Shopping Mall in good company at Octavia Books in New Orleans.
American Dream Sequence: Left Behind in the Monongahela River Valley
Today, nearly 100 years since John Kane painted the Monongahela River Valley as a place of American ingenuity and promise, the landscape is littered with the skeletal remains of an industry that once seemed unstoppable. In towns from Monessen and Rankin to Braddock, Duquesne, and Clairton, residents are in the midst of a decades-long postindustrial depression that shows no signs of letting up. These towns are outliers that reaped little benefit from Pittsburgh’s transformation to a hub of medical research and higher education in the 1980s and 1990s. And they exist at a remove from the city’s current economic renaissance, where neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and East Liberty are being remade into increasingly affluent hipster enclaves as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Uber, and Intel have set up headquarters in the city.
Nowhere in recent memory are the present-day realities in the Monongahela River Valley better documented than in photographer Pete Marovich’s Searching for Dream Street project, which offers an unvarnished look at the socioeconomic status of the old steel towns along the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers. Marovich, an award-winning photojournalist and contributor to Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Getty Images, and NBC News, has visited dozens of towns in and around Pittsburgh over the last several years to gain an intimate understanding of what life after industry both looks and feels like. Inspired by photographer W. Eugene Smith’s extensive documentation of Pittsburgh in the mid-1950s, which was later chronicled in the book Dream Street, Marovich’s photographs of the Monongahela River Valley capture everyday moments in these working-class towns long after the smoke has lifted.
Enormously important, unprecedented letter to the President from 24 United States Senators, including Bernie Sanders, outlining how defunding the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities – which is Trump’s plan – will assault creative culture and the very fabric of American society.
Since its inception in 1965, the NEA alone has given away $46 million in grants to writers. For a writer, an NEA grant can make the difference between taking a year off to complete a book and toiling at a day job. It isn’t hard to imagine that without these grants, some of the most important writers of the past half-century may have never published the works for which they are now beloved. (Among them was Audre Lorde, who spoke up passionately for the importance of arts funding.)
Letter scans courtesy of the Academy of American Poets, who organized the initiative.
(via explore-blog)
(via blackcoffeedemo)
shopping malls
cumbernauld
1977
1960s Civil Rights Era, Bob Adelman
For those unfamiliar, Bob Adelman was the iconic photographer behind many of the thought-provoking, historical photographs of the Civil Rights Movement.
A photographer and protest marcher, he spent a considerable amount of time fighting for justice and equal rights. His images capture groundbreaking moments, such as student sit-ins, Freedom Riders, the March on Washington and other significant events in Black history.
(via mattfractionblog)
Fragile Innocence at the Morning Bus Stop
(via darksilenceinsuburbia)
Welcome to Stevia Sphere’s Virtual Mall 2000, a mall of the new millennium!
Hyperrealistic ponds, interdimensional escalators, identical-to-life plant graphics and of course futuristic shopping! You will not believe your eyes when you see the mall emulation that our Y2K-ready computer system is capable of!
Scent, vision and touch will be transferred directly into your brain through Direct Telepathic Link™. Includes shopping-enhancing soundtrack provided by our CEO himself!Warning: Virtual Shopping can cause headaches, neck pain, limb numbness, nausea, anxiety and heart attacks.