Harold Lloyd isn’t trying to stop time in this famous scene from the 1923 silent comedy, Safety Last. The reason he’s hanging from this clocktower involves a convoluted tale of trying to make good in the big city, impress the true love he left back in Smalltown and make a quick bundle by scaling a 12-story building so that the fictional DeVore Department Store on the ground floor can generate some buzz and ideally move the merch — all that Horatio Alger stuff that doesn’t really change quite as much as it stays the same. The minute hand Harold’s holding onto over Broadway belongs to what is now the Sparkle Factory, owned by our good friend Tarina Tarantino, and stands across the street from the future Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles. The marquee you see in Harry’s background is for the former Majestic Theatre. By all accounts, it lived up to its name until it was demolished in 1933. While it’s too bad the Majestic couldn’t make it to the present in its physical form, we’re glad Harold’s literal take on social climbing managed to stop the clock and preserve its memory forever.

Passionately devoted to contemporary art and artists, Dorothy and Herb Vogel—a New York City postal clerk and a librarian—began, in 1962, to build what would become a legendary art collection. They collected the art of their time and got to know the artists and their work, eventually bringing together some 5,000 artworks. In 1991, the Vogels donated most of their collection to the National Gallery in Washington. In addition, they selected 50 works for one museum in each of the 50 U.S. states. The Seattle Art Museum is the beneficiary in the state of Washington and will exhibit the Vogel gift in the spring of 2013, which will be contextualized by works from the museum’s collection.

– Catharina Manchanda, Jon & Mary Shirley Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection : Fifty Works for Fifty States
Seattle Art Museum, Third Floor Galleries, through October 27, 2013

Of his many feats of daring, Harry Smith is likely most well known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, an act of assemblage that threw back the gray flannel curtain of the fifties and offered a glimpse into a weirder America, inspiring a generation of songwriters and listeners. Here’s Charley Patton’s growl like the plea of a ravaged crop on ‘Mississippi Boweavil Blues.’ Uncle Dave Macon is unhinged if not ingenuous, pledging, “Won’t get drunk no more…” on ‘Way Down the Old Plank Road.’ The Alabama Sacred Harp Singers are ethereal, like ghosts trapped in wax. Here’s the fatalism and syncretic religion of an America where strange spirits roamed the land from the Dockery Plantation to Appalachia. This isn’t an America you can straitjacket into the fifties forever, not when conjurer Mister Smith reincarnates the armies of what we were. Upon accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammies, he said “I’m glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music.” And so he did. Because he changed America with music. We’re celebrating the life of Harry Smith — a one-time resident of the building that has now become Ace Hotel New York — later this month on his ninetieth birthday, with music and readings by people who knew him and people he changed.

The songbook picture was lovingly defaced by Harry Smith.

The Usual is a local surf mag published in Montauk. Their latest issue is in partnership with Patagonia, leading up to their Bowery shop location opening early summer of this year. Keep an eye out.

Seattle-based Blackbird Ballard is camping out at the shop above Rudy’s Barbershop next door to Ace Hotel New York until the first day of July. Stop in for incense pyres and friendly faces.

“In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.” 

― David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

Wojnarowicz’s journals have been digitized by the Fales Library at NYU. They, like he, are things of beauty.

discovershadow

(Source: mdswngs)

Shoreditch, East London.

Photo by Joost Schurr