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Wednesday, June 26th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | Watch Battered & Bruised Vintage Toys Get Mesmerizingly Restored to Near Mint Condition
They say that toys were once built to last. But though metal and wood didn't break quite so easily in the hands of children in the early 20th century as plastic does in the hands of their great- or great-great-grandchildren today, time still hasn't been especially kind to the playthings of yesteryear. Enter the toy restorer, who can return even the most faded, rusted, beaten-up specimens to a burnished, gleaming condition that would turn the head of even the most smartphone-addled youngster. At least the toy restorer behind the Youtube channel Rescue & Restore seems to possess skills of this kind, and in its channel's videos you can see them put to use.
Over the past two months, Rescue & Restore has taken on such projects as a 1960s Tonka Jeep, a 1930s Wyandotte airplane, a 1920s Dayton train, and other such miniatures as a piano, a cash register, and even a functional oven. Most of them start out looking like lost causes, and some barely resemble toys at all. [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<div [...] http://cdn8.openculture.com/>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] <div class="oc-video-wrapper">
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<p>They say that toys were once built to last. But though metal and wood didn't break quite so easily in the hands of children in the early 20th century as plastic does in the hands of their great- or great-great-grandchildren today, time still hasn't been especially kind to the playthings of yesteryear. Enter the toy restorer, who can return even the most faded, rusted, beaten-up specimens to a burnished, gleaming condition that would turn the head of even the most smartphone-addled youngster. At least the toy restorer behind the Youtube channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/theDIYSRC/videos">Rescue & Restore</a> seems to possess skills of this kind, and in its channel's videos you can see them put to use.</p>
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<p>Over the past two months, Rescue & Restore has taken on such projects as a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncusxSgaN4I">1960s Tonka Jeep</a>, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq-k8JQW3n0">1930s Wyandotte airplane</a>, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1UtyH38kkU">1920s Dayton train</a>, and other such miniatures as a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJPLJMFoVzo">piano</a>, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfrWH4y2WoI">cash register</a>, and even a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r15QccHHu4I&t=10s">functional oven</a>. Most of them start out looking like lost causes, and some barely resemble toys at all.</p>
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<p>Fortunately, Rescue & Restore possesses all the specialized tools needed to not just disassemble and (to the amazement of many a commenter) reassemble everything, but to clean, resurface, and repaint each and every part, and in some cases fabricate new ones from scratch. Apart from the occasional explanatory subtitle, the "host" does all this work without a word.</p>
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<p>Despite their simplicity, the videos of Rescue & Restore have drawn millions upon millions of views in a relatively short time. This suggests that the number of people dreaming of a better future for their closets full of long-disused toys might be large indeed, though we should never underestimate the appeal of seeing the old made new again — an experience whose audiovisual satisfaction seems to be heightened by high-resolution shots and clearly captured sounds of all the dremeling, sandblasting, and buffing involved.</p>
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<p>Toys originally opened sixty, seventy, eighty Christmases ago have gone through a lot in their long lives, but after Rescue & Restore gets done with them, they could well find their way under the tree again this year.</p>
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<p><strong>Related Content:</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/watch-an-art-conservator-bring-classic-paintings-back-to-life-in-intriguingly-narrated-videos.html">Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2018/08/how-an-art-conservator-completely-restores-a-damaged-painting.html">How an Art Conservator Completely Restores a Damaged Painting: A Short, Meditative Documentary</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/watch-a-17th-century-portrait-magically-get-restored-to-its-brilliant-original-colors.html">Watch a 17th-Century Portrait Magically Get Restored to Its Brilliant Original Colors</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2015/07/the-art-of-restoring-a-400-year-old-painting-a-five-minute-primer.html">The Art of Restoring a 400-Year-Old Painting: A Five-Minute Primer</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/watch-a-japanese-craftsman-lovingly-restore-a-tattered-old-book.html">Watch a Japanese Craftsman Lovingly Bring a Tattered Old Book Back to Near Mint Condition</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-art-of-restoring-classic-films.html">The Art of Restoring Classic Films: Criterion Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitchcock Movies</a></p>
<p><em>Based in Seoul, <a href="http://blog.colinmarshall.org/">Colin Marshall</a> writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book </em>The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles <em>and the video series </em><a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/thecityincinema">The City in Cinema</a><em>. Follow him on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/colinmarshall">@colinmarshall</a>, on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/colinmarshallessayist">Facebook</a>, or on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/colinmarshallseoul/">Instagram</a>.</em></p>
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| 4:45p | Joy Harjo, Newly-Appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, Read Her Poems, “Remember,” “A Poem to Get Rid of Fear,” “An American Sunrise” and More
In Carolyn Forché’s stunning new memoir, What You Have Heard is True, the poet and activist makes a sad observation about poetry in America. When it is “mentioned in the American press, if it is mentioned, the story begins with ‘Poetry doesn’t matter,’ or ‘No one reads poetry.’ No matter what is said. It doesn’t matter.” But of course, Forché believed poetry mattered a great deal—that we need it in the struggle “against forgetting,” a phrase she took from Milan Kundera for the title of an anthology of the “poetry of witness.” Poets resist injustice and inhumanity, she says “by virtue of recuperating from the human soul its natural prayer and consciousness.” Such a poet is Joy Harjo, newly appointed Poet Laureate in the United States, the first Native American woman to hold the post. Harjo asks us to remember—to remember especially that the grand sweep of history cannot sever us from the natural world of which we are an inextricable part, and which is itself the source of “the dance language is.”
The stargazing, tree-hugging exhortations in “Remember” are radical statements in every sense of the word. Maybe poetry doesn’t matter much to most Americans. We cannot, as William Carlos Williams wrote, “get the news from poems,” and our hunger for fresh news is never sated. But maybe what we find in poetry is far better suited to saving our lives, offering a release, for example, from fear, as Harjo speak/sings in her charismatic performance from HBO’s Def Poetry Jam in 2002.
Harjo remembers the horrors her ancestors endured, and tells the fear that followed through the centuries, “I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin. But now I don’t know you as myself.” A member of the Muskoke/Creek Nation, Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1951 and earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1978. She went on to publish several books of poetry and nonfiction and win multiple prestigious awards while also performing poetry across the country and playing saxophone with her band Poetic Justice. Her soulful delivery conveys a fundamentally American experience of the struggle against erasure, a struggle against power that is waged, as Kundera wrote, with the weapon of remembering. Echoing Langston Hughes, Harjo weaves the story of her community back into the country's past and its present—a story that includes within it demands for justice that will not be forgotten. Poetry should matter far more to us than it does. But those who hear the country’s newest Laureate may find she is exactly the fearless voice we need to remind us of our unavoidable connections to the past, the earth, and our responsibilities to each other.
Harjo stopped by the Academy of American Poets this month in celebration of her appointment. Just above, see her read “An American Sunrise.” “We are still America,” she says, “We / know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die / soon.” These reading will be added to the Poetry section of our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.
Related Content: “PoemTalk” Podcast, Where Impresario Al Filreis Hosts Lively Chats on Modern Poetry An 8-Hour Marathon Reading of 500 Emily Dickinson Poems Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Joy Harjo, Newly-Appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, Read Her Poems, “Remember,” “A Poem to Get Rid of Fear,” “An American Sunrise” and More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 7:00p | Arab Photography Archive Puts 22,000 Historic Images Online: Get a Rare Glimpse into Life and Art in the Arab World
The history of photography, as most of us know it, has expanded by several thousand images and several more countries, thanks to the launch last month of the Arab Image Foundation’s online archive of photography “from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora dating from the mid-nineteenth century,” as the Getty's photography blog The Iris reports. The Beirut-based non-profit AIF has since digitized 22,000 images from its physical collection of 500,000+ photographs, collected since 1997, notes the Foundation, in “research missions and projects in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, Iran, Mexico, Argentina and Senegal." AIF hopes to eventually upload 55,000 scanned images, but funding issues have made the project a challenge.
Nonetheless, the trove of photos and negatives already made available not only significantly expands our view of photography’s reach and scope, but also our view of the Arab world—recording lost traditions, modernisms, and an array of cultural practices and attitudes that may surprise us, and that have since been suppressed in many of these same societies. “From same-sex kisses and men in drag,” writes India Stoughton for the BBC, “to nude portraits and children posing with assault rifles, the Arab Image Foundation is replete with startling and sensationalist photographs.” There are many photographs of flamboyant stage performers and celebrities. And there are many more conventional collections, such as the family portraits of Palestinians living in Jerusalem, Nablus, Ramallah, and Jaffa before 1948.
Amidst the hundreds of stiff portraits and awkward family photos, the archive features candid street shots and “many images of historic events and figures.” It also documents “watershed moments that have been overlooked by history.” Pin-up photography and pictures of male bodybuilders in Egypt; surrealist experiments with double exposures in 1924 by Lebanese photographer Marie al-Khazen, “one of the first female photographers in the Middle East,” writes Stoughton.
Al-Khazen’s “avant-garde compositions and habit of photographing herself and other women enjoying traditionally male pastimes, such as smoking, driving and hunting, made her a fascinating and unconventional figure.” The same adjectives apply to many of the photographers in this archive, whose work often shocks and surprises, but just as often communicates in more subtle ways the texture of everyday life for people in the Middle East and North Africa over the course of the late-19th to mid-20th centuries.
These images capture the daily lives of overlooked people groups, like the Bedouin hunters of Syria, as well as the lives of regular people before conservative regimes swept into power around the region and wiped away traces of modernization and the personal, religious, creative, and sexual freedoms we see represented. Now this photographic history joins several other comprehensive online libraries of historic photography, such as Europeana Photography, the George Eastman Museum, the Soviet Union’s premier photo magazine, and many more.
While not as extensive as some of these other collections, the AIF’s digital project is no less essential for the light it sheds on a past, and a medium, that continues to prove itself resistant to stereotypes. Enter the Arab Image Foundation's digital archive here, and learn more about how these photographs have been digitally preserved at The Iris. Related Content: Visit a New Digital Archive of 2.2 Million Images from the First Hundred Years of Photography Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Arab Photography Archive Puts 22,000 Historic Images Online: Get a Rare Glimpse into Life and Art in the Arab World is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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