http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/070200keating-rt66.html

Check out this article, and especially the slideshow with it- It is a brief documentary which knocke me over.

Check it out quick- the ny times doesn't keep stuff around foroever.

Tell me what you think too.

Andy

-- Andy McLeod (andrewmcleod@usa.net), July 01, 2000

Answers

This is a great thing to see, however, if you are not a registered NY Times user, you will have to sign up.

-- Jeff Spirer (jeff@spirer.com), July 01, 2000.

After I signed up, the server said that the the article was no longer available and had probably been archived. However, when I hit the back button and reloaded the original url, it loaded it without any problem.

As for the article, I'm glad to see that something like this is on the web, but to me, it's an example of everything that's wrong with a lot of social commentary today. Some of the pictures were interesting, but all in all, it ended up just a banal excursion into a nostalgic melancholia that probably had more to do with Keating's midlife crisis than any real social analysis. It doesn't help that this subject might have been topical and relevant 20 (or 30) years ago, but it certainly said nothing new for today.

-- John Kantor (jkantor@mindspring.com), July 02, 2000.

Yeah, critically, it's nothing original but I like it. I just about fell over when I saw it on the nyt. It looks like he just went on a bender and took a camera with him. It doesn't look self concious or like it's striving to be deep or anything like that.

It almost looks like he talked an editor into it and drank his advance or something. It's nothing I would do, but it looks like he just stopped trying and went, and without caring what he came up with, or whether it reflected well on him, or whether he was stopping at the same diner that Jack Keroac did when he wrote on the road. I think that is the neat thing.

-- Andy McLeod (andrewmcleod@usa.net), July 03, 2000.

just one quick note, if keating is who i think he is, this is not simply some midlife crises. he's in his mid-twenties. i believe that he's a friend of a friend who'd been doing a shoot on rt 66 for nyt, though i could be wrong in this.

does the age and the persona affect the images? look again at the thought of this young guy on this trip. what does it say about him, his relationship to society, and his outlook of youth?

oth, i think that most of the images lack any real drama or holding power for me. the text brings moreout of them, but alone the images don't work so well. with the text they become illustrations to some degree.

just a few thoughts.

mnm

-- michael meyer (mnm207@is9.nyu.edu), July 05, 2000.

Must be a different Keating. This one starts his article by talking about his first trip on Rt 66 when he moved out west in '77.

However, I've met several 20-somethings in grad school who affect a certain middle-aged ennui. (After all, by the time you reach grad school, you've already seen and experienced it all.)

-- John kantor (jkantor@mindspring.com), July 05, 2000.

john, right you are. i somehow missed that bit of opening paragraph. i would concede that this is not the friend of a friend. still, the topic comes up of if the photographer influences the way his (yes, or her)pictures are interpretted and viewed.

mnm

-- michael "i didn't read carefully" meyer (mnm207@is9.nyu.edu), July 06, 2000.

To flog a dead horse from another thread - I think that Natacha Merrit is a good example of that. My point there was that if she were a middle-aged man, her work would be dismissed as cheap pornography. Were she unattractive she probably would be classified as a lesbian activist.

-- John Kantor (jkantor@mindspring.com), July 07, 2000.