.: The A, B, C 's of Christmas Past

Saturday, December 24, 2005

The A, B, C 's of Christmas Past

The importance of Christmas past in the Charles Dickens "The Christmas Carol" was to remind Ebenezer Scrooge of a time of past innocence's shared during the holiday season.

"I have endeavored in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it."

Their faithful Friend and Servant,
Charles Dickens.
December, 1843.

While looking at pictures of my Christmas past I could see many of the things that would lead me through to adulthood and unlike Scrooge I have never lost the Christmas spirit. To illustrate this I have highlighted a couple of funny Christmas morning pictures from about 1968 and 1969....

1968

A. Santa, Santa, Santa... How many santa's do you need? This was the beginning of my parents obsession with Christmas ornaments! Today if you were to go to my parents home you would find a few more! 20 - 30? Not to mention hundreds of other Christmas bobles.

B. Black and White! Wow! yes a high tech 14 inch black and white replete with rabbit ears!(sometimes requiring tin foil enhancements), no cable, no satellite, VHF/UHF with 8 full channels!

C. Major Matt Mason!!! Ok if you know me, there is a hard core nerd in me at heart! Major Matt Mason was a popular bendable 8" action figure. An astronaut by trade Major Matt Mason was exploring the moon with his kewl three level moon lab and rover! Even at this age I knew I was a nerd and that sci-fi was important to my future... Having worked on Star Trek the Next Generation and Star Wars in my adult life, my parents investment in to my imagination seems to have payed off!

D. Colliers Encyclopedias! Too poor for Britannica, these poor cousins were some of my best reading as a kid!

E. OK these snazzy PJ's did have feet in them!!! So what! Get over it!

F. In an era of 8 megapixle digital cameras common in the consumer market, these really kewl wallet extra prints from Hite Photo were all the rage in the 60's! Now you could share a print with friends, show your kids pictures at work! Wow technology! I guess Mom still has the larger prints.....

1969

by 69 I had grown out of sleeping in Jammies with feet... I wanted to be a scientist...

G. A globe for my studies! How ironic to be turned to the African continent... with plans to go sometime this year (Things that make you go Hmmmmm)

H. Shouldn't everyone have a microscope???? Yes how else can you watch your sea monkeys up close???? Actually with the annual debacle surrounding some of my Christmas presents, Mom probably thought the microscope was a safe bet... Dad loved to take certain experimental liberties such as mixing the chemicals in my new chemistry set to create nitro glycerin or create sulfur smoke bombs, lending to the pine needle aeromatic ambiance of Christmas! Or the time I built a helicopter with my erector set... It had a motor that turned the blades with double D batteries! Dad's connecting of a 12 volt motorcycle battery in deed did cause the helicopter to briefly fly before burning out the motor in an electrical blaze and an 8 inch divot in the kitchen dry wall caused by the erant fly craft!!!!! Ah the fond memories of childhood.

Oh and by the way, one I didn't mark! The new 25" color RCA TV in the background!!! By 1969 man was landing on the moon and you just couldn't watch the black and white coverage on a small black and white TV... you needed full color for that!;-)

Christmas will allways be full of fond memories, including this year, though I am not going home to be with family, my friends have filled the void, invited me into their homes and shown me the Christmas spirit lives in all of us!

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

Order your copy today by clicking on the books above!

Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com