Like It Was Yesterday: The Photographs of Brad Elterman
Bob Dylan turns 70 today, and photographer Brad Elterman talks about photographing him and other celebrities.
I was just a young kid, 18, 19, 20-years-old.
I realized very soon that a picture of somebody holding a guitar, Dylan or whoever, it didn’t really matter, to me that wasn’t an interesting photograph.
tweet of the day
Elliott Erwitt, Personal Best
What I like in any—young, old, middle-aged, doesn’t matter—photographers is a sense that they are interested in the human comedy, you might say, [and] that the pictures are good technically—by that I mean, good composition, good content.
From an interview with Elliott Erwitt about his retrospective “Personal Best” at the International Center of Photography in New York.
(via the browser)
The Psychopath Test
It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.
After the conference, though, Hare seemed introspective. He said, almost to himself, “I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.”
“Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Hare. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
A few quotes from a chapter of Jon Ronson’s new book on psychopaths, The Robert Hare Checklist, and the mental health of CEOs and traders on Wall Street.
from the spam
Between us, I would try to solve this problem itself.
Poem of Questions
How strong is the beauty that calls to you?
Does anybody hold it always as a guide–or
is it the search that is required of us? Is there
rest in beauty? Or does the best of what we may
know require battering waves? Times we have loved
brought to ruin, and new times asking: How will I
rise to take my punishment, so that love
will again name itself the only path?
We turn to the dark for an end;
we walk out of it by knowing we have loved.
For those who hate musicals…
…you might become a believer. So certainly NSFW.
Herschel, the Magnificent Jew
Old Jews Telling Jokes, via John Gruber
May 23, 1934
This day in 1934 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow was shot dead by Texas officer Frank Hamer and his posse on a back country road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.
It probably weren’t much like in the movie.
Cooper’s and my friend Allen was just writing to tell about the 1936 Texas Centennial, staged in Dallas.
“One of the attractions which impressed my father, who at that time was 13, was the bullet-riddled death car of Bonnie & Clyde.”
Texas Talk
Austin-based PUBLIC SCHOOL made a deck of alphabet cards to help out those of us who don’t talk Texan.
[shit] i heard today.
lunchtime here yields a rich bounty of thoughts, feelings, opinions, and revelations i’d rather not hear. alas.
- I was a little tense this weekend, but what really concerns me is that Mayan calendar.
- I’m sorry, but I just can’t eat things that swim. I can’t get past the fact that it lived in water.
-Piranha? Yeah, he saw it, but he says it was mostly for the boobs and bush.
dream name
Austin Derwatt.
Message in a Dream
A neighbor asked me over last week to look at his American elm seeds. He is trying to grow new trees from a large healthy one that somehow has managed to escape Dutch elm disease. This is part of an effort to grow new American elms in our county in Virginia. But the neighbor has sprouted only a few seeds from dozens of attempts. And they don’t look so good.
My yard was very conservative when I moved in last summer. Within weeks it was bright and beautiful with exotic flowers that bloomed until December, then burst into life again a couple of months later. This earned me a bit of a witchy reputation. But my experience is limited to flowers, fruits and vegetables. I am not a tree person. But I told the neighbor I would see what I could find out. I started researching online. I found some information, but it was confusing. I was frustrated. Later in the week, I had a dream. I was walking with my father in the woods. He was the kind of person who could go straight to a stand of trees that had been declared extinct, or nearly. No big deal. It was like he could smell them out.
In the dream, my father bent down and started digging with his hands in the forest soil, pulling away the organic matter on top. He pushed deep into the packed earth and pulled that up in his fists. He held out the rich soil to me. I woke up thinking about the elms.
Yesterday, I told the neighbor I wanted some of the seeds. I mentioned the soil in the woods where I often roam near the trail near here (the Iowan sits on the bench and waits for me to get my fill). I did not mention the dead father and dream. But, I said, “I’m in.”
Image out of context
Douglas
Douglas died last night. He was a good dog. The most loyal I have known. He was strong. I could feel his heart in my hand. I will miss him, but he is with me.
Mr. Ghetto – Walmart
I suspect this will be some sort of thing (probably, NSFW).
via @mattthomas
Death Bloom
Last weekend, Daryl cut down our 25-year-old sweetgum tree. Dallas soil is wrong for sweetgums; it is too alkaline and causes iron deficiencies in the trees. But the prior owners had planted one, and it was beautiful, so we fretted over it for the 20 years we have lived here. Daryl would give it iron supplements, but it always looked anemic. It was beautiful, even as it failed to thrive. Last year, though, the tree was spectacular. The leaves were a rich green, its foilage full, and we thought perhaps a tap root had broken through the alkaline soil to a richer level. We realized this spring that last year’s performance had been the tree’s death bloom. It called on all of its resources for a final showing, in an attempt to make seeds that would carry on. It used itself up in a glorious display, then died.
from the moderated comments
LOL. this is part of the charlie Sheen interview. this isn’t a real interview people.
Music from last night’s reckoning
A fine article by Neal Pollack on self publishing
…in today’s NYT:
In addition to a great many bad books lost to the sands of time, there’s also a long history of successful self-published authors getting big deals with major houses. Today, though, self-publication crackles with possibility as never before. Witness the March news that the thriller author Barry Eisler had backed out of a half-million-dollar deal with St. Martin’s Press, his new publisher. He’d decided that he could, over time, make more money publishing without their help. Conversely, young Amanda Hocking, she of the vast success generated from self-publishing nine e-books, accepted a seven-figure advance from St. Martin’s, the same publisher that had just lost Eisler. Hocking issued a sassy statement that she was tired of answering e-mails all the time and just wanted to write.
“I just don’t understand”
Robert Fitzpatrick, retired transit worker, apocalypse evangelist, author of The Doomsday Code: God Is Warning Us Through the Bible, riding back home to Staten Island yesterday evening.
Harold Camping Post Rapture Interview
The world not having ended, Harold Camping had time to sit down with me, in his first post-rapture interview, and answer a few questions.
How certain were you the world was going to end on May 21 — did you have any doubts?
I’m battle tested man. I’m tired, I’m so tired of pretending like my life isn’t perfect and bitching and just winning every second and I’m not perfect and bitching and just deliverying the goods at every friking turn, because, look what I’m dealing with man, I’m dealing with fools and trolls, dealing with soft targets and it’s just, you know, it’s just strafing runs in my underwear before my first cup of coffee because I don’t have time for these clowns.
Can you expand on that?
I don’t have time for their judgement and their stupidity and you know they lay down with their ugly wives in front of their ugly children and look at their loser lives and then they look at me and they say “I can’t process it!” Well, no, you never will, so stop trying . . . just sit back and enjoy the show. You know?
But you were wrong the first time you predicted that the end of the world would take place in September of 1994. So you must think, in the back of your mind, that maybe you can’t actually predict when the end of the world will be.
Boom, that’s the whole movie, that’s life. That’s life, there’s nobility in that, there’s focus, it’s genuine, it’s crystal and it’s pure and it’s available to everybody. So just shut your traps and put down your McDonald’s, your magazines, your TMZ and the rest of it and focus on something that matters.
But . . . But . . .
But you can’t focus on things that matter if all you’ve been is asleep for forty years. Funny how sleep rhymes with sheep. You know? Anyway. We’re getting off topic. We don’t care anymore, we don’t care.
Okay, so describe to me exactly what you expected to happen on May 21 . . . .
Yeah, why not because it’s just pure, pure and complete gnarlyisms. Um, yeah, I sat with two radical fire napalm-dropping pilots in my movie theater watching the attack sequence, the chopper attack sequence on the beachhead to go surfing because they wanted to and those people were in their way. Um, and I was getting a tattoo during the the the the death from above. And it’s the banner from the death card that Kilgore is throwing on his victims. But there’s also falling from it is the apple from The Giving Tree. There’s my life. Deal with it.
So, have you thought about what you’ll tell your followers now that the Rapture didn’t take place?
You know, it’s um, I just, I’m sorry man, I got, I got, I got magic and I got poetry in my fingertips and um, most of the time. And this include naps. I’m a, I’m an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air and I will I will deploy my ordnance to the ground.
Okay. Any final thoughts?
Bye bye. Losers.
Rapture
It is 6:00 pm CDT. There is a breeze, it is 83 degrees. Beautiful. No rapture near as I can tell from the patio. Course I’m out on the patio alone. As I mentioned, all our friends, save one who isn’t here just now, (Andrew’s out on his bike somewhere.), are heathens.
Drove down to Springfield, MO, today, to meet my parents for lunch at Lambert’s. Had a th’owed roll and a JLT. (Jowl, lettuce and tomato on Texas Toast with “pass-arounds” of fried okra and fried potatoes.) Couldn’t eat it all, sent my left-over jowl home with Mom and her left-over fried chicken livers. (Gravy on the side.)
Lambert’s is loud with old-timey music. We, talkin’, were all like, “Hunh? Hunh?”
We thought storms between here and there, or their there and there, might prevent our meeting. It was a beautiful day for driving. On the way down, Danny and I listened to the sound-track of The Book of Mormon. I was at once horrified and laughed my ass off.
Re-winding A Clockwork Orange
Ed and Mike and a few others and I drove to Houston to see A Clockwork Orange when it looked as though it would not be shown In Dallas.
Watching Clockwork that afternoon was one of the most painful aesthetic experiences I’ve endured. And Kubrick’s film remains one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.
Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Suffering Song
The evening sky has blown apart
The fire on the hills has all gone grey
My mother’s got a few days left
She thinks it’s time we all
Learned to pray
My sister’s in the kitchen
My brother’s laying out his guns
My father’s pacing in the hallway
Looks like they’ve all figured out a way to run
