The documentary The Loving Story premieres February 14th on HBO.
burnedshoes:
© Grey Villet, April 1965, The Lovings, King and Queen County, Virginia
Richard and Mildred Loving with their children Peggy, Donald, and Sidney in their living room.
The Loving Story, opening at New York’s ICP this week (Jan. 20 – May 6, 2012) is a revelation, an undiscovered gem. In 1958, when Richard and Mildred Loving got married, it was an astonishing act of bravery and defiance: an interracial couple in the era of the Ku Klux Klan and Bull Connor - of firehoses and police dogs and lynchings; the Birmingham bombings and Freedom Rides were still to come. And yet here, in the midst of all the mayhem and hate, are a white man and a black woman casually interwined, so comfortable in their own skin that they are oblivious to onlookers; their armor is their love.
The compelling thing about the Lovings is that they are exquisitely ordinary. Only a photographer who can make himself invisible could capture that. There was never anything fancy about Grey’s pictures; they stripped people to their essence.
(read more here and here; thanks to chagalov for the la lettre link!)
So this happened in Queen Anne this week during Seattle’s big snowstorm…
Shit Seattle People Say When It Snows
Capitol Hill, Seattle
The Master from Flint Hill: Earl Scruggs
Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried. In 1945, when he first stood on the stage at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and played banjo the way no one had ever heard before, the audience responded with shouts, whoops, and ovations. He performed tunes he wrote as well as songs they knew, with clarity and speed like no one could imagine, except him. When the singer came to the end of a phrase, he filled the theatre with sparkling runs of notes that became a signature for all bluegrass music since. He wore a suit and Stetson hat, and when he played he smiled at the audience like what he was doing was effortless. There aren’t many earthquakes in Tennessee, but that night there was.
- For our Culture Desk blog, Steve Martin writes about banjo legend Earl Scruggs: http://nyr.kr/yyCvax. Click play to listen to Flatt and Scruggs’s famous Foggy Mountain Breakdown.
View from the Volunteer Park Water Tower, some 110 steps above road pavement at the base
Photo by Robert Kosara
npr:
Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Random Acts of Chaos: Underreported Stories of 2011: More Soldiers Commit Suicide Than Died In Combat
At the end of January 2011, the U.S. military released stats that raised some eyebrows, but not nearly as many as it should have. Congress.org reported that there were 434 reported suicides by personnel in active duty in 2010, but when we include the Air Force and Marine…
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