Big Easy Express

The best tour bus ever isn't a bus at all.

What We Do On Sunday

Cornett Family, Kentucky

"William Gedney made two trips to eastern Kentucky. In the summer of 1964, he traveled to the Blue Diamond Mining Camp in Leatherwood, Kentucky. Gedney [then] met Willie Cornett, who was recently laid off from the mines, his wife Vivian, and their twelve children. He soon moved in with the Cornett family, staying with them for eleven days. Twenty-two of the photographs from Gedney's 1964 visit to Kentucky were included in his one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (11/68–3/69). Gedney corresponded with the Cornetts over many years, and finally returned to Kentucky to visit and photograph the family again in 1972. In his notebooks Gedney writes about these lives he witnessed and photographed, the complicated relationships within such large families, the importance of the automobile. Gedney made notes about a creating a book dummy of the Kentucky work, but no completed dummy exists in the archive. With the exception of one image, the Kentucky photographs were never published during William Gedney's lifetime."

I urge you to read one of the letters Gedney wrote to the Cornetts. More from Ahorn Magazine. Photographs by William Gedney, courtesy of Duke University Library.

Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine (Newman) had a party one night—a great party, at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. (Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain.) The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people—and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she'd already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn't seen her in a long time. And she started doing, "I've got to go..." and she was just going to leave, and I was like, "Going to leave?" It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for awhile. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, "She's leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda's leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?" We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, "She's leaving, I don't know if you said goodbye to her." And we said goodbye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we'd drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there. It was just one of the best parties I've ever been to in my life. I'll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.

Bill Murray on Gilda Radner.

'Feelings' by Nina Simone

"God damn. You know what, what a shame to have to write a song like that ... Feelin—I'm not making fun of the man. I do not believe the conditions, that produced a situation, that demanded a song like that! ... Well, c'mon clap, damnit, what's wrong with you?"

Happy Father's Day

Makeup and Vanity Set

"MAVS sounds more like the soundtrack to an imagined ‘80s sci-fi midnight movie; if you close your eyes and let it all wash over you, his music emits a very specific otherworldly feeling—like what would happen if you took the work of David Lynch, set it in the dystopian world of Blade Runner, and let your imagination wander. 'I made a nine-minute score to a short film, the film influenced a 42-minute album, which then gets turned into a physical artifact that’s particularly nasty and degenerative, where the end user has to have a television and a VCR, has to sit and has to experience it, even in places where it’s just the analog tracking in front of them. The screen glows for the entirety of the record. There’s something really horrifying and exciting about that to me—that people would sit in a dark room and experience it that way.' To accompany the album, Newbolt created a parallel release for the album in the form of a limited edition VHS cassette and poster that echoes Ciccoline and Pusti’s combined affinity for a bygone cinematic era."

The heat has been oppressive, truly. Not everyday, but when it's here it lingers (or so it seems). The only time of relief is right around dawn, just after night has allowed everything to cool off for a few hours and a light breeze makes its way up this old building.

Sean just finished building all the bar tops and tables at a new taco joint in town. They have the most amazing, fun food. We were invited to their soft opening and test-drove just about everything on the menu: corn masa biscuits with lobster gravy, chorizo chili and beer cheese curds, and—my favorite—cilantro and mint chip ice cream. The place is really beautiful, and they just got the okay for patio seating. Go there, now.

Least Wanted, Female Felons

Damn, these be some bad bitches. Without a doubt, these women are guilty... of having some amazing hair. "Convict Coiffeur" Oh alright, that's not funny. From LeastWanted.

'Just Before Dawn' by Sonnymoon

Hello Young Lovers

Unifying the Universe

It's well known that all of Tarantino's films take place in the same universe—this is established by the fact that Mr. Blonde and Vince Vega are brothers, everybody smokes Red Apple cigarettes, Mr. White worked with Alabama from True Romance, etc.

As it turns out, Donny Donowitz, 'The Bear Jew', is the father of movie producer Lee Donowitz from True Romance—which means that, in Tarantino's universe, everybody grew up learning about how a bunch of commando Jews machine gunned Hitler to death in a burning movie theater, as opposed to quietly killing himself in a bunker.

Because World War 2 ended in a movie theater, everybody lends greater significance to pop culture, hence why seemingly everybody has Abed-level knowledge of movies and TV. Likewise, because America won in one concentrated act of hyper-violent slaughter, Americans as a whole are more desensitized to that sort of thing. Hence why Butch is unfazed by killing two people, Mr. White and Mr. Pink take a pragmatic approach to killing in their line of work, Esmerelda the cab driver is obsessed with death, etc.

You can extrapolate this further when you realize that Tarantino's movies are technically two universes—he's gone on record as saying that Kill Bill and From Dusk 'Til Dawn take place in a 'movie movie universe'; That is, they're movies that characters from the Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Death Proof universe would go to see in theaters. (Kill Bill, after all, is basically Fox Force Five, right on down to Mia Wallace playing the title role.)

What immediately springs to mind about Kill Bill and From Dusk 'Til Dawn? That they're crazy violent, even by Tarantino standards. These are the movies produced in a world where America's crowning victory was locking a bunch of people in a movie theater and blowing it to bits—and keep in mind, Lee Donowitz, son of one of the people on the suicide mission to kill Hitler, is a very successful movie producer.

I can't get enough of these kinds of fan-based, creator-started theory tangents.
From redditor UOLATSC.

A Day With Nick Zammuto