Thanksgiving is almost over but I came home to find these classic Thanksgiving links. I saw the WKRP Turkey Drop when it originally aired. You must watch it.
After looking at Inge Morath's pictures from The Road to Reno, I started googling for more Inge. Her name was familiar but her work wasn't. The few pictures online from The Road to Reno whetted my appetite. Ordering the book from my library wasn't enough. I wanted more. Now! So I started googling and pretty soon I ran across the picture that's on the book cover, above, attributed to Inge Morath. Then two associations flashed quickly into my mind. The lady in the leapard coat with the paper bag over her head with the Saul Steinberg mask drawn on it was on the cover of a book that was on my desk buried in a pile of other books, read and ready to post in this blog as well as some unread, that had recently surfaced in a recent cleaning frenzy. The second association was one of the pictures Alec Soth had in his post on The Road to Reno:
That's Inge Morath with her husband Arthur Miller. I'm a huge Saul Steinberg fan and I had purchased this book some time ago but hadn't really gone through it. After all it's a small book and it isn't really very thick. I passed it over for weightier and far more important books. [Irony alert.] At this point I didn't know who had taken the pictures for the book but it was obvious that Inge Morath had something to do with the book since it was obvious she was on the cover. I retrieved the book from the pile and, lo and behold!, all the photographs were taken by Inge. From Amazon:
Photographer Inge Morath and the late New Yorker artist Saul Steinberg engaged in a unique collaboration in the late 1950s and early 1960s by having friends and acquaintances don paper bags drawn with fantastic faces and then posing them for photographs. In a delightful series of individual and group portraits--now published together for the first time--otherwise respectable people have been implicated in their mischief. Morath's straightforward, reportorial style is the perfect counterpoint to Steinberg's charming, whimsical masks. The deadpan of the photography, the Paul Klee-like humor of the drawing, and the intriguing anonymity of the figures--we don't know who they are, but we know exactly who they are--stir a spirit of mischievious charm that will make this the perfect little gift book.
Saul and Inge had way too much fun making these pictures. The tall guy in the book is Inge's husband, Arthur Miller. The paper bag masks are works of art and they are what first attracted me to this book but, now that I've looked carefully at it, the photographs are totally amazing. Absolutely fun and absolutely...something else. Overnight this book has become one of my most treasured. Who knew?
I bought it at an online remaindered book store, Daedalus Books & Music, and it seems to be out of print but there are lots of used ones at great prices. Do yourself a big favor. Buy it. You won't regret it.
Afghanistan is sinking back into chaos and repression, especially in the Southern reaches where weak warlords and complicit officials have allowed the Taliban to retake power in exchange for some false sense of temporary stability as the repressive regime consolidates its stranglehold on the region and marches, ever onward, toward the prize of Kabul.
We gave our word when we invaded Afghanistan that the Taliban would be routed and that the repressive regime would be lifted so that young girls in the country would have a life outside layers and layers of forced cloth, so that they could have the hope of an education and some semblence of a potential future that allowed for them to make some choices about its course. We gave our word.
This is what we have today:
Clutching scarves nervously around their faces, the women whispered details of Taliban atrocities taking place in their native Helmand province: A translator's body found in a sack, carved into pieces. A police officer taken hostage, blinded and garroted with wire. A woman shot and hanged by her thumbs.
The terrific blog, Politics, Theory & Photography, alerted me to a new book on Inge Morath. The Road to Reno promises to be one of the most exciting releases of the year. The book is comprised of pictures that Morath took while she and Henri Cartier-Bresson made an eighteen-day road trip from New York to Reno to shoot on the set of The Misfits.
Along with her pictures, the book will include Morath’s notes that were “written each night at the table in a motel room that was always in a different place but always looked the same.”
A lot of blogs have commented on how the Pelosi-Hoyer-Murtha flap has played in the press. In general, Pelosi has taken a lot of flack, been called a "lame duck' and much worse (including botox jokes. I don't usually have time for sexism charges, but somehow I don't imagine if Nancy was Nate, those jokes would have been made.)
Taylor Marsh, for example, takes on Dowd.
Me, I wonder where all these people are coming from. I've been watching Pelosi for a long time, and I liked her back when almost no one in the blogosphere thought she was worth anything. Why? Because I watched how she maneuvered in the caucus, and what I noticed was this - she ran a caucus that went from quite disunited to voting together more than any other Democratic caucus in decades. When Jefferson was found with $90,000 cash in a freezer, she moved to publicly disassociate the Democrats from him. And she had a number of fights with other people in the caucus.
As with this fight, she won some of those fights and she lost some, but she had them. Now if she lost all of them, it'd be a problem, and she would indeed be a joke. But in fact she wins more than she loses. And the fact that she is willing to fight is important. You may have noticed that in Hoyer's victory speech he spent a lot of time saying how committed he was to the goal of getting US troops out of Iraq. That hasn't always been Steny's line - to win he had to assure the caucus that he was good on that issue.
Shia Walk French Plan for Lebanon Collapses by Robert Fisk
The Shia, the largest community in Lebanon, are no longer represented in the Lebanese government. It could be just part of Lebanon's bloody-minded politics--or it could be a most dangerous moment in the history of this tragic country.
At the weekend, the Hizbollah and the Amal movement walked out of the Lebanese body politic, splitting apart the gentle, utterly false, brilliantly conceived (by the French, of course) confessional system that binds this tortured nation together. There will be demonstrations by Hizbollah to demand a government of "national unity", which means that Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, winner of the so-called "divine victory" against Israel this summer, insists on another pro-Syrian administration in Lebanon.
Yes. I know a lot of you hate MEMRI, but you should read this carefully. This corresponds closely to what I am hearing from Leanon and the parties to this conflict.
Lebanon's Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel was assassinated near Beirut on Tuesday, security sources said.
They said gunmen opened fire as his convoy drove through the Christian Sin el-Fil neighbourhood. Gemayel was rushed to hospital where he later died of his wounds.
Lebanon is in the throes of a political storm pitting the anti-Syrian ruling majority against the pro-Damascus opposition. The political tension threatens to spill into street confrontations.
I'm almost done with Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation. It's about the clusterfuck that is Lebanon. A clusterfuck largely because of the west and Israel. Pierre's father and grandfather figure prominently. They were fascists.
Two women from New York, driving a big, white rental truck appeared at The Jacksonville Center Friday afternoon and said they were looking for a good place to shoot some pictures with a special camera.
Not just any camera, mind you, but a 250-pound Polaroid Land Camera that shoots 20 by 24 poster size photos -- the last of its breed and destined soon to be a museum piece.
Jennifer Trausch (left), works for Polaroid as the technician assigned to the giant camera the company leases out for $1,500 a day to professional photographers who want to shoot one of a kind photos (mostly portraits). The legendary Mary Ellen Mark has used the camera for some of her haunting portraits. So has Sports Illustrated legend Walter Ioos Jr. An even larger version that shoots life size portraits was used to shoot images of first responders after the September 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.
The larger version is retired. Polaroid no longer makes the giant rolls of film it requires and, soon, the company will stop making the 20-inch-wide rolls that feed the smaller version and it, along with four others, will fade into history along with the company's role in the photographic industry.
That super-large format camera in this photo is indeed a Polaroid camera, the largest of its kind in the world. It is being operated by Jennifer Trausch and Kim Venable on the dance floor of the Floyd Country Store.
Have the real effects of this monster-bubble been softened by the huge trade deficit?
Yes, because America currently borrows $800 billion a year from China, Japan etc. which keeps the economy sputtering along while our manufacturing sector continues to be ransacked.
The $800 billion account deficit is like a sedative which lulls us to sleep while the country is looted right in front of our eyes. For example, in the last 12 years, foreign ownership of US assets has soared from $3 trillion to over $12 trillion.(400%) At the same time, over 13,000 major US companies have been sold to foreign corporations since 1980. Nevertheless, Americans are only-too-happy to ignore these unpleasant facts as long as they can totter off to Wal-Mart to buy little Johnny his new video-game. It’s only a matter of time before the scattered, bleached bones of American industry appear everywhere across the American heartland.
And, does the Fed realize that Americans borrowed another $825 billion from their home equity in the last 12 months (to spend on house repairs, shopping, boats etc) and that without that consumer spending the nation’s growth rate (GDP) will shrivel to nothing?
Yes, because they provide all that data, too.
So, what does this mean for the homeowner whose future depends on the steady increase in his home equity? What can he expect?
Well, first of all, you can ignore all the gibberish you hear on the business channel about “soft landings” and a “temporary downturn”.
There’ll be no soft landings. This is the Big One; Real Estate Armageddon followed by a plague of locusts.
I've been shooting with my Industar-50 on my Leica IIIc. (When this roll is done the Industar-50 goes on my Zorki 3M.) It's a sweet little lens that collapses making it easy to put in a coat pocket.
It's a Tessar design. The Tessar optical design goes back to 1902. The Leitz Elmar 50/3.5 on the early Leicas was a Tessar. Actually, a version of the Elmar 50 is still in production.
It has four elements in three groups. When the Soviets copied the Leica II they also copied the Elmar in a series of lenses that ended with the Industar-50. The Elmar had the diaphragm between the first two elements while the Industars had the diaphragm in front of the third group. It's a little slow at f3.5 but that's an OK price to play for its small size. Most shooting isn't done below f3.5 anyway. For a faster lens I have a Jupiter 8 or a Leitz Summitar. Both need repair work, though. Later Industar-50s had a rigid body and there was a rigid body version for the Zenit SLRs, first in M39 mount and then in the still popular M42 mount. I've not done much shooting with my Pentax SLRs because they won't fit in my coat pocket with a modern lens. I've been noticing the M42 Industar-50s on eBay. Tiny little things. They can be had for between $10 and $15. I had my son's Zorki 4 at Oleg's for a CLA and new shutter curtains when I noticed he had new Industar-50s for $15. Oleg sent one back with the Zorki with no extra shipping.
It's not the prettiest lens but it makes the Pentax H1a small enough to fit in my coat pocket.
That's a Super Takumar 55/2 on the Spotmatic. The Spotmatic won't fit in my coat pocket. The I-50 is derived from a rangefinder lens and doesn't have automatic stop down or presets. You focus wide open and then stop it down the old fashioned way. The I-50 aperture ring is on the front. This would probably cause long time SLR shooter's heads to explode but I'm used to that sort of thing. It does make the viewfinder dim but it's been working for me. It also works to preset everything like many do on rangefinders. The H1a doesn't even have a built in meter so using this combination is a lot like using my rangefinders except this one will focus down to .3 meters and you can frame accurately at that distance. This is not a lens for low light conditions. For that I have the 55/2 and maybe someday a Super Takumar 50/1.4. So far I've enjoyed shooting this combination. The prints will tell if it's worthwhile. But a camera with a slow lens in your coat pocket always takes better pictures than the camera with the fast lens that is left home.
But wait! There's more! The I-50, with an adapter, will fit on our digital Pentax *ist DL making it a 75mm equivalent. How is that for a compact long focus lens?
I finally found the last picture to fill in that hole in the banner. It was taken in 1986 at the Calico ghost town in Lower California. I was 42. The 36 year old picture of me in the banner has just a bit of my oldest kid, Jenny, when she was an infant and the 48 year old picture has my youngest, Robby, showing how he could almost reach the ceiling of the bus I was living in at the time. I was looking for one with my middle kid, Katie in it. That's Katie in the picture with her hand on my shoulder. She's bigger now.
