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She agreed and tugged at her son to come inside, when the reporters hollered at her to wait. She held up her hands. "Please don't take pictures. I don't look decent." They aimed the lens at her. She crossed her arms over herself. "Please."
The cameras clicked and clicked. She stopped asking and pressed her mouth into a grim line. They would not give her the dignity she asked for because degradation sells papers. The most valuable thing she had was her tragedy.
Would those photos haunt her? Would she be reminded of her helplessness? Before coming to New Orleans I was surrounded by images of myself that scared me. During the summer my own reflection scared me. I saw a man whose ex-girlfriend would not take his calls, whose family was broken by pride and silence, whose mother was dying from overwork while he wrote poetry. I thought the time and money and sweat I gave to the poor would return an image of me as a decent man. It would be my reward. Instead I saw how small a part of their burden I could carry.
It is in fact Warhol who drew me to Pittsburgh. I was lured here by a Web site launched in May by the Andy Warhol Museum. The site (www.warhol.org/tc21) is itself a form of cultural time travel; it makes the contents of one of Warhol's Time Capsules accessible to Internet users. Largely unknown until the artist's death in 1987, the Time Capsules were the 612 cardboard boxes that he filled with the stuff that he accumulated--the by-products of art, life, and fame. Warhol used to keep a box by his desk and toss things in: correspondence, receipts, newspaper clippings, photographs, and gifts. Some of the things were so minor that anyone else would have simply thrown them away. One capsule, archivist Matthew Wrbican tells me, contained hunks of insect-infested pizza dough. Why? No one knows. Some things were so significant--letters from Mick Jagger, a paint palette used by Salvador Dalí--that anyone else would have put them carefully away, but Warhol dropped his overflow in cardboard boxes that were each taped shut, dated, and placed in storage by an assistant.
proud mary (the recording contract from hell)
"You know, maybe it happens in 'Cinderella,' but it doesn't in real life, where those people buy a company and then turn around and give it away," he said, "even though I am the main inventor of the property that generates all that wealth. I'm the guy that wrote and sang all those songs, and arranged and produced the records. So sometimes there's a lot of irony within my being. It's like, 'Gee, everybody's all excited about something that basically came out of one guy - me!' "
He builds houses out of sand, beer crates, even paper - and he's just been chosen to create the Pompidou's new outpost. Steve Rose meets Shigeru Ban.
Shigeru Ban is not your average architect. You can tell this before you even open the door to his Paris office, because to get to that door, you have to ascend to the top of the Pompidou Centre and out on to the roof terrace. There, Ban is stationed in a sort of elongated covered wagon, which clings to the high-tech structure like a parasite. Inside, the office reveals itself to be the near-opposite of its host building: rather than industrial steel and giant ducts, it is made of synthetic sheeting, timber and cardboard tubes.
"I just asked the president of the Pompidou Centre as a joke if he would lend me the roof terrace for my temporary office," Ban calmly explains. "I needed to rent space somewhere in Paris, and it's good to be close to the client."
more current emailed image files from jim louis in new orleans's fourth ward