The trauma bay in the emergency department at Temple University Hospital after resuscitation efforts failed. Credit Eric Curran.
Temple University Hospital [in Philadelphia] treated 481 patients with gunshot wounds last year, and 97 died. In this one hospital in one neighborhood in one city. As a country, we lost nearly 40,000 lives to guns in 2017.
(Eric Curran [third-year medical student], “I Remember the First Time I Saw a Teenager Die,” NYTimes, 2-14-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
We are an insanely exciting country. Come on over and head to St. John’s to drink screech and kiss a cod. Or let’s meet in the Sourdough Saloon in Dawson City, Yukon, and we can enjoy the Sourtoe cocktail together (I dare you to look up what that is). Eh?
Steve Prime
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
(From a letter to the NYTimes, 2-14-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
A Tibetan Weaver, 1895, by William Simpson from Watercolour World. Photograph: Private collection.
A new website is digitising millions of watercolours – to make instantly available a wealth of vital historic imagery that could assist everything from climate research to school teachers[.]
Private view of the Royal Academy, 1858, by William Payne from Watercolour World. Photograph: Bernie C Staggers/Yale Center for British Art.
The [Watercolour World] website, which has launched with about 80,000 works, focuses on pre-1900 documentary paintings: archival information gathering often duly kept in binders and boxes ever since. Some of the artists on the site were professional painters. Others were military draughtsmen, official expedition watercolourists, botanists, surveyors, as well as the untold numbers of amateurs – which [Fred Hohler, originator of the project] suspects will turn out to have mostly been women, unpaid for their time and skill – who picked up a paintbrush to record the world around them.
(Dale Berning Sawa, “Our lost world in watercolours – the paintings that documented Earth,” The Guardian, 2-14-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
A studio portrait of Dudley Randall, whose Broadside Press helped amplify the voices of prominent black poets. Credit Yancy Hughes/Job Trotter Foto, via Bentley Historical Library/University of Michigan.
Randall started the publishing house, which was based in Detroit, with his librarian’s paycheck, and it swiftly became a success, producing dozens of broadsides — a printing style in which just one side of the paper is used — as part of the Black Arts Movement, a flowering of African-American literature, theater, music and other arts.
“Black authors could not be published by white publications, white magazines or by white publishers,” Randall said in a 1973 interview with Speakeasy Culture, a literary publication out of Central Michigan University. “We had to do it ourselves.”
(Morgan Jerkins, “Overlooked No More: Dudley Randall, Whose Broadside Press Gave a Voice to Black Poets,” NYTimes, 2-13-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
Monica Lee opened Beverly Soon Tofu in 1986, specializing in soondubu, Korean-style tofu stew. Credit Coral Von Zumwalt for The New York Times.
While new restaurants in Los Angeles struggle to train and retain staff, the cooks at Beverly Soon Tofu have worked with Ms. Lee for decades, fermenting kimchi and frying kelp. “They speak broken Korean to me, I speak broken Spanish to them,” Ms. Lee said. “And this is how we work together.”
(Tejal Rao, “The Old-School Reasons to Love Los Angeles Restaurants,” NYTimes, 2-12-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
Ai Weiwei and Frank Gehry, photographed in Los Angeles on Nov. 1, 2018. Credit Joe Leavenworth.
Frank Gehry: Like in [the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, 1997, designed by Gehry]…, when I look at the building, personally I have all kinds of criticisms of it — I can’t understand why they like it so much.
Ai Weiwei: I’ve never been to the museum, but I hear people say the internal spaces are really well designed. So you’re lucky. You made good mistakes.
(Quoted by Jori Finkel, “Ai Weiwei and Frank Gehry Talk Art, Legos and Being Cultural Renegades,” NYTimes, 2-12-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
Miguel Covarrubias’s 1925 watercolor-collage caricature of his friend the photographer Carl Van Vechten. Creditvia Throckmorton Fine Art/Estate of Maria Elena Rico Covarrubias.
Born in Mexico City in 1904, Covarrubias was a member of Kahlo’s inner circle — a highly sociable workaholic, painter, anthropologist, teacher, writer and sometime curator — who had a chameleonic talent for drawing. He would illustrate his own books on the ethnography of Mesoamerican Mexico, but arriving in New York, at age 19, he established himself with influential celebrity caricatures for magazines like The New Yorker, Vogue and Vanity Fair… Covarrubias died in 1957 at age 53, ending a career worthy of a much longer life.
(Roberta Smith, from “What to See in New York Art Galleries This Week,” NYTimes, 2-7-19)
(c) 2019 JMN.
