Harry Callahan, “Eleanor and Barbara, Lake Michigan, 1953″
This a portrait of his wife and child. I think it often when making my own pictures of our family.
Helen Levitt, 1980
This made me think color photography was beautiful and inevitable.
Neighborhood Opossum
This poor fellow appeared yesterday. I looked out and saw my neighbor trying to help him; he was in bad shape with what appeared to be a broken jaw. Cindy gave him some water, which he drank, so we knew it was unlikely that he had rabies. We captured him and took him to the animal hospital around the corner–a place staffed by wonderfully kind people (Metro Paws). They confirmed that he had a broken jaw and a number of other injuries, and euthanized him. The whole thing reminded me of a poem by Gerald Stern.
Paul Strand – Wall Street (1915)
I loved everything about Paul Strand’s Wall Street when I first saw it, way back when. I look at it now and it still excites and inspires me to keep trying.
Peter Bialobrzeski
Mujer Ángel | Graciela Iturbide (A Favorite Photograph)
Mujer Ángel, Sonora Desert, Mexico (1979). Graciela Iturbide.
Graciela Iturbide: The photograph Mujer Ángel [Angel Woman] was taken in the Sonoran desert; she is a Seri Indian. I called it Mujer Ángel because in some way it represents the change that this community had. Until 80 years ago they were nomads and abruptly entered into the capitalist system of the US. They trade their folk art for electronic equipment like radios, videos, etc., and the use of this equipment within their culture is very interesting to me.
The photo Mujer Ángel was taken casually and when I saw the contact sheets I didn’t remember the moment in which I taken the photo. In this case, I feel that it is an image that the desert gave to me.
There are images in the history of photography as much as in the history of painting that one can’t forget. For example, I will never forget the Madonna del parto by Piero della Francesca nor La Piedad by Eugene Smith. What has intensity is what reaches and stays with us.
Brassai
I know, Brassai is a cliche, but I saw this photo on a cover of a Jean Rhys anthology I read in university in the 80′s. It has stayed with me since. My favourite picture of all time, bar none.
Sarah Small’s Juxtapositions
Some really cool juxtapositions by Sarah Small. I discovered these earlier this month and really liked them. Some of them are NSFW.
favorite photograph
A few weeks ago we posted favorite quotes from books we loved. Today, let’s post favorite photographs. If possible, give a link to information about the photographer, or include the information in the post. Christopher Walken, feel free to play along.
work in progress, 31
To walk the fields and see the hill. To notice the point where sky meets land and rolls into itself. To see the folds and remember, at last, the colors at the edges of one’s body are fraying.
Residual Ramblings on Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, American Pie & Sidebrow Speculative Redux
‘the police might be following me’
The Manteca Police Department has turned to Twitter to help fight crime:
“We’ve warned people about construction delays, and about a pursuit involving school resource officers. We had gang members at gunpoint and sent that out. We also put out a description of a car that had just been stolen,” said Osborn.
From the Twitter feed:
mpd responded to kids with a knife harassing crossing guard. Unable to locate near Northgate and school. Officers will track dwn kids. 8P1
Hopefully the kids didn’t get away when the officers stopped to tweet the pursuit.
Guinness and iPhone make a great pair.
For Mickey Micklos’ demo reel.
Dear Clusterflock
Do you also like to read the cwalken twitter posts in a Christopher Walken accent? Am I stating the obvious here? I do the best CW accent in my head . . .
Chocolate gounache ganache Ganesh
Via chocolatedeities.com, naturally.
Is the US obsessed with Real Estate?
Steven Malanga thinks so (via I don’t remember who):
So deep-seated is this obsession that we in the Anglosphere move seamlessly from discussing rising home prices and house flipping to conjecturing about the opportunities that waves of foreclosures will bring. Turn on your TV at 4 a.m. these days and you will find infomercials with titles like Profiting from Foreclosures have replaced infomercials with titles like How to Buy Real Estate With No Money Down.
This is nothing new. The housing downturn of the late 1980s and early 1990s, bound up as it was in the messy savings and loan crisis, nonetheless gave way to the housing boom of the late 1990s and then the housing bubble. The foreclosure crisis of the Great Depression, when at one point 1,000 homes a day were going into foreclosure, gave way to a post-War housing boom that sparked foreclosure problems by the 1950s. The frenzy that the New York Times describes seems to be in our DNA when it comes to housing.
The problem is that this obsession is not just a function of our cocktail party talk or front-page reporting. It goes right to the heart of public policy discussions in America, which is why our government often enables housing bubbles.
FYI, I have been a renter for years and it has always treated me well.
Yesterday’s moment of convergence
Witnessing @cwalken being spontaneously praised, in my very own living room, and then witnessing @mdresser explain, in person, that it’s (probably) not really Christopher Walken. My apartment is now exactly like Twitter, but in 3D, with cake.
Headless
Trick photo. Decapitated man with bloody knife, holding his head. Circa 1875. Albumen print; photomontage.
From the George Eastman House Collection. A contribution to Flickr Commons.
Bacon’s Van Gogh
Put out the light, and then put out the light
Othello. Act V. Scene ii. Cyprus. A bedchamber in the castle: Desdemona in bed asleep; a light burning.
Read more
Good memories
Saw Martin in the market today. He didn’t seem to recognize me. Regardless, reminded me of good times. Pennies deserved better.
Will Self on Writing
The Guardian had this piece on Will Self a while back. He discusses his daily output and the ironic burden of being a nihilistic satirist:
Self, who prefers to write his fiction on a typewriter, adds that his daily word count is lower than it used to be, “partly because I shifted to the Imperial Good Companion, which is a slower machine, about four or five years ago. Writing on a manual makes you slower in a good way, I think. You don’t revise as much, you just think more, because you know you’re going to have to retype the entire fucking thing. Which is a big stop on just slapping anything down and playing with it.” Joan Didion once told an interviewer that she used to retype her whole draft every morning to get back in the rhythm. “I’m not that good a typist,” Self says incredulously. “I’d aim to write, on a first draft, not a great amount any more, only about 1,200 words a day. I write the book through. And then I start rewriting it, in successive waves.”
Which led me to this fun fact from an earlier profile:
Did you know?
He was sacked from the Observer during the 1997 general election campaign for allegedly snorting heroin in the toilet of the prime minister’s election jet. Rather hypocritical, for as he pointed out: “I’m a hack who gets hired because I do drugs.”
Heroin? Self is sooo Nineties/Trainspotting.
via This Is Probably An Interesting Blog
Another drawing
Last November I wrote a first draft of a novel for National Novel Writing Month (Lou Ann dared me). It’s about Malta and werewolves. As I go through it now, making revisions and word-processing it, I think about Malta–and going back there–a lot. And it’s coming into my drawings, as some of you have seen. This is a new one that touches upon lycanthropy without being quite obvious about it. A short section of the novel–a folktale I invented for it–will be in the next issue of New York Tyrant under the title “Stop Your Caterwauling.” (If you click on the link, you may want to then click on “all sizes” and look at the image as bigly as possible, to make the text easier to read.)
work in progress, 30
Sun dried bricks, the paint around the flowers, as if the flowers — each separate suns — had dried the paint. He knew this. He had chosen it for a reason. He felt it through his body before the ejaculation.
six more for the folio?
Fresh off the discovery of the only portrait of Shakespeare painted in his life time, we have word that six plays might need to be added to the folio.
Dr Casson, an independent researcher and psychotherapist, said: “The folio on display contains what many think are the complete works of Shakespeare, but I have discovered six new plays that are all by the Bard, but which never made it into this 400-year-old collection.”
He added: “What we thought were the first plays by Shakespeare appeared anonymously in the early 1590s.
“It is inconceivable, however, that his first plays were the massive trilogy of Henry VI. Writers develop over time from simpler beginnings.”
(via kottke)
Update: Jason writes:
Several scholars contacted me to say that Dr John Casson’s “discovery” of six new works by William Shakespeare is not really all that notable, the consensus being that Casson is a hack with little credibility among serious researchers. Wikipedia has a good page on the Shakespeare Apocrypha, “a group of plays that have sometimes been attributed to William Shakespeare, but whose attribution is questionable for various reasons”. (thx, jeffrey & nick)
