• NYT:

    Ms. Mann’s approach to her subject certainly had precedents in art. In the 1920s the photographers Imogen Cunningham and Nell Dorr took nude pictures of children in the wilds as expressions of their own interest in naturalism. But Ms. Mann’s images arrived just as the country was beginning to fall deeper and deeper under the thrall of a new culture of obsessive child-rearing, and she seemed, however voyeuristically, merely to be letting her children be.

    But she was not letting them be, or so it is implied in “What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann” on Cinemax this evening. It is one of the most exquisitely intimate portraits not only of an artist’s process, but also of a marriage and a life, to appear on television in recent memory.

    Here.


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  • LA Times:

    But the camp itself, amid lush groves of eucalyptus and palm trees, offered a trove of details about the members of Heaven’s Army.

    They had plenty of food. Each fighter had his own supply of chocolate and biscuits. They were prepared: A 6-foot dirt berm and an equally deep trench surrounded the 50-acre compound.

    They were well organized. Living in at least 30 concrete-block buildings, all the fighters had identification badges. The group published its own books and a newspaper. The members apparently were enamored with their leader, a charismatic man in his 30s named Dhyaa Abdul-Zahra, whose likeness adorned the newspaper.

    And they were well armed and ready for battle. High-powered machine guns, antiaircraft rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and late-model pickup trucks with mounted guns were scattered around the eight farms that make up the compound, about 10 miles north of Najaf.

    Here.


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  • Op-Ed by James Banford, NYT:

    LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.

    But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.

    Here.


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  • WFMU’s Beware the Blog:

    This is probably the funniest comic book related website out there – devoted to proving that, contrary to popular belief, Superman was an a*hole. Featuring sections devoted to unintentionally sexual comic book covers, comic book war propaganda, comic covers featuring apes (it’s ridiculous just how many there are), stupid super powers, and confoundingly bizarre covers.

    Here.


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  • Blabbermouth:

    “Black metal was never meant to reach an audience,” Gaahl told The Observer. “It was purely for our own satisfaction. Something entirely self-centered. The shared goal was to become the true Satan; the elite human, basically. The elite are above rules. So people did what they wanted to do. And they had a common enemy which was, of course, Christianity, socialism and everything that democracy stands for, especially this idea that every man is alike and equal to his neighbour. That, of course, is a fake.”

    Gaahl’s extremist outlook is undoubtedly influenced by his surroundings. He lives on a farm three hours outside of Bergen, isolated from the mass of humanity. “My family owns three mountains,” he said. ‘There’s not much else around there. Love of nature is a big part of black metal. It’s easy to feel isolated in nature. And solitude and distance from everyone else is very important to us.”

    Here.


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  • NYT:

    When the Iraqi units finally did show up, it was with the air of a class outing, cheering and laughing as the Americans blew locks off doors with shotguns. As the morning wore on and the troops came under fire from all directions, another apparent flaw in this strategy became clear as empty apartments became lairs for gunmen who flitted from window to window and killed at least one American soldier, with a shot to the head.

    Whether the gunfire was coming from Sunni or Shiite insurgents or militia fighters or some of the Iraqi soldiers who had disappeared into the Gotham-like cityscape, no one could say.

    “Who the hell is shooting at us?” shouted Sgt. First Class Marc Biletski, whose platoon was jammed into a small room off an alley that was being swept by a sniper’s bullets. “Who’s shooting at us? Do we know who they are?”

    Here.


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  • PunkNews:

    Alkaline Trio have posted their forthcoming release Remains online. The album, which is a compilation of b-sides and rarities, hits stores next Tuesday through Vagrant.

    Here.


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  • Duplex Planet:

    “Get me a cup of coffee before I faint.”
    “I’m far from Lynn and I ain’t showered yet, no foolin’.”
    “I’ll be fallin’ down like a tree.”
    “You got me caught here like a pair of pants.”
    “I’ll smoke another cigar by and by.”

    Here.


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  • Daily Sun, Nigeria’s King of the Tabloids:

    Nemesis has caught up with a cripple in the Ibadan area of Oyo State, whose stock-in-trade was to charm his victims before dispossessing them of their money.

    The 24-year-old cripple, who was identified as Mumini Yusuf, allegedly duped his supposed helper of N27,000 before he was caught by the police.

    Here.


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  • VII Photo, Photos by Gary Knight:

    Since 2003 a war has been raging in Darfur under the watchful eye of the world’s political elite. Well-meaning politicians and celebrities have beaten a path to the refugee camps, been photographed with raped women and orphaned children, wrung their hands and called for something – anything – to be done. Little of any consequence has been.
    Here.


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  • By ISHMAEL BEAH, NYT Magazine:

    After that first week of going out on raids to kill people we deemed our rebel enemies or sympathizers of the rebels, our initiation was complete. We stayed put at the base, and we boys took turns guarding posts around the village. We smoked marijuana and sniffed “brown brown,” cocaine mixed with gunpowder, which was always spread out on a table near the ammunition hut, and of course I took more of the white capsules, as I had become addicted to them. The first time I took all these drugs at the same time, I began to perspire so much that I took off all my clothes. My body shook, my sight became blurred and I lost my hearing for several minutes. I walked around the village restlessly. But after several doses of these drugs, all I felt was numbness to everything and so much energy that I couldn’t sleep for weeks. We watched war movies at night, Rambo “First Blood,” “Rambo, First Blood, Part II,” “Commando” and so on, with the aid of a generator or a car battery. We all wanted to be like Rambo; we couldn’t wait to implement his techniques.

    Here.


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  • NYT:

    In 1932 the young Henri Cartier-Bresson, lately returned from Africa, saw a photograph of African children charging into waves on a beach. “I must say that it is that very photograph which was for me the spark that set fire to fireworks,” he recalled years later. “I couldn’t believe such a thing could be caught with the camera. I said, ‘Damn it,’ took my camera and went out into the street.” What Cartier-Bresson produced during the next few years, as the curator Peter Galassi once wrote, became “one of the great, concentrated episodes in modern art.”

    How much the African photograph actually shaped this work is debatable, but it struck a chord. It epitomized the combination of serendipity and joie de vivre that Cartier-Bresson admired: three naked boys, their silhouettes against white spray and sun-drenched water, making a perfect geometry.

    The man who shot the picture was Martin Munkacsi. Hungarian-born, a star of Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the leading illustrated German newsmagazine, Munkacsi was then one of the most celebrated photojournalists. He reached a pinnacle of fame and fortune in New York later that decade, claiming to be the highest-paid photographer in the world (he was notoriously self-mythologizing), revolutionizing the American fashion magazine under Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar.

    Here.


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  • Thomas Hawk:

    Another project I’d like to create is a some kind of a page of portraits that I’ve taken of people with blogs. The page would be a giant collage of thumnails and as you hovered over every small thumbnail it would zooom and pop up a larger portrait of that person with a link to their blog underneath. A pictorial directory of blogs. A way to humanize blogs to some small degree.

    I’d like to fill an entire men’s rest room with images of women, an entire women’s rest room with images of men and a unisex restroom with images of women and men. I’d like to cover interiors and exteriors of buildings with 8×10 photographs. Plastering every inch. I’d like to use my collection of macro images of children’s toys to cover a child’s play room.

    One thing above all that is important in my own personal collection of images is that each image must alone and by itself be interesting. It must be processed and presented with love and care to the world and suitable to exist alongside the other images in the master collection. Anyone can take one million photographs by setting the camera on rapid fire and shooting the same thing over and over and over again and dumping random shots onto the internet. I want to keep the quality of my images consistently high allowing only processed images that I feel meet a high enough quality bar to present.

    Here.


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  • Dead Time Pacifies:

    I was introduced to Casey maybe 10 years ago and he has been a mainstay in our punk/hardcore scene long before that. He has been in more bands than anyone else I know of. Casey has been known for his bands and his brawls. In recent times, with the advent of ‘his’ crew, The Viking Skins, some amount of controversy has surrounded this man who seems to cast a long scary shadow. I think a lot of people are too scared to ask him questions. I knew he was an interesting dude, so I asked the questions.

    Here.


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  • Wired:

    When you actually get to the school and begin the attack, things become subtler yet. As you wander through the hallways, the little pixilated victims scurry around in semi-random paths, and any time you cross paths a battle is triggered. You encounter the same six or seven kids over and over again: the “Jock Type,” the “Preppy Girl,” the “Sheltered Girl”, the “Preppy Boy.”

    It’s a neat stab at the mindset of the killers, who, for all their bombast about being objectified by their tormentors, did precisely the same thing to their victims. They didn’t see them as individuals: They were just metaphoric targets for their hatred. Indeed, in the game, as the killers did in real life, you don’t target any particular kids. You just wander around killing randomly. And Ledonne’s aesthetic decision to make Super Columbine so retro-looking enhances this effect: The game’s style evokes the killer’s pared-down, simplistic, self-serving view of the world.

    Ledonne also gets in a few sly jabs at video-game culture itself. When you acquire your weapons, the game announces it with the sort of cheery dialog box that is typical in an RPG: “You acquire a Fire Spell! You pick up a Frag Grenade!” Except here, because the weapons are drawn from real life (“Eric got a Hi-Point model 996 carbine rifle complete with shoulder strap!”), the exuberant tone highlights just how psychotic and disconnected from reality the conventions of video games can sometimes seem.

    Here.


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  • Washington Post:

    Hours before dawn on the last day of 2006, a gray van pulled up to the ATM housed in a steel shed just outside T.P.T. Supermarket in this run-down township. The store’s security guard, posted about 30 feet away, said he saw four hooded men jump out of the van, stuff something into the front of the cash machine, then run away.

    The blast that followed was so strong it jolted people awake in nearby homes, witnesses said. But before anyone could alert the police, the hooded men rushed back and pulled from the smoldering remains a box the size of a small file cabinet. Together they hoisted it into the van and sped off.

    And so ended the 53rd and final cash machine bombing of 2006, the year a toxic stew of joblessness, criminal ingenuity and readily available mine explosives gave rise to a startling new trend in crime-weary South Africa.

    “Eeesh,” said T.P.T. Supermarket’s night guard, Alpheus Nevhundogwa, 49, as he recalled the attack. “These people, dangerous.”

    Here.


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  • LA Times:

    Yet such discomfort also provides great fodder for his latest comedy, “Extras,” which has aired in England and returns for its second season in the U.S. on Sunday on HBO. Conceived as a sardonic look at unsuccessful actors trying to make it in the movie business, the series takes a new turn this season when a sitcom script written by the long-struggling Andy Millman, played by Ricky Gervais, is picked up by the BBC.

    Andy’s exuberance is quickly diminished when network executives proceed to dumb down the workplace comedy, titled “When the Whistle Blows.” They make him don a curly black wig and outsized glasses for his part as a dim factory boss. They insist his character utter an annoying catchphrase whenever someone appears to have cracked a joke: “Are you having a laugh?”

    Critics pan “When the Whistle Blows,” which is nevertheless a popular hit, a fact that only further depresses Andy. In one scene, he is accosted at a pub by fans of the sitcom who urge him to deliver his character’s catchphrase, which he does with no small amount of self-loathing.

    “The big theme of it, I suppose, is ‘Don’t compromise,’ ” Gervais said. “Be careful what you wish for. Success without respect is nothing.”

    Here.


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  • Photographer Joshua Brown:

    Selection from a portrait series of 50 (of about 300 that I have photographed so far) of my coworkers in a conference room.

    Here.


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  • PDN-

    The White House broke with tradition Wednesday night and refused to let photojournalists shoot still pictures of the president at the podium after his prime-time address on the Iraq war.

    As a result, newspapers and wire services had little choice but to run low-quality frame grabs from the video of the speech. An official handout photo from the White House, which most news outlets rejected, was the only other option. Caught in a bind on deadline, some newspapers ran the official White House photo with no disclosure that it was provided by the government.

    Here.


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  • WFMU’s Beware the Blog:

    This is one of the best records in my collection. I have a thing for spoken word records, and this is by far the best spoken word record I’ve ever heard. I usually like to play this record for people without telling them what it was intended for, to see if they can guess why anyone would buy it. The idea is straightforward enough: you put this record on in repeat mode while you’re out of the house in order to fool potential burglars into thinking someone’s home. Like those automatically light timers, except for sound. Of course, it would be far easier and more convincing just to leave the TV or radio on, but that wouldn’t be NEARLY as much fun!! Plus, this is in STEREO so you’re sure to get the extra added illusion that the voices are coming from different parts of the room!

    The truly great thing about this record is all in the execution. The couple bantering back and forth here presumably had kind of a rough script they were following, and sort of semi-improvised their banal conversation. It’s actors trying to sound as inconspicuously actor-ish as possible. Add to this the fact that, as per the instructions on the jacket, you’re supposed to play it at a level where someone standing outside the house can hear that there’s people talking inside without being able to make out what’s being said, and to me that’s a recipe for pure performance art! (In fact, I’ve considered staging a performance with two actors, using this LP as the entire backdrop.)

    Here.


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