Friday, March 28, 2008

Free Ticket to a Roller Coaster Ride

it's the ride you never want to take. Mom's diagnosis of dementia. We're all working our way through this diagnosis - and are calling upon all the resources we can find.

A great reference book: The 36 Hour Day.
Great dementia/alzheimer's support group - Hart Senior Center in Sacramento.
Website: http://www.alz.org/index.asp

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Disfarmer - Photography Exhibit

Aunt Julia gave a talk February 28th at Duke University Center for Documentary Studies.

Here's the detail:

DisfarmerPhotographs from the Studio of Mike Disfarmer, Heber Springs, Arkansas 1939–1946January 17–April 6, 2008 Lyndhurst GalleryPublic Reception and Talk: Thursday, February 28, 7 p.m.Scholar/Collector Julia ScullyThere is much that we don’t know about Mike Disfarmer, but what we do know makes for a great story.He was born Mike Meyer in Indiana in 1884. When he was eight, his family moved to Arkansas—-though later in life he claimed to have been blown there by a tornado and dropped in the Meyers’ yard. At the age of fifty, not long after his mother’s death, he made the local paper when he legally changed his last name from Meyer to Disfarmer. The reporter explained the change this way: “Since ‘meyer’ means ‘farmer’ in German, and since the petitioner was not a farmer, he chanced upon the name ‘Disfarmer.’ ‘Dis’ is said to mean ‘not’ in German.”). In adopting this new identity, Disfarmer distanced himself from his family and seemed to imply his superiority to other locals. A confirmed bachelor who made a point of telling people that he didn’t believe in the Bible, he succeeded in creating a persona that was both insider and outsider in the small mountain town of Heber Springs, Arkansas, where he’d lived since 1914.This eccentric, reportedly friendless man chose to operate a portrait studio for forty years. He documented significant and random moments in the lives of rural Arkansas families through the end of the Depression and World War II. No warm conversation, no props, no frills; an irregular tack for the traditionally gregarious profession of portrait photographer. His neighbors, all white, predominantly working class, came as they were, and as they wanted to be remembered: in work clothes, in uniform, in their Sunday best. They are hearty individuals living through challenging times, sliced from a virtually homogenous life. The frank, arresting portraits Disfarmer made stand as a compelling record of the home front. The community he held at a distance; his camera, he caressed.This exhibition presents classic Disfarmer images—posthumous prints from glass-plate negatives made between 1939 and 1946—that were discovered two years after the photographer’s death by former Heber Springs mayor Joe Albright when he purchased the contents of the studio for five dollars. A selection of these images was first published in the Arkansas Sun (Peter Miller, editor) and Modern Photography (Julia Scully, editor) in 1975.The Disfarmer Project, a reclamation effort launched in 2004 by Michael Mattis, has brought vintage prints spanning Disfarmer’s full forty-year career in Heber Springs to the public’s attention. A special thanks to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City for the loan of these prints.This exhibition is presented in conversation with the Bill Frisell Trio's The Disfarmer Project: Musical Portraits from Heber Springs, March 1, 8 p.m., Reynolds Industries Theater, West Campus, Duke University—part of Statements of Fact: Documentary in Performance, a series offered by Duke Performances.

Heeeerre, kitty kitty!


Today's project: take 3 feral cats from around our condo to the East Bay spay and neuter clinic. Now we have only 6 cats to catch! First we called Fix Our Ferals group, which make a phone interview. Once they approve, they provide a free referral, which includes a rabies and kitty vaccinations! Looking forward to limiting our local cat population!