Month: April 2009
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Taliban Forces Continue to Advance Into Pakistan
From washingtonpost.com:
Pakistani media reported that the Taliban have forcibly overrun Buner in the past several days, while many state judges and officials have abandoned their posts. The black-turbaned fighters have occupied a popular shrine and turned it into a radio station for extremist broadcasts. Public markets are reported to be deserted except for Taliban troops, shown on TV news channels wearing masks and wielding assault rifles.
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LA Weekly's LA People 2009
Some of my faves:
From LA Weekly:
Her Web site and moniker have become synonymous with the sloshed and sweaty shenanigans of L.A.’s cool kids and the underground ragers they frequent, but Shadowscene’s Ellei Johndro is far from just another “club photographer.” Unlike some novice shutterbugs who hopped the snapwagon when lens-toting characters such as the Cobrasnake started getting attention for their Web sites, Johndro’s had a passion for photography, editing and storytelling of all forms (creative writing was her major in college) since she was a teen growing up in Boston.
She started Shadowscene.com while still in Boston back in 2002, its original incarnation more of a personal showcase for her stark and, yes, “shadowy” cityscapes (lots of “streets and alleys,” she recalls). It wasn’t until she moved to Los Angeles seven years ago that the subject matter turned to after-dark hell-raising and earned serious hipster approval.
From LA Weekly:
Armed with his fourth novel since his breakthrough book, the memoir Permanent Midnight, Jerry Stahl has, in his own inimitable fashion, done a drive-by.
Pain Killers continues the adventures of Manny Rupert, the hapless, hopelessly romantic (in his own damaged way) cop-cum-detective we got to know and love in Plain Clothes Naked. This time a septuagenarian, Jewish millionaire named Harry Zell, who wields his walker like a shillelagh, enlists Manny to go undercover as a drug counselor at San Quentin. Rupert’s mission it to determine if a certain peroxide-blond, 97-year-old inmate is in fact none other than the Nazi Angel of Death, Dr. Joseph Mengele. As if that isn’t nettlesome enough for the illicit substance–susceptible sleuth, his first night on campus reveals his ex-wife and love of his life (who offed her first husband in Plain Clothes Naked by serving him a bowl of Drano-and-glass-laced Lucky Charms) has taken up with the leader of the prison’s Aryan gang … who happens to be Jewish.
From LA Weekly:
It’s odd, Jesse Thorn knows, for small children to adore public radio. “But it’s what my parents always had on in the car,” Thorn says. “I’ve been hearing Terry Gross my whole life.” All that listening time has given Thorn an uncanny ability to parse, in detail, the style and quirks of every interviewer to have appeared on NPR, nationally and locally, over, say, the past two decades. So it’s perhaps not surprising to learn that at 27, Thorn has already spent eight years with his own show, called the Sound of Young America, which he describes on his Web site — maximumfun.org — as something like Conan O’Brien on public radio, or Fresh Air, but more fun.”
From LA Weekly:
On a gray March morning, photographer Gary Leonard stands in the center of his gallery, a small room dimmed by overcast skies, sunlight feathering through the gaps between high-rises on Broadway Avenue. Leonard has a cold, but he’s agreed to meet with us, anyway, at his new gallery, Take My Picture, named after his recently retired CityBeat column. Later on, Leonard will sit behind a table laid with a collection of his black-and-white photographs, smiling only when asked, while the L.A. Weekly takes his portrait.
From LA Weekly:
When audio of Christian Bale’s tirade on the Terminator Salvation set surfaced, the actor unwittingly joined a select fraternity with Barbra Streisand and Bill O’Reilly: celebrities whose rants have been transformed into viral-dance remixes by RevoLucian. Almost as soon as Bale’s hissy fit went public, the Web picked up on RevoLucian deft a mash-up of Bale’s best quotes set to a synth-heavy beat. “Bale Out” turned “What don’t you fuckin’ understand?” into one of the year’s most addictive choruses and spun a little art out of the debacle. Considering how widely the song was heard, it’s almost surprising that nobody at the Newsroom Café recognizes songwriter and producer Lucian Piane, 28. RevoLucian is a pseudonym for what he calls “my remixes, my crazy things.”
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BookArmy: a last.fm for books
From Boing Boing:
Bookarmy.com is a London-based start-up aiming to be the last.fm of books — and we’re gathering steam on our mission to link every book and every author on earth.
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Photographers have to be a little cocky sometimes – not always
From RESOLVE — the liveBooks photo blog:
During my career I have been accused of being cocky, self assured, and overly confident. To which I respond; yes I am, I’m a photographer.
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Guy Tillim
From lens culture:
Tillim spoke with me at length about his work and philosophy when we first met in Paris in November 2008. You can listen to an 18-minute edited audio recording of that conversation here.
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Scarlett Coten
From lens culture:
It’s six in the morning and in this month of February I’m crossing a border on foot for the first time! It gives me a real sense of adventure. I leave Taba in a crowded taxi, radio cassette playing in the background, and let myself be carried away, totally alert, toward the unknown.
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Mike Brodie, Pensacola
From Feature Shoot:
Mike Brodie is a self-trained photographer from Pensacola, Florida, better known by the alter-ego, The Polaroid Kidd. At the age of eighteen, Brodie traveled the railroads of America, pending three years photographing the people he encountered along the way with his trusty Polaroid SX-70.
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Lode Runner Review
From giantbomb.com:
Can you put 25th Anniversary artwork on your game’s title screen if it’s 26 years old? This is the bold statement that Lode Runner on Xbox Live Arcade asks us to consider. This classic franchise that got its start in 1983 on machines like the Apple II and Atari 400/800 doesn’t really get as much respect as it probably deserves.
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Damon Winter: Angola Prison Rodeo « Prison Photography
From Prison Photography:
The rodeo featuring the prisoners of Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola, is an old – even traditional – event in the Louisiana calendar. Damon Winter is one of many photographers that have covered the community event. It is a raucous spectacle that brings together populations in and outside of the prison.
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Oprah's Photo Request Grabs Exclusive Rights to Submissions
From Photo Attorney:
Instead of submitting an entry to her contest, it may be best to just sit back and enjoy her show.
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I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed
From Commentary Magazine:
When new information about Americans who had cooperated with the Soviet KGB began to emerge in the 1990s, no individual case generated as much controversy as that of the journalist I.F. Stone, who had long been installed in the pantheon of left-wing heroes as a symbol of rectitude and a teller of truth to power before his death in 1989. Charges about Stone’s connections with the KGB have been swirling about for more than a decade, prompting cries of outrage among his passionate followers. Until now, the evidence was equivocal and subject to different interpretations. No longer.
