I’m at the counter of a Denver bakery next to a bikram yoga studio waiting on a blueberry scone and leafing idly through a stack of promotional cards advertising the services of a psychic who’s running a special: a one hour reading for $55. Next to me, the glass bakery case reads “Please don’t scare the cupcakes! (no hanging or touching of the glass!). The Psychic claims that she’ll read my aura, my chakras, and my past lives because “everything is energy and holds a vibration.” I misread this as “everything is energy and holds a vibrator” which causes me to snort in laughter and draws looks of calumny from the lycra-clad yogis around me. I slip one of the cards into my pocket and slink off to a corner table.
I love advertisements because they express what remains unwritten in our official culture. They speak to desire, and no doubt Freud would have a grand old time with my gaffe.
But this one ad card is different, or rather no different but in a different way. Read More…
A Day at the Beach, Baton Rouge, Lousiana (REUTERS/Sean Gardner)
I love this photo in a kind of “postcards from the apocalypse” kind of way. The way the photo inverts the usual overly bright and shiny beach postcard genre. It’s gorgeously unsentimental and tragic.
The manufacturing of a safe beach outing, complete with a garden hose to pipe in safe water and oil derrick peeking above the horizon.
Gives me a kind of Cormac McCarthy Road moment (but with less dinginess).
From a recent Big Picture series documenting the oil’s invasion of the Louisiana. As always, great photos to check out if you have a minute.
Lower Manhattan, New York City
7a.m. I rest in front of George Washington’s statue at Federal Hall at 26 Wall Street. I sit with my camera bag waiting for the light to move so I can get a good exterior shot of the Stock Exchange across the street. I am on assignment this morning recording a segment on the Exchange’s trading floor.
Washington’s statue tells me that he took the Nation’s first Presidential oath of office here on the balcony, the last day of April, 1789. The Stock Exchange across the street was formally started in May a few years later.
Read More…
April 18, 2010
…snapping her phone shut:
“Well, that was Dan, he did it, he bought that place near me with the dead guy in the septic.”
“I don’t know why he doesn’t just haul that thing outta there, walk across the border, and chuck it into Canada.”
- Two older Montana women overheard in the Denver Airport between connecting flights (Saturday).
