Viewmasters Deluxe

My fascinations tend to traffic in miscellany. I'm never quite sure what's going to catch my attention. But there are a couple of wizards out there who have somehow divined the formula, and who deserve a great deal of credit for the content of this website and my noisier Tumblr zoetrope. My old friend nickd, as ever, serves up a steady stream of weirdly charming artifacts. Phil, one time, sent me an extremely great list of blogs he reads, including such gems as the Hoefler & Frere Jones typography blog. Lots of very kind readers of this site will occasionally send me things that strike their fancy.

But special mention goes to one Steven Melendez, who for some reason decided one day to start sending me extraordinary things on a regular basis. Getting new leads from Steven always felt like having access to some secret, personalized newswire, with dispatches telegraphed in. I felt pretty lucky. Alas, I couldn't keep this newswire to myself—not in good conscience, at least. So when Steven mentioned that he might entertain the possibility of starting up a zoetrope of his own, I may or may not have used some capital letters to express my opinion about that possibility. The opinion was: YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

And, luckily for all of us, Steven made the right choice. That is to say: the only one.

And so, St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast. You will probably love it. I know I do.

photo via

RIP, Old Headshot!

Last year, when I first started this blog thing, I tumbled through a few different photographs of myself. I was trying to find a picture that could sit quietly in the upper-right-hand corner of the page, black and white and gray like the letters on the pale blue background, and be pretty unobtrusive. One stuck. Today it is unstuck.

I guess when you're 21, you look significantly older than you did when you were 20? Like, maybe 5% older? Definitely a statistically significant amount, at least. Anyway, I heard from three separate people over the past month or so that my old profile photograph (which I used everywhere) looked a little young. So, naturally, I set out to rectify the situation.

BUT. Do you know how discombobulating it is to wake up and think, "Today I will overturn my online identity in an extremely minor way?" During the accidental photo session that begat the first photograph, I had no idea what was going on; the process wasn't loaded with the dubious weight of an impending online identity shift .

Except then, I settled on one of the photographs, and used it almost exclusively whenever I needed to attach a photograph to my name online. For an entire year. I even sent a copy of the picture out to all of ROFLCon's guests before they arrived, so that they'd be able to recognize me IRL. It was disconcerting how many of them came up to me to sincerely thank me for this gesture. "It was so easy to recognize you!," they said. "That was really smart to send your picture out!" As I basically wrote in the email that accompanied the photograph: the real world's not text based, yo. Weird, right?

So. Today I enlisted some help to create a bank of replacement candidates. Sadly, I think my short haircut did little to bolster the illusion that I am 5% older. However, I hope the critics will be sated nevertheless.

I've settled on a temporary replacement (visible to your right), but I'm not stuck on it yet. Since this is so extremely important (not), I'd love your thoughts! I've got a couple hundred more to choose from, which is just overkill, so, you know. You've got choices.

I will crowdsource the determination of my online visual identity? It will be revolutionary! In a microscopic sort of way.

Magic More Useful than Home Economics

[video here; had to remove the embed, since it was auto-playing some lively orchestral music!]

Since my last two posts have been novel-length, I thought I'd give you all: a) a break, and b) a video on Home Economics from the ever-splendid Prelinger Archives of ephemeral films. I found this video via Rob Walker's murketing blog. Which, for the record, is great. Mr. Walker featured it in his "Sponsored Film Virtual Festival," an absurdly interesting exploration of the Prelinger Archive. I like his analysis, too. Listen to this: "To me what the film is really about the transformation of knowledge, or rather the control of knowledge — the replacement of folk learning with organized and managed learning; the replacement of skill acquired at home from family and community, to skill acquired from authorized experts."

And if that's not appealing, I don't know what is.

At one point in time, I decided to write a term paper on the development of home economics curricula. I collected many library books on the topic. They lived pleasantly in my room—under my bed, nestled up against my powercordless electric keyboard—for months. I did not write the paper. I returned the books.

I probably wrote about something useful, like amateur magicians, instead.

Instructions for Everyday Life: Homecraft & Romance

This past semester, I wrote a term paper titled Instructions for Everyday Life: Pornographies of Comfort and Instruments of Hope in Homecraft Magazines, 1945-2006. In it, I compared Popular Homecraft magazine to a more modern invention: ReadyMade magazine. It was an experimental sort of paper, full of ideas I was just barely starting to have. I learned a great deal from it, but I want to keep learning more. This is one in a long series of posts where I shamelessly lift material from term papers because I think they're neat. If by some miracle you'd like to read more, you know where to find me! diana (dot) kimball (at) gmail (dot) com. The thesis here is by no means set in stone, so please do send me your thoughts; I will refine accordingly. Here we go!

Instructions for Everyday Life
Pornographies of Comfort and Instruments of Hope in Homecraft Magazines, 1945-2006.

A woman stands, surrounded by flowers, in an ambiguous room. It is January, 1946, and World War II has just ended. The woman wears a blue, flowered dress that falls to just below her knees. She stands against an ivory curtain covered in orange blooms. Around her neck, there are three strands of pearls. To her right stand a chair, table, and a mirror; at first glance, she appears to be gesturing toward them. She looks straight into the camera. The smile on her face says that she is pleased. On second glance, though, it becomes clear that she is lighting a candle—the first of two. This furniture has been made expressly for her, by a man whose intentions are suspect. The man is visible in a black-and-white series of insets below, hard at work constructing a period framed mirror; a Sheraton style chair; an 18th-century console table. The finished objects, basking in the soon-to-be candlelight above, are beautifully turned-out. He has covered them in flowers, too. (No wonder the woman is happy.) Maybe she is his wife, maybe his lover. Maybe she is a figment of his imagination. But the chair, table, and mirror are very real to the man in the picture, and they mean something to him. They mean that the woman, figment or not, is happy, beaming, lighting a candle; ready to undress, remove her pearls, and abandon her flowers for his bed.

This staged fantasy was plastered onto the cover of the January 1946 issue of Popular Homecraft: The Home Workshop Magazine. Popular Homecraft was a magazine for homesick men. As such, it trafficked in the pornography of comfort. Whether these men were unsettled husbands or soldiers returning from war, Popular Homecraft invited them to cure their homesickness with instructions for building homes. Not houses; homes. After all, homecraft—like witchcraft—contains an element of trickery. Build the furniture, captivate the woman. The woman will make the home. Without her in the picture, it's just a room full of false and desperate flowers.

Almost 60 years later, we find another fantasy altogether. It is 2005, at Thanksgiving. Against a cool blue backdrop—more laboratory than dining room—a woman stands. A man sits. A beautiful, plasticine turkey looms in front of the man, on what looks like a spotless melamine table. The man could be, might be, a mannequin; his stare is forward and blank. Behind him stands the woman. She might be his wife, or his girlfriend. Either way, her intentions are suspect. Her tight, ruffled blouse is ivory, and covered in roses. She leans over the man's shoulder, wielding a cobalt-blue blowtorch. She gently flames the turkey, while the man sits immobile. He smiles vacantly into space; she flirts with the camera. It is as though she has stopped time. While she puts the finishing touches on an exquisite, eerie Thanksgiving dinner, the man waits patiently. His patience is a prop. The beautiful woman, cooking with power tools, is a vaporous role model. Her occult powers—the ability to stop time, to do everything, and to look good while doing it—are terrifying and alluring. She does not wear safety goggles. She does not need to.

This image is lifted from the cover of ReadyMade, a magazine for hopesick women. The hope in question is a doomed desire to do everything at once—make a home, make babies, make careers for themselves—while at the same time doing nothing, staying young and fresh and free. ReadyMade, a 21st century invention, offers "instructions for everyday life." Occasionally, these instructions veer into the territory of plywood and power tools; the Thanksgiving cover above promises not only a "simple holiday menu," but also instructions for pouring a concrete tabletop. More than amateur construction, though, ReadyMade is a magazine about homecraft for modern women. How does a 21st century woman create a home? With a blowtorch? By stopping time? The covers of ReadyMade are always the same: one handsome man and one lovely, mischievous woman. Ostensibly, it is a magazine that young couples can share. There is nothing about it that is overtly feminine. But this, too, is part of the fantasy: a romantic partnership, in which cooking, cleaning, and building are retrieved from their gender-specific domains and set adrift in the realm of togetherness. The men in ReadyMade are always well-groomed, always patient, always appreciative. They are rarely doing anything.

Advertisers in ReadyMade understand these hopesick women....

* * *
diana (dot) kimball (at) gmail (dot) com for more! At your own risk...

Previously:
Kodachrome
Fallout Shelters
Practical Magic

ROFLCon: At Last

The stun sticks around. One month later, and it's still hard for me to believe that yes, a few college kids and some brave believers made ROFLCon happen. I've already written about ROFLCon, a lot; in fact, if you've been reading my blog lately, you might get the impression that it's all I ever talk about. But since I bullied all my team members into writing "one month anniversary reflections" (a phrase made only marginally less absurd by the rapid pace of the internet), I figured that I should probably write one, too. Um. Another one. But different, this time.

The thing is: those two days, one month ago, were just two glorious days. During the conference itself, I ran around the whole time, clutching papers and making phonecalls and tracking down water bottles and tapping microphones with trepidation. It was a high-definition blur. It was amazing. It was over too soon.

But the backstory is just as outrageous. Christina outlined the genesis of ROFLCon in some awesome detail here. She was there in the very beginning. Me? I was there in the almost-beginning. The not-quite. I'd only just met Tim and Christina; had only barely started to map my then-obsession with BoingBoing to real-world things, like Free Culture. And ice cream. I already knew, from my very miniature stained-glass window view into their world, that these kids could do anything. So when Tim sent out an email to curious comrades, wondering whether we'd be interested in making this ROFLCon thing happen, I said yes. It was a strong yes. It may even have been in boldface. But I was far from sure about what I was getting into.

You know what, though? Nobody was really sure about what they were getting into. We made it up as we went along, which led to tripping on instances of ridiculous serendipity and also tripping over puddles of danger. Imagine a videogame, rendered in blocky pixels: there were these cyan puddles everywhere, and all of them (though round and chaotic) had inexplicably square edges. Organizing ROFLCon was like that. We jumped over the puddles where we could. We collected stars when we saw them. Mostly, though, we just tried to make it to the end; the pot of gold; the end of the CMYK rainbow. We made it, I think. It was worth it.

Working on ROFLCon felt like belonging to some alternate-universe braintrust. I have seldom in my life had the opportunity to work with so many absurdly talented people. The other day, I was talking with Christina about how everyone on the team seemed to have some unique superpower, whether writing letters to academics, amassing the world's largest store of knowledge about Soulja Boy, or powering through hundreds of emails a day. Every time we needed something graphic-designed, or some slick prose written up, or even just the sheen of real-world legitimacy, there was someone who stepped in to make it happen.

When I really think about it, this ramshackle braintrust has to be at the core of what made ROFLCon go. But over the past month, I've also had time to think of a few more things that I think made ROFLCon work, from a logistical standpoint. There are plenty of things I would do in the future; I'll write about those too, sometime, I hope. For now, though, we're looking back. So. Some aspects of planning ROFLCon that surprised and delighted me:

* * *

THINGS THAT MADE A JANKITY CONFERENCE LIKE ROFLCon WORK, MAYBE.

1) Sharing documents through a free service. We used Google Docs, but anything will do. It's pretty incredible to be able to not just work together, but to peek in on other people's work, even when you're not directly involved in creating it. I, for instance, kept a running budget of guest travel expenses in one of my spreadsheets, and whenever Tim needed a budget update, the number were right there. He could see everything I knew. Another less-obvious benefit of shared documents through a web service: the tabbed browsing format. It was so nice to be able to lift a piece of information from my gmail account and copy-paste it into the Firefox tab next door, where the master spreadsheet was hovering. Also: free. I think ROFLCon makes a pretty strong case for the feasability of taxing simple cloud software to the limit.

2) Email trust. When you're running tasks through mass emails, it's important to know that your emails won't get lost in someone else's inbox. It's also important to be able to mobilize the "braintrust" quickly and effectively. I always just completely marveled at the fact that I could send out a fast question, seeking ideas or feedback or information, and within 20 minutes I would have responses from 7 team members. Maybe we're all on our computers too much, but I have to say that that kind of responsiveness is a phenomenal resource. Especially at 2am!

3) Taking everything seriously. But not too seriously. If it's not fun anymore, you're dead. We sometimes joked about how ROFLCon meetings almost invariably (d)evolved into watching crazy YouTube videos. Except, that was kind of the point, right? We never stopped celebrating and studying the kinds of internet culture we were assembling. The key is that we were celebrating it, first; studying was a side effect. I hope that ROFLCon felt a little bit like that for the people who were there: a celebration that also couldn't help but make them think. When you get a bunch of thoughtful people into a room, and give them something to observe, it's not like they just stop thinking. And maybe, they talk to each other, too. Thoughts + thoughts = ideas. If ROFLCon had a formula, that might have been it.

4) Occam's Swiss Army Knife: Simplest tool wins. ROFLCon may have been about the internet, but we planned about half of it on a giant whiteboard. (To be fair, we always drew in a "share" tab on the whiteboard; we couldn't really start work without one. Yeah Web 0.5!) During the conference, I ran around with tattered sheets of paper—printed-out spreadsheets full of names and phone numbers and schedules and room numbers. My jeans pockets stained them indigo; my tired hands bruised their edges. But everything I needed was there, and the simple act of trying to figure out what I would need to have around helped me to plan out the days. With computers, everything's always at your fingertips; it's too easy to do everything on the fly. Paper requires some forethought. And forethought isn't always so bad. That said, there was definitely some last-minute engineering that went on. As you can see above, my left hand on the second day of the conference was tattooed with names, times, and notes to self. I was exhausted, and if it was on my hand it was in my face. Screens make it a little too easy to hide information. Hands aren't afraid to tell you off.

5) Intense attention to the internet. Duh? Well, not so duh. Sure it was a conference about the internet, but it also took us a bit to really leverage all the awesome publishing tools and visual magic that the internet has to offer. (See: the Inexplicable Sheep of blog #1.) Now, mind you, this is not attention I paid. People like Dean and Matt and rockstar blogger/all-purpose founder Tim made everything happen in the leadup; days-of, photographers like Dave and Scott and the video team from Respectably French and our in-house superhero blog mod Dan did the documenting so that people like me could sit in things like LOLCats and Internet Cult Leaders panels for a few minutes at a time, dazed and happy, and know that the whole thing was being recorded for posterity by people much, much more talented at those things than I am. People like Rachel minded Twitter even as they ran around doing the other sundry tasks involved in activating ROFLCon. You know. Like chasing down Brawndo and poring over blueprints. I can honestly say that I barely even got on a computer for the 40-some hours of ROFLCon. And weirdly, that was totally fine. All of these incredibly smart and talented and web-savvy people jumped on board and made the whole online thing magically appear, right alongside the IRL version. Except, they were the magic. And I was completely, utterly enchanted.

* * *

So. I will not say anymore, for now. This is already egregiously long. But do you know how much I loved ROFLCon? I loved it a whole lot. The whole thing.

We're talking about the future; we're sharpening our swiss army knives. We're not sure what we're getting into. We can't wait to find out.

Thanks to TrespassersWill for the photograph!

This Week on the Tim & Diana Show

The Rules of the Tim & Diana Show

1) It is never called the Tim & Diana Show.
2) The name changes every week.
3) The only two people on the show are Tim & Diana.
4) Sometimes Tim interviews Diana; sometimes the other way around.
5) Other people can appear on the show, but only under the name of Tim or Diana.
6) There will be no editing.
7) It will happen on Saturdays.
8) It will be absurd.

You can catch the first two episodes at www.timdiana.com, and further episodes every Saturday for the foreseeable future.

If you enjoy hearing about breath mints and misadventures, there is a strong likelihood that you will enjoy the above interview with me, performed by a splendidly disingenuous Tim Hwang. I just looked up the word "disingenuous" to make sure it meant what I thought it meant, and it totally did. Such definitional synergy is an auspicious start to an illustrious series of fake talk shows! I think we can all agree on that.

A Dangerous Habit, Now in Kodachrome

Everything is converging on Kodak.

Remember how earlier this year, I was going to take a photo a day for all of 2008? Well. More on that soon. But for now, all you need to know is that I've temporarily substituted learning about photographs for taking them. This has included a whirlwind tour through the history of film photography, courtesy of not just one, but two of my spring courses. I know, right? College. Awesome.

Since the end of the semester is thick in the chilly spring air right now, I've been racing to finish long papers for very fun classes. Topics have included: Matilda and Pippi Longstocking, augmented reality (with a detour through the history of Dungeons & Dragons), and vernacular photographs made with Kodachrome film. And so, in what is quickly becoming a dangerous habit, I am going to post the first two paragraphs of my Kodachrome paper. And then, if I'm lucky, two of you will email me with some interest in reading more. You know the drill! Diana (dot) kimball (at) gmail (dot) com, for all your ephemeral needs.

And here we go:

Stolen Moments: Accident, Authenticity, and Multiple Authorship in the Kodachrome Prints of Guy Stricherz

In the background of a Kodachrome photograph, a stocky brick chimney slouches toward brown, while weathered white clapboard slips toward gray. The lawn—a carpet of short, even grass—is green-black, almost monochromatic. In the foreground, a family stands: a father clutching the wrist of one young boy and the shoulder of another, an adolescent boy smirking pleasantly, and a mother holding the fourth and youngest son against her hip. The young boys are dressed in shades of blue, red, and yellow. Against the muted background, their striped shirts are vivid. The mother’s blouse is solid yellow with black piping. The boys’ blue jeans hum a deep indigo. The house in the background must belong to the family in the foreground. It is 1952. This is a stolen moment (Figure 1).

In a lifetime of photographs, accident will occasionally produce genius. In the words of one curator of vernacular photography, “while not every bungled snapshot is a minor miracle, some seem to tap into a sort of free-floating visual intelligence that runs through the bedrock of the everyday like a vein of gold.” The stolen moment above comes at the end of the photobook for the Americans in Kodachrome project, curated by Guy Stricherz. It is a scene from his own family’s young life, and ostensibly the inspiration for his curatorial ambition. For the project, Stricherz, with the help of his wife Irene Malli, spent seventeen years collecting Kodachrome slides from ordinary American families. These slides, taken between 1945 and 1965, were artifacts of the first color film craze. Color film, though, did not immediately translate to color prints. Prints were so expensive and difficult to make that few even bothered, preferring instead to view the photographs as slide shows in their living rooms. The rich, luminous colors of the Kodachrome process remained, for most families, suspended in the translucent film of slides. Uncovering accidental genius, like panning for gold, would prove an arduous process...

Photograph via.

Two Weeks of Twitter

Twitter Tree, originally uploaded by pandemia.

Twitter, for me, started during ROFLCon. Ever since, it's been an easy experiment: I like trying to figure out how it works. So far, here's what I've got:

Twitter is a good break from wordiness. In a conversation earlier this week, I compared it to taking a picture a day: trying to encapsulate 24 hours in a snapshot, or 140 characters, forces you to choose carefully. This is nothing new. But I was surprised at how that simple limitation made writing an update such a creative thing. Creative, and easy. It is always good to find simple ways to be creative during repetitive or stressful times. Like finals. i.e. now.

Also: the Twitter scene is opaque to me. Or rather, it's transparent, but I don't really want to jump in? The "@" convention makes Twitter updates feel like Livejournal posts used to, back in the day: clubby and scenic, exclusive and public at the same time. This is natural and not terrible and does not reflect poorly on its practitioners; it's just curious that we use our tools that way. Livejournal posts, incidentally, had a similar convention for noting when you were talking about someone who also had a Livejournal account. Since Livejournals tended to be more social, this convention got used pretty aggressively for social signaling.

Along those lines: I've noticed that Twitter is mostly about work and links and domestic life during the week, and then on Friday & Saturday nights, it all of a sudden becomes a scene report! How weird to come home and then write on Twitter that you spent time with someone who is also on Twitter, who will almost certainly read & respond to your post right away. I guess it's not weird. People do it all the time on the internet, especially teenagers. It's just funny to see the practice resurfacing with adults! Twitter must be the platform on which we've chosen to construct our artificial authentic selves. I think the character limit lends a sheen of realism.

Okay, finally: I think what's so striking about this social signaling in Twitter is that it's imbued with intentionality. On Facebook, when you do something or friend someone or post on someone's wall, Facebook just reports it; the "hey, look at me" is automated. Therefore, the person who wants to be looked at is absolved of responsibility, vanity, or attention-seeking. Twitter is all about self-reporting, and so that all-important illusion of absolution is whisked away.

That said, I kind of love Twitter. It's still uncluttered, and people are still pretty enthusiastic about it. The intentionality may make me somewhat suspicious, but it can also be charming. I like knowing what people want me to know, because the wanting is a window in itself. Artificial authentic selves leave traces of the artifice, embedded in the choices you know have been made. In the end, those traces reveal secret selves better than confessions ever could.

(And I'm here.)