MetaFilter posts tagged with life and of

Horns and Drums

ferdydurke — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:22:39 -0800

Death and Life: Madison New Life Band bid farewell to Bishop Daddy Madison in Washington, D.C. Stooges Brass Band plays in New Orleans [second line].

The last resort

MrMerlot — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:33:32 -0800

Martin Parr is a celebrated English photographer who has a reputation for being both preoccupied and inspired with notions of consumerism, foreign travel and tourism. Now you can actually go on holiday with him. The School of Life, a maverick cultural institution in London, is offering a weekend away with the sardonic snapper in the Isle of Wight. Parr has described the Isle of Wight as like "a living theme park, like stepping back into an England of 20 or 30 years ago". For the princely sum of £500, you get to stay in Parr’s favourite seaside hotel, and join him for visits to the Brighstone holiday centre, the Needles, Ventnor beach and "other landmarks of the Isle of Wight tourism scene". According to the website, Parr will discuss his photography as well as his collections of souvenirs and postcards, and train your eye to see the "ugliness in beauty and the horror in leisure". Future holidays with cultural figures are planned by the School of Life, including a tour of the "overlooked delights of Heathrow airport" with philosopher Alain de Botton and an exploration of the M1 motorway. To my mind, this reminds of the sports tours where past greats are paid to guide you around famous stadiums and then sit with you at dinner trading old anecdotes. But does this cultural-history-as-holiday have other antecedents, I wonder?

"People don't want to know the Marlboro Man has PTSD"

stenseng — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 22:04:49 -0800

It was an instant icon, with Dan Rather calling it "the best war photograph in recent years." About 100 newspapers ran the photo, dubbing the anonymous warrior the "Marlboro Man." The photograph hit the world on Nov. 10, 2004: a close-cropped shot of a U.S. Marine in Iraq, his face smeared with blood and dirt, a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke curling across weary eyes. He's quieter now -- easier to anger. He turns to fight at the sound of a backfire, can't look at fireworks without thinking of fire raining down on a city. He has trouble sleeping, and when he does, his fingers twitch on invisible triggers. The diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. The man in the photograph is James Blake Miller, now 21, and he is an icon, although in ways Rather probably never imagined.

Previously mentioned briefly here

So are we at high tide or low tide?

furtive — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 21:29:09 -0800

Fossil records show Biodiversity comes and goes in a 62 million year cycle. The analysis, performed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UBC, has withstood thorough testing so that confidence in the results is above 99-percent.