The Otis Historical Archives at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC are a textbook example of how physical archives used to be: unpicky, thankful, wildly disorganized, and full of surprises at every turn. An archive is supposed to provoke research, and to reward those who look longest and most carefully. We are delighted that the employees of the archive are using their off hours to gather their favorite public domain images from the archive for a mammoth Flickr account, for the integrity of the thing is intact. Flick, look, enlarge and tweak the (often astonishingly high resolution) images. Attribute and reuse, praise and continue the hard work of generations of old-fashioned archivists.

flickr.com

Entrance to Dash Snow’s studio, New York. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti, April 2009.

Please turn your eyes to Las Baladas Prohibidos, a small, easily digested essay in Mother Jones. It immerses the reader—quickly, thoroughly and sincerely—in the violent stew of Mexicali culture and Mexicali mentality, and it serves as an unintimidating introduction to the work of William T. Vollmann, perhaps the wildest and hardest American writer/academic alive. Vollmann specializes in epic histories of people and places, and his work asks for superhuman toughness and devotion on a reader’s part. It’s rather macho. For those who find machismo unappealing, start here, with this vivid, clean essay, then decide if it’s worth your while to continue with this man as your guide. We’re still deciding.

motherjones.com

Art world opening dinners are famously opaque affairs, no-expense-spared private evenings that allows an inner circle to tell each other how much they love each other, how much they’re willing to splash on each other, and how they’re only going to get closer. Indeed, this is the contemporary art world in a nutshell: always more lavish than is necessary, self-congratulatory, filled with pomp and ritual, and only available to an elite. It is with some pleasure, then, that we saw the Centre For The Aesthetic Revolution’s discreet photographs of a crashed scene dinner last week. The blogger was innocently stoked by the whole thing, but his example stirred us. We don’t have to smash the system in a rage, but, with blogs and cellphone cameras and conversation, we are certainly in a position to strip the art world of its mystery. And what would happen then?

centrefortheaestheticrevolution.blogspot.com

Architect Kisho Kurakawa’s iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood, completed in 1972, is ludicrously utopian, and never came good on its promise, and pretty derelict at this point. One wonders, though, if this means it should be destroyed forever. The 12x6x6 foot capsules, with giant porthole windows at one end and everything included inside, were designed to be removable and renovatable to adapt to the evolving needs of bachelor life. This never happened, once, and the tiny domiciles exist now as Pierre Cardin / George Jetson fantasies of pod life. Compromised fantasies: the plumbing is wrecked, the units are literally falling apart, the complex uninhabited, and who has a use today for wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape players? Yet, when it disappears forever, so too will the evidence that people enjoyed perfect lives, even for a day, this way. Docomomo International has tried and failed to save the building from being destroyed, and we’re obliged to reflect on the lack of a real preservation movement for landmarks of modern design.

docomomo.com