Sent from my iPhone
Sent from my iPhone
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?cu...
The second picture doesn't do much for me, but the first one really knocks me out.
There are two other formal portraits of Assange now out (that I've seen, there may well be others). Both are fine, but neither are closing fast on the top one above.
Max Vadukul for the New York Times' T Magazine.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/julian-assange-video/
Jillian Edelstein for Stern.
Assange's appearance in court today provided the daily snappers a chance to shoot something a bit more en pointe than usual, using the "heavily tinted windows of a police vehicle" as an off-camera filter. There's something surveillance-y about these three images that I like, though that may be because I just heard Jill Magid and Tevor Paglen speak at a event at the New School.
In the first photo, Carl Court renders the effect of the window-filter in a cooler machine-pink. In the two other photos, Peter Macdiarmid opts for full-on red-hotness. I think the Times picked the better of his two images seen here. Is Assange telling us the sting is on?
Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images in the Guardian: "Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, pictured through the heavily tinted windows of a police vehicle as he arrives at Westminster magistrates court in London, on 14 December 2010."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2010/dec/14/wikileaks-julian-assange-cour...
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images in Stern
http://www.stern.de/panorama/assange-vor-anhoerung-zum-haftbefehl-meine-entsc...
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images in the New York Times.
"The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrived at court inside a prison van with heavily tinted windows on Tuesday in London."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/world/europe/15assange.html
At Civl War Memory, Kevin Levin writes about a new book by the historian Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History, primarily to highlight her concept of "historic fundamentalism."
From Lepore:
Historical fundamentalism is marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past-”the founding”-is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts-”the founding documents”-are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; that the academic study of history (whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism) is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible. (p. 16)
This jibes with Andrew Sullivan's earlier take that the Tea Party is "an essentially cultural revolt against what America is becoming: a multi-racial, multi-faith, gay-inclusive, women-friendly, majority-minority country. The 'tea-party' analogy is not about restricting government as much as it is a form of almost pathological nostalgia."
See here for my earlier posting on the topic, the essence of which is this:
Ghost Dance fever raged among "the more recently defeated Indians of the Great Plains" and other tribes from 1889 to 1891. The revitalization movement was led by a Northern Paiute named Wovoka.
[Wovoka's] pronouncements heralded the dawning of a new age, in which whites would vanish, leaving Indians to live in a land of material abundance, spiritual renewal and immortal life. Like many millenarian visions, Wovoka's prophecies stressed the link between righteous behavior and imminent salvation. Salvation was not to be passively awaited but welcomed by a regime of ritual dancing and upright moral conduct.
If only Sarah can get us all to ghost dance a bit harder, soon America will be the white man's paradise it once was.
Photographed on February 15, 2010, in Charleston, Miss.
via youtube.com
The soundtrack, “Buses Are A-Coming,” is a Freedom Song created like so many others: composed in the heat of moment — in this instance in a Jackson, Mississippi, jail cell.
Freedom Rider Bernard LaFayette Jr., who rode on the first bus into Jackson, describes its genesis in Stanley Nelson’s forthcoming PBS documentary on the Rides:
"We made up a song saying that buses are a-coming. And we sang it to the jailers to tell them, and warn them, to get ready, to be prepared, that we were not the only ones coming. So we started singing, [singing] 'Buses are a-comin’, oh, yes, buses are a–comin’, oh, yes, buses are a-comin’, buses are a-comin’, buses are a-comin’, oh, yes.'
"And we say to the jailers, [singing] 'Better get you ready, oh, yes.' The jailers say, 'Alright, shut up on the singing and hollering in here! This is not no playhouse. This is a jailhouse.' So we said to ourselves, 'What are you going to do? Put us in jail?' "
This particular recording of “Buses” features the renowned singer Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, in concert with the Flint Community Schools Title One Choir and Verse Chorus.
On his blog today Jerry Mitchell reports that an anonymous businessman has set his sights on buying the old Bryant store in Money, MS, and restoring it.
Bryant Grocery and Meat Market has been broken by years of neglect and battered by high winds from Hurricane Katrina, but few have forgotten the events during the summer of 1955 that started here with a wolf-whistle and ended with the slaying of an African-American teenager named Emmett Till.
Now a businessman has put up a website, hoping to restore the fallen store, included in a list of Mississippi’s most endangered historic places.
I'm not sure how exactly launching a website is a prelude to a successful real-estate deal, but so be it. Good luck to him if he can pull it off. It will probably take a private effort to get the ruin into public hands. The word around the state is that the owners have always set a steep price as a way of preventing anything from happening with the old building -- too high especially for any state agency to afford, even in earlier, less dire times.
On his website, the anonymous businessman says his plan is "to fund the restoration process and use the building as a museum for Emmett Till and the civil rights movement that followed his tragic death."
I've always wanted to see the ruin restored as a ruin and a museum built nearby. Given the building's current state of near-collapse, a restoration would more than likely mean a wholesale replacement of the existing structure, and thus the loss of any physical connection with the events of August 28, 1955, as well as the subsequent 55 years. I'm not sure it can even be preserved as a ruin, but in that form, as in its current form, it would convey much more vividly and powerfully than any clean and tidy museum the history of race in Mississippi.
In so many ways, Mississippi is still a wreck.
Photographed on December 29, 2008
Kate Browne, my wife, built the third in her series of Cocoons in Greenwood, Mississippi, during two weeks in July. The sculpture sits in a park on the banks of the Yazoo, which flows through downtown Greenwood, on the opposite side of the river from where bales of Delta cotton were once loaded onto riverboats for shipment. Cotton Row, as the strip was once know, now principally houses the offices of the Viking corporation (as in makers of all things kitchen). Keesler Bridge, in the background of some of these pictures, used to pivot on its center column to allow riverboats to past. Behind the bridge sits the Leflore Country Courthouse.
Greenwood was the site of intense Civil Rights activity in the early '60s, and in 1966, during the Meredith March (aka, the March Against Fear), where Stokely Carmichael chose to deliver his infamous Black Power speech.
Kids and adults from all over town eagerly pitched in to create this Cocoon. Kate will be posting images of the build and describing the process at her blog in the coming weeks. You can also get info there on her two earlier Cocoons, in Mexico City and upstate New York.
