Respect Authority

As 2008 draws to a close, more and more attention seems to be getting paid to Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” award. Oh who ever will it be? Will be be a) Obama, or b) someone other than Obama? As we wait with baited breath, let’s step back for a minute and ask ourselves why on earth we give a damn about this arbitrary title from one of print journalism’s most rapidly declining publications.

Remember now, Time used to be a well respected news magazine. They didn’t always pick the fan favorites, giving the now coveted title to Adolf Hitler in 1938, and twice to Joseph Stalin (1939 & 1942). Even as recently as 1996, the prize was awarded to people outside of the public realm such as Dr. David Ho, a pioneer in AIDS research, even acknowledging that “Ho is not, to be sure, a household name. But some people make headlines while others make history” (Ho is not a household name, LOLZ… but I digress). Then… they kind of gave up. “The Whistleblowers,” “The American Solider,” “Bill and Melinda Gates, and Bono”? Time, that is not only grammatically incorrect, it is more than one singular person. Stop rewriting the rules to your own goddamned contest. And then who can forget the epic blunder of 2006. “You,” where they put a computer with a reflective panel on the cover, for people to look at on magazine racks and shout “OH MY GOD, IT’S ME!” That’s about when I stopped reading Time for good.

But there’s something interesting about the race this year. Sure, all signs point to Barack Obama (on Time’s website under “Cons” they include “Hasn’t cured cancer, nor won the world series.” They don’t bring the news anymore, but they sure can still bring the funny! Am I right or am I right?), but maybe that’s just too obvious. And wasn’t the real thrill of the 2008 election that we did it, that it was our hope that brought the Obamas to the White House? And we’ve already been the Man of the Year, so that’s out. Read More ›

Why are newspapers and magazines having such trouble visually depicting the new economic crisis? Is it because there are no bread lines? No “Free Soup” signs? A lack of fedoras? Every newspaper in the country has run a front page story about the crashing American economy and the accompanying photograph is always a huge failure. If I see one more lonely ATM machine, one more “going out of business sale” sign, or (god forbid) another beleaguered looking stockbroker, I may lose it. Granted, I have no idea what I would do if a photo editor told me to go out and shoot the completely non-visual market crash, but really guys? This is the best you can come up with?

After a few weeks of this, I was needless to say pleased when the Magnum photo agency announced they would be documenting “The New Depression” as it was being called. Magnum is the true old boys club of documentary photography so if anyone could do it, it would be someone working for them. The first assignment went to internationally acclaimed photographer Paolo Pellegrin, one of my all time favorites (his book, Telex Iran, is one of the greatest accounts of civil uprising ever published), and this is what he came up with. Empty cobblestone roads around Wall Street, large financial buildings split by shadows, and motherfucking pictures of sad traders on market floors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for the next migrant mother, but variety is, after all, the spice of life, and frankly, I’m not seeing a whole lot of it.

In what could be called the series finale of the longest running soap opera in American history, Martha “Sunny” Sharp Crawford Auersperg von Bülow died yesterday, after a 28 year long coma. I know. Who the hell is that? This is the question that has shocked me for the last 24 hours when I walked around exclaiming to friends, family members, and strangers on the street “oh my god, Sunny von Bülow died today!”  and no one knew what I was talking about. Not a single person. Her story, as her death, is a tragedy, albeit her life as she knew it has been over for nearly three decades.

Born at the epicenter of Manhattan’s cultural and societal elite, Sunny (the former Martha Sharp Craford) was nicknamed by her parents, after her cheery disposition. She married young, to an Austrian tennis pro, Prince (oh yeah, also a prince) Alfred von Auersperg, had two children, and was divorced in 1965. She remarried the next year to a Danish-German noble named Claus von Bülow, the son of a Nazi collaborator (his grandmother also famously had a passionate love affair with the composer Robert Wagner). Claus and Sunny had a tumultuous marriage, and after 13 years, each spoke publicly about seeking a divorce, especially considering Claus’s public and adulterous affair with soap opera star Alexandra Isles.

After a lengthy argument heard by the couple’s maid the previous night, Sunny was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom on the cold morning of December 22, 1980 with the window pushed open.
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