, instant messaging with and without video, Skype, version control on code. All these, but for Skype we use in the office anyway. Some people not in my department didn’t even know I was 5500 miles away.

BTW, have started following @telesaur and @phunkpathic on Twitter.

Saw the Fischbein exhibit at the Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires. The exhibit was big enough to fill the entire first floor of the Palais de Glace. See http://www.palaisdeglace.org/exposiciones/2009/01/flischbein/fischbein.html
The 3 pieces on that web page are about 3×4 feet. There were much smaller boxes and much bigger. Probably about 50 pieces in all, perhaps more. Most built around little plastic babies (1 1/2″ long) woven, glued, wired into/onto all sorts of things.

It took me quite a while to get into it. Eventually, it was humorous and interesting. As the blurb on that page says, he says, “Mi ideal no es componer, sino generar texturas”. It’s not about composition, it’s about texture. But it’s texture at a bigger level: color, rhythm, space and juxtoposition are part of the “texture”. So, why isn’t it composition? Maybe it is too.

My 96-year-old aunt, Virucha, told me this as we walked around the block in Buenos Aires that was once the quinta of the Pagliere clan (the block surrounded by Corrientes, Sarmiento, Gascón, and Acuña de Figueroa). In front of my cousin’s shop was a sign that said something like: “No dejar canastos en la acera o la calzada”. She saw that I wasn’t completely familiar with the words, so to illustrate she told me the following story.

[Virucha, mi tía de 96 años, me contó este chiste mientras dabamos la vuelta de la manzana que antiguamente era la quinta de la familia Pagliere (la cuadra entre Corrientes, Sarmiento, Gascón, and Acuña de Figueroa). En frente de la fábrica de mi prima Lucila Ballester (que diseña y hace trajes de baño de mujer), la hija de la tía, había un cartel en que estaba escrito: No dejar canastos en la acera o la calzada. Virucha vió que no conocía muy bien las palabras, así que para ilustrarmelas, me contó la siguiente historia.]

Una española se muda, con su gata, a Buenos Aires. Le pregunta a un vecino “dónde podría ir a pasear con mi gata?” “Bueno,” le dice el vecino, “el jardín botántico es lindo y ahí hay muchos gatos.” Entonces, un día la española lleva su gata al jardín botánico.
Un gato del jardín se acerca a la gata y le dice, “Qué tal si vamos a pasear por la vereda?”

La gata le dice, “no se dice ‘vereda’, se dice ‘acera’.”

“Bueno,” dice el gato, “qué tal si vamos a la calle?”

La gata le dice, “no se dice ‘calle’, se dice ‘calzada’.”

El gato, un poco harto ya, está casi por irse. Ahora la gata le dice, “Qué tal si vamos a coger un ratón?”

El gato le dice, “No se dice ‘ratón’, se dice ‘rato’.”

In cleaning my office, I came upon the business card of Antonio Balsemin, a card he handed me after he gave my son and me a ride in his taxi during our late summer 2001 stay in Rome. It was a very enjoyable taxi ride. He is outgoing, talkative and clearly a man of many interests. I let him do the majority of the talking since my Italian is passable but has no depth.

Though he happens to drive to be a Roman tassista, really he’s a writer. His passion in life is writing in his native dialect from the Veneto region of Italy. One gets the sense that it is partly to preserve his own past, but it also has a larger purpose.

He realizes as many people do, that in the past hundred or so years, the diversity of local cultures is disappearing as individual cultures and languages die. However, he does something about it. By writing in his own language he keeps one tree alive as the larger cultural deforestation goes on.

Check him out at: http://www.antoniobalsemin.it and check out an article written about him the same month he gave us a cab ride and a fascinating conversation.