Hatch Show Print in Nashville: iconic style, letter by letter [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jan 252013
 
Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

Hatch can reprint its greatest hits using the same elements

You may not know the name Hatch Show Print, but you know the style. Its block letters are visually synonymous with Nashville and country music history. When Hatch began business in 1879, Nashville was the fifth-largest printing center in the United States, and at that time, hand-assembled letterpress was how printing was done.

The middle years of the 20th century were hard on letterpress. Newer technologies rose to supplant the inky, time-consuming moveable type method, and both machines and their output were trashed. But Hatch’s curator and chief designer, Jim Sherraden, saw beauty in its imprecision, and he rebuilt the faltering business into an indispensable institution.

To someone in the 1880s, the blocky letterpress style that filled every handbill and advertisement simply signified disposable culture. Today, with so few practitioners, Nashville virtually owns the look.

I was lucky enough to be invited behind the scenes of Hatch Show Print.

The video shows you just how damn cool it is:

This graphic design stalwart merits its own book: Hatch Show Print: The History of a Great American Poster Shop. I want one.

Hatch Show Print

Letter by letter, page by page, we leave history behind

Manzanar, where decent Americans were destroyed [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jan 242013
 
With everything except the central meeting hall in ruins, this memorial has come to stand for Manzanar. June 2013

With everything except the central meeting hall in ruins, this memorial has come to stand for Manzanar. June 2013

The history of the United States could fairly viewed as a succession of excuses for not living up to its contractual obligations.

All men were not created equal, according to the Declaration of Independence: Slaves were allowed. The Supreme Court said the Cherokees were a sovereign nation: The South took their land anyway. Every citizen was entitled to equal protection, according to the Fourteenth Amendment: Women still couldn’t vote for another 60 years, and the Civil Rights Act had to wait another century. Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Washington to cash a check, but his people are getting paid on the installment plan.

In our living memories, few stains are more indelible and illustrative than the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War Two. They were American citizens, but that didn’t matter to the government. They were locked away in one of 10 residence camps, and by the time they got out, many people had lost everything — homes, businesses, all gone, wiped out. George Takei and Pat Morita are just two of the well-known people who endured these places and rose above them. Many others were affected for the rest of their lives.

I recently went to the isolated Owens Valley in east central California for a forthcoming feature that will be published by the New York Post. In the spirit of my visit to the little-known concentration/POW camp of Andersonville, Georgia, I shot a video tour of Manzanar, which was made a National Historic Site 40 years after the war ended. By then, most of the barracks had been sold to soldiers for tool sheds and cheap housing. They usually bought them for more money than the typical detainee received from the government upon liberation.

Ironically, this National Park unit is run by the Department of the Interior, which is the very same government body that oversaw the incarceration of legal citizens through the War Relocation Authority. Continue reading »

The mass grave under Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Nov 262012
 

Jason CochranI am tremendously excited about this video that I researched and hosted for AOL On’s “What Remains” series. It takes off from my popular blog post about the mass grave in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park. I think the broadcast-quality production these guys put together is phenomenal.

The short version is explained in my post, linked above. But the gist is this: There is a mass grave for 11,500 people under Fort Greene Park.

Here’s another disturbing fact that was trimmed from this telling of the story: The prisoners desperately wrote George Washington to beg him for help, to exchange them or free them. In response, Washington let them die. He didn’t want them to be released so they could spread smallpox to the general population.

There is a first-person account from one of the survivors: the riveting Recollections of Life on the Prison Ship Jersey by Thomas Dring. A really good version is currently in print.

I’m just hugely proud of the whole video, and the topic, as you can already tell, is dear to my heart.

 

I have a new reel

 Blog, Video
Aug 022012
 
Jason Cochran

This clip isn’t in the reel. Man, are you missing something.

Well, it’s an old but decent reel that’s been re-stuffed with my CBS stuff and some Shark Tank tidbits. Solid upholstery given a new fabric.

Video editing is not my forte but apparently being a camera hog is, because I had hours of stuff I rejected to boil my media appearances into this fast-paced somethin’ that covers live network stuff, live IFB hits, location shoots, and hosting.

 

I am sort of stunned by the amount of stuff I have done, actually. And I thought this kind of thing made me nervous. Guess not.

I have permanently embedded this sucker in the sidebar to the right, so if you don’t watch it now just feel free to ignore it there.

 

My cruise ship intercepts a raft of Cuban refugees [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jun 302012
 
cuban refugee boat found by royal caribbean 29 june 2012

Most of the passengers believed the Cuban refugees were cruising to Mexico. Because, ya know, the Oasis just went to Cozumel and Señor Frog’s was totally off the chain.

Yesterday, I was ending a week-long voyage on Royal Caribbean’s mighty Oasis of the Seas (travel writing, yo) with Nomadic Matt, and as our mammoth ship crossed the 90-mile distance between Havana, Cuba, and Key West, Florida, we encountered an inflatable raft packed with 18 refugees. They were in distress.

Something about travel and me places me where news is happening. Just as I did when Virgin Atlantic negligently stranded passengers without food for nearly two days at JFK, I turned to Twitter to report the story as it unfolded. Websites started picking up my coverage; CruiseInd.com generously said “Thank social media for this, and the people who actually know how to use it.”

So here is the short video I took when I wasn’t tweeting — which, given the slow upload speeds at sea, was the only way I was going to get word out quickly. (Read many of my live tweets at the CruiseInd.com link above, or in my stream.) I did not see this covered on the news later — Fox News was too busy lamenting over the word tax — and I don’t know what happened to these desperate souls.

No one except my fellow Royal Caribbean passengers seemed fooled by the rafters’ ridiculous claim that they were actually headed to Mexico. Even in the video, the rafters are making a half-hearted and impossible attempt to head west even though they were clearly making their way north, toward the Keys. America is so near Cuba at the location of this video that yesterday, a 49-year-old grandmother, Penny Palfrey, began a marathon barefoot swim between the two coasts in the same waters.

Continue reading »

How James Dean crashed: his death site [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jun 202012
 
Looks like it was yesterday. Where he died does, too.

I was obsessed with James Dean in college at Northwestern. I had this Phil Stern photograph of him (left) on my wall. I saw the movie adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for the first time and I was messed up by his intensity. There was something unbridled about his emotion that appealed to a 20-year-old. My acting teacher said to go with it.

A few months later, working for XS Magazine in Fort Lauderdale, I got to interview Julie Harris, who kissed him in that movie. She wasn’t overjoyed that I asked about shooting with James Dean when what she really wanted to talk about was Driving Miss Daisy, which she was doing at the local playhouse. Can’t blame her. The woman is a living legend herself. (Two years ago, I had another East of Eden one-degree: I rode an elevator with Lois Smith at the James Hotel in Chicago. I wisely kept my mouth shut that time even though I also wanted to hug her neck for Frank Galati’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.)

Some people are living lodestones. They get under the skin of other people. You can’t explain why.

Blackwell’s Corner, a half hour east on 46, was where Dean got his last refreshment break. That place was torn down years ago, and the new construction tries to cash in on his gruesome death with a fudge shop and forlorn half-stocked shelves of nuts and ’50s souvenirs. There are signs all but begging people to spend money there. It’s pitiful.

It’s hard to believe that in 2014, it’ll be 60 years since East of Eden came out. When I see clips now, I can recognize that he was totally out of synch with his co-stars. They were more stagey, more calculated. They felt like every other 1950s movie. During his silent scream at being rejected by his father, he was modern, an exposed nerve, and still is, because he was like a beautiful walking wound.

Anyway. I always wanted to see where he died, a place in the forlorn middle of California close to sunset on September 30, 1955. But it was so far away. It’s in the middle of nowhere. I’ve been to San Francisco countless times, and I’ve been to Los Angeles countless times, but at no time have I casually been in the scrubby in-between a half hour east of Paso Robles, California. Continue reading »

Andersonville: America’s concentration camp [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
Jun 192012
 

There’s a story about why those six graves are set apart like this. The video explains.

I feel ghoulish for admitting this about a place where 13,000 people died in just over a year, but Andersonville has a very special place in my heart.

I wanted to go for years. It nagged at me, the way Harpers Ferry did until I finally went and made it the first real post on this blog. And the minute I pulled into the parking lot for the very first time, in 2009, I was struck with the brainstorm that wound up becoming “AfterShark,” my post-show for ABC’s Shark Tank. Before I even went inside, I’d scribbled the concept down. It feels uncomfortable to say it, but something revelatory happens to me every time I visit here.

A few weeks ago, I went back, in the red-earthed rolling hinterlands of mid-Georgia, for the third time, this time to research a big project I’m working on. It was mostly empty, as it always is. I think that’s a shame. Americans should know what happened on their turf. We shouldn’t forget about it. We shouldn’t excuse it. Andersonville makes me indignant about ignorance.

So I made this quick video about it: what it looks like there, what happened there. It’s quick, and I hope it’s evocative. Continue reading »

Revisiting Rosewood, Florida, today [WATCH]

 Blog, Video
May 112012
 
Rosewood Baptist Church, Florida

Rosewood Baptist Church, Florida

A year ago, I first visited Rosewood, Florida, the site of a horrific racist massacre in 1923. Someone imagined a black man raped a white girl, and it exploded from there. I found the paltry memorialization of this American tragedy to be disquieting. I wrote about my first visit to Rosewood on this blog (click here to read that post, see the pictures, and read the depressingly politicized plaque).

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to return. Rosewood is in Levy County, where Florida State Road 24 meets County Road 324, a few miles east of Cedar Key on the Gulf of Mexico. This place once buzzed as a miller of cedar for Faber pencils. Now it’s quiet.

My first trip there was too unsatisfying, bereft of the vibration that turmoil usually leaves. I left without a sense of the gravity of what had happened there. If I hadn’t known beforehand, I never would have realized that this dusty, overgrown, fire-prone patch of coastal Florida land had hosted any event of note, let alone one charged with such fury, terror, and bloodlust.

This time, I battled the seasonal swarm of lovebugs to shoot a little video of Rosewood so people can see it for themselves. It appears, on the face of it, to be a dreary, sun-baked little outpost of pickup trucks and scrubby trees. It seems like nothing special as long as you remain ignorant.

But of course, the woods most people zoom past once were once the setting for unimaginable savagery. Continue reading »

A little of my recent work

 Blog, Video
May 082012
 
Jason Cochran in Bank of America's The Savings Experiment on AOL

Hosting 'The Savings Experiment'

You already read my blog, and thank you for that. I put a lot of thought and effort into my topics and writing here.

I always post some of my other goings-on through my Twitter feed. Not everyone follows my tweets (and even those I do can’t keep an eye on my feed 24/7), so I’ll round up a few links to a selection of the coolest things I’ve been up to in the past few months.

The New York Post: Update of this year’s development in Orlando

DealNews.com: Booking Got Bumped? Your Vacation Cancellation Recource

The New York Post: Preview of the big new rides at amusement parks across America

Scanorama (Sweden): Cover story on how to do Broadway like a local (link to PDF)

The New York Post: Feature on Anna Maria Island, Florida

I have two features in the editing pipeline at Travel + Leisure. They will be sequels to my recent feature for them about America’s Most Beautiful Neighborhoods.

BBC World: Expert appearance on Fast Track, discussing the South Korean theme park boom. I’m at 4:04 and 9:33. And they spelled my name wrong. I’ll know I’ve made it when they don’t spell my name wrong. Then again, that’s what Condoleezza Rice has been saying for years.


CBS This Morning: Segment about the ramifications of the proposed merger of U.S. Airways and American Airlines

I have also hosted four “The Savings Experiment” segments for Bank of America: on filing your taxes, buying drugstore items, and cable TV service (which is in post-production). I’ll embed those in a future post.

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