Posts

Posted on

Oompa, Oompa, Stick It Up Your Jumpa

frenchhornFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Musician Carly Lake plays her french horn during a performance of an eight-minute piece called Live Music Sculpture 3: St Paul’s Cathedral. The work has been composed by Samuel Bordoli specifically for the cathedral’s acoustic properties and features 27 musicians in six groupings spread throughout the vertical and horizontal points of the building. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Let us all agree that the French Horn is the great democratizer of instruments. There isn’t anyone in the world who doesn’t look ridiculous playing it.

Posted on

You Got A New Fool/Ha I Like Him Like That

firetownFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A resident tries to put out a fire after a blaze engulfed a shanty town in Manila. Photograph: Ted Aljibe/AFP/Getty Images

Just look at how close that fire actually is, and how terrifyingly flammable everything around the person seems to be. It’s all you can do to stop yourself wanting to reach into the picture and grab the person with the bucket to shake them and yell get out now.

Posted on

Hey Now In The Shade

jumpFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

A boy jumps from a pier of bridge against the sunset across Han River in Wuhan, China. Photograph: Barcroft Media

There’s something so ridiculously summery about this image to me, and so serene, too. Everything is weightless, waiting for the splash.

Posted on

The Ballad of Dark Clouds

smokeFrom the Guardian’s Photo Blog:

Smoke from the Carpenter 1 fire in the Spring Mountains range is illuminated by the setting sun as it billows behind hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

I’m pretty sure that’s the very definition of foreboding, that photo.

Posted on

WAM! BAM! POW! KRONTCH!

manhunterCOMICS, EVERYONE.

Seriously, Jack Kirby (with inker, D. Bruce Berry, in this case): This is just amazing. Manhunter is something that Kirby did for one issue, an edition of a series called First Series Special, in the 1970s, and it’s this entirely unfinished story filled with melodrama and potential and everything that I love about superhero comics. There’s so much there there.

Plus, that costume design is so, so great.

Posted on

Busy Doing Nothing (Note: Not Actually Nothing)

So, I may have accidentally disappeared from this site a little last week. It wasn’t intentional, I promise; I just found myself entirely snowed under with work as I started writing for the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog and realized worryingly quickly that I had underestimated just how much additional work that would actually be in reality (I gave up two other gigs in order to free up enough time, but the workload didn’t translate as I’d initially thought). That it was also a holiday weekend – Huzzah for July 4, which came at the right time to stop me feeling completely overloaded – both helped and didn’t help everything, as it frontloaded things onto the start of a week that was already busy but also gave me some breathing room that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Anyway, I’m sorry for disappearing without notice, and will try not to do it again in future. Well, except for next week, which is Comic-Con which I’m working for Wired.com, and therefore will be crazy and quiet and AIEEEEEE.

(That I am now writing for Wired, Time and the Hollywood Reporter, by the way, is both surreal and slightly scary to me. This has to be the peak, right? It’s all downhill from here on, as I flame out in spectacular fashion.)

Posted on

“Total Victory, Mom: It Couldn’t Be Better”

edithFor once, not from the Guardian’s Photo Blog, but from the New Yorker:

Everyone at the apartment of Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer who argued Edith Windsor’s successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, exploded in screams and sobs when the ruling came down. Kaplan called her mother and said, “Total victory, Mom: it couldn’t be better.” Windsor said, “I wanna go to Stonewall right now!” Then she called a friend and said, “Please get married right away!”

Photograph of Edith Windsor and Roberta Kaplan by Ariel Levy.

Rest in pieces, Defense of Marriage Act. After yesterday’s appalling Supreme Court decision regarding the Voting Rights Act, this was a relief, and some good news from a court that has demonstrated that it isn’t always on the right side of history.