All posts tagged: Chronicles

Photographer Larry Sultan’s New Book Chronicles His Lifelong Inquiry Into the Uneasy Theater of American Life

Photographer Larry Sultan’s New Book Chronicles His Lifelong Inquiry Into the Uneasy Theater of American Life

Published by Sam Flores

You have probably seen Practicing Golf Swing, a photo by Larry Sultan. It’s an image of his father, barefoot, practicing his golf swing inside his house. The daylight streams through gauzy white drawn curtains, and a small ’80s television set is on in the corner. It sums up Sultan’s work perfectly. He was a master of capturing domesticity and family life in both spontaneous and staged settings. His narrative collage style uses lush, vivid colors to tell the story. If you haven’t seen one of his pictures, you have definitely seen one that was inspired by them. Dad on Bed, 1984, Pictures from Home, from Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings (MACK, 2026).Photographer Larry Sultan. Courtesy of MACK. Sultan was born in Brooklyn in 1946 and moved to the San Fernando Valley three years later. This sprawling urbanized area in Los Angeles County, often referred to simply as The Valley, is bordered by mountains, in a state that Joan Didion described as a “landscape of uneasy suspension, characterized by immense bleached skies, sprawling suburban developments, and …

‘Darkology’ chronicles the hidden history of ‘amateur blackface’ in America : NPR

‘Darkology’ chronicles the hidden history of ‘amateur blackface’ in America : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

In 2013, historian Rhae Lynn Barnes was researching blackface in America when she encountered a stumbling block at the Library of Congress: Various primary sources on the subject were listed as “missing on shelf.” Barnes spoke to one of the librarians, and explained that she was writing a history of minstrel shows and white supremacy. Barnes says the librarian admitted that, in 1987, she had personally hidden some of these books because she feared the material would be used by the Ku Klux Klan. “Once [the librarian] understood the research I was doing … a few hours later, she came up with a cart packed to the brim with all of the material that I had been hoping to see,” Barnes says. In her new book Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment, Barnes traces the origin of minstrel shows, performances in which an actor portrays an exaggerated and racist depiction of Black, often formerly enslaved, people. Barnes says minstrel became so popular in the 1800s that the stars began publishing “step-by-step guides” explaining …

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles review – remastered 1997 classic is even more politically resonant now | Games

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles review – remastered 1997 classic is even more politically resonant now | Games

Published by Sam Flores

At first glance, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, first released in 1997 and now available in newly remastered guise, does little to separate itself from other boilerplate fantasy fiction. There is a hero, Ramza – an idealistic nobleman with luscious blond hair who cavorts about the medieval-inspired realm of Ivalice in search of high adventure. But quickly, and with narrative elegance, the picture complicates: peasant revolutionaries duke it out with gilded monarchists; machiavellian plots plunge the kingdom into chaos. Ramza must navigate this knotty political matrix, all while experiencing his own ideological awakening. There is a strong case to be made that Final Fantasy Tactics tells a better story than the landmark Final Fantasy VII (which saw Cloud Strife and a ragtag bunch of eco-terrorist pals taking on the shady megacorporation Shinra). And with our real-world political focus shifting from the looming threat of the climate crisis to the more pressing rise of fascism (though the two are inextricably linked), one can make the argument that Tactics is now also the more timely game. …