March 24, 2005

• THURSDAY WHATEVER

  Google Local

  Check it out. With Google’s new feature, you can plug in anything for location, including your street address and something to look for, and get it mapquested. I entered the word “fascinating” on the left with Portland, Oregon on the right and one of the links on the first page it came up with was for the Portland Art Museum, where they are now having a show of Diane Arbus’ work. When I was starting my Saturday A-Z Photo series last week with Ansel Adams, I almost chose Arbus instead because she was such an interesting person and photographer. She was kind of the Sylvia Plath of cameras. Born in 1923 to a wealthy New York family of Russian Jewish storeowners and the sister of Howard Nemerov who became an American poet laureate, she met her husband Alan Arbus when she was 14 and married him at 18. From him she began to learn about photography and they eventually went into business together as fashion photographers – he took the pictures and she did the styling. In 1956, when she was 33 she began to take her own photos. She became a portrait photographer, but her subjects were people on the fringes of society. The photo shown here is one of her most famous. Stare back at these identical twins and you will see that they are not, in fact, so identical. She went up to people on the street and in bars and clubs and asked them if she could photograph them. She was a pioneer in the technique of using flash in daylight. She used a square medium format camera with a waist-level finder so that she could view her subjects while talking to them and waiting for the moment she wanted. She became famous and awarded – and 15 years from the date of her first photo she combined barbiturate overdose and slitting her wrists and was gone at 48 years old. Take a look at some of her photos here. Look especially at the ones dated 1970 or 1971. Some say the nature of these photos represented the turn her soul was taking.
  

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  Deep Thought: “I don’t think I received enough love when I was a child. And not just from my parents. From my other relatives, and my friends, and from strangers and from all the creatures of the world, including bugs.”
  Today I am grateful for: Wood
  Guess the Movie: “If I had one day when I didn’t have to be all confused and I didn’t have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace. You know? “ Answer: Rebel Without a Cause, 1955. Winner: thenarrator.
  Left and Right Unite to Challenge Patriot Act Provisions
  Group Wants Limits on Access Allowed Law Enforcement
  by Edward Epstein
  WASHINGTON– An unusual left-right coalition opened a campaign Tuesday to sharply curtail controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, showing that Congress and President Bush face a pointed debate over renewing the law enacted just 45 days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
  It was a Washington rarity to see the American Civil Liberties Union line up with conservative lions like David Keefe of the American Conservative Union and former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga. But they were among those at a Washington press conference held to assail such Patriot Act provisions as those allowing law enforcement agents to look at library users’ records or to conduct unannounced “sneak-and-peek” searches on homes or private offices. (Rest of article here.)
  Guess the Movie: 9:05 pm
  + = Spring break for all the people who get it.
  - = Raining on ours here in Portland.

  • 8:24 am
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