“Stories, more even than stars or spectacle, are still the currency of life, or commercial entertainment, and look likely to last longer than the euro. There’s no escaping stories, or the pressures to tell them.”
(via housingworksbookstore)
“I appreciate how ya raised me. And all the extra love that you gave me.”
2pac, “Dear Mama.”
My brother took our beloved Mom for her first sushi today so I figured I’d give her her first Tupac dedication. I’m sure the sushi will rank a little higher but…..
Solid advice from Mr. Coward.
“I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor.” — R. Crumb
Billie Holiday, 1958. Photographer: Dennis Stock (via)
“I’ve been told that nobody sings the word ‘hunger’ like I do. Or the word ‘love.’ Maybe I remember what those words are all about. Maybe I’m proud enough to want to remember Baltimore and Welfare Island, the Catholic institution and the Jefferson Market Court, the sheriff in front of our place in Harlem and the towns from coast to coast where I got my lumps and scars, Philly and Alderson, Hollywood and San Francisco, every damn bit of it.
All the Cadillacs and minks in the world - and I’ve had a few - can’t make it up or make me forget it. All I’ve learned in all those places from all those people is wrapped up in those two words. You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. Everything I am and everything I want out of life goes smack back to that.”
-Holiday, quoted in Lady Sings the Blues (1956)
All of this focus on Trayvon Martin’s character after his getting suspended in high school—for an empty bag of weed, no less—is disconcerting. Anyone can get suspended for the silliest of offenses. Your tumblr was threatened with an in-school suspension in middle school for throwing a pencil…
A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of…
This is pretty funny.
Jim’s Favorite Songs from Jim Henson’s Memorial.
_____If you’re not bawling by the second chorus in “Just One Person” you have no soul.
June 20, 1965: “Young fans holding aloft bats they were given by the Yankees yesterday at the stadium,” read a caption the day after the team lost a double-header to the Minnesota Twins. The crowd, numbering 72,244, was the largest in four years, provoking the organist to serenade fans with the tune “We’re in the Money.” Photo: Ernie Sisto/The New York Times
So the New York Times has started a Tumblr to showcase their photo “morgue”…and my nerdy little heart just exploded.
Among many others over the past eighteen days, American Sunday Times war reporter Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik were killed earlier today during further shelling in Homs, Syria.
Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction and death, and trying to bear witness. It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash. And yes, it means taking risks, not just for yourself but often for the people who work closely with you.
Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers, children.
Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice. We always have to ask ourselves whether the level of risk is worth the story. What is bravery, and what is bravado?
— Colvin, speaking at a service for the war-wounded in 2010.
(via bbook)
Who’s sitting at the witness table at the GOP hearing right now on birth control for women.
Five men.
Click the link, read the article. I can’t wrap my head around the utter bullshit coming out of Issa’s mouth right now……
“As we awaken from sleep, our consciousness undergoes a radical transformation composed of dramatic adjustments in neural processes. Some neural circuits go quiet while others come online. The entire orchestration of the symphony of mind unfolds like changes in a music score, and while there is no single, master conductor… the decentralized process does have hot spots of top-down modulation linked by connections built over evolutionary time. These ‘command centers,’ for lack of a more accurate but succinct term, do one thing really well: They create our sense of self, our sense of being a protagonist in a continuously unfolding nonlinear narrative through which we can travel again and again in our memories and plan possible and even impossible futures.”
Magnum Contact Sheets
An exhibition called Magnum Contact Sheets is currently running at The International Center of Photography in New York City.
In a series that stretches from the 1930s to the present, the exhibit functions as a behind the scenes look at how Magnum Photographers arrived at their often iconic images.
Via ICP:
The images featured—both celebrated, iconic photographs and lesser-known surprises—encompass more than 70 years of history: from the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, the 1968 Paris riots by Bruno Barbey, and the war in Chechnya by Thomas Dworzak, to René Burri’s filmic sequence of close-ups of Che Guevara, classic New Yorkers by Bruce Gilden, and Eve Arnold’s famous portrait of the charismatic and image-savvy Malcolm X.
“The contact sheet embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality,” said ICP Associate Curator Kristen Lubben, who organized the exhibition. “It records each step on the route to arriving at a particular image, and thus provides a unique window into the creative process.”…
…The exhibition functions—in the words of Magnum photographer Martin Parr—as an “epitaph to the contact sheet,” marking the end of the analog film era and the rise of digital photography.
Image: The contact sheet for René Burri’s 1963 photoshoot with Che Guevara, via ICP.
Click to embiggen.
