happy christmas to all, and to all a good night

visions from a southern voyage thanks to: state library & archives of florida; domino sound record shack, new orleans, LA; http://1d2d3d.wordpress.com/ (BYO3dglasses)

yr in review

may this stand as a hint/promise/incentive to compile some sort of retrospective on the year..

dana schutz, the autopsy of michael jackson. 2005.

ohthankgoodness

my appreciation of bbc's nature videos just escalated in a very serious way:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wildlifefinder/

to go back to the birds//a few guest contributions

thanks to ethan moses (who has some great roadkill photos on his website) for the yellow wonder, and to z behl for the woodchip disaster.

katie hargrave diligently documents dead birds in iowa city, IA.

keep em coming!

cranework a la matta-clark

making headlines today: a crane split a house in california. yet again, bbc news (or the greater world of destructive forces via construction vehicles) has read my mind, as i just came across gordon matta-clark's "building splits"- buildings with parts intentionally removed, resulting in a crane-like effect, albeit with a bit more precision.

apparently matta-clark was also really into puns, thank goodness.

scarborough marsh

when i was growing up there was a spooky legend of a girl found dead in the middle of the yellow lines in the road crossing the salt marsh. 

to go back to birds//dead bird installment #1, at long last

massachusetts, 2009

let's remember ted kennedy for his contribution to the realm of photographs of disaster.

Today the Boston Globe presented a "rarely seen" set of photographs taken by and with police chief Dominick Arena at the scene of Kennedy's infamous 1969 car crash in Chappaquiddick. While one photo shows Arena sitting on the undercarriage of the submerged vehicle (making him a live figure in a scenario that implies destruction, uncanniness, death, etc.), the shot of the Oldsmobile underwater strikes me as a beautiful juxtaposition of water and mechanics. Other photographs of cars out of their trajectory, many dating from the 1950s and 1960s, include bodies, alive and dead, shadowy and clear, some absent from the image but implicit in the situation. From raw mortuary photography to considerations of what a car "should" be for and with humans and the surrounding landscape, I am transfixed. Some of my favorites: Stan Healy, crime photographer from Missoula, Montana. Weegee. Warhol's Saturday Disaster (1964) is part of the Rose Art Museum's collection.