In the new year may we all have our cheezburgers.

I'm pulling out all the birthday stops to wish the Crankypants a supercalifragilisticexpealidocious birthday.

I think *some* people got up extra early (like crack'o'dawn eastern time) just to birthday greetings...  Oh, well.  Better late than really late.  =D

If you were to make a mix tape to sum up 2008, what would the first track be? Please share that song with us.

I'm A Bad Luck Woman

Memphis Minnie

Hey man, droogie don't crash here.
There's only room for one and here she comes, here she comes.

Merry Christmas & Happy Hanukkah to all my Voxey friends.  My gifts to you today are, pretty much, the same as last year: a donkey and some oranges.  Have a great one!

If you are like me you have put off all your holiday cleaning until "The Eve."  At the very least, I betcha got another package to wrap.  So crank up these Christmas oldies and get to it.  Here are a few that we love here at M/Donkey Head Office.   Hey, atheists like music, too!

I've got a few more holiday tunes in my library if you want to check it out.  AND I saved a couple of things for tomorrow, too!  So, get to shopping, cooking, wrapping, cleaning, taking the sled to Granny's house, etc.

I have gotten woefully behind in my book write-ups.  (I can't call them reviews because they are so light on content  and my opinions are usually hidden behind a wall of disconnected half-thoughts.)  I've been reading and viewing an unusual number of photography books, and in order to start the new year with a clean reading/writing slate I am declaring this Photography Book Week here at Donkey Central.  And to start out with a bang, today you get a two-fer. Both of today's books come to us from Iowa. I don't know what's up with books from Iowa this year.  There was Dewey, which was more about the town in Iowa than it was the cat.  And now these two:  Driftless : photographs from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier  and The Oxford Project  by Peter Feldstein and Stephen G Bloom.  Both are black and white photoessays of rural Iowa.   They both continue the theme of Till The Cows Come Home, small-town middle-America, which is either vanishing or hangin on, depending on how you look at it.

Driftless : photographs from Iowa is a set of black and whites by Danny Wilcox Frazier.  It bears a short, but compelling, forward by Robert Frank.  The images are landscapes and regular people doing regular stuff: farming, hunting, fishing playing cards, praying, hanging out and horsing around.  There was nothing particularly sad or pitiful in the photos but as a whole they left me feeling a little weary and subdued.  Duke University has a site where you can see a bit more.  Mother Jones has a nice set of images.

Oxford Project is both a book of photography and a document of oral history.  Photographer Peter Feldstein set up a studio in an abandoned storefront and invited everyone in Oxford, Iowa to come have their picture taken.  That was 1984.  Twenty years later his friend, Stephen Bloom, suggested that he re-visit the project.  Feldstein said that he would photograph them if Bloom would interview them.  Twenty years later they went back to Oxford, located many of the his subjects again, and photographed them. 

These are straight-forward black and white full-body portraits.  The faces are not made up, the clothing is not glamorous.  They are the same people from Driftless, this time standing at attention, meeting the photographer's gaze.  These images are a formal (in that they all conform to the template of background, scale, etc.) documents of that slice-of-life middle-America.  A few of the portraits stand out to me as great photographs.  But when you put them next to their 20-year counterpart AND view them as part of this larger organism... the whole thing is rather amazing.

The narratives are also remarkable-- not for being thrilling stories, but because they ring-so true, sound so like the bittersweet stories all around me.

You get all this packaged in a hefty chunk of a book with a cool 3-D pane on the cover (which I tried to capture with my own crappy iPhone camera).  I am going to give OP rare "maximum number of stars."  I read it through as well as leafed it many times.  Thank you library.  Thank you Peter and Stephen.

OP has a very lovely website where you can view more images and I found an interview with Feldstein and Bloom at the Morning News.  You'll find another, rather thorough article at CNN.  I love the way they break things down into bullet-points.  Here's what the banner of the article says: 

Photo project gives voice to 'backbone of America'
Story Highlights

• Peter Feldstein set out in 1984 to photograph everyone in Iowa town
• He then rephotographed them 20 years later and recorded their oral histories
• Feldstein's colleague Stephen Bloom: "My job in Oxford was to talk to the voiceless"
• Resident: "There were things in there that the gossip line didn't know about!"

Gotta love that CNN.

Photographer Dan Nelken has taken his camera off the beaten path to photograph county fairs around New York state.  Over the past 10 years he has frequented county fairs and documented the people he has met and the spirit of the agricultural community in Till The Cows Come Home: Country Fair Portraits. 

My initial interest in Till The Cows Come Home was due to the image on the cover: a man in a John Deere cap, a teenager in a tiara, and a freshly-shorn sheep-- the sheep being the thing that "made" the photo.  I was not disappointed by the animals and I was surprised at how interesting the people were.  Some of them look foreign and unusual and others seem familiar, like somebody you once met... maybe at a county fair.  This element of portraiture carries over to the animal pictures as well in captured gestures and expressions.   

Nelken provides in his short introduction an impassioned synopsis of the "trending down" of the American family farm.  Even before I read the intro I was convinced of Nelken's sincerity.  These are not campy or ironic images, though some may see them as such.  With the exception of a haircut or two, these are not laughable people.  This is not a corny pursuit. 

Or, maybe the unmitigated corniness of the fair makes it the authentic corny, as opposed to that cheap knock-off corny.  In either case, this set of photographs is highly recommended by this country girl.  The artist's website has a number of images from this book and other of Nelken's series.

In farming communities across the United States, the harvest is celebrated annually at county fairs where local farmers showcase their prized produce and livestock.  In some places, this tradition has been established for more than 180 years.  Family farmers are the core participants in these summer events but their numbers are waning.  Agricultural exhibits, once the economic heartbeat of county fairs, are increasingly being sidelined by amusement parks and merchandising interests.

Every summer since 1998, from July to September, I sought out these three-to-ten day county fairs hoping to document through portraits and still-lifes, an agricultural tradition that may be in the sunset years.  Befriending some of the farming families that participated year after year, I was struck by the fact that both young and old compete not for any significant economic gain, but for the camaraderie and the inner satisfaction of knowing that their year-long effort might reward them with the highly-prized "Best in Show" purple ribbon.  I also learned that some had become "part-time" farmers out of necessity, relying on more stable occupations for a reliable income.  Not surprisingly, this par-time status did not diminish their dedication to their farming community, connecting them to the rich agrararian traditions of centuries past. 

Excerpt from Introduction to Till The Cows Come Home by Dan Nelkin.

Inmate escapes German jail in box