Let Us Now Praise Famously Lazy Art Direction
I don't know how many of you saw the cover story of the Chicago Tribune yesterday, about the Working Poor, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, the pictures on the front page convinced me that the thousand words would be self-indulgent crap. They were in that gritty black-and-white style that was so very very revolutionary when Walker Evans did it in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men -- in 1936. The Trib's use of it now merely means "we're lazily appropriating a seven-decade-old look to convince you that We're Serious About The Poor." I will bet you big cash money that every one of those Working Poor families has a color picture of themselves that they are very proud of, but apparently the Trib is too cheap and facile to actually engage the Working Poor's image of themselves, as they would rather cater to middlebrow liberals' image of them and slothfully perpetuate Depression-era stereotypes (literally!) that don't actually mean anything any more.
The friction from the Colonel's spinning in his grave must be what's making the weather so warm.
The friction from the Colonel's spinning in his grave must be what's making the weather so warm.