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I finally broke down and subscribed to the New York Sun, scandalizing Ed, who thinks 3 newspapers a day are enough.^*

I'm glad I did it. The Sun makes me feel as if I've picked up and moved to another city. In The Sun, New York is a town filled with charming & obscure neighborhood chapels and International Centers of Photography staging exhibits of mysteries like Unknown Weegee, Weegee apparently having been a photographer who followed cops around in the 1940s and took pictures of dead bodies. It seems that Weegee was an unpleasant character:

Weegee was a pest," Helen Gee wrote in 1997. "Popping off flashguns in customers' faces ... handing out greasy name cards, rubber-stamped with his logo, Weegee the famous."

Gee, the proprietor of Limelight, the first New York gallery devoted exclusively to photography, admired Weegee's tabloid photojournalism from the 1930s and '40s, but she had little use for him as an individual. (Among other things, he asked to photograph her daughter naked.) By the late 1950s, Weegee's fame was fading, and he had become something of a pathetic character. When Gee finally offered to give him a show at Limelight, he wanted to put up pictures taken with a trick lens, instead of his famous crime shots. "These broads with five tits will be a sensation," he insisted. "Nobody's done anything like it."

That sounds good to me.

On another morning I find one Lawrence Otis Graham ($?), a black man who went to Princeton and supported himself handsomely while there by writing books:

"Some kids worked in the dining halls or the library - my job was writing books," he said.

The first of his 14 books was about a 10-point plan that Mr. Graham devised for high school students to gain acceptance at a college of their choice. It was an instant success, not the least due to its serialization in Good Housekeeping magazine.

"I wrote a book a year while in college," he said. "By the time I entered Harvard Law School, I was making a tremendous amount of money."

Mr. Graham also became an entrepreneur while at Harvard. Teaming up with a friend, he launched a newsletter about marketing to young people, especially in affluent black communities. The newsletter, which sold for a subscription price of $500 annually, made its publishers a tidy fortune.

It was at Harvard that Mr. Graham met Pamela Thomas. Like him, she hailed from a prosperous African-American family. Like him, she was ambitious - obtaining an M.B.A. from Harvard in addition to a law degree.

They married not long afterward. The Grahams have three children, Gordon, 7, and twins Lindsey and Harrison, 4.

Pamela Thomas-Graham is group president of Liz Claiborne Incorporated. Earlier, she was president and chief executive officer at CNBC. Before that, at 32, she was the first black woman to become a partner at the fabled consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

Ms. Thomas-Graham writes mysteries whose locales are Ivy League schools.

"There might be a hint of the overachiever in both of us," her husband said. "But we were brought up to succeed - and to make our contribution to contemporary American society."

I think Lucy Calkins should spend more time reading the Sun, and less time reading the Times.

Lawrence Graham has a new book coming out: The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty.






The Sun also seems to run sayings on the op-ed page nearly every day. Now that is an excellent idea.

From today's paper:


Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
- Samuel Johnson

My thoughts exactly.

And here's Emile Zola on Edouard Manet:


In beginning a picture, he could never say how it would come out.




On Tuesday I woke up to find this dress on the front page:



designer: Oscar de la Renta

I want this dress. I'm never going to have it, but I want it.

Since I'm not going to have it, I think getting to look at it on the front page of my newspaper is a good thing.



Here's Weegee:




Weegee
source:
The Gibbes Museum of Art

source:
bezembinder




Summer
source:
coldbacon



Naked City
Weegee chronology
Weegee's profile & photos
Weegee: Paparazzi or Social Documentarian?
Fragment.nl "Writing is a trip"
coldbacon index of Weegee pics





^* Grammar query: 3 newspapers are? or 3 newspapers is? Now that I've read David Mulroy's The War Against Grammar, I intend to find out.



-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Jun 2006

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