#chaiball

project concept exploration poster 003

Similarly, I find myself really appreciating Arial Black in this context. Anderson’s hand lettering, inspired by the deco-inspired lettering of New York’s municipal signage, really is beautiful, but it also feels oddly contemporary to me almost because it’s so reverent to these vintage forms- while the Arial Black feels so effortless in its simplicity. I say all this not to knock Anderson’s work at all, more just to highlight my own interest in these little details that mark something of it’s time- and how often these details end up being imperfections or slight misfires that end up working in this really interesting way.

“The design of the menorah was a spur of the moment decision. I was at Home Depot and wanted to build something fun using non-standard materials. I remember sitting in the aisle surrounded by all sorts of steel piping. An employee asked what I was building and if I needed help. I told him “A menorah for Hanukkah,” and he walked away. Oh well, I figured it out on my own anyway!”

Myth aside, this guy is a badass. I know, not the most academic appraisal, but this matters to this project- we don’t often get to see Jewish representations of this particular construction of ruggedness, especially outside the context of war or military, and I especially like the way that it ties into Americana in general.

Mister Mort has been photographing menswear (and some women as well) on the streets of NY and occasionly beyond for the last couple decades and has an eye like no other. He manages to find these amazing through lines of American tradition in the most unexpected spaces, such as his recent high profile documentation of Deadhead culture over the last several years. With his own upbringing in the NY Chasid community, Rubinstein also often documents American Jews in a way that celebrates the wide variety of Judaic sartorial expression and tradition while emphasizing each persons unique self expression.

Chai Baseball Hat found at thriftshop, unknown, photo from twitter user @AlecEngerson (blurring and emphasis mine). 
The other thing that started it all. This thing is an absolute beauty, especially after spending a while looking for something similar online and seeing contemporary offerings- the way this design borrows from traditional ball cap styles, from the wide shape to the matching eyelets and brim to the strong typography- it feels more vintage than it probably even is.

One of the greatest essays on baseball and its symbolism by the complicated but often great Phillip Roth

The podcast that started it all, sorta. In this episode of The Kibitz, one of the hosts interviews Maya Benton, a museum curator, about a new exhibit of largely unseen photography by Roman Vichniac, a photographer famous for documenting Jewish Life pre-Holocaust for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Curating the show, Benton discovers a wide spectrum of Jewish life depicted, from rural to urban, and from observant to largely secular, despite the fact that Vichniac is most known for sort of “traditional” shtetl images of ultra observant men. The host posits that this was intentional at the time, as his photographs were commissioned for the express purpose of fundraising in the face of anti-semitism- also noting that she found captions Vichniac had included in his book, the Jewish coffee table staple  A Vanished World, incongruous with some of Vichniac’s negatives.  After the devastation of the Holocaust, these publicized images, which accounted for only a tiny percentage of the subjects Vichniac photographed during this time, became many peoples only visual representation of pre-war Jewish life, creating something of a false, or at least partial history of Judaism and Jewish life that still influences our ideas of the past today.