This continues to be a home for my series of sunset paintings. I’m now in the seventh year of painting every sunset – having begun the current series on January 1, 2006 – and painted many others, beginning in 1995. 

Most of the sunsets are seen from the same vantage point, facing the Blue Ridge, in Virginia, north of Charlottesville. Otherwise I paint the sunset view from wherever I happen to be. Even if painted later from a sketch, these paintings are done alla prima (wet in wet without later revision or overpainting) in around the same time it takes to watch the sun go down.

Please also visit Tabula Rosa (the red series), my Daily Paintworks gallery, and Moment & Horizon on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you for your interest in this work. 

We don’t even need to finish the tag line – “There’s a ____ for that”. Thanks to the genius of Apple, we all know about apps and that well, there’s one for everything. So here’s a few of them that can make the locavore lifestyle just that much easier.

Harvest – Select the Best Produce
What’s the best avocado to pick? How do you know when a pineapple’s ripe? This app will help you figure that out. It’s a $1.99 but it’s certainly worth it in the money you’ll save with perfect produce.
California Certified Farmers Markets
This one is self-explanatory – find a farmers market in California by city, county, region or geo-locatively near you.

Vermont Eats
If you aren’t in California, and maybe in Vermont, then you should throw down $2.99 for the well-done Vermont Eats app. The app shows you not only where to find local farmers and farmers markets, but also local food producers like breweries and bakeries, PLUS local food festivals and gorgeous images.

Canning!
Canning may be an old school way of preserving foods but it’s getting a 21st century makeover with the locavore movement and Canning! app. This app is $1.99 – cheaper than a book on canning however there are no images in the app. It does make it easy to can, giving complete step by step instructions on how.

Of course, Locallectual has a mobile site that makes it easy to find not only local foods, but restaurants that use locally-grown ingredients, local retailers and locally made goods as well.

-Jess

Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.

--Nickolas Ashford & Valerie Simpson

* * *

Analogue is better.  Paper, ink, typewriters, LPs.  Film.  I've been rediscovering this simple truth as I look through the 18 September 1950 issue of Life magazine.  Digital may be more convenient, but it's almost never as good.

This particular edition of Life is on my desk because contains a powerful, yet largely forgotten photo essay about South Africa by Margaret Bourke-White.  (At the time, she was probably the most famous photojournalist in the world.)  The essay was the first visual exposé of apartheid, South Africa's system of white supremacy, to appear in the mainstream American press.  It was a surprisingly hard-hitting condemnation of racial oppression and labor exploitation.  I spoke about it at the winter 2012 meeting of SERSAS/SEAN.  Now I'm turning the talk into an article for the journal Kronos:  Southern African Histories.

Until this point, I've been looking at the magazine on Google Books.  That's been useful.  And convenient.  But I knew that to do the essay justice, I needed to see, and hold, the real thing -- to come as close as I can to experiencing the magazine as people did in 1950.  Ebay to the rescue.

Life, 18 September 1950, pp. 110 and 111.  [Click on the image for a larger version.]

Without a doubt, seeing Bourke-White's essay in the magazine has changed the way that I'm thinking about it.  Here are a few random (and not particularly profound) thoughts about Life that arise as I turn the pages.

The thing is big.  Really big -- about 10 and 1/2 by 14 inches.  I'm old enough to have seen the magazine when it was still being published in the '60s and '70s, but I'd forgotten how large it was.  And it's heavy, all 172 pages of it.  The size and weight give the magazine a real presence.

The magazine might have a presence, but it's by no means an aesthetic object, like a book of fine photography.  While it's more substantial than a newspaper, it's clearly sometime that's meant to be disposable.  A couple of weeks on the coffee table or a couple of months in a barber shop, and it's done it's duty.  (Thank God for people who thought otherwise.)  Bourke-White probably couldn't have imagined that anyone be paying attention to her essay 62 years after it was published.

Nobody could possible have read the thing cover to cover -- not in a single sitting.  It's too big, too long, and it contains an almost overwhelming onslaught of words and images.  The South Africa essay almost gets lost.  It begins on page 111, and it's preceded by hundreds of ads -- 1/8th page, 1/4 page, 1/2 page, full page, double truck -- for movies, cars, toothpaste, tires, women's hosiery, fountain pens, shoes, clock radios, TVs, cigarettes, spark plugs, girdles, dog food, candy, sport coats, coffee makers, life insurance, baby strollers, vacuum cleaners, bourbon, and Vitalis hair cream, for "That Clean Groomed Look."  I could go on, but you get the point.  The magazine makes the internet look tidy.  Sure, I could see all of this on the Google site, but the physical act of turning the pages slows you down and heightens the impression of information overload.

The editorial content is almost as much of a mish-mash as the ads, ranging from "This is War," David Duncan Douglas's still moving photo essay about American marines fighting in Korea, to stories about a woman mayor in Virginia, a typhoon in Japan, Russian female athletes ("The Stronger Soviet Sex"), begonia breeders, Ethel Merman's new Broadway show, and an University of Wichita graduate student who invented eyeglasses that turned the world upside down.  All of this is accompanied -- or, more properly, lead -- by the prodigious use of photographs.  Once again, the act of turning the pages shapes the experience.  When you start a page one, page 111 is a long way off -- and, given all the distraction, you might not get there at all.

As important as Bourke-White's essay was to the magazine's editors -- with 31 photos spread over 16 uninterrupted pages (no ads), it was one of the longest and densest essays Life ever ran -- it was something that readers could have skimmed or skipped altogether.

All of this helps me understand something about Bourke-White's style.  Her photos were never subtle, never ambiguous.  She seems to have always been aware of the clutter that would surround them in the magazine, so she made images of power and clarity that were designed to stop readers in their tracks and to tell them immediately exactly the photos meant.  This is something the magazine's photographers did routinely.  Holding Life in my hands has made it easy to see why they did it.

I'll have some more substantial things to say about the essay itself in a later post.

Hanging out in downtown Richmond at the old Civil War Ironworks.

The bracelets, sponsored by the Keep A Breast Foundation, are designed to increase awareness of breast cancer. Some public school students wear them to honor a family member or friend who has battled the disease.

The Fort Wayne, Ind., Journal Gazette reports on the latest of these controversies. An unidentified high school sophomore in Fort Wayne sued after her principal forbade her from wearing the bracelet. It had been given to her by her mother, Julie Andrzejewski, a breast-cancer survivor.

One federal court decision in Pennsylvania already has established that two middle school students had a First Amendment right to wear the bracelets. In H. v. Easton Area School District, a federal district judge ruled in April 2011 in the students’ favor. The judge found that the bracelets caused no substantial disruption of school activities and were not vulgar or lewd.

Read more at firstamendmentcenter.org

Kim Houghton owns a dog day care center called Wag More Dogs. She sued after county officials declared that her outdoor mural depicting frolicking cartoon dogs violates an ordinance limiting the size of commercial signs. The dogs in the mural, which faces Shirlington Dog Park, are similar to dogs used in the shop’s advertising.

Houghton claimed the ordinance violates her First Amendment rights and is unconstitutionally vague.

A federal judge disagreed, and so did a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The panel said Tuesday that the ordinance is clear, content-neutral and narrowly tailored to enhance the county’s aesthetics.

Encyclopedia Virginia‘s programmer Peter Hedlund (left) and editor Matthew Gibson (right) at a fund-raising event for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities on May 20, 2012, in northern Virginia. (Kyle Samperton, Washington Life Magazine)

From the National Archives:

Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union on April 9, 1865. Six days earlier Confederate President Jefferson Davis had fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. Jefferson was captured by the Union on May 10, 1865, five days after he dissolved the Confederate government and a month after Lee’s surrender. Davis was imprisoned for two years at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

While at Fort Monroe, Davis was sent a brief letter signed by an unlikely correspondent, “the Devil.”

Transcript of the letter:
Baltimore Aug 10/65
To His Excellency
Jefferson Davis
Old Hoss I heard you was in trouble can I render you any assistance, if so let me know.

Yours till I get you
The Devil

Transcript of the envelope:
(Private)
To His Excellency
Ex President Davis
Wherever in the devil he is
(Hands off)

On this day in 1854, Anthony Burns—a fugitive slave from Stafford County, Virginia, then living in Boston—was arrested under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850). Failing to free him through legal channels, abolitionists later stormed the jail. A federal marshal was killed in the melee and the subsequent trial made national headlines.

After he was returned to Virginia, Burns spent four months chained in one of the Richmond slave jails, an ordeal that left him permanently crippled and in ill health. The Massachusetts Historical Society has an excerpt from a letter he wrote to his supporters at that time. Dated August 23, 1854, it reads:

… if what you all My Friends did for Me could Not keep Me from coming Back in to a Land of death it Did do some Good for my Suffering would have Been ten hundred times great than it is But I am yet Bound in Jail and am wearing my chains Night and Day … I am for sale … I will Be to you all A friend all My days … you can get Me Low he would take $800 dollars for Me …

IMAGES: Two broadsides related to Burns’s arrest and imprisonment suggest the passions surrounding the case. The image on the right can be found at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

This continues to be a home for my series of sunset paintings. I’m now in the seventh year of painting every sunset – having begun the current series on January 1, 2006 – and painted many others, beginning in 1995. 

Most of the sunsets are seen from the same vantage point, facing the Blue Ridge, in Virginia, north of Charlottesville. Otherwise I paint the sunset view from wherever I happen to be. Even if painted later from a sketch, these paintings are done alla prima (wet in wet without later revision or overpainting) in around the same time it takes to watch the sun go down.

Please also visit Tabula Rosa (the red series), my Daily Paintworks gallery, and Moment & Horizon on Facebook and Twitter.

Thank you for your interest in this work. 

Trying out Daddy’s new Chucks. 

Late May tenting on one of VA’s prettiest rivers.

The W.H.Kellogg Foundation recently did a survey and found that a huge majority of Americans (about 90%!) think that equal access to fresh vegetables for Americans is important. Another majority believes that American SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) should be doubled at farmers markets. Your $1 food stamp at the corner bodega would be worth $2 at the city farmers market. That’s a huge push to get underprivileged Americans to eat fresh and healthy – something that many have argued is unaffordable when you’re living close to or below the poverty line.

Other great news to come out of this survey is that 70% of those surveyed said they had bought fresh produce from a farmers’ market or stand in the past year, and almost 70% said they ate more whole grains, fruits and vegetables than they did five years ago. Although obesity is a huge epidemic in America, this could signal that people recognize the need to solve the problem.

While this was a small survey (800 people), it shows positive changes in Americans views of the importance of fresh and local for for all Americans, which if you ask us, can only signal good things to come.

View a great infograph showing more results from the study (we love a good infograph!).

-Jess

via email …
  
Last chance to save on Crozet Park Aquatics & Recreation Center (PARC) fees!  Register by Monday, May 28 and pay no joining fees to the PARC facility, which includes full access to the pool, full access to the fitness center, group exercise classes, and member discounts on all programs!   (Savings on Joining Fees:  $75 for Adult; $100 for Family).
 
Last chance to save on pool only fees!  Register by Monday, May 28 and pay discounted rates. 
 
See website for more information on membership rates. 
 
POOL OPENS SATURDAY, MAY 26!  For Memorial Day weekend, we will be open as follows:
 
Saturday, May 26:  10 AM – 8 PM
Sunday, May 27:  12 PM – 8 PM
Monday, May 28:  10 AM – 8 PM
 
FITNESS CENTER OPENS ON TUESDAY, MAY 29!
 
See website for information on hours of operation.
 
Check out all of our aquatics programming.  Additional information added daily!
 
Check out our fitness center programming.  New information added daily!
 
Join us for summer day camp.  Spaces are limited!
 
For those that have already joined, you can pick up your membership key tags starting Saturday, May 26!  We’ll see you soon!
 
Please contact Jessica Maslaney, Site Director, with any questions:  jmaslaney@piedmontymca.org. 
 
Thanks for your time!
 
Jessica
 
Jessica P. Maslaney
Site Director, Crozet PARC
 
Crozet PARC/YMCA
1075 Claudius Crozet Park
Crozet, VA  22932
 
434-205-4380
www.piedmontymca.org
 

Copyright RealCentralVA.com, LLC. If you like this post, please, visit RealCrozetVA.comwhere this was originally posted.

From Ta-Nehisi Coates (links added):

There is no history of racism in this country that [can be] chalked “up only to race.” You can’t really talk about stereotypes of, say, black laziness unless you understand stereotypes of the poor stretching back to 17th century Great Britain (Edmund Morgan again.) You can’t really talk about the Southern slave society without grappling with the relationship between the demand for arable land and the demand for labor. You can’t understand the racial pogroms at the turn of the century without understanding the increasing mobility of American women. (Philip Dray At The Hands Of Persons Unknown.)

And this works the other way too. If you’re trying to understand the nature of American patriotism without thinking about anti-black racism, you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the New Deal, without thinking about Southern segregationist senators you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the very nature of American democracy itself, and not grappling with black [people], you will miss almost all of it.

From The Historie of Travaile into Virginia Britannia by William Strachey (1849).

This is one in a series of posts that pays homage to The Art of Google Books.