September 19th, 2008

Chris Keeley

avedon

By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 15, 2008  .... 


 ....  The project's also risky for the Corcoran. The impoverished gallery has a long-standing reputation for pandering to ticket buyers; hosting an overstuffed survey of yet another celebrity photographer -- after last year's Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz events -- looks perilously close to selling out. Art lovers groaned when the Avedon show was announced. Only the hard work and scholarship of curator Paul Roth -- his catalogue essay, though more focused than the show, has 264 footnotes -- has made the risk pay off. There's an Avedon here we haven't seen much of before, and it's the one the photographer himself seemed most committed to.

I met Avedon a half-dozen or so times (he was the close friend of a sibling). When I praised the fashion photos I thought were his greatest work, he disagreed. He preferred his images of what-you-see-is-what-you-get reality.

The Avedons at the Corcoran give us the real Henry Kissinger. The authentic Andrew Young. The unadorned Ronald Reagan. The actual Duke and Duchess of Windsor. But also the authentic Abraham Rosenthal, Pete Rozelle and Evelyn Lincoln.

Who? Precisely. The crucial thing about Avedon's approach is he's an equal-opportunity authenticator. Here you are, in the presence of someone who's supposed to be the greatest recorder of the nation's great and mighty, and you can't tell the players without a scorecard.

Look at Avedon's group portrait of the Chicago Seven, famous opponents of the Vietnam War,( Collapse )

Chris Keeley

17 by Bob Dylan September 22, 2008

17

by Bob Dylan September 22, 2008

 
In the early nineteen-sixties, the photographer Barry Feinstein asked his friend Bob Dylan to write some text to accompany a series of pictures of Hollywood. The result of their collaboration, rejected by a publisher at the time, will appear in November.

In the early nineteen-sixties, the photographer Barry Feinstein asked his friend Bob Dylan to write some text to accompany a series of pictures of Hollywood. The result of their collaboration, rejected by a publisher at the time, will appear in November.

after crashin the sportscar

into the chandelier

i ran out t the phone booth

made a call t my wife. she wasnt home.

i panicked. i called up my best friend

but the line was busy

then i went t a party but couldnt find a chair

somebody wiped their feet on me

so i decided t leave

i felt awful. my mouth was puckered.

arms were stickin thru my neck

my stomach was stuffed an bloated

dogs licked my face

people stared at me an said

“what’s wrong with you?”

passin two successful friends of mine

i stopped t talk.

they knew i was feelin bad

an gave me some pills

i went home an began writin

a suicide note

it was then that i saw

that crowd comin down

the street

i really have nothing

against

marlon brando

Chris Keeley

The Fish Rots From the Head Down

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/18/eff_sues_bush/

The Fish Rots From the Head Down

EFF sues Dubya over warrentless surveillance

Inside AT&T's 'secret room'

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco

Posted in Security, 18th September 2008 21:48 GMT

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has sued President Bush, the National Security Agency, and nine other public officials to stop what the civil liberties group characterizes as far-reaching and illegal surveillance on ordinary US citizens.

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Chris Keeley

Jefferson, Hemings, and a disclaimed lineage.

Jefferson, Hemings, and a disclaimed lineage.

by Jill Lepore September 22, 2008

For Annette Gordon-Reed, the real scandal wasn’t what Jefferson did; it was what historians did, in scanting the evidence for it.

For Annette Gordon-Reed, the real scandal wasn’t what Jefferson did; it was what historians did, in scanting the evidence for it.

In 1852, when Harriet Beecher Stowe finished “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she wrote to a congressman, Horace Mann, who happened to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brother-in-law, to beg a favor. Might he know how to get a copy of her book to Charles Dickens? “Were the subject any other I should think this impertinent & Egotistical,” Stowe wrote, making of demurral a poor cloak for presumption. But she had reason to expect Dickens’s sympathy. A decade earlier, upon completing an unhappy tour of the United States, Dickens judged the country “the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty.” Seeing slavery at first hand left him sick. “I really don’t think I could have borne it any longer,” he confessed, after riding a train whose passengers included a mother and her weeping children, sold away from their father by a fiend whom Dickens satirized as yet another American “champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

It would be going too far to say that Charles Dickens had it in for the original champion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Still, he rarely missed an opportunity to throw a dagger in Thomas Jefferson’s general direction, slurring, in his American novel, “Martin Chuzzlewit” (1844), that “noble patriot . . . who dreamed of Freedom in a slave’s embrace.”

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