Theatergoers will have barely settled into their seats at “Reasons to Be Pretty,” which makes its Broadway debut this week at the Lyceum, before they will be jolted by the profanity-laced rant of a young woman directed at her passive boyfriend all because he told a friend she had a “regular” face. The entire play hinges on this seemingly innocuous comment, which is why the billboard outside the Lyceum describes it as “a love story about the impossibility of love” written by “Neil LaBute, playwright and provocateur.” LaBute’s plays are, in fact, so provocative that some past audience members have walked out midplay or screamed out “kill the playwright” or slapped an actor’s face after a performance. And that makes a side of LaBute happy. “It’s part of my makeup,” he says, “to ruin a perfectly good day for people.”
Right about this same time last year (it’s 70th anniversary) I found an incredible paragon of throw-down urban journalism resting on the counter of my local 7/11 store. To say The St. Louis Metro Evening Whirl is unlike any newspaper printed and distributed in the United States would be giving it so little credit it’s not even funny.
The work included in this exhibition demonstrates not only the hand of a talented artist, but also that of an obsessive collector. Each piece is an assemblage of street advertisements meticulously hand-collected by the artist over the course of many years. Layered deep in each work is a visual topography of the vibrant ethnic neighborhoods of New York City that collectively drive its pulse and frenetic energy.
“I do this as a regular pastime,” says Susana Raab of her practice of seeking funding for her personal projects. Her “Consumed” series, which documents America’s fast food culture and was featured in “Exposures” in March, has been supported by grants from The Puffin Foundation and the White House News Photographers’ Association.
In photography, it’s hard to define what an “outsider artist” would be. After all, we’re all photographers! Cameras are ubiquitous. Of course, not everybody is an artist. But still, what would a true “outsider photography artist” look like?
The kidnappers have reportedly sent a list of demands insisting that People magazine print a half-page feature on Hutton’s New York restaurant venture P.J. Clarke’s, provide them with a suitcase containing $500,000 in unmarked bills, and include the actor “without fail” in the next People.com “Who Looked Hot?” web column.
The National Press Photographers Association has announced that Andrea Bruce of the Washington Post has been awarded second place in the International News Story with her photo essay on a young girl in Kurdistan being circumcised.
Readers of this blog will recall reading the reasons for my revulsion at this photo essay
As I sit there, dreaming of this new Noctilux, I get an e-mail from none other than SEAL. Not only is he an accomplished music artist with a career spanning almost 20 years (his new CD “SOUL” is brilliant), but he is also a talented photographer who is lucky enough to own some of the best glass in the world, including the new Noctilux as well as the Leica 24 1.4 Summilux.
Richard Jones/sinopix/sinopix-
Fifteen year-old Lou Li poses. Lou Li spent 8 months forcibly married to a farmer in Yunnan, West China. Lou Li was tricked away from her home and sold to the farmer for 6,500 rnb in September 2006 and escaped in April 2007.
Melissa Lyttle/St. Petersburg Times-
For the first seven years of her life, Danielle never saw the sun, felt the wind or tasted solid food. She was kept in a closet in a Plant City apartment, cloistered in darkness, left in a dirty diaper, fed only with a bottle. “She was a ferral child,” said Carolyn Eastman of the Tampa heart Gallery. “We’d never seen a case like that.”
Thinking you’re done because you’ve moved your photos onto a DVD is not a good policy to take; it’s a mistake. And the reason is that the lifespan of DVDs varies from 5 to 100 years, according to testing. And if you leave it on your hard disk, well, hard disks only last five years, generally.
