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2011

De Blasio Moves to Bring Safe Injection Sites to New York City (Daily News)
If the plan proceeds, sites would open as a one-year pilot program in up to four locations — Gowanus in Brooklyn, Midtown West and Washington Heights in Manhattan, and Longwood in the Bronx. There are currently needle exchanges at each proposed site. The injection facilities would be run by the nonprofit Research for a Safer New York, and would not get city money.

Cash Cash or Lights Out (Walkers in the City)
In her book, she (Viv Albertine) talks a lot about her mother, who was born in 1919, and about the ladies of her mother’s age and the limitations they had to live with even as smart people who wanted to live life to the brim. She wrote about how after her mother divorced her father, just not having to do all his laundry and cook for him felt like tremendous luxuries to her. And how, when Viv was a kid, her mother would take her and her sister to the seaside for a whole day and let them do everything they wanted with all the money she’d saved for it, and then tell them that they’d had so much fun that they’d actually managed to cram a whole two-week vacation into that day, and she was so convincing that they believed her. Reading that, I thought, yes, that way of thinking is really the secret, isn’t it.

Scenes Unseen: The Summer of ’78 (NY Times)
Like the starlight that travels millions of years before we see it, the four little boys stand in their underpants at Coney Island on an August day in 1978, and it is only now, in a found photograph, that we behold them.  The ocean has not quite left their hair. Four decades later, they are still flexing their muscles, still just about 10-going-on-11.
... Until now, none of these images have ever been displayed or published. A selection of them are here and in a special print section. More will be on view from May 3 through June 14 at the Arsenal Gallery in Central Park, 830 Fifth Avenue, near 64th Street.

Can Cities Make Us Better Citizens? (New Yorker)
Sennett likes “grim.” He also likes “difficulty,” “complexity,” and “friction.” His critique of the effect of digital devices on the city, apart from the fact that they are “individualizing machines,” is that apps like Google Maps make the city too user-friendly, too “friction-free.” If you think that the role of a designer, whether of software or of city streets, is to make those things easier to use, Sennett would disagree. He sees “encounters with resistance” as crucial to learning any craft, even the craft of dwelling. Getting lost is how we learn.

100 Years Ago: France in the Final Year of World War I (The Atlantic)
The American photographer Lewis Hine is perhaps most famous for his compelling images of child labor across the United States in the early 20th century. In 1918, Hine was hired by the American Red Cross to document their work in Europe, as they provided aid to wounded soldiers and refugees affected by World War I. The photographs were also intended to drum up support for the Red Cross, and appeal to an American audience back home who had grown weary of the war, even as it crawled toward a close. Hine traveled across France, photographing refugee families, orphaned children, wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, the nurses and volunteers who cared for them all, the ruined buildings they fled, and the temporary homes they filled.

This Film Series Undercuts the Macho Mythology of Seventies Moviemaking in America (Village Voice)
Men like Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Schrader are constantly credited with defining a generation of rebellious auteurs who broke free of the studio system to revitalize cinema in Seventies America. But BAM (the programmer is Jesse Trussell) is countering this narrative, bringing into focus the era’s sidelined female trailblazers through 42 of their titles. Their work stands against the brand of macho bravado in which such New Hollywood classics as Easy Rider reveled — and is all the more subversive for it. It’s fascinating, too, to discover their influence on much-beloved scenes of the future, whether it’s the fake-orgasms banter of 1977’s First Love, predating the iconic comic fodder of When Harry Met Sally, or the struggling artist–meets–awkward moments shtick that Girlfriends nailed way before the likes of Girls and Frances Ha.

Olivia Laing: 'There's no book I love more than Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature' (Guardian)
I can’t remember now how Jarman entered our world. A late-night TV screening of Edward II? Kitty was immediately obsessed. She’d watch and rewatch his films in her room, his most unlikely and fervent fan, bewitched in particular by the scene of Gaveston and Edward dancing together in their prison, two boys in pyjamas moving to the sound of Annie Lennox singing “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”.
It was the books that did it for me. Returning to Modern Nature recently I was astounded to see how thoroughly my adult life was founded in its pages. It was here I developed a sense of what it meant to be an artist, to be political, even how to plant a garden (playfully, stubbornly, ignoring boundaries, collaborating freely).

Charles Chusseau-Flaviens, Photographer (Spitalfields Life)
Photographer Charles Chusseau-Flaviens came to London from Paris and took these pictures, reproduced courtesy of George Eastman House, before the First World War – mostly likely in 1911. This date is suggested by his photograph of the proclamation of the coronation of George V which took place in that year. Very little is known of Chusseau-Flaviens except he founded one of the world’s first picture agencies, located at 46 Rue Bayen,  and he operated through the last decade of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century. Although their origin is an enigma, Chusseau-Flaviens’ photographs of London and especially of Petticoat Lane constitute a rare and surprisingly intimate vision of a lost world.