In today’s Review section of the WSJ: an excerpt drawn from two chapters of my book, with some new material added in that talks about Polaroid photography and the way it relates to Instagram. Nicely placed, great art direction, couldn’t be happier, etc.
Hamilton’s documentary—see earlier news about it here and here—is returning to town for the documentary-film festival known as NYC DOC. It’s at the IFC Center this evening at 5:15, with a reception afterwards at the Impossible Project Space. It’s worth your time, Pola-enthusiasts. Come see it if you can. Tickets here.
Amazingly, New York City’s public-radio station WNYC has stayed on the air through the hurricane and the blackout. “The Leonard Lopate Show” is even sticking to its pre-storm schedule, and I’ll be on starting around 1 p.m. this Monday, November 5, talking about the book. Tune in if you can: In New York’s airspace, it’s on 93.9 FM, or AM 820.
UPDATE: Postponed owing to coverage of Hurricane Sandy. I’ll let you all know when it’s coming up again.
We’re featured on Very Short List—the e-mail newsletter that offers three interesting bits of culture per day—this afternoon. Welcome to anyone who’s clicked through from the embedded link, and thanks to the VSL folks for the attention.
A little more about the three recommendations:
• I’ve talked plenty about the 20×24 Studio on this site, so I don’t have to tell most Polaroidland visitors what it is. But I can tell you that interesting things are brewing there: Because of 20×24’s work with Bob Crowley’s New55 Project and an assist from the Impossible Project, it genuinely does appear that new large-format instant film is a real possibility for 2013. That’s amazing.
• In July 1945, an MIT professor named Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic, laying out his view of the future of information technology. In tech circles, it’s a legendary thing, but outside that world, it’s not well-known, and it’s amazing. The title is “As We May Think,” and in the latter portion of the piece he describes a future machine that he calls a memex. It’s a desk with a screen on top, and a huge, almost unfillable information-storage device within. Bush envisions a way in which information can be called up onto the screen, read, and its pages linked, in chains of thought, one to the next, and recorded so one can jockey back and forth from one document to the next. These memex machines are linked, so information can be passed from one to another. The thing is, shockingly, a pretty fair description of an Internet terminal, and what that means is that Vannevar Bush was trying to surf the Web in 1945. Nor did he just toss this idea out there: He went on to advise President Truman, and later helped start DARPA, the group that created the actual Internet. Read the essay—it will blow your mind.
•I’m just finishing Jon Gertner’s book The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, published last March, and like it a lot. It hits a number of the same themes as my own book, like the decline of corporate basic research in favor of straightforward product development, and the added value that results when a lot of smart people coexist in one place. It’s a bigger and more sweeping book than Instant, though, because Bell Labs had greater reach and more towering inventions. (Polaroid instant film is really interesting, but the solid-state electronics that came out of Bell Labs changed nearly everything you did today, and certainly made it possible for you to read this.) He’s a nice crisp writer, too, and does some fine work getting into the head of Bill Shockley, he of the transistor, the Traitorous Eight, and the unfortunate embrace of eugenics.
I had a surprise come my way on my trip up to Massachusetts last week. While I was at the Cambridge Historical Society, an audience member introduced herself: Nancy Bellows Woods, who’d been a chemist at Polaroid from 1968 to 1971. (She was, back then, married to Al Bellows, who appears in the book for his early work on SX-70.) Woods had been stationed in the black-and-white lab, she told me, and I asked her whether she’d worked for Meroë Morse, Land’s beloved deputy who ran the b/w research. She had indeed, and in fact had been there when Morse died, at just 46 years of age, in 1969. And she was so struck by the emotion surrounding Morse’s death that she saved the memo that Dick Young, another of Land’s top executives, circulated that day. Here it is (click the image for a larger, fully legible view).
Click to read at full size.
Maybe it’s just because I’m deep in Polaroidiana, but I too was moved by this. It’s neither sentimental nor corporate-cold, and it speaks of an environment where people really believed in their jobs as small missions, toward a product that improved communication, preserved memories, and actually did make people’s lives a little better.
Your host deep in the real-life Polaroidland: At the MIT Museum, October 18, 2012.
Lovely warm reception in Cambridge this week, at the events I mentioned in my last post. We filled every seat (about 50) plus some windowsill perches at the Cambridge Historical Society, and had 80-plus attendees at the MIT Museum for the party the next night. Both times, a good number of Polaroid alumni turned up, and many shared stories, anecdotes, and more.
A pair of excellent news hits helped bring in visitors: Mark Feeney’s long Q&A with me in the Boston Globe, and Janelle Nanos’s online interview for Boston magazine’s news blog. Grateful for both, and I loved catching up with Janelle, who worked with me a bunch of years back at New York magazine. And thanks again to Dr. Deborah Douglas, at MIT, and Gavin Kleepsies, at the CHS, for running two smooth, enjoyable events.
BUY THE BOOK
Available in many bookstores, online and off-. Click the photo to order from my local, the Strand Book Store.
BUY THE OTHER BOOK
WATCH THE TRAILER
On Vimeo: click the image to view.
