Permanent Record: October 2011

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

The bad news is that most of the Slate series is still not functioning properly (grrrrr); the good news is that I've been given permission to republish the entire series here on this blog.

The first Slate article is, for the most part, fine (some of the photo links are a bit wonky, but it's mostly OK), so you can read that on Slate. You're better off reading the second, third, fourth, and fifth articles here. The photo interface here on the blog isn't as elegant as the one on Slate, but at least all the links work, all of the text is present and accounted for, and so on.

So if you want to take in the entire series, or pick up where you left off, here you go:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

More developments soon.

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Isn't that nice? It's a little charm (actual size: half an inch wide), given to me by the lovely Kirsten Hively -- her way of congratulating me on Permanent Record's success.

Meanwhile: The folks at Slate are in the process of restoring the five-article series to its full functionality. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting close. I hope to post updated links to the series in a few days. Thanks for your patience.

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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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