.: 40 Years Ago Today!

Monday, July 20, 2009

40 Years Ago Today!

It's July 20th 1969.. It's also ten days before my ninth birthday. I am sitting on the aqua-marine contoured carpeting in my grandparents house at 9999 Plainview on the west side of Detroit. My eyes along with all of my family and several neighbors are glued to the new color RCA 25 inch television which was purchased by my Grandfather just for this moment. Its the only one on the entire block and you can tell from his pride that he is only to happy to allow anyone and everyone come see this historical moment in his living room. Just a couple hours earlier we watched as the Lunar module called Eagle landed on the surface of the moon just seconds away from running out of fuel. In that moment know one watch on Earth breathed normal.. so it wast just Huston that was about to turn blue in anticipation.

The mission had started on July 16th 1969... with the launch of the mighty Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 crew on it way to the moon. At 363 feet in height and when fully fueled weighed 265600 pounds or 3,038,500 kg! It continues to be the largest booster ever created and successfully launched repeatedly and it is said that the sound coming from its engines could be heard for miles. 13 Saturn V launches occurred from 1967 to 1973 (one to launch the Skylab Space Station) at a cost of 6.5 billion dollars! Today the same feat would cost over 40 billion!

Putting a man on the moon was a staggering technical and political feat that has since never been accomplished again. The culmination of the space race with communist Soviet Union.. a bid for technical supremacy, and a political win for the free market democratic system of living? It was all those things... but it was also the final frontier... There was no place on Earth left untouched by man and it is in human nature to explore things that are unknown. We had stepped off the planet with the first few tentative steps towards the rest of the solar system and unknown universe!

For a couple of hours Niel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the airless barren lunar surface..setting up experiments, collecting rock and soil samples and like every explorer before them placing a flag on the surface to mark the achievement, the American flag. While it was the accomplishment of America and over 300,000 of its workers... it was clear that this was more of a human moment and on that day almost two billion inhabitants of the Earth watched and listened to the event.

The Earth is over 240,000 miles away and the astronauts are relying on relatively fragile space craft to preserve them for the week they were away from home. This was at best a 50/50 endeavor in craft with thousands of working parts all of which had to work together or face disaster and the possibility of death (Indeed illustrated by Apollo 13 who's landing was scrubbed by the failure of a .75 cent part)

If Apollo taught us anything, it was that the Earth we live on is a fragile self contained space craft itself.. with finite supplies and ecosystem... What is clear is that we must rebuild our efforts to leave Earth for other planets and resources so that we can continue as a race..the human race.

It is somewhat sad that there are those who claim that the moon landings never happened. That it was a staged event for the entire world and perhaps the largest conspiracy of all time. This image of the Apollo 11 landing site and the decent stage left untouched for over 40 years taken this past Friday by a new lunar surveyor satellite currently looking for gas and water resources for a new lunar base. to those non-believers... It happened... let it go!

Note: All images supplied by NASA.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: have them go back and then put the video on youtube.

kidding; 12:59 AM

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.

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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