Anies Hassan dropped me a line about a new series of videos he’s making about the Thames Discovery Project.  He’s getting pretty slick with his production techniques!  Oh, and the archaeology is interesting as well…if you like that muddy, cold, London type of archaeology!  (don’t hit me!)

Credit the music and slap a CC license on it and I’ll be a happy girl.

I finally got around to uploading more of the movie we made (So You’re an Archaeologist?!) for the Afghanistan display at the Asian Art  Museum in San Francisco.

Sadly, I only got through the first two videos before I promptly threw away the main file I was working with to make more space on my hard drive.  After I get the source video from Dave (again!) I’ll post the rest of it.

And, if you’re up for a little bit of surrealist ethnography, here’s Las Hurdes or Land Without Bread, one of the movies we’re going to watch as part of our Ethnographic Movie Night next Fall.  More about that later.

Walter Benjamin’s great project, a study of the arcades of Paris, has been deeply influential in my work, and in the work of many of my peers.  While there are more academic reasons for this (this interaction with place, deep annotation, his use of photography and other visual materials, montage, his theory of knowledge/progress) part of my interest in his work stems from my love of places-in-between.  Seattle was the first real walking city that I lived in (and, later, New Orleans, which was more of a running city, at least in the late 90s) and I’d wind my way around the three great hills, up staircases, through wet, dense foliage, and between moldering brick walks.  More than museums, more than shopping, this is what I like to find in cities.  There are several paths in Berkeley, helpfully mapped and groomed, like Sharon Court:

It’s really more of a wander through an apartment complex than anything.  Nearby is Acton Crescent Path, which is basically a sidewalk between two houses.

Anyway, in anticipation of a late-October visit, I was perusing the Londonist, a blog equivalent to the SFist or the Gothamist, though I find that each of the *ists has a distinct flavor–SFist is about quirky news stories, gay rights, and Gavin Newsom’s hair, while the Austinist runs stories on Texas’ hilariously corrupt government and the music scene.  The Londonist features “secret places” and…”back passages.” It’s okay, I giggled too.

But the alleys in London sometimes have pubs in them!  This merits intensive exploration.

L-P Archaeology has started a lovely multimedia blog covering their work on Prescot Street.

http://www.lparchaeology.com/prescot/

They have a nice overview of the site, videos, and blogs from the excavators.  My friend Anies is doing a great job with the filming there, and he mentions how difficult it is to record while you have several other duties as an excavator–something I will have to face over the summer.  Fully integrating video recording into the excavation process might be a pipe dream, but it’s wonderful to see it popping up in the “real world” at a contract excavation.  The only thing I might add is a creative commons license on their flickr stream.   Overall, a great example of how to set up a dig blog for outreach.

In other news, I’ve managed to get sick for the fourth time this semester, one week away from taking my oral examinations.  I’m usually completely healthy–it might be that I’ve been under a bit of pressure, perhaps?