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Yesterday at the flea market I picked up a small cosmetics case stuffed with photos almost all of which were of the same woman. The bulk of the photos were photobooths and portraits documenting her as she aged over the course of about 50 years or so. I'll probably eventually put them all up over at Square America but until then here's a bunch- the dates where available are underneath each photo. Given the date of the first photo I figure she was born in late 1937 or early 1938. The last photo dates from the early 90s so she's somewhere in her early-to-mid 50s there.
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hill country

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harlan howard

wiki: Born in Detroit, Michigan, he began writing country music at a young age. After serving as a paratrooper with the United States Army, he went to Los Angeles, California, hoping to sell his music. He did manual labor while writing songs and pushing his finished material. Eventually he sold some of his compositions and, after a few minor successes, his song, Pick Me Up on Your Way Down, recorded by Charlie Walker, went to No. 2 on the country music charts in late 1958. A year later Ray Price had a major country hit with "Heartaches By The Number"; simultaneously a pop version of the song performed by Guy Mitchell went to No. 1 on the Pop Charts. Buoyed by these two major hits, Howard moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1960. Bringing along a large portfolio of compositions, he signed a contract with Acuff-Rose Music. Howard's songs were so immediately successful that in 1961 alone he had fifteen of his compositions on the country music charts, earning himself ten BMI awards. Among his biggest hits was "I Fall to Pieces," co-written with Hank Cochran and recorded by Patsy Cline. He also wrote the classic Kingston Trio song "Everglades", and the song "Busted", a hit for both Ray Charles and Johnny Cash.

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john schwarz after calder no. 6


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eau de horse sweat

eau de play doh

bacon salt

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Inside New York's First and Most Ornate Subway Station, Closed Since 1945


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One of Miami Beach's oldest houses was partially demolished this summer, prompting more debate over what's left of the single-story coral structure built c. 1915.

On July 9, owner Michael Stern bulldozed a 1939 addition to the Avery Smith House with the city's approval. Stern and co-owner Ivor Rose want to build a four-story building on the site.

"By no means is [the fight] over," says Mitch Novick, owner of a nearby hotel and former chairman of the city's historic preservation board.

The city's historic preservation board on June 12 approved Stern and Rose's plans to raze not only the addition, but a Mediterranean revival building and coral-rock garage on the site. The board said the owners can demolish the Avery Smith House if it is not structurally sound or able to be restored. If Stern and Rose demolish it, Miami Beach preservation laws say they must build a replica.

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frosty myers the wall


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quirk you


We’re drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today’s Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio’s This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs.

It’s been 20 years of beneficent, wide-eyed gazing upon the oddities of our fellow man. David Byrne probably birthed contemporary quirk around 1985— halfway between his “Psycho Killer” beginnings with the Talking Heads and his move to global pop—when he sang the song “Stay Up Late”: “Cute, cute, little baby / Little pee-pee, little toes.” (As it happens, Byrne appeared on July’s recent book tour.) Jon Cryer’s “Duckie” Dale in Pretty in Pink came a year later, and quirk was on its way.

As an aesthetic principle, quirk is an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords, the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously.

Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt. Napoleon Dynamite became a quirk classic by making heroes of Napoleon and Pedro, boy-men without qualities who team up against an alpha blonde to elect Mexican- immigrant Pedro class president at an Idaho high school. Napoleon seals the deal with a dance so transfixingly, transportingly wrong that it becomes a kind of deus ex machina. Pedro wins. (Indeed, inappropriate dancing is a big quirk trope, inasmuch as it provides a dramatic moment at which value systems can collide. See, for example, 7-year-old Olive’s unwittingly hypersexualized routine to Rick James’s “Super Freak” that brings the dysfunctional family together in last year’s Little Miss Sunshine. This itself called out to the unwittingly only-slightly-less-hypersexualized preteen dance troupe Sparkle Motion in the 2001 quirk-noir Donnie Darko, a movie in which Jake Gyllenhaal takes orders from a giant rabbit.)

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big blue and you


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rick rubin


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1st dibs


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Join us for a romp through the kaleidoscopic sonic playground of John Cage, as WNYC celebrates the 95th birthday anniversary of this patriarch of American contemporary music with hours of radio you won't hear anywhere else.

24:33 features rare audio drawn from the WNYC archives over the past 40 + years, including live performances and interviews with Cage — as well as Cage tributes, commentary, and performances by some of the most influential musicians of our time. We also hear recent recollections from artists such as choreographer Merce Cunningham, pianist Margaret Leng Tan, and singer Joan LaBarbara, as well as Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk.

In addition to 24:33 on our HD and internet channel WNYC2, Evening Music features ten days of special Cage-related programming, beginning August 27th and heard every evening at 7PM on WNYC-FM.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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requiem for katrina


One of many wrenching scenes in Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke
is a man bringing his mother back to the horrible ruin of her home. The man is Terence Blanchard, a trumpeter and band leader. He also wrote the music for Spike Lee’s film. Blanchard has just come out with a new album that expands on that score, and he talked to us about his experiences writing about Katrina.

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scroll baby scroll


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modernist coffee table / bucks co barn sale find


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more big pink


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justins got some nice house porn going on over at materialicio.us


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Last week, floodwaters reached the front steps of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in the second "hundred-year" flood of Illinois' Fox River since 1996.

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contractors spacepen

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WILLIAM AIKEN WALKER / rural southern cabin paintings


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moms


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President Bush commemorated Hurricane Katrina's devastating blow Wednesday with a somber moment of silence. Across town, in a symbol of a federal-city divide that persists two years after the killer storm, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin marked the levee-breach moment with bell-ringing.

"We're still paying attention. We understand," Bush said in remarks afterward.

The president and his wife, Laura, were spending Wednesday's anniversary in New Orleans and Bay St. Louis, Miss., determined to celebrate those he said have "dedicated their lives to the renewal" of the region. But with New Orleans and the Gulf Coast far from their former selves after two years, some here think it's the president's dedication that should be in the spotlight.

The front page of The Times-Picayune advertised a scathing editorial above the masthead: "Treat us fairly, Mr. President." It chided the Bush administration for giving Republican-dominated Mississippi a share of federal money disproportionate to the lesser impact the storm had there than in largely Democratic Louisiana. "We ought to get no less help from our govenrment than any other vicitims of this diaster," it said.

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rip hilly kristal


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