And so vibrators become vibrations, and yoga becomes big business, and cupcakes tremble behind glass, and psychics get LLCs and graduate degrees, and the world becomes more exquisitely repressed and sanitized.
(Beach) Apocalypse Now
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.
Reading Virgil on the New York Stock Exchange Floor
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 New York 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 Market across the street was formally started in May a few years later.
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A Personal Geography: Ouray, Colorado
In 1976, we took a summer camping trip to Ouray/Silverton Colorado area. As he drove our family station wagon, I sat in the back seat piling wads of gum into my jaw like it was chewing tobacco. The sound of his harmonica floated back…
Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation?
Now, finding my daughter hula-hooping or wearing wigs (even a man-wig) isn’t surprising. She scours thrift and costume stores for groovy wigs and is building a nice collection. She’s got a Liz Taylor wig, two Amelia Earhart wigs, a Paula Dean wig. Her Roger Daltrey wig is her only man-wig. It’s the combination of the wig and The Who and what those things meant to me in my own identity-formation that took me back a bit, equally as much as hearing my guileless pre-teen daughter belt out “we’re all wasted.”
Police Room 619, September 12
He was arrested on August 21 at a police checkpoint under Terrorism Act No 83 which allowed the government to detain any citizen for an indefinite period of time without trial and without the requirement to release any detainee’s name.
He was beaten repeatedly for 20 days until September 11th when, close to death, he was stripped naked and tossed into the back of a Land Rover and driven 1500km to a prison with hospital facilities.
He died on September 12.
Just Another Day at the Beach: 60 Million Years Too Late
Science has a way of creeping up on you. It’s sneaky—like classical music can be sneaky. One day you’re thrashing to the Ramones and Nine Inch Nails and the next you find yourself in tears in the middle of your living room because you just heard Lazlo Varga play a cello in ways you never thought possible and the strings’ vibrations reached out and bent you into a kind of fetal position of perverse ecstasy.
Armed and Dangerous
The first time I was arrested was on my dead father’s 52nd birthday.