show me the way

carlosbaila: Marina Abramovic meets Ulay“Marina Abramovic and...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:10:45 -0500

Marina Abramovic meets Ulay

“Marina Abramovic and Ulay started an intense love story in the 70s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course, they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again. at her 2010 MoMa retrospective Marina performed ‘The Artist Is Present’ as part of the show, a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her. Ulay arrived without her knowing it and this is what happened.”

“En los años 70, Marina Abramovic mantuvo una intensa historia de amor con Ulay. Pasaron 5 años viviendo en una furgoneta realizando toda clase de performances. En 1988, cuando su relación ya no daba para más, decidieron recorrer la Gran Muralla China, empezando cada uno de un lado, para encontrarse en el medio, abrazarse y no volver a verse nunca más. En 2010 el MoMa de Nueva York dedicó una retrospectiva a su obra. Dentro de la misma, Marina compartía un minuto en silencio con cada extraño que se sentaba frente a ella. Ulay llegó sin que ella lo supiera, y esto fue lo que pasó”

cavetocanvas: Elliott Erwitt, Rosenberg Case, Moment of...

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:20:19 -0500

cavetocanvas:

Elliott Erwitt, Rosenberg Case, Moment of Execution, Washington, D.C., 1953.

A raucous crowd wildly cheers Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s execution for espionage, creating a chilling record of the blind patriotic zeal of 1950s middle-class America.

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner: “Gilda got married and went away....

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 16:51:57 -0500

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:

“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”

- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live

Photo

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 16:08:38 -0500

Thirty-year-old Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s...

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:47:33 -0500

Thirty-year-old Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolution List, 1942

1. Work more and better
2. Work by a schedule
3. Wash teeth if any
4. Shave
5. Take bath
6. Eat good — fruit — vegetables — milk
7. Drink very scant if any
8. Write a song a day
9. Wear clean clothes — look good
10. Shine shoes
11. Change socks
12. Change bed cloths often
13. Read lots good books
14. Listen to radio a lot
15. Learn people better
16. Keep rancho clean
17. Dont get lonesome
18. Stay glad
19. Keep hoping machine running
20. Dream good
21. Bank all extra money
22. Save dough
23. Have company but dont waste time
24. Send Mary and kids money
25. Play and sing good
26. Dance better
27. Help win war — beat fascism
28. Love mama
29. Love papa
30. Love Pete
31. Love everybody
32. Make up your mind
33. Wake up and fight

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Thu, 22 Nov 2012 19:32:40 -0500

One of my best friends sent this to me. He’s amazing. I voted at 8:30 this morning. It was a...

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:11:00 -0500

One of my best friends sent this to me. He’s amazing.

I voted at 8:30 this morning. It was a personal realization that had been coming for six years, since I first knew Barack Obama existed. I wasn’t able to vote for him last time because I was in a hospital, in late 2008, in Kentucky, in a coma, with my torso split open and wrapped in plastic to stave off bloat and infection.

One of my first memories after waking up was watching Obama be sworn in as our president. I was suffering from terrible aphasia then: I couldn’t articulate his title in our country or the function of the ceremony I was watching. I didn’t really know where I was, I could not walk, I could not speak, I could not chew or swallow, I could not remember that I had graduated college and had planned a move to New York City.

Now, though, I remember watching his inauguration and knowing that anything was possible, knowing that sometimes you have to stand back, appreciate what you’ve done, promise yourself you’ll keep at it, and know that it’s never, ever the end. I knew that feeling back in 2008, back when I couldn’t express it in any way. I just knew it.

Four years ago I was living in a nursing home, in a wheelchair, in diapers, being fed three times daily by whichever nurse was near when my food tray rolled in front of me. Now, in late 2012, I live in New York City, I have an awesome apartment, I have an awesome job, I have an awesome man. No matter what happens tonight, or any night, or any time, it isn’t the end.

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Sat, 17 Nov 2012 21:22:07 -0500

John Calipari and the Marketing of Kentucky Basketball by Reeves Wiedeman

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 08:49:54 -0500

John Calipari and the Marketing of Kentucky Basketball by Reeves Wiedeman:

What Calipari has done is turn his basketball program into a place that, like a law, business, dental, or other professional school, is focussed on insuring that each of its students moves on to successful, satisfying careers. In this regard, Calipari is the most honest man in the sport.

letters of note

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 05:52:39 -0400

One icy morning in January of 1984, as the University of Oregon’s wrestling team headed to their next tournament in Pullman, Washington, the driver of the bus on which they were travelling lost control of the vehicle on a mountain road and could do nothing to stop it tumbling through the guardrail and over a 300-ft cliff. One boy, Lorenzo West, was killed on impact; another, 20-year-old Jed Kesey, was left brain dead. He passed away within days.

Shortly after Jed’s funeral at his family’s farm, his dad, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey, wrote the following letter to five of his closest friends

(Source: CoEvolution Quarterly)

Dear Wendell and Larry and Ed and Bob and Gurney:

Partners, it’s been a bitch.

I’ve got to write and tell somebody about some stuff and, like I long ago told Larry, you’re the best backboard I know. So indulge me a little; I am but hurt.

We built the box ourselves (George Walker, mainly) and Zane and Jed’s friends and frat brothers dug the hole in a nice spot between the chicken house and the pond. Page found the stone and designed the etching. You would have been proud, Wendell, especially of the box — clear pine pegged together and trimmed with redwood. The handles of thick hemp rope. And you, Ed, would have appreciated the lining. It was a piece of Tibetan brocade given Mountain Girl by Owsley 15 years ago, gilt and silver and russet phoenixbird patterns, unfurling in flames. And last month, Bob, Zane was goose hunting in the field across the road and killed a snow goose. I told him be sure to save the down. Susan Butkovitch covered this in white silk for the pillow while Faye and MG and Gretch and Candace stitched and stapled the brocade into the box.

It was a double-pretty day, like winter holding its breath, giving us a break. About 300 people stood around and sung from the little hymnbooks that Diane Kesey had Xeroxed — “Everlasting Arms,” “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” “In the Garden” and so forth. With all my cousins leading the singing and Dale on his fiddle. While we were singing “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” Zane and Kit and the neighbor boys that have grown up with all of us carried the box to the hole. The preacher is also the Pleasant Hill School superintendent and has known our kids since kindergarten. I learned a lot about Jed that I’d either forgotten or never known — like his being a member of the National Honor Society and finishing sixth in a class of more than a hundred.

We sung some more. People filed by and dropped stuff in on Jed. I put in that silver whistle I used to wear with the Hopi cross soldered on it. One of our frat brothers put in a quartz watch guaranteed to keep beeping every 15 minutes for five years. Faye put in a snapshot of her and I standing with a pitchfork all Grantwoodesque in front of the old bus. Paul Foster put in the little leatherbound New Testament given him by his father who had carried it during his 65 years as a minister. Paul Sawyer read from Leaves of Grass while the boys each hammered in the one nail they had remembered to put in their pockets. The Betas formed a circle and passed the loving cup around (a ritual our fraternity generally uses when a member is leaving the circle to become engaged) (Jed and Zane and I are all members, y’unnerstand, not to mention Hagen) and the boys lowered the box with these ropes George had cut and braided. Zane and I tossed in the first shovelfuls. It sounded like the first thunderclaps of Revelations…

But it’s an earlier scene I want to describe for you all, as writers and friends and fathers…up at the hospital, in cold grey Spokane:

He’d finally started moving a little. Zane and I had been carrying plastic bags of snow to pack his head in trying to stop the swelling that all the doctors told us would follow as blood poured to the bruised brain. And we noticed some reaction to the cold. And the snow I brushed across his lips to ease the bloody parch where all the tubes ran in caused him to roll his arms a little. Then more. Then too much, with the little monitor lights bleeping faster and faster, and I ran to the phone to call the motel where I had just sent most of the family for some rest.

“You guys better get back over here! He’s either going or coming.”

Everybody was there in less than five minutes — Chuck and Sue, Kit and Zane, Shan and her fiance Jay, Jay’s dad Irby, Sheryl and her husband Bill, my mom, Faye…my whole family except for my dead daddy and Grandma Smith down with age and Alzheimer’s. Jed’s leg was shaking with the force of his heartbeat. Kit and Zane tried to hold it. He was starting to go into seizures, like the neurosurgeon had predicted.

Up till this time everybody had been exhorting him to “Hang on, Old Timer. Stick it out. This thing can’t pin you. You’re too tough, too brave. Sure it hurts but you can pull through it. Just grit your teeth and hang on.” Now we could see him trying, fighting. We could see it in his clenching fists, his threshing legs. And then aw Jesus we saw it in his face. The peacefully swollen unconscious blank suddenly was filled with expression. He came back in. He checked it out, and he saw better than we could begin to imagine how terribly hurt he was. His poor face grimaced with pain. His purple brow knitted and his teeth actually did try to clench on the tubes.

And then, O my old buddies, he cried. The doctors had already told us in every gentle way they could that he was brain dead, gone for good, but we all saw it…the quick flickerback of consciousness, the awful hurt being realized, the tears saying “I don’t think I can do ‘er this time, Dad. I’m sorry, I truly am…”

And everybody said, “It’s okay, ol’ Jedderdink. You know better than we do. Breathe easy. Go on ahead. We’ll catch you later down the line.”

His threshing stopped. His face went blank again. I thought of Old Jack, Wendell, ungripping his hands, letting his fields finally go.

The phone rang in the nurses’ quarters. It was the doctor, for me. He had just appraised all the latest readouts on the monitors. “Your son is essentially dead, Mr. Kesey. I’m very sorry.”

And the sorrow rung absolutely honest. I said something. Zane picked up the extension and we watched each other while the voice explained the phenomena. We said we saw it also, and were not surprised. Thank you…

Then the doctor asked a strange thing. He wanted to know what kind of kid Jed was. Zane and I both demanded what he meant. He said he was wondering how Jed would have felt about being an organ donor. Our hearts both jumped.

“He would love it! Jed’s always been as generous as they come. Take whatever you can use!”

The doctor waited for our elation to ease down, then told us that to take the kidneys they had to take them before the life support was turned off. Did we understand? After a while we told him we did.

So Faye and I had to sign five copies apiece, on a cold formica countertop, while the machine pumped out the little “beep…beep…beep…” in the dim tangle of technology behind us. In all my life, waking and dreaming, I’ve never imagined anything harder.

Everybody went in and told him goodbye, kissed his broken nose, shook his hand, squeezed his big old hairy foot…headed down the corridor. Somebody said it might be a good idea to get a scrip for some kind of downers. We’d all been up for about 40 hours, either in the chapel praying like maniacs, or at his bedside talking to him. We didn’t know if we could sleep.

Chuck and I walked back to the intensive care ward to ask. All the doctors were there, bent over a long list, phoning numbers, matching blood types, ordering nurses…in such a hurry they hardly had time to offer sympathy. Busy, and justly so. But the nurses, the nurses bent over their clipboards, could barely see to fill out the forms.

They phoned the hotel about an hour later to tell us it was over, and that the kidneys were in perfect shape. That was about four in the morning. They phoned again a little after six to say that the kidneys were already in two young somebodies.

What a world.

We’ve heard since that they used twelve things out of him, including corneas. And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.

With love,

Ken

P.S. When Jed’s wallet was finally sorted out of the debris and confusion of the wreck it was discovered that he had already provided for such a situation. He had signed the place on his driver’s license indicating that he wanted to be an organ donor in the event of etc., etc. One man gathers what another man spills.

source

Harry Gruyaert. goodbye summer

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 11:50:00 -0400

Harry Gruyaert. goodbye summer

Indian ink & gold paint on Papyrus by Nja Mahdaoui,...

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 21:17:33 -0400

Indian ink & gold paint on Papyrus by Nja Mahdaoui, 2003.

Ramadan Mubarak, dudes.

"We would be a lot safer if the government would take its money out of science and put it into..."

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 21:01:00 -0400

“We would be a lot safer if the government would take its money out of science and put it into astrology and the reading of palms. Only in superstition is there hope. If you want to become a friend of civilization, then become an enemy of truth and a fanatic for harmless balderdash.”

- Kurt Vonnegut, 1970

ahboddah: Juan Gatti

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:40:03 -0400

ahboddah: Juan Gatti

Photo

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:34:21 -0400

The family photo that Charlie Duke left on the Moon on April 23,...

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:33:29 -0400

The family photo that Charlie Duke left on the Moon on April 23, 1972, NASA.

laphamsquarterly: Committed to learning the principles of Latin...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 23:01:00 -0400

laphamsquarterly:

Committed to learning the principles of Latin grammar as a child in Mexico in the 1650s, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz recalled that she cut her hair very short, and if she had not “learned such and such a thing” by the time it grew out, she “would again cut it off as punishment for being so slow-witted.”

hello finals, goodbye hair

"Lantz told me that the deepest relationship he has ever had with a game was with poker, to which he..."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 13:08:00 -0400

“Lantz told me that the deepest relationship he has ever had with a game was with poker, to which he was almost dangerously addicted. “Somehow teetering on the edge was part of the fun for me,” he said. “It was like a tightrope walk between this transcendently beautiful and cerebral thing that gave you all kinds of opportunities to improve yourself — through study and self-discipline, making your mind stronger like a muscle — and at the same time it was pure self-destruction. There’s no word for that in English, for a thing that does both of those at the same time. But it’s wonderful.””

- Just One More Game… - Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ by Sam Anderson

"What Calipari has crafted at Kentucky verges on beauty. I’m not (too) embarrassed to say that...."

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 22:34:05 -0400

“What Calipari has crafted at Kentucky verges on beauty. I’m not (too) embarrassed to say that. The last time we saw the ingredients mesh like this was with North Carolina in 2009, and Kentucky has the advantage of not having Tyler Hansbrough flopping around and goofing everything up. With Michael Kidd-Gilchrist’s amazing speed and finishing ability, Doron Lamb and Darius Miller banging 3s, Marquis Teague setting it all up, Terrence Jones scoring on the run and in the post, and Anthony Davis sparking the breaks with blocks and finishing them with dunks, this team is an aesthetic delight. Talent is not enough, and a system is not enough. But when the system recognizes that the talent is hot, sets the control level at minimum, and starts making perfect sense in March, then we’re all just leaping up from the tattered couch and laughing until it hurts.”

- Please Don’t Lose, Kentucky - Grantland

Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of 'Kony 2012' by Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:33:56 -0500

Solving War Crimes With Wristbands: The Arrogance of 'Kony 2012' by Kate Cronin-Furman & Amanda Taub:

Invisible Children has turned the myopic worldview of the adolescent — “if I don’t know about it, then it doesn’t exist, but if I care about it, then it is the most important thing in the world” — into a foreign policy prescription. The “invisible children” of the group’s name were the children of northern Uganda forcibly recruited by the LRA. In the group’s narrative, these children were “invisible” until American students took notice of them.