Jack Kerouac’s famous “scroll” of the typescript for his landmark 1957 novel “On the Road” is an iconic artifact, due to the cultural impact of its content, but its treatment (however reverential) as an oddball, one-off experiment masks its maker’s insight into the technology of writing and its prophetic relationship to his medium’s future. […]
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First of all, we — myself, my wife Anna, her son/my stepson Jacky, and our two cats, Billie and Mini — survived this hurricane unscathed and are all fine. Second, our house, on a small hill, sustained no damage at all, nor did most of our immediate neighbors — though we’re not far from the coastline of Staten Island. A missing storm window here, a few shingles ripped off there. More good luck. […] Late last year I gave a talk in London, “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” in which, among other things, I bemoaned the fact that the newspaper and magazine industry has begun to replace specialized critics grounded in the visual arts (like me) with “cultural journalists,” generalists with no depth of […] This year I found it necessary to fire a client, declining to undertake a second rewrite of a commissioned photo-book introduction. Both the editor and the photographer insisted that I refrain from discussing at any length the socially and politically charged subject matter of the pictures, demanding instead that I address the images purely in formalist terms, preferably by making comparisons to great painters of the past. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Election 2012: Image World (9)
Paul Ryan is the human face of “compassionate conservatism,” in other words. The rise to the top of the Republic Party of this cynical, opportunistic piece of white Wisconsin trash is proof positive that, even in the fetid waters of the radical right, fecal matter floats. […]