Laurel A Calsoni
Letterform Archive offers a visual explosion of the 1970s–80s punk scene in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.
“From the very beginning, punk’s visual art was deliberately simple, DIY, anybody could make it if you had a demented enough brain. All it took was scissors or a razor blade and some glue, and you could make collages…One wicked idea, especially one that’s going to offend everybody who sees it, that’s the way to go.” — Jello Biafra
Since 2003, we’ve been traveling through time to rediscover and share the legacy of MTV’s 120 Minutes, the classic U.S. TV series that exposed a vast collection of alternative music videos, artist interviews, and live performances to a diverse range of music enthusiasts across several generations.
This project captures and revisits the memories of 27 years of Music Television—this is the soundtrack of our lives.
With hundreds of volunteer contributors like you, we assembled this incredible archive from scratch, rebuilding nearly the entire history of 120 Minutes. Inside, you’ll find the playlists and music videos for 1,005 episodes, spanning across the various iterations of 120 Minutes on both MTV and MTV2 from 1986 to 2013, as well as Subterranean, its successor from 2003 to 2011.
Collection of over 9,000 of the best images from Shorpy.com available as museum-quality prints on archival papers or canvas. For the archive start here
A Norwegian company is preparing what they say is a doomsday vault, intended to preserve a huge variety of music’s most important works, on an arctic island midway between the North Pole and Norway.
The vault, the company say, can survive underground for 1,000 years
From Australian Indigenous music to classics by The Beatles, the Oslo-based Elire Management Group claim the vault – dubbed the Global Music Vault – will endure for at least 1,000 years, buried on the Svalbard archipelago beneath ice and snow at a depth of 1,000 feet. Read more here
Presenting His Bauhaus Teachings (1921-1931)
Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. Because of that, much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter’s work, which at its most distinctive defines its own category of abstraction, still exudes a vitality today. Read More Click Here
By Sara Aridi March 15, 2019
After two years of cataloging and preparing, the Lou Reed Archive at the New York Public Library’s performing arts branch at Lincoln Center opens to the public on Friday. And to celebrate, the library is issuing 6,000 limited-edition library cards featuring an image of Reed taken by Mick Rock in 1972.
The library acquired the archive — a large collection of notes, photographs, and more than 600 hours of recordings — after the rocker’s wife, Laurie Anderson, decided to share it with an institution that could preserve and showcase it.
Before Reed died in 2013, he had never discussed what to do with his belongings, Anderson said in a phone interview.
Read More Click HERE
Julia Gorton took epic Polaroids of Television, Blondie, Lydia Lunch, and more, and now she’s rolling out her collection on Instagram.
A downtown fixture behind a Polaroid camera at Hell’s Angels bar-turned-nightclub CBGBs, Julia Gorton took hundreds of photos of the characters that epitomized the 70s, which are slowly making their way to the public eye through her Instagram. Having first tried her hand at photography in high school thanks to a rec program director who sold her a Rangefinder for $20, and the assistance of a yearbook teacher who taught her to develop film, Gorton moved to New York from her native Delaware in 1976 and graduated to snapping Polaroids of the major acts of the burgeoning punk scene. “I don’t know what he might have seen in me that made him think I should have a camera, but I’m eternally grateful,” she said in a recent interview, of the man who sold her that first camera. “It changed my life forever.”
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If ever there was a time to listen to Neil Young, it’s today. The musician’s entire catalog is available to stream for free on his newly launched archival website.
Additionally, there are ten unreleased albums and a few unreleased films. “These are projects I did not release at the time for one reason or another, and many of the songs subsequently appeared on other albums as the years flew past,” Young explains. “The archive is designed to be a living document, constantly evolving and including every new recording and film as it is made. It is not yet complete as we are still adding a lot of detail to the older recordings.”
Read more on consequenceofsound.net
NY Times
January 12, 2017
“Mad Men,” an acclaimed show that explored a bygone era, will itself be grist for future cultural historians, thanks to a donation to the University of Texas at Austin.
Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, and Lionsgate, the producing studio, have given the show’s archive to the university’s Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum. The materials include script drafts and notes for all 92 episodes, costumes and props, as well as a collection of historical ads, magazines and other artifacts the producers used for reference and research.
“Mad Men,” an award-winning drama about angst and advertising in 1960s America, ran on AMC from 2007-2015. Though never a ratings hit, it was a critical favorite that influenced other shows as well as, with its sleek midcentury styling, the worlds of design and fashion.
“It’s our hope that the ‘Mad Men’ archive can satisfy academic curiosity and also provide creative inspiration,” Mr. Weiner said in a statement. “Both artists and scholars can retrace our steps and see how we became interested in the parts of the story we were interested in, and how the creation of the physical world as well as the characters and story lines in the show were the work of many talented people.”
The items and papers, which fill about 150 file boxes, will take roughly a year to catalog, said Steve Wilson, the Ransom Center’s film curator. Afterward, the materials will be available for study by scholars and the general public, and be the subject of future exhibitions. A few items will be on display in the center’s lobby until Feb. 1.
To read full article click HERE
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