Tag Archives: USA

Lots more viewing

Vivian Maier

Yesterday I watched a facinating documentary on the photographer Vivian Mair. I love what I saw of her work. As an archivist the whole story is also intriguing. Here is one of her pieces. Look closely at the gentleman on the phone. From what the documentary shows, Maier wasn’t afraid of showing aspects of the human condition that others turn away from.

Finding Vivian Maier

Toast of Tinseltown

Love Toast and there is a new series on BBC Two. (Everyone needs more comedy in these dark times.) The intro features a great piece of phone box artwork and this gets a bit more of an explantion in one of the episodes:

Screenshots continued

Escape Room (2)

Screenshots

The Changeling
Utopia

Real crime

We’ve started watching ‘Mindhunter’, set in the USA in the 1970s. There was mention of a serial killer who, when expecting to be hunted by police and finding he was not, rang in from a phone booth to confess. Here’s a screen shot from Wikipedia:

Lockdown viewing

Part of my Lockdown viewing has included all the repeats of ‘Agatha Christie’s Marple‘ and other Christie versions.

Crooked House

Then I moved onto Poirot and in the image below we have a murder IN the phone box:

The Clocks

Then there’s all the other TV I’ve watched, including:

The Irishman

Posting these I realise how bleak my viewing has been, so here’s something a little brighter:

Your Honor

We just started watching ‘Your Honor‘ and this shot appears in the first 10 minutes or so. I love the way it’s constructed, with balance and form and colour.

Wind phones

In 2019 I posted a story about the Japanese wind phone – you know I love to bring to this blog, the weird and wonderful ways that phone boxes exist in our world. This beautiful idea appears to be catching on . Here is a story from the USA. (I would love to set this off where I live but I’m afraid the booth would just be vandalised.)

Marshall phone carves out space for spirituality and grief

Woodfin resident Aaron Kreizman uses the Marshall wind phone to connect with a loved one. Photo by Laura Hackett.

Just off state Highway 213 in Marshall, a 1940s rotary phone sits inside a white, glass-paned phone booth, overlooking a garden and, in the distance, a ridgeline. While not physically connected to any network, the phone facilitates spiritual connections. Here, visitors can pick up the handset, “call” their lost loved ones and release whatever words they wish to communicate into the wind.

As Western North Carolina continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, the wind phone’s creator, Susan Vetrone, hopes the space will offer respite and a glimmer of hope to anyone struggling with the complex emotions that accompany loss.

“People are carrying around a lot of grief,” explains Vetrone, a Marshall resident who conceptualized the project this June and oversaw the booth’s installation in October. “It’s hard to lose people you love. … I hope this helps to relieve some of that angst.”

The concept for the Marshall wind phone, says Vetrone, is based on the original “phone of the wind” in Otsuchi, Japan, created by garden designer Itaru Sasaki in 2010. Sasaki initially built the phone to cope with his grief over his dead cousin. But after a tsunami and its aftermath killed 20,000 members of his community the following year, Sasaki opened the site to the public. In the subsequent three years, the booth became a community cornerstone, receiving over 10,000 visitors.

Vetrone first heard the story of the wind phone as she was mourning her mother’s battle (and eventual passing) with Parkinson’s and dementia. “It really moved me,” she recalls. “I immediately started seeking out a way to make it happen here. I wanted it to mirror — almost exactly if it could — the Japanese phone booth that brought so many people comfort.” 

Replicating the style of the original wind phone wasn’t easy. Vetrone had to sift through many red, shiny “UK- style” booths before eventually tracking down a plain wooden one, which she then painted white. “We wanted the feeling of lightness and spirituality,” she explains.

And to evoke traditional Japanese architecture, Vetrone commissioned local sculptor Steve Reed to create the booth’s ornate copper roof. She also weatherized the structure and installed solar lights inside the booth so visitors could make calls after dark.

Neighbor Sherrye Perry, who has lost both of her parents and visits the wind phone often, appreciates that it gives her the space to “say what you need to say.”

“It reminds me that there are all different ways and resources and paths to communicate with — at least in my mind — my creator and my ancestors,” Perry adds. “That we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. I can’t see them, but you can feel them. And they see me, and I feel uplifted by knowing that.”

How to get there

The wind phone is open to the public at 386 Madison Heights in Marshall, about a 25-minute drive from downtown Asheville.

From Asheville, take Interstate 240 to Interstate 26 west. At Exit 19A, take U.S. Highway 25/70 north toward Marshall. Turn right on State Road 213. After 2 miles, turn left on Madison Heights Drive. The parking lot is on the right.

Source: https://mountainx.com/living/marshall-phone-carves-out-space-for-spirituality-and-grief/

Screenshots

The Haunting of Bly Manor‘ – I enjoyed this ghost story. The only thing that bugged me was the obvious fact it wasn’t shot in the UK. Faux British architecture doesn’t do it for me. The above screenshot is an attempt to set a London scene.