Glacier Park Magazine editor Chris Peterson set out to chronicle 100 days in Glacier National Park in preparation for the park’s centennial celebration next year. From his photographs, he chose one for each consecutive day, and they are all amazing. Glacier is one of the most-beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and seems wilder than your average national park. The photos here reflect that. There are bear and moose, but many birds and incredible landscapes.
Peterson adds short anecdotes to each photo, and the best of them add to the enjoyment of the photo. He describes being in the middle of a forlorn mountain trail, setting up his tent among the mosquitoes and an approaching thunderstorm, suffering from a stomach-cramping illness, and accompanies the description with a photo that makes me want to trade places with him.
I’d recommend going to the page, immediately scrolling to the bottom and reading the entries in order. I didn’t want the 100 days to end.
Link: 100 Days in Glacier National Park
Set aside an hour-and-a-half sometime in the next week and take a look at Desperate Man Blues, director Edward Gillian’s 2003 film about Joe Bussard, known in record-collecting circles for his love for and devotion to 78s. Bussard seems like a curmudgeonly old fella who lights up once he drops the needle on one of his many rare discs. He chain-smokes his cigars, stomps his feet to the old blues and bluegrass and old-timey jazz that he collects, and rails against rock-and-roll as “the cancer that killed music.”
The part of the film I loved was traveling with him as he talked about searching for records, reminiscing about some of his amazing finds — some 78s he has are the only known copies in existence. He describes crossing streams to get to remote homes, flea markets, and dusty shacks lit by oil lamps, down on his knees, looking at for forgotten recordings by forgotten artists in a format that is not only part of a nearly-lost format, but the least-accessible type of that format.
On one of his trips to look at 78s, he views the man’s records and declares that they’re not old enough, rattling off a bunch of artists’ names. When the two men don’t recognize the names, he takes them to his pickup and plays cassettes for them. When Kokomo Arnold’s “Milkcow Blues” comes on, one of the men begins singing along and for a moment, all three are united in the experience. It’s a great moment, and it’s immediately recognizable for music lovers.
Desperate Man Blues (Pitchfork.tv) – available until February 6.
I’m finding so much music online these days. One really unique stage I stumbled across is provided on Black Cab Sessions, a site that features artists playing about as stripped down as one can get, riding through London in a cab. There’s something about the intimacy and necessary acoustic nature of these videos that is very appealing. I really enjoyed the Fleet Foxes, Beach House and Ryan Adams performances, and there’s a link below to a great Bon Iver appearance, but there are many more that I have to check out.
The Black Cab Sessions: http://www.blackcabsessions.com
Bon Iver on Black Cab Sessions
The online edition of Smithsonian magazine features an article by Bob Eckstein that discusses a forgotten shame: the pre-Frosty treatment of snowmen in popular culture. Snowmen were assaulted and abused by children and adults alike, possibly leading to their frequent depiction as drunken, out-of-control anthropomorphic wads of snow.
Snowmen were apparently an easy target — unable to run or fight back, they were also weakened by direct sunlight, and not as dapper as later depictions would have you believe. And advertisers exploited their pathetic nature:
To add insult to injury, the snowman somehow became a spokesperson for any product of an embarrassing sort, appearing in ads for every personal hygiene problem imaginable: dandruff, gas, hangovers, constipation, and bad breath. Add this all up and you have a Frosty with a pretty shaken psyche. We literally built him up only so we could, apparently, knock him down and use him as a piñata. It’s no wonder the snowman turned to booze.
Since those dark years, the snowman’s image has been rehabilitated, and we even have songs and TV specials to celebrate them. But when the holidays have come and gone, we have to wonder about the puddles they leave behind: are those icy tears?
Snowman Gone Wild (Smithsonian Magazine)
Be sure to check out the online gallery for examples of snowmen depictions.
Michael Lewis, who wrote about the madness of Wall Street in 1989’s Liar’s Poker, has an amazing article in the December issue of Portfolio magazine, detailing the ridiculous evolution of subprime-backed securities and the irresponsible, incompetent business culture that embraced them. This is great journalism — and I love the earthy, blunt language used throughout the article.
Here’s an excerpt:
The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. [Steve] Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.
But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says.
As an investor, Eisman was allowed on the quarterly conference calls held by Moody’s but not allowed to ask questions. The people at Moody’s were polite about their brush-off, however. The C.E.O. even invited Eisman and his team to his office for a visit in June 2007. By then, Eisman was so certain that the world had been turned upside down that he just assumed this guy must know it too. “But we’re sitting there,” Daniel recalls, “and he says to us, like he actually means it, ‘I truly believe that our rating will prove accurate.’ And Steve shoots up in his chair and asks, ‘What did you just say?’ as if the guy had just uttered the most preposterous statement in the history of finance. He repeated it. And Eisman just laughed at him.”
“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.”
I’ve always said that one thing that’s been pounded out of people over the years is healthy skepticism. If there were more people on Wall Street with “negative attitudes,” we’d all be better for it. We need more cynical people in commerce, in politics, in journalism — in every field. We have to demand answers and not be satisfied with the easy ones.
Lewis makes the point that this economic catastrophe has been a long time in development — he suggests that it may have begun when Salomon Brothers became the first Wall Street public company, making shareholders take all the risk while Wall greed advanced its risk-taking methods. Through years of increasing home prices, the development of mortgage-backed bonds, through boom and bust, short selling and “mezzanine CDOs,” the industry charged toward disaster, blinded by insane profits gained at the expense of everything else.
The End of Wall Street’s Boom (Portfolio magazine site)
Neatorama is a regular stop for me. Along with Boing Boing, it is the one of the best time-wasters out there. But it’s also the home of some very helpful information, like the story behind each of the logos for the big Hollywood studios, familiar to anyone who’s seen a movie in the past, oh, century or so.
I can’t decide which is my favorite (probably 20th Century Fox or Paramount), but I’m glad to know there have been five different Leo the Lions who have performed the growl at the start of an MGM film.
The Stories Behind Hollywood Studio Logos (Neatorama)
The “Always Something Interesting” photo blog Shorpy.com features a 1956 photo of Southdale, originally seen in Life magazine. Not a lot has changed: the escalators run toward the camera’s point of view, the Apple Store was just a fever dream in little Stevie Jobs’ crib, and guys no longer wear suits. Except for the guys selling suits in Macy’s. I’m pretty sure the mod lighting is gone too — I’ll check next time I’m in Hot Topic.
I bet that Woolworth’s rocked.
Shorpy.com Southdale full-size image
Political campaigns can be exhausting — and the campaign season behind us was especially tough — but at the heart of politics is a mix of people, strategy, emotion and changing circumstances. Newsweek has an amazingly interesting 7-chapter behind-the-scenes look at the 2008 presidential race, including insiders’ views of the Obama and McCain campaign staffs.
Some of the insights have already become post-election arguments (the animosity within the McCain-Palin campaign, the battle over that campaign’s message, and the ever-growing clothing tab), but tells of challenges within the Obama campaign as well. How our President-Elect handled himself — with disciplined restraint and patient deliberation — makes me even more optimistic about how he’ll lead this country.
It’s worth a few hours of reading this weekend:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/167582
Here are some fantastic photos of Barack Obama along the campaign trail taken by Time photographer Callie Shell. Besides the nice, simple navigation at the bottom of the page that allows you to load several photos at a time, this is a rare behind-the-scenes look at a rare man. It’s exciting to think that, in a few weeks, he’ll begin to bring this country and its divided people together.
The Digital Journalist: Callie Shell
I’m confident enough in my masculinity to admit that I love Cute Overload. This is what blogging is about: the unabashed obsession digitized. Soon, every photo or video of an animal (preferably a baby animal) being cute will be documented here. And the site has been responsible for several new words that deserve consideration in the English language: snorgle, prosh, puppitude. If you worry at all about your manliness taking a hit while oohing and aaaawwwwwing over the baby chicks and sleeping kitties, there’s always the Cats ‘n Racks link.
In its own vernacular, Cute Overload is redonkulous.
Link: http://www.cuteoverload.com/
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