I saw my first highway bluebonnets today, a sure sign that spring has arrived. The other obvious indication is all the out-of-towners crawling around Austin lately. My involvement with SXSW is absolutely minimal: I'm only in it for the opportunity to catch up with "once-a-year" friends, and I've come to really look forward to it. I guess there's a bit of hometown pride involved; what does it mean that I consider Austin my home, finally, after ten years?
Well anyway. It's gorgeous down here right now. Y'all come.
Bwah! My alma mater is in the news. From the local paper:
As Hood College celebrated its second annual homecoming last month, the naming of a female student as Homecoming King elicited both criticisms and praise.[...]Santo Provenzano, 21, who was also on the ballot for king, said, "My first thought when I heard she won was the obvious — she's a girl — Certain traditions are supposed to be a certain way."
Singleton Newman, 22, is a Hood senior who was nominated for queen. "She is not a man," Ms. Newman said. "It is a gender issue, and she is a woman."
Ms. Jones, who is openly gay, attempted last year to run for Homecoming Prince. Although she had the required number of petition signatures, the school's homecoming committee ruled against listing her name on the prince ballot.
You see, it only recently went coed, and apparently is experiencing a few growing pains (thank goodness!). I guess I don't have anything else to say about this, other than that I'm so glad that Hood continues to be a place where this kind of thing can happen, and where there are a lot of people who think that it should.
(Getting about half of the 169 ballots cast at a school of about 1000 also seems to indicate that not very many people voted, and thus that the campus as a whole just didn't really care one way or the other. Which again, as far as Homecoming goes, is also just fine with me.)
Following my own suggestion, I'm looking in Flickr to see what kind of Groups have "DDR" as a tag.
So far: Berliner Fliesen
Images of Communism
Postcommunism
And possibly less DDR-specific, German Decay (Decay! Decay!).
Not bad.
Two new things in the area of material history of the GDR. First, the DDR Museum Berlin, which plans to open in late spring of this year. From their front page:
Vor 16 Jahren hörte die DDR auf zu existieren. Seitdem haben zahlreiche Ausstellungen zur Berliner Mauer, zur innerdeutschen Grenze oder zur Stasi-Überwachung eröffnet - keine einzige dagegen zeigt das Leben und Aufwachsen in diesem Staat in allen Facetten.
Trotz allem ist das Interesse an diesem Leben ungebrochen: Ostalgie-Shows auf RTL, Ampelmännchen-Gerichtsverfahren oder Kinofilme wie NVA machen dies deutlich. Objektiv und beschreibend wird diese Nachfrage nach Information allerdings nicht befriedigt.
Diese Lücke schließt das DDR Museum Berlin: Alltagsleben eines vergangenen Staates zum Anfassen, egal ob Trabant, Fernseher oder MuFuTi!
Well, of course there's the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR in Eisenhüttenstadt, but maybe they mean in Berlin. Anyway, we'll have to wait to see whether they can really conjure up an "objective and descriptive" approach. In the meantime, the picture gallery is pretty. "Nostalgie pur" indeed.
Second, and more compelling to me at the moment, there's Alltagsspuren. People seek out evidence of the GDR, take snaps, and send it in to the project organizer, who catalogs them and puts them online. I just found this and haven't had time to really look through it all yet: public painting, stained glass, and sculpture; slogans and other signs on buildings; ads (including the restored VEB Feinkost sign and the Milchbar Pinguin in Leipzig); and other remainders. Pretty neat. The cooperative aspect of it makes it especially interesting to me. I suppose it's not so different from setting up a DDR-group in Flickr, but Rene Zimmer, the organizer, does write a brief essay for the Alltagsspur of the month, which I'll take as an indication that he wants to provide some context for the stuff he's gathering. Hope he can keep up with it; already there are so many images I'd like to know the story behind. Hey, maybe he needs some writers...
The Kunstarchiv Beeskow finally has a website of its own (including a completely inexplicable Windows-esque splash page). This archive houses a very large collection of art gathered from state buildings across East Germany: "culture palaces," factories, government office buildings, schools, you name it. There are a few pictures on the site, including one of my favorites, Hartmut Staakex's Schönes Wochenende. But mostly it contains a general description of the collection, the entire baroque Benutzungsordnung, and brief info on two recent exhibitions.
Apparently I could have made it to the Landwirtschaft show when I was in Berlin in the fall, but I didn't know about it, in spite of trying like crazy to find out if there was a show up. For about the last ten years the problem has been that the collection, which wasn't really an archive yet, didn't have its own internet presence, or any presence really. It was just a big pile of pictures out in the hinterlands. The collection had moved around a bit before the Länder established a permanent home for it Beeskow, and with the exception of a few small shows the work was pretty much closed off to the public.
They charge for use of the archive, which is a new one to me, but maybe it's more common than I know? Regardless: now that they're really open to the public, I gotta find time to define a project so I can get in there and do some digging.
