tarnoff: “The terrible rush of metropolitan life: those busy New-Yorkers,” (1915). Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery. In December 1866, Mark Twain left San Francisco for New York. Like generations of transplanted Westerners then and since, he found life in the big city a little disorienting. He described his feelings in a letter to the San Francisco-based Alta California. There is something about this ceaseless buzz, and hurry, and bustle, that keeps a stranger in a state of unwholesome excitement all the time, and makes him restless and uneasy, and saps from him all capacity to enjoy anything or take a strong interest in any matter whatever - a something which impels him to try to do everything, and yet permits him to do nothing. He is a boy in a candy-shop - could choose quickly if there were but one kind of candy, but is hopelessly undetermined in the midst of a hundred kinds. A stranger feels unsatisfied, here, a good part of the time. He starts to a library; changes, and moves toward a theatre; changes again and thinks he will visit a friend; goes within a biscuit-toss of a picture-gallery, a billiard-room, a beer cellar and a circus, in succession, and finally drifts home and to bed, without having really done anything or gone anywhere. He don’t go anywhere because he can’t go everywhere, I suppose. This fidgety, feverish restlessness will drive a man crazy, after a while, or kill him. It kills a good many dozens now - by suicide. I have got to get out of it.

tarnoff:

“The terrible rush of metropolitan life: those busy New-Yorkers,” (1915). Courtesy of the NYPL Digital Gallery.

In December 1866, Mark Twain left San Francisco for New York. Like generations of transplanted Westerners then and since, he found life in the big city a little disorienting. He described his feelings in a letter to the San Francisco-based Alta California.

There is something about this ceaseless buzz, and hurry, and bustle, that keeps a stranger in a state of unwholesome excitement all the time, and makes him restless and uneasy, and saps from him all capacity to enjoy anything or take a strong interest in any matter whatever - a something which impels him to try to do everything, and yet permits him to do nothing. He is a boy in a candy-shop - could choose quickly if there were but one kind of candy, but is hopelessly undetermined in the midst of a hundred kinds. A stranger feels unsatisfied, here, a good part of the time. He starts to a library; changes, and moves toward a theatre; changes again and thinks he will visit a friend; goes within a biscuit-toss of a picture-gallery, a billiard-room, a beer cellar and a circus, in succession, and finally drifts home and to bed, without having really done anything or gone anywhere. He don’t go anywhere because he can’t go everywhere, I suppose. This fidgety, feverish restlessness will drive a man crazy, after a while, or kill him. It kills a good many dozens now - by suicide. I have got to get out of it.

tarnoff

todaysdocument: Galloping into Spring Supervisor Burgess and Ranger Cooke Trying Out the Civilian Conservation Corps Constructed Hobby Horse, Douglas Fir Forest Camp, Mt. Baker National Forest, 1936.

todaysdocument:

Galloping into Spring

Supervisor Burgess and Ranger Cooke Trying Out the Civilian Conservation Corps Constructed Hobby Horse, Douglas Fir Forest Camp, Mt. Baker National Forest, 1936.

research.archives.gov

Spring break

Spring break

Prestigious addresses, Capitol Hill style

Prestigious addresses, Capitol Hill style

Do not image search “Shame”  bbook: oldfilmsflicker: thanks to thelousynative for pointing me to this Brilliant.

Do not image search “Shame” 

bbook:

oldfilmsflicker:

thanks to thelousynative for pointing me to this

Brilliant.

padapooper

Cornish College of the ArtsSeattle 

Cornish College of the Arts
Seattle 

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!)

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!)

burnedshoes

chenhila: So this happened in Queen Anne this week during Seattle’s big snowstorm…

chenhila:

So this happened in Queen Anne this week during Seattle’s big snowstorm…

chenhila