Culture Culture

If you’re like me, you’ve probably taken to watching Spanish-language television while washing your clothes at the laundromat. Here is a hot video for the song “Hay Un Son” by the Orishas that I caught during the rinse cycle. Consider the semiotics: what do the mask, the rooster, the tiger, the helicopter mean to you? Does it mean anything if you aren’t Cuban?

I am love with a wonderful litte blog called FLY, written by a young designer based in Philadelphia. See her post today about the on-point work of Georg Olden, the grandson of a slave who became an executive graphic designer for CBS in 1945, when television was just beginning. If you love design you might learn something.

Have you seen The Best Years of Our Lives, directed by William Wyler? The film is a classic, and I was happy to see it again last night after having first viewed it years ago in film school. It follows three veterans, including real-life double amputee Harold Russell in a gut-wrenching performance, who return home from World War II to discover their “readjustment” an emotionally challenging, economically frustrating, and often disappointing process. At numerous point in the story, civilians demonstrated little understanding about the real toll of the war and returning home. Here, support did not come easy, whether Federal, local, or interpersonal. It’s remarkable how similiar in many ways the plight of veterans remains unchanged after sixty years. Goes to show the more things change the more they stay the same. . .

The film did stir up my understanding of redlining, the development of the suburbs, and post-war wealth in white America. . .I’ve got more reading to do, but Wyler’s film, though considerably dramatic adds something unexpected to the picture.