Lowrider
Los Angeles, 2005. (The photo is not from the book referred to in the text to the right.)
Photo: Martin Høyem
Lowrider Space
We take a special interest in scientific works on outlaw aesthetics here at American Ethnography Quasimonthly. And we also love us some writing on car customization. Thus, when we heard about Ben Chappell’s Lowrider Space, a new publication from the University of Texas Press, we perked up: any academic hep cat who takes a look at lowriders is cool, calm, and a solid wig as far as we’re concerned.
Lowrider Space draws on Chappell’s participant observation fieldwork among car clubs in Austin, Texas. He describes how the lowrider culture creates a social space for its participants, and he points to the value of this space for a group of people who – because of their social status in the society they live in – are often denied access to other spaces.
It’s a cool piece of research, and we’re stoked to share with you an excerpt from the book. Here’s “Regulating Lowrider Space.”
We at American Ethnography think that the obituary pages of the newspaper are curiously delightful – when we read them we don’t read about death, we read about life, and therefore they leave us with high spirits.
With that in mind, here’s Ruth Benedict’s obituary, penned by Margaret Mead in 1949.
Courtesy of the publishers we give you an excerpt from Vietnam Zippos: American Soldiers’ Engravings and Stories 1965 – 1973: artist and Zippo collector Bradford Edwards’ essay on how his collection came to be.
From a depraved and desperate Montreal underworld, here’s a pitiless and darkly comic exposé of a dope hungry intellectual who educates himself in the art of hustling access to the contents of pharmacy cabinets.
Photographer Juliana Beasley worked eight years as a professional nude dancer, using her camera to document the clubs she worked in, her co-workers, and the customers. Here are some of her photos.
It’s around noon, late October, in a small town on the northwestern edge of the Colorado Desert. The outside air is clean and fresh, almost cold. A breeze blows through an open balcony door. Indoors, a modestly sized living room is jam-packed with dazzling paraphernalia, effects from the glamorous past of the lady who lives here. She’s worked in burlesque since the early 1960s.
Read the rest of our interview with Satan’s Angel here.
What else?
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Photo: Edward S. Curtis
We spent some time looking through the Edward S. Curtis Collection at the Library of Congress, and picked out a few photos which are currently our favorites. From these we selected the ones showing different examples of masks, because – as William Butler Yeats pointed out in 1910 – mask are just so damn cool:
It was the mask engaged your mind,
And after set your heart to beat,
Not what's behind.
These are wonderful, captivating images. Enjoy a stroll through our gallery, and see for yourself.
“American Ethnography is a stranger in a 1972 Riviera, sunburst yellow banged up and dirty, raving coffee madness cruising Main Street of the quiet desert town at 15 miles an hour …”
Today we’re digging Flautista! Herbie Mann Plays Afro-Cuban Jazz by Herbie Mann.
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Ruth Benedict 1887-1948
The Vietnam Zippo Lighter
Graduate School
Photo gallery: Lapdancer
