photograph Posts

One of the things I don't get about the press treatment of the Follieri/Galante scandal is their attitude toward actress Anne Hathaway. Until a few weeks ago she was the dapper Italian's girlfriend and they were constantly photographed together. But they broke up the week before the scandal hit the tabloids, and all we've gotten are these silly human interest stories. We hear speculation she must be heartbroken, we hear how she's moving on with her life, we even hear details about getting her dog back from her old apartment with Follieri. She's lost a lot of weight of her latest movie promo tour and mysteriously showed up at a Cape May bar singing Journey songs this weekend with a photographer conveniently in tow.

Hello? She was on the board of directors of the Follieri Group's charities. The New York penthouse they shared was paid for by conned money as were their lavish trips and high flying lifestyle. Boyfriend drama is the last thing she needs to be worried about right now. I sure hope the FBI is carefully going through her checkbook and date book right now. She both solicited and received stolen money. No wonder she's lost a lot of weight.

And what's up with her getting off the plane from London and driving a couple of hours to the southern tip of the New Jersey? The Cape May County house Follieri bought from the bishop was reportedly just sold again. Could Anne Hathaway be on the deed or authorized to sign for  Follieri? Idle speculation of course but I do wish her publicists weren't making fools of the popular press like this.

• Dust-to-Digital : Goodbye, Babylon
  In February 1999 a college radio disc jockey named Lance Ledbetter set out on a mission to compile rare and essential recordings of vintage religious music. Four and a half years later the result of this journey was released as a box set called Goodbye, B
  (tags: music wishlist)
• Dust-to-Digital : Art of Field Recording: Volume I
  Art of Field Recording Volume I is a four disc set with a 96 page book that contains essays and annotations by Art and over 100 illustrations and photographs by Art and his wife Margo.
  (tags: music wishlist)
• The Limits of History, II - Light and Silence
  Quaker history also presents a challenge to all of its modern tellers. Like the early Christians, early Quakers laid down their history after the initial flames had cooled, and re-told the stories in ways that reflected their comunity.
  (tags: comment quaker quaker.history)
• Max Hansen's new business cards
  B.L. Ochman has a nice post about a memorable business card. Prompts me to trot out the pre-release version of my newest card. It's a whole newspaper, with four articles about me. They say long copy sells... I sure hope so.
  (tags: comment)
• YouTube RSS Feeds
  YouTube offers several RSS feeds for categorized groups of videos (such as recently uploaded, top viewed etc) as well as customized feeds for users and tags. To subscribe to categorized groups of videos, simply click on the orange 'RSS' button next to eac
  (tags: tech tech.rss)

We went to family fav-place Longwood Gardens last night for New Year's eve. It was cold but the lights on all the trees were beautiful and the fireworks were loud and fun. Going around I kept thinking about how many cameras were around. I took a few photos of course, but I realized I'm starting to develop a reaction to Obsessive Photography Disorder. How many fuzzy pictures of long-ago fireworks do people need to store on their hard drives?

A few weeks ago I took an eye-opening picture at a wedding. It was a quick photo of the bride and father walking down the "aisle" (it was more a space between tables in a small banquet room). I must have had squirming Francis in one arm, the camera in the other, because it's all blurry. The light's bad, there's red eye, it's totally not something to send up to Flickr. But what's haunting about the picture is the background: behind the bride you can see four people. From left to right, they are: taking a picture, holding camera at neck level ready to take a picture, leaning back from the camera screen setting up a shot, and looking down at a display reviewing the just-taken picture. This is a wedding and it's the dramatic part: the bride's just entered the room and is about to be given away by her father (it's a second wedding so I can't take the symbolism too far, but still this should be a holy moment).

Many Friends Meetings ban cameras in wedding ceremonies and I shouldn't have relaxed my standards to take my own photograph of the wedding-in-progress. There are times where our presence is much more important than any documentation. I dare say that none of the two-dozen or so walking-down-the-aisle photos taken that day are worth developing or printing. I use my picture-taking for memory's sake and love looking at old shots of the family, and a few of the pictures I took that day are definite keepers. But us compulsive shutter bugs need to know when to put the camera down.

• Peggy P with the most photographed Qr license plate?
  "FRIENDS" from Oklahoma and the Osage Nation.
  (tags: checkback)
• Aj Schwanz on chairs, freedom and pews
  The theology of seating
  (tags: checkback)
• Boundless Linda on retreats and the tide of a worship community
  That tide of harmony, disharmony, and resolution is constantly shifting, and it's normal. What's problematic is when the conflicts get swept under the rug. It starts to get really lumpy under there, and we all start tripping all over the place!
  (tags: quaker quaker.fgc)

For comparison, Theo in Second Month 2003 and last week

They say second children don't get as much attention and that parents forget to take many photographs of them. We want to avoid that so we'll get an early start with some ultrasounds. They always look a little scary to me but I take solace that Theo looked just as skeletal but turned out pretty cute.  

 

 

 

On our sister site, Mordechai Vanunu's photos of the Israeli nuclear facility, the very pictures that got him locked up.

Mordechai Vanunu brought his camera to work in late 1985, shortly before leaving his eight-year stint as a technician at Israel's nuclear weapons factory at Dimona.

While their publication resulted in Vanunu being locked away for an 18-year prison sentence, his photographs of Israel's nuclear weapons factory - a bold statement against nuclear secrecy and for the abolition of nuclear weapons - are here for all to see.

Today's New York Times has an article called Hip New Churches Pray to a Different Drummer about postmodern and emergent churhces. The article has some good observations and interviews many of the right people, but the presentation is skewed: there on the front cover of the print edition are some New Agey hipsters holding their ears and hearts in some sort of mock-Medieval prayer, sitting in big chairs over the headline about the "different drummer." Egads.

The photo reminds me of my New York Times moment, when the photographer insisted on a few shots of me holding a guitar, which made it onto the "CyberTimes" cover, but the paragraph describing the movement is a good, concise one:

Called "emerging" or "postmodern" churches, they are diverse in theology and method, linked loosely by Internet sites, Web logs, conferences and a growing stack of hip-looking paperbacks. Some religious historians believe the churches represent the next wave of evangelical worship, after the boom in megachurches in the 1980's and 1990's.

Still, much of the article talks about the superficial stuff, what Jordan Cooper calls the "candles and coffee" superficiality of some of a form-only emergent church style. There certainly is a lot of chaff with the wheat. Julie read the article and was really turned off to the dumb side of the emergent church:

Honey, I just can't get with it. I empathize somewhat, but I'm a traditionalist, so I can't say I don't take just as much offense at "borrowing" Catholic and Orthodox spiritual practices as I do at the importing of the sweatlodge ripped off from Native Americans. I'm not saying that all Emerging Church groups do rip off, they're trying to find something legitimate, I can see that. It's just that they are settling for part of the truth without looking at the whole picture. Lectio Divina is part of a larger Catholic theology and really shouldn't be divorced from it, etc. I empathize with the unchurched and the unfriendliness of traditional churches to the completely unchurched. I don't know what the answer is, but this movement just strikes me as bizarre. Of course, again, I'm coming from a traditional Catholic perspective here, so "church" to me means something utterly different than to many, especially the unchurched and evangelicals, for example, who see worship as more open and dynamic and involving the heart, not so much about form. I guess in the end, it's just that some of this Emerging Church stuff is just too "cool." I'm glad that it puts some people in touch with God, and that's a good thing. But church should never be too cool or too comfy or too sentimental. It should challenge too. What I'd like to hear in one of these articles is how these new forms and this new movement actually challenge people to commit to Christ and to change their lives. Hmmm.

So true, so true. What I've wondered is whether traditional Quakerism has a threshing function to offer the emergent-church seekers: we have the intimate meetings (partly by design, partly because our meetings are half-empty), the language of the direct experience with God, the warning against superficiality. I can hear Julie laughing at me saying this, as Friends have largely lost the ability to challenge or articulate our faith, which is the other half of the equation. But I'd like to believe we're due for some generational renewals ourselves, which might bring us to the right place at the right time to engage with the emergent churchers and once more gather a new people.