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Thursday, Jan 01, 2004
graph paper
"If the threat of taking boring pix hangs over every photographer of ambition, Diane Arbus was perhaps more conscious of it than any other photographer. Her photographs relentlessly tell us how interesting they are; they dare us to look away from them. If our favorite thing in the world is not to look at pictures of freaks and transvestites and nudists and mentally retarded people, this cuts no ice with Arbus. She forces us to acknowledge that these are no ordinary unpleasant pictures of society's discards. They are photographs only Diane Arbus could have taken. The question of whether they are also great works of photography remains undetermined thirty years after her death. Arbus is not universally beloved the way, say, Walker Evans is. Interestingly (and fittingly), she herself did not love Evans. Of the 1971 Evans retrospective at MOMA she wrote: "First I was totally whammied by it. Like THERE is a photographer, it was so endless and pristine. Then by the third time I saw it I realized how it really bores me. Can't bear most of what he photographs.""
narcosphere
narco news relaunches.
Wednesday, Dec 31, 2003
the weight im in
"Hence, the weight in the Senate is about to shift, to those Senators who can provide a wide bandwidth message that their partisans will not merely repeat, but amplify by finding new arguments in its favor. The internet is finally the place where main street America comes - indeed, it is witnessing the rebirth of Main Street America - a place which does not merely put thumbs up or thumbs down - but which takes information from a diverse array of sources, and funnels them through context - that is done by linking - and community - which is done by commenting, either on the original web site, or in the text around the link. In short, instead of a public life that consists of push down and push back - public life is going to be centered around campaigns and organizations - like Dean's campaign, and like Moveon.org - that can pull people in, and pull people together. The definition of this moment is when people in a movement begin talking to each other, and making distant connections."
pressing information
"Press think has terms of art, and one of them is "master narrative," borrowed from literary critics. I use it to describe a part of the press that too easily eludes attention: the big story, sometimes the back story, often a fragment of a narrative, that generates all the other stories, which are smaller pieces."