Yesteryear’s New York: The Belly of the Beast

Jill Freedman: Love Kills (1979)

Jill Freedman: Tiffany

During the 1970s and 80s, an adventurous blonde named Jill Freedman with a quick eye for the unusual and bizarre focussed her camera upon the spirited characters and gritty sidewalks of a now-bygone era in New York City life. This modernist documentarian was a self-taught photographer who captured raw, intimate images in black and white, transforming urban scenes into theatrical dramas.

Freedman’s portrait of New York reflected a fallen city that was strewn with piles of garbage. Prostitutes and bag ladies walked the streets, while junkies staked out abandoned tenements next to children playing in vacant lots. For reasons involving both a shift in photographic styles and her own declining personal circumstances, Ms. Freedman faded from the popular scene in the late 1980s. But today, at a moment when much of Manhattan is awash in money and glamour, Freedman’s photographic legacy offers us a vivid portrait of a metropolis once defined by violence, poverty and disarray, a New York that once was.

Jill Freedman’s New York: Poverty, Violence and Disarray

Read more about Jill Freedman’s photography in The New York Times here.

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As Lemmings to the Sea: Drowned in Sound

Sigur Ros: Glosoli

Glosoli, by the avant-garde Icelandic band Sigur Ros, has received widespread acclaim for both its music and the highly artistic cinematographic music video. The video consists of a group of Icelandic children migrating towards an unknown destination somewhere in Iceland. Led by a drummer-boy, the children travel through a land characterized by open fields and rocky hills, all the while picking up more and more children. The group then falls asleep, the video entering a dream-like state signified by a change in hue. The music reaches its pinnacle at the end when the children finally reach a large hill and the leader starts beating his drum feverishly. As the song climaxes, the children start to run full speed up the hill. It is then that the hill is shown to be in fact a cliff, coming to an end at the ocean. When the children eventually reach the edge of the cliff, they jump off and swim through the air. The video contains an ambiguous conclusion, when the last and youngest child is shown to be hesitant to jump off the cliff, but ends up taking a reluctant leap.

Sigur Ros: Glosoli

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A Holiday Gift: Easter Delights

The Eggs Learn about Easter

Bright Eyes: First Day of My Life

Music: Paschelbel’s Canon in D

A Holiday Album: Easter Egg Photographs

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All Pimp’d Out

At first we thought that it would be a cute idea, but this Halloween costume has ended up causing our family all sorts of confusion.  We dressed up our 9 year-old son in this pimp suit and took him trick-or-treating downtown.  It was pretty crowded on the streets and as a result we lost him for a bit.  When we finally found him and got him back home, he took off the costume and he had turned into a 40 year-old Black dude with a strut and a disturbing tendency to want to slap around my wife and teenage daughter.  I guess it’s nice that he doesn’t wet the bed anymore, and he says he can find some good work for our daughter, which is something he has never shown an interest in before.  But we just don’t understand why he keeps wanting to call her “Suga Smoov.”  Was there some sort of chemical in the fabric that we were supposed to wash out?  We keep thinking that perhaps we should have washed the costume before we put it on little Stevie (who now insists that we refer to him as “The Hand”).

Thanks to 3quarksdaily.

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Ellen DeGeneres Speaks about the Killing of Larry King

Fellow Students at Larry King’s Memorial Service in Port Hueneme, California

Larry King’s memorial service was attended by more than 500 people in Port Hueneme, California. The service drew a diverse group of mourners who said that the killing had touched them deeply. Several students wore buttons bearing his picture. Lawrence “Larry” King was remembered Friday as a sensitive child, who on one recent Christmas helped his mother crochet hundreds of scarves so that U.S. troops in Afghanistan wouldn’t be without a holiday gift. “God knit Larry together and made him wonderfully complex,” the Rev. Dan Birchfield of Westminster Presbyterian Church told the crowd as he stood in front of a large photograph of the victim. “Larry was a masterpiece.”

The memorial service was a somber hourlong reflection on King’s life as a boy growing up in and around Oxnard, California. It was also a chance for his family, seated in a front row of Westminster Presbyterian Church, to offer a fuller portrait of the boy. King came to the public’s attention in the days after the classroom killing when it was revealed that another boy had targeted him after a falling out between the two about King’s sexual orientation.

The shooting has stunned residents of Oxnard, a laid-back middle-class beach community just north of Malibu. It has also drawn a strong reaction from gay and civil rights groups.

Ellen DeGeneres Speaks about the Killing of Larry King

Be a Voice Against Violence

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