Permanent Record

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

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It was exactly 15 years ago today -- Sept. 28, 1996 -- that I attended my friend Gina Duclayan's 30th birthday party, which was held in the gymnasium of the old Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan (shown above). It was during that party that I came across a discarded file cabinet filled with old report cards. I didn't realize it at the time, but Permanent Record was born that day.

So happy birthday to Gina, and happy birthday to Permanent Record -- forever linked in my mind.

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I talked about Permanent Record on the radio yesterday, on WNYC's "Brian Lehrer Show." The audio of the segment is embedded below.

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I'm about to take a short vacation, which means I probably won't be posting here over the next week or so. But I'll definitely be updating this site in the weeks and months to come, so sign up for the RSS feed or e-mail notifications (both of which are available at the top-right of this page) if you want to stay abreast of new developments. Thanks.

1 comment:

AnonymousOctober 4, 2011 at 5:06 AM
Thanks for the share! I just discovered your blog and I will follow you to Patheos!

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Permanent Record, an object-based history project by journalist Paul Lukas, began as an investigation into the stories emerging from a bunch of old report cards found in a discarded file cabinet. The report cards are still the core of the project, but Permanent Record has expanded to include examination of other found objects, including postcards, business records, photographs, things left inside of old books, messages in bottles, and so on. Basically, if it's old, seems to have an evocative story to tell, and has been orphaned, lost, or otherwise isolated outside its natural habitat, Permanent Record is interested in it.

You can learn more about Permanent Record here. To contact Paul Lukas, or to be added to the PermaRec mailing list, please click here.

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Other Projects
by Paul Lukas

• Uni Watch is an obsessive look at the world of sports uniform and logo design.

• Naming Wrongs is a line of T-shirts that pushes back against the selling of stadium and arena naming rights to corporate interests.

• Gromm•It explores the juxtapositions resulting from the installation of metal grommets in unlikely surfaces, especially foodstuffs.

• Key Ring Chronicles is a crowd-sourced project that explores the stories behind objects that people keep on their key rings.

• Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, a zine published from 1993 through 2000, looked at consumer culture in excruciatingly close detail. Its first six issues were compiled into the book Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, From the Everyday to the Obscure (Crown, 1997).

• My Pet Troll documents the relationship between a writer/webmaster and his most persistent and bellicose troll.

• The Candela Structures, a collaboration with the architect Kirsten Hively, documents the surprisingly complicated history of a set of super-cool fiberglass structures in Queens, New York.

• One-Man Focus Group, a weekly column that ran on The New Republic’s website in 2013, took a close look at the worlds of consumer culture, design, and branding.

• The Forewords, a collaboration with the writer Liz Clayton, are a lecture/slideshow "band" that has opened for the Magnetic Fields and performed while sitting in very, very high chairs, among other career highlights.

• Show & Tell was a live storytelling series in which participants were encouraged to bring an object of personal significance and talk about it for up to three minutes.

• Fire Wayne Hagin Already! chronicled the on-air foibles of a particularly incompetent baseball radio broadcaster and advocated for his dismissal.

• While not a distinct project per se, these articles written for the now-dormant design website re:Form all explore slightly eccentric topics, such as the design of membership cards, things that make a “click!” when they snap shut, and giant fiberglass animals.

Want to know more about any of this? Contact Paul Lukas.

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